Thanking the Monkey

We could have called it Holiday of Fear; got tabloid on our vacation using descriptors that wouldn't be found in the guides. On island and in primary forest there were moments of fright, waking up in a cold sweat; staying awake in a hot sweat. Our imaginations have got used to these conditions; they are ready to play tricks, tease with possibility and fake for fun whatever the weather.

On Phu Quoc, the Joyeux Noel of our French hosts was mixed with the usual fights to the death in the bathroom colliseum; as strange armoured flying beetles throbbed and crashed into walls, their rioccochet was a thud, a crack in the night that was matched only by the squeal of their prey, some less armoured, grounded creature who screeched out of something, like a cry from deep inside some impossible throat. Of course we cowered under our flimsy mosquito net, wondering how it could be reinforced, sandbagged against the flow of nature that flew, crawled and slithered in to our room. Certainly, there was atmosphere to the bungalow; it has been described before but sometimes in the dead of the night there were dreams cast of air-con'd concrete sealed off from nature.



In the mountains, in Dalat, our Vietnamese companions had been dressed by purchases from the Russian market; leather jackets that came in with James Dean and lingered somehow with the Fonz (ouch). They were proudly worn inside and out, warmed leatherettes in the brisk air of this mountain town. We managed to find a trek that took us, at first, not to a mountain as we had hoped but to a typical VN attraction, a challenging mixture of pink concrete and booths hiring the instant Hill Tribe look. Only later did we discover an alternative route that took us through honeysuckled tracks to patches of open ground with a view that stopped then opened the heart.

Then to Cat Tien, a huge natural resource and nature reserve only slightly tainted by party, only slightly flawed by the rush to commemorate human achievement in adversity while narrowing the opportunities for sustaining natural bio-dioversity. Still the Massage Parlour was in full swing; like the monkeys in the trees, a cheeky family of Macats who surrounded our house - the house which we had already plaqued as Blair Witch: The SE Asian Connection; its damp walls, empty rooms with dark wood doors and a meeting room downstairs, eight chairs and scarred round table that reeked of Hammer House and red velour rituals.

The monkeys tamed by relatives entertaining them with scraps; kicked over the bin like Friday night louts and then tore across the roof, banging into the windows which was a light tap with the young ones but a heavy thud with the dad's weight. And then as I tried to record an image of our visitors, a couple started to try the handle of the door, rattling it as much as our nerves. There was a moment of strange quiet, an awkward stillness amidst all the rush of activity. We looked each other in the eye, one of the older ones and I. A powerful sensation; an evolutionary deja vu. We had already met.