Voyeur

After being in the mostly fresh air of Chaing Mai,(Tuk Tuk rides can be asphyxiating), it is a familiar shock coming back to Saigon. Greeted now at a new airport terminal by throngs of taxi drivers eager to turn off their meters for the short run to the apartment or at least to state an exorbitant price aimed to catch those unfamilair with the value of the Dong. I have mustered the effort to say ' I live here. I'm not a tourist.' in Vietnamese but it meets with little recognition all things being tonal and I have probably said. ' I would like two tins of tuna.I have large feet' but hey, one has to try...

Taxi drivers aside, it's the number of people here that struck home. Statistically, Ho Chi Minh City has 9 million people in its metro area where boundaries have been swallowed up by roads and construction whereas Chiang Mai has 700 000 people in its metro area. Of course, Saigon has 4.7 million motorbikes too which often seem like they are all on our nearby main road when you are trying to cross it but you are never truly alone here. Every street (apart from the main streets in the city centre) has its separate pitches where people eek out some kind living.




On our street alone, Nguyen Van Thu, there is:

a man selling mangoes, (green) oranges, dragon fruits
a Banh Bo vendor ( street food)
a Quan An ( a local restaurant with tables on the street)
various iced coffee and tea stalls ( 5.00am - 9.00am)
various motorbike parks each with one or two attendants who charge 2000 dong per bike ( 8p)
a car park attendant who bills the growing number of car owners.
a fruit and veg shop that spills out on to the street
Xe Om ( motorbike) taxi drivers at both ends of the street

Our street isn't that long and its amazing how much activity occurs on it with only a brief respite from 12.00 - 4.00am. Well before dawn the street creaks into action. An ostentatious cafe at the near corner has recently opened called Cheery Cafe and has decided to wake up its neighbours by blasting techno at 5.30am.Not much cheery about that but I suspect the noise hardened Saigonese won't mind. I guess there is comfort in knowing that you are rarely alone but for foreigners and westerners especially with their sense of space and privacy, it takes some getting used to. Always being watched can make you believe that every third person hanging around the corner doubles as a goverment agent ready to pass on the important yet inevitable news of just how many decadent westerners tumbled home drunk on a Friday night. Of course this does happen, there are always stories abounding about such things but mostly there is simply a sense of curiosity ( and amusement) about the way we lead our (relatively) priviliged lives. There is more kindness than anger on these streets; there is more energy than disillusionment amongst our neighbours here and although our lives seem quite seperate some times - by buying fruit from the stall or getting a coconut from the impossibly laden concicle-hat woman who passes by sometimes - it is possible to be part of a community and certainly do no harm to it.Yes, we can feel squeezed here, stared at as though we had numerous heads and nearly run over on a daily basis but it does feel like a welcome home.

One Night in Chiang Mai

A Celebration in the foothills. See the quicktime movie to the right for an excerpt.

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.