past and future 19.03.10

We travelled by what qualifies as a junk through a portion of Ha Long Bay near Hanoi. The mountainous formations are familiar to 007 fans. Similar to Ninh Binh, these tiny islets are limestone fragments that are remnants – left behind by erosion and tectonic activity. The islets are home to some birds – practically the first songbirds we have heard in Vietnam, which leads me to believe that they’ve eaten all the rest.

We saw a group of men tucking into a plate of roasted sparrows back near Ninh Binh. They looked like bird that are victims of an explosion or a gunshot in a Merry Melodies cartoon, glossy, brown, crisp and naked with bulging eyes and a bulbous head. The gentlemen were crunching on those heads as we were enjoying our meal at the next table. The only other birds we see and hear are in dusty cages sucking in unburned petrol fumes at street level in toxic cities everywhere. Oh, and roosters.

Out on the quiet and contemplative South China Sea the chaos and cacophony of Hanoi washes away. One has to have one’s antennae fully out all the time in Hanoi or risk being run over or ripped off. It’s probably not as bad as I have made it sound but we are first-timers there and everything is new and unfamiliar. The sidewalks are the parking lots for motorbikes so pedestrians have to share the road with motorcycles, buses and automobiles, rickshaws, street vendors and other pedestrians – it has depleted my spirit a bit and this side-trip is a good respite.

Ha Long Bay is an embarrassment of beauty with gravity-defying upthrusts of rock layered in subtle atmospheric perspective. I had always thought those exquisite Japanese and Chinese brush paintings of vertical mountains with bonsai trees and pendant vines were some sort of cultural fiction but they are everywhere here. The junk we are on is a modest one with only 6 other guests, like us, they have opted for a more personal experience. They are all pleasant; Aussies, an American who teaches in Korea and a couple of Welshmen who are scouting out adventures for their small exercise-oriented Tourism company back in Cardiff.

Ha Long requires a selective attention. The landscape is very beautiful but there are many other junks out on the route. They tend to travel in a file so the view from either side is unspoiled but when we seek anchorage for the night we are in a veritable parking lot of junks. There are at least two dozen in a relatively small cove. As dusk falls the effect is quite lovely, the other boats lights reflect on calm seas creating a rich, glassy effect with dull steel grey water and burnt-umber boats with tawny sails and cadmium yellow and orange lights from staterooms.

In the morning I rose early and took photographs of the bay. A lighter was tending a ship nearby, grey-white plumes of smoke drifted from its exhaust as its engine pock-pocked away. Other tenders were sailing from junk to junk – the scene at once romantic and kind of eighteenth-century crude.

Before returning to the mainland we were taken to a cave in an island nearby the anchorage. There are a series of three caves within. The last was preposterously large; it could easily have held a ballpark. Folds and dripcastle blobs abounded.

As we descended into the caves I could see fossilized sea creatures in the limestone. It brought me to think of geological time and how mankind is such a blink in the cavernous amount of time that the earth has existed. The mountains are all sedimentary – castles of fossilized coral and the debris of sea life many hundreds of millions of years ago. Each centimetre represents perhaps a thousand years of life. Maybe more. The billions of billions of lifeforms that accreted in the Devonian(?) period have become stone; have been eroded and fragmented by the forces of water and geological stress.

Who could fail to consider the immensity of time and how insignificantly small mankind’s epoch has been. Now our oceans are taking up the excess CO2 from the atmosphere, the water is becoming warmer and more acidic. Coral reefs around the world are bleaching, suddenly dying – the magnificent reefs that are one of the primary nurseries of life on Earth are disappearing. The reefs are a bellwether of environmental stability. There is no known technology for reversing the effect.

This is a familiar internal conversation with me – the end of the age of mankind. It sometimes ends up with Bach. Particularly today. Bach, for me is elemental stuff. He pursues themes with variations and fugues that make me think of species selection; improvement, refinement, evolution. I am saddened to think that at some future time there will be no ears, no minds to perceive Bach. The gothic architecture of the caves would be a fantastic place to hear some of his grandiose organ works.

This may sound like two conversations but for me it all fits together. Because I am a dark one I spend a lot of time mourning things. I mourn the suffering that we are visiting on one another and the abuse we are subjecting our physical environment to. I am not unaware that my travel has a negative impact on the environment. I am burning a lot of fossil fuel to get my thrills.

I think that humans won’t perish altogether from the Earth. I believe that we will find a way to adapt to an entirely different and more hostile environment. It might be through the intervention of genetic manipulation or the agency of technological hybridisation – combining humans with silicon and carbon materials to modify our physical needs and resources – but I do believe that humankind is in for a bumpy century and I would bet against our entering the 22^nd century behaving and living as we do now - as natural evolution has designed us for this nearly-perfect world. But that's just one opinion.

The upper photo is the grand cavern. The little dots you see on the bottom are people. can you zoom in? The lower photo is a morning shot with a smoking lighter serving a larger junk.