Heaven & Hell & Heaven 09.03.10

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

Tao te Ching #9

It has been said that travel brings out the best and the worst in people – not only behaviourally (God knows we haven’t seen the worst of me yet) but also coping mechanisms: anxiety, confidence, faith and lapses thereof, patience and absence thereof. Our mettle was tested today.

After another sublime sunrise north of Nha Trang just jam packed with visual pulchritude then a relatively quiet day at Jungle Beach Resort (2.5 stars), we prepared to take a minibus back to Nha Trang – then on to Hoi An on the 11.30 night train. That’s when the seams started to part. Sophie couldn’t find her wallet with credit cards and health card etc. We had to jump into the van and had another ulcer-inducing ride along the narrow, two-lane Viet highway. The golden moment was when a bus passing us on a solid line found itself in a Klingon death lock with an oncoming bus that was passing a truck. So we were two abreast and the oncoming juggernauts were two abreast, travelling at highway speed (did I mention the dozen or so remora-like motorcycles swarming around. Everyone just came to a screeching halt and things sorted out in seconds. No one seems to get pissed, they just move on. Letting emotions get control would be fatal in these conditions.

When we got to town we needed some cash to pay for train tickets. But the ATM scarfed down my first interac card (Sophie’s wallet is missing remember) None of the 5 ATMs in the two block area would give me any cash on my next card and then we found out our train had been booked for 7.26. It’s now 7.10 and we are halfway across town. I threw our US funds that we kept for emergencies at the vendor and we folded space to make our way across town. The driver used his horn, accelerator and a bit of ‘The Force’ to get there. With 30 seconds to spare we lunged into the crowded (but small) train station. I got shaken down by a station-vulture for my last greenback and we climbed onto the sleeper car.

The night train is called a ‘soft train’. I thought that referred to the bunks but apparently it means that the train is cleaned twice a year. The ‘hard train’ is cleaned less often(?!!!?). I wish I had taken a picture of the WC on the coach. The sliding cubicle door was very hard to lock and then almost impossible to open. The smell would have gagged a maggot. The train jerked back and forth like the fun-house at the old Red River Ex. Unflushed urine was sloshing around in the toilet bowl and spilling over the brim (see today’s Tao te Ching) and fetid urine was sluicing around on the embossed metal floor like bilge in the cloaca of a sailing ship. The 5’ square unventilated room was painted a colour that might be described as chartreuse except the stains modulated the green to some even scarier hues. It felt like something out of a horror film. The smell was beyond my imagination to describe.

We arrived in Hoi An around 5.30 am after cadging a ride from the Danang train station. After dropping our bags at a hotel we trudged over the nearby bridge to the local market that was already in full swing – fishermen lugging greasy pails of thrashing fish and crustaceans off their boats to the crowded vendor’s stalls. We jumped out of the path of motorbikes speeding down the fish-slime slick narrow aisles. There were some very ‘interesting’ smells. Soph and I found a beverage stall and downed a tumbler of hot,thick, sweet Viet coffee and another drink (meieia?) that tasted faintly like halva. It is sort of thick and sludge-grey, not pleasant to look at but very satisfying. A little later we ordered some exquisite fresh seafood Pho on a bed of virginally white vermicelli, fresh chives and coriander.

Back in heaven. Soph found her wallet, ATMs work like a charm, we ate two more superb meals. Really a perfect day all round.

Hoi An is a beeyootiful town. Ridiculously picturesque with French colonial buildings and beautiful efflorescences of mildew or mold on caramel coloured walls creating a profoundly pleasing result. Traffic is much lighter than other towns and food is outrageously good and cheap.

And so to bed.

Sunrise near Nha Trang 07.04.10

Comme d’habitude. The sun rises postcard-perfect over the bay. The disc is an impossible rose pink - a fluorescent hue that no Jimi Hendrix poster has ever quite nailed. The greys are too delicate to classify – (but I’ll try): faded denim blues, snake skin greens, fluxed copper, dusky cinnabar. The obverse of the waves a perfect viridian or Prussian blue. The digital camera is totally unable to reproduce the subtlety.

Soft humps of distant islands half mixed into the grey dawn. Tony Onley serigraphs of yin perfection.

Oh no! The shrimp boats! Here comes the yang. Tiny confections of charcoal with the cliché silhouetted operator languidly guiding the helm. He, striking a pose, hand to mouth with faint plume of cigarette smoke, his foot propped up on a bulkhead. The square-wave chug-chug of their little motors the only audible sound besides the softly hushing surf.

It starts to become physically overwhelming – kind of embarrasing. We’ve been refusing the attentions of the street merchants pimping their little reproduction watercolours in Dalat and Nha Trang. Each ‘same same’ painting with a de facto smear of cadmium sunlight streaked across a flat expanse of grey or blue. And here I find myself taking photos of the same stuff.

Ah the torture of an art education. Balance the composition – dynamic, symmetrical, focal point, golden mean, law of thirds. Wait......for.....it..... Ah! Click. Treacle.

We spend a restful day (compared to what?) at Jungle Beach resort. Soph and I hiked a couple of klicks along a dusty highway: a terracotta gash slicing across the lush jungle landscape. They have finished dynamiting the for the road nearby the resort but, according to the proprietor there has been a dramatic increase in fishing with dynamite since the work crews appeared.

Last night a beach bonfire made from palm leaves and coco husks. The group was a UN of guests: Germans, Brits, Italians, a couple of Finns and Americans. A few locals sang pop and fold vietnames songs for a while then I played for a couple of hours on an old beater guitar. The strings are corroded by the salt air and they cut like a fine saw into my calluses. Someone passed around a ‘zigarette’. It was mellow.

Infinite Worlds 05.04.10

The Tao is the Great Mother
empty yet inexhaustible,
it gives birth to infinite worlds

It is always present within you.
You can use it any way you want.

Tao te Ching #6

Dream: I am part of a group of people who are collecting to fight for a good cause (?) – sort of guerrilla action against an oppressive government in the distant future. There is a sturdy woman in the group who is from a different dimension in the multiverse. Though she appeared normal she was very heavy and very strong because her ‘strings’ (see quantum string theory) vibrated at a different frequency from ours. In another scene I am coerced into befriending a devious young Fagan. I had been living with two identities. He has ‘killed’ one of them and knows my secret. His knowledge is dangerous to me and by accepting him as a ‘friend’ I confer some sort of status on him. He was persona non grata.

What a difference a day makes. Reasonable night’s sleep and a superb pho in the Nha Trang market for $4.00 for two (apparently depending on how one inflects 'pho' in vietnamese one is asking either for a bowl of soup or a slut - just a word of warning to interested parties), including chocolatey sweet Vietnamese iced coffee. The soup a melange of seafood with rice vermicelli noodles, piles of cilantro mixed with delicate sprouts, mint and opal basil. The cart operator added a bowl of something glossy and translucent white – maybe jellyfish. Later we will swim for the first time in the South China Sea.

There we met a charming old fellow named Peter – Australian national living here. A brown, wrinkled gentleman with a Gandhi-thin body, concave chest, a rubine, scabrous nose and watery sliver-blue eyes. He has married a younger Vietnamese woman named Hyunh. She is silent and demure, quite shy. She has a round face and gentle eyes that speak volumes in a language I don’t understand.

Peter has led a charmed life, working around the world performing his trade. ‘I may sound big-headed but I am a very good cabinet maker’ he declaims with a 87 degree head tilt. He claims to have worked in 20 different countries. From Botswana to Managua he works for hotels and large corporations, doing excellent work from his accounts. He told me his story while we bobbed in the gentle surf. At once gregarious and charmingly shy, he talks in a very animated fashion, blinking rapidly, tilting his head side to side and up and down; sweeping his arms and rotating his wrist and fingers to articulate his tales. Sophie says he reminded her of Wallace from Wallace and Grommit animated features.

I can tell Sophie doesn’t approve of Peter. His wife attends to him - maybe she appears servile but I can tell he adores her and she seems to love him too – who can say. He confides in me that Hyunh cannot travel to Australia with him when he returns to visit because she has had cervical cancer and they won’t admit her into the country. Without that information one might be tempted to write him off as having married a caretaker and servant but I don’t think so. He cares deeply for her. When she makes a small movement with her eyes he knows it is time to go back home .’Ah, ah Hyunh, yes, (to us) it’s time to be going home I think’. He politely bids us goodbye- chuckles when I give his wife a little bec on the cheek and they leave.

Life has crevices and gaps, the inner narratives of even our closest friends and loved ones are opaque to us, even our own lives are filtered and corrupted by our egoic lens .Each of us contains infinite worlds - dimensions unexplored and largely unexplorable.

Peter has recommended the beach just south of Nha Trang called Cam Ranh as being less touristic; excellent seafood with a prettier vista. He has also recommended Vinh Binh instead of Ha Long which is freshwater but, again less touristic and charming. He suggests Sapa is very beautiful too – when I ask him if there are not similar places in Laos he says that he has never been there – he thinks that the Laotians are more dangerous but we have heard just the opposite from other travellers.

Crazy Bus Drivers I Have Met 04.03.10

All that was missing was the cowboy hat, the mask and the cylinder of nitrous oxide. That was a crazy-ass ride up from HCMC to Dalat driven by a Vietnames Dennis Hopper. We’ve spent way too many hours on buses in the past few days. There has to be better way to travel.

Dalat was a French colonial town. Like the British, the French hightailed it to the highlands when it got stinking hot in the city. The climate is quite different here. They grow strawberries and coffee as well as a boatload full of gladiolus and mangoes, passion fruit and the like. The altitude changes quickly so there are lots of micro climates. It’s a beautiful city in a gorgeous landscape – for the record.

Anyway, back to the bus drivers. I’ve experienced some pretty scary ones. They generally involve prime candidates for Adler’s form of psychotherapy – bullies and tyrants (when the are pushing several tons of metal around). Ours was driving hell-bent for leather through dense fog on the wrong side of the road (in my opinion – he would have been good for India). Even though it was 3 in the morning there were plenty of pedestrians and cyclists walking at the margin of the highway (always back facing the traffic), they would appear suddenly and be gone before I had a chance to wet myself. If there was an oncoming motorcycle he would let that driver make the decision to go off the road – they would have been like so much bug splat. If he was overtaking a bus or truck he would pause in the oncoming lane to pick his teeth, seeming to dare the world to present him with an obstacle (did I mention that Vietnamese roads are designed with ungraded curves – so vehicles will slide off if they don’t slow down enough – our driver was exploring the physical limits of inertia on gravelly, potholed serpentine surfaces). All this to the score of a bizarre Chinese melody that sounded like a pop song played backwards - accompanied by a Chet Atkins tremolo guitar. Like Chinese surf-punk. Kind of cool if I could have detached. I asked the driver who the musician was and he wrote it down but the hawkers in the market wanted to sell me Korean porn and Cha Cha Cha music. Oh they teased me wickedly! I don’t think I got the right CD but I’ll have to wait ‘til I get home – might be an interesting Brazilian/Korean danceporn Cha Cha Cha extravaganza!

It all goes back to Yugoslavia in the late 70s. I was travelling with Cyd, Darby and J Owen Saunders by magic bus to Greece. The highway was pin straight and the day was clear and dry but we passed two fatal head-on accidents. All you could see was the bluish toes poking up from the coarse grey blanket, a dark black pool like transmission fluid seeping slowly underneath the still figure. How could that happen in perfect driving conditions? Then Peru – coming back from Nazca to Lima they put me in the front window so I felt like a goldfish in a house full of cats. The driver wove in and out of traffic like a snowboarder with a death wish. The theme is repeated; India where they drive like the steering wheel is loosely connected to the horn – our driver thought he was Tom Cruise in Top Gun - and now Vietnam. I couldn’t bear to wake Sophie up because it was just too horrible to witness. Anyway, we’re alive. It’s been an ok day in Dalat. The roads are less dense with traffic, the air is breatheable, the morning market was rich with fantastic produce. The Dreams Hotel, recommended by Lonely Planet is terrific.

We poor fleshy tourists are ripe picking for the folks here. Wishing to find interest and meaning we are like 8 year olds and our comic books; sending away for a fantastic toy based on inflated claims and unscrupulous writing. And always that terrible feeling; Not exactly as advertised. Vietnam is an amazing place but it is super-dense and the fleece that they get from tourist-sheep is clearly a critical part of the economy. Just the typical caveat for any interested parties.

We’re learning.

Beautiful, Ugliful 3.02.10

When people see some things as beautiful
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

From Tao te Ching #2

All along the highways. All along the urban and exurban routes there is commerce in Vietnam. Capitalism is relentlessly present. Life appears hardscrabble; extremely difficult, dangerous, monotonous, demeaning and tentative here. But the people here are tenacious, proud, obdurate. Mostly people are either taciturn or cheerful. At least that is their appearance. I think that most people are driven to succeed. The rungs on the ladder are widely separated and the code is the international standard – women and children are least favoured.

At once the ‘differentness’ presents challenges to the relatively unseasoned traveller (me). The rot and rust and dust and decay, the kitsch and clumsiness and blandness have a kind of charm, sometimes aesthetic, sometimes emotional, but it’s not a simple charm. Things are beautiful and ugly, inelegant and charming, oppressive and refreshingly different. On the surface there is a lot of yang drang but the yin shines through in the spirit and enthusiasm of the people we have met. My God they are resilient.

To underline that last thought, I'm having a blast photographing everything that moves, floats or crawls. And there's some cool roadkill here too Nancy.

Today, many more hours in buses and boats, cruising down to the Mekong Delta, the land is very rich here, abundant with easy access to water, lots of water, so lots of irrigation. In the middle of many rice fields there are stone sarcophagi. The value and scarcity of land make it a necessity to bury one’s ancestors in the family plot of land so to speak. I was thinking that these ancients are providing the plants with nutrients - phosphorous, carbon, iron, calcium – the ancestors continue to contribute to their lives.

Homeowners also put small offerings on altars to appease the dead who lived on the property in ages past, not family ancestors but the restless spirits of people long dead who once occupied that land. It is a practice that should have a place in Canadian culture. We should spend more time contemplating and giving thanks to those who have disappeared into the mists whose spirit and energy continues to dwell with and around us.

We saw a beautiful decrepit French Colonial home in the Mekong while we were cycling. We were told that not many colonial houses remain in that area because the VCs used them for shelter - so the US Navy shelled them to smithereens. The interior was straight out of a dream – crepuscular light, rust-stained walls and ceiling, perfectly cracked and shattered tile and dust everywhere. Gorgeous.

We saw water coconuts which have a magnificent shell and little mudskippers, those wonderful fish that come out of the water and hang out on the muddy banks. The Mekong is a brown river but the people bathe in it and it seems quite clean – which is amazing since it passes through five countries on its way to this estuary. The Homestay was a little bunker with a rattly fan but the scenery was magnificent and the boat trips along the channels and river were fantastic. The Cai Be floating market was a bit underwhelming but interesting nonetheless. I’ll try to get some images up on Flickr or some other public site. We saw rice paper and rice puff candy and coconut candy being made which sounds rather mundane but it is quite rich – they don’t use computers you see. The weird thing is; people do things with their hands (and feet) it’s quite fantastic really. We should have thought of this. The eighteenth century trappings aren’t really slick but it has a nice period feel.

And on..

Darkness into Light

Darkness and Light 03.01.10

As we travel I thought it might be interesting to use the Tao te Ching as a sort of lens through which to examine each day of travel and experience. The Tao te Ching is considered to be ‘The wisest book ever written’. I will often mention a piece of the days reading if it seems particularly meaningful or help contextualize the writing.

The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
Of all particular things.

Free from desire you realize the mystery
Caught in desire you see only the manifestations

Yet mystery and manifestations
Arise from the same source
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness
The gateway to all understanding.

Tao te Ching #1

A particularly Buddhistic thought to begin the book. I liken this thought to the idea of clinging to form. All reality is illusion. Want and attachment to form creates pain, we get caught up in the illusion that what we see, what we have, what we want will provide us with happiness but in truth it will only further our suffering.

Sophie and I arranged for a two-part tour from Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). Again, the traffic is a major part of every experience here in Vietnam. Schools of motorized scooters and such weave and unskein all around. The bus driver is continually honking in the vernacular of the horn. Tootles and blasts and repeated notes all represent different types of commands and alerts. Mostly the message is ‘Get out of my way small thing or you will be crushed’.

Our first visit is to a temple several dozens of klicks from HCMC. Cao Dai temple covers something like 200 square k of area. All religions seems to be represented and prayer is conducted with all factions participating. I don’t really understand the premise at all - in fact Victor Hugo, the French poet is one of the deities who is worshipped. Photo to be provided.

Hundreds of devotees file into a massive temple, all except for the highest ranking are dressed in white. A haunting and dissonant music begins and soon the worshippers begin to sing. With clouds of incense billowing from a table near the center, symbols and elements from many of the world religion (glossy green dragons twined like rattan vines coil up massive pink and white pillars, the window has the motif of an eye within a triangle – the same Masonic symbol we see on the pyramid on the US $1 bill, ceiling medallions have figures of tortoise and lions) it is haunting and sort of confounding. I should write no more because I am so ignorant of the ceremony and the particulars of the religion. But the experience was very rich and soulful.

The second leg of our journey took us to the Cu Chi Tunnels north and west of HCMC. The Vietnamese built many of these tunnels then they were appropriated by the Viet Cong.
Cu Chi, only about 65 km from Saigon, was a staging point for guerrillas and soldiers who were attacking the Americans during the war. The VC built around 200km(!) of tunnels during the war.

The entrance to the Centre (attached) was a wide pedestrian tunnel that immersed one in near blackness, meant, I am sure, as a metaphor. And spectacularly useful for my Tao te Ching – darkness into light. Upon emerging one is introduced to the plight of the soldiers on both sides of the conflict. The place has an oppressive air. Death, darkness and claustrophobia are constantly present. Man’s inventiveness in killing and torturing and destroying each other is the theme of the experience we had there; it hurt like a bruise. At the end of the demonstrations (indoctrination) we were taken as a group to a small subterranean room to watch stories told of glorious war heroes from Cu Chi. Both the visuals and the ham-fisted narrative somehow made the experience more awful. While I was watching the agit-prop I felt someone tap me on the left shoulder, I turned thinking that someone wanted to pass in front of me to sit in my row. I looked up and there was no one there. Undoubtedly a ghost.

Our guide for the day was an older gentleman named Minh (Ming) a very interesting fellow who would have experienced some pretty disturbing events in his life. He worked as an interpreter for the US for the purposes of interrogating captured soldiers. He had some very clear precepts for his life that he shared with us: mankind is doomed and one shouldn’t have children, and that he regrets not being a woman because ’women are the flower of the world’. He wants to come back to earth as a woman (whether he will bear children wasn't related). He constantly came back to his major thesis – we should be happy because life is very good to us (much better than it was to the ‘heroes’(=dead) of the American war).

Cu Chi - Enmity, hatred, territory, dogma – all the stuff of an object-oriented world view.
Cao Dai - Harmony, integration, selflessness, sharing – a promise.

Blind Massage 2.28.10

Is the date right on this? I wasn't liking the writing on this and haven't had much chance to post. So here comes a slough. I will try to add illustrations as I go on my photo management is rotten. I have too many.

After a long day of slogging through different places in HCMC Sophie suggested we take a soothing massage at a place recommended in Lonely Planet – an institute of blind practitioners. Sounds pretty great. We had images of nuns with Zen-like awareness relieving our stress and pain.

Before the session (about $4) I decided to take a pee – had images of some Heimlich manoeuvre on my bladder that would produce some cataclysmic event so I wanted to void my bladder. I had to run the gauntlet of about a dozen betowelled locals waiting by the steam room. I had been wondering where the Sumos hung out. In general the Vietnamese are lean and strong looking – here was a wall of generous flesh. The gentlemen stared at me, gimlet-eyed as I squeezed through their unyielding bulk to the toilet stall. Definitely hostility writ on their faces but I didn’t understand why. I squeezed back through the human wall and suddenly realized I hadn’t flushed – further proof, I am sure of my cultural inferiority.

Once back at the front desk I was directed to a stall surrounded by blue sheets. I was instructed to strip, lie down and wait for my masseur. No towel provided and only the curtain hung between me and the main entrance - so I was presenting ‘squab in a nest’ for the curious gawkers. The table was, in a word, scuzzy, but, in for a penny...

My masseur finally showed up. A young man who introduced himself as Pho. He bent forward and asked, ‘are you gay?’ For a moment I thought he was talking to me in Vietnamese, many of the words are monosyllabic, but I quickly got it. ‘Sorry, No ‘I croaked . Was I in the wrong room? He was silent for a moment then began to work (on my limbs and back). Pho talked noisily to his compatriots in adjacent massage cubicles. Finally he said to me ‘I have many foreigners clients. Do you want masturbate?’ I said ‘No, thanks, not today’. Why did I say that? He paused, then asked me quietly if I would give him a tip? I had a bit of difficulty understanding him at first then I wasn’t sure how to respond. His hands were pretty strong and I wanted to avoid physical injury on the first day of the trip so I suggested I would tip him for his good work. The rest of the massage proceeded, as they say, without incident.

I went down to the sun-baked courtyard to find Sophie sitting under lone scraggy little tree for the shade it offered I was attacked by a swarm of atom-sized fire ants that made a noose-tightening foray on my unmanipulated nether parts. Not since the days of Dien Bien Phu had a more devious assault been launched. I rapidly conducted a clever little anti-pismiric semaphore to the great amusement of the few sighted occupants of the compound and we fled, me doing a flailing pirouette that would have made Pierre T. grind his teeth with envy. Having vanquished the cruel arthropods(?) we hastened to a nearby establishment to consume a gallon or so of Saigon beer for its ameliorative effects.

Soph and I continue to be successful at crossing HCMC streets. Many have done so but I will attempt to describe the means by which one navigates streets in Ho Chi Minh City. Firstly one must envision oneself as a neutrino, passing through a dense screen of motorbikes (electrons)and more devastating vehicles (Protons). The vehicles are often up to 10 abreast, so it is kind of like playing frogger for keeps – but there is a ‘God loves You’ key stuck in the on position and miraculously one achieves the far curb with a feeling which is an incongruous admixture of superiority and humility. I also like to conjure up a bit of Cesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer and walk with certitude and strong energy. I think the drivers will sense weakness and pounce upon it like a tiger on a newborn deer.

And so to bed on my 2” foam mattress. Yum.