Forsaking February’s frigidity and fancying freedom from a frustrating frost finds us focused on a friendly fix of foreign frolic from a fourth foray to Vietnam, followed by a fourteenth fling in Bali, to find some ‘effing’ sunshine.
Obviously this trip is not about collecting new stamps in our well bruised passports; it’s simply about enjoying the wonders of wandering in a couple of endearing countries we’ve come to adore. The timing of our departure is impeccable, with it the coldest day in Victoria since 1948, the year I joined the planet!
With the fatiguing flights finally finished we deploy at the airport in Hanoi and patiently queue up for our ‘On Arrival Visa’. Prone to pretentiousness, the immigration officials are such a pain in the ass I reckon it would be helpful for the airport to provide a resident proctologist! Finally cleared hurtle we hail a taxi and brace ourselves for the dreaded driving ahead. It’s kind of like a sneeze; you know it’s coming, but can’t do anything about it.
Sure enough, driving the car like he stole it, our driver perilously blunders straight through a red light with a cell phone tethered to his ear. He has clearly upgraded himself to professional moron, having just given up his amateur status and we have named him Mr. Pid – first name Stu!
At the Serene Hotel in Old Town it’s immediately clear the name doesn’t come from its location. Wedged between a vegetable shop and a grisly fish shop on an alley only slightly wider than a piece of string, perpetual precaution is required with the snarling motorbikes using it as a shortcut. We find our room decorated with balloons, rose petals, rambutan, dragon fruit, and a bottle of wine; presumably to help soothe the transportation trauma involved in getting here. Their clairvoyance is much appreciated!
Jetlagged and unable to sleep, I shove off the sheets and go out for a walk, even though it’s only five o’clock in the morning. Cocooned in the darkness I overestimate my navigational skills and becoming lost in an edgy area near the train station, my predicament catapults me into a heightened state of situational awareness with my head on a swivel.
However as the sun comes up my anxiety goes down and I find my way back to the hotel where Christine is now awake. Afflicted with a condition diagnosed as ‘smarter-than-me’ she simply shakes her head, no doubt wondering if one day while out on my errant wanderings I might actually run into my mind!
Sauntering about the hodgepodge of Hanoi we notice an excess of shops flogging ‘Kopi Luak’, or ‘Weasel Coffee’. Now I may be on ‘dangerous grounds’ here, but as a tea drinker I find this coffee sounds disgusting. Partially digested coffee beans eaten by a mammal called the Asian palm civet are fermented as they pass through the animal’s intestines, and after being defecated with other fecal matter they are collected by farmers who wash them off and continue the roasting process. Sound appealing? Thought so!
Hanoi is an evil orchestra of horns and the habitual honkers are driving us bonkers! This Honky’s suggestion would be to rename the cacophonous city to “Hornoi”, or “Honkoi”, or even ‘Hanoise’; as any one of them would be a far more appropriate handle!
Vietnamese traffic is a constant soup of confusion with fender to fender motorbikes swarming about like angry hornets with a busted nest. Crossing streets on foot requires a Medal of Valor mindset when stepping off the curb in front of the impatient roaring river of rubber. We keep our fingers crossed that our action doesn’t put us in traction as a Moses-like parting of traffic miraculously flows around us like water around a rock. In some countries people still pray in the streets, and in this country they are called pedestrians!
With TET just ending we’re puzzled by an abundance of motorbikes that seem to have sprouted either peach or cumquat trees. Some sleuthing reveals that peach blossoms are meant to ward off evil and orange cumquats symbolize the hopes for a family’s prosperity in the upcoming New Year. Since most families don’t have room to permanently keep the celebratory potted trees, once TET is over the plants are returned on motorbikes to the garden shops to be cared for until the next trip around the sun.
The Old Quarter is where locals go to buy everything from bamboo to buttons, and dawdling about the streets we notice people feeding paper items into a burning metal barrel. The traditional Vietnamese belief is that death does not mean the end; the deceased simply move on to an afterlife where things are the same as in the living world and therefore require their home comforts as much as the living.
Relatives buy paper effigies of needed items and set them on fire to be transferred through the smoke. The fascinating paper offerings being incinerated include rice cookers, washing machines, cars, motorbikes, U.S. dollars, cigarettes, dentures, and even iPhones. Cell-service in the here-after – who knew?
Tantalizing aromas nest in our nostrils from various meats on the streets grilling over open fires intensified by the use of an electric fan. Overhead on the streets and posing a latent danger for anyone below, a titanic tangled mess of power lines resemble a sea of black spaghetti.
The Vietnamese are all sensational ‘squatters’, and hang out on the sidewalks in preposterous tendon-snapping squats that would make even a gymnast proud. I’m sure if we attempted to mimic their action the twang of our hamstrings snapping would be heard all the way back in Canada!
One of Vietnam’s most pleasing sights is mobile flower markets. Streets team with bicycles, but some owners don’t pedal them, they petal them! Burying their bikes beneath beautiful bouquets of fragrant fresh-cut flowers, the cheerful and colorful cargo varies according to the season, and includes everything from daisies to dahlias and lilies to lotus.
Three wheel cyclos mingling with traffic are pedaled about by men in pea-green pith helmets looking not dissimilar to soldiers. Joining them are rail-thin but deceptively strong ‘yolk-ladies’, who with bamboo shoulder-poles groaning under the weight of their burdens, stop for neither man nor motorbike while shuffling through the clogged veins of the city.
Through a company called Hanoi Kids we hook up with a couple of female university students wanting to hone their English. Acting as tour guides they take us to the iron-trussed Long Bien Bridge spanning a river named Red, and then just for the smell of it, to the Botanical Gardens and a vast flower market so ambrosial it makes us want to grow a couple more noses!
During the fun outing we learn the girl’s unpronounceable nicknames translate as ‘Butter’ and ‘Sheep’! Asking why, they are unable to explain in English and simply giggle off the question, so with the mystery unsolved we simplify matters by referring to them as ‘Marge’ and ‘Mary’. Asking M&M to take us to a place serving the tasty Vietnamese staple called Pho, we follow them down an alley to a lady hunched over a ginormous steel cauldron.
Our pho-nomenal meal is accompanied by bamboo chop sticks. Christine offers me a lesson in how to use the mega toothpicks, but with my dexterity deficiency, I’d reckon she’d have better luck teaching an emu how to knit. Since I can’t trade them in on a set of salad tongs the best I can do is to balance the oodles of noodles over the flimsy twigs and inhale! Much to my chagrin, the renegade strands rather unbecomingly try finding their way up a nose hole or slapping at an ear lobe on their way to being sucked into the vortex!
At Bia Hoi Junction I stop for a pint of beer, joining residents busy either smoking from long whistling bongs, stroking their chins, or carpeting curbs with spit-out sunflower seed shells. The street décor is akin to the children’s section of Ikea, and with my backside spilling over the edge of a silly stool and my knees up around my ears, I feel like a giant who’s lost his bean stock. Fee-fi-fo-fum, my bum is getting numb!
Ever the fanatic follower of fashion, Christine fancies some fresh threads today, and exercising due diligence I trail along to try and provide damage control. Shopping in Vietnam can be extremely fatiguing when dealing with verbally-incontinent merchants using the hypothesis that persistence beats resistance. Seeking an outcome of income, I swear they could talk the fleas off a dog!
As I’m eyeballing on an item of interest, one of the wizened ‘lookey lookey’ ladies sees this and shouts out ‘Sochi Sochi’. At first I think she’s just over enthusiastic about the Russian Olympics currently on TV, but then realize there IS no TV. The dentally challenged one is simply ‘p-less’, and trying to convey ‘so cheap’!
Taking a page from her book I use atrocious enunciation to reply ‘expen-expen’, causing her brow to crumple as her head does the old RCA dog head tilt. Suddenly her face melts into a smile having just come to the revelation she is dealing with a worthy adversary rather than simply an ATM with legs.
With ground rules now established Ms. P-less and I engage in the customary haggling dance before settling on a good-for-you-good-for-me price. Many moons ago I learned the shortest distance between a successful sale in any linguistically cumbersome conversation is sharing a good laugh.
While Christine stops in a lingerie store to make a few cheeky little purchases, I realize that starting out today with the intent of simply buying a pair of sandals, I too have succumbed to the perils of wandering. In addition to the floppy footwear I have accumulated a diverse gathering of blue jeans, a bag of beer, eight pairs of racy underwear, and a fruit called mothers milk!
Our time in Hanoi quickly rolls by and on our last night our old friend Smiley invites us out to dinner. Gathering us at our hotel, he makes a stop at a revolting street stall selling ‘thit cay’ (dog meat). Clearly it’s a man eat dog world here, but fortunately for us this is not dinner, simply a photo op. Vietnam is a definite country of quirks with birds taken out for a daily morning walk and dogs eaten for dinner!
Smiley and family take us to the largest buffet restaurant in Vietnam called Sen Tay Ho; a gastronomic adventure features an incredible variety of over 200 items! The food is spectacular, although some items require an open mind as well as an open mouth; whole cooked baby birds, fried larvae, crunchy crabs, turtles, snails, chewy octopus, and other oddities formerly unknown to our intestines.
With our flight delayed due to the being ‘broken’, we twiddle our thumbs for six long hours at the airport until it gets ‘mended’. Eventually making it to Danang we a taxi to the magical little town of Hoi An and quickly realize that while Hanoi and Hoi An may be a perfect anagram with their letters all the same, the two cities could not differ more! The historic river town of Hoi An translates to ‘peaceful meeting place’, but of course the chance of Hanoi laying any kind of claim to that description is the square root of bupkis!
Recharging our mental batteries during a week at Betel Garden Homestay, the interesting sights on our walks into town include paddy-hatted ladies balancing their burdens like a human scale from flexible bamboo shoulder poles, and flip-flopped locals transporting discombobulated ducks tethered upside down to bicycle handlebars. Early mornings a buttery ball of sun splays its rays across historic yellow buildings and flotilla of boats anchored in the river, presenting the quintessential picture of an old Vietnamese town.
Ordering a 12 ounce glass of Bia Hoi beer at lunch today costs a mere 3,000 dong (14 cents US)! Giddy with delight, what else can I do but order another. That was a waste of a line wasn’t it, I’m sure most already made that leap. In fact, I unabashedly order a third beer bringing my total bar bill to a whopping 42 cents. All-righty then, all I need to do now is work out how to acquire my immigration papers!
Tonight is Hoi An’s full moon lantern festival and a time when the town gives modern life the night off. All motorbikes all outlawed, as are lights from television, houses, street lamps, and neon signs. Once the sun settles in for its nightly nap, the only lighting comes by way of the swollen mango moon, beautiful hanging silk lanterns, or flickering cardboard candle lanterns bobbing along in the river. The gentle illumination makes it impossible not to enjoy the ambience of a night done right!
Hoi An is truly a ‘Garden of Eatin’, and the fantastic flawlessly fused flavors of salads pimped out with green mango, banana flower, lotus stems, pomelo, and crispy shallots are like a spa for the taste buds! The town also happens to be a ‘so-so’ kind of place, and streets are bursting at the seams with over 200 shops displaying clutters of cloth and armies of aloof mannequins. Perfectly tailored to Christine’s passion for fashion, I believe several lucky shop owners are now well on the way to early retirement!
Clearly joining in on this spendathon turns out to be a tactical error as she’s not satisfied until talking me into ordering a sports jacket. Ultimately I succumb and whip out my dong. You do of course realize that ‘dong’ is the local currency in Vietnam, right? Whew, glad we sorted that out! My million dong deal has left me ‘cashstrated’ and in need of a bank! Damn, shopping with that woman is downright dangerous!
While partaking in a photography class we bike and boat to where the Thu Bon River empties into the South China Sea. Fish boats moored off shore have eyes painted on their bows to keep fishermen safe at sea and lead them back to land. Also in the water, massive traditional fish nets splashing with life are pedaled up by foot-powered winches and suspended above the water. Fishermen who depend on this ‘net income’ paddle underneath the nets using long bamboo sticks to spill their bounty into tiny round basket boats.
In Vietnam, bamboo is said to represent the resilience and bravery of the Vietnamese people, and there is a saying that ‘A man is born in a bamboo cradle and goes away in a bamboo coffin. Everything in between is possible with bamboo’.
With over 30 years kicking around Asia we are well aware of the enormous affinity to the fastest growing plant on Earth. Bamboo is used for everything from its edible shoots to construction, and out on a wander we spot a bamboo bicycle leaning up against a clothing shop where I purchase a lovely shirt made from the very same versatile vegetation!
Small circular basket boats called ‘thung chai’ dot the river banks around Hoi An, and set upside down in the sun to dry, they look much like giant mushrooms after rain. Made of plaited bamboo strips covered with tar and tree sap, they are lined with cow dung to help make them as watertight as a frog’s rectum.
Cycling the countryside we spot a few of these boats tethered in a channel of the Thu Bon River and stop to negotiate renting one from the family. We’re surprised to learn the boat will come with a ‘driver’, as the owner has commandeered his elderly mother to be our paddler! Her face is crinkled like a walnut and she doesn’t speak a lick of English, but her merry eyes and big betel-stained smile instantly endear her to us.
Asking the family to keep our bikes safe we then warily step into a tiny boat looking like a floating flower basket on growth hormones. Bonneted in a paddy hat secured by an orange ribbon under her chin, our grandma ‘chauffeur’ ejects a red-brown plug of betel from her mouth into the river and we’re on our way.
After a few bends in the river the old dear deftly paddles our water chariot into a remote water-coconut grove and pulls out a machete. Oh-oh, are we about to be chopped up and fed to the fishes? Of course not! In a lovely gesture, the wrinkled wizard begins whacking at some palm fronds with her machete to cleverly create two ‘leaf hats’ to help keep the scorching sun at bay!
For a laugh she then hands her paddle to me. The trick is to row the round boat straight, but with only a single oar it’s like trying to type with boxing gloves on. Our elderly paddling phenom cannot contain her cackling as I row us around and around in circles like a one-flippered seal. With my pathetic efforts turning into such an oar-deal, it’s no wonder the funky little vessel came with its own a driver!
During the entire outing the tiny Vietnamese grandmother hasn’t stopped smiling and neither have we! Our spur of the moment river joyride has proven to be a Hoi An highlight, and is a lovely ending to another set of travels in the wonderful land of wows that is Vietnam.
It’s time now to reacquaint ourselves with Bali as our relationship with this island of head-scratching contradictions continues. Wonderful magic makes its home here, but so too does a much darker side lurking just below the surface. A constant battle is waged between ‘ying and yang’ with Gods and demons, pristine and polluted, sincerity and scams, prim and primal, kindness and crime, calm and chaos, and paradise and purgatory; all forming the enigma that is Bali.
Watching the carousel at Denpasar Airport get picked bare we notice that once again our luggage has not accompanied us, but told it should be on the next plane in about ninety minutes we decide to wait. The guys in the lost luggage department tell us ‘new airport no good.’ Apparently corruption and bribery helped India secure the contract and they cheaped-out big-time. The fellows may have a valid concern, as a sizeable portion of the new roof recently collapsing is hardly the kind of air conditioning one would expect in a new airport!
A couple of hours later at Yulia Bungalows in the village of Ubud we are thrilled to chill out under the spell of Bali’s Zen again. The captivating soundscape is simply gently clonking bamboo wind chimes, croaking kodocks, exotic birdsongs, giggling geckos, and of course the tinkling of ice in our glass.
These days it’s harder to find the declining rewards, but once off the tourist grid the real magic of Bali still shines. The haunting hypnotic melody of the gamelan, elegantly dressed women wearing tall fruit offerings like headdresses, village ducks herded in pretty little processions, Ganeshas pimped out with hibiscus flowers behind the ear, fiercely green rice paddies, lotus flowers reflecting on still ponds, and the eye-rolling dance performances of stunning Balinese women in candle-lit and moss-cloaked temples.
On a cycling we stop for water along the Champuahn Ridge Trail high above the Ayung River. Christine spots a carved picture frame she fancies, and after some hard haggling and my wallet whittled down, I end up dutifully wearing it like a large wooden necklace. This is the all too familiar yoke-like beast of burden look often occurring with the extravagant impulses of you-know-who! The only thought ricocheting around in my frontal lobe is that if I survive the thirsty ride back to the bungalow I’m planning to go on a nice romantic walk – to the fridge!
The term ‘Not my monkey not my problem’ is certainly not appropriate in Ubud’s Monkey Forest given the mischievous Macaques’ notorious thievery. Stowing away any ‘grabables from the furry thugs, we cross a moss-matted bridge and find a snake racing us to the other side! As the sun battles to penetrate the gloomy forest’s canopy of snarled old Banyan trees we’re forced to fend off a familiar foe with no gender bias and in a mood for feasting! Opting to trade mosquito bites for gigabytes, the ‘swat team’ quickly head off in search of an internet café to check our email.
In town we are accustomed to hustlers watching us like a lioness eyeing an impala on the limp as they try selling everything from watches to women and perfume to pot. Tonight however I’m approached by an insolent little pill-peddler flogging Viagra. With no need of ‘Grandpa’s Little Helper’ I quickly advise him to fornicate with himself; after all, the cocky little prick is just not a stand-up kind of guy!
Valuable Bali ducks are herded into the rice paddies for two reasons. Firstly, to plump up to an edible size by eating the algae, insects, and weeds in the fields; and secondly, waddling about in the mud creates oxygenation needed for the growth of rice roots. Sunning ourselves on our balcony with the merry chortling of the ducks next door falling soothingly on our ears we feel as calm as if in a post-coital cuddle.
Few societies in the world exist where religion plays such a role as in Bali. Treated as honored guests by the superstitious Balinese, their deities seem to require copious coddling with daily offerings of ‘Canang Sari’, meant to express gratitude to good spirits and placate mischievous demons.
Not much bigger than a deck of cards, the woven baskets contain goodies including things like flowers, rice, and betel leaf, along with the ever-present smoldering stick of pungent incense. The latter is because no one knows exactly where the Gods might be at any given time, and the belief is that the smoke’s aroma will be sure to reach a divine nostril or two. Respectful of local customs we stay vigilant in trying to avoid ‘sidewalk surfing’ on the extensive proliferation of godly offerings!
With our holidays ebbing away we move south to Seminyak as it’s closer to the airport for an early flight. It also happens to be a great spot for some last minute shopping without selling a kidney to pay the tab.
With her wallet rapidly shedding weight Christine has an overkill of salespeople fawning over her like a little posse of personal stalkers, and my main concern whether or not our departing aircraft will be able to achieve liftoff.
Tri Hita Karana is a traditional philosophy for life on the island, and roughly translated, it means achieving happiness by establishing and maintaining; harmony with God, harmony among people, and harmony with nature and environment. Bali appears to be doing very well with the first two, but the latter is facing major challenges with the island’s mass tourism taking its toll.
The onslaught of foreign visitors each year in Bali has exploded from less than 300,000 when we first visited in 1986 to over 3,000,000 today! This staggering increase of camera-clutching tourists has many troubled that the beloved island being ‘loved to death’. As a local once said to me, ‘Bali is like a bowl of sweets and the ants come from everywhere.’
Hopefully Bali will manage to hang on, just like its sticky-toed geckos, to its fabulous cultural smorgasbord, because the secret to the gorgeous island’s success will ultimately be in it maintaining a balance. Ah yes, as in all of life, it’s always about striking a balance!
Mark Colegrave March 2014