Beaches, boats and ‘bang me’ in Vietnam
By scott.poniewaz | August 5, 2006
Before I get started, I must apologize for the slow posting, but I’ve been pretty busy. I’ve got some catching up to do! Enough of that though, I’ll jump right in…
The bustling streets of Hanoi, Vietnam. Please click here or the image to see a gallery of images from Thailand and Vietnam. Also, FYI… my new gallery has thumbnails that you can click to switch pictures and if you drag the cursor over the image a caption should show up without having to click on anything. Email me at: scott.poniewaz@gmail.com if you have questions on or comments on it!
For weeks, maybe it has been months, I’ve just been thinking about getting to Vietnam and being able to belt out, “GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!” So when we got off the plane in Hanoi I had to contain myself, because it was about midnight. I guess it could be considered early morning, but in my book, it was just getting to be a late night. After being in the military dictatorship of Burma just a few days ago, I was at ease as I entered another country with a form of government foreign to our own democracy. Welcome to Communism.
To be quite honest though, I could not even tell. Each person seems to be living their own life, Hanoi is bustling with capitalism and you can see the division of classes fairly easily. Sure, you have the occasional propaganda posters on the streets and I’m sure if I lived there longer, I may find more evidence, but the word on the street is that Communism has become a thing of the past. It is still held closely to the heart of the Vietnamese people through Ho Chi Minh, or Uncle Ho as he has become known as.
The trip I took to his mausoleum was eye opening, for the Vietnamese it is a pilgrimage and really has no equivalent in American society. His embalmed body is an amazing spectacle encased in glass guarded closely by four soldiers with a backdrop of the Vietnamese flag and the former Soviet Union’s flag, which make up an entire twenty-foot tall wall. I heard that there is question about the authenticity of the actual body in the casing, so the whole time (about 45 seconds) I was trying to figure out whether or not his body was wax while I was herded through the room in a very neat, double-file line.
They believe that Uncle Ho’s body was embalmed improperly, because they thought they had figured out a way to do it in Vietnam inexpensively, rather than ship it off to the Soviet Union. People now think that they screwed up the process did it incorrectly and this is a wax version. He does look wax-like, but I couldn’t get closer than about 10 feet. Another thing about the mausoleum is that it was built against his wishes. Oh, the beauty of Communism. They built him a home and a sprawling garden to live in, but to show his adherence to Communist ideals, he gave it back to the people and refused to live in the house and lived in the electrician’s hut on the grounds. With that in mind, when he died, he wanted to be cremated, but again, the government went against his wishes and decided this wasn’t such a great idea and built the mausoleum to commemorate his rule and serve as a tomb of sorts for the people to come and see the father of their Communist country.
Hanoi is filled with interesting tidbits, but when you get down to it, its pretty much an Asian city. The only exception is that it had the complete sixth season of the Sopranos out on DVD already. I had been searching high and low all summer, but had failed miserably. Even after asking HBO to sell me the season finale through groveling emails, I had given up hope and thought I’d have to wait like everyone else. I practically tripped on it though as I walked down the sidewalk my first day in the city. I asked the man if it was the sixth season and he pointed to the back room of a silk store that was working as a front for the illegal DVD sales. I guess its pretty fitting for me to find a bootlegged copy of ‘The Sopranos’ on the Vietnamese black market. It also serves those damn execs at HBO right after hooking me into their series for years and getting me to have cable for the sole purpose of getting ‘The Sopranos!’
This whole transaction is pretty typical of Asian cities though, it is very difficult to even find a real copy of anything, whether it is music, movies, Ray-Bans or computer software. When you do go to the places, it is also common to either be taken into a back room or hand over your money, get a piece of paper with something written in an Asian language and be told to come back in five or ten minutes to get your DVD. The strange one is in Chiang Mai, Thailand where the man will take your money, hold up one finger to signify one minute, turn and hop on a bike and pedal down the street. The first time this happens though, you think he’s making off with your money, so you stand there in disbelief for a minute, but you trust him because it’s a Buddhist society and karma would bite him in the ass, so you stay there. In a few minutes, he pulls back up with DVD’s in hand and a little bit of sweat dripping down his face. It always makes me think how often these guys actually get busted, because some are set up in legitimate malls. I just feel bad for the poor guy in the back that sits there all day at his computer burning these, but maybe it’s a monkey. Either way, they’re raking it in!
To say that Hanoi has little to it like I said before is a complete understatement, as it has the torture cells of the Hanoi Hilton Hotel and many other historical sites that only put images in your head of some of humanity’s darkest moments. Trying to keep this short though, I’ll stay away from the history that other sources can do better than I can and stick to my travels.
From Hanoi, its about 3 hours to Ha Long Bay, literally “Where the dragon descends to the bay” in Vietnamese. The story goes that the dragon descended from the skies and the mountains and into the sea. His path through the area created the limestone cliff formations covered with jungle that jut out of the glistening, turquoise sea. We end up spending two days out at sea on a luxurious junk boat and end up sleeping under the thousand-star hotel as Trang, our Vietnamese guide, calls it. She is about 25 and finishing her five-year education in guiding from the local Hanoi university. While I usually laugh at tour guides that spew facts out, I am starting to understand why Asian tour guides do this. It is because they have spent all of this time learning ridiculous facts and being trained to tell the same jokes no matter what tour group they have and need something to show for their years of training. She begins our trip like we are the normal group, but she quickly loosens up when she realizes we are not your average tourist group. During a conversation on the boat that night, she explains that she, as well as the rest of the crew on our boat does not understand why we always seem like we are happy and smiling no matter what we are doing. The best I can figure out is that they typically get uptight older tourists that are rude and demanding. Our group of students just is out to have a good time and take the world in, whether we are catered to or not. They don’t usually have everyone anxious to hop in the kayak and paddle themselves, throw each other in the water, jump off the 25-foot high top deck of the junk boat or be happy with whatever we get. It is a strange realization that keeps popping back into my head and actually makes me quite proud that our groups have so much fun.
On the boat we eat all kinds of fresh seafood. Fresh crab, prawns, fish, mussels…mmm! That night I borrowed my co-workers iPod (mine is still missing and probably somewhere in Cambodia at this time, maybe still in Burma) and listened to Wilco as I lie on my back gazing at the stars from the top of our boat. It is something that will forever remain on the emulsion of my mind as the moon and stars reflected off the sea, our boat gently rocked my thoughts around my mind and for a few hours, the breeze blew all of my cares and worries away.
We returned to Hanoi after those couple days and hopped a night train to Sapa, which put us in the north where the hill tribes are. The Black Hmong and Red Dao are the main tribes, the Dao are shy, while the Hmong are outgoing, friendly and speak incredible English! One of our staff members had been there the week before and had a group of girls that are in the age range of 7 or 8 to 15. They are street girls that make a two-hour, 7 Kilometer walk to Sapa from their small village nearly everyday to sell bracelets and other small trinkets to tourists. This group obviously has the motive of selling to our students, but they don’t necessarily care about these sales, they are also genuinely friendly girls. They couldn’t understand that my student group of almost all girls did not contain a girlfriend of mine, then upon realizing this, they took it upon themselves to try and marry me off. First to a 20 year-old that was from their village and later to a tall, blonde Australian girl that seemed to have no idea what was going on as I walked with Sui (Sue) and Tey (Thai), my two new friends in Sapa (both about 13 years-old). They grabbed her as she walked out of a shop on the main street and they tried to put our hands together, which to them would signify the marriage. We both laughed along with it, but as far as I know am still living the single, bachelor life, but you never know what is legally marriage in Asia!
The two girls were my personal tour guides in the area and came with our group as we hiked into the hill tribe areas, then got stuck in a big rain. They are all wiser than their young years, because they have lived on their own and seem to have formed a type of sisterhood or family. They watch out for one another, but buying a bracelet from one can bring on a cutthroat battle among them, so I made sure to avoid that conflict at all costs. They kept asking me to come to their village and I would have loved to visit, because something tells me it would be well off the normal circuit of tourists, but work and time constraints kept me from doing so. We all still joke that the girls would go home to a modern apartment in the city each night, take off their hill tribe clothing and watch ‘Sex and the City’ together.
One of the beautiful things about the French colonization of Vietnam is their food influence. Sure, Pho, the typical noodle dish is great, but in Asia, its difficult to find the comfort of bread and cheese. Vietnam is the only place where you find great bread being sold corner after corner, but on the other hand, the sales pitch is similar to many of the other Asian countries, only it’s a different type of sale. At first, when I walked down the streets and heard, “Bang me,” I was caught off guard. Okay, so maybe hanging out with all these teenagers has forced me to revert to my teenage maturity level for humor, but who can seriously say they wouldn’t find this funny? Okay, so as if that isn’t funny enough, the word for two is pronounced, “Hi.” I don’t think I really need to connect these dots, but I will anyway. So when you want to order two loaves of this great French bread, you need to say, “Hi, bang me,” then try and keep a straight face. Sure, immaturity is a bitch, but its that kind of humor that makes travel such a wonderful thing through Asia. I could just start listing some of the awful translations I’ve found into English, but that will have to wait for another post. It was great to have the French baguettes and pastries that I found in Sapa though. A little western gourmet food was just the ticket for those few days.
After a few days among the mountains and jungles of the north it was time to start heading back to Thailand via Hanoi.
We headed back down to Hanoi on another night train and had a nice early morning arrival time of 4:30 a.m. The early morning arrival meant we did get the pleasure of witnessing the surreal early morning Vietnamese exercise rituals.
We are walking out of the train station and there is already a woman in her eighties that has probably been sitting at the same short, plastic table outside of the shop for years, perhaps doing the same thing she is this morning for just as many. She was in fine form drinking some sort of rice whiskey and asked me if I cared to partake. Only in some of my college days have I had anything to drink at that absurd waking hour of the morning and don’t worry mom, it has to do with wine on a Sunday morning during our marathon bible study sessions. We find our bus and as we pull away from the train station, we start to see the city come alive.
That alive is in the form of elderly men in short, white shorts and white wife beaters wacking around a shuttlecock (Note: I don’t know if wife beater is the politically correct term, but I don’t know any other name for the tank top style undershirts). Yes, the Vietnamese love their badminton and aren’t afraid to start playing on every inch of open sidewalk space before their workday begins. Where the stores usually explode out toward the street, they set up their courts. While the men play their badminton, the women meet in parks and other open spaces to do a strange form of aerobic activity. They line up in groups ranging from one to fifty or more and do weird exercises in lines that are almost like an Asian variety of Jazzercise without the music. Some men seem to do this as well, but theirs is more of a Tai Chi style dance with no music and they usually are by themselves. It’s also strange because the men will do their exercises anywhere they can, street corners, open parks or the thin strip of concrete running through the middle of the street. I think they heard their older brothers tell them to go dance in traffic when they were young and took it a bit too literally for far too many years.
I don’t know exactly why they do all of this in the waking morning hours, but it may be all the fish sauce they consume. I found out that on average each Vietnamese person consumes about 11 liters of the flavorful oil each year. With the average twenty-something male being about 5’4” that means they consume about one liter for each 5.82 inches of their body. It’s a little disgusting if you’ve ever had it, but they consume it like the Italians do their gravy or us Wisconsin natives eat their cheese. I think fish sauce is actually healthy, but they have to get rid of that stuff somewhere, so why not sweat it out at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m.
Kidding aside, they are happy, fit and active. Perhaps this is linked to the fact that they are fortunate to still be alive after the Vietnam War (or the American War as it is known to the Vietnamese). Due to the conflict, Vietnam is a young country with 60 percent of it under age 25. Compare this to our deteriorating, overweight American society and maybe we could start taking some notes about staying in shape and living life for each day that we have it.
And then there is the world of Vietnamese karaoke. They take it seriously and Vinh, one of the guys we worked with while we were there, sings nothing but love songs. I am starting to actually get a reputation around the workplace for my rendition of ‘Hotel California,’ which is a little scary, because I don’t do it well and it is a song that Asians all know. The sad thing about it all, is that my karaoke is minus the supplemental beverages that typically accompany karaoke. No holds barred though, I suppose, because I wail on the microphone from Thailand to Vietnam and anywhere in between! This was after my buzzed hair cut, the third country after a timid woman cut my hair in Burma, but was afraid to actually take any length off. I got fed up with my haircut in every country goal and just took it off one afternoon in Hanoi, got a pair of knock-off Ray Bans and hit the karaoke bar that night after dinner. I can assure you all, I am doing well over here, so please don’t worry!
As I journeyed through Vietnam, I didn’t walk away with as many of the great photos I had in other countries, but I did walk away with a humbling understanding of the Vietnamese culture. On many occasions I traded my photo opportunities for interaction with the people. It is something I am still processing weeks later and will continue to do until my next visit. The conversations with people I met there are still being replayed in my head, I flip through the sights and sounds like a video in my mind and I still try to grasp this fascinating country.
The Vietnam culture did not seem to impact me that much when I first left, but weeks later and after a bit of time and reflection, my interaction with the Vietnamese people was one of understanding, regret, confusion and laughter.
After all, who isn’t taken aback when they hear an attractive girl in her twenties ask, “Bang me?”
I sure as hell was, but the bread market is only the beginning!
Topics: Travel, Photo Galleries, General, Thailand, Vietnam |
One Response to “Beaches, boats and ‘bang me’ in Vietnam”
Comments
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9:58 am on August 14th, 2006
Scott,
It was really nice to see your photo journal… and great to see pictures of you (nice hair cut, clean face!!)… but did you really get that close to all those snakes?!! Snakes?? Yuck… MSR