Grandmothers in South East Asia

The Thais will sell you their grandmother. They will put her in a sack and get her into the back of your truck and then tell you that whatever is in the sack is potatoes/ diving equipment / elephant souvenirs.

The Cambodians will also sell you their grandmother. They will put her in a sack and get her into the back of your truck but Cambodians will actually tell you that their grandmother is in the sack. Cambodians are willing to argue with you for hours in order to convince you to buy their grandmother. Indeed, having two grandmothers of your own is merely in indication that you are rich and can therefore afford one more.

Interestingly....the Vietnamese will start by trying to sell you their grandmother. But when they realise that what you really want is a tour on Ha Long Bay they will say "fine, you can have the tour on Ha Long Bay but then you have to take my grandmother at a 50% discount". The interesting thing about the Vietnamese grandmother , however, is that when you get her, you realise that she is in a mini skirt.

Edge of National Highway No. 1, Vietnam, 15 February 2007

We began our ascent of Vietnam on an overnight bus to Nha Trang. I spent the night either hallucinating in the heat or reading my book, plaintively using my phone as a light. It wasn't a very good book. The fact that the conductor was snoring loudly from where he lay across the back seat didn't help either (yup Brandon, bus conductors really are the same the world over). Imagine our joy when we rolled into a quiet little beach town, took a room with a balcony overlooking the sea, strolled down to the beach, hired a beach chair, ordered lobster and a beer and passed out for the rest of the day? This, essentially, is Nha Trang.

Two days, several beers, some shellfish, a tan, a mudbath and some new books later we tore ourselves away from the decadent little hamlet by the beach only to find ourselves arriving in another decadent little hamlet - Hoi An.

Hoi An is a shabby little Vietnamese-French village, built in the 17th Century when it was a central trading port in the South China Sea. The houses haven't changed since the 17th Century and as a result the town is on the World Heritage List; we could have been walking through the Vietnamese version of Chocolat. Hoi An has long had a reputation for silk and tailor shops. It would be fair to say that Al and I pillaged the local tailors. We spent four days drinking coffee and eating croissants in the local patisserie and walking in and out of different tailor shops for fittings. We also took in some of the sights of the town (in between fittings). The most interesting of these were the Chinese family chapels. We were shown around the family chapel of the Tran Family. The family can trace itself back 13 generations (300 years) and on the alter in the chapel there are oblong wooden funerary boxes containing a name tablet and the biographical details of each deceased family member. There is also a photograph of more recent deceased family members on the wall. Out the back is a garden where a newborn's umbilical cord is buried so that, even if he travels far away, he will always know where home is. Essentially the chapel is a place where the Tran Family gather to venerate their ancestors and discuss family affairs.

Tailored suits in hand and prescribing ourselves several hours of sight seeing and cultural appreciation in penance for our yuppie consumerism, we travelled up to Hue. Hue, it turns out, is a veritable feast of sight seeing and cultural appreciation. I spent yesterday hanging on to the back of a motorbike (driven by a old Vietnamese guy who, in an insane fit of vanity, kept on sucking in his love handles) while dodging cows in paddy fields so we could see the mausoleums of the emperors of the Nguyen Dynasty.

The mausoleums are interesting stuff. The Emperors play a big part in designing their own monuments before they die and as such each is a unique expression of the monarch's personality. For instance, Khai Dinh's is suffused with European baroque and has lavish displays in porcelain mosaic. Legend has it, Khai Dinh was a particularly flamboyant dresser and it's rumoured that he brought back a string of fairy lights from France and proceeded to wear them around the palace, twinkling until the battery ran out. In complete contrast is the mausoleum of Minh Mang who was an authoritarian and distrusted the intrusion of Western religion. In keeping with this character, his is designed along traditional Chinese lines with all the principal buildings symmetrical about an east-west axis. It is at once stately and grand yet at the same time softened by a still lake with a red roofed pavillion.

Siagon, Vietnam, 5 February 2006

On Saturday we took a boat into the Mekhong Delta, lazily leaving Phnom Penh on a bus that hooted at everything in its path. When it gets to grit-your-teeth levels we have to keep reminding eachother that this is not a sign of pent up Cambodian aggression released as road rage, rather it's just a way of letting everyone know you are coming.

Alastair has a photo of me on the top of a river boat drinking a beer at 10am, rows of paddy fields and houses on stilts behind me, watching the water traffic as it chugs by. Incidentally, the Cambodian-Vietnamese Mekhong border post is tantamount to a luxury resort complete with border guard volley ball nets and I would gladly spend US$10/night to stay there.

We got off the boat in Chau Doc, as deep in the heart of the Delta as you can be. We were having a problem because all we had were US$20s and US$50s which we couldn't, hand on heart, hand over to a Vietnamese person to pay for our $3 meal. While we were worrying about how rich we were, the cylco driver we hired (the wizened old stoat) blandly delivered us to wrong guest house. He then proceeded to offer us a romantic sunset (what a joke) and followed us/"showed us the night market". We crossed the road to shake him off. This is more artful than it sounds. There are rules to crossing the road in Asia, these are they:

1. The French colonised Cambodia and Vietnam and, nominally, they drive on the right. However, there will almost always be a lone bicycle or motorbike taking advantage of the fast lane created by driving down the wrong side of the road. Watch out for him.
2. Disregard all pedestrian crossings and traffic lights as they are disregarded by everyone else. If you see a policeman directing traffic, wait until he is not looking.
3. Once you have committed to crossing the road you cannot change your mind.
4. Walk at a steady pace into traffic, do not run and do not stop, this will allow oncoming traffic to judge where you will be when they reach you and how to swerve accordingly.
5. Crossing near potholes can make traffic unpredictable.
6. In particular, avoid catching the eye of any cyclo drivers who will immediately stop on the off chance that you wanted a lift. This too makes traffic unpredictable.

Shrugging and waving we left the Old Stoat trying to turn his bicycle around in oncoming traffic and immersed ourselves in Chau Doc. It is Vietnamese New Year this month and we found a group of performers practising the dragon dance - think of the pantomime cow with two people inside that is actually a dragon but which looks like a lion dancing across a set of stilts 3m in the air - got lost in the Fish Market, emerged and had fish soup at the Night Market. People here live above their shops, there are few cars, the skyline was full of tv antennae and on Saturdays people sit on chairs in the streets and watch things go by. We were only two of a handful of Westerners.

The next day we found a local bus to take us north to Vinh Long. Clearly we were the entertainment of the hour and the old women on the bus were eager to know if Alastair and I were together or, if not, whether we could get together (this involved many lewd hand gestures). As the journey progressed, they wanted to let me know that, since I was single, the skinny man with the Hitler mustache was keen. Also, for Alastair's benefit, an innocent looking family photo album was produced that turned out to be a catalogue of girls in bikinis frolicking on the beach for him to choose from. About 2 hours into this, a French guy got on the bus and saw Al with his photo album (still trying to ask politely "is this your niece?" ) at which point the old women all started nudging me and pointing at the French guy not very subtly. I gestured that he had two huge diamond earrings in one ear and hence wasn't my type - the French guy clearly thought he had got on a porn bus. Subdued for a while, suddenly this old woman gets so excited she's jumping off her seat and she gestures to the French guy's earrings and then to Alastair and they start nudging Al and smiling and pointing. The French guy misses none of this and he says to us with raised eyebrows "we may do that in France, but not in Vietnam".

I have never been so glad to be dropped off on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere in my life!

Vinh Long is another town on the edge of a river. It also has no ATMs. It does, however, have the only escalator in the region and a guy who teaches the locals how to get on and off. On Sundays people go to the mall to ride the escalator.

Today we made it to Saigon. We have 20 days left to do Vietnam from bottom to top.

Aki Ra and the Land Mine Museum

Incidentally, in counter point to the post below, we visited the Landmine Museum in Siem Reap which is basically a shack at the end of a dirt road where a huge amount of explosives (live and not live) are on show along with a photographic display of the works of one Aki Ra. Aki is a Cambodian guy who diffuses landmines, looks after kids, lives off donations and is an all round top bloke. However, one should bear in mind that this is still Cambodia and the link below (written by an erudite Aussie) tells you all about Aki but also serves to show why I feel so at home in Cambodia:

http://catharsis.smiling-politely.org/2007/01/hey-rhea-cambodian-computers-are_17.htm

Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 2 February 2007

Cambodia has arisen an array of emotions within me, I have left off writing this blog until I could present my impressions as a whole:

Awe – at Angkor Wat and the temples surrounding it. We spent the better part of three days exploring the ruins and even then it didn’t feel as if we’d scratched the surface (on one day we got up to see the sunrise from Bayon, stayed to see the sunset off Angkor and inbetween rode a total of 41kms).

Affection – for Cambodians, who are both polite and upbeat. Considering their recent past and the fact that a dollar goes way too far in this country, one can’t help but admire the spirit in which surviving is carried out in this country.

Nostalgia – the streets of Phnom Penh are tree lined and warm. This, and the shabby French colonial architecture, makes it reminiscent of Harare (2nd Street Extension for anyone who would know). Come to think of it, the expatriates and aid workers in all the best restaurants are also vaguely familiar.

Tremendously, tremendously sad – For those who may not be aware of Cambodian history, in 1976 Cambodia experienced a Communist Revolution under a group called the Khmer Rouge. In an attempt to convert the country to a peasant dominated agrarian cooperative, people were forced out of the cities, split up from their families and the country returned to what is referred to as “Year Zero”. Intellectuals, professionals, monks, foreigners and anyone not peasant enough were subjugated and often executed. The most horrific face of this revolution, however, was a prison and torture centre comparable to the Nazi detention camps. Tuol Sleng was previously a high school until the Khmer Rouge converted it into a security prison (S-21) in order to detain and interrogate suspected enemies of the paranoid Party Cadre. Of the 20,000 people held, questioned and tortured in this place only 7 survived. As a rule, once people had “confessed” and given enough evidence to convince the Party Cadre that they were right all along, they were taken to a place outside of Phnom Penh, executed and buried in mass graves.

We spent today at the Tuol Sleng which is now a museum. The rooms have been preserved as they were found by the liberating Vietnamese army, including shackles, blood stains and a photo of the bodies of the most recent victims as they were lying, murdered just before their captors fled. Also on display are the photographs of every one of the victims of S-21 (the Khmer Rouge documented the faces of each of the people they interrogated and, if they had died from torture, photographed them a second time.) We also traveled out to the “Killing Fields”, the site of the mass graves (one of many around Cambodia) and witnessed the piles of skulls, the tree used to bludgeon infants and the pieces of clothing still buried in the soil.

I cried, without even bothering to wipe my face.

Reading “Voices from S-21” by David Chandler (an academic text written by an Australian historian) the book explores the inner workings of an institution such as S-21 where death and torture is carried out on humans by other humans. A passage in particular struck close to home:

In a sense, some of the people who were tortured at Tuol Sleng may have been fortunate not to have survived, if we consider the continuous, traumatic aftereffects of torture that afflicts so many victims and that led many survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, for example, to kill themselves long after they were set fre... one such example is Jean Amray, a prominent Jewish intellectual in postwar Europe and a survivor of Auschwitz committed suicide in 1978. In his eloquent short book ‘At the Mind’s Limites’ Amery may have foreshadowed his own death when he wrote:

" Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured….anyone who has suffered torture will never again be at ease in the world; the abomination of the annihilation is never extinguished. Faith in humanity, already cracked by the first slap in the face, then demolished by torture, is never acquired again."