Can Tho

Vietnam’s largest Mekong Delta town, Can Tho is SO Vietnam. Taking a boat ride down the brown river under a canopy of banana tree leaves perfectly framing thatched huts, I felt like I’d stepped into an Epcot Center ride or an American war movie. Either an adorable singing character had to be around the next turn, or Charlie would be waiting to blow my face off.

Hanoi is very much a 21st century city, and the northern landscape has always belonged more to the people than to Vietnam’s many waves of invaders, but in the south I found the land that everyone from Catherine Deneuve to Forest Gump has feared and romanticized.

The boat ride took us to a floating bulk market, where barges full of watermelons, pumpkins, jicama and crabs sell to smaller boats, who then sell the produce at land markets. Each boat advertises what it’s selling by hoisting a few pieces up a pole, so if you’re in the market for cucumbers, you can just look for a boat with cucumber flags.



We bought pineapple still on the stalk and ate it like a pineapple popsicle while we cruised by every kind of fruit that we eat in Hanoi and more all growing in their natural habitats. Then we stopped in this man’s “garden” (read: restaurant for tourists) where we got to play with snakes and eat said fruit. Then we napped.



The next day we took advantage of Jenn’s being there before us to meet up with a friend she’d made in town and have her mother teach us to make delicious banh xeo. It’s a coconut-batter crepe filled with pork, shrimp and veggies, then wrapped in herbs and dipped in sweet fish sauce. Wrapping and dipping are more or less considered the pinnacle of eating experiences in Vietnam, and for good reason. They’re fun to do and add a nice mix of flavors.

We then took a three-hour post-feast nap in the house of this girl we’d just met – also a very Vietnam thing to do. On the walk home, we stopped into a pagoda that serves the big Khmer population in town. We ended up chatting with a young monk for about an hour (because our Vietnamese is so good!) and he must have liked the company because he took it upon himself to make us each a smoothie. They were of unidentifiable flavor, but we think they were mostly sweetened condensed milk, with a hint of avocado. Delicious.

The last morning was for biking around the small towns set around the canals off the main river. I don’t think many tourists do that because it requires biking down a highway a bit to get there, and several schoolchildren actually screamed when they saw us. I blame my 6-foot friend Allison. The towns were very quaint, though, and serve a mean fresh coconut juice over ice.

Back in town, we went for more smoothies to try every new fruit that doesn’t make it all the way to Hanoi. And we napped. Life in the south is good.

Ha Giang: Like Sa Pa but more awesome

Ha Giang is beautiful. But it’s boring to say that in Vietnam. I’ve already written about sweeping terraced mountains that open into valleys speckled with villages. No one will look up from their desk if you tell them you walked through forests of bamboo too wide to fit your hands around, clustered together like conferring giants. Traditional stilt houses where generations live together above the nonstop chorus of fighting poultry, piglets tumbling over puppies and lumbering buffalo are nothing to slow the car for.

So what made the four days I spent in this poor, rural province on the border with China some of the best I’ve spent here? It was the man who helped us not get ripped off on the extremely crowded minibus and then asked for my number so his daughter could call me to practice English (which she now does). It was the woman, her teeth already black with betelnut though she can’t yet be 30, who drank us under the table with homemade rice wine and then sat down to watch a Christian superhero series with us because she thought we’d like the English. It was bonding with Dao university students home for the long weekend over the streets we all knew in Hanoi and the funny things Vietnamese people do there.



I went to Ha Giang with my Canadian friends Tim and Laura for the long weekend created by International Workers Day and Vietnam Reunification Day. We hiked for four days, sleeping in a different village each night. The area is sparsely peopled, but those who do live there are mainly of ethnic minority groups. We stayed the first and last night with Red Dao people, called so because of their distinctive red headdresses, and the middle night with a family of Black Dao who wear long, black shirts. Though the families had hosted tourists before, the way they barely fussed over us and the fact that we didn’t see any other Westerners during that most popular travel weekend in Vietnam created the feeling that we were the first outsiders to make it over those particular mountains.



Our days were full of experiences that tourists just don’t have, and not only of the “authentic” – showering with cold water ladled out of a bucket, watching families melt pork lard over open fires in their kitchens before eating on the floor with them – variety that we were paying to have. We were invited to go along with the young people of the village to learn the government choreographed mock-traditional dances that Vietnam teaches to its ethnic groups to attract tourists. We’d seen the same dances in a more polished form claimed by an entirely different people in the separate setting of the Mai Chau valley earlier in the year, but this time we giggled along as the kids struggled over steps that were as foreign to them as they were to us. We talked about international development projects with a Dao man who has never left his district while both grappling to find the right words in Vietnamese. An unlikely lingua franca, Vietnamese is not the language spoken among Dao families. Although they were fluent, their accents and patience made it much easier to practice our painfully patched together sentences with them than with lowland Vietnamese people.

In my favorite moment, our younger guide, who had come across as standoffish and uninterested in talking to us, confided that he simply had poor hearing. He did want to spend time with us, we just had to speak more loudly to include him. Our campaign of offering him cookies, taking photos with him, trying to clean up after ourselves and engaging him in small talk that would undoubtedly been unintelligible to someone with the very best ears had finally paid off.

Ha Giang had all that. Plus, it was beautiful.

Chuc Mung Nam Moi!

The calendar changes in Vietnam on January 1, but the new year doesn’t really come until Tet – the start of the lunar year that usually falls in late January or February. It goes something like this:

Preparation: Ong Tao, the kitchen god, has been privy to each family’s secret business throughout the year, so it is time for him to return to heaven to make a report to the Jade Emperor up there. On the 23rd day of the 12th month, a farewell dinner is held for him, before he rides a big fish up for his weeklong visit to heaven. To aid that trip, families burn paper fish, horses and clothing to be transformed into a spiritual state for Ong Tao to use in his travels. People also release fish into lakes and ponds, which in Hanoi are sold by men with clear plastic bags of live fish hanging from their bicycles. Also, Ong Tao has no pants. Legend tells us that either he is too poor to afford them, or he burned them in the hearth fire or he was in such a rush to get back to heaven that he forgot them. Either way, he makes a fairly unimposing figure to be determining each family’s luck for the next year.

Cultural note – There are actually three kitchen gods, two men and a woman, who represent the three legs of the tripods traditionally used in Vietnamese cooking. Ong Tao is the most famous.

After Ong Tao leaves, families can start cleaning (which is not allowed during Tet) and decorating for the holiday. Huge flower markets open all over town, where people can buy kumquat trees and miniature peach trees with light pink blossoms. Also, the traffic gets so bad that I once couldn’t figure out a way to cross the street even when all the vehicles were stopped.



Giao Thua: In Hanoi, where people are “modern,” the city holds a semi-Western-style New Year’s Eve celebration with fireworks over Hoan Kiem lake. At midnight, though, everyone goes to the pagoda to pray and give offerings to gods and ancestors. The midnight prayer constitutes the Giao Thua ritual (giao meaning to give and thua meaning to receive), symbolizing the passing on of life and the recognition of that gift by the current generation.

First day: This most important day is reserved for visits with the husband’s family. The first visitor to a household in the new year determines the luck for the whole year and must be carefully selected. My friend Matt “ate” Tet with a Vietnamese family, where the matron selected herself to be the first visitor and simply left the house, took a walk around the block and returned to “visit.” Also, money of equal amounts in envelopes is exchanged as Tet gifts, so that everyone eventually ends up with the same amount he or she has gifted to keep poor families from actually losing a lot of money at Tet.

Second day: is for socializing with the wife’s family and close friends and potentially for gambling, if you’ve had a really good first day.

Third day: Visits from other important people like teachers and doctors occur then. The “first visit,” if counted only for non-family members, can also happen on the third day. That was the more traditional practice, but since Vietnamese people have started using the later days of Tet as time to travel, the first visit has moved up in some households. Items for the ancestors, who have returned for the new year, are burned for their departure at this point. Those first three days involve a lot of cooking for women and an intense amount of rice wine drinking for men.

Later: Businesses and shops reopen on the fourth day and life returns to the streets, which empty out during this family-oriented time. On the fifteenth day of Tet – the first full moon – there are ceremonies at temples. Vendors also use the final two weeks to sell the last of their banh chung, an incredibly rich, glutinous rice cake stuffed with meat and mung beans and wrapped in banana leaf – the delicacy of the season.

Happy Year of the Ox!

My life as a sea turtle judge

As you’ve probably gathered from Scott’s posts, work trips in Vietnam are not the stuffed-shirt affairs we’re used to back home. The riotous drunkenness to actual work ratio is somewhere between much more likely and guaranteed to be heavily tipped in favor of the former, but I thought an excursion to judge school children’s drawings of sea turtles might be different. I was wrong.

When our marine program manager’s son’s birthday kept her from traveling one weekend, my boss in communications and I were selected to attend some project wrap-up activities in her place. The project was to educate coastal communities about sea turtle conservation through extra-curricular lessons for middle schoolers. To show what they’d learned, students at two schools were holding back to back contests over a weekend where they would put on skits, sing songs, read poems and explain artwork they’d created about sea turtles.

Here’s what I wrote about the weekend for work: http://iucn.org/about/union/secretariat/offices/asia/asia_where_work/vietnam/?2487/Student-Contests-Promote-Sea-Turtle-Conservation Here’s what actually happened:

Our two provincial government escorts woke us painfully early each morning to eat spicy fish noodle soup and then sit in a café for 45 minutes while strong Vietnamese coffee dripped into cups of sweetened condensed milk in front of us before driving through little seaside villages to the schools. On Saturday, it was raining heavily when we arrived so we drank equally strong green tea while waiting for the weather to break.

When it did, the children’s performances were truly adorable. Of course, my level of Vietnamese is so far below a sixth grader’s that I couldn’t legitimately judge their work, but I could run around taking pictures of them waddling around with paper cutouts of turtle shells on their backs and doing unrelated dances that their teachers seems to have thrown into the mix just for cuteness' sake.



After the competition, we walked through a field to a farmhouse – I never fully understood that, but best not to question – for more green tea followed by a seafood feast. With beer and rice wine the only beverage options, I selected beer, figuring it would be the less lethal choice (that would prove to be a mistake). I proceeded to watch two representatives of the local department of aquatic resources, two from the department of education, a school principal and any number of teachers get red-in-the-face drunk and deliver round after round of overly congratulatory speeches to one another. Then I was slipped an envelope with the equivalent of $3.50 in it and sent on my way. That seems to be the standard “thank you for showing up” amount.

At that point, it was still only about two in the afternoon. And how do a 40-some-year-old employee of an international environmental organization, her American intern, and their two government guides spend a free afternoon in rural Vietnam? With three hours in a private karaoke room coercing the American to sing obscure English-language songs over more beer, of course. The mass consumption of caffeine and alcohol left my stomach in dire need of a solid meal by that evening, but instead my boss insisted that we’d eaten too much and should walk to the market to pick up a meal of bananas, oranges and a single sweet potato each to eat alone in our separate hotel rooms. My pitch to add yogurt to the mix was rejected because “citrus and dairy can’t be eaten at the same time.”

I woke up the next morning with traveler’s sickness that would last the next two days – turns out the ice in my beer the day before wasn’t filtered – for a similar contest at a school with enthusiastic young teachers eager to practice English phrases like, “my heart is full from meeting you.” This particular booze-fueled lunch ended with the principal standing as if he was going to give a speech, but instead singing a love song from his province – directly to me. That performance was followed by another song from him, a song from a government official and a ditty about Hanoi from my boss.

We left and drove to Hue, the nearest big city with an airport, with two separate stops to drink tea on the side of the road with people who were never introduced to me. I disappointed Mr. Anh, one of our government friends, by saying I’d rather see some of Hue’s sights than go back into a dark karaoke chamber. He grudgingly took me to a very nice pagoda/monastery and walked me across the city’s famous bridge before dinner. Not surprisingly, the meal was early enough to allow us time for hours four and five of karaoke for the weekend, before I finally got to drag my tired and dehydrated self back onto a plane for Hanoi.

Burma

Stepping off the plane in Yangon is like stepping back in time. Our first interaction with the city was from the back of one of its ancient taxicabs, physically holding the rusty doors closed to a vehicle with the steering wheel on the wrong side of the car from at least the ‘70s, when the country used to drive according to the British system. From there we witnessed scenes that could no longer exist in many Asian countries: monks still part of a bustling everyday life that includes women selling calls from landline phones set up on tables on the street and crowds waiting for rides in jam-packed pick-ups for which a boy hanging off the back and yelling is the only indication of a destination. Some of that sense of arriving in a land out of time is quaint. It allowed for the preservation of a culture where men still wear traditional long longyis, women still grind wood into a tan powder they apply to their faces as sunblock and families still send their sons to become novice monks, gathering alms every morning for at least a few months of their lives.



Some of it, however, is evidence of a marked, government-created lack of progress. In Yangon, where the situation is best, many people only have electricity two or three days a week. Rural people treat serious conditions with a mixture of spices because they lack access to a doctor and the means to pay for care. Leprosy colonies still are present, though the junta vehemently denies their existence. Employment for educated people is scarce; the military toughs who run the country would rather rely on their 800,000 forced laborers instead.

The dissonance between what Burma could be and what the government has let it become is astounding, because despite the prevalence of small men with big guns, it remains a nation of wonders. In Yangon we saw the Shwedagon pagoda – an awe-inspiring gilded stupa topped with a 76-carat diamond and surrounded by a complex of equally breath-taking holy sites, including spots where you pray based on which of the (eight) days of the week was the day of your birth. The Shwedagon is one of a half dozen blindingly gold pagodas that claim to enshrine Buddha’s hair, teeth or other relics we saw in a single day in Yangon.

The “world’s largest book” is carved on 729 doubled-sided marble tablets, housed in 729 pure white stupas at the Kuthodaw pagoda in Mandalay. The stone pages hold the entire Pali canon of Theravada Buddist scripture, which took 2,400 monks working in 24-hour rotations six months to read out loud, when ordered by King Mindon to do so in 1879. The ancient city of Bagan holds 2,200 temples in 40 square kilometers of unbroken countryside. That landscape, with earthen-toned temples as far as the eye can see in every direction, represents only about half the pagodas that stood during the former capital’s heyday, 800-1,000 years ago.



The list could continue. The sites we saw in Burma eclipsed those of any other country we’ve visited in scale and number, and we would giggle at the frequency of gorgeous buildings our guides would drive by without seeming to notice. The country’s great wealth of natural resources – it is not uncommon to see piles of precious stones for sale on the sidewalk – makes its people’s poverty and repression seem all the more unfair. Many people, from trishaw drivers to strangers met on the street, were eager to spread the word about the regime’s brutal policies. We met a woman whose mother was stripped of her medical license after participating in a pro-democracy demonstration two decades ago. Her response was emblematic of the quiet defiance exhibited by many Burmese faced with such indignities. “They can take my license, but they can’t take my memories,” she said.

The tourism industry in Burma is highly regulated, to keep foreigners from seeing blight-stricken areas like the post-cyclone Irrawaddy delta and to ensure that the government profits from their presence through fees and state-run businesses. Knowing that our dollars would be lining the pockets of corrupt ministers was the biggest deterrent to traveling to Burma, but once there, we saw how being around to purchase from everyday people also could do some good. And there was plenty to buy! Every town specializes in a number of handicrafts, and we visited a workshop for just about all of them. From intricate laquerware that takes months to complete to umbrellas that can be fashioned by hand in just minutes, we learned the centuries old techniques that family businesses are still using today.



People were happy to take us into their workshops and show us their craft even when not trying to make a sale. It was part of what struck us most about Burma – the people were genuinely kind and interested in practicing their English and learning about us. At Mandalay Hill we were surrounded by college students wanting to get to know us, one of whom – a monk – since invited Scott to gchat. People indulged us as we joined them to watch the Chinese New Year/shopping center seventh anniversary concert taking place outside our hotel in Yangon. When we crashed a wedding in Inle Lake, instead of being greeted with disapproving stares, we were taken to be photographed on stage with the bride and groom and feed big plates of noodles. Of course, at the reunion of about 100 of my family members held at a monastery on our last day, I was showered with questions about the family in America and overwhelmed by the number of connections I would now like to cultivate with my relatives in this isolated but beautiful nation.