flights

En route from Vientiane to Hanoi, I met a frenchman named Fabrice. He and I crossed paths again in Hanoi and exchanged stories over dinner. I’ve just now found his URL on a slip of paper, and I’m looking at some pictures from his travels. He has a lot of great pictures of Vietnam traffic, but I can’t figure out a way to bookmark individual pages on his website, so you’ll just have to go and browse. Worth it though.

I’ve been back in Singapore for a week now. Since I returned, I’ve worked five 16-hour days, and my culture shock has recovered enough to enable me to spend S$82 on two rounds of three drinks each (Thumper last night with Thavy and Shelly).

Last week I posted my pictures from Bangkok, Laos and Vietnam, but there were some notable things I was not able to photgraph…

1. I saw a young boy lay his motorbike down on a winding mountain road. He had swerved to avoid our bus, which was barrelling uphill and rounding a curve in the wrong lane. As the boy swerved and braked, his motorbike went down. Had he been going just a little faster or a little closer to the road’s edge, he would have spun off the steep embankment and tumbled perhaps 50 meters to the valley floor. We asked our bus driver to stop to see if the boy needed any help, but the driver dismissed us and forged on. Out the back window, I watched the boy stand up and limp around his fallen motorbike, inspecting the damage. Before we had passed completely out of site, I was surprised to see two or three other motorbikes drive by the boy without slowing down at all.
2. We had been en route from Sapa to Bac Ha – two villages in the mountains of north Vietnam – near the Chinese border. In Sapa, I had signed up for a trek to several villages of the Black Hmong and Red Dzao tribes. The day was foggy and muddy, and stupidly I had brought only a pair of Tsubo loafers. They were completely caked with mud at the end of the day and looked so rediculous that I’m sorry not to have taken a picture.
3. Whenever I found myself travelling through the Vietnam countryside – by motorbike, bicycle or bus – children along the way would stop and wave. When I was able to hear them, the were often shouting “hello?”, inflected as a question – like someone answering a telephone.
4. In the city of Hoi An, which sits between a river and the sea, I saw many different kinds of boats. I took pictures of some of these, but one I didn’t capture was a fishing boat made of bamboo strips woven into a perfectly round bowl perhaps two-and-a-half meters in diameter. I’m not sure how someone would pilot a round boat like this with any efficiency, but every day I could see them at the edge of the horizon, floating far out on the South China Sea. The strangest boats I saw, however, were tiny row boats on the river. Except for their small size, it was not the boats themselves but the rowing that was strange. The rowers had strapped the oars to their feet, leaving their hands free to lay out their fishing nets.
5. The last thing I wish I’d taken more pictures of was the amazing food I had over and over again. Of course there was the cha ca I already described, but there were delicious spring rolls, french pastries, steaming noodle soups, strange new fruits and all kinds of colourful fresh chillis and herbs.

As I’ve travelled the Vietnam countryside, I’ve seen many many times the folkloric image of the bamboo-hat-adorned farmer stooping among the chartreuse blades of a rice field, or leading a water buffalo through mud and mist. To my eyes, it always looks like a postcard or a sweeping location shot from a movie. To the farmer, it’s no doubt just another day of work.

Still, the Vietnamese themselves seem to see the beauty this image holds, and the way it represents their country. It manifests itself again and again in paintings, woodcarvings and embroidery.

Yesterday, I finally attempted to photograph it for myself.

I went for a massage yesterday, and at the end, my masseuse took the liberty of waxing my back hair. That may be too much information for the squeamish, but I do want to stress that I had very little back hair to begin with.

Asians don’t typically have as much body hair as westerners, and some Vietnamese seem particularly fascinated with the hair that they see on us. I’ve seen kids, for example, run up and touch the arm hair of caucasians in Sapa and here in Hoi An.

My masseuse wanted to extend her waxing to my arms and chest. Youch! I politely declined.

The other day I met a couple of post-middle-aged social workers from California. The wife was half Vietnamese but looked somehow Peruvian. The husband was caucasian. One of the observations the husband made was that in Asia, life moved at a slower pace. Things are more relaxed, and people have more time to nurture family and community. Life in Asia, he said, is less hurried, less competitive.

Perhaps his observation is a testament to our capacity to see what we want to see, but my own observations have led me to a very different opinion. Of course I myself could be mistaken, but my impression is that the Vietnamese work incredibly hard just to get by. Out of financial necessity, they tend to eat breakfast and dinner at home with their families, which certainly can strengthen family bonds, but in general, they seem to work long hours with few days to rest. I’ve seen, for example, many many children working – riding alone on motorbikes or otherwise apparently fending for themselves.

As for the rest of Asia, my experience with Chinese, Koreans and Singaporeans has led me to believe they are extremely competitive – no less so than westerners anyway. All my Chinese and Korean friends have told me of parents who constantly compare themselves to their friends – always trying to buy better cars, clothes, schools, and constantly demanding that their children to out-achieve their peers.

I can’t say myself that this is typical of Singaporeans, because those that I’ve met don’t seem to be playing the same game. However, most of them have at some point expressed the opinion that Singaporeans in general are pretty competitive and materialistic.

Recently, the Straits Times ran an piece about latchkey children. The centerpiece of the article was an eight-year-old Singaporean-Chinese girl whose parents commuted out of town to work every week, leaving her completely alone from Monday to Friday. She prepared her own meals, washed her own clothes, made her own way to school and back each day. If that kind of parental behaviour is not driven and competitive, then I don’t know what is.

In the US, her parents would be arrested for this kind of neglect, but the Straits Times piece took a slightly softer position. While it didn’t condemn them, it viewed the situation as pretty unfortunate and focused on the kinds of institutional changes schools and the like were making to accommodate these kinds of latchkey children.

I’m not sure there’s a connection to squatting – the title of this post – but the squat position is part of daily life here more than I’ve seen anywhere else. As a result of so much practice, everyone here can squat flat-footed, rather than on their toes or the balls of their feet. I usually can’t.

Most “toilets” here consist of two foot pads and a hole, requiring users to squat. As I’ve wandered the streets of Hanoi, Sapa and Hoi An, I see people sqatting all the time – peeling sugarcane or selling baguettes, for example. Even restaurants – sidewalk “restaurants” anyway – provide tiny little plastic stools or kindergarten-sized chairs for their patrons, meaning people essentially squat while they eat. The first time I sat on one of these, its legs collapsed, and my ass landed on the pavement. If I’d been truly squatting, I wouldn’t have needed the stool to bear my full weight.

Squatting, to me, represents a working position. It means you’re ready to move at any moment – to stand, to shift, to grab another handful of sugarcane or pursue a potential customer.

Squatting is what they do in Southeast Asia, and squatting is the opposite of relaxing.

In Laos, the boys play a game that looks like a cross between footbag and volleyball. They kick a small wicker ball back and forth over a real or imagined net, performing various tricks. The main rules are, you can’t touch the ball with your hands, and you can’t let it hit the ground.

In Vietnam, young people play a game that looks even more like footbag. They form a circle and kick a small cork-shaped object with a feather poking out of the top. They pass it to each other in the air and perform various tricks. The main rules are, you can’t touch it with your hands, and you can’t let it hit the ground.

I’ve had a lot of delicious food on this trip, but one of the highlights has been a local Hanoi creation called cha ca, which requires a fair amount of table space to accommodate its various components.

The main and most important bit is crispy pieces of mild white fish, fried with green onions, challots, yellow onions, parsley and various other herbs – served on a sizzling hot plate.

A second tray contains an array of fruits and herbs, including thin-sliced, very lightly-salted green melon and banana (the latter with the thinnest bit of peel on the edges), thin-sliced pineapple, some type of parsley, several types of basil and other leafy herbs I didn’t recognise.

Another component is a bowl of steaming rice vermicelli, and the final piece is a dozen or so rectangular sheets of the thinnest rice paper.

To eat the dish, you take a sheet or two of the rice paper, add a small amount of each of the above ingredients, roll everything into a basic spring roll and dip it into the accompanying sauce.

Just describing it again makes me salivate.

A popular joke in Hanoi says that when you buy a car or motorbike, the first thing you check is the horn. After five days, the most amazing thing to me about Hanoi is the noisy ballet of vehicles on the streets.

In Bali, Bangkok and Vientiane, road rules are loose to say the least. Vietnam takes it to another level.

There’s a speed limit and a side of the road you’re generally meant to travel on, but beyond that it’s basically a free-for-all. Drivers are responsible for what’s in front of them and not much else, so horns and brakes are key. Vehicles pretty much change “lanes” without warning, and it’s the responsibility of everyone behind them to get themselves out of the way. If you want to drive faster than everyone else, you just honk your horn a lot and push your way into openings – or create new ones. If you’re driving a truck, a bus or a big car, you just proceed at whatever pace you desire, lean on your horn, and it’s up to everyone else to get out of your way.

For pedestrians here, it’s a thrill. The proper way to cross a street is to wait briefly for the smallest of openings, then step into the street and shuffle at a slow and steady pace until you reach the other side. For me, the smallest of openings means no cars or trucks, because there’s always a moving swarm of motorbikes. You just keep moving and pray that the riders and drivers go around you. As you cross, you just hope that if something hits you, it’s a two-wheeler.

The other day, I wandered until I found the widest, busiest street I could. I watched for a while, and I never saw a single soul crossing my chosen street, but I decided to go for it anyway. I held my camera at my hip, facing the oncoming vehicles, and filmed my heart-pumping crossing. When I reached the safety of the opposite curb, I reviewed the footage, only to find that I had aimed just a little too high. All I could see was the occasional scarf-wrapped head of a motorbike rider.

Therefore, my thousand words will have to be enough, because I’m not gonna do it again.

I heard once that whatever you’re doing when the clock strikes midnight on new year’s eve will define what your coming year will be like. If that’s the case, then my 2005 will be defined by travelling with new friends, mobile sleeping or cold weather.

When the clock struck the end of 2004, I was on a sleeper train out of Hanoi, bound for Lao Cai on the Chinese border. My travel companion was my new Malaysian friend Elena, and the winter draft through the train car kept me very cold.