July 24, 2005
Good morning, Vietnam
It has been ages since I updated my blog. It seems that everybody in Europe are having holidays and good time, sunny pictures don't seem to raise envy anymore.. :) But this time we have really good ones from Vietnam!
Its a week since we came back, so the impressions and stories are slowly fading away. However, once again, it seemed to be a place where I'd like to spend at least few weeks, not just 5 days. The country is huge and there's plenty of things to see. We just managed to have a quick look at Saigon (Saigon is the the old name of the Ho Chi Mingh city. Nowadays the city is named after revolutionary uncle Ho, who is considered to be the father of the nation.) and spent few days at Mui Ne beach, some 300km away from the city.
Saigon is a really interesting, alive and in many ways a horrible place - traffic is unbearable, its very noisy, poluted and completely covered in asphalt. The picture above is the view from our hotel balcony. Besides all the traffic, Vietnam is an incredibly noisy place. It doesn't matter, what mode of transportation they're riding, everybody is constantly honking. Honking to signal that they're overtaking, honking to give you way, honking to tell you that they see you, honking just for the hell of it.. Piip pip piip piip all the time... After few days you get so used to it, that it doesn't disturb too much anymore.
There's nothing left of the romantic old days - the image that I had in my mind of thousands of cyclists, heavy rain, Vietnamese style hats and umbrellas. It is all gone. Everybody owns a motorbike, every street and crossroad is jammed with cars. The traffic flow seems unstoppable, but the drivers are quite considerate for pedestrians. All you need to do is to step off the pavement and start walking (slowly!) accross the street. The motorcycles will flow around you and you can reach the other side of the street relatively safely. One of the taxi drivers told us that 10 years ago very few people could afford to buy a motorbike, but these days Chinese bikes don't cost anything..
The communist government after the revolution and war tried to control the population by sending some people away to rural areas (yeah, familiar soviet style..), but people came back illegally and try to make a living in the city. Their kids, however, can't go to school, because they're not registered in the city and apparently they can't own anything or run a legal business.
Considering the hardship these people went through just few decades ago, its really amazing to see how resilient the Vietnamese people are. The country is triving, one way or another, and however devastated it was 30 years ago, people managed to stand against the "superpower" and stand back on their feet. The Americans really did horrible things in Vietnam (and they also don't seem to learn from their mistakes..). I'm sure, everybody has heard that besides traditional war (where you kill people) they also launched "ecocide" - "...the war saw the most intensive attempt to destroy a country's natural environment the world has ever seen. American forces sprayed 72 million litres of herbicides (named Agent Orange, White and Blue..) over 16% of South Vietnam to destroy the Viet Cong's natural cover." (this is from the LP, our "Bible") They also used huge bulldozers to rip the jungle floor or burned forest with napalm, bombed limestone to create landslides, etc. You still see people without limbs begging in the streets and there are reports that the numbers of children with birth defects are anomalously high.
These pioners we saw marching in the park on Sunday morning (bah, I could imagine better things to do on Sunday :) Its very interesting to see how the communist style ideology and regulations harmoniously co-exist with capitalist trends. There are posters and banners displaying some form of social advertising - against HIV, malaria, or just boosting communist morale and ideology, painted in very old fashioned soviet style - plain colors, very stylized characters, fists, peace doves, etc. And these things come along with all the western brands, pampers, shampoos, in full colors and beautiful gradients. Interesting. Initially soviet poster style developed together with technological limitations of those days print machines, but now it seems that the style acquired life of its own - it is technically possible to make full color photographic quality posters, but the stylized plain posters are still considered more impactful. Somehow the style became canonized (like Bizantian icons?)
Kaj spent much more time in Vietnam - he went there for the Vietnam office opening party and stayed on the Mui Ne beach for several days before I joined him. The initial idea was that he would learn kite surfing while waiting for me. But unfortunately the wind was still the whole week, except the first day when Kaj arrived there with his colleagues. Although he never tried it before, Kaj promised that his next big hobby is going to be kite surfing. Lets see, how and when he picks it up! One thing for sure - there should be steady wind in the place where he's going to learn it.. :)
Mui Ne is a beautiful sandy peninsula with a fishing village on the shore.
Once again, another country, completely different fishing boats. These were very funny plated basket-like boats, where people would row using spade-like ores. For me it looked like some bad taste Russian witch wannabes (a Russian witch from my childhood cartoons flies in the sky in a bread-making bowl and ores with a broom). The motor boat would drag them in this kind of chain along the beach and they'd put nets into the water. However, I'm still puzzled that they don't leak. Imagine yourself going to the sea in a basket, ha?!?
There's tens of kilometers of sandy landscapes around Mui Ne. This cemetary looked like a place where I wouldn't mind resting either...
There's 2 kinds of dunes around the area. RED...
...and WHITE.
In the white dunes we were noticed by the sharp eye of local children that are patrolling at the parking lot.
This kid dragged along with us wherever we went in the dunes and tried to convince us to take a slide down on these plastic mats. When we didn't support his little business, the boy started complaining in Vietnamese and mock-crying, so we had to talk to him in Finnish and tell him to go to school.. Eventually we ended up paying him some 20cents worth of local currency - dongs, but I really felt bad - if the kid earns money by hanging out in the dunes, he'll never go to school... In general, tourism seems to be quite a new lucrative business. For example, people still don't speak much of English, but as I understand, the laws are quite foreign investment friendly. In a few years all the empty strips of beach will be sold to somebody, I'm sure.
Another interesting thing was that chairs and tables in most of street cafes and cofee shops are these kind of tiny plastic things, seemingly scaled down some 25% from what we're used to. Although, your butt fits all right in the chair, you still feel like a giant in most of the places. Local people are not that small, so I don't have a theory why chairs and tables are only up to your knees...
Oh yes, the long waited feeding pictures.. :) Kaj seems to be so strange precisely because he's sitting in this small chair and eating from a tiny table. We met a cool German guy Jorg and hanged out with him quite a lot - we went to the local night market and had super-delicious spring rolls and pho bo - beef noodles (the guys had, I'm "vegetarian".. he he...) And also visited a bia hoi place - a shop that brews fresh beer daily. Bia hoi has very little alcohol, but otherwise tastes quite like beer (kaj would add that "it tastes very good!")
Another great thing in Vietnam is nuoc mam (fish sauce) that is brewed for several months in this kind of pots. Yes, yes, outside, in the sun, in the pots. Basically it is just juice of rotten (or should I say fermented :) fish, but it tastes so good! Depending on wind directions we sometimes used to get interesting smells on the beach.. :) Another good thing about Vietnam is Vietnamese coffee. Kaj went really crazy about it, but I couldn't take it, - they mix coffee with sweet milk and then it tastes like drinking candy. If you don't mix milk, the taste may kill you - coffee is thick as tar. Kaj bought some special "weasel coffee". I'm sure you'll be excited to hear how it is made - first weasels eat raw coffee beans, then they come out fermented through the other end.. yes, yes, no kidding. Then it is collected (washed, hopefully :) and roasted. The story behind all this is that weasels eat only top quality best beans, so you can be quite sure that the coffee is very good.
And I have to confess that I became a meat eater for one day..
I couldn't resist the temptation to try to real pho bo - beef noodles soup, and my oh my it was tasty!!!! Kaj is already working on the business plan, but we're not telling you what yet.. :) For now I think that Vietnamese food is the tastiest on Earth (except maybe Thai, or Indian, or Italian.. hmm...:)
