Indochina 2010: 2011

We've been in Ho Chi Minh City for the past two days, but arrived here in Bangkok late last night (4 Jan) for an overnight stopover before our flight home, via another brief stopover in Mumbai.   British weather permitting, we'll be back at Heathrow by 06.30 on Thursday, 6th.

Once again, the culture shock of being in a big city after the relative peace and quiet of 15 days in the beautiful, ancient fishing village of Hoi An, we found almost too much.    So, for our only full day back in HCMC, we decided to take the 45-minute taxi ride out to the Dang Sem Lake and Waterpark.   But our thoughts of spending the day in a semi-rural, peaceful location, lazing and reading in the sunshine and having the occasional plop in the water to cool down, were really far from the mark.   The lake and the water-park - both of which charge a separate, albeit small, entrance fee - are set in a very noisy suburb, are full of gigantic garish sculptures, eateries every 20 yards varying from fast-food stalls to sumptuous restaurants/dining halls, two floating on the lake, have great water-features and Alton Towers-esque water-rides, each with their own sound effects.   Both places also have pop and rock music blaring out over massive sound systems all over the place - particularly in the few gazebo areas set aside as 'relaxation zones'!!   Not quite what we were looking for, but we could imagine our four grandchildren having a great time in the water-park.

On our first night back here in HCMH, we witnessed a pretty horrible incident, and the only overt aggression we've seen in the whole 3 months.   We were sitting at a pavement cafe, listening to their Pink Floyd sound-track and occasionally fending off the attempts of the numerous roaming street-vendors trying to flog us books, or bracelets, or sun-glasses, or cigarettes.   We noticed one of the cafe's uniformed 'security guards', or bouncers, patrolling the pavement in front of the cafe, start to get verbally aggressive with a female street-vendor trying to sell books - the book-sellers all stack their books in a 4-foot high Jenga-like pile, held together with string, and carry them aloft, to catch buyers' attention.   This bouncer's verbal aggression turned into some shoving and pushing of the girl, and the girl put her books down and started to 'give him some lip'.   Suddenly, the bouncer lost his rag completely, and lunged at the girl, slapping, punching and kicking at her, while she did her best to fend him off.   As their fracas spilled into the road, with traffic flying all around them, equally suddenly a small, middle-aged English woman rose from her chair, lunged at the bouncer, screaming at him to stop.   She managed to grab his arm and pull him away from the girl, holding her hands flat to his chest and, amazingly, stopping him in his tracks - though all the while he never once took his eyes off his victim, burning hatred into her: scary stuff.   It was a pretty ugly scene, which perhaps only lasted 2 minutes.   But it was only when Andy intervened, putting himself between the woman and the bouncer to pull her away, whilst two of the waiters grabbed the bouncer and attempted to pull him away, that I realised that the small, middle-aged English woman had been me!   Not surprisingly, we chose not to stay for the drinks we'd ordered ...

The next night, we chose to return to the street-food stalls at the back of the central market here, where we'd had our 'beef on a roof-tile' meal, seemingly decades ago, but actually only about 2 months ago.   Once again, the atmosphere in this bustling market area was just great - mainly full of local people, but with a fair sprinkling of tourists and ex-pats as well.   Here, the cafe and restaurant staff cook every possible kind of sea-food, meat, vegetables, rice and noodles over large flaming charcoal barbecues, in flaming woks, in great steaming metal or clay pots and pans of all shapes and sizes.   We shared a huge barbecued fish with a soy-sauce and chilli dip, morning glory (a kind of water spinach) steamed with garlic and shallots, squid steamed with ginger, and special fried rice, all washed down with a couple of bottles of Saignon beer.   Delicious.   Afterwards, we braved another ride home by 'Cyclo' through the manic traffic, still gobsmacked despite several months in this region, at the hair-raisingness of it all!

As you may have gathered, the weather here is still pretty hot - probably in the high 20s - and our last full day in Hoi An before coming to HCMH had been bright and sunny once again, after several warm but overcast days since Christmas.   So we'd cycled to the beach for lunch, and to say goodbye to the beachside restaurant waitress who'd been so friendly and cheeky on our past visits.   On our way back, we'd stopped our bikes while Andy took pictures of a Vietnamese farmer ploughing his paddy field on the back of a buffalo-drawn plough.   Out of Andy's line of sight, one of the farmer's friends approached Andy, laughing and grabbing him by the arm and then leading him down into the paddy-field.   He got Andy to take off his flip-flops and, before he realised what was afoot, Andy found himself knee-deep in the thick, black, almost gelatinous soil, with the farmer attempting to hand over the reins of this buffalo-plough for Andy to take over!   Watching it was hilarious.   Andy found it virtually impossible to move, stuck as he was in the black mud, unable to pull his legs out to take even one step, and apprehensive that the powerful-looking ox might take an active dislike to him whilst he stood helpless!   The farmer and his friends nearby all had a good laugh at Andy's predicament, but they took pity on him, one of the men even leading Andy by the arm to another, paddy-field, where this man proceeded to wash all the mud off Andy's legs and feet - as you'll see from the photos below.

Our flight to HCMH had left from Danang, the nearest airport to Hoi An, and we took the opportunity to have Sunday lunch with John and Liz at a very modern Asian-Western fusion restaurant there.   Poor Liz, though, turned up with one shoulder strapped up - she'd had a motorbike accident on her way to Hue earlier in the week, and had managed to break her shoulder.   She was clearly in pain still, but the cocktail of pain-killers and a Bloody Mary or two seemed to have helped a little!   After lunch, John and Liz took us to the top of the towering Green Plaza Hotel for the panoramic views over Danang's river, to the mountains on one side and the ocean on another.   A great way to see the attractiveness of this, the fourth-largest city in Vietnam, which had looked a bit grim from the only views we'd seen previously as we went through by bus a couple of times.   There is about a 10-mile stretch of the coast road between Hoi An and Danang which is being rapidly developed at the moment, with dozens of huge, Vegas-like, golfing resorts, as well as residential resorts comprising streets of expensive villas each with its own swimming pool and ocean-views.   The kind of 'anonymous' location where you could be in any country of the world.   Sadly, this development - which, we were told by our taxi-driver, many locals suspect is simply lining the pockets of a few government members - has meant that whole fishing communities have been forcibly relocated, often miles inland and with inadequate compensation, robbing them of their homes and villages, their livelihoods, and their whole way of life.   What is even more depressing is that local people no longer have access to their own beach or ocean, which is available only to paying guests or owners of these huge resort villas, and for most of these 10-or-so miles, you would no longer even know that there IS a beach or ocean beyond the vast edifices which now line the view from the once coast road.   Can you imagine the uproar if, say, the residents of Brighton were suddenly to have the beach and English Channel taken away from them in this way?

Well, we're just waking up to our last day in Indochina, here near the airport in Bangkok, where we'll just chill out for a while - assuming we can find the Thai Massage facility advertised in the hotel's brochure - until our Air India flight leaves this evening (5 Jan).   We'll no doubt be spending some time reminiscing about these last three months, which have given us so many exciting and memorable experiences - and which we hope to enjoy reading about in our blog when we get home.   So, we'll take our leave of you in this last posting on our Indochina blog by copying from the late, great, Alistair Cooke's once-regular sign-off:

"And so, my friends, if you have been ... thanks for listening.".