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A Tale of Two Tours: Part 1, Ba Chuc

Published February 28, 2011 Independent , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Vietnam 3 Comments
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We were racing the sun. It was begining to glow orange, cut into pieces by the great green palm leaves. The Mekong Delta—the landscape of every Vietnam War movie I’d ever seen, where boat engines sounded like the echoes of helicopter blades.

We were trying to get to Ba Chuc before the sun went down. It was the site of a Khmer Rouge massacre; a pagoda with the bones of the deceased had been constructed. I’d planned on visiting it the next day, but when Sam Mountain turned out to be a bust—cages full of endangered birds for sale, and small boys peeing between make-shift altars—I’d decided to make a run for it.

We pulled into a dirt lot with the sun low, barely above the squat structures—corrugated tin walls and thatched roofs. The motorbike driver didn’t speak English; he pointed at the sign on a small, concrete building. “Ba Chuc.” I handed him my helmet, and he leaned back to wait.

Inside was empty, a lonely government building—fading paint and dusty floors. The walls were lined with photos depicting the massacre. Along this stretch of border, there were several Khmer villages; it had, at one time, been part of the Khmer kingdom. In 1978, the Khmer Rouge had come into the town of nearly 4,000; only one person survived the massacre.

I’d read this all in my guidebook. Here, all the signs were in Vietnamese. The brutal black-and-white images didn’t need translation. I walked slowly, alone with the freeze-frame horror.

A barefoot woman entered the room. She was withered and hunched. She tugged at my sleeve, pointed to the picture of a girl’s body impaled through the vagina. She made a thrusting motion, her eyes desperate. She motioned around.

She kept pointing, I kept nodding—what else do you do? She held incense out towards me, made a motion for bowing. I didn’t want to buy any incense. Not so much that I didn’t want to buy it, but that I didn’t want to burn it, to bow—to mime the motions of someone else’s religion, someone else’s sanctity, someone else’s tragedy. Not mine, not mine. (I hadn’t wanted to go to my uncle’s funeral as a little girl, and it was the same feeling—an old feeling, buried feeling, that I’d forgotten—something in me saying, “No, no, no.”)

I walked over to the pagoda. It was in a grassy lot, mostly deserted. A large tree grew next to it. It was pretty, rural, littered with trash. Two teenagers sat holding hands. Three small, dirty boys played on the steps leading up to it. They leapt up, walked over to me, palms open. I shook my head (no, no).

They followed me as I walked in a slow circle around the pagoda. Behind glass, skulls had been arranged according to age: 0-2, 17-25… It didn’t seem real.

I circled around once, twice. I didn’t feel anything I thought I should be feeling (“There’s no right or wrong way to grieve.”) I didn’t feel anything, really, but numbness, and a “no.”

I walked back down the few steps, back towards the motorbike, the driver, another distance to be traveled in silence. A rock hit the groumnd beside my sneakers. I looked back, and the boys giggled. Had they meant to hit me? Was it malicious, were they playing, who was I, what was I doing there?

I walked back to the motorbike through the dirt-lot dusk, feeling nothing but “no.”

Saturday Night Fevered

Published February 27, 2011 Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Vietnam Closed
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Long stalks of flowers and twisted plumes of incense burning. Nodding, bowing, chanting with their eyes closed. Trays of food—peeled fruit, shrink-wrapped cookie packages, an entire plucked chicken—held atop people’s heads as they murmur. Candles and coconuts, red glowing altars (to what, to what?).

Children and hunched-up old people, a constant bumping, bustling, brushing against—the Asian conception of personal space, or lack thereof, exemplified. Announcements on a loudspeaker (what, what?).

Smoking a cigarette while he prays. Sweeping rubbish out from under the feet of the worshippers—playing cards with footprints on the floor.

Photocopied money in buckets being carried, to be burned—tossed into a pit outside that shoots scraps of burnt paper all over, raining ash in the night wind. Smoke rising (to where, to where?). Calling to children—“Em oi! Em oi!” Some kind of urgency, some kind of plead—nothing Christian about this piety. Nothing solemn; everything sacred.

Security guard siddles up to me, glances at the furious scribbling in my notebook (for what, for what?).

A Buddha-looking diety looking down on it all—a halo of neon, flashing in technicolor.

——–

This was perhaps one of the biggest What The Fuck moments of my travels. I had no idea where I was, what was going on, what any of it was for—just that I was suddenly immersed in it, plunged into a cloud of incense smoke and chanting and riotous fervor. These were the notes I made in the middle of the madness.

The motorbike driver didn’t speak any English. We were coming back from another site outside of Chau Doc, a town along the Cambodian border in the Mekong Delta. The roads became cluttered, lined with food stalls and carts and bodies, bodies. They filled like a clogged pipe until they choked and he had to pedal the bike through the crowd.

He stopped in front of a temple adorned with blinking Christmas lights. He pointed. I went in.

It was a funny thing, to be wrapped up in the zeal and fervor of it all without having the slightest clue what any of it was—an entirely sensory experience, a ritual out of context, a girl out of context, cultured-shocked.

When I got back to the hotel, I asked the English-speaking desk clerk, “I just went to some temple, up the road and—”

“You saw thousands of people,” she finished me, nodding.

“Yeah! What was that?”

She told me that they’re city-folk; they come to Lady Temple after the new year to ask for good luck. On weekends in February, March, even up through April, the otherwise sleepy town of Chau Doc swells with these Vietnamese travelers.

“Pilgrims, pilgrims,” the other clerk told me the next day. He’s younger than the girl, I thought, but he only seems it—he later told me that he’s almost 40. I wondered where the years went, behind his boyish smile.

“Other times, not so many people in Chau Doc. It very good for the business.” He looked out the glass lobby windows onto the town’s main market, overflowing into the street with tourists—not so many of them Western.

Snapped a couple of jostled photos before I saw the "No Camera" signs...

Expensive, Bad and Popular: The Mystery of Highlands Coffee

Published February 26, 2011 Places , Southeast Asia , Vietnam 4 Comments
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It was gonna be bad. And not just bad—cheesy, inauthentic and fuck-all expensive. And yet I felt that sneaky smile, that oh-God-I-hope-no-one-sees-me sensation.

I let myself get sucked into the air-conditioned arms of Highlands Coffee.

It’s the Starbucks of Saigon, and morbid curiousity led me to do it—the same cringing magnetism that inspired me to watch Eat, Pray, Love on the airplane (which I incidentally thought was more about codependency than travel). But it’s not just uniformed workers serving bland psuedo-Italian espresso drinks and pre-packaged sandwiches that makes it lame. It’s the utterly, unabashedly Western approach to coffee, and the inherent riddle of it: why does a country that already has its own distinct coffee culture need a Starbucks rip off?

Fancy coffee: it’s the international sign of gentrification. No, no—it’s not just an Oakland thing, or a Brooklyn thing. We in the States may have moved beyond Starbucks to point that we can, oh say, smell the different between Blue Bottle and Four Barrel (I’m not proud), but I think the basic phenomenon is inherently the same.

Case in point: I was in a one-day writing workshop with a girl who was working on a piece about the burgeoning coffee scene in Seoul—hip young kids hanging out for hours, sucking down the sweet stuff—and how it signified a shift towards all things Western.

Fair enough. But why would Vietnam need something like Highlands? Why would anyone forgo a 50 cent ice-cube-brimming glass of powerful black and sweetened condensed milk, drank sitting on a plastic stool under a sun umbrella on the sidewalk—for a sterilized, $2 cup-and-saucer of shitty espresso?

Well, for one, I wanted to use their Wifi and make use of their Western bathroom to wash my face and take out my contacts before an overnight bus. But the rest of the folks, I dunno.

As one might suspect, the majority of customers filling the two-story, corner-office location were Westerns. They didn’t appear to be tourists so much as expats—discussing business deals on their iPhones, explaining their credentials to suited men who sat nodding thoughtfully, glancing at papers and sipping their cups. They filled the cushy, comfy chairs, and their chatter filtered softly beneath the piped-in soundtrack of easy-listening versions of “Seven Nation Army” and Mariah Carey Christmas carols (yes, it’s almost March).

The longer I sat, though, the more the perhaps true draw of Highlands revealed itself to me. A well-dressed Vietnamese woman ate a piece of chocolate mousse cake while her son pretended to do homework. She looked over at him every now and then, and corrected him snappily—mispronouncing the English words he was studying.

A group of women sat on a wrap-around maroon sofa. Their voices were low, speaking in an accented English. I eavesdropped: they were a Bible study. Several members were from Manila, the rest from a scattering of Asian countries. English was, of course, the common denominator language to discuss their newly embraced religion.

And it struck me that both groups were, in their own ways, trying to be Western, adopting the language, religion, dress—and coffee. Was that the answer to Highlands success, or its mere existence? That it catered to people striving, striving? And that it didn’t even matter if the coffee was good (it wasn’t), or that I cost more than my breakfast and lunch combined?

Was that the great global metaphor hidden inside an expensive cup of coffee—the symbol of it? Was it just a different version of me waiting in line at the farmer’s market for 20 minutes to get my special blend of $10 beans?

Well, an hour of free Wifi and one cup of crappy espresso certainly couldn’t answer all that. But it did serve to quell the curiousity—and convince me to stick to the street stalls.

Saigon’s Secret Cities

Published February 25, 2011 Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Sola , Southeast Asia , Vietnam 5 Comments
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Zero points for subtlety

It seemed like LA to me: glitzy buildings, endless traffic, neon lights reflecting off the hoods of gleaming cars. After two weeks in Vietnam, Saigon’s wide roads and rows of Western shops, its construction cranes turning this way, that way, like slow skeletal animals—it all seemed terribly wealthy to me.

And even more than Hanoi, there seemed to be no break in Saigon, nowhere to rest or even catch your breath from the heat and exhaust and honking, the billboards and the building, always building—more, higher, newer: an unrelenting city, like hot breath on the back of your neck.

But if you looked, if someone showed you, you could find them—passageways, skinny portals to other places, other cities, secret cities just behind the surface.

You don’t notice them at first—or you think they’re dead-end alleys, nothing gaps between buildings—no wider than a doorway, and you step through them, into them, into another world: alley streets that wind inside city blocks, where people sit in doorways and women crouch over grills of smoking meat and children run and laundry hangs and TVs flash beside flashing altars and telephone wires stretch in impossible tangles, like dreadlocks—in short, where everyday life is lived.

It’s cool and quiet inside—the buildings are high and the alley streets narrow. You pass a succession of doorways, more glimpses into the lives of the people inside, a flood of images: families huddled on the floor around a big cooker, eating rice; chickens clucking around; old men napping in hammocks; women lighting incense and raising it and waving it and tucking it in a crevice to smolder and smoke.

It feels like a Moroccan medina, those deep parts when you wander far enough—little shops set up in the front rooms of people’s homes, the random internet cafe, children running everywhere, squealing and toddling off into doorways. Only the smell is of fish instead of spices, and it’s motorbikes instead of donkeys you have to look out for.

But it’s the same sense of feeling strangely at home, even though it’s so far from your own home, anything you know of home. There’s something incredibly comforting about the living of everyday life. For those of us that have treaded onto the dark side—maybe for all of us—there’s something really precious about the doing of everyday tasks, a simple joy in being a part of the world, a simple part of it all—even if only as a passing shadow on the wall, a white girl snapping photos and peering in crevices and smiling and waving when the children exclaim “Hello! Hello!” in an English they barely know.

You wander and rove, twist and turn, and then suddenly you’re back out on the surface, the wide swarming streets, an assault of heat and honking. It feels addicitive—you want more, you want to go back, go back under. You find another small portal and dive into the cool dark shadows.

It starts to feel like water, like bobbing up and down, in and under the surface, submerging and coming up for air—only you’re not sure which is the breathing and which is holding, cheeks full and a quiet burn rising through the chest.

You move in a strange space through caverns, observing the private lives of organisms you feel you’re somehow distantly related to; you move through a still, dark world terribly foreign but also somehow familiar, somehow like home—at home, in the secret cities of Saigon.

Sylvio, Character Study

Published February 25, 2011 Places , Southeast Asia , Vietnam Closed
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Too shy to take a picture of Sylvio. So here's some sunlight coming through the umbrella thatching. Let's pretend it's a metaphor.

Grizzlied OG with wiry sun-blasted hair, old-man eyebrows that look like a million little spider legs—walks around shirtless, smoking. Not a warm and fuzzy type at all. A tough old dude who smiles sometimes with his eyes, laughs sometimes with his chest (more of a grunt, really, accompanied by a low shake and a choir of smoke).

“The only problem is, what am I gonna do when I finish building?” Shrugs. “Eh, I’ll probably just make furniture. You can always make furniture.” An indeterminate accent—mentions being a kid in Canada, but it’s not that; there’s a twinge of something else. Speaks Vietnamese with the workers, seems to joke with them—they smile—but the tone is flat, and the face rarely smiling.

He shovels dirt in the afternoon, asks, “Is your Wifi working?” “Did you ever get your coconut?” Yes, yes. Disappears during the day to a place behind the buildings and shrubs and palms, where I imagine him weaving, hunched over shirtless in his baggy cloth pants—weaving more bamboo roofs and walls and beach umbrellas; carving and crafting wood into chairs and tables, shining the dullness until it glows.

Weaving, weaving, a neverending project—his own Buddhist sand garden. And you wonder what for. What is he building away from, or towards? The framed photos that hang over the doorway to the kitchen? Him with an 80s mane, tuxedo arms embracing a woman in layers of poofy sequins? The dim pictures of a little girl?—face obscured, leaning over sand, or in a park, maybe, leaves creating shadows that even in the still-frame seem to crawl like insects. Where are they?

I don’t ask. He doesn’t really create an atmosphere of asking. “How long have you been here?” I asked on the first night. “Just since last night,” he teased flatly, the hint of a twinkle in his eye that reminded me of my dad, only a little dimmer. “We knew you were coming, so we built it up.”

“Oh, well, you shouldn’t have.”

“Ah, no,” ashes his cigarette, clears his throat. “Nine and a half years, we’ve been here.” And looks around at the roof, the table, the trees and paths now consumed by night—looks around and down and doesn’t say anything more.

So he answers, and he certainly isn’t rude, but it doesn’t encourage any more asking. A tough old dude, a building dude, a man of that generation—the world covered with them, from every country it seems—as though there were something in that generation. Something they’ve seen, or that’s seen them, and they seem to withdraw very far inside, into their man caves of building and sculpting and staring off and thinking. Of laughing with their chests and smiling with their eyes, and leaving you never quite sure when they’re messing with you or when they’re serious or if you’re bothering them or bugging them—them, them, under all those layers of sun-beated skin.

Take Me To The Jungle, And Don’t Ever Take Me Back

Published February 24, 2011 Budget , Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Vietnam 1 Comment
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Okay, so outdated pop culture references aside, hear me and hear me well: Jungle Beach is the stuff of backpacker folklore.

A rustic, simple homestay: a cluster of bamboo cabanas on a sandy lot, shaded by the whispering palms of trees; hammocks and hand-made lounge chairs; a communal dining room where guests gather twice a day for meals; thatched sun umbrellas stuck into the sand of a postcard beach.

Sometimes a place feels so special that you don’t really want to write about—as though writing about it would sully it, or giving it words—trying to give it words—would cheapen it, lessen it, and you want to keep it a private, precious thing.

I arrived at Jungle Beach a little heart-heavy (see previous post), a bit of melancholy sprung up, as though something tapped into a murmuring, gargling reserve of oil beneath the surface of me and wasn’t shooting out like a geyser, but rather seeping through, leaking out into the sunlight.

In any case, I crawled off the overnight bus a stop early, 40km outside Nha Trang—5:30 am on a dusty strip of highway that consituted the town Doc Let. I took a motorbike the next 20-some km, sleep-blurred and thirty-mouthed, to Jungle Beach. I arrived, and I didn’t ever want to leave.

It wasn’t the kind of place that immediately bowls you over. “This is nice,” I thought, as I curled up under a thin blanket, inside a soft blue mosquito net. But the place grew on me—or I grew into it.

Hours and days passed in some sort of other time zone. Wake up with the sun. Jog on the beach or do yoga on a mat in the shade. Eat breakfast. Do some writing, some reading. Lay on the beach. One of the workers comes out and says it’s lunchtime. Rise off my feet, sit at the communal table, pass bowls of meat and veggies and rice and sweet chili sauce. Have another coffee. Go back to the beach. Not even read, really, just lay there—lay there thinking, or not thinking, just watching the waves and feeling my own kind of waves inside, welling up, rising and receeding, as though I were standing on the banks of a monumental sadness, whose bounds I didn’t know, just the pull of its gravity. Cry sometimes, about nothing in particular.

Three pm, and someone comes out with a little plastic plate of fruit, pineapple or pomello or watermelon. Eat it with a toothpick, get a coconut, drink it and scrape it clean with a spoon. Go wade in the water, hopping waves or letting them pummel me, or floating on my back and watching the great white clouds walk across the sky. Shower, check my email, write. Gather for dinner and spend hours afterwards chatting with the other travelers—mostly couples, mostly German for some reason, but really cool people, different ages but all open and friendly. Feel like it’s midnight when it’s only 9, say good night and curl up under a thin blanket, inside a soft blue mosquito net. Repeat as necessary.

The place was built by a dude named Sylvio, who walks around shirtless and smoking, a tough old guy (see character study in upcoming post). He bought the land nearly 10 years ago, and built the place slowly, each cabana by hand, and it’s become the stuff of backpacker folklore.

One of the most impressive parts of Jungle Beach is the staff. The staff to guest ratio was almost 1:1, a friendly, laid-back Vietnamese staff that didn’t pander to the guests and fawn over them, but was attentive—in short, that actually seemed to really care that we had a good time. Ten years of working in the service industry, and I’ve decided that that’s all people really want—to feel taken care of, to feel like you actually give a shit. It’s a rare thing, and it doesn’t necessarily come with heafy price tags and swanky surroundings. It comes, to be completely and utterly trite, from the heart.

I spent four days and three nights doing virtually nothing at Jungle Beach. And as my depature neared, I found myself desperately not wanting to leave. I discovered, without having known it, that I really needed that time—to decompress, to clear out some space, to get ready for the project I’m about to embark on. And yet I didn’t feel rejuvenated, in a sense; I felt simply like I didn’t want to leave.

But what would another day have done? What would another week or year done? Will I ever actually work through all this whatever-it-is I carry in me? Will I ever be done? No, no, it was time to go.

But I can’t ever remember feeling so sad to leave a place. I looked around—it all seemed so precious. I actually almost cried. What the hell is all this? Am I going crazy? Am I becoming soft in my old age?

I got in the taxi and we bumped off, leaving the buildings and the thatched roofs and the gate and the barking dogs in a billow of dust behind us.

Little Artist Girl, Hoi An

Published February 20, 2011 Food , Lonely Girl Loves , Places , Southeast Asia , Vietnam 3 Comments
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The best cup of coffee—or rather, glass of coffee, tinkling with ice cubes and a teeny spoon for stirring—I had in Hoi An wasn’t at one of the wicker-chair, wifi-ready terrace cafes with an English menu. Sure, those were nice too: to sit and look out on the lantern-lined pedestrian streets and tailor shops and footbridges and the grey strip of water on which paper-mache Tet floats and old wooden boats nodded “yes, yes.”

But those were more of the ambiance. The best actual coffee I had was at a plastic-chair, sooty-pavement stall near where locals loaded their motorbikes onto a dingy barge and set sail, to somewhere off into the reedy horizon.

I sat sighing and stirring and soaking in what felt like a private nook amidst the “charmingly touristy” bustle of the city (it really is quite lovely, in spite, or because of, all the tourism). I observed the goings-on, and then I noticed her: a little artist girl, studiously perched over her clipboard.

She was fully absorbed in her work, a study of the colonial building across the street. The bicycles and motorbikes and swarm of people didn’t seem to exist to her—she sat focused, consumed by the work at hand.

Passerbys stopped to observe her; she didn’t seem to notice. Old men who sat smoking, drinking coffee, waiting alongside the docked boats for an indeterminate something, slowly got up to watch her. They stood around nodding; she didn’t look up once. Nothing else seemed to exist; none of it—the people, the street, its bustle, the whole honking world—mattered except the building, her drawing.

She was an artist at work. In her poofy red vinyl skirt, her frilly white socks, her fuzzy beret; her unwavering black eyes and posture of pure commitment —a perfect little artist.

She worked for the duration of my leisurely linger. Eventually she looked up, over at a man that might have been her father. He nodded, tenderly clipped another board atop her drawing to protect it from the flurry of the street. He took her hand and they walked off together.

I got up and paid for the best glass of coffee I had in Hoi An.

No Hue: Hue Riders Knock-Off

Published February 18, 2011 Blunders , Dirty Tricks , Independent , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Vietnam 3 Comments
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Um, is this supposed to be something important?

Mr. Loc is over it.

He slows the motorbike, pulling over to the skinny shoulder of the highway that wraps seductively around the lush green mountain. He points. “Photo.” It’s more of a command than a suggestion. I snap of shot of the vista—pretty, with rice paddies and a cloak of fog. But I couldn’t tell you any more about it.

That’s because Mr. Loc isn’t having it. He’s shown us the goddamn vista, his posture seems to say, what more do we want?

Even the most skilled and adept of independent travelers (and I’m certainly far from one of them) falls for an imitator sometimes. It happens: we’re tired, we’re rushed, our guard is down, it seems like a good idea. We wind up paying top dollar for a half-assed adventure.

I’d heard about the Hue Riders one night in Hanoi. Instead of a boring old tour bus, they take you on motorbikes from Hue to Hoi An, an historic trail that stops at waterfalls and pagodas and old American bunkers. “It’s supposed to be brillant,” one of Jacob’s friends told me, hunched on our plastic stools over the billow of BBQ smoke.

Killer. Sign me up.

I asked my hotel in Hue if they’d heard of the Hue Riders and they nodded enthusiastically, leading me over to the dude posted at the cafe next door. He thumbed through his photo album—him with smiling white girls, him with white dudes giving the thumbs up sign. He showed me an entry in his customer comment notebook from a girl who was “from your country!”

I couldn’t tell if it was cause to be suspicious, or if he was just that certain kind of proud that third-world tourism workers sometimes are. He showed me his business card: “FIFTEEN YEARS Experienced, All’s for your satisfaction.” But hey, it said “Hue Riders” under his name.

It was only later, after I’d paid and signed up, that the real suspicion began to mount. I googled Hue Riders. And holy shit, there was an actual, legit website. For the real Hue Riders. Of which Mr. Loc was not one.

Oh well, I told myself. Chalk another up to experience. Sometimes the DIY, hustling tour guides can be just as good as the bona fide ones your LP recommends.

Which is true. But Mr. Loc, I’m discovering, isn’t one of them.

He isn’t terrible; he’s just monumentally not into it. Fifteen years of experience has translated to boredom.

Our first stop was a fishing village off the highway: a dirt road strewn with debris; a couple of kids playing soccer; a clutter of wooden boats, docked and sleeping; nets laid out like the vacated skins of snakes.

“Fishing village,” was the extent of explaination given.

Joe, the upbeat and friendly male half of an American couple who’d also gotten roped into the tour, attempted to ask some questions. “Do they go out in the morning?” We got a sort of unintelligble, one-word answer.

Now at a mountain pass—but was it the first or the second pass?—I attempt to eavesdrop on the tour guide next to us. Something important about these cables, this view, something about Americans? I try to ask Mr. Loc. “Was this something important during the war?”

“Yes, I think so.”

Tourists at a former bunker

We move along. It’s a foggy, white-wrapped day, and all the sights we stop at are equally shrouded in hazy incomprehension. We stop by bunkers used during “the American War” (now a tourist trap—more on that in a later post). We stop off for overpriced coffee at a cheesy resort. We pull over at the roadside operation for a kind of cosmetic oil made from a local leaf. We stand around awkwardly as Mr. Loc tells us the prices of the different sized oils.

“Not much of an oil type myself,” Joe declares good-naturedly. He’s pathologically cheerful, in that particular American way, with his buzz cut and beaming cheeks. “When do we get to the waterfall?”

“No waterfall today,” Mr. Loc declares. “The weather,” he gestures around us, “road too slippery.” He makes a skid-and-crash motion with his hands. We nod solemnly, disappointed.

We stop at Marble Mountains, thrust from the flat earth near China Beach like a glittering rock of crystal. Pagodas and temples abound. Joe maintains his positivity, reading aloud from his Lonely Planet to make up for our lack of tour guide. I’m grateful for his unrelenting optimism.

Holy light

We wander into a cave that feels like a cathedral—a carved Buddha in the stone, incense like breath, sunlight filtering through the ceiling like the fingers of gods. There’s the hush of a holy place there; Joe reads that during the War, it was used as a VC hospital.

In a corner, a bat with a broken wing arches and flops. He squeaks intermittenly, and it sounds like a very small prayer, echoing against the rock.

We descend the mountain and find Mr. Loc waiting for us, leaned against the motorbike. “Okay, we go.”

I realize the thing about Mr. Loc isn’t that he’s rude or unknowledgable or even a shitty tour guide. It’s that he’s supremely Vietnamese. It’s this certain way, this certain attitude, that I’ve begun to understand, the same as in the nail shops at home—matter-of-fact, blunt, nothing sugar-coated or said sweetly. Here’s your tour. There’s a sight. Good? Okay.

“Vietnamese people aren’t very nice,” other travelers have told me. I understand where they’re coming from, but I don’t think it’s a simple matter of not being nice; I think it’s a profound cultural difference. (“You want pedicure? Okay, you pick a color.”) Brusk and brash—jarring as the chorus of honks from the motorbikes.

We arrive in Hoi An wind-blown and dirt-covered. My eyes well from the thousand particles of crap swimming around my contacts; my hair’s matted to my head from too many hours wearing a helmet.

Mr. Loc drops me at my hotel. “Happy?” It’s a business-like question.

I nod. Why not?

Hanoi’s Secret Cafe

Published February 16, 2011 Hanoi , Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Sola , Southeast Asia , Vietnam 11 Comments
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I love rooftops, and I love rooftops in cities—sitting up on your bird’s perch and watching the strange dance of it all.

There’s no pigeons in Hanoi (except the ones you see plucked and pink at the food stalls), and there’s virtually no places to take respite.

Jacob told me about the secret cafe—not so much a secret, but a nameless, signless place you could never find without looking for it. On a road behind Turtle Lake, beside an especially terrifying roundabout, at the heart of the chaos—a nondescript storefront shop selling all the usual lanterns and bags and lacquered art. You walk past it, through it, down and back, what looks like the dim hallway to some squalid toilet.

It actually leads to a cafe, opening up into a courtyard that evokes the same “ah” sensation as stepping into a riad from the din of a Moroccan medina. A girl thrust a menu at me and told me I needed to order there, right there, before going any further. I pointed to the coffee with milk and egg white, as recommended, and the girl moved aside and let me pass.

I climbed up a flight of stairs, past a set of carved doors left ajar, revealing a glowing, smoldering altar within. Up another skinny staircase, and I was at a quiet little terrace that overlooked the lake, the skyline, the swarming street, the madness of the city.

It was my fourth day in Hanoi, and I was only then beginning to make sense of it. Its roads were a tangle of incomprehension, like lines in a palm whose fortune you couldn’t quite decipher—electrical wires and branches the gentle hatch marks that lay like a webbing, even less decipherable in what was certainly a story, certainly trying to say something.

But on the terrace it almost made sense, or at least begin to take shape. The other tables were sparsely inhabited by couples, leaning in and speaking low, by a few other foreigners smoking and reading. My egg white coffee came and it was goddamn delicious, thick and like a milkshake. I spooned it to myself like I were my own infant and sat there, just sat, thinking my nothing thoughts and watching.

It was refreshing, to be up there like a bird, in a city that doesn’t have any—to enjoy a moment of peace amid the frenzy. Which is a metaphor for life, in the way it’s all a metaphor for life—one great metaphor beneath the surface of everyday, at the center of everyday, everything just an arrow, pointing, leading, hinting us towards some soft secret (down a passageway, behind a trinket shop)—nudging us towards something we can’t possibly ever know or say, can only sense sometimes, in the still moments—can only approximate, speak about in abstractions, relationally. Which is why it’s a metaphor in the first place, and not The Real Thing—why we need metaphors and egg white foam in thick coffee and pretty little terraces to take a breather on.

Hanoi Secret Cafe: 11 Hang Gai

Suicide-Proof

Published February 15, 2011 Photography , Places , Southeast Asia , Subculture , Vietnam Closed
Tags: , ,

I dreamed your apartment was suicide-proof:
those little half-windows
that only open in slits,
like doped-up eyes,
how we blew the smoke
sideways and down
and it couldn’t really make it out,
just blew right back to us.

I asked if there were earthquakes here
and you said there weren’t,
but I didn’t believe it—
not that I didn’t believe you,
but I didn’t believe the earth—
that somewhere down
under all this something
was shaking,
ready to shake:
the smell of a seizure
before it erupts.

I got up and paddled
my bare feet across the floor,
my bad ankle snapping.
I realized I’d forgotten the kitchen window,
that slides open wide—
a ledge and a little metal railing
that wouldn’t be enough
to keep a body from crouching,
crawling out
to the 16 stories
of honking beneath.

Lauren Quinn is a writer and traveler currently living in Hanoi. Lonely Girl Travels was a blog of her sola travels and expat living from 2009 to 2012. She resides elsewhere on the internet now.

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