Friday, April 20, 2007
vietnam
amazazing.
in love. with the waters and the mountains, the paddies and the cities, bubbling drains filled with flowers, bicycles, jingle jangle bells, pecking birds, ice cold streams, rickety bridges, and everything in between.
hanoi: colourful and strange cafes and bars and shops and stalls stacked in unruly disorder, tucked into the vast sprawling tendrils of back alleys and dark corridors that open suddenly into courtyards with bicycles and ancient washing machines. the lake and its attendant 6am taichi devotees triggering morning-rush deja vu. motorbikes racing and revving to traffic light changes. the friendly and heartfelt people-- the electrical store owners and workers poking and prodding maps at closing time. the bookseller who recognised us on the last day, when we bought a book on our first. the random kindess of the banana lady. the beer boys and the elvis waiter who shared their bread with me (this last memory is slightly blurry). food. despite one isolated IgE incident on the first day the food is a continual parade of delight and surprise. coffee (this must be considered in a category of its own). excellent. smooth, rich, dark, potent, and cheap. (i considered inserting a joke about how i like my men. but i refrained. sort of.) bicycles and poles and baskets piled with flowers and undies and weighing scales, pigs bananas durians dragonfruit melons rubbish. walking through empty streets slowly filling up, in the gloaming, with noise and smoke, bikes and roaming street hawkers.
sapa: jostle. just the right amount-- enough to get the adrenaline pumping but not bad enough to keep you awake at night/in the morning). the views. immaculately-terraced paddies staircasing down green hills and clouds cascading over mountaintops under the bluest sky. the children that troop the streets hawking touristy(?) trinkets, a sad mix of innocence and worldliness. the red dzao and black hmong ladies that crowd the market square, not so charming, but displaying brief and heartening flashes of the little girls in the mountains that wave to the camera and jingle tiny pillowcase keychains as they walk. food. chocolate and baguette barefoot laziness, and the waiter from the moon, washing bikes and studying by night, and cooking delicious banana crepes in the day, and his sudden confession that he hated his job. freezing mountain streams, and snakeskins. hiking, past buffalo and pigs and ducks and on wide almost-roads of gravel, tiny brown sandy paths with dusty children. the hair-raising ride back down in the dark to sapa station with the whistling game that kept me still and my bladder relatively-quiet. the unique insanity of road construction making the roads seemingly-impassable in both directions. until your driver does it. twice, thrice, and a few times with heavy construction trucks snarling past in the opposite direction. i am thankful for the incessant and heavyhanded use of the horn.
ha long/cat ba: freezing dives. dead coral and non-spiked sea urchins. salty showers. bloody bad food. singing half-remembered national anthems and campfire songs. dominic, who showed up all the young ones with his dancing-- over rocks and logs, down and up mountains, past cassava, through quiet fields where kites ride the thermals far above the corn stalks. his wife, who loved brazil and rio. the old dutch seaman, proud of his viking heritage and his time in the navy. the dutch bank courier in his bright red muscle tee with rolled-up sleeves, who thinks "malaysians swing". (we haven't corrected him yet. merdeka!) the two newlywed canadians, jon and anita, traveling round southeast asia.
(i'm still in shock-- surreal, the 6 of us train-ing, bus-ing, ship-ing, biking and walking across 7 days of brand new sound and smell and brightness. hopefully the feeling never fades. vietnam should always be the intruiging and massive and enticing confusion that it is for me now. i want to make it real here, i want to put it down so the colours never run (like the sapa shawls-- beware) from my memory. i want to show myself, one day when i forget, what it was like to feel this thing that is vietnam. i don't know. i don't think i ever will. that's just the way it is)
+ fictions&fires
9:45 PM
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plangere, latin: to strike, or to lament.
in the depth of winter i finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
--albert camus
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to be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.
-- ee cummings
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