Asia 2008

On Saturday morning a week ago I headed east to Hạ Long Bay in a minibus with three women in their early thirties: Antje, Inga, and Jule. I had booked a trip on a tour operated by a Hanoi travel agent.

They are from Frankfurt, and speak good but not perfect English, so it is easier for them to talk in German. So I have learnt some German by the passive smoking method. Listening to their soft Frankfurt accents made me feel really ignorant, forcing them to talk English, so I’d better learn some upon return (I have more chance of actually learning some German than bloody Vietnamese). The best thing I learnt was “ear worm” – a good phrase for that tune in your head that won’t go away. In return I taught them “brown trousers moment”.

Our guide is Tinh. He is 27 and has a degree, of course, in English. He is a good chap, and extremely enthusiastic, and proud of his country.

Hạ Long means descending dragon. The old name for Hanoi, dating from 1010, is Thanh Long, ascending dragon. The islands of the bay were created when the dragon landed, carving out valleys. And why would you want to argue with such a poetic explanation?

Hạ Long city seems a bit of a hole. The port is chaos: tens of junks, hundreds of tourists. But after a minor delay to sort out ticketing errors (the difference amounting to 10,000 dong) the four of us have lunch on a large junk capable of accommodating 16. They are nearly vegetarian, at least while in Vietnam, so I get most of the junk food.

After lunch we set engine, and motor past lumps of limestone, looking like teeth (or, occasionally, cakes) dropped on to a plate of custard. The magnificent scenery is the point of the trip.

Like the landscape at Sapa, and at the Perfume Pagoda, and around Ninh Bình, it is karst. The whole country seems to be karst.

As far as I know, karst is a landscape of half-dissoved soluble rock, usually limestone. The surface and fractures are dissolved by mildly acidic rainwater. There are lots of caves, sinkholes, and underground rivers.

The original Karst – with a definite article and a capital letter – is above Trieste. People there speak Slovenian, and in Slovenian, it is Kars. In Italian it is Carso. The Austrians – temporary possessors of that part of the world where Teuton meets Slav and Latin – called it Karst. But the karst in Vietnam is like nothing I have seen in Europe.

The main island, Cát Bà, is surrounded by floating fishing villages. People row between house and fish farm.

We stopped late afternoon for a spot of kayaking – actually canoeing, in pairs. C2, in the code. Although it was quite fun, it was pretty pointless. It would be a good way to paddle around the many caves around Cát Bà (woman island), but we just paddled around a bit. I would have liked to have done it on my own, and for longer.

After canoeing we switched to another boat, the second of four or five during the trip. Each had a special function: the first was our lunch boat, the second the post-kayaking boat. The boat took us to our private island, Cát Ông (man island), staffed by four or five young guys and a young woman, for us four. This ratio is normal in Vietnam, where underemployment is rife and labour cheap.

There is a central pavilion, with sofas and a bar, and half a dozen bamboo beach huts equipped with electricity – perfect. This is mine. At high tide the balcony got wet.

On this holiday I have been drinking cocktails, which I seldom enjoy, simply because the prices are absurdly low. More of the same here.

There are lots of Alsatians around the place. In German they are not named after a former province; they are ‘sheepdogs'. One of the dogs is obsessed with rocks. It thinks of rocks and nothing else; wakes up and thinks of rocks; sleeps and dreams of rocks. And on this rock I will build my life. Every person it meets, you can see it thinking “will this two-leg dog play rocks with me?” And if you do, oh bliss. Canine nirvana.

Dinner is merely adequate, save for one of the best shrimps, beach-barbequed, that I have ever tasted. After a day on the water we are tired and hit the hay immediately, and fall asleep to the sound of the waves. I sleep under a mosquito net for the first time I can remember.

At breakfast the next day a large buzzard, or some such, was circling the beach. 49 falconiforms are listed for Vietnam, so I am none the wiser.

We took a third boat to the harbour near Viet Hai village (Viet sea) on Cát Bà, past lots of fish farms and people rowing in their front to front way. To get to the boat we were each ferried by canoe. Tinh took me.

We walked five km along a road to Viet Hai village.

The cicadas were very loud, and I heard birdsong for the first time in ages.

Then we climbed a rocky and slippery path to Navy Peak, maybe 270m high. The climb was not so difficult, but the humidity is high in Vietnam, and higher still in forests, so we were dripping at the top. I’m sure the view from the summit was delightful, but we were attacked by mosquitoes and did not linger. This is Inga flicking her towel at the mosquitoes. One might as well order the waves to retreat.

After a huge lunch at Viet Hai we took the boat back to Cát Ông. The wind had got up and I got seasick.

On land I played fetch with the lithophilic dog. In its transports of delight, its teeth came into contact with my hand. I don’t think its teeth marked, let alone pierced the skin, but it made me stop nevertheless. A single bite would mean a trip back to Hanoi and several injections. My rabies injections would just give me more time to be treated. Even a scratch or a lick can transmit rabies if you have a cut. But I think the dog was merely deeply stupid and obsessive-compulsive rather than mad, so I chanced it. No symptoms so far, beyond my usual aversion to unadulterated water.

The wind got up on the final day. The girls’ boat trip was cancelled, and then my bike ride was cancelled too because of the storms. Lightning struck about 150 metres away while we were on the boat. So we just minibused, very slowly, to take the daily hydrofoil from the port in the afternoon.

We stopped along the way to throw stones from a cliff. The tide was a quarter of a mile out. This was my attempt to recreate a famous painting of his wife and of Anna Ancher by P S Krøyer, which hangs in the Skagensmuseum at the northernmost tip of Jutland. It should be retrievable somewhere around here: http://www.skagensmuseum.dk/index.php?id=96&L=2.

Actually the light was nothing like that in Skagen, so I am not sure why that came to mind.

Then we visited a cave that had been turned into a military hospital by the VC during the American War. There was a small concrete swimming pool. The largest cave was turned into a cinema.

We ate a few yards from the war memorial near the port. We shared some clams, with a sweet chilli sauce, with the various Vietnamese men around the place – our driver, tour guide, guys from the resort and from the restaurant. I’ve never eaten better.

We helped it down with Hanoi Vodka, steeped in the leaves of a local plant that Tinh said cures headaches (salicylic acid – aspirin – came from willows. It’s much more plausible than tiger penis or bear gall bladder). This was a bit like a flavoured Russian vodka, and we drank it à la russe – very quickly. Our driver not excluded. You say “tram van tram” [ie, 100%] or “mot, hai, ba, cho!” before drinking. I had half a dozen shots.

Then we had lunch: prawns, potatoes, greens with garlic, fish balls with lemongrass, chicken with lemongrass. All simple and delectable; the cook (female, invisible, indoors) was an unheralded genius.

Ninh Bình itself is, as far as I can see, just a provincial town stretching for a couple of miles down a large dual carriageway. But there is plenty to see around it, which has reminded me why I am travelling. I’m staying at the Xuân Hoa Hotel, where the room is not bad ($12) and the owners are very friendly. The hotel is named after the owner and his wife, but Xuân Hoa also means spring flower. I think.

Ninh Bình is famous for its goat meat. I have had it here twice and it wasn’t very good – nothing like a Caribbean curry. There is snake on the menu but you have to order it. I tried doing so, but the cost makes no sense for a single portion: 800,000 dong, which is 16x the price of my usual dinner here.

On Thursday I took a taxi motorbike 45km to Cúc Phương National Park. There I saw the Primate Rescue Centre before heading 20km inside the park to check in. I stayed the night and walked on both days before heading back, exhausted, to Ninh Bình. The park was wonderful, even though I was eaten alive by mosquitoes. I was going to say countless infinities of mosquitoes, which is of course not true. But say there are 10 mosquitoes per square metre in the park (and I can tell you that there are a hell of a lot). That makes 100,000 mosquitoes per hectare. The national park is 22,000 hectares. So that means 2.2 billion mosquitoes, I think.

A mosquito weighs, on average, 1 milligram. That is before eating. They can eat three times their own weight in blood. They manage this partly by immediately urinating all but the plasma.

So the mosquito biomass of Cúc Phương national park is, according to my estimate, 2,200 tonnes.

I may write more about Cúc Phương in due course, because it was fabulous. I also wore out lots of batteries taking photos of butter- and dragonflies.

I am reacting badly to the bites I got in the park, perhaps because there are so many of them. There is no malaria around here, but there is always dengue.

Yesterday I was still tired after the national park, so I got up late and took a public bus to Phát Diẹm, otherwise known as Kim Sơn. It cost 12,000 dong to go 30km or so. There is a cathedral there, built in 1890 or so. I think I remember reading that 20% of the population of VN is Catholic, but they are concentrated in pockets. Most of the Catholic population fled south in 1954, but many have returned. To judge by the cemetery outside Kim Sơn, two thirds of the population around here are Catholic.

The cathedral is known as the stone church, which sounds banal; but most temples around here are wooden, so it is noteworthy. There are four chapels around it, all closed except for mass, like all churches in Vietnam. Plus three grottoes. There are familiar European gothic elements, particularly inside, but the exterior is largely indigenous religious architecture. The free-standing campanile holds an absolutely enormous bell (two tons in weight), with a gongy breathy sound. At 12 it struck 30 or so.

Graham Greene wrote about the cathedral at Phát Diẹm in The Quiet American. I don’t remember it, though, which makes me think I haven’t read the book as I had believed.

I wandered around Kim Sơn, also seeing a nineteenth-century covered wooden bridge, before whiling away the time waiting for a bus by watching the cyclists. A guy on the bus back told me they were celebrating Buddha’s birthday in Ninh Bình, but I saw no evidence of it.

A lot of the signs around here advertise Rươu Kim Sơn. That just means spirits or wine from Kim Sơn. I bought some. The proprietress filled a small water bottle with a clear spirit from a large water cooler. It cost 8,000 dong, about 25p. Everything around here is made of rice, bamboo, teak or rattan, so it’s a fair bet that this is a rice distillate. It smells slightly of obstler. It tastes a little fruity and then a little nutty. Very nice indeed, and a bit of a bargain. I’ll stock up before I go to Huê.

Today I hired a bike and pedalled through back roads, lanes and paths to Hoa Lư. There were no signs and I didn’t know where I was so I stopped and asked directions three times and watched where people pointed. Actually it is probably difficult to get completely lost, because it’s a cartesian world here. The roads and lanes run in rectangles, no doubt because the irrigation systems require it.

About half of the people I passed shouted 'hello!'. I am an object of fascination here. If a Martian landed in London and took the Tube, we would ignore it, as long as it didn't make too much noise. Not here.

Hoa Lư, a ruined citadel now, was the capital of the Ðinh and early Lê dynasties between 968 and 1009. In 1010 Lý Thái Tổ moved it to Hanoi, which celebrates its millennium in 2010. The citadel, three square kilometres in area, is ruined, but two old temples still stand, the Ðền Thơ Vua Ðinh, celebrating Ðinh Tiên Hoàng and his family, and the Ðền Thơ Vua Lê, celebrating Lê Ðai Hành and his family.

I’m not getting much out of the temples in VN, probably because I have never had a guide and haven’t the faintest idea what I am seeing. The Ðền Thơ Vua Ðinh seemed a lot like the Temple of Literature in Hanoi to me. So, again, the best part of it was the getting there.

I also climbed up to the 207 steps to the Ðinh tomb, where again lots of people stood next to me to have their photos taken. Like Woody Allen's Zelig, I am heading into the photo albums of hundreds of Vietnamese families. 207 steps is not so many, but the heat was oppressive at 2pm. On the way down I realised I was seriously dehydrated, which is my excuse for shouting at a woman who tried to charge me a dollar for a small bottle of water. A glass of cane sugar juice solved that problem.

Tomorrow I hope to cycle again, this time to Tam Coc. This is wonderful cycling country: utterly flat, and the only wind comes from the air resistance and the beer.

Goodbye and, I hope, adieu to Hanoi. It grew on me, but only a little.

I'm now 93 km south of Hanoi, in Ninh Binh. In five minutes I'm off on the back of a motorbike to Cuc Phuong National Park, where I'll be walking a bit and staying the night.

Chùa Hương Tich, the Perfume Pagoda, sits on Hương Son, Perfume Mountain, 70km southwest of Hanoi. The mountain, 381 metres high, is a limestone karst outcrop. It is perhaps so named because of all the incense burnt at the temples. It is the most important Buddhist site in Vietnam, and has been the subject of songs, poetry, books and paintings.

Every year between February and April the Chùa Hương festival takes place. Hundreds of thousands of people visit the pagoda from all over Vietnam. On busy days 40,000 people visit.

I had calculated that Thursday was, as far as I could tell, an odd day on the lunar calendar, so it ought to be less busy. I can't be sure, but I think it worked; other photos that I have seen have far more boats on the river and larger crowds at the temples.

Actually it is a series of temples. A legend says that the Chùa Hương festival is to worship a princess who incarnated Avalokitasvara (a disciple of Buddha) and attained Enlightenment there. The shrine in which she worshipped was discovered in the 15th century by three monks. In 1687 the Superior Bonze Tran Dao Vien Quang came to Hương Son and it was transformed into a major Buddhist sanctuary, starting with the Hương Tich temple.

I booked a tour through a travel agency and a minibus with about 12 of us plus a guide set off at 8am. It probably took a couple of hours. Among our group were two Vietnamese brothers, originally from Hanoi. One had brought along his wife, originally from Beijing, the other his son. They had left Hanoi about 50 years ago and gone south. They had left Vietnam in 1975 and settled in Orlando, Florida. The son, born in the USA, spoke reasonable Vietnamese. He was slightly taller than me and much bigger than his father. For his uncle, it was the first time back to Vietnam in 33 years. I love meeting people like this - their life stories are moving.

We stopped at the village of Mỹ Đức. There is a road from Mỹ Đức to the pagoda, but almost everyone travels the last stretch along the river Yen. There are hundreds, if not thousands of boats at Mỹ Đức. There is a boat for every visitor, or so it appears.

For a non-Buddhist, the water section was the highlight of the journey. The river flows through a dramatic karst landscape. Limestone crags jut unreally from a flat plain.

We all got into one large rowing boat. It was powered by one woman rowing at the stern, and two young people pushing/pulling an oar at the bow.

The method of propulsion is curious to someone brought up on western-style rowing. Unlike the western method, the rower faces forwards, usually standing up. The rower therefore has to push the oar away from her. For power, the western method relies on the strongest muscles in the body: the quads, buttocks and lower back. The front-to-front method relies largely on the triceps, which are puny in comparison. The only way to make it work is to lean forward, employing the weight of the body. This is no use if you are sitting down, when the stomach has to substitute.

All the rowers also feathered the oar before they had finished their stroke. I couldn’t watch. But it was a perfect way to reach a temple.

The chap trying to get out of the picture is Brice, who is a French teacher in Ho Chi Minh City.

Although not too hot, it was humid, and rarely have I done anything so intelligent as take the gondola. Those who walked up were sopping by the time they reached the top.

Near the top is Chùa Trong, the Inner Temple, aka Hương Tich cave.

There has been a shrine there since 1575 at the latest. The cave is dotted with stalagmites and stalactites. Naturally, they have names, such as golden tree, silver tree, silver worm and basket. Nine stone drops are called the Nine Dragons (the Vietnamese see dragons everywhere). Nui Co - the maiden and Nui Cau - the youth – are supposed to look like heads. Women who want children often go to Hương Tich and pray at Nui Co and Nui Cau.

I didn’t know any of this at the time. I just saw a huge cave with lots of people praying at various rocks. A bit like some churches in southern Spain. As at all Buddhist temples, the worshippers made offerings: fruit, vegetables, biscuits, chocopies (mmm, chocopies), beer, golden lotus flowers, cigarettes.

Then I headed downhill. It became clear that the Perfume Pagoda is an idyllic spot ruined by unrestrained development. Between the entrance and the cave at the top, the path winds over slippery limestone for perhaps a couple of miles. This path is a one-dimensional shanty-town.

Shacks line its entire length, selling an identical range of crap. They either sell souvenirs, or a place to rest on the climb up or down, or the facilities of a WC (ve sinh). There are a lot of WCs.

Each stall along this linear favela generates its share of rubbish, which is dumped over the side of the path. So there is a huge amount of rubbish on the way.

On offer:

• Golden lotus flowers, some of which carry the face of the goddess of mercy;
• Name scrolls;
• Hats, cowboy and coolie;
• Sweets;
• Herbs and spices;
• Waistcoats for children, saying ‘souvenir of Chùa Hương’.

Many of the shacks play loud music. It’s ghastly. All rather like my memories of Blackpool.

The shacks are there, of course, because people buy from them (many are not there outside peak season, apparently). In this case, it is Vietnamese tourists, most of whom were wearing or holding Chùa Hương souvenirs. You would think that half way up they would have no chance, but such are the crowds on peak days that everybody gets business.

They are also there because the government, which owns the site, allows it. If it had any sense it would corral the commercial ventures into a single place, enforce dumping regulations and ensure that the holy places retain the atmosphere that they originally possessed.

There were some nice things to look at on the way, but they were partly accidental. These were flowers that had fallen from a rice tree next to the path.

Having had lunch at the bottom, I headed to the lowest pagoda, Hương Tich, which you’re supposed to go to first. And, at last, I could see the point of the place. There were very few people around, and in one or two courtyards I had the place to myself.

You could see that it wasn’t just a tourist attraction, but that monks actually lived there. There was a courtyard with a lovely pond with terrapins (?) in it.

Dragonflies VTOLed.

But unfortunately I had discovered the real deal too late to have a proper leisurely look.

The journey back was just as lovely, I think, although a lunchtime beer made me drowse.

Hurrah! My visa has arrived! Life is good again. I am free to leave. Only I can’t, now. I’ve been on a silkbuyfest this afternoon and have ordered some pyjamas to be delivered tomorrow morning.

However, I’m on the bus to Ninh Binh tomorrow evening.

******

You see signs outside some restaurants on the outskirts of Hanoi saying ‘thịt chó’. They are advertising that they serve dog meat.

It has not been on the menu in any restaurant I have visited. It is, in any case, inauspicious to eat dog in the first half of the lunar month, and it is now the 10th.

I did, however, stumble across a couple of dogs in the December 19th market. One was bisected transversely through the waist, the other coronally.

*****

This is, I was told, a dog rose, which I photographed in Sardinia.

Rosa canina grows in Vietnam as well as in Europe. According to Bao Ninh in The Sorrow of War, some NLF soldiers discovered that if they dried the roots, cut them up and smoked them, they produced a narcotic effect. But as soon as the Commissars discovered that the soldiers were on drugs and noticed the reduction in motivation, they banned it. The book is a novel, but it was based on his own experiences, and I don’t suppose he made this up.

*****

I’m perfectly willing here in VN to forego a main course because it costs £1 too much. You get used to different prices, and it is sensible to do so.

Yesterday I was walking around the West Lake and stopped to buy a bottle from a pavement vendor. I asked the price for a 500ml bottle, and the old lady paused and clearly made up the answer: “mười nghìn”, 10,000 dong. About 30p. I said “mười nghìn, my arse” and walked away, irritated, muttering. Who did she take me for?

Sure enough, around the corner I got a bottle for 3,000 dong.

Obviously, it’s only a few pence, but it is a pain to be quoted ludicrous prices all the time for something as basic (and homogeneous) as water.

*****

Property prices are falling in London, hurrah. A lot of people have wanted to talk about property prices. They all quote prices per square metre. When asked about prices in London, I can’t answer: the only prices I have ever heard quoted per unit area are rents for commercial property, and my knowledge of these is years out of date.

Anyway, the information I have been given is that property prices in Hanoi are comparable to those in London. Rents are cheaper. Earnings are far lower. Something does not add up. If rents aren’t covering the cost of capital it’s because people are buying with the expectation of capital gains. That’s one classic definition of a bubble (Bagehot’s?).