Vietnam

I’m in Hội An, a town built on trade and left untouched by mutual agreement during the American War. A lot of the buildings, therefore, are 200-year-old trading properties. This is ancient in a country in which few buildings are over 50 years old. It’s a very popular tourist town, and everyone I know who has been there loved it. I didn’t. For about 15 minutes.

One reason is that there is a little less hassle than in Huế. I was only importuned 13 times (I counted) on my way to lunch. And not one of the 13 tried to sell me women. As a man travelling on my own, I had expected to meet lots of pimps and prostitutes. But, pleasant surprise, until I went to Huế I met none. I put this down to avoiding any place that advertises karaoke or massage.

It also helps that there is electricity here.

On 30 April 1975 the armies of the north occupied Saigon, and Vietnam was reunified. Tomorrow, the 33rd anniversary, is Liberation Day, a national holiday. The day after is May Day. So the Vietnamese are on holiday and it will be hard to find a hotel room. For the same reason, there is no point in going to the Cham ruins at My Son. I’ll just hunker down, read and eat enormously.

I can read without worrying about my book stocks because there is a bookshop in Hội An. It is on the island, on the way to the Sleepy Gecko Bar. It is called Randy’s Book Exchange. The owner – you can probably guess his name - is from southern California. I woke him up. Most of his stock is from the USA. It is strong on thrillers and romance. It was impounded by VN customs for six months while, they claimed, they read every book. They refused to release 450 because they were "depraved". They were mainly romance, says Randy. On the books they released, VN customs slapped a duty of ten times what Randy had paid on each book.

The food here has been very good so far, at least as good as Huế, which is itself known for its food as a result of its imperial legacy. A speciality starter is ‘white rose’, pork and shrimp on steamed rice paper. Like dim sum. Many of the delicacies in Huế were variations on the same theme. There is a lot of seafood here, and yesterday I had 700 grammes of fat juicy barbequed clams. On top of fried vegetables, steamed rice and won ton soup it was a bit much but I packed it in.

I wear long-sleeved shirts in the evenings. Not many tourists do, and so many locals assume I work in VN. Last night I was talking to a lady called Ty, after she served me a 4,000-dong glass of cold fresh beer. She recommended that I go to a certain souvenir shop, owned by her family, called something like Souvenir 42. She said not to go to another shop of exactly the same name. There is an arms race of trade names here. As soon as a shop or hotel is successful, others crop up with the same or similar names. Eventually the original may change it name. (In Huế, for example, I ate well at a restaurant called La Carambole. It is in the guide books. Next door was a place called Le Caramel.) In the developed world this would be an infringement of property, for which a remedy would be available. There is no incentive to invest in a trade name if someone else can steal it from you.

Ten days ago I spent a night and two days at Cúc Phương National Park. Today, temporarily able to upload photos. I want to focus on the most striking aspect: the butterflies.

We drove 20km from the park boundary to the place where I was to spend the night. On the way we drove through countless clouds of cream-coloured butterflies. These are the most common butterflies in the park. Their numbers are incredible.

They fly in lines like kite streamers. From the moped, it seemed as if an invisible gun were firing flowers at us in spirals – psychedelic. As we drove through the clouds, we were pelted by papery bombs. It was hilarious and the urge to laugh was strong, but you had to keep your mouth shut to avoid snacking between meals, so I just giggled manically instead. I couldn’t begin to describe the sheer joy of it.

Once we stopped it became clear that the butterflies were not spiralling at all, but weaving crazily as if trying to dodge bullets.

On the walking paths, particularly in the valleys, you see these loony festoons, but you also see butterflies of many other kinds. Those I can recall were: small and cornflower blue; tortoiseshell (larger than my outstreched hand); orange and black; caramel toffee ice cream; rust-brown and cream; tobacco leaf; chocolate with white spatters. There were many other kinds too.

This may be a Sergeant, genus Athyma.

This is a Polyura species, possibly Polyura eudamippus.

They fly in different ways. Some flutter by; others glide and swoop; some fly like bats. The tobacco leaves glide. The large black ones flap like swallows. The small tortoishells are too fast to see. One black and white butterfly flaps and then just hangs in the air, outdoing Michael Jordan. The small blue ones dart like Jason Robinson.

These look like Cruisers, Vindula sp.

These may be Bluebottles, Graphium sarpedon.

Best of all, but impossible to photograph in flight, were huge butterflies nearly as big as my hand, black when they settled and folded their wings, but iridescent pale blue when flying. A glorious sight. You can only see the blue on this individual because it has lost part of its wing.

If you want to get close to butterflies just stay still; then the butterflies approach. Especially if you are near something that they want to eat, like a turd. But the mosquitoes approach sooner.

I’ve changed my mind about travelling by motorbike. I started taking xe om around Hanoi when I gave up on the taxi thieves. Two wheels - it’s the only way to travel.

Taking a xe om through the streets of a city is a nerve-wrecking and thrilling experience. Mopeds, cars, trucks and cyclists pour through the streets on independent courses. The flow is chaotic. They have to weave past pedestrians, forced on to the roads by the absence of pavements. Traffic lights – many built with money from the French government - are obeyed only at some junctions. Those who want to turn left do not wait for the opposing traffic to end; they just dive in. So the traffic flows through in four directions. To get through, drivers have to judge their own and predict others’ positions to within a couple of inches. On the whole they do, although I’m always conscious that my knees stick out at the sides of the moped more than the average passenger’s.

While the traffic is a marvel to behold, the Vietnamese drivers are not displaying wonderful skill. On the contrary: they are shit drivers. Their skills in positioning vehicles are mitigants born of the complete absence of any useful driving ability.

You see some driving that is so crazy, so apparently suicidal, that you have to laugh. Almost no-one – truck driver, biker, cyclist – looks before pulling into traffic. No-one uses the mirrors. Vehicles approaching any other vehicle from behind therefore have to hoot constantly. On a highway the average bus driver will probably give a prolonged blast once every five seconds during the day. You know when you are within 200 metres of a road in Vietnam because you hear the horns.

It is misleading to say that they drive on the right. The inner lane of a main road is, in practice, reserved for bikes and mopeds going the other way. So you have to cycle in the second lane. In order to overtake, vehicles will use any part of the road, including the part you are on. Speeding, weaving, under-age driving and drink-driving are also normal.

Most of the time they get away with it. But not always: Vietnam has one of the highest traffic fatality rates in the world. Nearly 13,000 deaths were recorded by the government in 2006. By way of comparison, in Great Britain, the number of people killed in road accidents in the same year was 3,172 (source: DfT). So that’s a lot of dead people who shouldn’t be.

According to the World Bank, Vietnam has an official fatality rate of 8.3 persons per 10,000 registered vehicles, an injury rate of 10.7 persons per 10,000 vehicles and an accident rate of 12 cases per 10,000 registered vehicles. Only China has a worse record. In OECD countries the average is 1 to 2 fatalities per 10,000 registered vehicles. (Source: FIA Foundation press release of 2005.)

This is partly because they have more crashes, and partly because deaths per crash are higher. According to a BMJ article in 2002, the high rates in Vietnam and elsewhere are due to frequent crashes involving multi-passenger vehicles, including buses, trucks, and minibuses.

Road traffic injuries in developing countries mostly affect pedestrians, passengers, and cyclists. According to the BMJ article, in the US over 60% of road crash fatalities occur in drivers, whereas drivers make up less than 10% of the deaths due to road traffic injuries in the least motorised countries. In Vietnam, motorcycles account for 59% of injuries in traffic collisions, bikes 24%, pedestrians 11% and motor vehicles only 4%. (Source: WHO).

According to the WHO, there are several risk factors in the VN figures, such as non-use of helmets by two-wheeler users, speed, poor road conditions, traffic mix, alcohol and poor visibility of road users. Other risk and impact factors might also be suggested: seat belts, corruption and non-enforcement of traffic laws, absence of emergency facilities.

It is getting worse. In 1990 the VN rode bicycles. Then the country started getting rich fast. Within a decade, most people in Hanoi and HCMC were using mopeds that they didn’t know how to ride. Now there are 20 million motorbikes on the streets each day, and the number is rising fast. (Most people in the countryside still use bikes.)

So fatalities are rising. There were 4,907 in 1994; 11,900 in 2003; 13,000 in 2006.

Now Vietnam is on the threshold of an income level at which large numbers of road users switch to cars. Within the next decade income per head will have doubled, and Hanoi may look something like Bangkok does now: choked.

The cars might be safer for their drivers but they are more dangerous for everyone else. In developing countries, cars are a status symbol at least as much as a means of transport (mopeds are much more practical in cities.) SUVs are prevalent, and they are usually driven by idiots. I have been run off the road by several.

In 2000 only 3% of riders wore helmets (source here). Vietnamese motorcycle helmets were hot and heavy, and known as ‘rice cookers’. In this climate you need a helmet that doesn’t cover the face. Fashion concerns also limited usage (really). Head trauma was, therefore, very common. (Head trauma usually means comas, paralysis, vegetables.) According to Greig Kraft in the article just cited, every day in 2000, 25 riders were killed and over 50 others suffered brain damage or other permanent disabilities. Their injuries absorbed more than 75 per cent of urban hospital budgets.

An NGO called the Asia Injury Prevention Foundations, run by Kraft, stepped in to manufacture cheap, ventilated helmets called Protec and to sponsor the provision of free helmets for children, TV adverts and billboards promoting helmets.

Even so, fatalities have continued to rise as more people switch to motorised transport.

The government belatedly passed a law on 15 December 2007, and most riders now wear helmets. The fine is 150,000 dong, about $10 – enough to deter. Serious traffic injuries fell by 50% within weeks. A similar helmet law was tried in 2001, requiring helmets on highways outside cities, but protests killed it. The fine for violation was very low, and it was not enforced.

The next stated priority for the WHO is drink driving. They must also be considering a campaign for cycle helmets, not least since perhaps half of cyclists are children.

One day, perhaps, the government will set and enforce high standards for driving tests. And a couple of decades after that, the Vietnamese will be able to drive.

I haven't been able to access the travellerspoint website since arriving in Huế because it is too slow. Until now. So a quick update. On St George’s Day it poured down. I stayed in my room, catching the wifi from a hotel next door, finding out traffic accidents statistics and bird populations (more of which later). The day before yesterday it merely rained. I took a bike and visited the Citadel.

While I was there, my camera reset its numbering to 0001. I had taken my 10,000th photo with it. More to the point, I have taken 8,200 since the end of June 2007, and 4,000 in the last seven weeks. It is accelerating like a drug habit.

Yesterday I took an organised tour north to see the Demilitarised Zone, DMZ. There were perhaps 35 of us on the bus so it wasn’t a very individual experience. We set off at 6 and returned at 6, and we spent nearly all day on the bus. With the exception of two sites, we only stopped for 10 or 15 minutes and the sites we visited.

The first exception was Khe Sanh, which did its best to present a story of heroes and martyrs against cowards. There was little there other than the museum; the Americans blew the place up when they abandoned it, and the locals stripped the remaining concrete after the war.

The second was the tunnels at Vịnh Mốc, north of the Ben Hai river. Unlike the tunnels 1,000 km south of here at Cu Chi, these tunnels were not used for fighting in. They were used for several years for living in. The villagers had to go underground because the Americans were bombing the area so much. They built a set of tunnels at three depths. Branching off the tunnels were little niches; this is where families lived. There was a maternity room. 17 babies were born in the tunnels. It was the only site really worth travelling to unless you have some emotional link with the war.

Yesterday I was monstrously hung over after drinking with some people from the tour: Magnus and Sara from Scotland, Kate from England and Robert from Amsterdam. We had half a bottle of vodka each and several beers. I think the vodka had formaldehyde in it because I felt poisoned all day.

At 7 pm I went back to the Citadel for the third time. They have a 'Royal Palace by Night’ programme that runs about twenty days a year. I wasn’t sure what it involved, but the ticket cost only 55,000 dong.

Passing through the main gate, Ngo Mon, I walked over the emperor’s bridge, passing between two goldfish ponds. Smiling, silk-clad women holding lanterns lined the bridge. I joined some people sitting in front of the Thai Hoa palace. We watched a show of music and dancing. It was fun, although not the sort of thing I would want to see more than once.

Then I wandered along paths within the Imperial Enclosure, illuminated by paper lanterns. The atmosphere was enchanting. I had tea at the Pleasure Pavilion in the Queen Mother’s complex. I took off my sandals and sat on a seat about six inches from the ground. Vietnamese tea, blessedly weaker than usual, was served from china cups decorated with chư nôm writing. I ate candied ginger and nougat. Tea was served formally by a young woman with a beatific smile. Her name is Dung – pronounced Zoong in Hanoi but Jung here -, she is twenty, a student in Huế, cute as a chocolate button. I had eight cups.

Then I had dinner at the Lạc Thiện restaurant. Lewis Moody and Ben Kay had eaten there too; their photos were on the walls. The food was excellent and cheap, and the meal was fun. The proprietor, who is mute and, I think, deaf, communicated more easily with me than those Vietnamese who can speak. He gave me a bottle opener: a small plank with a nail embedded. He showed me an album of photos sent by previous customers, all taken of them with a Lạc Thiện bottle opener, in places all over the world. One couple were standing in front of King’s College, Cambridge - my old college.

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Bird species

The UK is a bird-friendly place. We don’t eat a lot of game. Shooting birds – a very common activity in Italy, Spain and France – is reserved for relatively few places and few people. The UK is also a very popular destination for migratory birds. And it hosts a quarter (writing from memory) of Europe’s sea birds. So you would expect to see a lot of species in the UK. The British Ornithologists’ Union’s British List for 2006 recorded 572 species.

307 species of birds are listed in Cúc Phương National Park alone. 840 or so are listed in Vietnam, and 1,000-odd in Thailand.

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A recipe

In Ninh Bình I ate stir-fried squid. Chop squid into small pieces. Add chopped spring onion, onion and dill. Stir-fry. That’s it. Delicious.

Except it probably had MSG in it. Monosodium glutamate has had a bad press in the last ten or twenty years. It gives some people headaches. For example, at cookery class in Luang Prabang, Izzy and Marla understandably demurred for that reason. We used chicken stock instead.

MSG is described in English ingredients lists as ‘flavour enhancer’. But that is misleading. It is a flavour: umami. It is the fifth taste, the others are sweet, sour, bitter and salt. Specialised umami receptors on the tongue are stimulated by glutamates. Miso soup tastes like umami. Umami tastes succulent and savoury; indeed, umami means ‘savouriness’ in Japanese. Anchovies and marmite also have plenty of it. I adore it.

Umami was identified by Professor Kikunae Ikeda in 1908. He also identified and isolated MSG. A genius. Since MSG doesn’t do me any harm, I’ve decided to cook with it sometimes when I get back

I travelled to Huế overnight by bus. The journey was absolutely vile and I am a wreck. So I am just cruising the town drinking coffees. I’ve got into the habit of drinking cà phê sưa – coffee with milk. Made with condensed milk, it is strong and sweet. A filter is set over the glass, and the dark coffee drips on to the milk. The two layers don’t mix, so it looks like a Guinness upside down. I don’t like it much, but it imparts the necessary drug dose. It’s better iced.

They have power shortages here. There is no power in the mornings, but there is in the evenings. Or maybe it alternates. I didn't understand my instructions.

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Anyone who might be European, American or Japanese goes through Hanoi besieged by taxi-thieves, touts, hucksters, hustlers, hawkers, pushers, pimps and parasites. Actually, not the penultimate as far as I know, but I needed a list. So when anyone talks to you, you instantly think “What does s/he want from me?” And you immediately say “No thanks.” It's difficult to be open when 99% of people just want a piece of you.

I have to admit that I'm finding it hard to like the majority of Vietnamese. There have been many exceptions, notably tourists guides like Tinh at Hạ Long Bay, and all the guys at the hotel in Ninh Bình. But there has been too much naked grasping. It's really tedious going through life as a walking wallet.

Sometimes – but not often, sadly – cynicism lets you down. First was when I used a facility on Lake Hoàn Kiếm. As soon as I walked out, a woman spoke to me. “No, thank you,” I said. But she persisted and I lost patience: “I do not want!” I said, voice raised, in Vietnamese. Turned out, of course, that she was the attendant simply trying to levy the standard fee.

Second was when two young women approached me, at roughly the same spot. “Do you have five minutes?” Well, I have a year. They said they were students. But I assumed the five minutes would involve me listening to some story and then parting with my money, so I walked on. But they persisted, and it turned out they simply wanted me to look over an English assignment – they are training to be interpreters and had a rather difficult piece to listen to and translate - and to practise their English. (How did they know I wasn’t French? They didn’t.)

In fact several people have now approached me wanting to practise their English. That’s fine by me, so long as they only want to practise their English; half the time they want a gift as well. Really the only Vietnamese that tourists are likely to talk to other than touts of one sort or another are people wanting to practise their English, and tourist guides, and other tourists.

All of my tourist guides so far in Vietnam have had degrees in English. Here, the skill with the greatest economic value added seems to be languages: English and Chinese. So, many of the smart people are likely to be studying languages.

The Huế hassle has already started. Not only do moto-taxi and cyclo drivers assail you at every corner, but here the human mosquitoes have a different tactic from in Hanoi: they engage you in conversation. Maybe because we are south of the DMZ here, so more English is spoken. “Where you from?” first. Then “How long are you here?” Etc. One cyclo driver followed me for ten blocks. But it’s not really possible to ignore someone who smiles and asks you where you’re from, even if you know it’s only a preliminary to a sell. I just tell them at an early stage that I do not want a xe om or cyclo. And if that doesn't work, I'm within my rights to tell them to eff off.

As is probably clear, I'm fed up with it.

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On a much better note, congratulations to Vicki and Hasan, who now have a son, Kamran.

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Are you married?

One of the first questions asked of all people in Southeast Asia.

The only proper state for an adult, especially one of my seniority, is to be married. So in Vietnamese, you do not say ‘I am single’. You say, ‘I am not yet married’.

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To anyone going to Hanoi I offer the following:

1. Don’t take taxis, unless you telephone for them first. The meters are usually fixed.

2. Take the motorcycle taxis, xe om. 10,000 dong for a journey of a few blocks; more if going more than, say, 2 km.

3. Consider staying outside the Old Quarter. West Lake and its neighbour lake Truc Bach are nice spots. The government quarter east of the station isn’t bad. Just go to the Old Quarter if you want to shop or arrange tours.

4. Go to the Ethnology Museum.

5. Minimise your time in Hanoi.