Asia 2008

I’m in Bangkok suffering from a huge lull in motivation, I hope temporary. It may have something to do with the humidity. Instead I’ve been burning cash but have little to show for it. That’s what comes of hanging around the shopping centres.

There are a number of food vendors among the market stalls just east of Central World shopping centre. One of them sells grilled insects such as crickets and cockroaches. Even hen they're deceased and grilled, I can’t bear to look at roaches. Don’t you know where they’ve been? And I’m not convinced that merely grilling a cockroach would kill it, if nukes don’t. So I went for a bag of crickets, with a little chilli sauce. They’re crunchier than a soft-shelled crab but not as crunchy as a prawn’s tail. They absorb the smoke of the grill and they taste a lot like pork scratchings - much nicer than a tepid sausage I had at the same time. They’re anatomically perfect down to the spiky hind shins, and they vary significantly in size. The largest ones have huge, downward-curving abdomens and they are more than a mouthful; I couldn’t bring myself to bite them in half.

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The Queen Saovabha Memorial Snake Farm was founded in 1923 to provide antivenins for victims of snake bites. It was the second such farm in the world, the first being in Brazil. It is a serious endeavour and the snake farm is part of a local hospital and affiliated to the WHO. (They also give vaccinations and a rabies post-exposure clinic so I returned this morning to be jabbed with live encephalitis.) They milk the venom from the snakes and inject it into horses. They take blood from the immunised horses, extract the plasma and that’s it: antivenin in immunoglobulin form. Some is kept in Thailand and some is exported.

You can see the various snakes behind glass, but they also put on shows twice a day. A loopy herpetologist with an ear-mike talks about the snakes while they show, in series, king cobra; cobra; banded krait; many-banded krait (perhaps); and white-lipped pit viper.

Most snakes sense vibrations, so the best thing to do if you meet one is stand still. A pit viper, however, senses body heat, so the best thing to do is run. Cobras and kraits use neurotoxins; pit vipers’ venom causes tissue and blood clotting injures. This is a white-lipped pit viper.

The king cobras are the biggest.

But scariest are the monocled cobras, which hiss.

The snake handlers stand around in wellington boots and go just near enough to the snakes to cause them to rear up and display their naga hoods, to hiss and occasionally to strike. Then the handlers have to grab them to put them back in their box; that takes real skill and occasionally a handler will get bitten and perhaps lose a finger.

I was in the front row, very close to the snakes, and they advised us to stay still…

They also showed us an Asiatic rat snake, a copperhead rat snake and a Burmese python. These are not venomous. There is a project to increase the numbers of rat snakes in the rice fields because they eat rats (as do the farmers). I think the snake I handled in the Mekong delta was a Burmese python.

For some reason Australia has ended up with the most poisonous animals. It has the four most poisonous snakes in the world; the most poisonous spider (the funnelweb, at its most poisonous in central Sydney); and the most poisonous jellyfish (the box jellyfish).

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Monday was a yellow day in Bangkok. Perhaps half of the locals wear yellow T-shirts with the national crest on the breast. People here are hugely royalist and they sincerely love their king. (If any don’t, they stay quiet: it would be like professing Catharism at the Vatican.) They also wear orange plastic wrist bands inscribed with ‘Long Live the King’. On Monday a lot of yellow-shirted people came to Siam Square to participate in a demonstration against the Electoral Committee, which they say is corrupt.

Tuesday was a largely pink day.

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On Sunday night as I wandered towards the Metro I smelt elephant. I’ve obviously learnt something on this trip.

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Sad but true: one of the most popular products on sale in pharmacies in Thailand, as in Vietnam, is whitening lotion. For Thais, the paler the skin, the better. Most westerners want a tan. We all want to be cafe latte.

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I asked the nice guy who sold me a replacement mobile (I’ve lost all my contacts, by the way) about the cheap i-pods. ‘Made in China’ he said. But do they work? ‘Yes. For a few months.’ I’ve bought one to replace one that disappeared in Sapa, but I can’t make it work. My Chinese isn't good enough.

Hội An was the first foreign settlement in Vietnam. It was then known as Faifo to Europeans. Four hundred years ago it was an important trading centre, with trade routes heading from Faifo all over the world – particularly to China, Japan and India. The Dutch were there in large numbers at the time too. The Japanese and Chinese quarters still exist, and the Japanese covered bridge links the Japanese quarter to the Old Town.

A couple of hundred years ago the town’s trade began to dwindle as the river silted up and Danang (known to the French as Tourane) took over as the major port.

The money dried up, so a lot of the buildings are about 200 years old. The traditional merchants’ houses are wooden, with sloping roofs. The planks are orientated down the roof. The house is in several sections: a front section open to the public, a courtyard and then the private quarters, and then a kitchen area. The courtyard is a design classic, since it ventilates the building. Modern buildings, laid out on the same narrow plots, lack this feature and its benefits. Apparently the old buildings of Kyoto are very similar, and this may be no coincidence, since pottery from each municipality has been found in the other.

The local government – prompted by its listing as a UNESCO World Heritage Site – has slapped severe planning restrictions on the buildings in the Old Town. It attracts a lot of western tourists – few Vietnamese – and the town protects its collective commercial interest by restraining individually rational development.

As I mentioned before, the town is blue and yellow. The boats are blue and yellow, the river is blue on a sunny day, and the houses are ochre. What with the water and the bright colours, it’s a rewarding place to take pictures. Here is the first batch; another batch will follow.

On the bus to Hội An we were honoured by the company of Elvis.

Lamp shop.

Illuminations.

Vendors chatting.

A view from the bridge.

Lantern shop again.

What's this? I asked a photographer with a a paparazzo lens. 'Vlha' he said. It means bee-eater in Czech.

Wading bird

A Chinese temple at Hội An. There are quite a few of them.

Waterflower at a Chinese temple.

A remora at the hotel.

On the waterfront.

Ancient ferryman. Part of the town lies across the river, and another part on an island. You can walk there, but it’s very hot, so it’s easier to take a ferry. Vietnamese pay 1,000 dong; most tourists probably pay at least ten times that.

I flew back to Bangkok on Friday the Thirteenth. I'm staying in the shopping district and agonising over whether to splash out on a digital SLR. Given the number of photos I take I think it ought to be done, but the prices here are comparable to those on line in London, and I wouldn't trust a warranty. I'll probably wait until Singapore.

Some things jump out after Vietnam:

• they drive on the left.
• no-one uses the horn.
• most people wear shoes instead of flip-flops.
• the Thais – at least the affluent in the shopping centres – are significantly fatter than the Vietnamese. Coconut milk, second only to polar bear milk in fat content, may have something to do with it.
• the watches and clothes on sale in the Siam Paragon are genuine! More interesting is MBK, which is like an indoor market with a younger clientele. Some of the shops on the periphery of the floor sell an 8GB i-pod nano for the official price of 7,590 baht. The stalls in the middle purport to sell the same thing for 1,000-2,000 baht - less than the price of 8GB of flash memory. How can both co-exist in the same market? The answer must be heterogeneous consumers who select themselves into different price bands. For the separating equilibrium to sustain itself in the face of such a price disparity, the cheaper product must be significantly inferior. Which means it can’t be the real thing: a fake, with pirated software. I intend to find out.
  

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The USSR under Gorbachev began to reduce aid to Vietnam in the late 1980s. It dried up completely in 1991. Around that that time the joke went as follows

Message from the USSR to Vietnam: “prepare to tighten belts”. The reply: “send belts”.

On which subject, I am reminded of a remark I once heard attributed to JM Keynes, although I have not been able to find it since.

There are two ways to tighten your belt. One, tighten your belt. Two, eat more.

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More French words in Vietnamese:

• Pho mai, cheese
• Ga, station.
  

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I hope someone will tell me if I’ve mentioned this before on the blog; I am becoming increasingly confused between conversations and the blog. Who Wants to be a Millionaire airs in Vietnam (and in Thailand). One of the questions had the following answers: (a) tau, (b) tau, (c) tau, (d) tau. The words were differentiated only by tone.

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In northern Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and southern Vietnam, it is the rainy season. Most days, it rains heavily for about an hour a day; the rest of the time it may be cloudy or sunny. Yet almost every day the BBC weather forecast for Saigon and Bangkok gives 'rain' as the predominant weather feature. Rain for an hour a day is not a predominant feature; nor is a forecast a useful guide to conduct when it says the same thing every day.

I can’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this before; I've written quite a lot, very quickly. When the Vietnamese sniff, they do not merely sniff: they attempt to move all fluid from the nose, ears and sinuses into the throat, with perhaps a touch of cerebrospinal fluid if they try violently enough.

And when they spit, as they do frequently, they do not merely hawk, they try to slough the lining of their throats, and maybe even cough up an organ or two with it.

It’s perfectly normal. You often pass a young couple sitting on a bench, looking good, but both parties snorting and gobbing as if they’ve just been waterboarded and then tear-gassed.

They eat with their mouths open and smack their lips when they eat, in a way that I have previously seen only on The Life of Mammals. I find it deeply offputting.

On the other hand, we lick our fingers and we lick stamps. Southeast Asians find that disgusting. Minh Mang, emperor in the first half of the nineteenth century, used to call westerners “barbarians”, and given the state of the average backpacker in Saigon you can see why.

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I mentioned that the Rue Catinat had been renamed. It turns out that the street was named after the ship that was named after the admiral. The ship destroyed the Vietnamese forts in Tourane in 1856, a few years before France established its Cochinchina colony. So it’s understandable that they renamed the street.

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I spent a couple of days recently on an absurdly cheap tour of the Mekong delta. The Mekong splits into two in Cambodia and subdivides further in Vietnam, where the Mekong serpent has nine heads. At Mỹ Tho, on the Lower Mekong, the river is a mile wide. It does not look like a lake or a sea, but it differs so far from the mental model of a river that the brain does not register it as such; simply as something else.

The turbid river carries immense quantities of silt; you can see it flowing miles out to sea on satellite maps. The silt markedly increases the fertility of the land in the delta, as it does in Egypt. I don’t know how this effect works since it’s just quartz and feldspar dust. A lot of barges carry sand up a canal to Saigon, perhaps to feed the infinite appetite for cement. I don’t know where it comes from; could it be reclaimed silt?

The delta is a waterworld, with 3,000 km of rivers and canals. They are building bridges in some numbers – all to an identical template, it appears – but you still need to get in a boat to get to most places conveniently.

Seventeen million people live here, slightly more than live in Holland. It is one of the most fertile regions on the planet, so it has always been densely populated. (They were smelting metal here centuries before metallurgy reached Europe.) The region produces 14 million tonnes of rice – in three crops a year - out of the national total of 36 million. That is about half of what Vietnam eats, I think, so in principle the region could support a much larger population. If that were the case, the entire region would be under concrete and there would be no rice. You can see that effect on the outskirts of Saigon. The population of Saigon is currently said to be around 8 million people and 5 million motorbikes. Both numbers are growing. Every peripheral plot is a building site. The city is spreading at what would appear to be hundreds of yards a year – and the land being built on is some of the best arable land on earth.

In fact it will be interesting to see whether the increased rate of return on agricultural land will reduce the rate of substitution into other activities. I suspect it won’t slow it at all. The value added for each square metre of urban land in Saigon is probably many times that added by a square metre of rice, even at today’s high prices. If so, concreting the paddies around Saigon is economically efficient.

Some of us stayed in a stilted bamboo bungalow a half-hour boat ride from Cần Thơ.

By this time we were running over two hours late. We had had to change bus twice and were delayed by the rush hour on the ferry over the Bassac. Beer-deprived, I was cross.

The proprietor introduced himself when we arrived: “Hello, I’m Hung.” “Lucky you.” Well, someone had to say it.

I went to sleep under a pink mosquito net to the sawing of cicadas and the occasional tut-tutting of geckos.

A few of us went for a walk at 6 am. The motorbikes were passing on their way to town so there was no way to sleep.

Things are changing fast in the delta. Until two years ago the track was just a path that could not take motorbikes. All the residents worked locally as farmers. At the same time as the path was upgraded to a track, a new concrete bridge was built over the canal. Suddenly the residents had fast access to the nearest town, Cần Thơ, and now all but the very young and the old commute to jobs in Cần Thơ by motorbike. They earn a lot more there, and the buildings are being upgraded from bamboo to brick.

On our early morning walk we stopped at a small local market. It operates from four until eight in the morning. On sale, as well as the usual fruit and veg: live fish, eels, frogs and ducks; marigolds for praying to Buddha (giving long life); banana flowers, pumpkin flowers.

I picked a clump of kapok overhanging a shack. They used to stuff pillows with it. It feels like cotton wool.

Later in the morning we visited a floating market. Bigger boats come from elsewhere to sell their goods. Buyers and tourists float between them in smaller boats.

In a tour group you see the world through a bubble. I have less curiosity about what I am seeing than when I am on my own, and the impact of the surroundings is attenuated. In a large tour group – 32 of us - the notional object of interest barely registers, and most of the fun comes from talking to the other tourists. To be honest many of the sites are not much in themselves: a family making coconut candy; a rice husking factory (closed); a family making rice noodles.

To make the coconut candy they leave the flesh to dry; slice it finely in a machine; squeeze the milk out; add sugar and milk and leave for 45 minutes; heat until it turns into caramel; pour into metal moulds; chop and package on site. No part of the coconut is wasted: the wood make the pillars of the house; the leaf provides the thatch; the hairy nut makes matting and soil for bonsai trees.

More interesting is the landscape itself. Water coconuts overhang the creeks, and coconut palms grow behind them.

This is a mudskipper, a living record of how animals conquered the land. At least, according to the Guinness adverts.

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Everywhere you go in the countryside, and in many places in the cities, you see loudspeakers atop telegraph poles. Every morning and evening the loudspeakers amplify the Voice of Vietnam - a news station.

Electronic amplification over public loudspeakers, carrying a hectoring voice that you can’t switch off or turn down. An Englishman is legally obliged to use the word Orwellian here – and indeed I have done so in a previous post.

I asked Hung about it in the Mekong delta: why? He seemed slightly offended that I asked: it’s very useful, he said. People like to listen to it. No-one minds that it starts at five because everyone is already awake.

Yesterday I visited Saigon Zoo. I didn't mean to: I thought I was buying a ticket to the History Museum, but ended up in the zoo and stayed. My inner culture vulture is disappointed with myself, but at heart I'm more interested in animals than in Cham sculpture.

The Lonely Planet guide says "We strongly recommend against visiting the poorly kept zoo animals". This is the same Lonely Planet that publishes a guidebook to Burma. The Vietnam guidebook is not shy of issuing ethical instruction and I for one do not appreciate it.

The animals were indeed kept in poor but not absolutely barbaric conditions. The zoo is probably like London Zoo was about thirty-five years ago; our expectations and sensibilities have changed rapidly. Nevertheless, the large mammals in particular were kept in enclosures that were far too small for them. The worst examples: a gibbon kept in a tiny cage; a hippo sat motionless in a small, vile pool.

In both cases, it is a relevant question whether you are doing more harm than good by visiting and paying the dollars. In the case of Burma, I prefer to follow the advice of Aung Sang Suu Kyi; this avoids what would otherwise be an agonising decision. In the case of the zoo, there is at least some chance that the money will contribute to improving the facilities. I do not hold out much hope, though: although the people who run the zoo will be aware that conditions fall short of those expected in the west, the majority of visitors are Vietnamese, and they could not care less as far as I can see. So there may be little commercial incentive to improve. Many of the visitors delighted in harassing the animals. Some also fed them anything that came to hand. Another reminder that attitudes to animals here differ sharply from those in northern Europe; even from mine, and I'm no animal rights activist. I came close to hitting one fat moron, teaching his stupid fat son how not to behave by harassing and feeding sweets to the bears.

But I stayed anyway, of course, because I love watching animals. The one species that you are supposed to feed at the zoo is the goats:

This is a white rhinoceros:

Leopard, lioness, lion:

Asiatic black bears:

An ostrich:

Siamese crocodiles:

Estuarine crocodile:

A green iguana:

Smooth otters:

A unicorn gemsbok:

A blesbok, perhaps:

And an orang utan: