Asia 2008

Come on you Reds! I’m not talking of Premiership teams. One year after throwing away a huge lead in the promotion playoffs in possibly the most ignominious defeat in the club’s history, Nottingham Forest secured a miraculous promotion by beating Yeovil 3-2 while, amazingly, rivals Doncaster lost to Cheltenham. (If this was in India, you’d investigate for match-fixing.) Leeds can consider themselves very unfortunate, docked 15 points for matters off the field.

Now Forest are back within a division of where they should be. They will need to strengthen their squad. I’ll celebrate in the traditional manner by drinking 15 pints of beer, vomiting in the street, insulting foreigners and picking fights.

Congratulations and respect to Frank Lampard for having the courage to take and score a big penalty midweek. I hope people will get off his back now.

*

I’m in Hội An, which is blue, yellow and photogenic. The sun has come back after several weeks in hiding, it’s very hot and I am doing almost nothing. This is the place to do it. I did make it to the Cham ruins at Mỹ Sơn yesterday, rising at 4.30 to beat the crowds, and tomorrow I hope to get around to visiting the Cham museum in Ðànãng.

I’m having clothes made. At the last count: 3 pairs of shoes; 7 shirts; 5 pairs of trousers; 2 pairs shorts; pyjamas; 1 suit; 15 ties. There may be more to come. I don’t need any shirts at all, but when I buy off the peg, the chest is usually 8 cm too big and the waist 15 cm. These shirts fit – so long as I never drink another beer (at 4,000 dong a glass it’s as much as I can manage not to have beer for breakfast). The shoes are as I had expected: the quality of the leather is poor and the stitching distinctly unBritish (there isn’t any). But they fit and they’re comfortable.

The Vietnamese are extremely tactile. You see men walking around with their arms around each others’ shoulders or hand in hand. They have less need for personal space, and fewer parts of the body are off limits. In London, if a man touches my thigh, I’m suspicious. When I went to Hạ Long Bay, Tinh was all over me at one stage; he didn’t mean anything by it. The women, too – although since I don’t know the rules (I assume there must be some), I’m careful.

It’s the same in the tailors’ here. They are all female. One tailor, Chi, was always rubbing my stomach or back, or feeling my meagre biceps as if I were carrying apples and clad in lionskin. Nor is there any polite question about which side you dress.

And they all say ‘you very handsome’. It's untrue, but it certainly does no harm. In Thailand the compliments flow like water, but there have been none in Vietnam until Hội An.

*

I finally polished off The Aeneid the day before yesterday. For two months I was stalled in Book 7, which is really boring, but the last five books raced by. I raced through The Quiet American by Graham Greene, having woken up to the fact that I hadn’t read it. It’s no better than an average novel of his, which puts it head and shoulders above most things written in English in the last century. I cannot think that anyone has written better dialogue. The movie is a faithful adaptation and nearly as good as the book.

"We went out by time-table and came back by time-table: the cargoes of bombs sailed diagonally down and the spiral of smoke blew up from the road-junction or the bridge, and then we cruised back for the hour of the aperitif and drove our iron bowls across the gravel." Very good.

I’ve read less than usual on this trip, partly because I am spending about an hour a day deleting photos. Other books read: A Short History of Laos by Grant Evans, The Coroner’s Lunch by Colin Cotterill, Pattaya 24/7 by Christopher G Moore, The Role of Pool in Asian Communism by Colin Cotterill, The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, Blood on the Moon by James Ellroy (not his best).

I only picked up the first Cotterill book – at Daunt Books in London - because he writes fiction about Laos. But it was a happy discovery. The protagonist is an elderly doctor forced to become Laos’s only coroner after the revolution in 1975. Cotterill writes with great assurance, a bit like Alexander McCall Smith. I’ve searched Thailand, Laos and Vietnam for others in the same series but found none.

*

A great pleasure while travelling is to be able to listen to a BBC Radio show by podcast. I try to catch In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg every week (hat tip: Melanie and Iain Shaw). A little bit of England, it explores ‘the history of ideas’. Every week he takes a subject and invites two or three academics to discuss it. Part of the pleasure is that listeners are not, for once, assumed to be unintelligent children with attention deficits. In recent weeks he has covered the dissolution of the monasteries, the Fisher King, the enclosures, Newton’s laws of motion and Darwinian adaptation. He is very good on cultural history and the arts, rather wobbly on the science, but it doesn’t matter because he is talking to experts.

*

I have met four people called Dung in the last week or so, three female. The Vietnamese consider the name euphonious.

For me the iconic image: dense two-wheeled traffic.

Queues outside the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. They move very rapidly.

On another day, no queues. It was closed.

Schoolchildren in front of the Bahnar house at the Ethnology Museum.

The water puppet theatre.

One scene at the water puppet show depicts the restoration of the sword. Hồ Hoàn Kiếm means the lake of the restored sword. Lê Lợi used a magic sword called Heaven's Will in his sucessful revolt against the Ming Chinese. Like Bilbo's dagger, it gave him great power. While he was boating on the lake, some time after the revolt ended in 1427, a golden turtle took the sword from his belt and dived back under the water. Lê Lợi then renamed the lake in honour of the event. The Turtle Tower has something to do with this legend.

Apparently turtles still live in the lake. An impressive specimen of rafetus leloii is displayed at the Ngoc Son temple. It's a surprise that anything can live in the water, which is bright green.

On the left of the Turtle Tower is Ngoc Son temple. It honours general Tran Hung Dao and a couple of scholars. Tran Dung Hao has a claim to being one of the greatest generals in history (as does Vo Nguyen Giap, hero of the most recent wars of independence). He beat the mighty Mongol army in the time of Kublai Khan. There is always an image of the person or people being honoured. People worship them. I don't know who this guy is, though. A protective spirit, I suppose.

Hoàn Kiếm is a refuge from the fug of the inner city. In the early morning Hanoians go there to exercise (I emphasise that this is hearsay). A lot of people also use the place to meet up and chat.

Silks on sale in the Old Quarter.

Cyclos are broader in Hanoi than elsewhere. Some broad people travel in them.

The Temple of Literature, a university as old as Bologna's.

You see a lot of vendors in Hanoi, as elsewhere in Vietnam. If on foot, they are invariably female and conically hatted. They carry their burdens hanging from a rod across the shoulder. Sometimes they shoulder extraordinary loads, and when they do, they move their limbs in an exaggerated and rhythmic manner, like the Tracy brothers.

Finally, some shots taken around Hồ Tay, west lake, a large lake to the north of the Old Quarter. There is some very expensive real estate on the east and north sides; Sofitel have a hotel there.

Half way up the east side there is a pagoda called Tran Quoc.

Lots of families and couples come to stroll of an evening. Others come to drink or fish.

You can rent pedalos. Like everywhere else in Vietnam, there is a lot of construction work around the lake.

Vendors sell balloons, windmills and carvings.

It is altogether a pleasant spot.

I travelled to Cúc Phương on the back of a motorbike, driven safely (mirabile dictu) by Hong.

The journey was great. It’s 45 km from Ninh Binh to the boundary of Cúc Phương National Park, and the landscape – paddy fields, hills, cyclists in bonnets – is very pretty.

All the low-altitude parts of northern Vietnam look like this. Paddy-fields separated by dikes; the country is one enormous piece of hydraulic engineering. It is impossible to conceive what it looked like before wet rice cultivation.

We ride along the dikes. On one side, carpets of flowers. On the other, carpets of litter.

At the entrance you buy a ticket, surrender your passport and book your place for the night. I chose a stilt house in the middle of the park, costing $6 for the night. They warned me that there would be no electricity. Fine – I had a torch.

Just outside the entrance is the Endangered Primate Rescue Center (sic) run by biologists from Frankfurt. The primates at the centre are langurs, gibbons and lorises. Lorises are nocturnal, so I saw none. The inmates either have been bought from markets or were born there. Primates are captured and sold, usually for the purported medicinal qualities of their organs or secretions. Some are very rare: Delacour’s langur, for example, has a population of about 60 in the National Park. They are rehabilitating some langurs in a larger enclosure with the aim of releasing them back into the wild. This is Delacour's langur, with the white shorts.

I was introduced to my guide, Hương, who took me through the centre. She was in a hurry; her explanations were cursory. We started with the langurs. Langurs have very long tails, used for balance only. She showed me white-faced, black, five-coloured, Ha Thin, Delacour’s, grey, grey-shanked and red-shanked douc langurs. I’m not entirely sure which is which.

This infant, three months old, was born inside the centre.

Gibbons are the only indigenous ape in the region. Other than homo sapiens. They have no tails and comically long arms.

Some of them are rather aggressive and they have to separate the males from the females. Mature males are black, the others ginger. This is an adult female.

After visiting the centre, we entered the park. We stopped off near a cave in which stone age artefacts were discovered. 5,000 or 7,000 years old, from memory. The objects found included three ritual burials, evidence, they conclude, of ancient religious feeling. Nothing remains of these objects in the cave.

The cave turned out to be a large complex with no lighting. I walked from one chamber into another, and into a third, and before I knew it I was lost. There was no-one else around. No exit signs. No hint of light from outside. No sound but the occasional drip signifying growing stalagmites. It was extremely slippery. It is not easy to remain rational in a cave; the fear is probably deep-seated in our species. I didn’t panic – I made a short Blair Witch video instead - but I did feel thoroughly uncomfortable until I found my way out.

You have to confront your fears – a piece of wisdom that came to mind. But if so, why? Life is much easier if you don’t, although you feel good after you do.

I'm also scared of spiders. But I wasn't scared of these large skinny ones, which was fortunate because they were everywhere. Timorous beasties, they floated along like hovercraft. Far worse were the small spiders with long abdomens, half-way to scorpions. They jump. They kill mosquitoes but they can also kill dragonflies, I believe.

We biked the rest of the 20 km through butterfly daisy-chains to the isolated spot where I was to spend the night. There were 15 Vietnamese and me, the only guest. The noise from cicadas and birds was almost oppressively loud, like a Hitchcock movie.

After lunch I walked. The forest is dense. For every tree growing upwards there are ten epiphytes in the crannies, some sending creepers downwards.

You hear industrial sounds all the time: powerdrillls, lawnmowers, chainsaws, electric shavers, rattles, maracas, hooters. That is just the birds. They sing constantly in the canopy, but you cannot see them.

I took photos of what I could see: arthropods. Stopping every few minutes, I made very slow progress. Even at a mile an hour, sweat dripped off my nose.

When a big leaf crashes down from the canopy it has several collisions on the way down. What with these constant noises nearby and the limited visibility, if someone were out there trying to shoot me, I would go crazy within a day. That’s what soldiers faced in the war. They took heroin to cope.

I duelled with a green dragonfly, orthetrum sabina sabina.

Dragonflies are fierce predators: they eat other invertebrates. Small ones eat midges and mosquitoes; larger ones eat butterflies and even small dragonflies. Their larvae will eat absolutely anything smaller than themselves, including fish. They hunt by eyesight.

In French they are libellules, and the name is almost identical in Italian, Spanish and German. The Linnaean family name is Libellulidae. While the French word is delightfully liquid, I chauvinistically consider the English words dragonfly and butterfly best of all possible words.

My devil’s darning needle was afraid of nothing and engaged in several warning flights before settling on the same spot each time – so I heroically stayed at that spot and took photos. Some people think that dragonflies can sting, but they can’t. They can bite, but not hard enough to break the skin.

The dragonfly photos can be seen full-size in my photo gallery, but in case you can’t be bothered to click, here is a blow-up of a wing. I hope the gold flecks in the wings are visible.

Along the route I passed my notional goal: a thousand-year-old tree, terminalia myriocarpa, an East Indian almond. Said to be 45 metres tall, but you could not see that far up. Its roots began to buttress off a couple of metres from the ground, so it was 5 metres wide at the base.

By a large pool there were attractive magenta dragonflies: trithemis aurora.

Among other animals, they can take water skaters on the wing. In this photo you can see predator and prey.

Flying, but never settling, were black and yellow ones looking like butterflies: rhyothemis variegata arria.

Mosquitoes by the million. I had made the crass mistake of walking in shorts. There is no malaria here, fortunately. Do monkeys get malaria, I wondered? Yes, they do.

Of the few birds I could see, most were shrikes. They fly around the trees like sparrows. But I did disturb a silver bird the size and shape of a peahen: either a silver pheasant or, more probably, a grey peacock-pheasant. On the second day I twice disturbed a chestnut bird that flew away with the metallic flapping characteristic of a pheasant taking off.

I came across a well-camouflaged lizard.

As I approached, it relied on its camouflage and stayed still. A perfect subject.

Once I got very close, it stood up, perhaps to look big, or to prepare for flight.

The paths were well marked and it was impossible to stray. But around 4 pm I began to get concerned that I didn’t know where I was. I hadn’t seen a soul. I spent the next half an hour walking sharply downhill, which made me very concerned. But I was just walking down into the same valley: I had climbed in the morning without noticing, so invertebrate-obsessed had I been.

In the evening, tired and elated, I had dinner back at the camp. Without electricity, there was no hot water; this was no hardship. There were seven Vietnamese staff around. One of them, Thảo, came to talk to me. She spoke little English, but enough to seem deeply, deeply weird. I ordered a beer from the fridge. It was very warm; the fridge had fooled me.

Accompanied by two dogs and preceded by my lunar shadow, I walked back to my concrete stilt house. The path was lit from the sides by fireflies, blinking on and off at 1-3 Hz. The effect was similar to that of standing up too quickly and seeing stars.

I had already decided that this was the perfect place to tackle the rest of The Aeneid by torchlight. The stilt house was empty. My room lay off a panelled corridor that felt like the Marie Celeste. There was no-one within 500 yards. All I could hear was the chirruping of insects and the barking of frogs. But unconsciousness struck instantly.

In the morning small pools of silver covered the grass, each a bedewed spider’s web.

I walked until three on the second day. My three sets of camera batteries were exhausted by mid-morning.

In the afternoon I am walking along a road when there is a loud disturbance in the canopy above. Grunting constantly, a colossal squirrel, a metre long, walks along the branches and jumps from tree to tree, cracking branches and dislodging leaves as it goes. It is black with a chestnut collar and face. If it is a squirrel, it weighs many times as much as a grey. And indeed it is: ratufa bicolor, the Giant Black Squirrel. It is very rare, and, given the noise it makes, that is not too surprising.

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. But there were many other kinds.

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.

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.