Asia 2008

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 bodhisatva and 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. In a courtyard was a lovely pond with painted turtles.

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?).

Just got back to Hanoi from Hạ Long Bay, to discover that the visa I had expected to turn up tomorrow is not due until Friday. But I paid an extra $20 to avoid this. I am pissed off and very tired.

Vietnamese has six tones. Like all European-language-speakers, I find it hard to tell most of them apart, and impossible to reproduce them at speaking pace. (One, however, is easy: it starts high and goes higher, with a glottal stop in the middle, as if Vinnie Jones had grabbed your vitals.)

Nouns come with ‘classifiers’, of which there are many. There is one for ‘thing’, another for ‘fruit’, another for ‘animals (which includes knife), another for paper, etc.

There are at least ten words for ‘you’ depending on the relative age of the speaker and interlocutor.

On the other hand, the tense system shows just how much redundancy there is in, say, French. It consists of a tense marker, plus the (invariant) verb. English is pretty similar in the future tense. Thus:-

Ðã – past (the tilde denotes the strangulated shriek tone I just mentioned)
Ðang - present
Sẽ – future.

Food is pretty simple, too. None of your lovingly hand-crafted reduction of free-range Lincolnshire jus, or whatever. Stir-fried squid with lemongrass and chilli, for example, is squid fry lemongrass chilli – four syllables in Vietnamese.

I lunched at the Hanoi Hilton yesterday. Not the infamous Hanoi Hilton, obviously – more of that later – but at the Hilton Hanoi next to the Opera House. For obvious reasons it does not call itself the Hanoi Hilton. In fact I only went in to escape the attentions of a persistent taxi driver. Half the restaurant is outdoors on a terrace – out of the question in a baking 38 degrees – and half inside, under a glass ceiling but air-conditioned.

It was perhaps the best meal I have had in Hanoi, and the best part was the starters. A mix of fresh spring rolls, with pork, shrimp, green banana, pineapple and rice vermicelli; fried spring rolls, with crab, carrot and mushroom; and a salad with crabmeat, onions, chilli and peanuts. All fresh, subtle, and harmonious. Glorious.

This was followed by farmed crocodile with young galangal and shallots. This merely out of curiosity, of course. I expected to eat interesting things all over southeast Asia, but apart from the bamboo worms (actually caterpillars) and the sparrows, and the hundred-year-old eggs, I suppose, nothing has cropped up.

The crocodile was listed in the fish and seafood section of the menu. The same judgement has been made by the Catholic church, which adopted its own taxonomy to define the categories of flesh comestible during Lent and at other penitential times. Thus turtles and alligators have been classified as “fish”. The distinction is made, according to theory, on the basis of the temperature of their blood; the element in which they live or oviposit (if that isn't a word, why not?); or a distinction between pesce and carne in Latin languages. Or all of the above.

The flesh was completely white, and very soft, but also rubbery, so the meat was difficult to cut. It tasted of galangal. So that’s that – not worth bothering with again.

Dessert was a medley of cubes and mousses that sounded more exciting than they tasted. Coffee mousse, lemongrass ice cream, green bean and strawberry bavarois, Dalat red wine jelly, that sort of thing.

A blow-out beyond my normal budget on this trip, but great value for $42.

The other Hanoi blow-out was at Bobby Chinn’s. The owner-chef is Chinese-Egyptian and went on a rugby scholarship to Millfield School in England. He is a former banker, stand-up comedian etc and is, I imagine, someone who would describe himself as ‘larger-than-life’, a ‘bon viveur’ etc. The catering business is full of such extroverts.

Anyway, the menu is full of self-indulgent but largely amusing comments. The wine list enumerates the stages of drunkenness:

1. Witty and charming
2. Rich and powerful
3. Benevolent
4. Clairvoyant
5. Forget dinner
6. Patriotic
7. Kenny G is a genius
8. Witty and charming, part II
9. Invisible
10. Bulletproof.

There I also learnt a new cocktail. Karber’s Frenzy: Bombay Sapphire, tonic, codeine, lime. I like the sound of it.

The location is great: south side of Hoàn Kiếm lake. White tablecloths sprinkled with rose petals; a pumpkin soup amuse-bouche; huge wine glasses; great service. Warm seafood salad (excellent), lemon-scented poussin (over-nutmegged), whisky sour and glass of red wine, $49.

I did actually intend to write about the prison at Hoa Lo – another time perhaps.