The ancient City of Lanterns …and of rain…

I should have known this but Vietnamese is a very long and mostly thin country. So the top to the bottom of it covers a few latitudes. Hoi An is in the middle, close to Da Nang.This area is known for clouds. However I have had the added pleasure of the ancient City of the Lanterns in the torrential rain. You know when your trousers are so wet they are translucent. When your shoes are so full of water that you squelch with every step. There were some hours without rain. And then you could see how beautiful it still is. The buildings are small. Predominantly yellow. The roofs are tiled . All dark. The streets are narrow. There is a river crossed by a quaint painted Japanese Bridge. There are river boats and tour taxis made to look like automobiles of the 30’s. There are alleyways and trees and street vendors by the hundred selling pancakes, roasted okra, whole squid and bamboo sticks with an assortment of unrecognizable seafood. There are coffee shops selling salted cream coffee. I am not a coffee drinker, but it was riches in a glass. A tea called Rose and Lychee. Is actually hot and pink, made from lychee with roses floating in it. There are lanterns hanging everywhere. Across the streets, along the river. Silk and bright. There are also many mopeds and scooters. it is still Vietnam after all. There are plastic ponchos and umbrellas leading me to believe that I am not the first person to squelch through the charming streets of Hoi An. What is remarkable is that although every doorway opens onto a shop or a cafe of some sort, the external facades of the buildings remain as they always were. The concrete steps, the shutters, the big wooden doors, the windows; they are all still there. The main trade is making clothes. Turning rounds suits, dresses, shirts, trousers in a couple of days. It seems that Jeremy Clarkson did an episode of “ Top Gear” in Hoi An and his measurements still are held at the shop called YALA where, when he is need of another fine suit, he just calls and hey presto! I’m not sure everyone has such success. I passed by a women being fitted into a green dress with ruffles in odd places that she will surely look at with horror when she gets home. For the locals or visitors from the country they have this iconic dress that women wear. Loose trousers and a very fitted dress that splits at the waist and two flat panels hang front and back. In pinks, yellows, cream, patterned and textured silk. Perhaps it was so common to see because it was New Year. It looks a little less formal with a plastic poncho or a puffer jacket over the top of it, but I blame the rain. Apparently Anthony Bourdain’s favourite Banh Mi came from a lady in the market in Hoi An. I am not surprised. I had brilliant Hoi An spring rolls made with a clever shredded wheat exterior. Pho and Morning Glory. I may have to give more respect to this plant Morning Glory. It has a really pretty flower, often blue and in my garden it weaves up like a baddy in a fairytale and chokes all the other climbers on my fence. I’m not going to try cooking it. I’ll leave that to the Vietnamese. Met lovely people yet again. Traveling in different kinds of ways. All with information, some with insight. And a few make your day with their laughter. Oh, how that brightens the world. As you feel the threads that connect people from all different sorts of places and periods and you realize homecoming is not about “home” but comfort in company. I went for a bicycle ride with my last afternoon in Hoi An. Two hours in and I got hopelessly lost. I knew I should head for the sea, but there were so many bodies of water: rivers, ponds, rice fields…that I lost my sense of direction. There was a moment where my blue watch that had been telling me I had lots of time, turned on me and I was getting flustered. Two older men on bicycles passed me. ‘ where was I going?’ They said. I pointed to the basket on the front of my bike which had the name of my hotel on it. ‘Ah’ they said. ‘Difficult’ they said. ‘Follow’ they said. And I did. Until we stopped and the younger one said, ‘sorry, wrong way.’So we turned around and they said ‘follow’ again and they bicycled , me in the middle, one in front and one behind, all the way till they deposited me at the gate to my hotel. Then they bicycled off smiling and waving. Were they on a bike ride for pleasure those two local men? Were they expected at a family meal? Did they really give up an hour of their Sunday afternoon to help an incompetent foreigner find her way back to her packed suitcases? “Si Camun” I said many times. I don’t think I ever pronounced it well enough to make it stick. That is the closest I can get to thank you.

How Many Mopeds Can One City Hold?

If the city is Hanoi, apparently as many as the streets can hold. Hanoi has hundreds, thousands, millions of people zipping around on their Vespa’s or small motorbikes. But I get ahead of myself. Hanoi. A word that belonged to M.A.S.H. To China Beach to the Thin Red Line. I remember on my very first trip to America I went to a cinema in Westwood. There was a matinee of a new film by Stanley Kubrick. It was called “ Full Metal Jacket.” The titles were coming up, the theatre was still dark but I could hear sobbing from the back of the Cinema. When the lights went up I saw it was men sitting separately probably in their forties or fifties. In the years I have lived in America the Vietnam war has been documented in films, in exhibitions, by Ken Burns in his ten part series, in the memoirs of Robert McNamara and Henry Kissinger. I have known and admired John McCain, who is perhaps the most famous survivor of imprisonment in Hanoi. And now I am here in the streets of Hanoi. There are a couple of areas which have the mark of communism. The policemen guarding the fireworks for New Year’s Eve are soldiers not to be messed with. The flags flying everywhere red with a yellow star. The vast Ba Dinh plaza in front of Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum guarded by soldiers all dressed in white. The sleazy cops in the three police stations I had to deal with when I had my phone stolen, who smoked and watched videos on their phones and would only ask “ what do I expect from them?” The strangeness of visiting the “Hanoi Hilton” the famous jail in the centre of Hanoi where the Vietnamese were imprisoned under the French Colonialists and which was then used for American servicemen who were captured in the Vietnam war from 1965 to 1973. The many descriptions of the appalling treatment by the French Colonialists. The many descriptions of the caring and thoughtful treatment given to the Americans. How they were given better food than the local population, how they played chess, and football, how they received lots of care packages from home. The photographs of happy prisoners to back it up. Strange again I say. There are fires everywhere. Little piles of red and gold paper being burned for good luck. The pavements are impassable, littered with plastic chairs and cooking pots and thousands of motorbikes. You step out into the street hopeful that no one will run you over. And they don’t. These bikes with three, four, five people squashed onto them; with shopping and dogs and babies and half a tree of peach blossom. They obey no signs, no traffic signals. They drive on the wrong side of the street, going the wrong way; but somehow they scoot and curve and brake and no one seems to hit anyone or anything else. It is one of the miracles of Asia in my book. The people with whom you come into contact are very kind. They would love you to pay full price, but allow you to bargain in a language you both make up to use between yourselves. Their money is ridiculous. The smallest note is 500 dong. That translates to 1 penny; or 2 cents. Then up to 1000 dong. Which is 3 pennies. Or 4 cents. And thereon it goes up to 10,000, equaling 34p and 42 cents. I can say no transactions are smooth. You insult people many times a day by offering to pay them an amount less than the paper it is printed on. You end up showing them what you have in your wallet and let them select what will get you out of the shop soonest. It seems that they stopped making coins because children swallowed them. Good move, I say. The bell boy in the hotel took us on a personal project. He was horrified when I was robbed. He would jump up and open the door when he saw us approaching. He snatched our bags away from a taxi man he didn’t like the look of, holding them to his chest as if they were the Crown Jewels, saying “ we don’t know you.” His uniform , which he wore proudly, was slightly puffy as if the lining had shrunk and the trousers finished an inch or two above his ankles. He was older than the rest of the staff as if he had missed a promotion somehow. “ T” he said his name was. It wasn’t, but he wanted to save us the embarrassment of getting it wrong. It will sit hard with me for the rest of my life that we tipped him what we thought was a handsome amount and it was probably less than 50p. I didn’t know about New Year. it’s enough that I avoid it in my own culture because midnight will never come and after midnight is just too silly a time to be up without pyjamas and good book. But here in Vietnam it is New Year. It is Tet. It is enormous. A six day national holiday. it is about red dresses and smart jackets and being with your family and eating special food. Everyone puts on their best and walks around eating ice creams and taking photos of each other. Many shops are closed. As are banks. Everything costs a little more. But hey! What is a few more Dong…actually I can’t answer that.

Temples and more of the north

I don’t know how you prepare for another culture. You read books. You watch films. But when you park your bag in the clean hotel room and you grab your cotton cap and you wander out into the streets and wham…..is it the noise? The smell? The feral cats darting from alley to alley. The minor motorcycles zooming everywhere. The open spaces on the ground level, with tables on an angle where people sit and drink or sit and eat or stand and cook. The sky is visible in strips above you as the narrow streets with their two storey buildings crowd it out. Every where underfoot there are slabs of uneven concrete perhaps covering water pipes. The streets have potholes, the sidewalks come and go on a whim. The poles carrying hundreds of electrical and telephone wires interrupt your way and the wires sling and circle above you like a knitters nightmare. Staying within the walls of the Old City. It is where you stay when you come to Chiang Mai I am told. It is not like a city. It is as it was. With sections of the old brick walls and a moat that defines it’s borders. It isn’t that it is dirty, but it is cluttered. In a way that has secured it’s survival, it is now full of hotels and guest houses. Using the existing buildings for the most part. Restaurants, some haphazard with plastic chairs, some inside what looks like a furniture store. Many, now cleaned up and spacious, sadly serving pizza and burgers. There are many massage places. Blind massage, Thai massage, every version of massage that you can get on a sandwich board. But there are also places like the Coconut Cookery school where you share tables with other visitors and eat paper spring rolls with basil and rice turned blue with a local flower and sweet curries served out of a coconut. Met a young family from near Strasbourg in France, who were coming to the end of a six month trip with their daughter Capucine. They told us of the many bus trips they had been making as they made their economical way around South America and South East Asia. They said all you need are Two T shirts, a pair of shorts and a pair of jeans. That was the key apparently. Note to self. Don’t need the pink linen trousers. The boutique hotel was called “ ElliBum”. An airy, eclectic place full of flowers and wicker furniture. Run by these glorious sisters. One whom has pink hair and when I asked her where the name came from she turned and patted her bottom. “ the most famous bottom in Chiang Mai,” she said. “ As big as an elephant’s.” Elephants like sticky rice with Ginger. Just in case you ever get the chance to feed one. And cucumbers and bananas. They will stand and pick up things from your hand one by one with their glorious trunks. For hours and hours. The ones at the sanctuary I met ranged from 6 years old to 76. Each with their ‘mahout.” The person who stays with them like a favorite uncle, makes sure they are safe and don’t get into trouble. Temples. Criminal to confess but after marveling at one and possibly two, it’s a relief to look at something with straight lines. I remember many years ago a great British travel journalist called Julian Pettifer, talking about how people had stopped using their eyes to record what they were seeing but used a camera. I think he called it “ missing the Diamond.” That it was a like a screen between them and what was unfolding in front of their eyes. What would he make of it now, I wonder. There is no arm without a cell phone pointing at a sight or held high to catch oneself and the sight or just to catch oneself and bugger the sight. The white temple of Chiang Rai was awash with single poses and walking videos and requests and gathering of groups and even a dog with booties who was lifted up to be remembered by the Buddha. It was a total chaos of little screens. It had a bridge that you walked over , apparently to Paradise. Surrounding you as you start your ascent was a sea of cement hands clawing upwards

The Gulf of Siam

I have now worked out I am 15 degrees north of the equator. The sun is still rising and setting in the east and west. That the temperature, when I open the door of my friend’s beach house in Rayong, is always hotter than I think it will be. That humidity will turn smooth hair curly. It was such a gentle and dignified way to ease from Woolen to cotton, from lace-ups to sandals. To land in Thailand and be driven, I think it is south, my sense of direction has got a little wobbly here. to the beach house of which I have heard so much over the years. It was a long drive. Mostly flat. With dribbles of buildings either side of the road. If the road doubled in size or if there were street lamps in a rural lane, my friend, Carl, would say “ you’re looking at corruption.” If there was a large and very ornate house behind gates but clearly visible from the road, he would say, “ corruption.” The strange thing seemed to be, that very wealthy Thai people will often demonstrate their wealth in full view. No long and hidden driveways for them. No copse of trees shielding them from the passing traffic. No. Every Baht is front and centre. The long awaited beach house is all that was promised in the many photographs I have seen over the years. Clean, calm, white, verdant, comfortable. Carl lives with his partner Chaiyo and their dog Baobao in the middle of Bangkok city and here on the gulf of Thailand. Chaiyo, to ease his mind after long sessions in the city hospital in charge of the emergency room, does Lego. But we are not talking a tank or a miniature “ White House.” No. He does whole streets. The entire set of “ Friends.” His next project is a full size vintage typewriter. So alongside Buddhas in different sizes and ancient wooden doors there is a village of brightly coloured plastic, it makes you long for an old fashioned train set to chuff around the coffee table. Rayong is a lot of beaches strung along the side of a road that travels, ( not sure I can do this….) west? On the weekends all the locals come and spread out their picnics on mats under the trees. The fishermen go out every night in their painted boats hanging with green lights to catch the squid. Why squid will surrender to the colour green I honestly don’t know. Our beach is called “ One Beach.” Again, I know no logic for this. One beach has a cafe which does excellent chips and a really good Pad Thai. They also have an open air massage shed, where these four women take their hands and make anew the tired muscles on our tired bodies. Most of the foreigners or Pherenge ( spelling courtesy of WM) as they are called, are Swedish. No answer for that one either. Except the King of Sweden bought a place down here and maybe everyone else followed. There are young Swedes and older Swedes. They come down for months and their brown bodies lie comfortably in the sun in bikinis and trunks that are not on their first outing. And Oh-how-happy they must feel as they remember what their countrymen are opening their doors to, on a freezing day in Stockholm in January. It couldn’t have been a lovelier time. Crafted by the other King, King Carl of Hospitality. There was never a moment when I felt I was at sea, unless I was bobbing around it in myself. What is in the personality of someone so vigilant for the well-being of people under his roof. What umbrella did he stand under that would make him hold one so colorful and protective over his chosen friends? I stand under it warm and thankful.

Back in the U of K

It’s taken me some time to settle down. To write this. Not to settle down here. That is always quite a tidy step. A recognition. A language. A pattern of behavior that I know and I fit back into. I know how to negotiate my way around. To ask for help. To find my way. I don’t stand out. I don’t sound like a stranger. Even though I haven’t been here since before the onset of Covid. This is wintertime. The days of gloves always being in the pockets of coats. Collars that come up around your ears. Scarves that can be pulled up over chins. It is still a time for masks. The virus still meanders it’s way through crowded places. The carriages on the underground are still packed like sardines at peak hours and being tucked into someone’s armpit takes on more meaning in these days of covid. It took me a little time to get my bank card. “ we’ll send it to your home address.” “ No, please don’t.” Because people tap here with their cards. Instant payments abound. In shops, on the street. Most of the check-outs in supermarkets are for card only. Then when I got the card, the last bit of alienation went away. I moved in the flow of the Brit. That river of people who own and work and play in Britain. When people ask me how long I have been living away, I lie. Truly, it is longer than the entire lives of some of the people who are asking me the question. How would they understand the figure 25. And, actually, I am still lying. I have walked endlessly around streets on the open ended journey from one tube stop to another. I have jumped on buses careful to sit where I can see the oncoming streets because my bearings are not what they used to be. I have crossed commons, I have kept to the paths in parks. I have bought the newspaper on a Saturday and been so excited that I even looked at the sports section. I have eaten an egg and cress sandwich from Marks and Spencers. I have drunk a half of cider. I have sat in the velvet theatre seats of the west end and watched a curtain rise. I have sat in the carpet seats of the national and seen the lights go down and up. I have stood in a returns queue outside the Almeida Theatre on Upper Street knowing I wouldn’t get a seat, but just couldn’t tear myself away from the possibility of insane good luck. I have stood on the tube train, I have sat down on the tube train. I even made sure I did a trip on the new Elizabeth line where the seats and the platforms are bright and shiny and the miles go by in minutes. I like nothing better than to stand under the huge curved glass ceilings of the train stations where the big purring animals, the big boys of the train world begin their journeys. The feeling as they slide, almost soundlessly, away from the platforms into the world of back gardens, over bridges, to the green countryside where they slice through fields and the edge of small towns and villages, remains as thrilling as it always has. I had tea and christmas cake many times over in warm kitchens. I had lunches in the members rooms of museums. I was overwhelmed by the hospitality of friends who had me to stay and stay and stay. I saw anew Lucian Freud’s work spread over many rooms at the National Gallery. I heard the choristers of Westminster sing high and clear at Evensong at the Abby. I learned the basics of roulette as my dear friends guided some of their dear friends into the New Year with gambling in the Suffolk countryside. I finally visited the house with the garden and the wall and the views beyond, with the walks and the chats and the pink sofas and the welcome; and yes, it was worth the wait. I got wet, I got muddy, I got jolly cold. Not complaining. Honestly. I blow on my freezing fingers with pride. So very good to be back.