Mekong Delta: down the river without a paddle...

Business as usual on the Mekong

The Mekong Delta is the second great rice bowl of Vietnam, the first is in the north in the wake of the red river. Although the day we went was overcast, the light was fantastic, and the great bowl of river reflected the heavens and made the colours pulse like ancient marine paintings. It was fantastic to get away from the cluttered, polluted, noisy streets of Saigon, out to where it seemed the sky went on forever (which it does!) and the river had the breath and feel of the ocean. I could finally breathe again. The floating market was just ending, a few bedraggled barges laden with their cargoes of watermellon or mango were scattering over the expanse of muddy brown water, their owners kicking back with their feet over the stern rails, closing their eyes under the colourful umbrella of their drying clothing hanging above them. We circled around a huge expanse of delta, at one edge the ragamuffin stilt housing of the delta traders huddled together as if holding each other up on their decaying stumps. Out on the water huge islands of floating greenery passed by, as if they were islands out in search of a new location on the globe, the air was fresh and reviving.

After the obligatory visits to the local traders work and showrooms (rice cakes, rice confectionery, generally a lot of rice) and the token reptile handling session, we were taken to lunch where whole fish, skewered to huge spikes, were served accompanied by a number of other fairly bland Vietnamese dishes. It was a long way to come to buy Chinese stuff in the market, a New York woman complained (sure enough, a lot of the merchandise was from China!) It was a long way to come, but I was in my element with my camera under the big sky, over the muddy Mekong water...

Row of colourful barges on the Mekong

A profusion of water lilies near the restaurant in which we ate lunch

The skies and the light and colours made me think of Breugel and some of the Flemish painters

Motorboat down the Mekong

The Big Skies of the Mekong more visible in infrared

Mekong Big Skies

The stilted houses in which the people live are painted very colourfully

The barges are like great hulking rotting boxes that are at this stage showing their age

Old barge and stilt houses

The diffuse light brought out all the colours

Christianity, as in many impoverished areas, is dominant

Tourists chug along the muddy river 

Another tourist boat heads in to shore

House on the Mekong

Laundry on display on one of the barges

Detail of barge

It's so wide, the Mekong feels like the ocean

Trader on the Mekong wearing the ubiquitous face covering: the pollution is even here...

Stilted houses with tv arials on the Mekong

Medieval scene of woman making rice wrappers

Nha Trang: the Vietnamese Riviera

The lovely curving bay of Nha Trang, Vietnam

The Pacific Ocean from the Other Side

I reached Nha Trang at 5.30am having decided to brave a ‘sleeping bus’ from Ho Chi Minh city. The bus was brand spanking new, with two tiers of sleeping pods equipped with little trays and a seat adapter so that you could lie virtually flat in your little pod. I was very impressed as I set off with a group of Vietnamese people (very few foreigners would brave the bus, the mistaken consensus being that the trains, even though you’re sleeping four to a cabin, are better than the buses) in air-conditioned comfort.

Thing is, you can have a fantastic new bus but if the road is bad the journey turns out being not great. There is only one motorway (and I use that term very loosely) that links southern Ho Chi Minh city with Hanoi in the north, the Reunification Highway. It is a two-lane highway that sometimes turns into just one lane in each direction, with no barrier between the traffic going in opposite directions so that it becomes necessary to draw the little curtain so you do not see the screaming lorries flying by, seemingly missing the bus by split centimeters. And there is the constant honking of horns as in Vietnam a driver uses the horn to indicate everything, from ‘get out of my lane’ (cars do this to the millions of mopeds & motorbikes in a kind of highway hierarchy), ‘don’t (insert expletive) move into my lane’ and then just for the sheer joy of hearing their own horn joining the cacophony of others.

Two joggers on the beach, Nha Trang

The road was extremely bumpy, there apparently being no money in Vietnam for road renovation and improvement. My main concern was toilets as there wasn’t one on the bus, but they stopped three times, once for forty minutes when they turned off the engine and we all nearly suffocated because there was no longer any air-conditioning. All in all it was pretty ok as a journey, I’ve experienced much worse (including my ‘first-class’ train journey from Bangkok to Surat Thani) and I was happy to arrive at Nha Trang, a sea-side resort about five hundred miles from Saigon on the beautiful pacific and my hotel was right on the beach front, the huge curve of the bay reminding me very much of the Croissette in Cannes minus all the posers and ‘exclusive’ beaches).

Fabulous ginger and lemongrass margarita I had at a beach side cafe

Lined with huge palm trees the sweep of the bay was impressive encircled as it is with huge mountains, the jade grey pacific studded with early-morning fishermen. Local people were out on the beach and on the walkways that lined the beach doing tai chi, or jogging, or just hanging around. I liked the place immediately, not least for the fantastic breeze that blew in off the pacific. And then I realized that it was that great ocean I had to cross to get to my final destination on this trip, San Francisco. I had never been on this side of the pacific before and I was suddenly aware of its great immensity and power.

The view from the first hotel I stayed in (which was the best thing about it!), Nha Trang

I was disappointed with the first hotel having paid twice what I have been paying, wanting a bit of luxury after my bus ride. Rated officially as a four star I could not understand why it had been given that accreditation as it seemed just a bit seedy and unraveling at the seams. There was also another giant skyscraper being built right beside it and the noise of machinery was intrusive.

I booked another hotel at half the price down the other end of the bay and it turned out to be fantastic, the best hotel I have stayed in yet, less than a year old with great staff and a beautiful room. I had a swim and then went for a Vietnamese massage with a girl who told me her name was Ah, and how appropriate, she was so sweet and small I was concerned she would be able to have any strength to give a decent massage, but I needn’t have worried. Vietnamese massage seems to be a cross between Thai and oil massage with little Ah jumping up on my back and using her full weight to prod and massage my aching muscles. With her limited English and my non-existent Vietnamese we had a halting but reasonably effective conversation.

View of the colourful buildings from the second hotel I stayed in (the Sun & Sea Hotel!), Nha Trang

The feeling I had the whole day was one I hadn’t experienced in a very long while. Maybe it was because the air shifted, clouds rolled in and a strong, though warm, breeze whipped up cresting the waves and billowing the palm trees and bougainvilleas. Could have been the number of negative ions in the air but I had that exquisite anticipation of something truly beautiful, like Christmas, only Christmas where everything is perfect. It is something about the quality of the light, it can’t exist in full sunshine, which by and large I’ve experienced since I’ve been here in Asia. Pre-storm, electric, where everything is cocooned in a penumbra of soft ease. 

Beautiful dish of sea bass on mustard mash I had at a beach-side cafe, Nha Trang

I’d wander from the ocean up the the swimming pool and sit, my body exposed to that amazing breeze, so full of life and promise. I had a fantastic lunch with wine for under ten dollars and watched an old black and white Agatha Christie Miss Marple mystery with Margaret Rutherford on tv in the afternoon, completely enjoying it. It was a day of soft indulgence and complete contentment.

Strange Gaudiesque church on the 'croisette', Nha Trang

One thing I have realized is how much I dislike being a tourist. After the Mekong Delta trip I swore it would be the last. I have to find other ways of travelling as this way I’m cocooned from the real life of the country I’m travelling through. I wanted to visit the islands out in the bay, but later that day the wind whipped up, the sky turned molten steel and the sea became choppy with white-capped waves.

Man fishing from a round coracle, Nha Trang

Saigon: Remnants of the War

Saigon Street with no traffic, a miracle

Arriving in Ho Chi Minh city via the airport is like driving into madness. Here you get your first taste of the Vietnamese dependence on/ love of the motorcycle as the streets become engorged with millions of them, and the air becomes 1 part oxygen to 9 parts carbon dioxide. Everywhere they are coming at you,buzzing and honking for right of way, not content to drive on the streets, they drive on the meager footpaths that are already full of parked bikes. The city is like a great shrine to the combustion engine. The first time I stepped out of my hotel into the heart of motorcycle darkness, I had to beat a hasty retreat into a cafe it was so overwhelming. Everywhere people trying to get your attention to take you somewhere, sell you something, and everything is for sale. The streets teemed with noise and chaos and the Vietnamese of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh city (apparently you can call it either) don't seem to be perturbed in the slightest. 

There is no apparent order to the shops, old crumbling lean-tos with dischevelled people selling trinkets right beside  huge shiny glass and chrome car dealerships selling state-of-the-art mercedes cars. In front of the shops are women with traditional Vietnamese wicker baskets on poles across their shoulders with a few vegetables in them, or piles of green mangoes, and people are preparing food to sell from the most modest of cooking utensils, a pot, a kettle, ingredients: it's all compact and it's all mobile. 

My first day I headed over to what is called the War Remnants Museum, which is where they document the details of the American War of Aggression. Outside, huge captured American tanks and bombers take pride of place, their violent memories scored onto the rusting metal of their massive lumbering bodies. B52s, huge tanks, and gigantic transport helicopters with their outsize roters hanging mercifully useless in the hot morning air. Walking by them, I wondered what action they saw during the height of the madness that was the Vietnam/American war. Saigon itself back then was the center of US command and wasn’t liberated by the Vietcong until 1975 when the last Americans evacuated and the war was declared officially over. 

US Army troop transporter outside the War Remnants Museum, Saigon

Captured US aircraft on display outside the War Remnants Museum, Saigon

When I left the US as a child of seven the war was very much still in progress, my family had already moved back to Ireland when the ‘incident’ at Kent State university happened, where the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating against the war, killing four people and injuring eight. I remember that incident well. It seemed like a turning point, along with the image of Kim Phuc, her seven year old body naked when her clothes were incinerated by Agent Orange as she ran from her village which had been carpet bombed, and just a few years before Nixon resigned for the Watergate scandal. To me, as a teenager, it seemed like the country in which I was born and lived the first seven years of my life and the values on which it was founded was in tatters. Perhaps it was when my own disillusionment set in. Had I been a bit older there is no doubt I would have been out there protesting with the thousands of others.

The museum is an education. Old artillery in glass cases, sections of a sewer children, who were subsequently shot by US forces, hid as the enemy approached, a whole section on photography and how powerful it was in bringing the war to an end, the various photographers from Time and other magazines and papers, many of whom lost their lives while bringing those amazing images to the world. There is a very disturbing section on the effects of Agent Orange and other chemicals that were used profusely on Vietnam (and on Cambodia when the US Army tried to stem the tide of arms coming in through the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through Cambodia’s eastern flank). These toxic chemicals caused devastation to the landscape, causing cancer and serious birth defects amongst the population for years to come. The tragic and heart-rending images of the people affected by these toxins are to be seen in this section of the museum. I was quite happy when the lights in the museum suddenly flashed and an alarm sounded, which I discovered meant it was lunchtime and the museum was closing for lunch. I’d had enough.

I have been trying to comprehend the psychology of a people that could withstand the full force of the US Army for years, hiding out in an intricate warren of bunkers below the steaming earth as it  bravely withstood everything the US had to throw at it. Pretty much everyone agrees it was due to the leadership of Ho Chi Minh that got them through that time.

The famous image of a group of children, including Kim Phuc who had her clothes burned off in an Agent Orange attack on her village. This photograph galvinized anti-war sentiment across the world.

Time magazine's coverage of the Vietnam war showing Vietcong prisoners loaded onto a boat by US soldiers

When I left the US as a child of seven the war was very much still in progress, my family had already moved back to Ireland when the ‘incident’ at Kent State university happened, where the National Guard opened fire on students demonstrating against the war, killing four people and injuring eight. I remember that incident well. It seemed like a turning point, along with the image of Kim Phuc, her seven year old body naked when her clothes were incinerated by Agent Orange as she ran screaming from her village which was a smoldering cinder, and just a few years before Nixon resigned for the Watergate scandal. To me, as a teenager, it seemed like the country in which I was born and lived the first seven years of my life and the values on which it was founded was in tatters. Perhaps that was when my own disillusionment set in. Had I been a bit older there is no doubt I would have been out there protesting with the thousands of others.

The museum is an education. Old artillery in glass cases, sections of a sewer children, who were subsequently shot by US forces, hid as the enemy approached, a whole section on photography and how powerful it was in bringing the war to an end, the various photographers from Time and other magazines and papers, many of whom lost their lives while bringing those amazing images to the world. There is a very disturbing section on the effects of Agent Orange and other chemicals that were used profusely on Vietnam (and on Cambodia when the US Army tried to stem the tide of arms coming in through the Ho Chi Minh trail that ran through Cambodia’s eastern flank). These toxic chemicals caused devastation to the landscape, causing cancer and serious birth defects amongst the population for years to come. The tragic and heart-rending images of the people affected by these toxins are to be seen in this section of the museum. I was quite happy when the lights in the museum suddenly flashed and an alarm sounded, which I discovered meant it was lunchtime and the museum was closing for an hour and a half. I’d had enough.

Although written twenty years ago, this piece from a book I've found invaluable throughout my journey is still appropriate:

On entering Saigon I realized that I was not prepared for the shock. I had thought about all the practicalities, but not about what the return would mean for me. The Saigon that came to meet me was a bedlam of humanity. I felt lost and almost frightened. On the morning of the 30^th April 1975 I had wept with joy to see the tanks of the Liberation Army rolling into Saigon: the war was over, and the Vietnamese would now be masters of their own country. When I returned ten years later I had wept with despair when I saw how the Communists had wasted their chance to make Vietnam a truly free country. Now I was even more heartsick. The failure was everywhere, in the life of every one of those who had won the war.

From ‘A Fortune Teller Told Me’ by Tiziano Terzani

I felt exactly the same as I first entered Saigon twenty years after this had been written. I stayed in a hotel in the center, District 1 called ‘Tan My Dinh’, which became my private joke as I would say it to myself in an old-time prospector’s voice whenever something in the environment threatened to overwhelm me, which was fairly often, as in, ‘Well, tan my dinh…’ It’s amazing what amuses you in such times. I booked a day trip to the Mekong and immediately regretted it. And this is because I have come to realize over the course of this amazing trip I’m on that I am not a tourist. Let me explain...

In fact, there is nothing that fills me with dread more than a trip with a group of strangers that involves a ‘guide’ and a tour bus. And, as I was to discover in Vietnam, all tours have a pronounced mercenary character, aimed as they are at showing you as little as possible of what you actually want to see (the floating market or life on the Mekong…) and instead spending the bulk of the time parading you through the local alligator farm, snake pit or iguana wrestling tent, where they just happen to sell the particular animal’s hide done up into a nice wallet or purse. You can try on the python like movable art, wrap the magnificent creature around you like a stole and then be shown how lovely its skin looks in a laptop case. There is something obscene about this way of thinking at which the Vietnamese are so alarmingly proficient, where everything is there to consume, literally or figuratively. It turned my stomach in the Mekong. Glad to hear others weren’t impressed, a New Yorker complained that pretty much everything they were selling in the market was from China. It’s also isn’t lost on me where this voracious consumerism comes from, imported wholesale as it was from the west, traded outright for all the real vestiges of local custom. I had higher hopes for Asia, hoping some of the ancient charm would remain (more twinkling lights, tinkling bells, oddly discordant music filled with chimes and gongs and insanely high-pitched female voices, a people as mysterious as we in the West are mundane). If ever it was there, it is now (if southern Vietnam is anything to go by), sadly, almost completely obliterated. Another thing that is insupportable about being a tourist is how quiescent tourists generally are with the level of utter crap that are confronted with, without a murmur on their part. This is another thing that has brought me to the cconclusion that I am not a tourist. I tend to murmur quite a lot....

Take lighting, for example. Everywhere are fluorescent strips flooding everything with flat vacuum tube light. No hint of mystery left, everything blasted in brilliant floodlight.

We took a three hour cruise up the Mekong, a wide, languorous muddy river with great tufts of green branch-like islands, and a lot of plastic debris, floating around. People were out on ancient river barges selling whatever they could. Not at all like the floating market outside Bangkok, this was a quiet, nonchalant affair. The shanties of the people lined the water, on wooden posts. After the confines of Ho Chi Minh the wide open sky and great vast river was refreshing.

Later, I wandered around Saigon looking at historical landmarks, the Continental Hotel, the Opera house.  Everywhere a million honking motor bikes vying for space. Everywhere a hundred people urging you to buy something, to let them take you somewhere, every encounter behind the smile and the friendly, Where you from? an eyeball rolling up into dollar signs. I wanted to get away as soon as possible. I booked a ‘sleeping bus’ to Nha Trang, a seaside resort two hundred miles north of Ho Chi Minh, and more importantly, on the Pacific ocean.

Iconic picture of young Vietnamese girl standing in front of her burning village

Saigon street vendor

Fish for the Buddha: Siem Reap Market

Fish freshly killed by the Cambodian fish wives of the Siem Reap market

It seems to me that Cambodia, if Siem Reap is anything to go by, is still suffering the immense psychological effects  of Pol Pot's mad years of destruction and insanity. Most people are desperately poor, there are no intrinsic industries apart from the newly mushrooming tourist industry, and that is everywhere rampant and overwhelming. What about the psychological effects of all that murder and loss on the Cambodian people? People are so poor they are selling their own children to sexual predators that pour into Cambodia by the truckload preying on young children, mainly girls, and destroying lives. This is a poverty so complete, such an anihilation of self-worth that makes it possible to consider giving up your children to these monsters.


The government is corrupt and not much of the huge amounts of money made annually now from tourism gets to help better the lot of the average person, that's why I felt so outrageous to pay $60 for a three day pass to the temples, knowing how little good it will do the  people who really need it and how many greasy pockets it will line of the powers that be.  Leaving Cambodia I'm feeling a bit sad not to have gotten away from the tourist traps and out into the country where the real people are. But also, frankly, a little relieved to beleaving, getting away from all those wandering ghosts.

Woman picking her teeth in the Siem Reap market



Chicken lady, Siem Reap market

There is a basic dourness about the Cambodian people, although it may just be not liking having their photos taken

Fish and Fruit

A selection of fresh fruit and vegetables at the Siem Reap market

So you get the markets, as photographed here, the many young girls bored out of their minds with no prospects other than the brothels of Bangkok and Phnom Penh and this place at a market stall.

The utter boredom of what they do is most obvious amongst the young girls

Pigs heads and offal for sale

Very happy to be dead, thanks very much!

Definite resistance to photography in the market

Anyone for tarot?

The Legacy of Pol Pot: Skulls & Silence

Buddhist stupa (shrine) Wat Thiem, Siem Reap, Cambodia: skulls of the many victims of the Khmer Rouge found by the Buddhist monks at this temple 


Some people say they can't sleep in Cambodia. I must say I slept pretty well but had very strange dreams. It must be all the souls who died violently flitting about the edges of consciousness. I can't help feeling I am now on the Asian conveyor belt whirlwind tour and am beginning to resent being a tourist. My next trip will not follow a tourist route. Although it is fantastic to see these places I am beginning to be overwhelmed by the 'Asian Miracle'. How can you travel to one of the poorest countries in Asia with such a tragic and violent past and concentrate on seeing fantastic temples, even those with World Heritage accreditation while always in the background are the Cambodian people looking for crumbs from tourists and their own government. I read in the paper on the flight out of Cambodia that the government are trying to get the malnourishment statistics down from 50% to 30% by 2012. That means that half of the population are officially starving. Meanwhile hordes of tourists bypass all the ugliness staying in air-conditioned hotels, shifted about in air-conditioned cars, unaware of the more recent - if less magnificent - history. A two day ticket to visit Angkor Wat and the other temples is $60. Over three quarters of a million people visited the temples last month - do the figures, this is not a small amount the government are making. Where is the money going? Why are the people starving? Why are such huge numbers of Cambodian women and children being trafficked for sex, mostly to western men? It seems to me part of this 'Asian Miracle' is the elevation of money as the new god, at the expense of peoples lives.

Buddhist alter at Wat Thiem, Siem Reap

Detail of skulls

Wat Thmei, Siem Reap, Cambodia: The Buddha Dreams