Anyone who actually reads these ramblings may recall I began the last epistle with a litany of: a friend’s death, illnesses and a suicide. I guess it’s a sign of growing older as dear friends leave us forever. The friend I mentioned last time lost her battle with pancreatic cancer in February - the world has lost a wonderful woman and a dedicated volunteer far too soon…..
For the first time in my life I’m considering using ‘age’ as an excuse for something. I can’t assume what age my brain thinks it is but, just sometimes, my body has no qualms about telling me that it’s 72 years old!!!
OK - back to Perth international airport for another 3,896km flight north to Singapore
As we approached Asia, watching frequent flashes of lightning playing hide and seek among the ominously dark clouds near the aircraft was only slightly unnerving.
All my contact with Singapore reflects how seemingly efficiently the country runs. The immigration card required just a few basic questions (name, passport number, nationality), no ‘customs’ form to complete - no waiting in a long queue to be processed. Walk up to the luggage carousel and there’s your luggage waiting, continue out through the ‘nothing to declare’ option. Approach the transport desk and advise which hotel you want to go to, they give you an identification sticker and show you a map with the route to take to get on the right bus. In my case: it was around 9pm and I was told that the bus would be there at 9.30 - it arrived promptly at 9.27 (the next day the bus left the hotel exactly as advertised). I arrived back at Terminal 2 and needed to get to Terminal 3 - no problem, just catch a free driverless electric train which leaves every few minutes.
I stayed outside the airport this time (rather than in transit as I did not want my luggage disappearing again). The comfortable hotel in Singapore had a large window between the bathroom and the bedroom - is that a bit voyeuristic, or is it just me?
Apparently: ‘There are more than 6.5 billion people in the world today. Nearly two-thirds of them are Asians living on less than third of the land’. I was back to being very much in the minority. There were weeks at a time when I did not see another occidental.
And so to Hanoi (or Ha Noi), Vietnam (or Viet Nam)….
I had an official form endorsing my visa application for the full period of my stay; so I was naively thinking that the process would be simple and straight-forward……
I approached a glass enclosed office and joined a queue for ‘visa on arrival’. After several minutes, a guy who had obviously done it all before said “this is only where you pay; you go over there to present your passport”. So you walk past that guy to the opposite end of the office to another queue, where we figured out that there was yet another A4 form to complete, riddled with extraneous questions that no one will ever check.
There were only two officers to handle all the applications and they seemed to spend their time on the phone or aimlessly chatting to each other; there was certainly no implication of haste, or offering ‘service’. One of them had a predilection to constantly inspect the interior of his nasal passages with his right index finger, and then study the output.
After a long wait, the guy at that end of the office condescended to accept paperwork to be processed. Then I walked back the way I had come to stand in the original queue. The visas were ultimately processed by the first guy and the second guy collected them; with no regard to the order in which they were presented, so the queue really had no relevance at all.
Six oriental guys (obviously not Vietnamese or they would not have needed a visa) turned up after most of us had been waiting about half an hour and their passports were processed first - perhaps as a result of a little ‘under the counter’ incentive?
Another delay was caused by three Australian youths who had no cash and the official kept tapping a sign that said ‘cash only’. In the end he just left the office (door open) and took one of the youths to an ATM outside the no-man’s-land of the international airport to get cash - and was gone about twenty minutes - during which time: no one was served!
SO - after nearly an hour: I received my visa, before some others who had been waiting longer than me…at least, by then, there was no one left in the next queue for immigration and all the customs officials must have gone home as the area was deserted!
Luckily the guy sent to collect me had waited! I don’t know why; but the thought of kidnap occasionally flickers across my mind when in a foreign city at night and being driven around in the dark, seemingly in circles, by a stranger. I started to recognise a few landmarks - like Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. I thought I was being taken to a hotel: we stopped in a deserted forecourt on a dark street and I accompanied the driver through a narrow, dark alley and up some gloomy steps - I was thinking, ‘this is an odd hotel’ but soon found out that it was the client’s home and office when I was met by the charming and bubbly daughter of the client.
The guesthouse where they had me booked was very convenient: just a few minutes walk around the corner…but that was its only redeeming feature! It was all rather basic: no top sheet on the bed (common enough), a shower in the bathroom without a cubicle so that water ran all over the toilet/floor, and the floor sloped away from the drain (also common) so the bathroom soon resembled and indoor swimming pool. I took to sweeping the water on the floor towards the drain with the toilet brush so I did not have to paddle to the toilet. There were two towels, although they were about the consistency of an old tea towel and the size of a hand towel. The picture on the television could not decide if it was supposed to be in black and white or colour, it was ‘snowing’ and the kept ‘rolling’ - so I tuned it to CNN and used it as a radio. The view out the tiny window was of a very close, scaly, old concrete wall with sewage pipes (but at least the room was at the back away from the traffic noise and constant horn blowing).
After comments to my client, she had most of those problems remedied - she is an amazing woman! She turned up and promptly had staff rearranging the room furniture. I also learned that a ‘light switch’ actually turned on the hot water (no more cold showers). Then we went shopping for towels and some honeycomb-type matting for the floor so my little tootsies could be above the pool of water. We went to the Old Quarter where there were a series of shops specialising in selling towels, then drove to another street where they all sold mats. The staff checked out my flickering TV - and replaced it with a new one.
After being at home in temperatures around the +42°C (108°F) mark - the weather was decidedly ‘cool’ and everyone was festooned in layers of clothing. My client very kindly loaned me her son’s heavy-duty anorak to keep warm.
I fronted up to the office next morning and was fed a filling western breakfast of three fried eggs, but with a local touch of assorted pickled vegetables. As staff started arriving, there was just sufficient English conversation for me to gather that I would be accompanying the client and some other folks to the Homestead (the focus of my assignment) and twelve of us bundled into a van for the 65km trip into the countryside. After being shown the rather impressive ‘farm’ complex and partaking of a very filling and tasty local lunch (enhanced with small glasses of friendly but ferocious rice wine) I was told that I would be going to see their organic vegetable farm.
How do I get into these situations? Before I knew it - I was on the back of a small motorcycle and slipping and sliding sideways through narrow muddy farm tracks (it had been raining for days) to the organic vegetable plot; where they had also constructed a building in the traditional style using rice stalks and what looked like mud for the walls. They were growing vegetables without pesticides, using natural compost and also had traditional hand- or foot-operated equipment for separating the rice from the hulls and then pounding it into flour.
The terrain featured two prominent and rounded hills, I was told the story of an ancient princess and the hills represented her breasts. Back at the main complex, we were all led down a steep muddy hill to a small temple (where the women all prayed) by a pond with pretty pink lotus flowers and were told that it was a sacred place - related to the rather large aforementioned departed princess. The pond was geographically located just below her navel … I’ll leave you to draw your own inference! Nearby is another prominent mound that represented the male equivalent - be interesting if they ever get together?
After returning from the walk down and then back up the steep muddy trail, we were all several centimetres taller from the build-up of sticky mud on our shoes!
The aforementioned friend who passed away was known and loved by my client and, a few weeks later, we went back and held a small but moving ceremony for her at the little temple. The peace was only broken by me blubbering.
For a primarily communist country they cling to some religious connotations: the ancient belief is still that there are separate gods for virtually anything - and to include Buddha in the mix will not hurt, will it? At the many shrines and traditional sites the locals are inclined to be burning incense, making donations and be in prayer. One day, I saw a man in central Hanoi burning a pile of money (not real I assumed) on the pavement. I was informed that most of the population have strong religious beliefs, including rituals and shamans to connect with the dear departed (and there are some six million Christians), but that fact is not acknowledged officially by government.
On the second morning I was there, I was kindly taken on a tour of Hanoi by two staff. We visited Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum (he was not receiving visitors that day), an ancient pagoda, Vietnam’s first university, revered shrines and an electric ‘car’ tour through the Old Quarter. The tour was fascinating - you could buy practically anything among the maze of narrow streets. Vendors had even set up assorted businesses on the pavement: I saw one guy cutting keys, several had set up low tables and kiddie seats to create an instant ‘restaurant’; one regular restaurant proudly displayed a sign promoting ‘beef and goat udders’ (I’ll bet that your mouth is watering at the prospect?).
We had lunch at a local restaurant specialising in ‘pho’ (pronounced ‘fur’). Dozens of people were jammed into a tiny space, sitting communally on benches at trestle tables with an accumulation of assorted rubbish on the floor. The kitchen was at the front (open to the street) where a chaotic bunch of ‘cooks’ were throwing noodles into bowls, handfuls of some undetermined minced meat and assorted greenery - all with their bare hands - then adding hot water and serving the bowls at an amazing rate; at around $1.70 each. Not too surprisingly, I was the only occidental there. Actually, it was just as well that I can eat using chop sticks - or I might have been starving during the Vietnam sojourn…..
I’m surprised at the amount of food such small people can continually consume; there is also some trick to pacing yourself as new dishes seem to keep arriving each time you think you’ve finished the meal. Once aspect that I felt was unusual was the predilection of some people to chew with their mouths open, making ‘chomping’ sounds.
I travel with my tiny iPod Nano (with over 2,000 songs - over five days to play every song - and it’s only about half-full) and now an Amazon Kindle (with over 40 books so far - including the ‘complete works’ of several authors - and a capacity of over 1,000 books) which saves space in my luggage as I usually take a stack of paperbacks. I used to purchase second-hand paperbacks for around $10 and get 50% back as credit off the next purchase. I can buy Kindle books from zero; plenty on offer for .99¢ and up. I’m of an age where I still wonder at where technology has brought us. There I was: 65kms from Hanoi among paddy fields, with buffalo roaming the streets and I can sit at my computer with WiFi, contact Amazon and have a complete book on my Kindle (that automatically selects between the stronger of WiFi or a free 3G signal) in a few moments - is that not amazing?
People everywhere were on their mobile phones - including riders on motorcycles. I was watching a peasant woman in a remote paddy field, up to her hocks in muddy water and planting rice; she stopped - I thought to straighten up her back - but she put her hand in her pocket and started chatting on her mobile phone!
After returning to Hanoi for a few days, I was taken back to the Homestead so I could train the staff, starting with housekeeping. It was cold in Hanoi, but colder out in the boondocks. Temperatures around 10-12C (50-53F); now I know that a few of you live in regions where it’s colder and you get snow - but I’m used to the tropics! We had several training sessions using my PowerPoint presentation and the owner translated - showing immense patience and expertise by repeating points over and over. Ultimately, I was truly impressed at the staff’s comprehension of the subjects, especially in a foreign language.
One morning, one of the staff offered to take me walking through some of the local farming countryside. I was wearing boots and a traditional peasant conical straw hat (I was going to type ‘comical’ - both adjectives apply). It had been raining solidly every night, so everything was sodden wet. We were negotiating narrow, muddy, slippery tracks between the rice paddy fields that got narrower and narrower the deeper we ventured into the maze of rice paddies….and the inevitable happened! I slipped down the side of a very narrow track and finished up on my side, thigh deep in glutinous mud.
The guy I was with helped haul me out of the mud with ‘plopping vacuum-like’ sounds and back onto the track. So - I slopped my way back to an organic vegetable farm owned by the client and the local manager came and took me back by motorcycle. I was embalmed with sticky mud all down my right side. I was originally told that I’d only be there for two days and then go back to the Hanoi office – so I did not take changes of clothing. So, I was wandering around in the chilly mountain air, trying to look ‘elegant’ with a towel wrapped around my waist and skinny white legs protruding!!!
I don’t know how (in the main) Vietnamese people remain so petite; they EAT forever. They don’t have a ‘main course’ - every meal is umpteen choices.….and no matter how you try to pace yourself with what’s on the table, there always seems to be another plate of something offered!
I was travelling back and forth between the administration office and the Homestead. The third time was in the company of the client’s lovely and intelligent daughter. We started with a 40-minute taxi ride through Hanoi traffic - which is an adventure in itself - to the government-operated bus station. Dozens of busses milling around with destinations painted on their sides, a woman on a loud speaker system loudly proclaiming something or other and buses blowing their deafening horns incessantly. We found a bus and clambered aboard for about a 50km trip at a cost of VDN20,000 each (one dollar!). The bus broadcast what I presumed was local popular music (at least it was not that discordant noise) and the driver hit his klaxon-like horn every few minutes when within 100 meters of anything. Then we caught another taxi to the Homestead.
They had several groups booked for tours and lunch, including a group of German farmers and contingents from the Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs.
I was asked to join a group including a couple of local millionaires (maybe billionaires, even in dollars as they were into road construction, housing developments and gold mining) and asked to advise one of them on what was wrong with his huge local restaurant that was losing money. The guy did not speak any English but his son was there who was attending an ‘economics college’ in London. The meal started off with glasses of sake and moved onto 15-year-old Scotch whisky, interspersed with the usual multitude of dishes, including ‘ostrich’. We kept clinking glasses (in the ‘cheers’ fashion) every ten minutes or so, and you had to empty your glass ready for the next refill.
The Vietnamese language is interesting - it used to be based on Chinese characters until the Portuguese attacked it, then French missionaries in the 17th century arbitrarily changed it to translate the scriptures into the Latin alphabet, festooned with a wide range of accents. It is a ‘tonal language’ with each syllable having six different tones that can alter the meaning. To be technical: “It is based on the Latin script (more specifically the Portuguese alphabet) with some digraphs and the addition of nine accent marks or diacritics – four of them to create additional sounds, and the other five to indicate the tone of each word. There are many diacritics, often two on the same letter.” Pronunciation can be tricky to master, for instance, the popular dish spelled ‘pho’ is pronounced ‘fur’; my client’s name is Oanh; but pronounced ‘Wang’. One of the staff was Dat - ‘well, that’s easy’ I thought, ‘I’ll call him ‘Mr Dat’. No, he wanted to be known as ‘Mr Success’. Apparently, Vietnamese is the third most spoken language in Texas!
We had eighty students (from 20 countries) and ten teachers from an International School for three nights/four days in March that stretched the staff capabilities but they all performed extraordinarily well. Including producing 900 meals (dinner and lunch with a choice of up to ten dishes each, so a total of over 5,000 ‘serves’) from such a basic kitchen and accurately judging the quantities for buffet - and no illnesses - a great achievement!
We could not serve anything at all containing even a hint of nuts; we also had to make provision for vegetarians at every meal and the teachers asked to remove Red Bull (and then Coca Cola) from the drinks refrigerator. We had a few small dramas - like a student with an insect in her ear at midnight (they coaxed it out with sugar and a raisin!), another bitten by ‘something’ and her vomiting twice, and two teachers going home early with a rash and inflamed eyes!!
The night before the group arrived, an old lady next door had the unmitigated audacity to depart this world. Of course, that resulted in lots of mourners milling around, two days of amplified discordant ‘music’ and an ancient large-wheeled hearse parked on the street; it all added to the general ambience mixed in with 80 hyperactive teenagers running about.
During the school’s visit, I moved to a room behind a basic ‘house’ at one of the client’s two organic vegetable gardens. It was an interesting trip to and from the room on the back of a motorcycle along a muddy track. It was OK though because she made sure it was cleaned up for me, I had a bed and a mosquito net - what more do you want?
While the Homestead did not normally cater for ‘casual’ guests - they did check in now and then. One day we had a Korean guy with two Vietnamese gals, booked into the same room - he only drank beer and had 28 boiled eggs for breakfast. Another night, a Belgium guy with an English girl checked in - he was BICYCLING around the world - started in Brussels, across Europe to India, to Asia; then he was a bit unsure, maybe Canada, then the USA, then down through South America - Australia to Africa and then north and home!
One of the many tours offered by the Homestead included a visit to a local ‘ostrich farm’. I was taken there one day and thought ‘they don’t look like ostriches to me’. So I did some research: they were Aussie emus! I made mention that it was perhaps not a good policy to be educating children and giving them incorrect information and the details were changed.
I’d moved to the Homestead as a base and (when staff were not busy preparing for, serving, or cleaning up after groups) having daily teaching sessions in English and various hospitality subjects. Let me tell you - teaching English is just not ‘easy’: it really takes some flair, unbridled patience and dedication. However, I truly was impressed with the speed in which the staff learned new information in a foreign language.
They were feeding me handsomely from that scary kitchen. There were fresh vegetables from their own ‘organic garden’ and lots of fresh local fruit. Even some of the ‘meat’ was ultra fresh from an area of the Homestead used to show the kids about farming. The chicken in my curry or stir-fry might have been placidly pecking away a short while before being served as a meal. Kitchen staff could be seen wandering down the hill to the kitchen holding panicking poultry or a protesting pig. Wild clucking or a pig screaming like a….well: like a ‘stuck pig’; could be heard from the kitchen just before the inevitable silence. They also had some very cute, pink-eyed, white rabbits that I used to feed and they would rush up to the front of their cages when they saw me approach. Now and then, there would be one or two less cute rabbits - yep, you guessed it: on the menu..
For lunch and dinner I had the rice wine (made with an infusion of honey from local honeycomb) - it came in a 500ml recycled water bottle (complete with old label), it looked like muddy water and packed such a punch that after a sip I could not breath through my mouth (or suffer a paroxysm of coughing) and had to have a shovel-full of food ready to quell the fire. I convinced myself that it was ‘medicinal’.
A primary aspect of the staff that I admired greatly was their versatility and their willingness to tackle almost any task. OK, I’ve been a hotel manager and you have to do what you have to do, including being up to your ankles in s**t clearing blocked toilets. The manager at the Homestead was doing the usual ‘manager’ duties, plus repairs, plumbing, etc - one day he was inoculating rabbits! The petite, young female staff were just as likely to be stacking bricks or vegetable gardening as doing housekeeping. Even the chef could be preparing meals for 100 people, or involved in housekeeping duties when required - I could not image that happening in western society! The work ethic was also more flexible - staff thought nothing of working every day (no such thing as time-and-a-half, or double-time). Apparently even government staff were reluctant to take annual leave in case that looked like they were not completely devoted to their job.
On Saturday, March 31; the Homestead had 210 people (mostly children) booked in seven groups for tours and lunch (each group with its own menu); plus a family and ten x 20-somethings staying overnight. Then extra people just kept turning up wanting lunch: so they served about 30 extra meals. You can only try to imagine the noise level with all those kids - tearing around; then add the unmitigated horror of child Karaoke! They dealt with that chaos rather well with additional, casual staff.
The next day we were expecting two groups for tours and lunch totalling only 50 people, so only the regular staff were on duty. Then: extra people just kept turning up unannounced in relays for lunch and they served around 90 people. Of course, each typical Vietnamese meal can consist of at least six courses.
There are 26 million registered vehicles in Vietnam, and 95% of them are two-wheelers. There are over 9,000 new motorcycles on the road EVERY DAY. They have over 13,000 deaths on Vietnam roads every year.
I made comment that the Vietnamese must be the “noisiest people on earth” and they agreed, then thought and qualified it with: “Us and the Chinese”. More than half a dozen people anywhere culminated in a cacophony of noise - I wondered WHO was actually ‘listening’ as they all seemed to be ‘talking’. Groups of children or adults in the midst of a meal would break into what sounded like a school chant - at the maximum decibels they could manage. You can sort of understand the unbridled racket of 50 to 100 school children excitedly jabbering away … but the groups of adults were as bad - if not worse! There is a penchant for playing card games (even the kids) and that can also degenerate into a loud talk fest!
With its idyllic countryside location, I would have liked to promote the property as a destination to escape the city to peace and quiet. But, that was not really true; oh, the nights were reasonably quiet (ignoring the frog chorus) but during the daytime, the intermittent traffic was noisy. Of course there was the usual plethora of motorcycles buzzing past like demented bees. Those long-armed tractors would trundle slowly and loudly up and down; a local small truck was in abundance that made an unbelievable racket (some would go past trailing a load of reinforcing steel rod on the road, so the loud scraping sounds added a counter-point to the clattering sans-muffler cacophony); huge trucks and busses would zoom past. Because there was a dangerous almost ‘u-bend’ right by the Homestead, vehicles would continually sound their klaxon-like horns repeatedly as they approached. Most horns were not ‘factory-issued’ they were LOUD, some warbled continuously. The noise level was often enough to make you wince, to suspend conversation, and even ‘thought’, in the ruckus!
The fertility of the locale was amazing. When I arrived in March, the paddy fields were only brown muddy lakes, then the locals started planting ricelings (I just invented a word) and within weeks there was a sea of green - I swear that you could almost watch the rice grow it was so fast. The staff stuck a series of green bamboo ‘sticks’ in the ground and, within weeks, they were sprouting long shoots and growing rapidly. The locals moved trees around like they were small plants. They dig around the roots, chop them off rather short with an axe; transport the tree, plant it somewhere and the trees happily grow. Almost daily you’d see huge trees travelling along the road - well, don’t be silly, on the back of a truck, but often you could not see the truck under the tree/s anyway!
We had another run of customers in mid April: Thursday - 240 kids, Friday another 140 kids, Saturday - two groups totalling 90 (30 overnight), Sunday - 90 plus 30 = 120, Monday - 55 plus 24 over night = 79; all having daily tours and meals. No classroom ‘training’ during that time!! A week or so later: 250 pre-school kids and 32 adults.
I was chatting to a gal from Canberra, Australia who was at the Homestead with a church group and some orphans. She had asked me what I was doing there and I gave here a little bit of ‘history’. She kept repeating that I was ‘an inspiration’ - she said that all HER father did was watch television and go fishing!
There is sure no shortage of insect life in Vietnam - it seemed that any bug that could crawl of fly was there, in an infinite variety. I was shown some leaves on a tree covered in huge ladybugs - at least four times the size of Aussie ones! I took my washed socks off the line one day and luckily I looked at them first: geometrically planted were two neat rows totally six eggs that some insect had contributed to my laundry. I awoke one night, it was pitch dark, and I looked up: there was a lightening bug doing lazy circuits of the room - fascinating. As the weather warmed considerably, my wrists and ankles became festooned with dozens of welts from something that I never saw nibbling at my extremities.
The complex was on two sides of a road, close to a sharp corner where motorcycles, trucks and busses zoomed past – so it could be deadly when you have a few hundred excited little kids running around. They had decided to fit some of those rubberised ‘speed humps’ painted with yellow stripes right across the road to slow the traffic down. I suggested that they would need to get permission first. I was looked at blankly: “Why?” “Because it’s a public road.” “Well, if it’s ‘public’ then it is our road…..” Can’t argue with the logic?
The flight from Hanoi to Singapore was scheduled to depart at 10.55. Now, this does not happen too often: passengers were taken from the terminal (unfortunate name for the base for aircraft?), across the runways to the Vietnam Airlines Boeing 777-200, which left early at 10.35, after the usual lumbering around the runways; the wheels were up by 10.40. We were scheduled to arrive at 15.05 but landed at 14.35.
I take back a bit of what I said about the efficiency of Singapore Immigration. I had four hours between flights, so decided to check my luggage to Singapore, pick it up and promptly check in again, for Perth - so my luggage stood a smaller chance of going missing again. Of course, that meant immigration and customs - I got stuck in an immigration queue with an official who kept taking ages with each person and referring young women to a ‘higher authority’ - could be something to do with trafficking young women. I guess, so I wasn’t complaining.
And so, back home - left the Homestead at 06.30 on Monday, got home 02.00 on Tuesday! Several aircraft had landed in Perth at the same time: immigration was crowded (just as well I have a new passport and can use it in a machine which asks a few questions, scans the passport, then you go through a gate which takes your photo and compares it to the passport). But - very long queues at customs and only a few staff on duty!
PHOTOS ON …..
https://picasaweb.google.com/BevanLibya/Hanoi2012?authkey=Gv1sRgCPKrjYC_8qqNuwE
Click on <slideshow>