Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

We allowed ourselves the luxury of not rising until 08:30 today.

We left around 09:30 for a last walk around Kowloon, our hopes of returning to The Peak dashed by the fourth consecutive cloudy day since our arrival.

Attempts to find a good place to enjoy dim sum failed, leaving me feeling grumpy and dissatisfied. Oh well; we’ve eaten splendidly during the rest of our trip, so I can’t really complain.

A short walk through Kowloon Park, stopping to look at the bird garden and impressive aviary, were about all we had time for. Back at the hotel, we checked out and proceeded to the airport, enjoying as much efficiency in this direction as we had upon our arrival.

A 12 hour plane flight ensued, followed by an interminable wait for our baggage, a bus ride to the train station, and finally the slow, rickety Caltrain ride to Menlo Park.

We’re now at home, preparing to go out for pizza, hoping to get back before the effects of this 40 hour long 2nd December (that’s what you get when you depart from a country that’s 16 hours ahead of Californian time) start to take hold of us.

Beyond Kowloon and Hong Kong Island lie other islands that also make up the Hong Kong SAR. It would take quite a while to see these in any detail, so we decided to opt for a day-trip to Macau instead.

Macau is less well known than Hong Kong, but bears quite a few similarities. It was colonised by the Portuguese some 300 years before the Brits wrested Hong Kong from the Chinese, but unlike Hong Kong, Macau was never formally ceded to Portugal. Rather, its colonisation was peaceful and the consequence of an agreement made with the Chinese in 1557. The Chinese government of the day allowed the Portuguese to settle and trade from here in return for rent and customs dues.

The Portuguese handed Macau back to the Chinese on 20th December 1999 and now it, too, has become a SAR (Special Administrative Region) of China, guaranteeing it notably different treatment from the rest of the country for a period of at least 50 years.

We had tickets for the 08:30 Turbojet ferry crossing, a high speed catamaran that makes the 65 km crossing in around an hour. Our being mistakenly categorised as ‘turbo class’ passengers and led to an extremely comfortable upper deck (with a toilet sink whose tap was cast as a fish head) with reclining seats pretty much made Sarah’s day before we’d even left port!

Most of the public information in Macau is bilingual in Cantonese and Portuguese. Although the Portuguese is fairly easy to decipher if you know any Spanish, this doesn’t seem to help much when questioning the locals, as there are very few Portuguese speakers remaining in the territory. We did overhear a few in a cafe, however.

After a bus ride into the centre of the peninsula, we marvelled at the facades of old Portuguese colonial buildings on Largo do Senado (Senate Square) and the bizarre sight of road signs containing both Portuguese text and Cantonese characters.

We then visited the ruins of an old church before paying a visit to the Museum of Macau for a couple of hours.

In the afternoon, we took a taxi down to the southernmost tip of the peninsula, where Macau Tower soars 339 metres into the sky. For a ghastly high price, we rode the lift to the top of the tower and were treated to some fantastic views of the surrounding area. Even the mist, that we’d hoped to leave behind in Hong Kong, could not obscure the great views here.

The inner observation area of the tower has a glass floor for its outer ring, meaning that you can walk in a circle around the tower, all the while observing the 339 metre drop below your feet. Creaking sounds under my feet did not exactly inspire my confidence and I was surprised to find the experience unnerving.

The views from here once again offer a tantalising hint of a new frontier, this time mainland China in the form of Zhuhai SEZ (Special Economic Zone). A SEZ is basically an area of China that has been designated a capitalist zone, to cash in on its close proximity to the sea (and thus trade with other countries) and the SARs in the area. Chinese people require an internal passport just to visit Zhuhai and the other SEZs.

Sadly, we had no time to visit, so we had to make do with the panoramic views.

In the failing light, there was just enough time for a quick visit to the A-Ma Temple, before settling down to dinner in a close-by Macanese restaurant.

We’ve used many currencies on this trip: Thai Baht, Lao Kip, Vietnamese Dong, Hong Kong Dollars, and now also Macanese Patacas (and the Avos, 100 of which make for 1 Pataca). Not wanting to get stuck with Patacas (you can spend HKD in Macau, but Patacas are unloved in Hong Kong), we used up our last banknotes on a taxi to the ferry port (where you can even buy Lucozade, Ribena and Fruit Pastilles!) and then took the catamaran back to Hong Kong Island, where we made the quick ferry crossing back to Kowloon.

The last full day of our honeymoon had drawn to a close 🙁

We’re back in HCM after our three day trek up the Mekong Delta.

Sarah is off, getting a haircut, so it’s down to me to fill you in on the last couple of days.

Yesterday, we had another very early start as we headed out by boat to a floating market. Our boat pulled alongside a vendor’s boat, so I clambered from the roof of our boat onto the roof of the vendor’s boat to purchase some fresh pineapple. A whole pineapple was skinned and then presented to us for the princely sum of $0.20. Delicious!

We then visited a village where rice is transformed from the grain into thin sheets. The sheets are then cut into thin strips, commonly known in the West as noodles. Once again, the Vietnamese let nothing go to waste. The husk of the rice is used as fuel for the furnace that heats the rice paste. The rice itself is made into noodles, and the ash of the expended husk is used as fertiliser for the new rice plants. Absolutely nothing is wasted in this process, leaving the casual observer (us) in awe of the harmonious relationship it’s possible for people to have with the land on which they live and work.

Yesterday saw us switch between a variety of boats, including a mid-size vessel on which we would spend the entire afternoon navigating the branches of the Mekong.

For some of the journey, we were allowed to ride on the roof of the boat. When the boat in front of us passed under a low bridge, we observed as the people on the roof lay down and cleared the underside of the bridge with a good 25 cm of leeway. Confident that we could do the same, we began to lay flat on the roof of our boat.

Now, perhaps the boat in front was carrying more kilos of human cargo than we were and that was the reason that the boat sat lower in the water than ours, but when we came within a metre or two of the first beam of the bridge, I really thought we weren’t going to clear it. I was in a good vantage point to judge this, too, as I was at the very front of the roof and was mentally preparing myself to be ground into a pulp and sold on the floating market the next day.

Not to worry, though. We cleared the bridge with a good 8 cm of space between my nose and oblivion, and we were treated to what was probably the best close-up of the underside of a Vietnamese bridge that we’ll ever see.

Eventually, we arrived in the town of Chau Doc after dark, just 3 km from the Cambodian border. 3 km as the crow files, that is; the actual border crossing is two hours upstream by boat and a lot further by road. Apparently, there aren’t so many places where you can cross the border from Vietnam into Cambodia.

It was nice and cool in Chau Doc and dinner was partaken outside the motel-like hotel where we were staying. Corny insrumental Eric Clapton style music failed to ruin our appetite and we spent the evening talking to an Anglo-Swedish couple.

We rose again with the sun this morning and drove through Chau Doc to the outskirts of this small border town, passing many pagodas on the way. We stopped to view a particular pagoda, whose name escapes me now, but after ascending its stone steps we were treated to a magnificent view of the rice paddies, which sank away in the distance into a flood plain on the Cambodian side. Across from the flood plain, a few houses and small villages could be seen in Cambodia, although I have no idea what name those communities go by.

This rural corner of Vietnam was very lush and attractive. The town looked worth spending at least a day in and I found the sight of Cambodia a mere 3000 metres away quite tantalising. We’ll just have to save that for another trip, I suppose.

Incidentally, Chau Doc was the scene of the 1979 border dispute with Cambodia, when Khmer Rouge soldiers would cross the Vietnamese border on a daily basis and massacre the civilians. The Vietnamese fought back (as they always have), ultimately entering Cambodia and overthrowing the government.

Some museums in the area apparently document this history very well, but we had no time to stop and make a visit.

The bus took us back to the dock, where we boarded a small rowing boat for a visit to a floating village.

After five minutes, I was beginning to wonder whether my eyes were playing tricks on me or whether the small puddle of water present in the bottom of the rowing boat when I had embarked on it was, in fact, the same small pond that I was now staring at.

Glancing around the boat, I spotted a drinking-fountain like jet of water spurting into the boat on the front right-hand side. The simultaneously hilarious and rather terrifying thought occurred to me that we were actually sinking!

The waves caused by the wake of the motorised craft that occasionally passed us were lapping closer and closer to the rim of our boat, which was slowly but surely aligning its top with the surface of the water.

I shouted to our guide (who was in another boat) that our sieve-like craft was destined for a watery grave and that we, the occupants, had no desire to share its demise in the murky Mekong. Luckily, we were almost at the end of the first leg of our journey for today, so we were relieved to disembark just a few minutes later at a fish farm.

Steel nets are suspended into the river below floating, wooden houses and fish are kept and nurtured in these nets. They feed them some kind of fish and rice paste mixture. It was quite a curious site to watch them being fed through a trapdoor in the floor of this floating house.

From there, we continued our voyage through the floating village (on a different rowing boat!) until we reached another village, this time on land and home to the ethnic minority Cham people. The Cham people are Muslims, not Buddhists. They have their own language, but they also speak Vietnamese. Apart from some head garb worn by the women, I couldn’t immediately tell them apart from the everyday Vietnamese in the same area.

It was an interesting experience to visit the village’s mosque and see Arabic on the entrance; not something you expect in rural Vietnam, close to Cambodia.

Back on a larger boat, we began the journey back towards HCM City. We spent four hours on this boat, the sun scorchingly hot, the wind not even a whisper in the clear blue sky. Sweltering, it was; simply unbelievably hot.

We had lunch on the boat and made a short stop in the afternoon at a village where incense is made.

At about 15:00, we transferred to air-conditioned coach for the remaining four hour trip to HCM City. On the way, we made a superfluous stop at an ignominious bonsai garden, whose main attraction seemed to be some monkeys and apes that had been driven stark-staring mad by the confines of their inhumanely small cages.

We arrived back in HCM City in the pouring rain, which constitutes the second time the city has greeted us with a downpour. We picked up our luggage from the tour agency, checked back into our hotel, collected some laundry and then Sarah went one way to get a new coiffure, while I came here to update the home front.

Anyway, we leave tomorrow morning on an 11:40 flight to Hong Kong. As always, I’m excited to be going to the next place, whilst being simultaneously depressed at having to leave the current one.

I’m already trying to persuade Sarah to allow us to extend the trip by a day, so that we’ll have time to visit Macau, which would make a great day-trip from Hong Kong. We’ll see whether my persuasion bears any fruit.

We would like to finish this message by wishing Sarah’s folks a happy 35th wedding anniversary (on Saturday) and a fun time in New York. We’d also like to wish all of the Americans a happy Thanksgiving.

That’s it for now; more, presumably, from Hong Kong.

We’re in Can Tho in the Mekong Delta today and it’s pretty early and we don’t have much to do, so the cheap internet cafe seemed like a good option.

We’ve had a fun first day of our delta tour. First we went to a village where they make popped rice, popped corn and popped noodles. They do this by putting rice (or corn or noodles), still in the hull, into a huge wok full of black Mekong sand. It all pops up rather quickly and then they sift it to get the sand out. From this, they make tons of things, like a cross between a Rice Krispy treat and Cracker Jacks.

Next, we went to a coconut candy factory. They grind up coconut meat, press it to get the juice out, boil that and add some sugar and maybe another flavor like chocolate or juice from some plant, and then pour it out and process it like taffy, without the stretching. It’s pretty good.

The most fun part of they day was after we got to Can Tho. We had 90 minutes between arrival and dinner and everyone went to their rooms to shower and relax. Our room was hot and has four non-English TV stations, so we decided to go out for a walk. We saw lots of gross animal butchering things, similar to what we’ve described before. Then we went down a less busy street and into an alley in an attempt to head back towards our hotel. Well, this alley twisted and turned and went on forever. Every house had a few kids and they all ran out and screamed “hello!” at us. Some touched us or started to and then chickened out. lots of kids and mothers brought out babies and had them touch us. What they get out of touching us, I don’t know, but it’s pretty funny. We both felt totally like gorillas in the zoo by the end of this. Lots of people stare at us as we walk by. Tonight, a little girl approached Ian and kissed his hand and (we think) indicated that she wanted her picture taken. He obliged and a bunch of little kids came in to pose. As soon as the flash went, they scattered.

We had some ice cream after dinner and had funny language difficulties. We asked for the bill and they guy told us the amount. Then he came back and said “how many?” We asked how many what. He said “yes,” and looked at us expectantly. This same exchange went on about five times and then we finally got sick of it and left.

Now it’s early to bed, for once, assuming Ian doesn’t find some way other sight we have to see or shop we have to go to or God knows what. He’s very good at making every planned early night turn into midnight or later. We’ll be woken at 6:30 tomorrow and will be heading out to a large floating market. It should provide some good photo opportunities.

Just in case we don’t write by Thursday, Happy Thanksgiving! Save me some stuffing, Mom.

Back in the West, I can’t haul my arse out of bed in the morning to save my life, but when on holiday, it doesn’t seem to be much of a problem at all. This morning started particularly early at 06:30, but 07:00 is not an uncommon start to the day for us. When you’re on holiday for just one month, you have to try to cram as much into the daylight hours as you can.

This morning, we checked out of the hotel, dropped off some laundry with an old woman in a back alley behind Duong Pham Ngu Lao (the street of our hotel), and then boarded the bus for the journey to the Mekong Delta. A couple of hours later, we left the bus and proceeded further by boat.

The highlights today were a village where popped rice and noodles are made, and a second village where confectionery is made from coconut. It’s really tasty, so we bought some from the source.

The Mekong itself betrays a new and interesting scene whenever the boat curves around a new stretch of river. People bathing in the muddy water, houses on stilts, barges laden with goods, conical-hatted women rowing narrow boats downstream, children waving from the river bank… a real feast for the eyes and soul.

We’re now in the town of Can Tho, where we’ll spend the night. Dinner was rather dull, but we both tried a glass of snake wine, which is made with a pickled cobra. It wasn’t bad, but tasted more like sherry.

Tomorrow morning, we rise again at 06:30, eat breakfast and then head out to see a floating market on the Mekong. That should be quite a spectacle.

We’ll spend the night tomorrow just a few kilometres from the Cambodian border. How I wish we had a couple more weeks to go over the border and spend some time touring around there. However, there are already so many places that we have skipped over. We have more than enough to fill a second month-long trip to the area.