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SujiTimes - 2 days Mekong Delta April 2008

I was thinking along some odd parallel lines. Both the rural and urban landscapes of Vietnam are lush, colorful, crammed with detail and texture and color.

Meanwhile, in the book I was reading, Annie Proulx described a barren, stark landscape that is wide open and neutral-colored – but her prose was as busy and colorful as Vietnam. And the effects of both were overwhelming. In the case of Vietnam, I loved being immersed in the swirl of Southeast Asia, and we’re already planning our next trip there for December. In the case of Annie Proulx, her writing is just too damn colorful – irritatingly, even laughably so, and I can’t say with certainty that I’ll pick up another of her novels any time soon.

All the same, the opportunity to be in Vietnam and read about the Texas panhandle at the same time did teach – or rather, remind me of – something important. As much as I enjoy traveling in the tropics, where everything (the air, the vegetation, the markets) is so thick and the scenery so crowded and vivid, I think my natural habitat is in wide-open, pale-colored spaces with temperate climates. Or maybe that’s just a habitat I miss, strongly. Lori Porter, a fellow teacher from KIS, was traveling in South Vietnam with her brother when we were there, and her comments about the contrast between her home (Casper, WY) and Vietnam provoked me to think about these polar opposites a lot. And as far as the writing goes – if I ever do manage to write something other than these long-winded musings about vacation travel, I should keep in mind that often, a lack of detail speaks more convincingly than a circus ensemble of outlandish characters and events.

None of this has much to do with Vietnam, though. I’m afraid to write about that country because I loved it, but found it complex, and worry that I don’t understand it sufficiently to do it justice. Visiting a nation in which your own country waged war not so long ago produces an inevitable tangle of impressions and thoughts. I must have thought I knew something about Vietnam, but in retrospect, that “something” turned out to be little more than images from the standard list of ‘Nam movies, which may help to understand a certain American experience that affected my parents’ generation profoundly and continues to reverberate in the U.S., but teach little or nothing about the corresponding Vietnamese experience. I still know next to nothing about that, but I did find When Heaven and Earth Changed Places helpful in beginning that branch of my Asian education.

So then, onto something I understand a little better: a great spring break. I’ve already taken up too much space in this entry with reflection, so I’ll try to keep the travelogue brief, and steer clear of topics such as communism and war scars. We flew in to Saigon, aka Ho Chi Minh City, where Dana, a friend of mine from college and junior year abroad in Spain, was kind enough to meet us at the airport and take us to her house. Dana has lived in Ho Chi Minh with her Vietnamese husband, Kamh, for six years. I can’t stress enough how ideal it was to be picked up at the airport in that particular city – Saigon is as intense and crazy as any place I’ve been to, with motorbikes clogging every major road in what appears at first glance to be a complete chaos. The heat, on top of the traffic, was stifling, and having such gracious hosts to put us up in their lovely home and show us some of the outstanding things Saigon has to offer was the perfect way to start this trip. We ate and drank well at night (the food in Vietnam is unbelievably delicious, by the way), and during the day, did our best to see the city on foot, interspersing many sweaty and terrorific street crossings with iced coffee and fruit shakes at some of Saigon’s great cafés. We couldn’t help noticing how easy it was to find restaurants and coffee shops with character, in contrast to the Starbucks jungle we’re used to in Seoul.

After Saigon, we toured the Mekong Delta for two days with Innoviet, a tour company we turned up on the Internet. Our tour group consisted of our tour guide, and us, and the unintentionally private tour, which included a homestay with a family near the town of Tra On on the delta, was incredible. We traveled by local buses, at least three different boats, cyclos (tricycle taxis), and bicycles, and of the many people we encountered and enjoyed at least some interaction with (rice farmers and refiners, cocoa bean shellers, brick cutters, fish farmers, coconut candy makers, rice paper cookers, floating marketeers, Buddhist monks and nuns . . .), exactly none of them were tourists like us. Innoviet advertised that they take their groups off the well-beaten Mekong tourist track, and they absolutely delivered. Our tour guide, Thanh (I’m certain that I’m misspelling his name, and my pronunciation of it is even worse) was a young, good-natured guy who gave us exactly the kind of experience we were looking for.