And yes the people of Vietnam are nice!

Two more random acts of kindess…sharing durian with me in a restaurant and a man in a shop spending an hour taking me to the Post Office so I could post Christmas presents to my family in Scotland….would thís happen at home I ponder?

Are the Vietnamese nice?

In short, and so far, yes!

I’ve been in Vietnam for about 5 days so far and have spent those days in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, as it is now called.  I’ve been worried about coming to Vietnam for a while.  Most travellers I meet told me it was a bit of a nightmare.  They regaled me with tales of bargaining for a bottle of water, fighting to get local prices and the general “meanness” of the Vietnamese.

Maybe I’ve just been lucky.  Maybe it’s because I’m with a mate and things like bargaining are always easier when you’re two but so far so good..a few examples…

When I first got off the bus..with my bags…a prime opportunity for advantage to be taken of me…I was given helpful and accurate directions from a local hotel owner to the hotel my friend had booked. No tricky business. No telling me it was miles away and I’d need a taxi.  The staff in the hotel were friendly to the point of almost doing gymastics to please us.

Day two in Vietnam brought more kindness…some local students walked us around a kilometre to find us cheap street food, told us the price, made sure it was what we wanted and then came back 5 minutes later to give us some local fruits (tiny apples served with chilli, salt and sugar).

Day three we visited the Cao Dai Temple and Chu Chu tunnels. The Cao Dai’ists (their religion is a combination of buddhism, confucuanism, taoism, native vietnamese spiritualism, christianity and islam) welcomed us into their temple and allowed us to sit through the service and take photos. They didn’t even ask us for a donation.

Day four I did my Christmas shopping at the local market.  Now shopping can be anything from fun to hell in my experience abroad.The hardest thing can be trying to work out what you should pay for something…ie not be taken advantage of but not so low that you are taking the mick…but in Vietnam, and again I stress, so far, this was easy…you ask the price, go to 50% and eventually you’ll get it for around 55 to 60% of the original price. No messing around. You know the final price and that’s it.

I then made some Christmas cards and asked the hotel owner whether he could possibly write “Happy Christmas” in Vietnamese on them. He did this with pleasure and was beaming from ear to ear throughout calling over his friend to see the cards I had made. Would this happen back home I wondered? I asked him also for some newspapers to wrap gifts in…two minutes later he produced this…again would this happen at home? A trip to the post office was again heaven.  They wrapped my parcel (free of charge), taped it all up, there was no queue and they charged me the correct price.  Seemed too good to be true!

It is fair to say that there is always someone selling something in Vietnam.

From the fake booksellers who carry upwards of 30 books in their arms and ply their trade around the bars, to the sellers of fans, cigarettes, watches, bouncy balls..you name it they sell it. If you say “no” it does usually work. A bit of humour can get a smile in my limited experience…to cigarettes “don’t want to die”, to books “have read them all” or “what’s your favourite”, to sunglasses…just put mine on, smile broadly and say “one pair’s enough”.

To moto drivers “ok, have moto already, you want lift with me?”, to any drivers trying to charge ridiculous price “no thanks not want buy moto just want lift”.  This last one can usually get a smile and again I say so far in Vietnam the people have enjoyed smiling.

I did get overcharged for a cocunut. It was my first day and I was still grappling with the currency. He was outside the Ho Chi Minh Musuem and position was all important.  But he did it with a smile and I now know the “local price” so won’t make that mistake again!

So, in short, so far, the Vietnamese are nice and let’s hope it continues.

Death of the book….

Is it the death of the book as I know it?

Tonight in Phnom Penh I tried desperately to swap an original Lonely Planet guidebook for a new one on Vietnam before I go to Vietnam in a few days.

Off I went to the bookshop which had a sign saying “buy, sell all books”.  She offered me a dollar for a used novel but nothing for the LP.

“Do not want” she said.

I walked alongside the Mekong River which is full of little stalls selling books (all copies).  I tried a new tact…”two books for one….good for you, good for me”.

“Cannot” was the reply.

I went into another bookshop where the vendor was hiding behind a pile of used books.  I asked her if she was interested in my LP.

She said “no, these books are gifts from travellers, cannot buy second hand but can sell you copy”.  I tried to tell her that the copies are poor quality and fall apart in a few days with their poor bindings…but to no avail.  She wouldn’t even swap two for one.

I tried a 7 year old book seller in the street carrying his little box of “copy, new books” around his neck.  He took a cursory glance at my books pointed to a tiny fold in the corner and said “no good, not new, no one buy old books”.  He tried to persuade me to buy some of his “copy, new books” wrapped in clear cellophane.

The trouble with all this copy book business which seems to be huge here is that the death of the original book seems upon us…no one wanted my second hand LP.  And I didn’t want a copy where the maps are so fuzzy you can’t read them at night, the edition date on the back has been updated by a year, and the pages fall out after a few days…

And if everyone buys copies what will happen to the book industry? And what happens to all these copy books which only last a few weeks?  Is it truly the death of the book as we know it?

Breakdancing with bombies

I met Kim at the COPE Centre in Vientaine.

COPE’s an organisation that helps out victims of unexploded ordinance (UXOs).  They call them “bombies” in Laos.  He told me he was a volunteer at the Centre and that he wanted to practise his English. His English was very good.  The guide at the Centre said I could ask Kim what had happened to him.

When I asked him he told me that he had previously lived in the countryside in Laos.

Four years ago, when he was 15, his mate passed him a “bombie”.  Local children in Laos sometimes collect these bombies to sell off as scrap metal to help get money for their families.  It seems that despite education aimed at highlighting the risk of them exploding, children can’t be kept away from them.

Kim had the bombie in his hand.

It exploded and he lost both hands and his sight.

He’s keen to publicise the risks of bombies and after he’d eaten a chocolate ice cream which disappeared in less than a minute (he told me ice cream was a favourite of his) he rushed back to his room to get me a dvd he wanted me to watch.

While he was gone I couldn’t help thinking of him trying to find his way using his white stick and trying to locate the dvd in his room.  He came back about 10 minutes later with the dvd.  We were both determined for me to see it and found a computer after a while which let me watch it.

I was mesmerised.

There was Kim on a stage dancing.  The dance was about what had happened to him when the bomb exploded.  He was on the stage alone with darkness around him, no props and haunting music in the background.  He put his arms together and danced as if holding the bombie between his hands.  Then his arms went up in the air and he fell to the ground.  I was moved so much by his performance.  I told him it was beautiful.

It’s hard to believe the effects that bombs dropped over 30 years ago are still having today in Laos.  It’s estimated that there were 200 million cluster bombings over Laos (I read this at the MAG centre at Phonsavon) or  1 every 8 minutes for 7 years.

The local kids get 25 cents for one kilo of metal which could maybe buy around 20 bananas in Laos. For a big bomb they can get 200,000 to 300,000 kip ($20 to $30) which is one week’s salary.

The bombies don’t only kill those looking for them to sell. Many lie in farmers’ fields and can be hit by ploughs or stood upon.  Some are embedded inside trees.  Others are in the rivers.  Not all of them explode but some do and with  terrible consequences.

I’d heard some explosions a short time before visiting COPE when I was in Muang Ngoi Neua in Northern Laos. Someone told me this was explosións of old bombs.  I hadn’t realised the extent of the bombies but meeting Kim who finds the energy and courage to dance after his horrific experiences really brought home to me the dangers that exist and the strength of the people who live with these ticking timebombs every day of their lives.

If I had to fall in love with a country….

It’d be Myanmar…

I loved this place.  Quirky, different, like another age, it is unique in so many ways.

Here are some of the things I loved about it….

1. The velvet sandals they slip around in. Men and women.
2. The beautiful longyi style skirts they wear, even in the tiny basic villages they look beautiful.
3. Betel nut. So many red stains on the road…not fights but the stuff they Split out after chewing the betel nut.
4. Steering wheels on the right…and driving on the left.
5. The night booksellers of Mandalay. Each night they set up their stalls in darkness (Myanmar doesn’t do street lighting) selling everything from “How to teach yourself English”, to “Geology for Beginners”, from medical books to Buddhism books.
6. The people reading.  They love to read wherever they are.
7. Their love of football especially Manchester United!
8. Their cute metal food containers saving on plastic bag wastage.
9. Their school uniforms. All over the country there are standard colours for the school uniforms so school longyis must be in green.
10. Their crazy currency which goes up and down every day. With an official Exchange rate set at 3 kyat for a dollar when the black market rate isa round 740 for a dollar.
11. The sellers of the old bank notes. Where else in the world was the currency once changed to all the 9s?
12. From a country with so much beauty, the awful image on the 1,000 kyat note which looks like a hospital.
13. The rowing style on Inle Lake. Thigh on the paddle.
14. Limits on petrol buying so huge crowds standing outside the stations waiting to fuel up.
15. The world’s cheapest stamps. You can send an airmail letter to anywhere for 30 kyat! (yes the Exchange was 740 for a dollar!)
16. The old cars
17. The devotion to the Buddha which sees people streaming into the pagodas, lining their buddhas with gold leaf and making beautiful offerings.
18. The monks and nuns everywhere.
19. The fading beauty of the colonial buildings.
20. The “nat” festivals held to Ward off the bad spirits.
21. And lastly…Thanaka.  Made from ground up tree bark mixed with oil the ladies, men and children smear their faces with it to protect from the sun and also as a form of makeup.  Now I can’t see that one taking off back home but I did buy some just in case!  I wonder what the response would be if I turned up to work in it…

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