My own contribution was: (5.) A guy ditches class to open a box and punch a Nazi. It stumped people longer than I had expected it might.
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Our midway destination in Vietnam was Hoi An, an old city midway along the coast of Vietnam and an hour from Danang (the arrival beach for American marines). Despite proximity, Hoi An was particularly lucky to have been one of the few old cities of Vietnam to have escaped the war without being bombed or its surrounding forests defoliated. This would have been a real tragedy. Hoi An was an old trading post, a port city where merchants from all over Asia would ship and trade goods. The merchants did very well of course and built rich homes and temples for themselves. The architecture of Hoi An is influenced from all over Asia with Chinese, Indian, Cambodian, Thai and Vietnamese styles popping up in different places. The pride of Hoi An is a Japanese covered bridge with it's own Buddhist altar and beautiful red paint. There are also many old wooden houses with some impressive “crab-shaped” archways and chalk lines depicting the water levels from past and often recent flooding. In the 1990s, the water reached five feet from the ground, and the owner proudly showed us a picture of himself in a boat floating in his living-room.
The other great fortune of Hoi An is to be close to the ocean. The beach is a little trek out of town, but for a dollar we rented bicycles all day to travel to and from the beach. The waves were even big enough to do a little body surfing.
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Our trip began in Hanoi Airport, and ended in Bangkok's International Airport. Between there, we travelled by buses. In Cambodia, this means two seat rows with passengers leather chairs and bus rides that are not too long, but still twice as long as the rates advertized. In Vietnam however, it is convenient to jump onto the open tour service which offers nighttime sleeper-buses up and down the coast of Vietnam. These buses are overbooked, loud, uncomfortable, disorienting, and take twice as long as the rates advertized.
The buses have beds set up in them for passengers to sleep on. There are two floors of buses in bunk-bed fashion and three lanes of them, except at the back were there are five side by side. Beds are sided by "protective?" metal dividers around the shoulders making them both impractical and uncomfortable, not to mention a lot like a hospital gurney. After about twenty hours in this condition you feel a lot like a hospital or maternity ward. Other interesting cultural details: (1) the dash and ceiling lights are an intricate rainbow of neon colours typical of a Buddhist festival, and there is incense burning from a holder on the front grill of the bus, as if it were a prayer holding the engine together. (2) Vietnamese drivers, like several of their Asian counterparts, use the horn as a turn and merging indicator. This takes the form of honking at oncoming traffic and cars or buses that we wish to pass. Unlike turn signals, which are visual and have multiple uses, the only effective statement a horn can make is "look, I'm here." and sometimes "deal with it!" In some vehicles, the designers understood this and built their horns to use an echo form that starts strong and diminishes.
On this particularly lovely ride, conditions were perfect. I was placed in the top back five by five row between two people propped onto two metal bars with no foot bar or seat-belts. This meant that when the bus stopped suddenly, I was on a sliding rail that threatened to hurl me into the aisle six feet from the floor. Also, my bus was blessed with two horns for a unique variety of honk types which began to be used extensively around six o'clock this morning. The entire travel time was 24 hours.
Of the only large sleep I managed to get on the bus, I had the most hilarious nightmare I've ever had. I was watching the evening news with my parents when a story about a new government financial scandal ended by reminding viewers to practice safe internet shopping. I went outside in a taxi and rounding the corner I saw a handful of people (no more than twelve), standing outside of Jack Layton's mansion chanting. It sounded to me like one of those fake mailbox generated protests probably organized my an opposition party, so I mocked them as I passed; I suppose I combined the maximum amount of nerdiness and Toryism, saying "Don't you people have work tomorrow?" (How old am I?). On the way back I started counting them aloud to mock them once again. One, Two, Three, Four...
Things usually go wrong, I've noticed, when I start to count in dreams. Around about nine, the mob began to approach. The cab driver started to quicken the pace, but the protesters were mighty fast for their ages. Their chant changed too and they could now be seen running and yelling, "Understand the riot! Understand the riot!"
The taxi turned a corner but then got a little confused and did a sort of panicky three-point-turn and pirouette. A few runners got around the corner and zoomed in on the car which was doing its best to speed away. I was now, for some reason on the trunk of the taxi and one or two of the zombies were catching up fast. As he got within biting distance, I aimed a good stomp to his face. My aim in the dream seemed to connect perfectly, but in reality I had connected perfectly with the seat in front of Michael, no doubt scarring the peasant tones out of some poor Chinese woman.
Luckily this passed without incident, save a good blister on my heel, but I suppose my excuse had I needed one would have been to say "Understand the riot!"
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Compared to Hanoi, Saigon is a booming megapolis. There are night clubs and a strong youth culture that comes out on weekday nights to dance in parks, hang out on motorbikes around ice-cream trucks, or drink beer at the roadside cafes. We were there for valentines day, so we saw lots of cute looking couples (well, ok...pretty cute looking, but almost all cool looking asian guys look a little too thuggin for me to say that too confidently...I mean they have like motorbikes and know muai thai and stuff... still pretty cute).
Vietnam is a former French colony, and a lot of French culture has seeped into it even if it's hard work to find a young person who speaks French. There is a world famous coffee grown in the country. It's served in street-side cafes, like most food, and with shots of sweetened condensed milk, over ice too from time to time. Sandwiches come in baguettes, and Ban mi trang is a common street-food of Vietnamese meat cuts, pate and sauce stuffed into a baguette. Also, in Hanoi some people actually do wear berets... like unironically.
In Saigon, we had hopped off the bus in the middle of downtown and wandered into a guesthouse Mike found about an hour before we left the bus station in Hoi An. It turned out to be run by some very nice people who gave us lots of candied coconut and talked about our travels and Canada and the like. Mike became friendly, and flirtatious, with the daughter? cousin? who took us out for food and drinks, brought us out to eat dog, and eventually was seduced to Mike's persistent charm.
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Dog 1:
A Chiwawah that guards the door to our guesthouse. It has teeth so bad, they make the old people seem charming. Emerging at forty five to eighty degree angles from the gums, they are better at mashing food that anything else. Luckily, the dog never smiles, but spends all its time barking at guests coming in and out the door.
I felt better about eating a dog earlier, realizing again that it's sentiment that makes us sympathize with the pretty dog while feeling less concerned for the filthy chicken. Not that that solves anything, but when animal rights are formally claimed, I will insist on their right to dental care.
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After our time in Vietnam, we hopped the bus to Cambodia. We had bought it from the guesthouse and some language barriers sent our bus to Phnom Penh, as opposed to Sihanoukville. We made a hasty decision to stay and see the city in the morning while grabbing the bus out to Sihanoukville in the afternoon. That morning, we got up, travelled to the market, a booming almost Persian looking dome filled with jewelry and clothes selling stalls. We were there pretty early and got to see the jewelry sellers wiping down the mirrors in their display cases (that's what sells shinny stuff).
In Cambodia, we some time on the beach (well, in Vietnam we did too in Hoi An, but here was a longer time) in a place called Sihanoukville. It's like a beach vacation sponsored by the dollar store; everything is sold in American prices, usually for a buck or two, but you can also pay in riel. The experience of using two currencies at the same time is a little disorienting to say the least. Still, it beats getting used to Vietnam's dong, which for whatever reason is valued into tens of thousands (a bottle of water costs 15,000 dong).
This was where I was possibly most concerned for our eventual return and the safe recovery of our trip. Sihanoukville is like the Siren's isle of travellers, a place backpackers might come to die. It was here that the discovery of enormously cheap and sketchy Valium was illustrated to us from a friend who became a travelling companion for the remained of the trip, an Auzie from Brisbane. In all fairness, it made perfect sense for the remaining bus rides which were by now as terrible as ever. In the last push to Thailand, a woman with the boniest head I've endured slept on my shoulder the whole way giving me a tennis arm that lasted a day-and-a-half. I wanted to read my book, but suddenly found I couldn't keep my eyes open. Four hours later, we crossed the border and onto a new bus with roads and drivers switching to the left and right hand sides respectively.
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Beach urchins in Sihanoukville:
Kid: Where you from man?
Me: Canada
Kid: Man FUCK Justin Bieber.
Me: Is he Canadian? Huh... sorry?
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In Siem Reap, we went to visit the temples of Angkor Wat, the largest temple complex in the world. The biggest have been restored and cleared, but a lot of them are still in the state they were rediscovered in, with gigantic trees pulling them apart and roots crawling into the stone bricks. It's just like in an Indiana Jones movie. I also pushed hard to rent bikes for the day, so we got to travel at our own pace and got that wonderful feeling of relative size to movement while circling around the temples.
Siem Reap is also a relatively large town in Cambodia. It has a large student population, and lots of young people come to work in the service industry in hotels, restaurants and it's thriving bar street. We also managed to talk to a monk in Siem Reap's central Buddhist temple. Lots of young Cambodian men come to work for the temple as monks. It's a scholarship program that give them the opportunity to go study abroad. I asked how many women become monks shortly after this, knowing somewhat in advance that the answer is none (women are only allowed to be very devotional non-monks). So it seems like an unsteady start to a country trying eagerly to move forward to limit it's university experience to one half of the population. So it goes, slowly.
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Dog 2:
Grey, bald, wrinkled, with the most perfectly menacing fangs I have ever seen on a dog. He hangs out on the top stairs of the western gate of Angkor Wat. There's no such thing as reincarnation, but if there was, this is the form priests who starved their six hundred slave peasants for the godhead and their own wicked wasted power would return to assume.
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We finished our travel in Bangkok which was, frankly, comparatively more expensive and frustrating than anywhere else on our trip. We only stayed a couple days, and the only relatively cheap thing to eat was street side pad-thai, which is honestly quite good. (That and the pool table that was connected to the bar below our hotel. We played there all day for three days and only ordered maybe two beers a person.) Interestingly however, Pad Thai's not an authentic Thai dish. It's actually Vietnamese. During the nationalist push, the king encouraged Thais to eat and make it as a spur to rice farmers, hoping to strengthen the economy. It's just another indication of my preference for Vietnam I suppose.
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A Coda: Reflections on a Thai Sex Show
What began with a tuk-tuk driver's insistent request and a cheap laminated program moved through the alchemical minds of my travel companions, emerging as a command, “we are going”. No use arguing when Mike gets this committed. Off we go, I guess.
This was the furthest out of the tourist district of Bangkok I ever travelled. Even further than my mid-day walking trip to the bell tower. Further than the clothes market where the buses go to rest for the night. The tuk-tuk drove us down streets that could have been confused for warehouses in Detroit had it not been for the humidity. I suppose a warehouse is a good place to hide a sex show from the forces of the “Super-police”, whose boastful placards adorn hotel signs and street maps. Here, outside of the watchful eyes of the international community, the Thai police are not so concerned for the international image of the country and it's royal family’s high opinion of it's own morality. Here is where the tuk-tuks get commission to travel. Pecunia non olet.
In the warehouse, past what looks like a Christmas tree except that it's covered in paper bills, is the door to the darkened room with seat all around the stage. It's dark, so it's hard to make out other face in a packed bar, but most seem to be young backpackers or middle aged Asian tourists. The spread of men and women is about half and half.
The show is one part magic show, one part anatomy, and a final part transgression. Women use their kegel musles to do a variety of complicated manoeuvres: smoking cigarettes, draining a bottle of cola, blowing out candles, firing a blow-dart at some balloons, or firing ping-pong balls into a cup. Lots of the acts seem, like any transgressive magic trick, dangerous at first sight but with the right slight of hand are safe enough to repeat all night safe. At one point, a woman pulls a string of razor blades out of her pussy, and then shows how they are able to cut paper into strips. It's admittedly more than the average trip to Club Supersex Montreal.
However, it's hard to say that any part of the show is really all that sexy. Even the conclusion to the show, in which a toned man performs intercourse with one of the show's girl's onstage in a variety of complicated gymnastic manoeuvres, focuses more on the extreme than on the sensual (even if the theme from titanic is being played by the D.J.).
What are the conditions of the girls, and boys, who perform this type of act? It's hard to say. For one thing, we stayed long enough to see the show three times, so a night must be a long thing indeed. For another, the performers do use protection, part no doubt of Thailand's often-earnest push to combat the spread of AIDS. But otherwise, it's hard to say. Patrons don't get to go wandering in the back of restaurants, and sex clubs are likewise if more serious about it. We can speculate all we want, but we are left with the educated guesses of NGOs and our own unique fears.
From what I have since learned, Thailand's sex trade (and here I'm talking about true prostitution and the massage racket) is strongly made up of men and women from the Hill tribe, a Thai minority from the north. Many lack citizenship papers and have no representation. The recent collapse of their traditional economy, in part due to opium eradication campaigns, have made it convenient to comply with the Thai sex trade. This would make them one of those unknown clusters of stateless people. Some NGOs have taken to representing them, and many take a neutral stance of prostitution, and this seems to me like a good way to approach the issue.
Prostitution is easy to give way to cheap moralism, and the victims of these purges are almost always the weakest participants. In a country where it is considered socially appropriate for men to have mistresses, and where the religious codes of Buddhism imply that there are hierarchies of women, some of whom it is appropriate to pay for, it is rare that clients will be the first to suffer the worst of the law. “Why do you lash that whore?” Shakespeare asks us. It is our duty to recognize our own commitment to responding appropriately to this awkward question, and overcoming the ugly deformities of our traditions.
I once wrote a brief reflection on prostitution and the sex trade for the Kings Feminist zine, and my opinions haven't changed much since then. This was certainly one of the tawdrier and more dispiriting corners of the sex trade, but then so was the one I was writing about earlier.
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Dog 3:
A slum-dog if there ever was one. In Bangkok, he wears a kid's yellow soccer jersey, as filthy as he is. Tide should steal both and make a television commercial in which both are thrown into a washing-machine. The magic of television would turn a tragic ending into a commercially viable one.
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On the plane out of Bangkok, the Thai English-Language newspaper left in the seat-pocket in front of me had an editorial cartoon of General Qaddafi, depicted as a statue mid-speech with soldiers shooting from the general's mouth into a crowd of unarmed protesters.
By the time I'd crossed through customs onto the Guangdong to Beijing flight, Xinhua's editorial cartoon depicted an oil drum watching televised coverage of middle-east protests and having a price inflating series of heart attacks. It's hard to say that America would have been so cynical even on a bad day, but China was just about one of the only leading nations at the UN to support the Iranian crackdown on political demonstrations.
The vacation's over. Welcome home.
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Answers:
1. Back to the Future
2. Jurassic Park
3. The Day After Tomorrow
4. Toy Story
5. Raiders of the Lost Ark
