Words worth a thousand pictures

Beautiful Hue beach

During a trip to South-Central Vietnam I was at last able to experience some of the differences I had so often heard about between northern and southern Vietnamese. I wanted to test the anecdote that I was once told describing the differences in character between the regions.

"A young man goes to the market to buy some fish sauce (staple Vietnamese ingredient), but after purchasing a few bottles, he clumsily sets his foot in a ditch and the bottles shatter to the ground. A woman from the North walks past and says: "How clumsy you are! Be careful next time!" Just behind her, a woman from the South walks by, stops and, looks at the boy while handing him some money saying: "Here you go young man, some change to buy some more sauce." Finally, a woman from the Center walks by and kneels to the ground desperately attempting to collect what little sauce can be recovered from the accident.

After spending a few days in Hoi An and Hue (both cities located in Central Vietnam), I realized that the last lady in the story is certainly a myth. I couldn’t help but be taken away by wide-smiled warmth and hospitality of the locals.

Rice fields in Hoi An countryside

What I quickly realized was that, in order to trigger a deeper and more permanent beam enlightening their faces a simple effort to speak Vietnamese was sufficient. Let's not get ahead of ourselves; I still express myself worse than a 2 year-old butchering any notion of pronunciation and tones. Nevertheless, when capable of getting over my initial hesitation, my struggles to say something even remotely comprehensible proved to be a highly effective and strong tool. When in Hanoi, my scattered and poorly pronounced vocabulary is cause of puzzled looks and usually impatiently annoyed grimaces. In Hue and Hoi An, on the other hand, even the most negligible effort would immediately trigger "Oohs!" and "Awwws!" In moments of extreme confidence, I would even try and develop slightly more complex sentences, inevitably resulting in the best possible customer service. Doors opened. Smiles widened. Eyes lit up and questions started pouring, "Why do you speak Vietnamese? Do you live here? Where? For how long?"

Hue beach boy

Our first night in Hue we had a very late dinner in a small restaurant a few streets down from our hotel. The restaurant was practically empty, but we liked the simple bamboo furniture and overall vibe. We were looking to taste some of Hue's famous banh dishes and, sure enough, found it there. The waiter was extremely hospitable and accommodating. We even had a little chat at the end of the meal and left feeling that Hue would be a nice closure to our week's holiday. Our last day, we decided to have lunch at that same restaurant, this time for some Pho Bo and Pho Ga. The same waiter was there, obviously excited to see us again, asking us all kinds of questions about our stay in his native city. He dug deeper to see what the plans for our last day were. Despite the oppressive heat, we were determined to go see some of the Nguyen dynasty's tombs, at which point our waiter suggested: "Why don't you just go to the beach? It's a perfect day for that and it's only 13km from the city-center!" We admitted to not having thought of that and were also unsure of how we could make our way out there, an uncertainty he quickly tried to clarify: "Oh! Don't worry about transportation; you can just take my motorcycle! I'm working all day anyway, until 10pm. You could just take the bike this afternoon, go for a swim, and return it this evening when the sun sets." My jaw dropped. Was this guy for real? I made him repeat his proposal just in case I missed something between slowly ingesting the steamy soup and desperately attempting to wipe transpiration droplets from my liquefying self. No. I had heard what I had heard. He wanted us to use his old Honda Wave and go to the beach.

The ride out there was an incredibly beautiful adventure. We got to explore Hue's countryside, feel the breeze through our hair and get a feel for the day-to-day living outside the tourism frenzy. The beach was beautiful: natural, with no signs of oppressive hotels or herds of pasty white potato people (literally the way foreigners are called in Vietnamese); just some locals playing around in the water or enjoying some seafood at an improvised eatery. What a beautiful way to conclude our vacation, to mentally prepare for the return to the Hanoian traffic-frenzy, pollution and chaos. All this thanks to broken sequences of basic vocabulary vaguely sounding like Vietnamese. Instead of the picture being worth a thousand words, the words were worth a beautiful picture.

The army of change

When I first arrived in Vietnam and was searching for housing, one of the most recurrent pieces of advice was: “Just ensure you properly survey the building’s surroundings for any old houses that might succumb to the demolisher or for any empty lots waiting to be filled”. At the time it seemed like a silly piece of advice as, disembarking from Switzerland where authorities are eternally “improving the city for your improved living”, I thought I was properly vaccinated. I moved into my little studio apartment, pleased to find no empty lots and ancient homes in good shape. How naïve.

View from my window while writing

A week into my move, trucks rolled-in at impossible hours of the night unloading material in the opposite houses’ front yard. To this day, I can’t comprehend what they are attempting to achieve as the loading and unloading of stuff  has become a daily parade for the past 5 months. Despite this ongoing commotion, nothing has been altered in the house’s configuration. Alas, everything changed the day prior to my return from my holidays. I received a text message from my friend and neighbor stating the news: “Overnight, the house adjacent to ours was torn down. Welcome to hell.”

Indeed, the next day I could see with my own eyes: a large empty space next to my building. I wanted to understand. I spotted the lady that runs the scooter-wash shop in the long-gone building. She moved a few doors down and had changed her business. With her broken Russian, I was able to decipher that she was a simple tenant paying rent and that the owner had certainly foreseen some added profit in the demolition. She was told to leave and, the next day, the house was no more.

For a few days after this event, there was silence. Calm after the storm. No movement. No workers. No architects. Nada. I started to hope that the owner jumped ahead of himself, miscalculating his wealth and deciding to halt the new development project. Once again, I felt so naïve. Soon enough, new trucks joined the old ones at wee hours of the night, unloading, loading, whatever. Making noise. Motors always running as if the ignition were a foreign word in their vocabulary. When one of these ogres reverberates through our tiny street (which is only 5 meters wide), each time it feels like a miniature earthquake. For best results: lie in one place, horizontally. A bed is a good option.  

Construction site across the way

Because of the oppressive summer temperatures, construction work usually begins at 5:30-6:30am, with a break somewhere around dinner, resuming around 10:00pm until late into the night. Workers are often young and inexperienced peasants from distant provinces. They are frequently barefoot lacking any form of head protection (although today I spotted one wearing his motorcycle helmet!) and are confined to living on site until completion. Oh, and forget about comfy Sunday sleep-in sessions! No day is a bad day to work, including weekends.

When the lights are out, here they come, like an army of vampires. Instead of sucking blood, they live off of people’s sleepless nights. The implausible silence of nightly Hanoi streets is disrupted like clockwork by the legendary transporters. When standing on my balcony, enveloped by darkness and silence, I can hear them coming: roaring and rumbling indescribable sounds; echoing their way through the narrow alleys. They send shivers through ancient Hanoi homes’ foundations, fearing their time, too, has come to succumb to development, to the construction of taller, larger and more modern buildings. You can almost sense the sighs of relief of all pre-war houses when, all that’s left of the truck-battalion, is a thick layer of black smoke suspended into darkness. One more chance to enjoy the sunrise, and maybe the last?

Withering beauty

Beautiful karst rock

After hearing so many stories of Halong Bay’s hidden beauties and after watching the mesmerizing images from Régis Wargnier’s Indochine (1992), I finally had the occasion to visit this mythical place, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I was aching to discover what most tourists venturing to the tropical South-East Asian climates seek, the untouched lush natural landscapes that are becoming such a rarity across the globe. In addition, after almost five months of living in Vietnam’s hectic, noisy and densely-populated capital, awaken either by the screeching songs of propaganda radio or some endless construction project at wee hours of the night, I seriously deserved a real break for my mind, ears and soul.

The trip was nicely organized, including a pick-up service directly at my doorstep at 6:30am. The entire drive from Hanoi to Haiphong is a like a live exposition of Vietnam’s stages of irregular and mostly unplanned development: women in conical hats working their dazzlingly green rice paddies in the background of an infinite wall of houses (aluminum shacks next to five-story villas, wooden kiosks next to a huge hi-tech factories) stretching from the last Hanoian suburb all the way to the Gulf of Tonkin. Not one square meter of land along the road has been left to breathe in peace.

At the port in Haiphong, we were accompanied to the hydrofoil which would take us directly to the Island of Cat Ba, the Bay’s largest of some 1600 islands. After overcoming the large waves of the sea’s unsettled waters, we were projected into the first taste of the Bay’s splendors. Although the town of Cat Ba is following the rash architectural style used in most of the countries’ rapidly developing cities, the magnificent limestone hills hovering over it provide the first glimpse of the area’s beauty, and a complimentary breath of fresh air free of the city’s congested pollution.

As the boat that would become our home for 3 days and 2 nights slowly docked into the small port, I couldn’t help but ask myself in which state the Bay’s waters are. Not only are they tainted by a permanent shade of turbid green, something quite uncommon for tropical seas, but the water in the port is certainly not deprived of its own personal collection of floating plastic bottles, plastic bags and a slimy-like fluid with a not-so-pleasing odor.

Floating kiosk

This first flashes of horror and hesitation were quickly settled once the port of Cat Ba became nothing but a miniature dot on the horizon. The natural beauty that I was so anxiously seeking finally began to unfold before my eyes. The towering karst sculptures, the entrancing monotonous song of the cicadas and the sun’s reflections playing tag over the smooth and placid waters made me forget of the environmental impacts of rapid development, at least until I opened the book I was reading to a new chapter… See it before it’s gone…

Bill Hayton dedicated a chapter in his “Vietnam: Rising Dragon” on the rapid destruction of one of the world’s most beautiful and unique landscapes. Not only has the center of Vietnam’s coal industry been concentrated for decades in Cam Pha, an area just north of Ha Long City, but after being pinned a UNESCO World Heritage Site was the authorization given to build a large cement plant just next to Cam Pha’s coal mines. The water surrounding the coal mines is so saturated with coal dust, that it’s become profitable to dry it out and collect the dust for the creation of coal bricks for the countries’ stoves.

The idyllic and secluded beaches that one can find when venturing through the imposing limestones are covered in residues of dead corals. At a first glance one could think that the little fragments are just funny-shaped rocks, but at a closer look it is immediately evident that they are chunks of dead coral, coral that has slowly been dying since the extraction and destruction of mangrove forests which used to protect these and other fragile organisms.

Beautiful view from a cave

Another thing I started to worry about were the living standards of the floating fishing villages. From a distance they might look charming and authentic with their colorful boats and little wooden houses (miraculously held afloat by large Styrofoam boxes covered in plastic), but unfortunately they mostly survive off of intensive oyster, crab or fish farming which requires the use of polluting feeds. The houses lack appropriate facilities for basic needs, and little soft Styrofoam balls can be spotted in any possible corner of the Halong’s vastness. To top it off, most of the boats tugging herds of tourists through these natural beauties lack appropriate septic tanks to dispose of their passengers’ waste, which is then released directly into the bay. There were 1,5 million tourists visiting the Bay when Rising Dragon was published in 2010.

Unless action is taken soon, it seems that the fragile yet astoundingly breathtaking landscape of Halong Bay will soon be remembered only through some fading postcards stacked in travelers’ storage rooms or a child’s bedtime story.