Endre Friedmann, who became Robert Capa, died when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam on May 25, 1954. The film in his camera was printed, and that's what you see in the museum. His most famous picture is from Spain, of a dying Loyalist soldier falling from the impact of a bullet. There are those who say its a fake.
What is certainly a fake is the 'iconic' shot of a communist tank breaking through into the Presidential Palace in Saigon in 1975, which marked the end of the conflict. There was no photographer present at the time, and it had to be restaged a few weeks later. Apparently, too, the famous shot of American marines raising the flag on a Pacific island to mark the end of that conflict is a staged recreation, as is the shot of Russian soldiers raising the Red Flag over the ruined Reichstag in Berlin.
My Penguin copy of 'The Quiet American' is a bootlegged fake bought outside Hô Chi Minh's mausoleum in Hanoi. It is badly photocopied on cheap and insubstantial paper, and I have to use my Swiss army penknife to cut the pages. I love it all the more for its fakery.
Incidentally the Continental Hotel does still exist, and I've seen it without realising. It stands by the French Opera House, and now sports a row of luxury boutiques (Calvin Klein and the like) where once the terrasses thronged with expat journalists, wheeler-dealers and girls in flowing silk pants.
My unfake Knirps umbrella, bought in Zurich earlier this year, gave up the ghost in yesterday's tropical downpour. RIP.
Saturday, 27 December 2008
Friday, 26 December 2008
war remnants museum
I drag myself around town in the sweltering heat like a reluctant snail.
I seek refuge in an icy air-conditioned cafe for a premature lunch.
Reluctant ever to leave I get stuck into Graham Greene's 'A Quiet American', which is set in a Saigon of almost 60 years ago. All the street names are French, and the Americans are only just beginning to become deviously involved. A city of terrorist attacks, bombs, assassinations. Marvellously evocative, like a 'film noir.' Did they ever make a film of it? I must track down the Hotel Continental where the expats and journalists mingled on the terrasses, and killed time in drink. Does it still exist?
I crawl across the road to the War Museum, and stay there for hours, rapt.
The 'Quiet American' of the story was killed early on, before even the French had left, but many hundreds of thousands came here to replace him in subsequent years, and the museum traces the ensuing conflict, mainly in photographs.
Many photographers of all nations died here.
Larry Burrows, a Londoner, worked for Life magazine and pioneered the use of colour photography in his photo-journalism, which was still rare. An unprecedented and highly influential 14-page colour spread was published in Life. He was killed in a helicopter crash in Laos in 1971, with several colleagues.
Dickey Chapelle from Wisconsin, christened Georgette Louise, died in 1965 of wounds.
Sean Flynn (son of Erroll), went missing with his companion Dana Stone on Cambodian Route J. They are pictured, young and dashing on their motorbikes, the day they left towards a Vietcong roadblock.
Kyoishi Sawada, a Japanese, died in Cambodia 1970. His Pulitzer prize winning photo of escaping villagers crossing a river is on show, as is a later picture of him and the same villagers in safety.
Many others are remembered.
Perhaps the most famous was Robert Capa, who had already covered Spain, and many terrains in the Second World War. He was at the Normandy landings in 1944, and followed on to Paris. He was a Jew from Budapest, glamorous and brave it's said, and had a romance with Ingrid Bergmann, which was apparently the subtext and inspiration of Hitchcock's Rear Window! He also found time to set up Magnum Agency in 1947.
David Halberstam wrote in his book 'Requiem ' :
"We who were print people, and who dealt only with words and not images, always knew that the photographers were the brave ones, and they held in that war - which began in an era of still photography and ended with colour film and videotape, beamed by satellite to TV stations all over the world - a special place in our esteem. We deferred to them, reporter to photographer, as we did in few other venues"
While I look at the deeply moving photos the air seems to congeal, I sweat profusely, and the heavens open with a massive and prolonged hammering on the tin roof of the Museum. The tanks and airplanes in the yard disappear behind sheets of rain. Catharsis? How would it have been to fight in conditions like this? Unimaginable. I spend another couple of hours wandering, and wondering at all this madness. More terrible images of the aftermath of War. Too much to bear really, but I need to see it all. To witness and honour.
I seek refuge in an icy air-conditioned cafe for a premature lunch.
Reluctant ever to leave I get stuck into Graham Greene's 'A Quiet American', which is set in a Saigon of almost 60 years ago. All the street names are French, and the Americans are only just beginning to become deviously involved. A city of terrorist attacks, bombs, assassinations. Marvellously evocative, like a 'film noir.' Did they ever make a film of it? I must track down the Hotel Continental where the expats and journalists mingled on the terrasses, and killed time in drink. Does it still exist?
I crawl across the road to the War Museum, and stay there for hours, rapt.
The 'Quiet American' of the story was killed early on, before even the French had left, but many hundreds of thousands came here to replace him in subsequent years, and the museum traces the ensuing conflict, mainly in photographs.
Many photographers of all nations died here.
Larry Burrows, a Londoner, worked for Life magazine and pioneered the use of colour photography in his photo-journalism, which was still rare. An unprecedented and highly influential 14-page colour spread was published in Life. He was killed in a helicopter crash in Laos in 1971, with several colleagues.
Dickey Chapelle from Wisconsin, christened Georgette Louise, died in 1965 of wounds.
Sean Flynn (son of Erroll), went missing with his companion Dana Stone on Cambodian Route J. They are pictured, young and dashing on their motorbikes, the day they left towards a Vietcong roadblock.
Kyoishi Sawada, a Japanese, died in Cambodia 1970. His Pulitzer prize winning photo of escaping villagers crossing a river is on show, as is a later picture of him and the same villagers in safety.
Many others are remembered.
Perhaps the most famous was Robert Capa, who had already covered Spain, and many terrains in the Second World War. He was at the Normandy landings in 1944, and followed on to Paris. He was a Jew from Budapest, glamorous and brave it's said, and had a romance with Ingrid Bergmann, which was apparently the subtext and inspiration of Hitchcock's Rear Window! He also found time to set up Magnum Agency in 1947.
David Halberstam wrote in his book 'Requiem ' :
"We who were print people, and who dealt only with words and not images, always knew that the photographers were the brave ones, and they held in that war - which began in an era of still photography and ended with colour film and videotape, beamed by satellite to TV stations all over the world - a special place in our esteem. We deferred to them, reporter to photographer, as we did in few other venues"
While I look at the deeply moving photos the air seems to congeal, I sweat profusely, and the heavens open with a massive and prolonged hammering on the tin roof of the Museum. The tanks and airplanes in the yard disappear behind sheets of rain. Catharsis? How would it have been to fight in conditions like this? Unimaginable. I spend another couple of hours wandering, and wondering at all this madness. More terrible images of the aftermath of War. Too much to bear really, but I need to see it all. To witness and honour.
blues continued....
a computer blip......
.......with calf eyes, who mysteriously failed to reappear after a summer break; indiscretions in the changing room it was conjectured. We giggled heartlessly in prurient clusters.
'Boggy' Marsh was a lovely gentle man, who usually taught Latin and Maths; he was doomed, on Wednesday afternoons when it rained, to lead Religious Studies in a tiered chemistry lab to a horde of frustrated athletes, and sports skyvers ( a volatile mix). One very rainy season we ploughed chaotically through the Book of Job. What a pain that was!
Young Mr.Dixon, fresh from some brilliant university, who never stayed long enough to acquire a nickname, inculcated in me a love of English literature, although I could never see the point of scanning a sonnet; hero-worship glosses easily over the unpalatable and incomprehensible.
There was the old guard who had fought in the War - one in Korea - and the new generation who had just missed National Service. They floated and glided around in the same black togas, but were poles apart, from different planets it seemed.
To find out more about my old school, and a boy's growth to manhood, read a semi-fictional account of it in Julian Barnes' first novel 'Metroland'.
He was a year above me in the Sixth Form. I breathed the same air, but would never have dared speak to him, august as he already seemed. I note with sadness that his wife Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent, died in October.
Back to the present, David is languishing in his room with a temperature and a sore throat, and watching movies. He went to hospital yesterday, and dengue fever (from mosquito bites) is a possible diagnosis. He seems to be on the mend, and has eaten a fried egg for breakfast, with gusto.
I am off to visit air-conditioned museums.
.......with calf eyes, who mysteriously failed to reappear after a summer break; indiscretions in the changing room it was conjectured. We giggled heartlessly in prurient clusters.
'Boggy' Marsh was a lovely gentle man, who usually taught Latin and Maths; he was doomed, on Wednesday afternoons when it rained, to lead Religious Studies in a tiered chemistry lab to a horde of frustrated athletes, and sports skyvers ( a volatile mix). One very rainy season we ploughed chaotically through the Book of Job. What a pain that was!
Young Mr.Dixon, fresh from some brilliant university, who never stayed long enough to acquire a nickname, inculcated in me a love of English literature, although I could never see the point of scanning a sonnet; hero-worship glosses easily over the unpalatable and incomprehensible.
There was the old guard who had fought in the War - one in Korea - and the new generation who had just missed National Service. They floated and glided around in the same black togas, but were poles apart, from different planets it seemed.
To find out more about my old school, and a boy's growth to manhood, read a semi-fictional account of it in Julian Barnes' first novel 'Metroland'.
He was a year above me in the Sixth Form. I breathed the same air, but would never have dared speak to him, august as he already seemed. I note with sadness that his wife Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent, died in October.
Back to the present, David is languishing in his room with a temperature and a sore throat, and watching movies. He went to hospital yesterday, and dengue fever (from mosquito bites) is a possible diagnosis. He seems to be on the mend, and has eaten a fried egg for breakfast, with gusto.
I am off to visit air-conditioned museums.
boxing days blues
I note with sadness that Eartha Kitt has died.
And Harold Pinter, Nobel Laureate for literature; born to Jewish immigrants in the East End, he was brought up and educated in Hackney as the family prospered, and died in a beautiful Georgian square in Notting Hill, married to that scion of the Longfords, my heroine Lady Antonia Fraser. A fine actor himself, he wrote some of the most iconic plays of the twentieth century. Rags and schmattes (he was born in Fashion Street) to literary riches.
Last night I dreamt of Mecca. No muezzin sounded , only cries of schoolboys, 'See you outside Mecca at one.' This was Mecca by-the-Thames. Mecca the caterers did our school lunches half a century ago by the water at Blackfriars.
The dream was no doubt prompted by sight of drying cassava roots on our biking odyssey. Cassava roots? Miraculously, and unbeknownst to me, that bane of English school dinners, tapioca, is extracted from the root! The tapioca was always cold by the time I got to the sweetie counter - I was a shy and unpushy child. I never knew it otherwise. 'Toad spawn' we'd cry in unsimulated disgust, and pass on to the wobbly pink blancmange. Sometimes the damp glutinous globules became ammunition when the teachers backs were turned, and flew through the air.
Where are those teachers now?
'Boggy' Marsh, and 'Bonso' ? Monsieur Le Mansois -Field (Froggy) who gave up trying to teach us French before Christmas, to enchant us with his reading of ghost stories? 'Narbo' - the slave driver - we called our Latin teacher, the mildest of men. 'Jock' (Dr.Law-Robertson) , was a refined Scotsman who taught me Goethe and Schiller; his discreet use of peppery cologne ( I can smell it still) excited ribald gossip in the locker-room, in an age when real men wore only Old Spice and, that, never on a weekday. What a long way mens' cosmetics have come since those ante-diluvian times! Now we boys are awash in potions and lotions, and splash on fragrances, from vile to intoxicating, as though there were no tomorrow. What a marketing triumph!
What has become of the softly-spoken and rather unathletic gym teacher with calf eyes
Thursday, 25 December 2008
erratum
Whoops! For yesterday's AGM please read ATM. Tropical heat plays havoc with my brain cells.
I have received the most wonderful Christmas present from David and Joanna, last Saturday's Guardian! I'll savour it for weeks.
Happy Christmas Day to all.
Back to the streets................
I have received the most wonderful Christmas present from David and Joanna, last Saturday's Guardian! I'll savour it for weeks.
Happy Christmas Day to all.
Back to the streets................
Wednesday, 24 December 2008
christmas greetings from hô chi minh city (saigon)
Hours of walking in my new crocs (made in China - does that make them fakes?)
The flipflops I bought way back in Ekaterinburg to negotiate the toilets (often awash) of the Trans-Siberian railway finally fell apart last night. RIP.
Saigon is replete with the most wonderful deco buildings. I stand amazed and open-mouthed at street corners, as I haven't since we left Russia.
The old hôtel de ville, a glorious nineteenth century extravaganza, is now the Hô Chi Minh Museum; the man himself, 'oncle' as the population fondly called him, sits in the front garden fondling a young girl, in innocent allegory no doubt. He is surrounded by confections of nylon lotuses in many shades!
Its very, very hot so I head for the Botanical Gardens and linger a while amongst the lush vegetation and shady glades, admiring painted storks in lovely greys and whites, and muted pinks, who rattle their long yellow beaks like castanets; I wish I could join the Siamese crocodiles who wallow in glorious cooling mud but opt instead for iced tea.
Hard by is the History Museum, another glorious building from the 20's, an amalgam of Deco and Chinese hard to describe. Inside too its lovely, in the cool halls where the last ten thousand years of Vietnamese history are quaintly displayed.
At the heart of the museum is a small open courtyard, set with tables and chairs, around a tinkling and splattering fountain. I order another iced tea in this enchanted spot where people come and go. The boy - or is it a faun? - who serves me tea, takes up a bamboo flute and plays an ancient air. A troupe of young nymphs arrive in shimmering white silks beneath transparent lime-green shifts which flutter and billow, though there is no breeze. I talk to my young neighbour, a girl from Amsterdam who has been studying town planning in Hong Kong, and is in little hurry to go home and put her clogs up.
I fall into a reverie. Gratitude wells up for all the AGM's which, over a vast landmass dispensed zlotys, roubles, touregs, yuan and now dong without a hiccup. A deeper gratitude too to my parents, who came to England as penniless refugees and worked unceasingly to improve their lot, and give me the best education they could conceive of. If the AGMs have anything to disgorge its largely due to their efforts.
Returning home slowly I stop at the twin-towered, red brick French cathedral. By its side is a grandiose old colonial post office which I mistake at first for a handsome belle époque railway station. Sitting at the base of a tall column which bears a three metre high Madonna simpering odiously at all the Christmas festivity around her, I reflect with sadness on Christmases past, gone with the dinosaurs and the Oriental Emperors.
Seasonal greetings to you all.
The flipflops I bought way back in Ekaterinburg to negotiate the toilets (often awash) of the Trans-Siberian railway finally fell apart last night. RIP.
Saigon is replete with the most wonderful deco buildings. I stand amazed and open-mouthed at street corners, as I haven't since we left Russia.
The old hôtel de ville, a glorious nineteenth century extravaganza, is now the Hô Chi Minh Museum; the man himself, 'oncle' as the population fondly called him, sits in the front garden fondling a young girl, in innocent allegory no doubt. He is surrounded by confections of nylon lotuses in many shades!
Its very, very hot so I head for the Botanical Gardens and linger a while amongst the lush vegetation and shady glades, admiring painted storks in lovely greys and whites, and muted pinks, who rattle their long yellow beaks like castanets; I wish I could join the Siamese crocodiles who wallow in glorious cooling mud but opt instead for iced tea.
Hard by is the History Museum, another glorious building from the 20's, an amalgam of Deco and Chinese hard to describe. Inside too its lovely, in the cool halls where the last ten thousand years of Vietnamese history are quaintly displayed.
At the heart of the museum is a small open courtyard, set with tables and chairs, around a tinkling and splattering fountain. I order another iced tea in this enchanted spot where people come and go. The boy - or is it a faun? - who serves me tea, takes up a bamboo flute and plays an ancient air. A troupe of young nymphs arrive in shimmering white silks beneath transparent lime-green shifts which flutter and billow, though there is no breeze. I talk to my young neighbour, a girl from Amsterdam who has been studying town planning in Hong Kong, and is in little hurry to go home and put her clogs up.
I fall into a reverie. Gratitude wells up for all the AGM's which, over a vast landmass dispensed zlotys, roubles, touregs, yuan and now dong without a hiccup. A deeper gratitude too to my parents, who came to England as penniless refugees and worked unceasingly to improve their lot, and give me the best education they could conceive of. If the AGMs have anything to disgorge its largely due to their efforts.
Returning home slowly I stop at the twin-towered, red brick French cathedral. By its side is a grandiose old colonial post office which I mistake at first for a handsome belle époque railway station. Sitting at the base of a tall column which bears a three metre high Madonna simpering odiously at all the Christmas festivity around her, I reflect with sadness on Christmases past, gone with the dinosaurs and the Oriental Emperors.
Seasonal greetings to you all.
extinct now 37...........
..........this is where I had to publish and be damned, as the computer started playing up.
As I was saying : Tigers and crocodiles and oriental emperors, all extinct now. This Emperor, a confirmed francophile, scarpered in 1954 to the Champs Elysees, married a French lass called Madeleine, who as Empress of Vietnam perhaps found it easier to book a restaurant table, and gloried in her factitious elevation. The old palace above the lake fell apart amongst the frangipani trees and giant creepers, before being snapped up by a hotel chain and rebuilt.
We pass rice fields both wet and dry, and visit an illegal granite quarry which continues to operate thanks to backhanders to the local police supremo. A massive chunk of granite has been undercut by youths with hammer and chisel, and nothing more than flipflops for protection, and starts to groan and creak and expel little whirlwinds of dust. 10 minutes till it breaks away, the boys calculate. Fascinated, I want to stay and watch but my prudent and fearful companions hurry me along. We pass elephants which once worked the logging trade, and now labour beneath tourists. We see canoes on the lake carved from single massive tree trunks by folk from the many 'minority' villages.
We drench ourselves below monumental waterfalls, and stand by concrete monuments to ferocious tank battles. Both Mr.Wing and Mr.Yang are war veterans - they fought for the South; we hear tales from the horse's mouth.
We eat fruits I've never heard of, and learn the arts of rubber production in shady woods smelling of ammonia as the latex oxidises, where once workers died in droves from malaria and dengue fever. Have you ever seen a cashew tree, or drunk eau de vie from pomelo trees that grow outside your window, at a sweltering brickworks owned by a host who on the verge of bankruptcy and ruin, won the National Lottery? We drink to his good fortune, and admire his many grandchildren.
We take siestas in roadsides hammocks shaded by bamboo, sipping milk from coconuts, discover how rice noodles are produced in wooden shacks where whole families live, and marvel at the profusion and baroque invention of roadside Christmas cribs which line our route south on the Ho Chi Minh Road. Everywhere there are handsome new churches built since 2000, when restrictions on religious freedom were rescinded; the Virgin Mary has moved in with a vengeance, pouting and smirking at her good fortune from domestic doorways and ecclesiastical precincts.
We survive the entry into mad, mad Saigon without a graze or contusion.
Many thanks to Mr. Yang and Mr. Wing and Mr. Nam for wonderful insights into their country, and for two-wheeled adventures without a tumble.
Previous fear of motor-bikes, fed by my internal mother, has quite evaporated. Many times I wanted to wrest the controls from Mr.Yang, leave him a while under a palm-tree, and scoot off alone into the sunset. What bliss. So who out there wants to be Charlie Boorman to my Ewan McGregor for trips of the future?
Talking about Charlie, long before he knew Ewan he came to me for Alexander lessons as a sallow and ill-postured youth. I'm sure you have admired his grace and uprightness in the saddle these days.
While I am name-dropping here is another one. A nautical-sounding Mrs Sail phones to make an appointment for her husband. How pathetic, I think - can't he make his own arrangements? What's his name I enquire politely. Alexei. How pretentious; I have already taken against him. Alexei Sail.
Alexei SAYLE! Ohmygod! Not the vituperative, iconoclastic, foul-mouthed, hyperactive, deeply scarey, Jewish Liverpudlian comic? He'll surely have my guts for garters, make mince meat of me!
My friend Alexei turned out to be a softly-spoken pussycat, touched by melancholy.
Christmas Eve in Saigon. I have just had breakfast, and will step out now into the torrid streets.
As I was saying : Tigers and crocodiles and oriental emperors, all extinct now. This Emperor, a confirmed francophile, scarpered in 1954 to the Champs Elysees, married a French lass called Madeleine, who as Empress of Vietnam perhaps found it easier to book a restaurant table, and gloried in her factitious elevation. The old palace above the lake fell apart amongst the frangipani trees and giant creepers, before being snapped up by a hotel chain and rebuilt.
We pass rice fields both wet and dry, and visit an illegal granite quarry which continues to operate thanks to backhanders to the local police supremo. A massive chunk of granite has been undercut by youths with hammer and chisel, and nothing more than flipflops for protection, and starts to groan and creak and expel little whirlwinds of dust. 10 minutes till it breaks away, the boys calculate. Fascinated, I want to stay and watch but my prudent and fearful companions hurry me along. We pass elephants which once worked the logging trade, and now labour beneath tourists. We see canoes on the lake carved from single massive tree trunks by folk from the many 'minority' villages.
We drench ourselves below monumental waterfalls, and stand by concrete monuments to ferocious tank battles. Both Mr.Wing and Mr.Yang are war veterans - they fought for the South; we hear tales from the horse's mouth.
We eat fruits I've never heard of, and learn the arts of rubber production in shady woods smelling of ammonia as the latex oxidises, where once workers died in droves from malaria and dengue fever. Have you ever seen a cashew tree, or drunk eau de vie from pomelo trees that grow outside your window, at a sweltering brickworks owned by a host who on the verge of bankruptcy and ruin, won the National Lottery? We drink to his good fortune, and admire his many grandchildren.
We take siestas in roadsides hammocks shaded by bamboo, sipping milk from coconuts, discover how rice noodles are produced in wooden shacks where whole families live, and marvel at the profusion and baroque invention of roadside Christmas cribs which line our route south on the Ho Chi Minh Road. Everywhere there are handsome new churches built since 2000, when restrictions on religious freedom were rescinded; the Virgin Mary has moved in with a vengeance, pouting and smirking at her good fortune from domestic doorways and ecclesiastical precincts.
We survive the entry into mad, mad Saigon without a graze or contusion.
Many thanks to Mr. Yang and Mr. Wing and Mr. Nam for wonderful insights into their country, and for two-wheeled adventures without a tumble.
Previous fear of motor-bikes, fed by my internal mother, has quite evaporated. Many times I wanted to wrest the controls from Mr.Yang, leave him a while under a palm-tree, and scoot off alone into the sunset. What bliss. So who out there wants to be Charlie Boorman to my Ewan McGregor for trips of the future?
Talking about Charlie, long before he knew Ewan he came to me for Alexander lessons as a sallow and ill-postured youth. I'm sure you have admired his grace and uprightness in the saddle these days.
While I am name-dropping here is another one. A nautical-sounding Mrs Sail phones to make an appointment for her husband. How pathetic, I think - can't he make his own arrangements? What's his name I enquire politely. Alexei. How pretentious; I have already taken against him. Alexei Sail.
Alexei SAYLE! Ohmygod! Not the vituperative, iconoclastic, foul-mouthed, hyperactive, deeply scarey, Jewish Liverpudlian comic? He'll surely have my guts for garters, make mince meat of me!
My friend Alexei turned out to be a softly-spoken pussycat, touched by melancholy.
Christmas Eve in Saigon. I have just had breakfast, and will step out now into the torrid streets.
Tuesday, 23 December 2008
pillion epiphanies
We are safe and sound in Saigon, three days later!
We have had a fantastic trip, and a whole education.
Hardly out of Dalat, we stopped at a wayside temple with an incredible giant dragon of many colours, snaking its way around the shrine gardens, amongst other mythical creatures, reminding me of the fantastical sculptures of Nikki de Ste.Phalle - and there's a name to conjure with!- she who married Jean Tinguely of the crazily complicated installations.
The dragon perhaps blessed us for the remainder of the trip.
We visited a flower farm where today roses grow for the markets of Hanoi and Saigon, and gerberas for export to Europe. Until quite recently flowers as a marketable crop were discouraged by the authorities, as frivolous and decadent capitalist furbelows perhaps. A Dutchman - who else?- persuaded them otherwise. Today its a thriving and growing industry supporting many families. The whole area around Dalat is an Eden that grows every kind of vegetable and greenery in the sunny valleys.
Next stop a silk workshop, where we follow the whole process from cocoons incubating in giant dish- shaped baskets, to the same being dunked in hot water to kill the larvae before they have a chance to break out and damage the silk; the silk is then unravelled in complicated Heath-Robinsonish machines manned (?) by girls, and in great clattering looms is woven in predetermined patterns into the finished product. All this goes on in big corrugated sheds, airy and light, but the noise cannot be much different from the satanic cotton mills of Lancashire. Most of the workers are young girls, who manage a smile for the tourists who roll in on motorbikes. In case you are concerned about the dead larvae, nothing goes to waste here. The drowned creatures are an excellent source of calcium, and prized as delicacies. I defer when offered one, but David, who has already eaten scorpions at the night market in Beijing, savours them.
We visit coffee plantations. Vietnam, to my great surprise is the world's second exporter of coffee after Brazil. We learn to distinguish robusta, mocha and arabica. The most prized coffee is however 'weasel'. Weasels, discriminating creatures that they are, chew and half-digest only the very finest beans, and then excrete them semi-processed as it were. Their droppings are collected by very patient farmers and cleaned, and then marketed at exorbitant prices. Beware counterfeit 'weasel' however, as it abounds.
We visit dark-skinned montagnard tribes in their villages of shacks and long houses on stilts, who have been persuaded down from the higher reaches, for education and medical care, and to work the coffee plantations. It is a Saturday, and most of the menfolk are piteously drunk, while the women work on. Everywhere, and we will see this for three days, coffee beans are drying on giant tarpaulins on every flat expanse of ground.
We learn how to set up a rice wine distillery, and feed the fermented and finished rice to the pigs; and how brothers fought brothers in the war, and uncles fought nephews.
After a copious lunch overlooking a valley once napalmed and bombed to flush out Communists, we ride on, jolting and jolloping through the rain forest, and I struggle with a fatal desire to have a siesta on the back seat - suicide!
On the second day we visit the rebuilt Summer Palace of the last Emperor of Vietnam (1913-1997), a beautiful place on a hill above a lake where once crocodiles roamed and tigers came to drink. Extinct now 34
We have had a fantastic trip, and a whole education.
Hardly out of Dalat, we stopped at a wayside temple with an incredible giant dragon of many colours, snaking its way around the shrine gardens, amongst other mythical creatures, reminding me of the fantastical sculptures of Nikki de Ste.Phalle - and there's a name to conjure with!- she who married Jean Tinguely of the crazily complicated installations.
The dragon perhaps blessed us for the remainder of the trip.
We visited a flower farm where today roses grow for the markets of Hanoi and Saigon, and gerberas for export to Europe. Until quite recently flowers as a marketable crop were discouraged by the authorities, as frivolous and decadent capitalist furbelows perhaps. A Dutchman - who else?- persuaded them otherwise. Today its a thriving and growing industry supporting many families. The whole area around Dalat is an Eden that grows every kind of vegetable and greenery in the sunny valleys.
Next stop a silk workshop, where we follow the whole process from cocoons incubating in giant dish- shaped baskets, to the same being dunked in hot water to kill the larvae before they have a chance to break out and damage the silk; the silk is then unravelled in complicated Heath-Robinsonish machines manned (?) by girls, and in great clattering looms is woven in predetermined patterns into the finished product. All this goes on in big corrugated sheds, airy and light, but the noise cannot be much different from the satanic cotton mills of Lancashire. Most of the workers are young girls, who manage a smile for the tourists who roll in on motorbikes. In case you are concerned about the dead larvae, nothing goes to waste here. The drowned creatures are an excellent source of calcium, and prized as delicacies. I defer when offered one, but David, who has already eaten scorpions at the night market in Beijing, savours them.
We visit coffee plantations. Vietnam, to my great surprise is the world's second exporter of coffee after Brazil. We learn to distinguish robusta, mocha and arabica. The most prized coffee is however 'weasel'. Weasels, discriminating creatures that they are, chew and half-digest only the very finest beans, and then excrete them semi-processed as it were. Their droppings are collected by very patient farmers and cleaned, and then marketed at exorbitant prices. Beware counterfeit 'weasel' however, as it abounds.
We visit dark-skinned montagnard tribes in their villages of shacks and long houses on stilts, who have been persuaded down from the higher reaches, for education and medical care, and to work the coffee plantations. It is a Saturday, and most of the menfolk are piteously drunk, while the women work on. Everywhere, and we will see this for three days, coffee beans are drying on giant tarpaulins on every flat expanse of ground.
We learn how to set up a rice wine distillery, and feed the fermented and finished rice to the pigs; and how brothers fought brothers in the war, and uncles fought nephews.
After a copious lunch overlooking a valley once napalmed and bombed to flush out Communists, we ride on, jolting and jolloping through the rain forest, and I struggle with a fatal desire to have a siesta on the back seat - suicide!
On the second day we visit the rebuilt Summer Palace of the last Emperor of Vietnam (1913-1997), a beautiful place on a hill above a lake where once crocodiles roamed and tigers came to drink. Extinct now 34
Friday, 19 December 2008
les delices de dalat
I walk all day in perfect anticyclone weather around this lovely town. A French doctor, Alexandre Yersin, proposed it as a site for a sanatorium in 1893, and this week it celebrates its 115th birthday!
I am at first confused by the plethora of furniture stores spilling their sofas and fauteuils, and tables, out onto the pavements, until I see that some at least are cafes still waiting for their morning custom. I pass a coffin shop with its ornate, rococo wares piled high, and wrapped in cellophane.
I wander up to the French Cathedral on a hill, and watch a Vietnamese boy giving a face-lift to a statue of the Virgin Mary, in white gloss paint. Nearby is a convincing simulacrum of the Eiffel Tower, now hung with all manner of device for modern telecommunication. At its foot is the old Post Office - now the Cafe de la Poste - once linked by leagues of telegraph wire to the Quai D'Orsay in Paris, and to cities and settlements all over French Indochina. An imposing gubernatorial hulk of a building is now Novotel, Dalat.
By the big lake I see some kind of fair going on. Its part of the anniversary celebrations; trade stalls of drinks and eatables ; children everywhere arriving by the bus load. They besiege me with hellos and goodbyes, and giggles and handshakes. I'm an involuntary star. Somewhere I carry an irrational guilt for the Vietnam War. Why are they all so friendly to me?
I enter a cavernous concrete hall where there is a marvellous exhibition of the history of the town. Photographs of bemused, half-naked citizens of the original mountain village soon to disappear in imperial improvements. Pictures of empty streets and splendid villas. There is the station, built in the 20's - I resolve to search that out later. A whole display of Alexandre Yersin, a handsome fellow with a good beard, and an imposing-looking lycee named after him. The market building constructed just after the Second World war. How splendid it all looked, and how little the French could enjoy it, before being booted out. They never got to see the trees they planted in such abundance, around the lake, and in the new parks and spanking golf-courses, come to maturity.
I walk to the outskirts of town to find the station. There it is at last, surrounded by bougainvillea and a lovely garden of potted trees. Now alas only toy trains run from it, for the tourists. Nevertheless it is a haunting place. I imagine the comings and goings. The administrators coming up from the cities to visit their dutiful wives, who have escaped the heat and turmoil below for the season. Honeymoon couples arriving to boat on the lake, and have croissants in the cafes, and do whatever else it is that honeymoon couples do. I am reluctant to leave, I have such a strong sense of the place, and its whispers.
I walk to the grand Lycee Yersin, built to educate future colonial administrators for a thousand years. The French have gone, and the Americans have gone and the country begins to sing its own song.
Back in the hotel I wonder who this Yersin was. Some cool colonial administrator? Adventurer? Exploitative scoundrel? I Google him. What a surprise! Amongst many other things, he was co-discoverer of the bacillus which causes bubonic plague, and is named after him, Yersinia pestis. He set up Pasteur Institutes in Saigon, and in Nha Trang. I passed by the latter yesterday! He set up Hanoi's first medical school. On his tomb is written : "Benefactor and humanist, venerated by the Vietnamese people." His name remains, where many other colonial names have been execrated and erased.
I am at first confused by the plethora of furniture stores spilling their sofas and fauteuils, and tables, out onto the pavements, until I see that some at least are cafes still waiting for their morning custom. I pass a coffin shop with its ornate, rococo wares piled high, and wrapped in cellophane.
I wander up to the French Cathedral on a hill, and watch a Vietnamese boy giving a face-lift to a statue of the Virgin Mary, in white gloss paint. Nearby is a convincing simulacrum of the Eiffel Tower, now hung with all manner of device for modern telecommunication. At its foot is the old Post Office - now the Cafe de la Poste - once linked by leagues of telegraph wire to the Quai D'Orsay in Paris, and to cities and settlements all over French Indochina. An imposing gubernatorial hulk of a building is now Novotel, Dalat.
By the big lake I see some kind of fair going on. Its part of the anniversary celebrations; trade stalls of drinks and eatables ; children everywhere arriving by the bus load. They besiege me with hellos and goodbyes, and giggles and handshakes. I'm an involuntary star. Somewhere I carry an irrational guilt for the Vietnam War. Why are they all so friendly to me?
I enter a cavernous concrete hall where there is a marvellous exhibition of the history of the town. Photographs of bemused, half-naked citizens of the original mountain village soon to disappear in imperial improvements. Pictures of empty streets and splendid villas. There is the station, built in the 20's - I resolve to search that out later. A whole display of Alexandre Yersin, a handsome fellow with a good beard, and an imposing-looking lycee named after him. The market building constructed just after the Second World war. How splendid it all looked, and how little the French could enjoy it, before being booted out. They never got to see the trees they planted in such abundance, around the lake, and in the new parks and spanking golf-courses, come to maturity.
I walk to the outskirts of town to find the station. There it is at last, surrounded by bougainvillea and a lovely garden of potted trees. Now alas only toy trains run from it, for the tourists. Nevertheless it is a haunting place. I imagine the comings and goings. The administrators coming up from the cities to visit their dutiful wives, who have escaped the heat and turmoil below for the season. Honeymoon couples arriving to boat on the lake, and have croissants in the cafes, and do whatever else it is that honeymoon couples do. I am reluctant to leave, I have such a strong sense of the place, and its whispers.
I walk to the grand Lycee Yersin, built to educate future colonial administrators for a thousand years. The French have gone, and the Americans have gone and the country begins to sing its own song.
Back in the hotel I wonder who this Yersin was. Some cool colonial administrator? Adventurer? Exploitative scoundrel? I Google him. What a surprise! Amongst many other things, he was co-discoverer of the bacillus which causes bubonic plague, and is named after him, Yersinia pestis. He set up Pasteur Institutes in Saigon, and in Nha Trang. I passed by the latter yesterday! He set up Hanoi's first medical school. On his tomb is written : "Benefactor and humanist, venerated by the Vietnamese people." His name remains, where many other colonial names have been execrated and erased.
peter fonda, dennis hopper, here we come
At the breakfast table I regale my Dutch and Estonian companions with tales of our upcoming motor-bike safari. They ooh and aah, to my great satisfaction, I who was too lily-livered to contemplate motorbikes a couple of days ago.
We met up last night with Mr.Nguyen - 'call me Wing'- , Nam and Khan, who constitute 'Easy Riders Inc, Dalat', and around a hotel table we plot our route, and discuss terms. We peruse their book of hand-written testimonials from happy customers (one from Pat of LLandudno, whom we met in Hoi An, who turns out to have been 70!) and clinch the deal. Tomorrow we set off at dawn for a four day trip which will take us further into the Central Highlands, and then all the way to Saigon for Christmas. I can hardly believe how heroic I am about to be.
Back in about 1967 I acquired a Honda scooter. That year I was a medical student in town, but living, still marooned, in a South London suburb, which seemed ever more remote from modern life as the 60's fizzed and buzzed out of its epicentre in Chelsea. A scooter I hoped would put me in touch with the pulse of the city, and its flower-themed Zeitgeist . It was my first ever private means of motor locomotion, and the world perhaps would be my oyster.
I soon learnt to hate the Honda. It had a meagre 49cc engine, and had been previously owned by a gargantuan baker who had flattened its suspension. It never achieved a running speed above 15mph, and in a headwind you might as well have been going backwards. I bought it in October, at the beginning of a harsh and endless winter, came perilously close to frostbite, and sold it in the spring to the next sucker down the line.
Later that year I bought my first Mini, second-hand, KMX 201B (the only registration number of all the cars I have driven that I have been able to remember, and still remember after 40 years), grey exterior with tan upholstery. It was love at first sight, at the seedy car-merchant's on Brixton Hill, in the shadow of the Prison.
The Mini had the original sliding windows, and a pull-cord to open the doors, and in the middle of what you could not call a dashboard, so devoid was it of any features, stared the Cyclop's eye of the speedometer. It was a joy to drive, and of course was the epitome of 60's cool. I had arrived.
Today I explore Dalat, a hill station built by the French. We are far above the damp and fog, and cloying humidity, of the coast, and the air sparkles at 1500 metres.
We met up last night with Mr.Nguyen - 'call me Wing'- , Nam and Khan, who constitute 'Easy Riders Inc, Dalat', and around a hotel table we plot our route, and discuss terms. We peruse their book of hand-written testimonials from happy customers (one from Pat of LLandudno, whom we met in Hoi An, who turns out to have been 70!) and clinch the deal. Tomorrow we set off at dawn for a four day trip which will take us further into the Central Highlands, and then all the way to Saigon for Christmas. I can hardly believe how heroic I am about to be.
Back in about 1967 I acquired a Honda scooter. That year I was a medical student in town, but living, still marooned, in a South London suburb, which seemed ever more remote from modern life as the 60's fizzed and buzzed out of its epicentre in Chelsea. A scooter I hoped would put me in touch with the pulse of the city, and its flower-themed Zeitgeist . It was my first ever private means of motor locomotion, and the world perhaps would be my oyster.
I soon learnt to hate the Honda. It had a meagre 49cc engine, and had been previously owned by a gargantuan baker who had flattened its suspension. It never achieved a running speed above 15mph, and in a headwind you might as well have been going backwards. I bought it in October, at the beginning of a harsh and endless winter, came perilously close to frostbite, and sold it in the spring to the next sucker down the line.
Later that year I bought my first Mini, second-hand, KMX 201B (the only registration number of all the cars I have driven that I have been able to remember, and still remember after 40 years), grey exterior with tan upholstery. It was love at first sight, at the seedy car-merchant's on Brixton Hill, in the shadow of the Prison.
The Mini had the original sliding windows, and a pull-cord to open the doors, and in the middle of what you could not call a dashboard, so devoid was it of any features, stared the Cyclop's eye of the speedometer. It was a joy to drive, and of course was the epitome of 60's cool. I had arrived.
Today I explore Dalat, a hill station built by the French. We are far above the damp and fog, and cloying humidity, of the coast, and the air sparkles at 1500 metres.
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