Animal, Vegetable, Tofu

Monday 13th October: As we travel further out of the city and towards the Mekong Delta, the landscape grows gradually less built and gradually more farmed. I gaze out of the window of the bus and watch the last of the horn blaring, motorbike buzzing roads retreat to be replaced by less horns, less bikes and more potholes. The bus jolts constantly, bouncing us in our seats, a situation which is surprisingly enjoyable. By the time we pull into a service station the landscape is green and the station itself is an open shack with hammocks strung across it, something we will begin to see everywhere as we move further out. A hen broods protectively over her bandy legged chicks by the toilets and we drink out of coconuts which seem softer fleshed than in town.

We know we have definitely left the city when we replace bus with small boat, and head out to Unicron island, one of four named after sacred animals (Phoenix, Dragon, Unicorn and, rather less legendary, tortoise). The bee keepers we are visiting are waiting for us and seem rather too used to tourists, holding out wooden slats covered in tiny bees for us to hold and pose for photographs.

"Don't drop" warns our guide, "or bees will kill us." This does not do much to placate those in our group who are afraid of bees. I am not, and hold the honeycomb with relative ease, feeling most intrepid while I do so.

I am apparently less intrepid when we are moved on to the next part of the tourist machine, posing with a large python.

"She looks a lot more natural with that snake than you." says M, after I hand the poor snake over to the next sweaty tourist. Rubbish. I was brilliant with the snake. I am a natural. I am basically Saint Francis. I don't know what he thinks he's talking about. And we have the photos to prove it. (I note that only the women hold the snake. The men hang well back and hide behind their cameras).

Actually I feel sorry for the snake. 

"He can't bite." Says our guide, reassuringly. I am fairly sure Pythons kill their prey by squeezing them rather than biting, and I am suspicious as to why exactly he can't bite. What have we done to him to render him so inauthentically docile? I am not told the answer but there is a tell tale scar beneath the snake's chin (if a snake has a chin) which hints at foul play. I tell the snake silently that I am sorry that he has been relegated from graceful and deadly predator to photographic prop. I tell him I hope when I held him I didn't hurt him and that I recognise the role reversal, the natural way of things being that mankind fears snakes for their power and poison. The snake is impassive. Oddly, I don't think he understands. 

My ability to communicate telepathically with the snake, however, is at least surpassed by my ability to do so with other humans. As we sit down to taste Jasmine tea with some of the longan honey produced on site by the diligent bees (longan being the plant the bees largely feed on), one of our fellow travellers, a man we shall call Dirk, who has been causing a fair amount of fuss already with constant questions and general lack of social or cultural awareness, picks up one of the limes which the Vietnamese lady serving us squeezed into the tea, and simply bites into it. Her face is a picture, as presumably is mine, because she meets my eye and dissolves into politely suppressed giggles. It's a nice moment because she doesn't speak much English and I even less Vietnamese, but a feel a little guilty that it is at Dirk's expense. Dirk is a natural figure of fun though entirely without intent, but he is also somehow endearing despite being infuriating and I have great admiration for his courage in travelling alone through a country which clearly baffles him.

We set off again, in tiny four person wooden boats, through a tunnel of tropical greenery which looks exactly like it had in any film I have ever seen about the Vietnam war. Sorry, the American war. I have been calling it the 17 year war to demonstrate my impartiality, and because it saddens me that it went on for so long. 

The journey is idyllic, drifting along wearing conical hats provided for us, even down to the little newts on the riverbanks, bouncing around in the mud. Make no mistake though, it is a landscape as deadly as it is beautiful. The river water is a brown colour from the natural silt on the bottom. It is searingly hot. And we sit idly in our boat watching a sack full of something drift gently past us. It takes a little while, and a wave of shocked gasping, as we realise it is a decomposing animal. Whether drowned in the sack or a pre-killed carcass it is unclear. It looks a little dog-like.

We 'moor'. By which I mean that the boats pull up close to the wooden plank-way leafing onto the shore and we balance, wobble and jump the rest. This is done much more naturally and with more ease by our Vietnamese guides. And me of course. I am as agile as a mountain goat. Or a bouncing newt.

Lunch, for us, is vegetarian and deliciously simple. It is also possible to pay a little extra and try the King Cobra. The smell of cooked snake, mingling with the sound of chewing drifts on the still air. To the side of the restaurant a King Cobra lies, impassive at the bottom of his cage. If we wanted we could hold him before we ate his comrades.

I am sounding critical so I will point out that the day so far has been amazing. Deeply interesting and full of hospitality. The Vietnamese are some of the smiliest people I have met even in the face of the most rude of tourists, and the tour, while whirlwind, has been hugely interesting. We kill and eat animals in England too. We domesticate and interbreed them, show them off and encage them. Hypocritically, I ask what the snake tastes like. Chicken, apparently.

We traverse the slow river again to move to another island. "Keep hands in boat" warns our guide. "Because of Crocodile." In retrospect I think this was a joke but I enjoy feeling safely endangered all the same. I saw nothing that looked remotely like a crocodile, but when I tell the story back home, there are going to be crocodiles. Plural.

We visit a coconut candy making workshop. I think M has gone into some detail on the process itself in his blog but suffice to say it is remarkably lightly mechanised and largely done by hand. The coconuts are peeled, flesh grated and discarded, the shells used as fuel to heat the fire for the pans which melt coconut, condensed milk, malt and other ingredients for the candy, which is rolled, chopped and wrapped twice. All by hand. 

I don't know, perhaps there are factories for coconut candy full of chrome and steel which do almost everything via machine and which chuck the coconut shells into the river. Perhaps the hand made workshops are just for the tourists. I hope not. But maybe that is just as fascinating. The idea of an entirely mechanised product should, surely, be of note in itself. Do we in the west take bus loads of tourists to frozen pea factories? Perhaps we should.

M and I buy some coconut candy. There is a short but amusing episode in which we peel off the outer layer of paper to find a second, translucent layer underneath. After futile attempts to remove this we realise it is rice paper and we can eat it. We look forward to watching other travellers make the same mistake. No one does.

Another boat ride and we visit a fruit orchard and taste mango, dragon fruit, tiny bananas and rambutan fruit while a group of amateur musicians play us traditional music. It's lovely. 

Piling back into the mini bus we merrily bounce and hop our way towards Vinh Long. I stare out of the window at the snatches of life I can see as we pass.

A couple ride past on separate motorbikes, the man holding the woman's foot to keep them together.

School children cycle past on some of the first push bikes we have seen, holding the long white tails of their school uniform out of the way of the chain.

Shacks made of sheets of corrugated iron stand along the roadside. Two children play outside them bare foot in the mud before running, simultaneously, back indoors.

When the bus finally stops our guide tells us we can disembark for a rest stop. The journey will take another hour. There are moans of dismay. I am surprised at the sort of things some of our fellow travellers complain about. So far the rain (a monsoon shower around midday) and the distance between destinations have been top of the list. I am not sure what our guide can do about these. If he could control either of them I doubt he would waste his time being a tour guide. 

I run to the toilet (its been a long and jerky journey). When I emerge I find that, ttypically, everyone is waiting for me. So far each rest stop had featured, somehow, me being the last to emerge from the toilet. Despite my protestations that this is due to my polite queuing habits, rather than a strange yearning for the inside of Vietnamese toilet cubicles, M informs me that he has already developed a special 'I'm sorry, my wife is still in the toilet' face. I ask for a repeat performance of this face, as I have not been present for the original. He provides it. It's a cross between a smile and a grimace. I tell him it looks just like his normal face.

It turns out that our home stay is on Vinh Long, and so we will not be travelling on with the rest of the group. We get into a boat and cross to an island off the main Vinh Long city. 

We had expected something rather more primitive. In fact our 'homestay' is more like a b and b, filled with beautiful wood carvings on the walls and with our own room, bathroom and mosquito net.

After we 'help' to make an amazing dinner we sit for a while outside, drinking in the quiet and the greenery. We have eaten tofu twice today and it has been beautifully prepared and tasted different both times. On neither occasion did it taste like chicken.

I hear no motorbikes and some enthusiastic cheeping which suggests several nests with newly hatched chicks in the roofing. I lie in a hammock under the stars and the dog comes to  sit with me, eventually wriggling underneath the hammock to give my bottom a friendly nibble. Despite warnings of even more ferocious mosquitoes than in the city, he is the only thing to nibble me this evening. And the result is less itchy.

In the shadows of the surrounding plant life I see a slow moving grey thing and point it out to M excitedly. "Look!" I say, "a snake!" I am pleased to see one which has managed to evade capture and retain its dignity. M squints into the darkness. "I think that's a stone." he says. I don't care. When I tell the story later, it will always be a snake.

Before bed I take a happy shower. I think that possibly this is heaven. On the floor of the shower room there is even a flower petal. On further investigation it turns out to be a peice of lettuce I have trodden in from dinner.

Still. I crawl under our mosquito net and drift off to sleep contentedly.

When I tell the story, it will always be a flower.