Wednesday 15 October: We begin heart stoppingly early at half past six in the morning, though by Vietnamese standards this is positively a lie in. Vietnamese, we know from talking to O, get up very early (think four or five am), may sleep in the middle of the day for a couple of hours and, depending on age and part of the country, may retire to bed as early as eight. It makes sense given the climate. We have been attempting to emulate it, at least to some extent, but its difficult. Old habits die hard.
Dirk is most concerned about breakfast. "When will we have it?" he asks, constantly. The guide, who probably breakfasted some hours before, and is trying to navigate merging us with another tour group who will be crossing the border to Cambodia later, and must full out the necessary paperwork, does his best.
"Noodle soup?" he suggests, somehow still finding the energy to try to please. Noodle soup, or 'pho' is a traditional Vietnamese breakfast dish. It's fantastic for stocking you up for the day and is generally delicious. We have eaten a couple of variations on it since being here, and breakfasts made for us by O, which have been unfailingly delicious, have often looked rather more like the UK concept of 'dinner' than 'breakfast'. Frankly I love it. It beats cornflakes any day. Even crunchy nut ones (though that's a harder contest).
Dirk is outraged. "Noodle soup!" he says, "It's half past six in the morning! I don't want noodle soup. Where is the bread?" The guide makes a swift arrangement with the waitress in a nearby restaurant in Vietnamese. Whether it included the words 'stupid tourists' or not, we will never know. She nods and hurries off. But Dirk brims with questions. "How much?" he says, "I will pay only ten thousand dong. Where is the bread? I want to see the bread first." At the last minute he changes his mind. The guide has to run back to the restaurant to cancel the order. I miss the rest of this exchange because I am utilising the toilet facilities. Again.
We pile onto a boat which takes us to a floating fish farm. The fish are piled together in small compartments beneath the floating platform. The guide feeds them, a process which makes the water boil with them. I am pleased for the fish farmer, that he has a trade. But cue the usual vegetarian angst.
"Do you think the fish like being all crammed together?" M asks me in a stage whisper. "They love it" I say.
We are passed, after the fish farm, to a different guide, who is, I think, with a different tour company. He takes us to a traditional settlement of the 'cham' people. They are a gentle minority group, making their living from growing rice, drying fish and, for the women, weaving fabrics. They live simply and peacefully, with a strong Muslim faith.
We enter a room in which a young cham women, modestly dressed and with her hair well covered, operates a loom.
"See here ladies and gentlemen", says our new guide, "you see the loom?" We see the loom. We wait for him to tell us how it works, how many hours a day she might use it, how the thread is sourced and dyed, etc.
"Listen to the sound it makes" commands our guide. Obediently, we do. It is a rhythmic clattering, followed by a swoosh as the thread reaches the edge of the fabric. "She is saying," says our guide, "I am single, I am single, I am single." He laughs heartily at his own joke and repeats it a few times. I am fairly sure the girl understands, as he has already told us that cham children learn cham, Vietnamese and English. With admirable grace she continues without changing expression. Presumably he makes this same joke with each tourist group that gets farmed through. I am deeply uncomfortable. We are all clicking away with our cameras and I am sure that the Muslim faith does not permit the photography of a woman's face. We are making jokes about her marital status, which in this context is a serious business and we proceed to stand on the grounds of the cham mosque, wearing very little and cackling. It all feels wholly inappropriate.
But what do I know? The cham are selling handicrafts which are presumably largely bought by tourists. We are part of their living.
Back in the bus, we jolt for a while, stopping briefly to take in an amazing cave pagoda near Chau Doc which is like an ever unravelling maze of small stairways and tunnels leading onto various chambers and different icons and statues. At this point it is only us and Dirk, the others having set off across the border to Cambodia. Dirk doesn't want to remove his shoes to enter the pagoda. He is convinced someone is going to steal them. When we rejoin him and the guide they are seated in a cafe at the bottom of the steps leading up the mountain towards the pagoda - and finally Dirk has got his bread. He has made some attempt to barter the shop owner down from her already very cheap price, something the guide is refusing to translate for him. We drink some iced coffee while we wait and the smiling shop owner gestures to me to come and see her baby, fast asleep in a tiny hammock. She is a great deal friendlier to us than she has been to Dirk.
When, after a little more driving, we stop for a couple of hours at Vinh Long, we find ourselves sitting at a market stall nearly opposite Dirk, who is trying to barter the market holders down from rock bottom prices. Except this isn't the sort of place where you haggle. It's causing an enormous fuss.
But let's not give poor Dirk a hard time. If you read the guide books and do your research it is quite possible to arrive somewhere like Vietnam convinced you will be robbed or scammed at every corner. Dirk is just hyper aware. And he's travelling alone. Hats off to him.
This doesn't stop him being deeply embarrassing. Or deeply rude. But it goes some way to explain it. We are not much more hardened travellers ourselves. But we have British politeness drilled into the very core of us. And whilst on the one hand it can constrain you horribly, it saves you, at least, from outright rudeness. Not from shyness or from appearing cold. But the self deprecating , constantly apologetic demeanor helps a little in terms of coming out of the inevitable social gaffes you will make when you travel, smelling, if not of roses, at least not too similar to manure.
We eat our meal quietly, using the spoons the market holder has given us, which she clearly keeps for foreigners despite actually preferring chopsticks and eulogise in the slightly patronising broken English you find yourself adopting when abroad about how good the meal was on our way out. We may be causing less trouble. But we're really quite dull.
We see, from the bus window on our final journey back to Ho Chi Minh, a number of people begging, something we haven't seen at all in the city. People beg or are homeless on the streets back home, not that it doesn't bother me there, but the image that really, stubbornly sticks with me is of a little boy, maybe seven or eight, sitting on the side of the road and crying. His hand is on his stomach and the tears are real, they glint in the sunlight. A myriad of traffic hurries past him. There is nothing I can do and we have passed him in an instant, but the memory doesn't leave me easily.
I have talked to a number of Vietnamese people now about poverty, and the answers are all too familiar to me. Gaps between rich and poor exacerbated by the failure of the rich to pay their taxes, difficulty in knowing who is con artist and who genuinely needy, money going to money, a government working hard to resolve these issues but reforms are complicated, lengthy and economically risky. These are the problems faced by so many countries no matter what their politics or who angelic or despotic their government. It's a problem which has its base in human nature. The pull of power and money is strong indeed. How many people, truly, can say they are not swayed by any form of it?
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