April 24th, 2010

Narrow dusty roads (paths) are lined with homemade fences. Labor and materials are free. When it rains, this sandy soil turns to super slippery goop.

In some places, cactus rows replace fences.

This old house is made of bamboo and twigs with a palm thatch roof. It is probably for animals or storage, but people still live in such houses. Salem's brothers built one on the property with all of the materials scavenged on the property. No nails involved.

There are haystacks everywhere. This is the preferred way to store rice straw for animal food. They are tall and thin and supported by a pole in the center.

This us the afternoon market (picture taken in the morning). Every neighborhood has a morning, or main, market which is larger. The afternoon market is useful as well as a social gathering place. Notice the low tech system for keeping utility wires off the road.

This is a Viet Cong war memorial cemetary. There are about 300 graves here, but this is only one of at least two in this small town. That's a lot of graves for a population of only a few thousand. Salem's maternal grandfather, who first fought against the French, then the Americans, then the South Vietnamese is memorialized in the other cemetary in town. He died on the last day of the war in 1975 after 20 years at war and his body was never found ( a real problem for a Vietnamese family that is unable to properly bury their relative). There are no publicly recognized graves for the dead of the South Vietnamese army. They are buried in private family plots without recognition of their military service. There was a National Cemetary near Saigon, but shortly after the war ended, the families were notified to come take away their dead, as the cemetary would no longer be maintained.

This wide agricultural belt contains the fields of many local residents. Salem's family has several widely separated fields of about 50 x 100 feet each. Notice that not all utility poles are forked sticks.

When I was out riding my motorcycle, Salem called and said they were going to work in the fields and I was encouraged to join in. Today they were planting peanuts and mom, Salem, two sisters, a brother, and a niece were involved. Mom is closest to the camera with the hoe. While she worked her way turning a 4-5" row, the niece followed and dropped raw shelled peanuts every 3-4 inches. On the next pass, mom would turn over another row, covering the seeds in the previous row as she uncovered the next one. I followed, breaking up clods and removing weeds, but was not really very helpful.

Walk in the new neighborhood

Our house is at the dead end of a 100 meter long little street wide enough for two motorbikes to pass, but too small for a car. When we need a cab for the airport we have to meet him by the secondary road. That unpaved road leads about 3/4 mile to one of the urban roads of Nha Trang. Yes, that's barbed wire along the side of road. And yes, I think about that every time I ride through on my motorcycle.



A sharp right turn leads down to the dead end and our house.



We are protected by a tall iron fence and gate. Our landlord's brother is in the wrought iron fence business.



This house is single story. Pictures of the inside another time.



There is actually a yard with plants and "grass". It needs watering, but never cutting. At night the yard is full of toads.



The house came fully furnished including our own madonna in her grotto. The furnishing also included a dog which was replaced when the first one ran away. When the second one disappeared, the owner decided to replace him with a new dining table. (His other brother is a wood worker).



Beside our house is a pond full of aquatic plants (many edible). Guys come and fish here, often using electrodes attached to a car batter which they carry on their back as they wade in the pond. The frogs at night are deafening.





Straw mat weaving seems to be the home industry in our neighborhood. There are usually several looms at work nearby, but today none were in operation.



The neighborhood is heavily Catholic (in addition to our Madonna in the Grotto)



The Christian graveyards are quite different from Buddhist graves which seem to be more spread out. If you've ever seen a Caribbean cemetary you'll see a similarity.



But then right up the road is a little pagoda complex. Vietnamese call all temples "pagodas", but this tower is what is called to mind when I hear "Pagoda".



The dragon motif is inidicative of the Chinese branch of Buddhism which dominates from Saigon north. In the Mekong delta and through Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, the cobra dominates the temples, indicative of the Indian branch of Buddhism.



Did you know that Buddhism has a flag? This is it. A lot of the rancor between the Buddhists and the Catholic dominated South Vietnamese government in the runup to the war was symbolised by the government's prohibition of the Buddhists flying their flag in public, while Catholics flew the Vatican flag at their celebrations.



This water buffalo was quite curious and concerned about my approach. A moment later he lumbered out of the water to get away.



In Nha Trang, you take your garbage to central collection points. Ours is about 200 yards from our house. Luckily more chickens than rats hang around.



I always thought of watermelon as an American dessert, but it is one of the most popular here and in China.



This guy sells lottery tickets from his little table every day. This is a common job for the poor and you will commonly be approached by 5-6 people selling tickets while you sit in a coffee shop. If you say no to one, the next one standing beside him will ask you anyway.



This little convenience store is representative of dozens of others on my 3 mile walk. The strips hanging from the ceiling are individual ketchup-type packages of shampoo and conditioner which women seem to buy in that form rather than in bulk. They will usually take the shampoo to a hairshop where they can get a wash and massage for around a dollar.



This guy lives in wooden one room shack. He was eating lunch in his front door and agreed to my taking his picture. He seems to take some pains to make his little abode look nicer.



This rickety bridge is on our route to our friends, Doc and Bao Anh's house. If I can rig a helmet cam, I'll show the route which is kind of interesting. When a big wind blows, a lot of the planks of the bridge blow away, but it is rebuilt in 1/2 a day. The toll is 5 cents for a bicycle and 10 cents for a motorcycle (12 cents with a passenger).



Mountains are always visible in the background.

Tet 2010 Preparations

For most of us baby boomers, the word "Tet" is inextricably bound up in the phrase "Tet Offensive", the episode in 1968 when the Viet Cong simultaneously rose up in cities across Vietnam, famously taking and holding the Citadel in Hue for several weeks and briefly even entering the US embassy grounds in Saigon. While it would be difficult to deem it a military victory, the fact that the enemy could mount such a large scale, coordinated attack was totally at odds with official optimistic reports that the public had been receiving about the effects of years of rapid escalation of our forces in the country. The PR victory was enormous and most analysts consider this to be the beginning of the end of the war.

Tet is, in fact, the lunar New Year celebration in Viet Nam or what you usually call Chinese New Year in the States. The first day of Tet is February 14th this year, but preparations have been underway for weeks.

In the cities, decorations very reminiscent of Christmas lights in the States are going up on the streets. We're in the countryside now, but I'll try to get some pictures when we get back to Nha Trang. Most houses and shops have signs "Chuc Mung Nam Moi" (Happy New Year), which like some people's Christmas lights, never come down before next New Year.

Forget about it if you want to go anywhere except by your own vehicle. Bus, train, and plane tickets have been sold out for most of the month of February for months. Planning my recent trip to the States, I had to get back to Saigon by February 3rd the latest date I was able to procure a domestic ticket back to Central Vietnam, even though I was shopping in December. The highways are jammed with speeding busses as drivers try to get one extra profitable round trip from South to North before the holiday. Mixing this with excessive celebratory drinking and the frequent highway traffic tragedies are not surprising.

Flower markets are popping up in all the market areas. The most popular plants seem to be mums, with huge pots of yellow mums everywhere. I remember a huge flower market in Saigon last Tet when I was stranded there with a much larger variety of beautiful flowers, most coming from the mountain city of DaLat. Salem bought us a couple of beautiful pots of mums, almost as tall as she is. Each cost about $10US, but like the guy who buys his Christmas tree on Christmas Eve to take advantage of the lowered prices, she expects to go back this weekend for some discounts. I'm not allowed to go on these shopping outing because the price immediately doubles when I'm there.

At least in this farm household, the preparation of "cakes" for the many expected visitors is well underway, but I'm pretty sure it goes on everywhere. Each day Salem's mom makes a different one, often using instruments and pans that have come down to her from earlier generations. The other day (unfortunately I was without my camera) she mixed rice flour with a sugar water syrup into a very dry blend. You could form a ball, but if you put it down, it would fall apart of it's own weight. It was almost like a pie crust before the liquid is added. Anyway, this powder was poured into a metal ring about 1" tall. A little depression was made and filled with a sweet paste, and then a metal cap inserted in the ring. This was pounded with a block of wood to about 3/4 of its original volume. When pushed out of the ring it was a pretty little cake with a decorative pattern on top. Rather than being cooked, these were put in the sun for a day.

Next day, she and Salem made some little fluted cakes based on wheat flour. Because there are no ovens in the countryside, an elaborate little pan was used that sits on a bed of coals, but also has a top which is covered with coals. After the pan which sits directly on coals is heated and buttered, batter is ladled into the little indentations in the bottom of the pan. The top, which is covered with glowing coals is then lowered into place and 8-10 minutes later the cakes are done and the process starts again. This year's batch was mixed from 7 cups each of flour, eggs, and sugar and took most of the afternoon and evening. Soon after starting, Salem's mom was called to the field to retrieve sweet potato cuttings for the livestock that grandpa had abandonned, so Salem ended up with most of the task, well into darkness. Because there is only one flashlight, and cakes baking takes preference at Tet, mom had to return from the fields in pitch darkness.




Tet is not a time of major gift giving, like Christmas, so although the markets are full of people buying food, a lot of stores have already been closing so people can return to their ancestral homes for the 1st day of Tet. By the second day, when we ride the 5-6 hours to Nha Trang, we don't expect to find much but gas stations open along the way.
I was awakened today by calls that breakfast had just been delivered; excited, enthusiastic calls. i'm not a marine biologist, so maybe you can help me undertand what I had for breakfast.



How can you resist when you've got a sweet girl doing all the hard work? I did supplement with a bowl of corn flakes.


At 100 years, Grandpa and Grandma are pretty much off the hook for preparations.


10 days off school, 4 new puppies, and all the coconut shells you could ask for - what's not to like about Tet?


The ancestors need to be remembered too. Salem (above) and mom (second) prepare flower and fruit arrangements for the family altar.

Vietnamese Sweat Lodge

I returned from my quick trip to San Francisco and Scottsdale with some gifts from my grandchildren - a very feverish cold/flu and a case of pink eye. We are staying at the farm house for two weeks until the Tet New Year on the 14th. Salem and her family gave me 3 days to get well my way and I wasn't having much success, when it was announced that they were putting together what I have to call a sweat lodge - a 2000 year old cure. Ignoring the many multi hundred year old graves behind the house, I agreed to give it a try.

First, Salem and her mom built me a tent out of straw mats and blankets.



Next, a big pot of 8 different leaves from the farm and environs was boiled. This did not appear to be Colonel Sanders secret recipe.




With the pot in place I was asked to strip naked and squat in front of the pot inside the tent. I come up short in the squatting department in comparison to any Vietnamese, so a small stool was found for me. After about 20 minutes of breathing in the vapors and sweating I was allowed to come out and sat down for a very hot bowl of rice chowder heaping with black pepper.



I have no earthly idea if it was related, but about 3 hours later, having spent a few hours napping under a comforter, I went up to the rooftop to read a while. I broke into a vicious sweat and my fever broke. My jet lag ceased the next day as well. Picture a bunch of naked guys in first class huddled over pots of steaming leaves on their flights to Asia to solve jet lag. Might work on global warming too.

Sunday Ride to Song Cau

I rode my motorcycle up to Song Cau today to visit Salem's family, check out the progress on the house, and just enjoy riding. Song Cau is about 40 miles up the coast on Route 1A, the coastal highway. "Coastal" highway is a bit of a misnomer since the road is seldom in sight of the ocean during the entire 1000 miles from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi. One reason for this is that for major stretches, especially in Phu Yen province, there are large bays separated from the ocean by mountainous islands and peninsulas. These bays provide beautiful vistas as the road emerges from the several passes along the highway.
I stuck with the highway going to Song Cau because I was anxious to get there. Work on the house proceeds a little more slowly now as it rains part of each day, but it's looking great as it gets it coat of stucco and paint.




Soon after arrival, we sat down for lunch (at 11 AM). Vietnamese eat lunch early because most of them get up at 430 AM or thereabouts.

There was a salad (meat is pretty common on Vietnamese salads, normally beef or seafood), some grilled fish, rice (not shown), and question cake. The word "cake" here applies to noodles and the "question" apparently refers to the curves which resemble question marks.

On the way back to Tuy Hoa, I opted to get off the main road and try to find my way home on the back roads. These skirted the west side of some of the bays and consisted of dirt paths for a lot of the way. The bays are fished by fisherman with nets in very shallow canoes. Along the edges are many shrimp pens, a lot of which are abandonned at this time because the industry was overbuilt a few years ago.





In the fields along the way were, as usual, many tombs. These are often decorated with swastikas, which were used as symbols in Eastern religions for more than 2000 years before being used by Nazis in the 20th century. Nevertheless, I am still taken aback when I first see them. A piece on Buddist use of the symbol follows below.

Buddhism originated in India in the 5th century BC and inherited the manji or swastika. Also known as a "yung drung"^[16] in ancient Tibet, it was a graphical representation of eternity^[17]. Today the symbol is used in Buddhist art and scripture and represents dharma, universal harmony, and the balance of opposites. One can see swastika on the Pillars of Ashoka where the swastika is a symbol of the cosmic dance around a fixed center and guards against evil.

The paired swastika symbols are included, at least since the Liao Dynasty, as part of the Chinese language, the symbolic sign for the character 萬 or 万 (wàn in Mandarin, man in Korean, Cantonese and Japanese, vạn in Vietnamese) meaning "all" or "eternality" (lit. myriad) and as 卐, which is seldom used. Swastika marks the beginning of many Buddhist scriptures. The swastika (in either orientation) appears on the chest of some statues of Gautama Buddha and is often incised on the soles of the feet of the Buddha in statuary. Because of the association of the right-facing swastika with Nazism, Buddhist swastika (outside India only) after the mid-20th century are almost universally left-facing: 卍. This form of the swastika is often found on Chinese food packaging to signify that the product is vegetarian and can be consumed by strict Buddhists. It is often sewn into the collars of Chinese children's clothing to protect them from evil spirits.

In 1922, the Chinese Syncretist movement Daoyuan founded the philanthropic association Red Swastika Society in imitation of the Red Cross. The association was very active in China during the 1920s and the 1930s.