noodles | travel blog

I was sitting at a noodle stall the other day, when a Vietnamese man stopped and said hello. He asked me where I was from, how long I had been in town, etc. so I assumed he was a motorbike driver.

I'm staying in a very touristy street, where a large population of motorbike drivers offer their services with great enthusiasm. They sit on their parked bikes, clapping their hands and waving at passing tourists from a geat distance, occasionally shouting out surprising greetings to turn the head of a potential customer. (The current favourite is "Hellomoto?" - from the ad.) One look in their direction is enough for the most eager ones to jump off their bike and walk with you for a while. If you're already standing still they will sidle up and start a brief polite exchange before offering you a one-hour sightseeing tour around the city. It's a bit awkward. I know that they’re only trying to make a living, but faced with so many people constantly battling for your attention you tend to switch off a bit.

It turned out that this man actually was a motorbike driver. In contrast to the other ones I've spoken to, he had very good English. Sometimes he would close his eyes in mid-sentence, holding his hand up as a sign for me to wait, while he mumbled to himself in Vietnamese. When he was happy with the wording, he would open his eyes and deliver complex and idiomatic sentences with great confidence, followed by a stream of apologies for keeping me waiting so long. I was very impressed and asked him where he had learned to speak the language so well.

He told me that every evening when he comes home from work he has dinner with his family and then, late at night, no matter how tired he is, he sits down to study His wife tells him he's crazy. He showed me a copy book full of phrases and sentences that he writes down (presumably from a dictionary) and then practices in spare moments during the day. I remember this entry:

significant
She gave him a significant nod/wink.

He likes talking to foreigners, as it gives him the opportunity to improve his skills. He said that he was really happy to have met me, as a lot of tourists are very suspicious of his intentions. Given that I was still, up until this moment, expecting the conversation to turn into a sales pitch, I suddenly felt extremely stupid. Not knowing what to say, I asked him how long he had been working in tourism.

"The story of my life is complicated," he said.

In 1975 my friend had just completed high school with the highest marks in his home town. He was due to go to university, and spent his time reading Western classics. When the South Vietnamese government fell that year, his father, who had been working for the government, was sent to jail for more than a decade. His children were refused entry into higher education and banned from any employment in the public sector. When my friend's father was released from jail, he remarried and moved abroad, severing all contact with his family. My friend had various jobs until he arrived in this street around ten years ago and started working as a motorbike driver for the tourists. He's in his late forties now, telling me that you have to learn new things all the time to keep your mind occupied. That's why he studies English. He tells his kids that knowledge is more important than money, and that the life they live is their destiny. Sometimes he's angry with his father, but he doesn't tell them that.

On the day of the Tet Festival (Vietnamese New Year), I went to one of Saigon's flower markets. Flowers are clearly the decoration of choice for the festival, and huge specialised markets appear in the weeks leading up to the New Year. It seems that no matter how modest your shop, house or river boat, for Tet you buy at least one pot of yellow chrysanthemum and place it outside your door. The more money you have, the more decorations you buy. Two, three or four flower pots, New Year banners and flags, baby Buddha cut-outs, dragons decorated with fruit and, in the foyers of the luxury hotels, entire forests of man-sized potted orange trees.

In order to get to the market I had to cross a rather wide and very busy street. Motorbikes are the main means of transportation in Saigon. I've later learned there is one for every three inhabitants. (There also seems to be on average three people on each bike, but that's probably a coincidence.) I soon realised that there wasn't going to be a lull in the onslaught of horns, fumes and faces, and it seemed highly unlikely that someone would stop and wave me across. So I spent some time studying the local pedestrians. As it turned out, it's quite simple. Just step into the traffic and keep walking very slowly until you get to the other side. Don't hesitate, don't stop, and don't start running. (From later experience I would add that you shouldn't cross at a spot where a spectacular and unexpected sight suddenly appears around a corner, as drivers in Saigon are happy to take their eyes off the road for quite some time.)

So, the flower market. Where I'm from, if you leave it until 2 pm on Christmas Eve before you get the tree, you're inevitably going to come home with a real shocker. This was not the case here. An hour before closing time there was a huge selection of top-quality plants and flowers on display. As nervous vendors started lowering their prices, the shrewdest punters pulled up on their motorbikes. I soon realised that the latecomers weren't out to save on the decorations. They just wanted more for their money. Mothers pointed and paid, and sons and dads strapped gravity-defying heaps of vegetation onto the motorbikes. Then the whole family climbed on and swerved out into the street again. That afternoon, all over town, you would see little islands of flowers floating through rivers of traffic.

Almost all the motorbikes you see in Saigon are 100 cc. Many people ride Chinese makes, and there are apparently a few domestic ones. But Honda seems to have the lion's share of the market. That evening I went to an outdoor concert venue near where I'm staying. As the crowd sat quietly on plastic chairs waiting for the New Year's show to begin, a man in traditional costume walked onto the stage and gave a lengthy introduction. You didn't have to understand Vietnamese to realise who was sponsoring the event, as the words "Honda Vietnam" and "Ho Chi Min" ended almost every sentence. A couple of posters on the backdrop read "HONDA - The Power of Dreams", and below them was a spotlit red motorbike. After a while two men in suits came onto the stage. The host talked some more, and then one of the suits handed the other one an oversized cheque. I don't know if the crowd had a grudge against imported motorbikes or if they were just eager for the show to start, but the transaction was followed by the shortest sneeze of applause I've ever witnessed.

Three boy bands and four girl bands later, I decided to leave. I had a meal, checked my mail, and was back on the street just before midnight. There was, if possible, even more traffic than before. Everyone was in their Sunday best, riding home from their family celebrations. Outside every shop (next to the chrysanthemums) there was a little table with food offerings for the ancestors. On the pavements, people had lit fires in little metal buckets where they burned sheets of paper that I've later learned is money (not real) for the ancestors to spend in the afterworld. And then, in a large crossroads about 50 metres down the street, I saw the strangest thing: The traffic had stopped. More than a hundred people were sitting on their bikes in the middle of the street, with the engines turned off. As I walked towards them, other motorbikes zipped past me, horns ablaze, trying to force an opening in the crowd. But then they too slowed down and stopped. As I arrived at the scene, I understood: Booooom! Across town, down by the river, the municipal New Year's fireworks were under way. This was one of the few spots in the neighbourhood that you could view it from.

We all watched, applauding the most spectacular displays, until it was over. And then - another once-in-a-lifetime experience - I heard the roar of one hundred motorbike engines starting in unison.

This one's about rice.

Yesterday I had another great chat with the owner of a tiny cafe where I've been having meals for the last few days. As usual there were no other guests. The owner came out of the back room, where he had just finished watching a nature programme about divers on a coral reef. He was in an excellent mood.

"How can the water be so clear! Like glass! And the fish are so beautiful! I would love to try it!"

After he had prepared my meal, he brought his own supper out from the back room and joined me. Our conversation meandered through a diversity of topics, such as diving, malaria, the weather and the Khmer Rouge, before inevitably turned to rice.

Before he owned a cafe, my friend used to travel around inland Cambodia as a rice merchant. He has previously advised me on the four different qualities of rice (settle for number two, steer clear of number four) and the difference between rice from areas where they harvest once a year (delicious) and areas where they harvest twice (tasteless).

This time he told me about the floating rice. You may already know about this, but I'll tell you anyway.

Some background: The Mekong river starts in Tibet, travels down into Laos, and then follows the Thai-Lao border for a while before it cuts through Cambodia on its way to the great delta in the south of Vietnam. In Phnom Pehn, the river is joined by the Tonle Sap river, a smaller tributary which originates in the Tonle Sap lake a 100 km further inland.

In the rainy season the Mekong gets too big for its shoes. It starts pressing its way up the Tonle Sap river, forcing it to reverse its course. Consequently, the water level in the lake starts rising.

The rice farmers around the lake (who, not surprisingly, live in houses built on very, very tall stilts) have prepared for this by sowing floating rice along its banks. As the water level rises, the rice plants germinate and start growing.

The floating rice always stays, well, floating. As the depth of the lake increases from a few feet to over 10 metres, the top of the rice plant is always above the surface, growing up to 10 cm (!) a day to match the rising of the water level. After the rainy season, the flow reverses, the lake recedes and the rice is harvested on dry land, seven months after it was sown. This is apparently one of the oldest known forms of agriculture.

Today the bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh made a stop in a village. As we all got off the bus, some women came over to sell refreshments to the (mostly Cambodian) passengers. Mango, pineapple and fried spiders. That's right. Hundreds of huge black, shiny, greasy spiders piled on a tray.

While we were standing there I had a chat with one of the Cambodian passengers. I asked him about the spiders. He wondered if I might like to try one. I declined politely.

Needless to say, I wondered if he might like to try one. (I was carrying my camera at the time.)

"Oh no," he said, "these ones aren't fresh."

Ah, very clever. Why didn't I think of that. I'm sorry, normally I would ask for a dozen spiders to go and skip the mango altogether. But these ones, well, they're just not up to the standards of freshness that I've grown accustomed to.

Anyway, my knowledge of this culinary oddity is still very sparse. The guy told me that they catch them by flushing them out of their holes in the ground with hot water. I don't know if they come out one by one or in herds. During the short time we were there I didn't see anyone buying spiders, so I don't actually know if they're sold one by one or if you get a whole bag. I also don't know if you only eat the legs and throw away the grape-sized body or if you just pop the whole thing in your mouth.

I do know that I'm losing my audience very fast.

(Sorry folks, this is written in a rush. I've just arrived in Phnom Penh, and I need to do some work before I go to bed.)

On Sunday I crossed the Thai - Cambodian border and got on a bus to Siem Reap, off to see the Angkor temples.

National Road 6 is the worst road I have ever experienced from inside a civilian vehicle. It consisted of a large variety of rocks and potholes covered in fine red sand. At times you couldn't even drink water from a bottle without spilling it all over yourself.

I had made some new friends on the train the night before, and there was a great atmosphere in the bus.

We drove through endless stretches of dried-out rice paddy that the farmers were scorching in preparation for the rainy season. Others were fishing with nets in muddy ponds. In the villages, every house, tree and vehicle within 30 metres of the road was covered in red road dust.

Whenever we stopped, local kids came running out of the shops sell us souvenirs and practice their English. I hadn't got my head around the currency, so I ended up buying a single postcard for the price of one night's accommodation in Lampang the week before. That was one kid who didn't stay to chat. (In fairness, the postcard was more beautiful than the room.)

At one point we picked up some Japanese travellers because the pickup they had been riding in had broken down. An hour later we had a flat tyre. As our driver was changing the wheels, the Japanese quietly hitched a ride with another passing pickup. The rest of us had a wander in the fields or chatted to local kids who pulled up on motorcycles. When the wheel was ready we had to push-start the bus. Ten Westerners screaming "Second gear! Second gear!", each in their own language. Hilarious.