hoi an, march 2009

and, as mentioned yesterday
a piece i wrote earlier about Hoi An, half way up the Vietnamese Coast
...
And the day before... the restaurant after the restaurant at the end of the wolrd, yes wolrd ... aka au bout du monde ...
next a small jetty so ricketty its as near to an unjetty as a jetty can be... one of its makeshift-mayshift supports a simple pile of stones... precarious indeed for the allday payloads of putputting mopeds riding off the ferry boats from the unseen brother jetty across this harbour under its high afternoon sky of blanched blue and puffy white ... for the workmen and their tools, the whiteshirted men on their pristine machines back to danang thirty km north, the blue and white schoolkids on bikes, the overloaded women with bamboo and watermelon...

and, beyond, the palm-topped harbour leeward of the spit and the choppy south china sea... the sea just south of the gulf of tonkin...

was it really jim morrison's dad who started the vietnam war? well he was captain of the boat in the tonkin incident, which was the yanks equivalent of the fake polish invasion of germany on 1939 ...

while across the bay are ... the boatyards, with three fancy-white catamarans hauled ten feet above the concrete ...

the chinese fishing nets with, out in the bay, the man on the high platform before the thin bamboo ricketiness pulling on the six-pronged ropewheel and lifting the wide wide net out of the water to reveal a minimal catch another man on a tiny coracle rows out to...the short bowl-shaped boats... the fishing boats chugging out of sight round the head to the unseen sea... the green nets piled like turfs ...

If these people want a decent society the only thing they’re willing to do about it is subscribe to the disney channel

whilst here, in the browned shadows of the bar, the beer is larue, all of 10000 dong ... the fat barwoman unaccustomed to such custom... as i sit there replete... the universal chummy swapping of a light for a cigarette ...

the beached boats as muddy as a water buffalo's favourite duvet...

the spindly chickens picking at this, the natural human-stained armpit of the harbour...

the ruddy faced man pissing his drink in the drink next the jetty...

the mechanic in the GI moped helmet...

the two year old shitting brightish yellow ...

the women in their facemasks, the curiously functional and non-ornate two-ply facemasks ...

the lizards flitting on th walls, everywhere – hotel internet everywhere

to win had that i might win again... a gain again

before the cycle back from here, cuc dai, through the village...

the cups of sand with fifty incense stick stubs...

the high trilbies on the old cycling men, what are they called? i've seen them on the eight foot papier-mache figurines in some of the chinese pagodas...

the shagging dogs, yet more shagging dogs, the dogs here are notably randy ...

the hanging, is it, bougainvillea?...

the cycling schoolgirls holding hands, the cause of most of the near accidents on our lengthy bumpsquish trip north ...

the corner-swooping young guys on their buzzsaw mean machines, the same world over ...

the trail of schoolboys cycling shortlegged after speedy longlegged me down the spit to get here... calling out, i love you, i love you, oh yes, the kind of thing which happens when priscilla isn't here to chaperone me [?]...

back onto the road past the resorts which stretch from here up china beach towards danang...

nothing is true...but some things are more true than others... so is truth dead? ... no... truth is alive and well and living in manhattan ...preparing for the move to beijing

as i pedal back towards hoi an ...

a wonderful jewel of a place, possibly the most beautiful town i've ever been to...

pagodas, shrines, 500 year old bridges, a hundred tailors, a hundred cobblers, low distressed-yellow streets in higgledy-grid,
wooden balconies,
dark interiors,
cool-aired pagodas and assembly halls with their
rich intricate colours and
downright sinister papier-mache devils which,
here in hoi an,
are entwined by a single serpent,
the limpid waters rippling the moon,
the lantern shops a spectacular after dark,
the array of cheap local delicacies in every café and restaurant and, especially, the cafeteria stalls...

the killer papaya or mango salads,
the deep fried wonton with duck,
the rick pancakes, the fresh spring rolls,
the 16p beer,
the cheapest of the trip by a distance...

with the USAFucked ruins of the lost champa civilisation just 45km off...

in honolulu a couple of honeymooning ballroomdancers were hospitalised after falling asleep on a nudist beach in the sun... however, they were later seen retiring to their hotel rooms for some ginger rogers

and, well, either we're really lucky or there's no end of great places here because every time me and my sweetheart simply ramble ...
whether 200km by coach to a barely known...
or a mapless perambulation round a city...
or a brisk cycle to the coast ...
or a following of road down povertyfucked longhouses to a floating muslim village, with its mosque on stilts and its waterside market of watermelons and corn...
or the bonkers 30km trip on the back of a moped in darkness and rain, including the breakdown outside the brothel, the crash into the schoolgirls, the voracious sellsellsell of the ten fifteen shouting pricing repricing mocking rejecting pricing mopedmen which got us into this nonmess in the first place...

cos we sure had to git somewhere away from them and that and the descended darkness of grubby hyperbiztown danang...

they’re not just selling their own souls... they’re selling our souls as well

and well, after all this near-random guidebooked whateverness we, with ever-accidental smartness, end up somewhere bloody marvellous...
cos this place has so much to offer...
an old world urban paradise, a flat moonlit river, the big green or blue sea, the gridded yellow streets to be walked again and again, and again...
the ancient japanese bridge...
with beer and black coffee and fruit shakes...
the streets of watersellers terracotta-sellers lottery-sellers tailors cobblers, more tailors more cobblers, the same motorcycle men calling out to me four times a morning as i beeline from hotel to coffee to internet to hotel to market to foodstalls to coffee to rentabike...
a fertile bed of ideas gone to dust, a language of words and ideas once rich and earthy, now the stuff of tumbleweeds and distances, premature ageing and famine, flapskin jowls, and trains and buses that don't come no more...
where once, between fingers, it would clump and stick, ever different every time, now it is all powder and falling away

the unquestioned presumption of our own goodness, all empures [sic?] worship at the temple of themselves...

history is written by the winner then who writes it when everyone loses?

what a place, as nice as prague, split, varanasi, barcelona, paris, fez, uhh lacock, edinburgh, new orleans...

a relief after saigon which was great but BigCityAnywhere, the Vietnamese version, like pnhom penh was great but Big City Anywhere the Cambodian version ...
[the United States of Urbia?]...

the, errr, moon? so huge it must be a lamp nearby, no a balloon going up over the island, no, its the moon, huge and golden...
and rising to whiten and shrink high in the stars...

and i feel both kind of embarrassed, and who-cares? ...
cos it is a total tourist trap...
yet more of the global archipelago of the united states of touristan ...
but the reason its a tourist trap is cos its so magical...
more than anywhere else on the trip... a
nd we can do so much from here, champa beach food walks cycle a-hundred-tailors-shops-for-priscilla-to-unload-buckets-in, my summer performance shirts, [black silk-cotton with golden embroidery?], etc that, why leave?...
so we won't...

but i will be of course be doing my anti-tourist poem all summer so this is hypocrisy...
but hey, hypocrisy makes the world go round, we all always knew that right?...
right?...

cos the second worst thing about all this is that all the tourists are here...
but the worst thing is that i'm here...
this place would be so much nicer if i and my manky stodgy wooden western mind wasn't...
astral travelling anyone?...
anti-heisenbergianism anyone?...
and i remember when i went to india...
thinking, when i left, new world same me, and thinking, when i returned will it be, same world, new me...
when in fact its just me me and me again, hauling the baggage luggage and ricketty train carriages and wheelless rickshaws and unfunct pantechnica of both my past and my grimy scaly barnacled brain...

clanger man's top tips...
if you've got a nice girlfriend, or boyfriend, and for some stupid reason you want to be single, then the deft and opposite use of the question, which one are you? will ensure its swift demise... which one are you?...
a guaranteed dealbreaker, the sad single man's stupidendous swansong...
can i invent the word stupidendous?...
when you're clanger man you certainly can
and if you're a politician and you want to lose power, maybe there's some bad economic times coming and you want to get out, then clanger man recommends instituting mandatory annual driving tests,yes, mandatory annual driving tests, and you'll soon be out of power
and if you really want to muck up your life, firebomb your own house for the insurance but then confess to the police after five minutes’ questioning... i've heard of it happening

a lush setting for human beings to find themselves in, river and estuary and sea and flood plain and paddyfield and cornfields and jungle...
yet, being massively touristy and only 90000 strong, how much function has the place except for the tourists?...
all the tailors and cobblers and ceramic-shops are geared to tourists ...
yet despite this it is a great place to stop, to get over the twelve hour bumpcrashysquish busrides, the six hour bumpcrashysquish minbusrides...

for it is truly alien and i've realised it is the alien i like most in all this, the big 100-day 4-country quickquickfartooquick trip...

it is the indisputably new and unknown and alien that crank my grimy sweaty handle...

the jungle, the jungle islets, mosquito-net bamboohut and all, the chinese pagodas, the cambodian palaces, the great food, whether the shrimps and kampot pepper, or the soups or the salads, the crammed cheapish buses, the markets...

whether the veg market, the meat and fish the cloth or the everything market...

in bangkok in trat in siem reap [even] in battambang in kompong chhang in kompong cham in pnomh penh in kampot in saigon in dalat in kon tum and now here...

and the alien of discovering myself raving about spicy salads, about wooded carvings in the pagodas, about the catchy cambodian dance tunes staying with me for days, about the new sense of beauty in the pagodas, about the thick people-soup streets...

yes, on my first tour, i got off the plane in montreal and i started talking about myself, i then proceeded to talk about myself all the way into ontario where i got even better at talking about myself and headed west, continuing to talk about myself across the prairies with ever more consummate aplomb, despite the fact that nobody in saskatchewan actually listened, and proceeded to roll into british columbia where i was talking so loudly about myself that they could hear me before i even got there and where i talked about myself with ever greater vigour variety ease and erudition until i finally got on the plane 15 weeks after i had started talking about myself and finally, actually, stopped, talking about myself...

it was not bad

and nowhere is how we expect ...

so much so we plan to discuss and pindown our thoughts on what each next place is like just so we can marvel out how wrong we are...

and we emerge from so many great trails we would never choose to venture down from the far end...

and the great fun of having the limits of vocabulary so taxed...

the haloes of the gods less technicolour than acid techno... the spiral incense cones, the six-foot ashdropping spiral incense cones ...

the pagoda backspaces an asian food court of deities...

of finding words for the tastes, the smells, the textures the patterns the bustle the fruit the veg the sound the words the script, of failing to find words for the tastes, the smells, the textures the patterns the bustle the fruit the veg the sound the words the script the faces the smiles the teeth the clothes the desperation the disappointment...

cos i am always notbuying...
and notbuying when their hopes, the shopkeepers the restaurant owners the salesmen the saleswomen, have gone up, is pretty damn awful and means i move stonyfaced, as Brit-me ever, through the streets the markets, eyes only flitting with interest cos there is, as with siem reap [angkhor wat] and elsewhere, an air of desperation to it all, these people haven’t got much, they haven’t got enough, at all...

so even if you stop at the end of a 200 metre driveway down to a seaside café a woman will instantly sprint towards you from the café, attempting to bolt the 200 in treble-quick time and show you the menu so you shove off sharpish cos it feels cruel and resume your slow-past pedalling, watching, thinking, rehearsing

...
EGO-TOURISM out of the way/ out of the way/ clean it up a bit/ there’s enough of you/ out of the way/ out of the way/ i like that/ i don’t like that/ i like that/ i don’t like that/ out of the way/ out of the way/ all this for me?/ you shouldn’t have/ out of the way/ out of the way/ i’m very pleased i’m here, with myself/ thank you/ out of the way/ out of the way... i am enjoying myself/ for there is much in my self to enjoy

And the next day...From heavily bustled old town, the buzzingdisconcord of the generators seeing how there’s a powercut, the calls of the moped men, the taxi men, the shoesellers, tailors, watercolourists, artists, cafes, restaurants...
to bumpbikey unmade roads, on map but not yet made, to pagoda to pagoda to jungly country lane to rice paddy estuary to deep-wallowing waterbuffalo in a waterbuffalo-sized deep wallow to stork to fishermen to fishing village to fighting dogs to agent orange girl, twelveish, with bulging eyes and oversized widening head, to bridge to fishing village to bombed-up cactus dunes to dual carriageway to defunct old resorts to half-built new resorts to village, all the while hello hello helloing back at the wide-smiling calling kids, and some of their calling wide-smiling mothers, to manic car-park to family beach of vietnamese Saturday afternoon before the coldish crashing sea and high blue with a beer and a chance for us to discuss again how much we are enjoying ourselves