little trouble in big china

While we were in Saigon, Valerie and I went to check out the Cao Dai temple at Tay Ninh. Cao Daism is a 20th-century religion founded in Vietnam, and claims a few million followers worldwide. I'm not sure how it's regarded among the Vietnamese, but I can imagine how it'd be thought of in the US. (Side note: as one who was raised atheist, I find all religions pretty strange; some seem to have merely had greater legitimacy conferred on them by dint of having been around for so long. So anything here should be taken as curiously amused, but not disparaging.) It is, if nothing else, a very colorful religion, even more so within the cathedral than without.

From what I understand, which isn't much, Cao Daism is a mishmash of various belief systems, primarily Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, but with dashes of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, among others. One of the premises is that the large number of religions has caused God's message to be lost, so they're trying to 'bring it back', as it were. God, by the way, is represented by the All-Seeing Eye, which looks remarkably similar to the symbol found on the back of the US$1 bill. Anyway, the Cao Daists are about uniting humanity, overlooking differences between people, and peace and understanding, which all sounds pretty good to me.

If I'm getting this right, God often tries to relay his message through cultural means or intermediaries (their saints, who have appeared in visions, and are sort of like prophets, I guess). The three major saints are thus Sun Yat-Sen (of Chinese nationalism), a Vietnamese poet laureate named Nguyen Binh Khiem, and Victor Hugo.

A while back I declared that my least favorite thing about China was the squat toilet. When you're out traveling in rural China, though, there are a lot of things about which you don't have a lot of choice, and not only did I get plenty used to the squat toilet, I can also say that I've dropped trou over a shared trough that was only sheltered on three sides, 4000m up a mountain (gentlemen will please remember that this is not common custom for Western distaff). That wasn't the only trough, either.

When I saw this outdoor "restroom" (trust me, no one wanted to rest here, and it looked like no one had in weeks) behind a rarely-visited museum in Hue, I rather hoped someone could point me to a trough. The level of maintenance of this sink should give you a good idea of what the rest of the place looked like. I didn't take a photo of the stall, which did feature a Western-style toilet, because I really didn't want to see any more of it than I had to. Suffice it to say that I was glad I was carrying plenty of tissue paper, and that the other occupants of the stall (several spiders, including one that was the size of my two pinky fingers side-by-side; what may have been a baby scorpion; and a few flying things) were not quick enough to investigate the newcomer to actually reach me before I exited.

From Hanoi, Valerie and I moseyed down to Vietnam's central coast. OK, we took a plane, but it was a very laid-back kind of plane. Which is appropriate, because the central coast is a laid-back kind of place. Both Hue and Hoi An are small cities (Hoi An is really more of a town), the traffic is more mellow, there's less of it, and hey, you're practically on the beach. Less honking. It's nice.

Hue was newly-unified Vietnam's capital through the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, but it was pretty well demolished between 1945 and 1968. A number of the buildings within the Imperial Enclosure (similar to Beijing's Forbidden City) have been nicely restored, but there are also vast areas of overgrowth, or piles of bricks, where buildings used to be. There's also a pair of elephants hanging out in some of the overgrowth in a less-trafficked corner of the Enclosure, presumably kept there by the government, but for what reason I have yet to figure out -- they're not considered a tourist attraction, anyway. Outside of the Citadel -- the moated portion of the old city that contains the Imperial Enclosure as well as (now) residential areas (entrance in photo) -- Hue is a pretty regular city.

Hoi An, on the other hand is a tourist haven. The town had its heyday as an international trading port in the 16th and 17th centuries, and is now enjoying a resurgence as an international tailoring port.

These shops are everywhere in Hoi An, which claims a population of about 25,000 people, and over 200 tailors. The downtown section is small and easily walkable (a decent portion of it is closed to motor traffic, such that instead of honking, we heard one guy walking his cart down the street, saying "beep beep"), and about evenly split between Vietnamese merchants and Westerners trying to decide what fabric and pattern they would like for their cheap, custom-made shirt, dress, suit, or winter coat.

Time for some history! 

The ancient Hindu kingdom of Champa established the first buildings at the sacred/ritual site of My Son in the 4th century, and continued to expand through the 13th century. Although the Champa and Angkor kingdoms were separate (and known to war with one another), the buildings bear some resemblance (I'm told) to Cambodia's Angkor Wat.  At any rate, the Champa kingdom fell apart around the 1300s, and the site was presumably abandoned and/or forgotten, and was only rediscovered at the end of the 19th century.  What remained of the site was all but flattened during the American war, but parts of it are now being excavated and restored, in what I am sure is a painfully slow process. Some of the remaining walls bear bullet holes, and there's a large bomb crater (now overgrown with weeds, but the depression remains) in front of one of the sanctuaries. (To be fair, the Americans probably weren't attacking indiscriminately or to purposely destroy the cultural history; the site's location and geography had made it a good headquarters for the Vietnamese leaders.)  

A little bit of trivia for you: the method that the Cham originally used to lay the bricks (or rather, to make them stick together) remains unknown; you can tell which portions of wall are original and which are the product of recent reconstruction by looking at the bricklaying. The Cham bricks lie packed flat on top of each other, with virtually no separation, while the 20th-century work looks more like the regular brick-and-mortar pattern with which we're all familiar.

One of the things I did in Hoi An was take a cooking class. If you've never taken a cooking class, let me give you this tip -- you get to eat all the food at the end (or sometimes, throughout). And they use good ingredients, so you really can't mess anything up too badly.

Among the dishes we learned to make was, of course, pho (yes, it's pronounced fuh; it doesn't rhyme with no). We took a bit of a shortcut by not boiling the stock for 8 hours, but we did do the rice noodles from scratch. Essentially, you mix rice flour and water until it looks like papier mache liquid, and then you scoop it onto that setup on the right, so that it forms a little steamed pancake. Then you gently pick it up, fold it into layers, and slice. It's actually pretty simple, provided you have the right setup, but a bit time-consuming. It turns out that pho vendors in Vietnam leave the noodle-making to others, and just buy the noodles to dunk in the soup. I'm thinking if it's not worth it to them to make their own, the chances of my making them anytime soon are very low indeed.

I have been lax, my apologies. It's time to get through Vietnam and back to the business of being in China and all of its attendant wackiness. With some luck (or maybe just diligence), you'll be inundated with Vietnamese snippets this weekend. If I'm really good, I can even do it without having to divert full attention from the four Olympic channels (CCTV-1, CCTV-2, CCTV-7, and CCTV-Olympics. I'm not sure what happens to that last one come September).

It's here, it's here! After more than a year of buildup, the Olympics have officially kicked off (unofficially, there have been soccer games for the past two days). I understand that those of you in the US will not be getting an Opening Ceremonies broadcast til about 12 hours after it started, and I suspect that most Americans are more interested in the sports than the much-hyped Zhang Yimou Extravaganza (as I've taken to calling it). However, the Chinese are way into the production, and I know this because we're almost all the way through the parade of athletes, and I can look out my window and see.... absolutely no one. There is not a single person on the street. Not even one in pajamas.

Haaa-vaaaa nagila, haaava ...

Incidentally, the score in Shanghai is Funny Drink 3, Jen's (male) friends 0.

I told you it'd be making a comeback. This here is Vietnamese karst, found in Halong Bay (and elsewhere along the coast, I'm sure, but the Bay is the only part I went to). Unlike the Stone Forest, there's still plenty of water hanging around. And with the water, lots of greenery.

One of the nice things about being on the bay, aside from the fun things like kayaking and swimming around your boat, is that once you're about ten minutes outside of the harbor, there's almost no honking.

The first thing you notice in downtown Hanoi is the honking. More precisely, it's the zillions of scooters and motorbikes surrounding you, and their honking. Motorbike traffic outnumbers everything else on the road, with the possible exception of puzzled pedestrian tourists trying to figure out how to cross the street without getting run over (note the tire in the middle from the bike cutting through traffic -- BEEEEEEP). Motorbikes are also allowed places where cars are not, which means that there is no escape.

This turns out to be primarily a Hanoi phenomenon -- the motorbikes, not the honking. While motorbikes are prevalent all across Vietnam, they seemed to be most clearly dominant in Hanoi (as we went further south, the ratio of [motorbikes : (cars+bikes)] evened out somewhat). The honking, on the other hand, is a nationwide epidemic. At first, it was hard to figure out why people could possibly want to honk so much, and often for no apparent reason. And whether, with continual exposure to such levels of honking, there was anybody left with enough hearing to actually discern the various honks. Speaking of which, you'd be surprised at the variety of honking mechanisms found among your average Vietnamese vehicles: there's the regular single honk, the double-monotone honk (not to be confused with someone single-honking twice; these all require only one push of the thumb), the two-tone single honk, the two-tone multiple-honk, and the multi-tone melody honk -- think the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazzard.

After careful study of road traffic in four different cities, though, I believe I have discovered the secret of the honking, and really, driving in Vietnam in general: it is all a big video game.

The rules of the game are simple and a bit malleable, but the object is essentially to establish your sole domination of the road. Your primary tools are honking, passing, and careful lane positioning. Vehicles and pedestrians alike should bow to the will of your thumb, index finger, and acceleration pedal. However, as everyone else around you has the same objective, this is no easy task. The following seem to be rough guidelines for a winning strategy:

1. If you are a four (or more)-wheeled vehicle, at no time may all four wheels be in the same lane. Said event would be a clear demonstration of submission and unworthy pretending to the road-mastery crown.

2. If you are a two-wheeled vehicle, you should, like a small mammal backed into a corner, make yourself appear large and intimidating. This can be accomplished by (a) piling as many people and/or cargo -- boxes, hats, dozens of live pigs or ducks, your entire family -- onto your bicycle or motorbike as possible, and (b) weaving madly so that no one can see your true width. Also, since it will be hard for you to straddle a lane on two in-line wheels, you should attempt to occupy as much of a single lane as possible. Choose wisely -- the middle of the lane may not be the best place to accomplish this, as you leave room on both sides to be passed. Weaving thus becomes doubly useful. Honking, of course, replaces hissing and shrieking.

3.Since there are no double-yellow lines, passing may take place at any time, regardless of upcoming curves and oncoming traffic. The larger the vehicle passed, the more points. Bonus points are awarded when passing in traffic, hence you may expect to have to jockey for outer position when you have company. While attempting to block another driver's pass is sometimes successful, be aware that your opponent may score double points if executing a simultaneous-multiple-vehicle pass (that is, 2-vehicles wide, not consecutive vehicles). In such an event, your best strategy is to prolong your pass to such an extent that s/he is eventually forced to drop back in the face of an oncoming vehicle larger than him/herself.

The finer points of Driving: Vietnam may be explored later, perhaps with a quiz ... so stay on your toes!

(Also, as an aside, the book linked to in #2 is fantastic, and completely representative (i.e., not an embellishment) of sights in Hanoi.)