The Last Blue Mountain

by James Chilton

  First light, with its soft pink shadows, was the time to set off in a mokoro. Half a tree trunk and probably chiselled out personally by your poler, it was just wide enough for a well-fed figure and long enough to sit one behind each other, just above the water line. Point an arm at a passing saddle billed stork and the whole log tipped precariously. The poler, standing at the back, instantly adjusts the balance with his stick against the shallow bed of a water-lilied pond and stability returns before further enthusiasm, cries of alarm or laughter start another roll. In between, slipping through nature, there is still, silent magic. On the islands graze elephant, impala, kudu, reedbuck, giraffe and buffalo.

  As the mokoro was poled away from the sandy shore, there suddenly appeared out of the reed and papyrus a huge bull elephant. Balanced in half a leaky tree trunk, just above the water and within yards of a five ton irritable elephant, places one in a scale of vulnerability close to a walnut shell in the Roaring Forties. An immediate squirt of adrenaline makes some reach for a camera and others for their God but as we back poled into the reeds, it became apparent that the elephant was simply demanding clear passage across the stream and in a few measured splashy steps of undeniable authority, he had crossed to a juicy patch of ilea palms on the other side. The nuts of this palm are a favourite but being out of reach, an elephant leans his forehead against the tree and in a series of quick heaves brings down a dozen or so nuts each the size and weight of a cricket ball in a fusillade that bounce off his armoured skull and on to the ground. The nuts have about the same density and flavour as a cricket ball but they apparently aid the elephants’ digestion as they rattle around inside and the nut itself benefits from its enzyme ridden journey so days later, when it drops to the ground the other end, its germination has been given a useful start.

  The sudden failing of tropical light brought a cacophony of grunts and croaks from the reed frogs. Occasionally they were all in unnatural unison, but then nature’s conductor set the usual erratic beat and night jars, boubous and chattering quelea joined in. Cicadas provided the continuo, and fortissimo passages were managed by a trumpeting elephant, hippo grunts and a lion’s distant roar. Later, there was sublime quiet through which the rustles of the smaller nocturnal rodents were caught by a weary ear.

  Moving east we admired the Victoria Falls – The Smoke that Thunders – before indulging in a little rafting fun. Well, that was how it was put to me. I had not rafted before and thought that floating down the Zambezi would make a pleasant afternoon trip. Later, on the sandy shore, equipped with a life jacket, a helmet and listening intently to a muscular South African describe the emergency drills for roll-overs, flipping, and righting a Zodiac I realised I had been daughter-duped. The journey was terrifying, the walls of water were as tall as a house, the boulders vast and the current overwhelming. Had I known this was a Grade 5 ride (one less than that for professionals), reason and sense would have ensured that I never entered the rubber monster but since these were both absent, I had an exhilarating, enlivening, thrilling and rip-roaring ride.

  Vietnam

  February 1996

  ‘Life for him was an adventure; perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens’

  – Edith Hamilton on Aeschylus (The Greek Way)

  Saigon was hot and humid enough to dampen a shirt in minutes and airport immigration was unusually trying – five forms to complete and each studied and checked meticulously by a fellow in a uniform of bilious green with four stars on his epaulettes; it took almost an hour and a half to reach him at the red line on the floor. When it is apparent that the wait is long, the scrutiny thorough and the officials tired, there comes upon the lines either a resignation (British and Americans), an anxiousness (East Europeans) or a competitiveness (Germans, French and Italians). The Japanese have no idea what is going on and stand smiling in hot sun throughout the day but all will push their luggage along a few more inches than might normally be civil. It is always the case that one’s own queue has at its head the illegal immigrant, the illiterate or the ill-educated. Sometimes an interloper approaches – he pretends to be unaware of the procedures and has a stupid and sly grin. The queue, which so far has subscribed universally to individual competition, immediately assumes a mutual solidarity. Few looks are exchanged but there is a common broadening of shoulders and a shuffling forward of bags to close any chink in the defences.

  In the morning I took a cyclo tour to the extraordinary temple of the Cao Dai sect; they combine Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist and Catholic religions and their saints include Joan of Arc, Victor Hugo and Winston Churchill. Unique to a small area of Vietnam, they maintained strict neutrality during the war. I went to the Viet Cong tunnel complex at Chu Chi with its labyrinthine series of claustrophobic rat holes, some down to 65 feet (20m). The Museum of Foreign Aggression and the Ho Chi Minh Museum both appalled in their depiction of atrocities but they reminded me that Saigon fell to the Vietcong over 20 years ago on 30th April 1975. I hoped we would be able to leave the war soon – it is dreadful and depressing to have these reminders thrust upon one. I kept my toothless, whiskered, stick-like peddler to go on to the market in Cholon in the Chinese Quarter. For a country previously brought to its knees in economic ruin, there was now nothing you could not buy. Everything was geared to commerce and here was a frenzied, frenetic, fast moving, weaving, ducking, hurrying, bargaining orgy of activity.

  At cross roads, there appear to be about 17 cars, 7,000 bicycles and 70,000 mopeds – all Hondas. These cohorts charge at each other from all four directions simultaneously; additionally, there are spectacular intersections of six roads. If you are in the middle, in a cyclo for instance or, God help you, on your feet, there is little you can do but pray to your maker and quickly too, for what remains of your life can only be measured in seconds. But moments later, at a time when you should be strawberry jam, a miracle occurs; you are out on the other side painlessly and noiselessly. How this feat is accomplished hundreds of times a day by countless popping motors, rickshaws, cyclists, walkers, carts, porters, trolleys and 17 cars seems a miracle. Part of the miracle may stem from a mutual social attitude, engendered by Buddhism, where individual survival is subservient to the paramount concern for others. To the westerner nurtured on a largely selfish diet, this selflessness is assumed to be primitive and naïve – it is exactly the opposite.

  The Ides of March came with clear blue skies and the coolness of the hills. At 4,500 ft (1370m), the hill station of Dalat was a charming surprise with pine trees and large areas of cropped grass. It is to Vietnam the Darjeeling of India or the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. The houses are sturdy and colonial with stuccoed and elaborately timbered façades, steeply pitched roofs and steps that lead up to the front door, like an oriental Le Touquet. Previously the haven of the families of the administrative French, it had now been taken over by communist officials eager to avoid sweating it out in Saigon. The people here are a little different too; Montegnards from the mountain tribes, fuller in the hips with high cheekbones and darker skins. It was cold and there was a blazing fire in the hall of my little hotel; I had to put on a shirt and sweater in the middle of the night, bringing my mosquito net down on top of me like an animal trap.

  The road up from Saigon passed through plantations of pineapple, rubber, tapioca and banana. Sugarcane was being harvested and a belching diesel engine drove a giant mangle from which syrup was drained into seven successive boiling vats so that its viscosity ran from juice to glue. Much of the hillside would have been thick jungle had it not been slashed and burnt for plantations, cut for timber or destroyed by the toxin Agent Orange in the war. Coffee grew at higher altitude and in cafés it was served in a little metal perforated cup that sat on top of a glass and filtered down on to a teaspoon of sweetened condensed milk. Tea grew here too and was in every restaurant – green, coarse and pungent. Taxi motorbikes ruled the roads and at every crossroads there waited grinning youths who invited you to climb aboard then roared off laughing. I sel
dom knew where I was going (the language barrier is insurmountable) so I gestured left or right from behind – the roundabouts were terrifying.

  Breathless from fear and altitude, I arrived at the summer residence of the last emperor, Bao Dai who was deposed in 1954. It was an appalling and sprawling sort of post-modernist, art deco dump, brimming with kitsch of the worst kind. Dalat is a honeymooners’ town and the whole house had giggling couples in every corner taking photographs of themselves playing the gilded piano, hanging on to elaborately painted wrought iron screens or lounging on furniture that looked like 1940s Maples – it probably was. In the gardens, amongst hydrangeas, roses, agapanthus and arum lilies, photographers each had their own props. These included cowboy outfits and horses with wild-west saddlery, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, a prancing Pluto and Father Christmas. The brides were dressed up to the nines and looked as though they were off to another wedding in their high heels, gold lamé, the brightest lipstick, dayglo taffeta in every shade and raffia handbags. I hoped they were having a good time but it seemed hard work. In the evening they flocked to little cafés around the lakeside and pushed off into the water in pedalos shaped like hearts or pink clouds.

  Later on I called on a Buddhist monk who lived in a mini pagoda he had built himself. He was perfectly charming, spoke a number of languages including excellent English, kept seven dogs and laughed a great deal. He was very interested in my camera and extremely knowledgeable in spite of his own being an elderly and basic model with which he kept taking photographs all the time, convulsed in giggles. He was an artist and thought it amusing that what he sold for $10 here, he charged $500 for when he exhibited in America.

  A seven hour drive down to the coastal plains was spectacular, with pine giving way to market gardens of neat and carefully tended rows of beans, tomatoes, grapes, potatoes and melons. In turn these changed to the dazzling green of rice paddies, picture postcard scenes with white egrets, women in conical hats and small boys leading great, grey, lumbering water buffalo. I stopped for lunch at Cam Ranh Bay which had been a huge American port but nothing remained except the detritus of war – rusting military trucks and a million miles of barbed wire. Sitting close to the sea and vulnerable to the inshore wind, I lost my entire fishy dish to a freak gust that blew it westward off the table.

  On the beach at Nha Trang three Vietnamese women, a mother and her two daughters, operating under a sign that said ‘Massage $5’ and on a mat laid on the sand, pummelled me for an hour causing me such pain I cried out but my pleas were ignored. When I said that I had a cold they squirted camphor oil up my nose where it stung for two days. Feeling black and blue and probably looking like a half ripe blackberry, I went off to a Confucian temple. There were no formalities, not even the usual abandoning of shoes. Huge coils of smouldering joss sticks were suspended over three inner courtyards and fantastic decorations of gold snarling dragons curled around every lacquered column while more joss sticks (bought in multiples of ten), burnt pungently in great bronze urns. In front of the ‘altar’, a lavish affair swirling with every shade of gold and scarlet and with more fearsome, open jawed dragons and elaborate friezes of reticulated devices, stood a long stainless steel counter of the kind usually found in a self-service restaurant. Here, just out of reach of hungry dragons, a small parcel of rice or bowl of fruit could be purchased, to be then offered for redemption or favours or a choice of animal in the return to the next life. Special requests required a few dongs of the local currency and this brought two thumps on a great wooden drum and a clang on a bell. I sat in the cool of a courtyard to gain relief from the heat and all who entered, clasping their smoking sticks, smiled benignly at me. When a poor market porter smiles at a fat traveller with pen and pad and a big camera, here must be a religion of universal sufferance and tolerance. Outside, the street litter bins were shaped as penguins.

  Moving on, a hotel at Hoi An, a small historic town on the banks of the Thu Bon River and near the sea, had been the U.S. army officers’ club and reminded me of the officers’ mess at Ipoh – large, spacious and cool with lazy fans, dusty potted plants and elaborate but unattractive wooden decorations. My bedroom was huge – enough for one army officer, two tourists or three Vietnamese families. There was a fridge well stocked with 7 UP and an inventory of the room’s contents read: ‘1 Chinese glass, 2 plastic slippers, 2 spoons, 1 tea set ....’. This is followed by the instruction that ‘all the equipment listed above must be kept in constant use’. The laundry list included shoes, hats and ties with separate columns to indicate if you want them washed, ironed or both. In the morning I ordered four silk shirts – I cannot think why, as I have more shirts than I can wear, but at £7.50 each made to measure in 24 hours, I was seduced. I also made an appointment with Dr. Phuc (I just called him ‘doctor’) as I was so bored of my cold with its aches and pains; however, when my eleven o’clock appointment came and I was having a baguette and coffee overlooking the jetty where the fishermen came in with mud crabs and wicker baskets of shrimp, my cold suddenly felt better. Tonight I may regret the missed diagnosis.

  One of the wonders of this country is the complete lack of pretension and the attractive openness of its people. The war ended 20 years ago and there is a new generation but even the over-40s are charming, friendly and without bitterness. Some world weary cynics might call it naïve but it is so universal and so clearly well meant that it must be firmly rooted in the culture. Children abound, as inquisitive and talkative as any worldwide but not once has a hand been held out and my pound and a half of Woolworth’s mixed humbugs has been untouched.

  At 6ft 2in (1.9m) a broad-in-the-beam Englishman does not fit easily in to the Lilliputian scale here. Doors are 5ft 10in high, beds are as short, it is impossible to get my knees under any table and the plastic stools arranged around a restaurant table seem to come from a playgroup. The stature of the Vietnamese belies their strength and they seem made mostly of tensioned rubber and reinforced steel. Huge bundles of sugarcane, great sacks of firewood, baskets of cauliflowers and barrels of water are handled like candyfloss. The market traders, boatmen, farmers and street vendors all wear the winkle-shaped straw hat that is fastened under the chin with a broad ribbon but the schoolgirls and all other women wear wonderful hats. From four years old upwards, black, straight, shiny hair is topped by every variety of hat that aims to please. Broad brimmed, cloche, peaked, flat, beret, flopping, stiff, straw, wool, denim, lace, velvet and raffia; always set off with a band, bandanna, flower or bow. They are jocular, frivolous, pert, provocative, smart and sassy and the prettiest hats I have ever seen.

  Wishing for a boat trip to the mouth of the river, I made arrangements with a swarthy, cheeky fellow in baggy pants and with a couple of gold teeth. We went through the routine six times: four o’clock, down river, big boat, big motor, $2 and we shook hands. It was rehearsed this often on the presumption that my own disbelief at the modest price equalled the reassurance Two Teeth required as to his luck in earning $2. At four o’clock there was Two Teeth but not the 50 foot (15m) sea going launch I had sat on to make the bargain. With uncharacteristic brazenness he pointed to a rowing boat but my angry shout of, “Big boat and motor,” deterred him further. He beckoned me to follow him to the far side of the fish market where, still muttering, “Big boat, big motor,” I was rowed to a larger boat manned (sic) by a pretty helmswoman wearing spotted trousers and a winning smile; another rowboat picked up my guide whose only English words were “good” and “OK”. At the mouth of the river great nets, each the size of a tennis court, were suspended by bamboo poles the thickness of my leg. The net was let into the water and later winched up from a rickety platform. I never saw this happen (they fish at night) but it looked as though the weight of more than a dozen fish would have brought the whole contraption tumbling down.

  Hiring a bicycle with the misplaced ambition of ‘Mercedes’ written on its crossbar, I pedalled to the beach which was backed by casuarina pines and coconut palms and edged by the froth of a mild
surf. Palm thatched shelters were arranged in two long lines and as an early comer at 9.30 am, I secured a semi-detached model at the end of the front row. A few coins bought two deck chairs, a table, shelter from the sun, peace of mind and thoughts of home for the whole day. Small boys offered pineapples, hard boiled eggs, peanuts and shell necklaces and when I trotted out the well-worn, “Maybe later,” they implored me to remember their name in case I changed my mind. By the time I reached my chair, Fang, Fung, Phoo and Sing, Sang and Song had all merged in my mind like a twanging tune from a broken banjo. Later Fang – or was it Fung? – peeled a pineapple into a spiral and I ate it like a lollipop, juice colouring the sand at my feet. Sing – or was it Sang? – miffed that I had promised to buy from him was placated by the sale of a baguette stuffed with Laughing Cow Cheese Spread, onion, cucumber and fresh mint and I winnowed a bag of peanuts in the off shore breeze.

  A fishing fleet was beyond the surf. Long sleek boats with long curved bowsprits that arched up into the gentian sky, each with two men in coolie hats crouched in the stern. With an eye painted on either side of the bow, the boats looked rather menacing, like a swordfish on the prowl. On the sandy side of the surf, bicycles drew temporary lines. Had General Westmoreland seen the determination of a Vietnamese riding through sand, he would have kept his marines at home. In the afternoon, I bicycled into the countryside for photographs of laughing boys riding lumbering buffalo and later attended a Vietnamese cooking lesson. Based on noodle soup as a starter, stir fried fish or meat with vegetables followed. Intense competition in the markets produced the peak of freshness and the highest quality. Menus were long but all were variations on a theme that used peanut oil, garlic and shallots and all or some of mint, basil, parsley, coriander and plenty of lemon grass. The oddity of the language showed up in the menu. I did not find a word that was more than four letters long but there were seven accents that acrobatically sat over and under letters, sometimes three high. There seemed to be no logic so: Canh thit cât heo nâo cai was Pork Soup but Gà sa ót was Fried Chicken with Lemon Grass, Chilli & Vegetables. My favourite was fried eggs: Gà ôpla.