Thailand and Vietnam

Jo and Louise feed a tiger cub in Thailand.


Bangkok, Thailand
Bangkok is a blur for me. On our first day, we took a tour of a tiger zoo, and crocodile farm, and while sitting on a wooden bench in a large amphitheater, a phe, or spirit, climbed onto my back, and took possession of my body. I started to shiver and shake, and the next seven days were spent in a feverish haze. The doctors on board the ship seem to think that I had dengue fever. I must have picked it up in India from a mosquito.

Jo and I had reservations at a hotel in Bangkok, and I decided, perhaps foolishly in retrospect, that I might as well be sick there as on the ship. I thought that I just had a virus, and that the fever would pass in a day or two, but I was wrong. It lasted about a week, with spikes and low ebbs, night sweats followed by teeth chattering chills, terrible headaches, aches and pains like a truck had run over me, bleeding gums, no appetite, and utter misery. The fever was not inconsequential, almost 104 at night, and I was totally wiped. It’s been over with for two weeks now, and I am definitely on the mend, but it made for a bizarre four days in Bangkok, with most of the time spent in the hotel room trying to stay warm. Poor Jo. I don’t think it was much fun for her. It made me think of the many cemeteries in Africa and Asia we have seen along our travels, full of the bodies of colonists from northern Europe who had fallen prey to the grip of a phe. (I kept telling Jo, if I die, you and your sisters are actually better off financially---you can sell the house and go to whatever college you want. She kept saying, don’t die, please, not yet.) One of the doctors on the ship visited a tropical medicine hospital in Chennai, and reported that most of the patients were being treated with dengue fever. Some died of it, but they had started out the illness in a debilitated state from a life of poverty. Life in the tropics can kill you---but not me, not this time. Let’s hear it for being a well-nourished, healthy specimen, the product of good medical care and a privileged existence.

We did get out every day, at least for a few hours, and saw the Grand Palace which is a remarkable, absurdly gaudy extravaganza. We made our pilgrimage to the Emerald Buddha, and to the golden Reclining Buddha, and moved around the city, sliding in and out of one hot pink cab after another, driven by the sweetest people I think I have ever met. At night, we took walks around our hotel which was in an older section of Bangkok, and enjoyed the night life on the streets, with family groups eating and cooking outside of shops. There was music playing, and children and dogs running up and down the alleys, and old people sitting on low plastic stools, slurping noodles out of huge bowls. It was hard to navigate.

The reclining Buddha in Bangkok.

I love the way that Asia pours out onto the streets at night, and turns their front stoops and store fronts into an extension of their homes. Anyone who is willing to wind their way through the cheerful chaos is invited to the party. I love the smells of cooking food, the clatter of pop music, the sounds of languages I don’t understand, the smiles and nods, and sometimes the looks of surprise that we foreigners were still with them after the sun had gone down. At night, no one is interested in selling me anything. It’s family time, eating time, relaxing time, laughing time, and I suspect, story time. I never get tired of roaming the streets of Asia at night. Never.


Vietnam
Semester at Sea sponsors overnight trips, most of which are prohibitively expensive, but the cheapest one on the menu was an overnight trip that went up and down the delta of the Mekong River on a variety of wooden boats. I didn’t think I could figure out Viet Nam on our own, the price was right, so Jo and I signed up for the trip. Our group consisted of 18 young people, and aside from one Resident Assistant, who was all of age thirty-one, everyone on the trip was 22 years old, or younger. They were just the ages of my two friends who had been drafted into the army to go to Viet Nam over forty years ago, Bill from Kansas, and Will from Columbus. Both had come to the Mekong Delta to fight a war that neither of them believed in. I remembered them from the days after the war when they had come home to college in the early seventies, shattered, battered, and old beyond their years. Bill carried with him the painful memory of having killed an elderly, bearded Vietnamese man who wore a coolie hat, and Will, who was in law school with me, had woken up in a hospital bed in Saigon, the only one of his unit who had survived. Neither of those Williams was ever quite right again. Both of them lived among us, but at distance, far away from those of us who had not gone to Vietnam, but who had sat out the war in our respective universities, protesting our government’s policies.

Houseboat on the Mekong Delta.

I carried those two young men around with me in the Mekong Delta, listening to the chatter of the Semester at Sea kids as they talked about their majors, their boyfriends back home who were too possessive, their mothers who loved them and called them on their cell phones too often, their fathers who were hoping they would get summer jobs even in a lousy economy. We went up and down the muddy Mekong River, took pictures of the floating markets, bought ice cold sodas from a little boy in a small wooden boat who rowed up to our boat, offering his wares. We chatted, we dipped our hands in the brown water, we took off our shoes and socks, we drank coconut juice from coconuts that had been macheteed open by our guide, we felt the hot, dry wind evaporate the sweat off our heads, we swatted at mosquitoes, and took too many photographs.

Floating down the Mekong River.

The students eventually forgot that I was there, and I was able to perch silently on the edge of their youth. I listened to their worries, and observed their flirtations, and witnessed the silly things that made them laugh. Their laughter made me laugh even though I almost never saw what was funny. They were---they are---so gloriously and so un-self-consciously young. They do not even know that they are young---and in the midst of all their glamour and blonde pony tails and baseball caps sitting on their heads backwards, surrounded by their enthusiasm and innocence, I thought about my two ghost boy passengers from the Midwest whose youths had been stolen from them.

Having tea and fruit with SAS students.

I felt sad and sorry about the war. Our guide, a young man named Kha, had lost his three older sisters and his father at the hands of the Americans. This he told me quite matter of factly, staring out across the muddy water of the Mekong River, sipping on a coconut, and instructing a young man from Semester at Sea to keep his arms inside the boat. And so I added the older sisters of Kha, and his dead father, to my ghost load, and they rode around in the back of the creaking wooden boat with me, along with the frightened, lost boys named William, who probably still haunt the heads of two sixty-plus-year-old men living somewhere in Kansas, somewhere in Texas, men who have wives battling weight and grandchildren they love, and plasma TVs. This was how it felt to be in Vietnam.

The outings didn’t always hang together all that well. In the morning of one of the days, we went to the Cao Dai Temple, a religion founded in South Vietnam in the early 1920s that purports to be a synthesis of Buddhism, Daoism, and Catholicism. We were fortunate to visit during one of their services, and watched from a balcony as prayers were chanted through a haze of incense, and traditional Vietnamese music poured out from a band of twenty or so musicians. The huge hall was packed with devotees dressed in white robes, kneeling in tidy rows, underneath the brilliant pink pillars encircled with writhing black dragons. It was ethereal, and mesmerizing.

The Cao Dai Temple.

Then we headed off to the Cu Chi Tunnels, perhaps one of the oddest tourist destinations on this voyage. It is about 70 kilometers northwest of Saigon, and consists of a 200 kilometer cobweb of underground tunnels that housed hundreds, maybe thousands, of Vietnamese villagers and guerilla fighters beneath some of the most hotly contested areas during the war. We first had to watch a propaganda film that was virulently anti-American, and then the white devils were led around the tunnel system, stopping for tea and fruit in the middle of the tour, and for time to purchase Cu Chi Tunnel souvenirs at the gift shop where ice cream and bottled water and alcohol with dead snakes coiled in the bottom of the bottle were also for sale.

The Cu Chi Tunnels.

It was over a hundred degrees, and I just couldn’t put the whole scene together in my muddled mind. I had a gaggle of ghosts in a cart that I was dragging around behind me, and they were extremely confused and upset, and I was weak from a week of dengue fever, and overall, it was bizarre and distressing. And the jungle was so very hot. In the background, you could hear the shots of guns where for a few Dong, tourists were allowed to shoot at the outline of black cardboard guerilla fighters. We were drenched in sweat, and the mosquitoes were following us around in menacing clouds. (Perhaps I was feeling a bit paranoid about the mosquitoes, but I made one student who was puffing up with multiple bites wrap herself in a green hemp hammock that she had purchased at the Cu Chi Tunnel gift shop.) I am told that My Lai has also been turned into a tourist destination, and our fellow Semester at Sea travelers who had ventured up to Cambodia had walked across the Killing Fields, stepping on human bones, as they were led up and down the backdrop of former horror by courteous, opaque young tour guides in white shirts, most of whom had the remains of family members beneath their feet. Irony was nonexistent. The war had simply become a commodity. Now we stop here for ten minutes, to use the toilet, to buy a souvenir. It’s just the way things were.

The ghosts on the Mekong River.

On our last day in Vietnam, Jo, Beth, the ship librarian from the University of Virginia, and I had a glorious, frivolous day of shopping in Saigon City. Aside from the traffic, which was by far the scariest I have ever experienced anywhere in any of my travels due to the rivers of motor bikes that pulse through the veins and arteries of the city with a fierce, perilous energy, Saigon is a modern, beautiful city, with trees, and broad avenues, French architecture, designer shops, cool, glittering malls, ice cream parlors, and trendy stores with the most amazing objects to buy---shiny lacquer ware, leather, red paper lanterns, silks of the most startling hues. We didn’t spend much money, but a little money could buy you a marvelous cluster of plastic bags full of lovely treasures. The city is booming, and on the move, mostly from an influx of capital from Singapore and Taiwan. We ate a sinful lunch in a small, cool dark room, of individual pizzas in thick, cast iron pans, with extra cheese, and fresh pineapple chunks, and then went for a foot massage on the fifth floor of the Rex Hotel that started off with a ten minute soak of our feet in a wooden bowl full of warm, cinnamon flavored water. For an hour, listening to soft, plinky plink music, and resting in a lounge chair under a light blanket, a smiling, young Vietnamese woman massaged my feet and my legs with peppermint oil, and worked her thumbs into my sore pressure points. My ghosts got bored, and decided to go home.

Traffic of Saigon.

I don’t know what else to tell you about Vietnam. Both Jo and I loved it, probably the most of all the places that we have been to so far. (Excluding India. I don’t count India in the mix. I love India above all; she knows that well.) Still, Vietnam was incredible. I will forever remember those many hours going up and down the muddy waters of the Mekong River in little rickety wooden boats. The food, the greenness of the rice-paddies, the water puppets (I forgot to tell you about the water puppets!), and most of all, the kind people we met---and their generosity of spirit. In a country where we might have been shunned, we were greeted with open arms, and open hearts. We loved Vietnam. LH