The following are the notes I took during a trip in between Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam made during the Christmas holidays of 2003. Back home, I copied them, adding some information to make more evident the path. Since photos do not do as bad as a photographer and as a lazy person I try to remember the places as I can. Not being able to show you some pictures, then, nor bore you with my endless stories, I send you the following.
There you will find special group dynamics, because, for personal reasons, I wanted to remove everything related to the company of people with whom I began this journey. There you will find impressions. Many superficial impressions.
Friday, December 26 ... the plane Paris / Ho Chi Minh
The story does not change much. Always made me vibrate are the names. The airline as well as showing off and landing in an entity, or play on a screen that shows the nose of the plane - the pilot, I think, I hope!, it relies on the on-board instruments - offers passengers and for the duration of the flight the exact path that the plane is making. For the duration of the trip are fascinated by the map - the green plains, blue seas and lakes, brown deserts and mountains - and the study in detail. We fly over the area of \u200b\u200bthe Caspian Sea, Baku, Tashkent and the Aral Sea that is barely visible on the bias. Then Quetta, Kandahar, Kabul, the latter barely touched. The shape of the airplane reproduced on paper jerky. Approaches the highest mountains in the world. The plane of the lapping, moving slightly to the south. We fly over and Nalonda Patna, which, turn, between Calcutta and Varanasi. Names. Evocative names.
The path that leads us to Ho Ci Minh, who continue to call Saigon, across the strait is the Bay of Bengal, then flying over Rangoon to glide on the delta of the Mekong.
Strangely this time I'm not afraid of flying. I do not know if he has to do with my personal reconciliation with death, or the fact that the plane very little dancing and especially to regular rhythm. After a confused shouting
first take-off, now there is silence in the aircraft. Before there was a guttural noise excitation. Language sounds that remind me of "The Hunter", the scene of De Niro that you point the gun to his head, or the scene of the sampan on the Mekong in the film by Coppola. The hostess Vietnamese are nasty, poor, nasty and tired.
I think a time travel made me dream more than they do now if I look fascinated the girls that we serve coffee in a long burgundy dress, their gestures and graceful machines, and the old, the old lady sitting behind Jean Michel who is crippled and unable to take hold across two seats. I do not know how he manages to grow on two seats, but she does. I sense that the people I meet are happy acrobatically very small area. Undoubtedly an advantage. The old woman has a transparent nylon scarf over his head and when he wakes up looks at me and smiles. I do not know why the old smiles at me, or why I smile at her, we do not have many more years apart, me and old, but her name is "old" me and instead I say "giovande woman," still "young woman" ...
In Saigon we wait for the flight to Phnom Penh. In the vicinity of room for passengers in transit there is a beauty salon where practicing a foot massage. On the chaise longue on which to make me fall asleep while a boy lay quiet and precise massage me for an hour ends at the fixed price of $ 5. Drifted off to sleep thinking that paradise, these places will sell out at moderate prices.
Phnom Penh 12/28/2003 - Sunday
Last night I could not sleep. I could not sleep because I feared that the impressions, the first, those that count and are always wrong, he runs away.
Africa, for example. The feeling of Africa that took me as soon as they got off the plane, even when still in the air I looked down from above and everything looked like a desert, a desert of sand dotted with palm trees. I expected the intense green of the vegetation intricately told in novels and movies, and instead the first image of what was once the Cochinchina is beige.
airport comes to pick us Tareth, a friend of Daniel, or rather, his old driver of the times when he was in Phnom Penh for home. In the roles that was made during the regime of Pol Pot he was guarding. It was the side that is clearly wrong. But it tells so flat and with no trace of emotion. It seems that here in Cambodia, the forty / fifty are spread very unevenly between victims and torturers. They are more the latter than the former. Pare. And it is perfectly logical because the victims, most of the time, their role they have played to the end.
Tuol Sleng was a high school, turned by the Khmer Rouge in the center of torture and extermination, and now a museum of genocide. There have been wanting to Cambodians, it seems, but the Vietnamese. It is they, the Vietnamese, which is forcing the Cambodians to remember. Thousands and thousands of photographs. Men, women, boys, girls, children who look at the camera with her arms clasped behind his back, his eyes dazzled, a registration number pinned on his chest. At Tuol Sleng
we get there, Claudio and myself, early in the morning. At seven o'clock we are already inside. We arrive on the back of a motorbike. Each of us has his own motorcycle. They say they are waiting for us outside, but then my driver I reached inside the museum and walk along with me. His father, he tells me, died a few months after the fall of Pol Pot says in English that he was exhausted and could not make it. He adds, no one has ever known. But he knows with certainty that there was never finished Tuol Sleng. He had been transferred to the north, in the countryside to work maize and rice. They had moved north because they lived in a city in northern districts. The city was divided into four, I he says. Those neighborhoods went north to the north, those in the Eastern Suburbs to the east, and so on. Simple and effective.
A sign shows the Decalogue of the prisoner. Rule No. 3: "Do not be an idiot because you're the man who opposed the revolution." Rule No. 4: "Answer my question immediately without thinking." Rule No. 5: "During the beating ol 'electricity is prohibited crying out loud." Fill in the rules book with a pencil.
at Tuol Sleng were quietly tortured and murdered twenty thousand people. Seven of the survivors, including a painter who has painting then life in prison. His paintings are on display at the museum in the room above the one where, in glass cases, surgeon seventeenth-century style, are stacked hundreds of skulls. Almost everyone has the skull fractured. I read that the prisoners were killed with a pick or hammer. Among the guardians, whose photographs are on display on the second floor of the school, the same faces of the victims hallucinate. Only one of them is incarcerated in Phnom Penh. Others live and work in cities or elsewhere. How Tareth, our sweet driver.
Phnom Penh is a city with low, low, dusty, closed to the east from the confluence of two great rivers, the Tonle Sap and the Mekong. The Mekong flood period change in direction and pours its waters into the Tonle Sap. In a period of shallow water during the dry season is precisely that they are I, behaves rather like a river and all agree to pass on its waters into the sea.
Along the roads many young boys and girls, they run two or three on a motorbike. Where do they happen? Where they go? The impression is that of a sweet city, a city talcum powder. The vegetation comes from the courtyards of the houses, enclosed by high walls. Here and there, well kept lawns and perfectly square dividing a block from another, beautiful restored colonial houses, located mainly in the banks of Asia, colonial houses let it go bad, ugly houses per se, but there is no dirt even if there is dust, dirt is not stuck I mean, a few insects, geckos on the wall of this bar where I write, the FCCC, the Foreign Correspondent Club of Cambodia. Local-ventilated and airy terrace on the second floor corner of a building overlooking the River. Pale yellow walls, a circular bar counter of solid wood and dark leather armchairs and sofas, coffee tables. The wooden ceiling. Beams and joists that cross. Iron fans running unnecessarily so the air flow that comes from the river is cool and pleasant, but give the local atmosphere of lazy film. The waiters in white jackets serve to customers, for most Anglo-Saxon, beer and cappuccino. There is a pool table in a corner room, but you miss a ball.
From the terrace I look down. People who shake that comes and goes. People laughing and speaks thick. Chinese traders, Vietnamese fishermen, Buddhists, some Muslims, Malays and Chams, rare in the West.
at six this morning we had breakfast on the rooftop terrace of our hotel, a few meters dall'FCCC. The city is already awake and working and industrious. On the banks of the Tonle Sap hundreds of people working out, a kind of aerobic Orientalized to the rhythm of disco music Ibizan. Three or four instructors - credited or savage? - Performing the dance moves on the parapet of the embankment by the river that divides. Do not look at the students. They look at water. The people behind them, he conscientiously repeated the gestures.
At the market yesterday, the market-mosque located north of the city, not far from the river, now the Russian market, live fish, blue crabs, bat kebabs, mountains of fried grasshoppers, and fruit and vegetables, lots of fruit and vegetables, many unknown. They, the sellers, smiling very gently. In this people that even five years ago was killed by the energy of the worker ants, there seems to harbor no aggression, no anger, no pretense. A woman, an old red gums for betel, approaches me, gets on his knees and begged me to give her some money. I get up and I walk away. I have a feeling that all eyes are focused on me. I stop. I found an old, they are embarrassed, but she is gone.
In the afternoon we leave for the capital of Kompong Cham, which will take a boat to ascend the River. From now and for many days will become the Mekong river. The efficient Tareth has rented for us a van waiting for us on time at three in front of the hotel. He smiles, Tareth, waving slightly bent with hands folded in front of the face.
The recently paved road runs north into the river on the left. The landscape gradually becomes more and more agrarian. The villages are covered by the succession of pointed roofs of pagodas and palm trees protruding from the gardens that surround them. The houses are all made of bamboo on stilts several meters high to withstand the flood of the river during the rainy season. Some canoe on the river fishing.
Without him we ask our driver makes a slight diversion to stop near a sacred complex in dark stone. I discover that the monks - I call them so students dressed in orange - do not touch women, ask for money to continue their studies and want at all costs that you write your address. From the ceiling of the central pagoda which sits a fat Buddha colorful kites hang in pastel colors.
Kompong Cham (Cham of the pier) is a large fishing village halfway between Phnom Penh and Kratie, the capital of the biggest province of Cambodia.
We sleep, only guests, absurd in a hotel-style socialist realism. The architect should probably have completed his studies in Moscow, I say. Huge spaces, corridors that have ballrooms, an input that could house an army. Before we go to sleep the next day take the pier where the boat. For a couple of years the river is crossed by a concrete bridge connecting the city to a vast forest of heveas on which seems to have been shot on film "Indochine." Even at night along the river continues to trade in oranges, bananas and tamarind in the light of gas lamps. Many people sleep on mats stretched slightly away from the ground by wooden frames simple. They sleep in the dark, each with its radio on at all volume. The concept of silence completely alien to them.
Kompong Cham / Kratie / Steung Treng 29/12/2003 - Monday.
around the boat that reminds me of the Alilaguna that reaches from Tessera Venice there is great agitation. Men and women who drag themselves back packs and bags and backpacks down the shore with difficulty that leads to the level of the river and climb the narrow walkway which gives access to the boat. Our bags are tied on the roof. I choose to do as backpacks and I sit on the roof too, to enjoy the air and river views. Inside the cabin air conditioning throttle and shoot video in India at full volume. The boat runs fast on
greenish waters of the River. Near me a girl, Solydem, politely asking me if I speak French, a language that she taught in the village an hour from here. We chat with difficulty because of the engine and wind are opposed to the conversation. Solydem asks me if I have children, if you love your country and if I find it poor. I wonder how many years do. Twenty-three I tell you, but I have absolutely no idea. She laughs and says, happy that he is thirty and single. Use your word: single. He also says that she likes to teach. I politely indicate all the names of villages that parade on one of the two banks. I pronounce them with her and nod. We exchange e-mail addresses. When it comes down after an hour, he stopped in the middle of the path of earth salt on the shore and I am hello with the hand.
As you go up north to the villages are becoming rarer and appear here and there islands that are nothing more than sand banks. The river reminds me more and more parts of the lagoon or Vignole Sant'Erasmo. It's not like I can imagine. Not the Mekong leading to Colonel Kurtz and in some ways I'm disappointed. The predominant color here, too, is the beige of the sand and the green of tropical vegetation.
On the roof you will now need to be careful not to slip because the river narrows slightly, or simply to break because of the different sandbanks and here and there are slight rapids that accelerate the race skid by a little boat. The only change position continually. Now it's right, now left, now in the face. The river twists more and more loops, curves and eddies. Marie Claire protezionetrenta distributes sunscreen. I sprinkle the face arms and legs, but forgot my feet up in the evening meeting, as printed, a copy of my sandals.
The boat every now and then approaches one of the two banks. There are those who rises and falls. Parcels fall. Parcels rise. I realize that we sail the boat on which also acts as a cargo Postal making deliveries along the banks. At each stop, crowds of young girls flock to fast on the dock to offer food and beverages to travelers. I'm still at the stage of hepatitis attention, I avoid all food and beverage for a handful Riel I just buy a bag of strange red fruit from the rind with choking of the tentacles, red, too. They are refreshing, a little reminiscent of the lechwe, but sweeter.
in Kratie berths around eleven o'clock in the morning. Suddenly I realize that the sun burns.
They say the boat will make a stop for an hour and a half or two. Impossible to know exactly what time will start again. Calculation downward an hour and a half and go up to the shore leading to the town. Walking is a relief after four hours crouched on the roof.
Kratie is a small colonial town asleep. The market is at the center of town in a square in a square. There's no frenzy, I think. Rather, a great calm. We sit down to eat a little fried rice with vegetables in a restaurant with no doors or walls of the corners of the square is a square. Phnom Penh since I realize that all corners of the houses are cut at an angle, forming an irregular pentagon, sweet and rounded. A country with chamfered corners ... I keep wondering where it is hidden the ferocity of the Pol Pot years
I head to the market in search of the cocoa butter. Wind River dry lips. Indico lips to a girl in traditional sarong that takes me by the hand and leads me by a friend who introduced me to an endless array of colorful lipsticks. I shook my head and pointed to the white of a sack of rice at my feet. The girls do not understand and laugh. Perhaps they believe that I want to eat rice and indicate the restaurant. I make the sign of lipstick and mime "lips suffering." So understand, rummaging in a pile of merchandise ranging from the improbable to the straw hats to socks nail clippers made in Korea and extract the cocoa butter. Then they consult each other on price. How can fire at a western tourist on vacation? They are asking the equivalent of half a dollar chuckling. I make the sign of a knife that I cut the carotid artery and then I pay. They laugh. Always laughing girls here. And hello do with your hand.
off again after an hour and a half. Navigation now becomes more tortuous and difficult. I wonder how he manages to find the pilot in this maze that changes every minute. Not even a year ago, he says a former professor of mathematics cambodian which now has become a guide and who is heading to the Laotian border to receive an American couple on vacation, this area was still occupied by the Red Khmers and clashes with government troops were on the agenda. Today, the only danger is the shallow water of the dry season. We must follow the stone pillar in the form of small shrines that protrude from the water and showing the proper path. He says it's dangerous to be on the roof because there are fast but I want to go in there and I firmly attack the neighbors. That, as one would imagine, happy laugh. A little by little we move into the virgin forest, now so similar to what I imagined, that it is even a caricature. The rapids are vigorous, but just beyond the water is calm and herds of water buffalo bathe on the shore. Some bird alights on colored tufts of grass that will resist the force of the River. But as we advance the feeling is that the thinning of life, human and animal, to make way for the flourishing of the plant that leaves no room for anything else.
Steung Treng to arrive in the 16 and 30. It is no longer one on which we sail the Mekong, but the Self Sen, one of its tributaries.
Once the border with Laos coincided with this village. Now it has moved about forty miles to the north. We are unsure whether to stay or go. With just over an hour as night falls down on time at 18, and it seems that at a certain hour of the afternoon, the border guards let them go and close the border. What's ahead no one knows, but here we are sure you need to sleep and eat. We consult with the professor in mathematics hour tour guide who should stay. Voting shall be by show of hands and won the party "will remain."
Sleung Treng - Voeum Kham border with Laos - Khong Island 30.12.2003-Tuesday
For the latest travel tens of kilometers of the river cambodian, towards the border with Laos, we are obliged to take what they call fast canoe. It is a long narrow canoe from the flat keel that draws only a few centimeters and with a powerful Chinese engine and patched. The pilot sits in the stern and the engine throttle. We shake in front of him, his knees almost in your mouth, motorcycle helmets on their heads and orange life jackets. This stretch of river that I rip fast, no use trying pagodas, water buffalo and fishing scenes. Here is just water as far as the eye, rocks and trees whose roots protrude several meters from the water taking eccentric and twisted forms that indicate the flow of current perfectly. Some bird colored here and there, floating bamboo trunks. Even the shadow of the freshwater dolphins that we ensure its presence. If there are, the infernal noise of the engine mettein them escape. The more we advance towards the north, begin to draw more of rolling hills covered with vegetation, and this simple fact, the landscape changes dramatically.
The canoe races on the rapids, making slalom bold rocks and sandbanks, I'm not quiet, I cling to my neighbor, a professor of mathematics, now a tour guide, taking advantage of the step by joining us. I'll take it in hand and he said politely: "Je vous en Prie" giving me the impression of walking on the Champs Elysees.
Behind yet another bend, the river narrows suddenly, the banks become very high, and approached the dugout to the left.
Voeun Kham. The border.
long been a forbidden passage. Then one year, rather than open tolerated. I always thought that the borders are bad people. Borders has always made me uneasy. Always afraid I do not know why, to be rejected. This frontier but not scary because it is unreal. A border in the middle of nowhere, not a place, an absurdity that no one seems to separate the two lands.
We climb the sandy shore with difficulty. Two huts on stilts in the shade of a group of palm sugar. A hut habitation. The other office. Customs officers are wearing military jackets opened on shorts and t-shirts misshapen and discolored. Fill in the forms, deliver passports. Laughter. Nervous jokes. Two young Australians are the opposite. We are told that further north along the river there are waterfalls that form a pool of sparkling water and moved on which, they say, you can bathe. Remain in the words of the two. Do not you ever see.
Daniel negotiate the "price" of the passage with one of the officers. Agrees to $ 5 apiece, a handsome sum in a country where the average income is around twenty U.S. dollars per month. Suddenly reappear our passports, and multiply the smiles.
the Lao border post is in front, but on the river bank. Some huts offering food, bottled mineral water, straw hats cone. Lao Customs officers are playing cards sitting on the ground under the hut that serves as the office. Visibly disturbed by our presence their way into a military jacket and are going to check passports. The oldest, in broken English, asks me how much money we have given the other hand, to the Cambodians. Two dollars, chin, I do not know why. They look at him and then lay the heavy tax to two dollars, too.
this side of the river seems to me right away that there is still more sluggish and slow. It seems that the Lao are the Brazilians of Indochina, good people who does not move, do not shake, smiling perhaps a little 'less of the Khmers, and held more upright. An elegant bearing, erect, especially in women, which is immediately to me a stretch of clear distinction.
From home, Indochina seemed to me a flat sea of \u200b\u200bfaces, almond-shaped eyes and noses. The Lao are different from the Cambodians as a Swede is a Calabrian. Faces sharper, smaller noses, higher cheekbones, a slightly darker complexion. The women are beautiful. Beautiful and proud.
A fifteen kilometers north of the border, the Mekong flows in Khon Phapheng impressive waterfalls. Immediately upstream spiatarra as a lake, about thirty miles from its waters and low protruding islands and islets. Wander around the falls by land on a tuk tuk decorated with blue in the direction that we reach Khong Island ferry the river in a canoe.
The Hall Hotel is a wooden guesthouse overlooking the river, surrounded by a lush garden. The room is big, the beds are large and protected by large white screens. Jump on the wooden floor of the lovely river frogs. The terrace, dotted with bamboo chairs and tables, protected by huge geckos blue and gray efficiently play their role of insect eaters. Around the pier two or three other guesthouse, one of which is under construction, bear witness to the future tourist island. For the moment the atmosphere is that of a total and absolute peace and sunny.
Claude Vincent is buried in a stupa, the pagoda a few meters from the main island geusthouse. A bronze plaque in Laotian and English that informs Claude Vincent was cowardly assassinated in 1996 on the road between Vientiane, the current capital, Luang Prabang, the ancient capital. Continues, the plaque, saying that Laos mourns a friend. Claude Vincent was also a great friend of Daniel. We visit his grave together at nightfall. It seems that Claude Vincent had opposed the development of the island by a consortium of Chinese / Thai financed by the opium lords who even wanted to build a casino on the island. It seems that this was the reason of his ambush and murder. Claude Vincent was a Buddhist, I told Daniel, married to a Lao princess - but adds that almost all women are princesses here - and had not even left the Laos since the mid 70's when the country became the scene of an undeclared war. The son became Monaco and lives in the north, in a monastery. His wife runs a guesthouse a few kilometers, the plateau of Bolovan. From the main pagoda there comes a night of singing monks. This ancient technique allows them to sing continuously without ever take a breath, but breathing through the nose and emit sounds without interruption. The hand wraps, stregante. Claude Vincent smiles from a photo attached to the stupa. He has a young look. E 'in his shirt sleeves.
The island is cut by two perpendicular roads. A pair of young hoteliers who works in Rimini in the summer and then travels through the winter we recommend that you try a bike and go around the island. I travel for a month. He is happy. She says she can not wait to go home, dreaming of the tortillas his mother, who can no longer holes on the roads, fried rice, cockroaches and mice. He says that next year wants to take a vacation at Club Med. He says he does not give a damn anymore. Among the travelers, the Italians are always the most light-hearted and humorous. In the golden book of hotels and museums sarcastic comments in Italian break the monotony of the politically correct comments constantly dithyrambic of British, French or German. She is kind, "with the beauty we have in Italy what the fuck are we doing here" but does not say. I like her. I was nice and I like their accent Romagna.
cycling through the island on the short side. Are the two. The sun beats down, but they are just eight miles down the road. Some rice fields to the right and left of the road. Some huts where crowds of children running out to make hello with the hand. In return we take the sandy path that follows the coastline between the river and close to the huts that overlook the river banks missing an hour .. the sun goes down and there is a flurry of activity by washing. Women dressed in sarong wash tight over the breast. The children play barefoot on the water. Between houses some colorful pagodas, a deserted school. Greet the children as we passed in a language that resonates immediately as lullaby. I do not understand exactly what they say ... Bailiff? Wadi? Auadì? I try to play sounds, but every time I do laugh at all. Even the youngest children. Adults divert his gaze, embarrassed.
The path is interrupted by walkways and wooden bridges ill-dressed. I wonder, apprehensive, on average, how many children fall off bridges and walkways, slip between the boards bumpy roll down the steep banks that lead to water. I wonder how many children drown in the river every day. They are very small. Two, just three years. Suns, advance in the water brown.
Pigs blacks, on a leash or not, we cross the street. And chickens, turkeys, dogs. The night falls suddenly, a few miles from the village.
I learn two words: "sabado", goodbye, hello, hello, and "upciài lala" thank you very much. The Lao thanks makes me think of the refrain of the song by Simon and Garfunkel when Dustin Hoffman in "graduate" will take her ... Elaine. Cinema. Always and only cinema. Vat Phou
-Champassak/Paksé 12/31/2003 Wednesday
Where today are the ruins of Vat Phou, a time there was a Hindu city, one of the first capital of the kingdom Khmers. The city looked a lake, and a few hundred meters to the east river. The lake and the city were sacred and they drew their strength from a source, too sacred, that flowed from the mountain overlooking the lake. It 's noon, the sun is hot, and so far there's just us. The temple is divided into three parts: a plain, another mountain in the middle and the last at the top. At the main temple is accessible by a steep staircase from the steps narrow, irregular and very high. Heads, torsos of statues, giant feet, lie abandoned around the hill, in the tall grass. At the foot of the stairs an old sells flower arrangements to leave as offerings to the sacred temple. I climb the stairs mainly driven by the desire to reach a as soon as the shadow is barely visible from below. The frangipani trees lining the street are not shadow this season because no leaves, just branches of white flowers and fleshy, they too white, slightly streaked with yellow. Scent of magnolia and are so bare, naked and beautiful.
oasis of peace, fresh greenery, flowing water surrounding the main temple. I understand why we have built here. Overlooking the valley and the river behind him and is protected by the vertical walls of a mountain apparently inviolable. Wherever consonance Hindu carvings, statues in some ways reminiscent of Mayan or Aztec gods, Apsara dancers from many hands, statues of deities that appear designed children / poltergeist. I wish I could draw the patterns, understand its symbols. I pause fascinated to observe the details of carvings that I do not speak. A group of women
Oriental (Thai, Korean, Japanese, South?) Moves from one temple to another focus in prayer. Invite me to bathe her head at the source. They say it is a source of long life. They say that this water remains healthy.
It seems that a hidden path in the jungle region linking the holy city of Wat Phu Anghkor of the city. Five or six hundred miles of trail that winds through the vegetation, crossing rivers and mountains. I look down and I try in vain to identify the path.
To reach the ruins of Wat Phu use a tuk tuk from time to time that cross the Mekong River on rafts of logs which, once filled, providing transport from shore to shore. The same tuk tuk takes us in the evening to Pakse, industrial town with signs of recent development and messy.
Paksé: recent and particularly opulent villas on the avenue leading to the heart of the city. Five star hotel, five-story, $ 14 to the room including breakfast for two. He, the manager, a Frenchman of the South East, talks about explosive growth of the city ... Traffic, I ask? Even he says. At 19, he says, a family in view of the city will celebrate the marriage of her daughter. There will be those that count, he says. 19 to materialize in front of dozens of jeeps and trucks. Any car whose windows blackened. The bride and groom standing at the entrance of the hotel, offering all guests a sip of whiskey from the same glass. They shove the envelope in two large heart-shaped boxes. There's one for those invited him and one for her. Money, explains the director. The Hall of marriage, huge, resounding with the amplified voice of a fairground barker introducing the music and possibly entertain the guests. The women, almost all in traditional dress, struggling to walk on golden sandals from the heels. It 's a pity, I say. The best thing about these women is the pace.
E 'on December 31. On the terrace in the hotel a top New Year's Eve dinner for four Western tourists English sad-looking.
Seeking an Internet Phone. There are many. Computer cloned and dirt floor. Phone Andrea. It 's his birthday! He says that in France it's cold. We can speak with difficulty for those two seconds of silence are interspersed with the voices.
Around the market, a modern building with three floors around stairs and windows, a series of bar / karaoke music to shoot it locked in the local jeunesse dorée.
Rimini Meeting the two in a modest little restaurant. I'm waiting to take the night bus to Vientiane, the capital. Seeking a visa for Burma, and she is increasingly tired and eager to return home. We wish you a year to 21 and 30. To the 22 already asleep.
Paksé / Vientiane / Louang Prabang 1 / 1 / 2004 - Thursday
When I travel I do not like to take the planes. Introduce a sharp break in the path, in evolving human types, the slow change in vegetation and climate.
I'm afraid of flying. For years now. The Rimini I had described the airline as a sort of Laotian dustbin of Russian aviation, with aircraft flying at sight, bad seats bolted to the floor, chickens and other animals in the cabin. The airport promises Paksé bad. Virtually no control and the usual duties to be paid to non-existent self-styled border guards. The plane is actually perfect. Best of the shuttle buses that take me from Marseille to Paris. Flight quiet and look down.
Vientiane has the air of a bleak and desolate seaside resort out of season on a Sunday afternoon. It's hot. Nobody moves. Nobody looks at you. Comb group of friends sitting in front of the doors of downtown shops. Monks in orange clothes sciabattano naked scratching his neck. The men move from one chair to another. From a subtree to another. The market day, the Talat Sao, the air has dropped one-day pre-Christmas sales. Hand-woven scarves, silver chopsticks, old and new jewelry, plastic slippers, embroidered bags. No one insists on selling what little he has to sell. They're sitting on the floor smiling and sellers. The museum of the revolution ended. Sunny and closed. We head to Susaket, a temple in the city center. The property is in the cloister of a Benedictine convent of the 14th century. Who was conceived in Europe, I say. Dozens of Buddha tucked in all the same. Hundreds of niches behind them, each with a smaller Buddha inside. Sciabattano monks in the temple courtyard with tourists trying to learn a few phrases of English books.
miraculously found a cafe run by a Lao back from France. A lonely English law focused the Bangkok Post last week. The cappuccino has nothing inferior to a cappuccino French is bad, then, but it's a cappuccino. Ordered two, history of taking on.
The few hours spent in Vientiane in the evening waiting for the plane that will take us to Louang Prabang are already so many. The river is deserted. We encounter the local people. Feeling of being alone in an indifferent city.
Louang Prabang 01.02.2004 / Friday
Bun is one of many of nun Louang Prabang, the ancient capital and holy city. Live Vat Xieng Thong, one of the many temples scattered around the peninsula on which stands the city. Dreams of one thing: go to Rome to find his Italian friend. We keep on repeating like a parrot the few sentences of unnecessary Italian they have learned. The Bun
dawn parade along the main street with other kids like him to receive offers that men and women kneeling in their pockets to pay bandolier without raising his eyes. Cooked rice and glutinous, but also packages of crackers or Mars. Watching them pull out all together - the dawn - I realize that their estates have different colors ranging from dark red to orange on Tibetan saffron. They are children, young and old. A few monks of middle age. Assistants accompany the parade of monks with large nylon bags in which the surplus reserve of offers once the pockets are overflowing. The bidders are in the minority and mostly local tourists Korean, Thai or Vietnamese. Their minibus waiting quietly on the curb.
Hundreds of boutiques offering local handicrafts to tourists pearls. Miles of scarves, notebooks of rice paper, colored paper lanterns, jewelry and bronze Buddha heads. At the market women with children have breast opium, marijuana, are offered. At a banquet bottles containing snakes, scorpions, reptiles and strange yellowish liquid water within a unique promise sexual performance. On another bench of the bushes istoriatee bags of bark peel the medicinal properties. An old man shows me a lot of bark and touches my head ... They want to cure a headache, bark, or calm the fears, or magically make more intelligent? The old man insists, and he also touches his head.
Louang Prabang is nothing but a narrow strip of land in the water of two rivers: the Mekong and the inevitable Nuam Khan, a tributary. Across the river in the mountains. At the center of the peninsula a hill high enough to dominate the landscape on which stands a pagoda red and gold. We leave the city by bike. I'm looking for a new backpack. The straps of my backpack were snatched in the air and a view of the walk that I absolutely would expect to find a new backpack. I find the Chinese market, near the stadium. Everything here is made in China by sellers to light bulbs to lawn mowers Borsalino hats to socks. Fifteen U.S. dollars to find a backpack as I never dreamed of in life. Black and gray, double safety hinges, double lock, internal and external pockets. Solid. Efficient.
A German who lives in the city for many years tells me that we're going to cross the border on foot to reach Vietnam is hermetically sealed to Westerners. I insist. Maybe paying customs officers, I suggest. He says it's dangerous. The Lao become corrupt, he says, but the Vietnamese there will never pass. It 's the border of traffickers of opium, he adds. They have no intention of Western ficchino the nose there. Before greeting I recommend not even attempt ... "Avoid suffering, he says ... "
I speak with my neighbor, a Laotian living in California, ritono in town to visit family. We both lay on his stomach in a hut on stilts, and we do massage. is to be massaged of the most popular in this country. We do massage to relax, to stimulate the muscles, to cure diseases, we can be massaged by old women lean muscles of steel and strong fingers like the claws of an eagle, from as delicate as young girls, young women away. Daniel says that where it says karaoke is engaged in erotic massage. Still in Laos is less apparent than in Vietnam, he said. But it will come. It will also here. My neighbor says that Lao She did not even know there was a border at Dien Bien Phu, but says we can not disappoint groped and pass the same. In this strange country where sweetness is mixed with falsehood and reality is an effect of advertisement. In reaching
friends in the evening, I stop to rest in the courtyard of a temple. It 'the time of singing. The usual lament winding ...
Louang Prabang-Mouang Khouam 3/1/2004 - Saturday
rediscover the River. Not the Mekong but Nuam Oou, another tributary. Lying on the bottom of the wooden boat, under a roof of sheet metal, I write these notes. E 'morning, cold, and a thin layer of fog with us. And 'this, without doubt, the river of my cinematic universe. Links between the vertical walls, ascend the surrounded by mountains covered in vegetation that appear to be very high. Gray, green and red. The gray water and rocks sticking out here and there. The green trees, palm trees and a plethora of unknown species clinging to the banks, tangled roots that go down into the water and then go back to mid-trunk. The red of a land that is sometimes fat, sometimes it is dusty. Loops, bends, rapids the boat passes, giving the engine. People who live along the River. People who canoe carved into the trunks of trees or arranged by joining together the best two or three large bamboo stems. A paddle are children, sometimes toddlers who seem to sit directly on the water. They laugh when they see us go but never make hello with the hand. Sometimes in the universal sign greet imported from America. Thumbs up. Everything OK! On the banks of big pink pigs, small pigs and blacks, water buffalo just be glimpsed in the face and eyes. Women washing fabrics. Women washing children. Women who wash. A frenetic washers.
Through the dense vegetation are perceived huts on stilts made of woven bamboo mats. Here and there, stretches of mountain burned and naked. Halfway, sometimes, an abandoned hut. I say probably cut the trees, trees with valuable wood, teak, rosewood. Then burn everything to redo the humus. The boat captain does not speak. Annoyed she turns away when one of us mentioned to move the boat dangerously unbalanced. Sometimes someone from the shore beckons to request a ride. Take about a man who after a good half hour will be downloaded in the middle of nowhere, further north on the right bank of the River. A woman and two small children to climb down again near a village.
On a mountain that is presented in vertical in front of us are dug niches. Hermits? Hiding? Ammunition dumps? Ho Chi Minh Trail passed just for this river. The Vietcong were crossing the border with Laos in the area of \u200b\u200bDien Bien Phu, skipping over the mountains to to reach the River. From here down to Louang Prabang by boat and then farther south to Cambodia which penetrated into South Vietnam.
do not follow the advice of German and groped by a unanimous decision on the move. Daniel has total confidence in the power of the dollar. Catherine of luck or chance. Claudio does not believe that we will pass but does not prevent, and let things take its course. Of
thick bamboo poles planted along the shore with yellow and red flags flapping slightly. A déjà vu. Just before reaching Kurtz in Coppola's film, the same poles and the same drapes are lined up along the sandy banks of the River. In the film, are an omen of danger. These here, real ones, are an enigma. Us they do? What do they mean? No human being within a few kilometers. Trees, endless trees cover the banks. Liane hanging. Bamboo float. We come across a boat like ours down. The two boats approach. The captains are spoken. Passengers of both one another up. We, in the removal, hello do with your hand. They, the Lao, smiling without lifting a finger.
I seem to crawl into something deeper, to penetrate something every kilometer lose intelligibility. It is not a path, but rather a penetration ...
docked at Mouang Khouam, the last town accessible by water. Situated on a bend of the river crossing with a more affluent child, the village is slightly raised on the mountainside. A footbridge connects the two banks of the steering wheel. There are no roads here, but tracks and paths. We expect to sleep in primary and conditions at the center of the village there is a guesthouse in masonry, luxuriously furnished. Sign of a bet on the future development of tourism in the area or luxury hotel for opium traffickers awaiting customs officer compliant? In the courtyard a game of badminton row the team of Dien Bien Phu to the local team. Loud music and the usual showman entertainer who screams into the microphone fouls and scores. The reserves of the badminton crowd around us. Party members are young, well dressed and with all of gleaming bikes cross. It takes almost a day, they say, to travel by motorcycle to eighty kilometers between the border of the village. The Chinese border is slightly farther away, but we insist you come first. No problem if we have to pass the visa. We could go to China, they suggest. From the border with Vietnam, however, is not passed. E 'is closed and sealed. We offer to accompany us still laughing Daniel who, like St. Thomas, stronger panoply of ad hoc prepared false documents - a false letter of the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs calls him a friend of the country, a French diplomat false document stamps, and letters of recommendation , all equally false - wants to see visually what is now evident. Meanwhile, in five decide to go two days in the mountains. Marie will be waiting in the village because of a swollen ankle and sore. Daniel will be at the border and if it will not be back in two days, will mean that you can go and then we will arrange to get there.
A boy in the country aims to guide us in the mountains. We will be back in two days. In broken English tells us that much salt, he says. Eight, nine hours of travel. We'll make it? With the foot dolomite what we are eight nine hours?
Mouang Khouam / Ban Sleung Ouam / Mouang Khouam
4-5 January 2004
Night in Ban Sleung Ouam, minority village in Akka, in the minority Mong was a night of strange noises. It is possible that my memory is mostly noise? In the hut where we sleep the sound of crying babies, the elderly who are coughing, children, a girl seems to me that she coughs too fiercely. The noise of the fire is crackling in the room. There is fire and smoke blackened the walls which completely wooden salt and flows with difficulty between the interstices of the bamboos. Peek around the fire men sitting around smoking opium in long bamboo pipes also. Outside the screams of rodent control, kids armed with bows and arrows to hunt mice hidden in piles of wood. Again within the mats that are squeaking. In a very old man gloom Jang massage, the boy who accompanied us so far, mainly using his feet and pulling back his arms and legs. The cabin door creaks every time someone enters or leaves. Outside the sows grunt. A dog barks and then stops.
edge of the village on a pike three meters high cropping a dog's head with the mouth held wide open by a stick and the black and swollen tongue hanging to the side. Jang wants to reassure us when he says that is a sign of welcome? Beside the dog a bunch of guys throw with their feet across a network a ball of woven strips of rattan. At the sight of Catherine trudging under a huge backpack in khaki shorts, scream with joy.
watch us, we stare. Are held aside. Then the whole village takes us to the source where we try to wash under a trickle of water coming down from the rock. They are all around us and stare. Embarrassed us to wash parts, briefly. We are covered with dust. The red dust of the path we have traveled, squeezed between high grass.
is not nice to walk in these mountains. There are no clearings, panoramic, not ever walk in open spaces, but always in the midst of tall grass, which stifle any view. After several hours of climbing we lose sense of direction and space. The climb is monotonous and claustrophobic. Pure effort. Heat and fatigue. There is a total and absolute silence. No birds, no animals, no insects.
the morning we went through a couple of villages lying near some stream wade badly. Bombed villages stubbornly wrong during what is called the Vietnam War, if you think that the most bombed country in history it was the officially neutral Laos. Wherever the remains of American bombs that people use in various ways. How to support the base of the huts. As two separate basins to collect water. As for feeding pigs. Jang tells us to stay on the path. There are a little unexploded ordnance everywhere, and it is dangerous even a few feet away. In a village abandoned by a pagoda monks, Jang says, are gone because they no longer wanted to live in disadvantaged areas as well.
the village where we sleep begins the relentless fashion show for the sick who come to seek treatment from us: two Italian teachers, an architect, a nuclear physics and a leader EDF. We have a tube of arnica, a bottle of hexomedin to disinfect bandages and aspirin. We treat dislocated limbs with arnica ointment, disinfect wounds, and distributes aspirin. In the role of non-doctors without borders are absolutely inadequate but it is impossible to make us understand and refuse treatment. A girl coughs strong front for me to understand the symptoms of his illness. I jump back and asked when I did the last time the call against tuberculosis and do not know quite what to do, but she insists, takes my hand, and then spread a little arnica on his chest, feeling like a doctor of Moliere ... maybe the placebo effect, I say .... The girl goes away satisfied. Consultations take up the next morning at dawn, when the village wakes up in the frenzied cry of roosters.
What do these people live? Jang said that once grew poppies, which two years ago, the army burned their fields and fields of him today just two remain well hidden, he adds. A woman begins to flay a marmot near the fire. I am afraid that want to offer me for breakfast, but Claudio readily extracted from the bag a few that we dilute Nascafé bag in boiling water.
poor and miserable who lives in the dust and mud of lean chicken, geese, pigs and bastards of the dog. No romance, no myth of the noble savage, only wide-eyed and amazed, mouths blackened, and too many children. Do not allow themselves to take pictures as they are. You scoff. Children of mothers breast or on the backs of older brothers cry as soon as I approach them. A family, father, mother and two young children, just before we come up, runs to change. Once dressed up in traditional costume of these people, a minority among minorities, are asking to be photographed. They are stylish. In his dark blue pants, loaded with silver jewelry she and the headphones that children carry on their heads. Are photographed in front of their hut. They look serious in the target fixed.
not take us outside the village, but up to the curve of the path with us their serious look. Back to
Mouang Khouam. Daniel is not there. E 'back from the border empty-handed and left a few hours ago Loaung Prabang to look for a flight that will take us to Hanoi. Let the hotel name and a vague date for the next evening at seven. We decide to get
Louang Prabang the same day. We must go down the river to a village where if all goes well we should reach the ancient capital by night. Our journey to change look and direction. Do not arrive on foot in Vietnam as we had imagined, or walk in the mountains north of Dien Bien Phu.
not all is well. Since the beginning of navigation on the river back to understand the engine of the boat hired to go down is not working as it should. The captain, a young boy with a wool cap pulled down over his eyes, he's nervous, she turns often hear the noise it makes the engine. A thud from a flooded engine. He stops again. Dismount, recovery, clean up the candles, again to stop again. The river down in these conditions is no longer the same. Do not look over the mountains, the trees, the banks and the kids fishing, but the clock. Night falls relentlessly at six o'clock. The sunset is very short, a few minutes soon, and soon after dark. We try to calculate what is missing on arrival. Launch hypothesis: that mountain I remember, the last two hours. That village too. The spades decked with flags on the shore, then we discover to be a market. Missing too much time. Can not do it. A few minutes before sunset the boat docks at a sandy shore and the captain is a sign that we can no longer continue. We insist foolishly and stupidly, induced by the swarm of mosquitoes that attacked as soon as the boat stops, which must continue. The boy intimidated and dare not say no again. Most no chance of stopping now. The river rushes between vertical rock walls. Night falls and darkness struggle to distinguish the rocks that rise, the floating logs, the sand banks.
The guy lights up a big pile and set very concentrated the dark water. We meet a canoe that you pour on the side of stroke. The battery light shocked gaze of the men who paddled. I'm afraid. We all fear. I hear the sound of teeth rattling from fear of Claudius. We do not exchange a word for a whole hour that seems like a century. Close to the rapids engine gives the captain and I close my eyes in fright. The boat swings, spins, but in reality it seems that banging the rocks that I get to the last moment to dodge the boat. Let us go forward in the darkness and silence. Near the concrete bridge that marks the arrival at the river port of the full moon illuminates the water split up my anxiety.
The minibus that we rent for three hours to travel the road that divides us from Louang Prabang is so shabby that at every jolt the tailgate opens and backpacks rolling asphalt. The driver laughs unflappable while we run frantically to retrieve our belongings scattered across dozens of feet of track. Claudio croon the entire repertoire of the Beatles from Please Please Me to Abbey Road.
Louang Prabang 06/01/2004 - Tuesday
There is a French word that perfectly describes this day: flaner. What does stroll, relax, do nothing, be without the programs, letting go wave. I plan not nothing, nothing I visit, spend the day with a cup of coffee to another, from one wall to another and I look around. The linda Louang Prabang with its Italian cappuccino and a French baguette is the dream of all travelers. A place where you feel clean. Clean and rich. It 's also the place for shopping, Louang Prabang. Those who have passed through here and did not buy a scarf woven to the frame raise your hand! The two rivers that enclose the town lead to very quiet. I devour a plate of thin strips of beef flavored with lemongrass and watch a boat / house down the river slowly. Who shall dwell in the house wooden rose from taxes blue located at the stern of the boat? A Dutch? A family of merchants lao? At the bow there is an altar surrounded by flowers.
Tomorrow morning we take the road to Vientiane and from there a plane that will take us to Hanoi. Daniel has arranged everything for which we find in the case where we have breakfast coffee. The road that will take is not a good way, he says. The axis Louang Prabang / Vientiane is paved and comfortable. Cross the mountain range of Xianghoang in a thousand turns and finally descending to Vang Vueng and then Vientiane. The problem, he says, the caravan assaults. The mountainous stretch is not safe, but assured him that a couple of months is patrolled by regular army troops to ensure progression.
Louang Prabang / Vientiane / Hanoi - 01/07/2004 Wednesday
The regular troops are there. Every fifteen to twenty kilometers, there is one sitting on the floor on the side of the road smoking a cigarette under a makeshift shed. I'm shirtless and ill-dressed and holding the machine gun resting on his knees. They're more like militia than regular soldiers. Perhaps more bandits than regular soldiers. Our driver before tackling the mountain stops in a village where we go down to drink a cup of coffee - black Lao coffee, bitter and thick as the bottom of a mocha. A bunch of naked children around us and mimics the actions of Bruce Lee. The driver has a great deal of strange to wrap cigarette packs in cellophane. It prepares a dozen - nylon bags containing every four cigarettes - which are then fitted on the seat beside her.
Each checkpoint that never stops no one slows down and throw one of these packets out the window in the direction of the soldier on duty. He wants to make friends, or simply a nice guy?
Suddenly across the street completely deserted of this mountain we see a girl trudging bike with large backpack on his shoulders. A few hundred yards downstream there is his buddy. He also labored with a large red bandana covering his head. Australians? British? Swedish? We watch them amazed and delighted by the window. So amazed that we have not even time to hello with the hand. They stop and watch us disappear around a bend.
Almost 400 km, ten hours away. At noon, the driver makes a stop / lunch at the village of Vang Vueng other side of the mountains. There must be something in the neighborhood, I say this because in addition to us there are five or six other Westerners and guesthouse. Two Dutch lady of sixty years, I explain that there are hills around, and waterfalls and streams where rafting. They do not move from the village for more than two weeks. Do not go to see the waterfalls or streams. They are in the village and chat with people. They say I'm in love with the people. Sitting at the table in the bar next to me eating a sandwich with grace and kindness to the vegetables. Dressed as they are in office skirt and blouse sleeves, straight out of a gathering of activists, the Salvation Army. Greet us, smiling and wish us a safe journey.
Hanoi - 7-11/1/2004
It was not love at first sight between me and Hanoi. It 'been a slow conquest of the result of intense courtship display. Lien
that welcomes us to the guesthouse is a girl unleashed. Speaks, smiles, gestures, shake, does everything to make sure that we do not change the hotel and that remains to her. We remain, more than anything to not disappoint. The guesthouse is one of the many houses of old Hanoi, just a few meters wide and four stories high. Two rooms on each floor, eight bedrooms in all. Out of the deafening concert of millions of scooters.
Cross the street in Hanoi requires recklessness, courage and faith in mankind. Rest at least a quarter of an hour on the roadside to wait until the traffic thinned out until I say so you do not. In Hanoi you get off the sidewalk and cross the street with my eyes closed and constant pitch. Woe to make a difference, woe to falter. The thousands of motorcycles, bicycles and rickshaws that flow like a river along its streets are well aware to avoid passing on condition that he maintains a constant pace.
I expected it to be like Hanoi Pnhom Penh. A sleepy, dusty town. Where women still wear traditional dress and wear long white gloves to the elbow. So I had described who had been just a few years before. Dusty, I was assured, little asphalt, gas light and lots of bicycles. The bikes are there, but vastly outnumbered by the bikes, which seem endless. A swollen river than the bike. Majestic, slow and steady. It seems that around every corner there is a monster with open jaws incessantly spewing motorbikes. Motorcycles and youth. Boys and girls, the latter beautiful, moving toward what you do not know. They move, trumpeting with rhythmic regularity as possible and avoid putting the foot on the ground. It seems to be a sort of code or play or skill. Never to stop, prevent passers-by and especially to avoid putting the foot on land.
And 'the forbidden city sidewalks, Hanoi. The sign of the rejection of colonial France and rational. Sidewalks accommodate motorcycles, mostly Chinese, which are arranged to stand on them. Between a motorcycle and the other women squatting on their heels cooking, boiling, frying. Whole families eat squatting or simply chat. Here and there, young and old women carrying baskets of oranges rocker or banana, or scissors and knives, baskets, or baskets covered with cloth. Difficult to guess what they contain. Day and night women / rocker wander the old town and also with the gray sky, wearing straw hats in the shape of a cone tucked under the chin ragged scarf squared. We unravel in traffic, safe and elegant gait. Small quick steps. Some stop to balance the load.
To look at the facades of the houses need to find a safe space where to stay.
houses in Hanoi are all beautiful. Those of the beautiful old town. Imposing colonial and those of old districts of France.
In this town, thank God, rationalism in architecture has never arrived. The houses are the most beautifully irrational I've ever seen. Tall, narrow and colorful than the old city interspersed with terraces, balconies, bowindow, recesses, balconies, ledges, railings, columns, vines, and again, glass, wood, ceramics, cast iron, wrought iron, stone, all possible colors and materials that blend into a bedlam of geometric shapes undecided between roundness and acute angles. A city designed by thousands of architects to build improvised induced in height, perhaps to evade customs duties calculated on the basis of the width of the facades and perhaps save on Building land prices, given the near absence of labor costs.
of colonial houses, hidden behind lush gardens and gates, can be glimpsed flashes of front corners and if you walk along the main boulevard in the French, to the north or south of the old city. They are beautiful, but less special than the others. We saw these houses that we already turn of the century, certainly with less greenery, with less wealth, perhaps, but the forms do not completely irrelevant, unless amaze us.
In Hanoi, a few hours of arrival, I decided to stay, avoiding the visit to the nearby Baie d'Halong, already seen in dozens of films, and the Perfume Pagoda located a few kilometers from the city on an island Red River. These are the two main tourist spots in the area, but I feel that I will not tear myself away from this city. I want to discover the plan.
And slowly I feel that the city appears to me. Slowly walking randomly along streets, boulevards and along the banks of the many inland lakes that make a city water with boats, canoes and pedal boats shaped like swans. I get lost in the maze the old streets of Florence to suggest that municipal corporations are characterized as: the Silk Road invaded from the West, and less-frequented Tarass pharmacists, employees of the tin, color pigments, ceramics workers, watchmakers' , of eyewear, birds, tropical fish. The streets of hairdressers for hours massaging the scalp of the customer, the streets of barbers who are also pedicure, manicure and extract the wax from their ears with the old method of the candle. The streets of the hackers who hacked the whole world of information technology has never been able to produce and sell a few dollars for copies of CDs, DVDs and various software. The markets have little space in Hanoi. The old city is really huge market. Squeezed between a street and the other stalls of fish, meat, spices, fruits and vegetables. Women and children have loads of plastic bags are around trying to sell to tourists lighters with the portrait of Ben Laden or Saddam Hussein - "Good men! Good, men!" - T-shirts with the portrait of Ho Chi Minh.
the war museum, a few block from the mausoleum containing the embalmed body of Ho Chi Minh, the victories of the people of this hard working ants against Japanese, French, Chinese, and Americans are told with the tones of the most ridiculous propaganda Third World. "The proud people of Vietnam defeated the French vile oppressor in the great battle of Dien Bien Phu. "Written unnecessary because the story is enough to speak for itself. Eloquent one of the many photos exhibited at the museum. that of a Vietnamese girl, almost a child, barefoot, straw hat on his head and gun Stock in hand that an American soldier prisoner, three times bigger than her and with the best possible equipment.
The ascetic face an intellectual romantic Ho Chi Minh is present everywhere, often alongside the portraits of the rulers in power. A message that naive wants to instill in people the idea of \u200b\u200bcontinuity between past and present but that is not influenced by fat and faces pitted with Noriega of cheating representatives of the political current. The same people who roam the wide boulevards in a Mercedes with a driver from the windows tinted. The same people who live in luxury inside the Forbidden City, in the heart of the city, behind high walls protected by soldiers.
A walk along the wide boulevards of the French town just the west. What do you walk in, seem to be asking the local, long avenues by which trade and crafts are absent? I understand that in this city adrenaline random walk is a luxury, a waste of time. Life is in traffic, in traffic, which focus the energies of millions of young people who live there. The former are few. If I meet someone along the lake, dressed in traditional black, white hair, short long white beard, pointy, round glasses blacks.
Lien tells me that young people in the evening, traveling by motorcycle through the city with their arrears, then to stop along the largest lake in Limone. Thousands actually necking along the lake. Returning from the collective great restaurant near the road dam to the airport, where they pile up of fashionable shops and grave robbers, passing by. The conductor of rickshaws that brings me back to my guest house them out with his hand, laughs and adds, "Bum, bum, sida!" I play as easily as a warning to sexual mores are become too liberal.
gradually forced to walk and beat the city the few individual coffee western, an oasis of peace, especially those where you climb to the upper floors, on top of houses, terraces far from exhausts and noise. Sunk on an old sofa, half-torn silk sip of orange juice. On the terrace on the roof of the house in front of a tan viet does gymnastics. To my right another boy, western, this time, listen to a song by Led Zeppelin with their eyes closed. I realize when you lift that is made like a monkey. This coffee-bar-terrace, where the feeling of peace is enhanced by tropical plants scattered here and there and a big fan Magneti Marelli brand that runs slowly on the ceiling is not far from the road of opium dens. There we passed just before arriving at the cafe. On the sidewalk in front of Fumerie groups of men playing cards very concentrated. Inside, men lying on beds of straw in long aspiring pipein blackened bamboo. The boy sits down on the couch intoxicated by the music.
the evening we have dinner with Stephanie's sister, Catherine, in Hanoi for almost a year. He works as a doctor in a private hospital. Hanoi is not malaria, he says. There was the SARS and many hospitals were forced to close. Who was in - patients, nurses, doctors - in some cases there has been and is dead until they have lifted the quarantine. Great fuss was made, he says, the death of an Italian doctor at the beginning epidemic. He says he knew all that doctor. That was much appreciated and loved by the people. Many Western patients? I ask. She laughs and tells me that there's many who have come to bite the sewer rats who hide behind the toilet bowl of the restaurants in Old Town. People sit, she says, and sewer rats bite frightened calves and ankles. For the rest a few cases of dengue, and many fevers and amoebiasis. Overall, he concludes, Hanoi is a city quite healthy. It 's very Catholic and so is Stephanie Guillaume, her husband, who works for SOS International, an organization whose existence I did not know who is responsible for public health emergencies, individual or collective, in all planet. They speak to us and excited about the anniversary of the pope and of their trip to Rome. Hanoi is just beyond the garden gate, but to sit at the table between the French, in a beautiful house furnished with taste, spread goat cheese on crispy baguette seems unreal.
The last day in Hanoi, in the hours before departure, are frantic. I have the impression that the town escapes me, I will spiatarri between the fingers. I discover new angles to a few tens of meters from the guesthouse. Why did not I noticed before? I'm frustrated, I do not want to leave. From the great loves is difficult to separate without moods.
