The postcard from vietnam

So, this is to make up for the fact I'm so slack at writing postcards. And it will probably be as brief as a postcard too, as any minute now I shall need to find a toilet - not  necessarily an easy feat in Hanoi.


We just went to Halong Bay, apparently one of those places on the planet you're meant  to see before you die etc ec, and spent two days and a night on a boat. It was rather pleasant - particularly after coming from Hanoi which is humbug central- to have two days of travel,  meals, accommodation, activities organised for us.And Halong Bay is pretty  eery and spectacular- massive limestone peaks and monoliths just sticking out  of the very still (somewhat  polluted) water.

We visited an enormous, incredibly impressive cave (Pete wants to get a map of it and set a D&D game there), and climbed a painful number of steps on one of the islands (literally painful, my thighs are still cranky)- the veiw from the top was  breathtaking though.



On our boat were a few very lively Brazilians who somehow had us singing karaoke at night - something I'd promised myself   I'd never do. It took a fair few glasses of wine -  which we felt the next morning when we were up bright and early  to kayake around a floating fishing village hidden among the íslands...

We were a bit disturbed by the number of dead fish floating on the surface, and, well - let's face it - the pollution was so bad we didn't sê the sky for two days... But it was still a relaxing few days, nice hanging out on a boat.

Back in bustling Hanoi now, heading down to the central coast tomorrow. Today's mission: find a cinema playing the Avengers in English...

Vietnam: random thoughts and experiences

Eating: Oh my god, the food. Mainly, our preferred method has been to look for a street stall where many locals are, hold up two fingers indicating we want two of whatever their main dish is, and then delight in whatever simple but exquisite dish they bring out. This worked well in HCMC. Doesn't work so well in the very untouristed town of Rach Gia where we are now- at least not when I forget to bring my fork (being embarrasingly chopstick-hopeless) and go hungry for much of the day....

Doing yoga on tiny spaces of floor in budget hotel rooms, squeezed between bed and door. Gives Pete an excuse to stay in bed an extra while as there is just not room for two of us moving about the rooms.

Vietnam vs India: here seems a lot less chaotic and traumatic than India?! (Not sure if Pete would believe that, having never been to India but having spent 3 days in Ho Chi Minh). How do things just keep ... working? And so smoothly? Is it the socialist/planned economy  influence? Wish I'd done  more political background reading before I came. What do you mean we can pay here for a boat/bus/as many stops as we like ticket to Ho Chi Minh and there'll be no 5-hour queuing and no missed buses and this  little bit of pink paper you're giving us will mean we've paid and nobody will ask  for money and someone will be  at the pier to show us onto the boat- isn't travel meant to be harder than that?

Spending 5 days de-stressing on Phu Quoc was a great start to the holiday, especially after all the work-related travel I had to do recently. The downsides of tropical paradise were also the upsides, I guess: it was very set up for tourists, very easy... but surprisingly difficult to find the simple, cheap local food  stalls we'd come to love in HCMC: instead we had to choose between Vietnames Italian, Vietnamese French, Vietnamese Mexican restaurants ... all playing the same music that I think of as "backpacker music"- I'm sure it's the same David Bowie/Bob Marley/etc  compilation CD they were playing in the touristy areas of the Sinai and Turkey when I was there 20 years ago. Here at  Rach Gia, we ate at a street cafe near the river and during the course of our  meal two separate buskers  turned up on cyclos, to which were strapped massive ghetto blasters, and sung in return for food/money/beer, while also distributing moist towlettes for donation. That's what I call fine dining...

The thing about spending one week lazing on the island is that we have two weeks left in which to fly to Hanoi then travel overland back to HCMC, and it was only yesterday we got our heads around the distances in this country... how could we have made such a mistake, coming from the rather large continent of Australia?! The prospect of overnight/all day trains or buses isn't as appealing as it was a decade of so ago... anyway now the marathon begins, as we attempt to see at least a few more parts of the country...

Phu Quoc

We are in Vietnam.

There will, sadly, be no photos in this post because I can't find the right cord and the net cafe computer lacks an appropriate SD card slot. I will attempt therefore to create pictures using words, as difficult as that sounds.

We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) early in the morning after a long night in the Changu airport in Singapore. They had couches that were okay for sleeping in, but that was about it that late at night. Everything was expensive and bright. Then plane to HCMC, which was the opposite. And that was great.

The dominant mode of travel is the cyclo - the tiny motocycle/vespa thing that everyone seems to own and is used for all purposes. We ate in a cafe were a house was being demolished and every brick and strut was brought in by cyclo, carried precariously on the back of the bike.

The traffic is unbelievable. The rules are non-existent. People indicate absolutely everything that they are going to do by honking. Overtake? Honk. Make a turn? Honk. Drive the wrong way up a street? Honk repeatedly.

And it all kinda works, in ways that make no sense to me.

The food is amazing. Pho and ban mi and everything you could ask for.

We have spent the last couple of days on the tropical island of Pho Quoc to the west of HCMC. We went on a cyclo tour of the south of the island, where we saw a pearl farm, an old penal colony converted to a museum and - the highlight - a fish sauce factory.

Our cyclo guides - Do and Tai - were really nice and helpful and never asked for a tip or any gratuity. But when we left the fish sauce factory it was made pretty clear that we were taking a bottle home as a souvenir. Now if we can just figure out how to get it on the plane...

Hello Changi

We made it to Singapore. Sadly not in the 747 I was so excited about, but that's budget travel for you.

Changi airport is massively larger than the entire city of Darwin, I'm sure... the transit lounge is a mega shrine to commercialism.There is free internet though!
So, do we book a hotel room for 6 hours sleep, curl up on the couches, or shop til we drop? I think negotiating Ho Chi Minh City in a state of sleep deprivation isn't the start to my holiday I was looking for...

Pete sleeping at Changi Airport, April 12 2012

And now to Vietnam...

I have been meaning to blog about the amazing second half of my two-week sojourn in Central Australia. I really have, it was quite an incredible and inspiring time.

It will have to wait though. I came back  utterly exhausted, treated myself  to a quick little  indulgence, 

helped with last-minute organising for the Good Friday rally for refugees: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNSOp2X_pWI&feature=youtube_gdata_player ,

spent the weekend drawing attention to the outrageous ongoing detention of refugees: http://newmatilda.com/2012/04/11/refuge-human , http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/50624 ,

and am now off to Vietnam for three weeks.

One day life will slow down long enough for us to  write about it... maybe after a week lazing on the beach at Phu Quoc...

Central Australia again

This week, for a change, my peripatetic life brings me to Alice Springs, to attend an Indigenous employment conference. With such illustrious speakers as federal government representatives, NT government representatives ("look at all the great things we're doing to encourage Aboriginal people to buy some white socks, put them on, pull them up, leave their land and get a job. They'll thank us one day"), and Generation One spokespeople (Aboriginal Australia's greatest friend, mining magnate Twiggy Forrest, reckons it's great if blackfellas can be just like whitefellas and become wage slaves to mining companies that have so far been such good news for Aboriginal people)... the less said about the conference the better.

I am, however, being put up at a rather flash hotel, a bit of a change from my usual field trip digs.

Here's the view from my hotel room:

I do love the landscape around Alice Springs. It seems art is never far away in this part of the country, and I was very pleased to see the yarn bombing movement has arrived in Central Australia.

Here's two pics from the Desert Knowledge Precinct, just south of town.

We were visiting the precinct as part of the conference, to see examples of some Aboriginal-owned social enterprises. I don't have a lot to say about that, wish I'd pay more attention to the awesome work the Centre for Appropriate Technology is doing though.


But some happened out there that made me see red. We were all sitting about in the sun, resting after lunch. I was sitting on a park bench beside a Balanda (non-Aboriginal person), and a few metres away a Yolŋu woman from up near where I work was playing with her young  daughter on the grass. The Balanda  was playing with her iPhone, and I soon realised she was taking photos of the woman and her daughter, zooming in to take photos of their faces etc.

Each time they turned our way, she quickly put her phone away and looked the other way. I'm not suggesting anything inappropriate here - well, yes I am actually: do people tend to sneakily take photos of white children? Was there some noble savage fascination going on? Why couldn't she just say "your daughter is so cute! Do you mind if I take a photo?"

I hated myself for not saying anything to her, but I was tired and avoiding all forms of confrontation, indeed any sort of interaction.

But then the woman playing on  the grass, who I know through work, struck up a conversation with me, in Yolŋu Matha. I managed to say to her, in language, "Is it ok that this Balanda  is taking photos of your daughter?", and while the Balanda focused on me with naive questions about Aboriginal language, Yapa and her daughter smiled at me and slipped away. So I guess at least they got to know what was happening and chose to leave the situation, but I reckon really it's incumbent on all of us to not tolerate racism, and to challenge it when we can, and on that count I failed...

When the conference was over, I grabbed the camera (you might have noticed I'm a bit enamoured with taking photos at the moment), and headed to a nearby Botanic Garden, with the rather pleasant name of Olive Pink.

After six days at this very flash, but rather lifeless, hotel here in Alice, I am missing Pete, and the tropics (where my skin isn't so dry it's itchy), and our rather humble but much more homely home in paradise, and the simple pleasure of being able to look in the fridge, rather than at a ridiculously expensive menu, to decide what to eat.

So tomorrow I check out and head to the airport - but not to fly home! I have five days of adventure to get through first. I am picking up my Yolŋu colleague (also my adopted sister), collecting a campervan, and driving to Yulara (the famed Ayers Rock resort about which I am sure I blogged last year). Yapa is beside herself with excitement at seeing Central Australia, and Uluru for the first time (I'm worried the cold is going to hit her like a tonne of bricks, that saltwater woman).  

I am beside myself with excitement because my aṉangu friends and family from Irrunytju, where I used to live and work, are meeting us at the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjarra Women's Council Kungka Careers Conference. Two very special parts of my ḻife are coming together, and we're going to do lots of radio work - multi-lingual, cross-station interviews between aṉangu and yolŋu, as well as lots of fun workshops, and maybe teaching each other songs in Top End and Desert languages....

So, despite feeling tired and wanting to go home, I believe we shall have a ball.

Stay tuned...

Just cos it's cute

I have saved this photo onto my work phone, so whenever things get a bit stressful...

I am suddenly overwhelmed with cuteness and there is nothing to worry about anymore :)