The Road from Can Tho to Ben Tre. A Weekend...

Nate, Cat, and I traveled to Ben Tre and Saigon over the weekend. Ben Tre is about 3 hours away; Saigon 4 hours. I hear there are many coconuts in Ben Tre, I didn't see many. I hear Saigon is huge and the traffic is crazy, I can vouch for both. It was Khang's (from Princeton) sister's wedding. Something more on the wedding may come later. What follows is just some thoughts from the travel over the weekend.

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There was no direct bus from Can Tho to Ben Tre. We had to take a mixture of mini-express vans, moto-taxis, ferries, and big buses. Ly, one of the many amazingly helpful members of the English department, figured out the travel with me the day before. We would wake up at 4:00 the next morning to catch the first leg of our journey. Vans are simple to ride. Get in, get out. Stop at a rest station for food and relief. Get in, get out. Now, before I leave that one alone I would like to share a great little piece of engineering. The “urinals” at the rest station in tam map where we stopped for a break. One stands in front of a tiled, backward sloping, slightly-right tilting shelf that makes a “U” around three sides of a room. Short walls rise from the shelf every 2 feet. An opening at the bottom of each wall allows water to pass along the whole expanse of the shelf. A ‘U” shaped aqueduct of sorts. Transporter of waste water. It really did work smoothly, must save on water and must have been very cheap to install. Limited plumbing. And it gives a fairly private feeling standing there, unlike the tin troughs found in England. Great little engineered shingymafobby.

Off the bus. Moto-taxis at the ready. Honda om’s they are called. Not sure what that means. Om, in some shape of vowel or form of tone, means hug, I believe. A quick exchange in extremely broken Vietnamese involving a few terribly mispronounced words I learned the day previous and a piece of paper and a pen got Nate, Cat, and myself on the backs of three motorbikes without being ripped off too much (so long as the ferry was as far away as they claimed it to be, which it wasn’t). Aw crap. No helmet. I meant to bring it with me, but completely forgot. I remember looking searchingly towards my bike on the way out the door in the morning, but nothing registered in the early hours of the day before the sun broke the horizon. I did not want to get on the back of a motorbike, but it was the only way to the ferry, save a 10km (not really 10km as we found out) walk towards a wedding party that we may or may not be late for. As I realised I had not looked very closely into the sunglassed eyes of the driver to see if he was drunk, my legs perked and stood at the ready thinking about how much time I had to spring off the back of the bike if I saw something coming at us before the driver did. I always like to be prepared. Nothing came at us. We arrived at the ferry unscathed, our hands regaining their blood only moments after releasing the back handle of the bike.

The thoughts that go through the mind of someone who doesn’t want to be in a place there are: Do I trust this person I am entrusting my safety to? Why didn’t I bring a helmet? Why doesn’t anyone wear helmets in this country? (changed since Saturday with a new law that, if enforced, will eventually make helmet-wearing fashionable. Even laws can dictate fashion.). He is looking to his left for way too long. What is he looking at anyway? How can a couple of construction workers on a roof be so interesting at a time like this? But as they say, I’m alive now, so pigs could fly if they fell in the forest, or something. I’m not that great at proverbs.

Snippits of a country passing by. Bus windows dusty, glare glaring back at me. Rice paddies between patches of city. Houses of cement, tin, bamboo. People everywhere. Children squatting in front of rusted tin sheets, intently watching ants slowly crawl over and move the nutrients of a worm to its next destination as a baby ant. Monuments in the middle of rice paddies marking the burial of family members returned back to the land that will feed their children and children’s children. Circles. Cycles. Natural processes paralleled by ancient traditions.

Colourful plastic lawn chairs lined up facing the road. Hammocks draped orderly under thatched roofs. A hard-hatted construction worker on an angled roof handling large heavy sheets of metal above his fellow workers hammering below, sans hard hats. A wrench tightening a greasy nut. Black smoke puffing out of metallic cylinders. Banana leaves. Coconut palms. Dust and plastic. Crumbled concrete mingling with haphazardly piled bricks beside men eating noodles on tiny plastic stools. Spokes turning. Rivers frequently crossing under roads. Boats on rivers. Houses on rivers. Buildings overhanging rivers. Trees overhanging rivers. Short haired dogs collapsed defeatedly on shaded tiled floors. Road signs. No signs. Green. Grey. Brown. Blue. Colours streaking my retina. Breath in my lungs. Calm in my head. Hands clutching a rock, a reminder, a presence. Beauty passing by and floating in my vision. Thoughts pausing on random frames of a reel whizzing forward. Snippits of a country passing by.

Mark.