TRAVELER's FORTUNE: Epilogue

These are just images that will stay with me, nice, precious moments, rare moments, moments when you hear yourself say: wow, this really is the time of my life!








 This is the internet plug that was just above the toilet in one of the hotel's bathroom in Vietnam.





These are the precious worms canned in alcohol, who knows what for!

The same, here's a bird being conserved and bottled, along with her plums... Next to the snakes...
 


Just a girl... "Dreamy Vietnamese Girl".



This photo belongs to a friend I've made in this trip. I'll use it cause it's beautiful and think it's a nice-panoramic-epilogue.



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TRAVELER real FORTUNE , Chapter 10: SAPA

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The last exceptional thing that happened to us is called SAPA, a village in the mountains, in the north, where there are some tribes living.

Here I discovered that the common sense and the true value of a life and its principals are never forgotten, even if the people believing in it can hardly read.

I remembered that being human has nothing to do with how many books you have read and it is a quality that we loose day by day in the society that we create, society meant to eventually self-destruct - but this is another story.

The lesson that the girls Black H’mong (the name of their tribe) gave us, was one that will stay with me always!

These girls, between 9 and 15 years, live already without their parents, down in the village, trying to help their families by selling things to the tourists; mostly they sell aluminum earrings, handmade bracelets or traditional clothes.

The boys about the same age are already working the land. Very few of them go to school, and around 15, they get married.

Most of these girls were coming at the reception of our hotel, we found them there every morning, playing cards. We easily became friends, they were very, very open, and as we have soon found out, very warm and tender.

The smallest in the group was always around me, touching me, always looking up and smiling, happy to be able to change a few words in English. Because, even if they do not go to school and they do not know how to write, well, they do speak English! They have learnt it with and from the tourists. Of course it helps the business also!

Well, this small one asks me if I want to buy something from her. I said yes and I asked her to bring me some earrings that, I noticed, were in a very fashion among them, and she promised to bring them to me the next day.

That very next day we were also living, so when in the morning I saw her at the hotel, I knew she was waiting for me. As it was raining and we had to spend the morning in, she was always around me and I was curious how and when will she give me the earrings, I was sure she had it!

After a while she finally show them to me, looking for confirmation that they were the ones I asked for. I said, “yes, thank you, this is it; tell me how much does it costs”. She looked down and she said that I have to give it a price. So… I gave her the equivalent of two dollars or so. You can not imagine the big-big eyes she made looking at the money!

I didn't know if the reaction was due to the fact that I gave her more than she was expecting, or less... But I went for it wasn't enough. So I offered her another dollar, asking if this will do. Her eyes got even bigger and she thanked me whispering the words.

I was so impressed by her reaction! Immediately her friend came over and asks me if I would like to buy something from her too. I said no, but I gave her the same equivalent of a dollar saying that I have enough jewelery for a day, but this is for her. She thanked me the same gentle way and they disappeared.

Five minutes later they were back, coming directly to me, taking both of my hands and putting bracelets on them. I said “no, I do not want to buy any more”. And the answer was; “These are not for sell, these are our presents for you!”

I swear I was so deeply, deeply touched!

In the afternoon we could visit a little more around and late afternoon we were in the bus, waiting to go back to Hanoi. The whole group of girls was there. They kissed us all and they told us to come back soon.

One of them, kind of a leader (the quickest one on cheating while playing cards) came next to the window of one of our colleagues and asked: “Why didn’t you buy anything from me? Yesterday I asked you and you said you will. I asked: you PROMISE? And you said YES. Now, why didn’t you buy?”

We all told the guy to give her some money. He searched his pockets and he handed it to her, through the window.

The girl looked directly in his eyes, said nothing and slowly turn her head looking away and up, obviously offended.

None of the girls beside her touched the money, even if the guy was waving them hoping that someone would pick it up.

The bus started to move but the girl stayed there, unmoved, looking up, proud, teaching us that in Sapa a promise is a promise !

This is the image that I keep.

This is the image that I left with.

This is the image that follows me and that made me love Vietnam.

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TRAVELER MISFORTUNE, Chapter 9: Transportation & Christine the happiest encounter

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The transport, the most common one here, is the scooter, as I said. Everybody has one. And they use it in more many ways that you can ever imagine. This small bike on gas has place for 4 or even 5 persons. The whole family can be transported on it! Successfully!


And beside the bunch of people riding it, you can see that a whole different world can be transported with it! Even a big refrigerator that somehow manage to stay on the back of a small scooter in a strange equilibrium… And sometimes you can see chicken being transported, or a whole pork...




The image of Vietnam changed when I met Christine.
Good people are to be meet in the most common places. Along the time I made friends in bus, pharmacy, supermarket... me and Christine met in a DVD shop.


She was talking about her sick dog and she was looking for treatment. I thought she was a tourist and I told her that maybe the best is to get in touch with the French Embassy. We started to talk and I found out that she was living there, she’s half French, half Vietnamese and from that day on, we sow each other every day!


I am proud to say that I have a good friend in Hanoi, she showed me another face of the town, she invited me and Fid at her place - a kind of traditional Vietnamese house but in a good way, not at all narrow, very big living room (as we would never get to have in Paris!), few floors, lots of dogs…


Thanks to her I found good places to buy pearls, real ones, cause here you can also have real stuff for still same small prices; I discovered corners that I never knew about, shops to buy everything you want, that I couldn’t discover by myself. Suddenly my staying in Vietnam became vary pleasant!


I found a good place to do some sport, there was also a swimming pool, in the afternoons I was seeing Christine… and evenings were reserved to my husband. So life was so good!
Having a good friend can be the secret ingredient of a happy life, did you know that?


I started to use a motorbike every time I went out, there were always a few at the corner of my street, I knew now the prices so no matter what they were asking I couldn’t be fooled, and the driver was smiling like a kid caught doing something bad when asking for a price and found out that I was giving him just the half.
I started to feel at home in Hanoi, it was very hard to say goodbye, especially to Christine, who even very beautiful, never let me take pictures of her.


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TRAVELER MISFORTUNE, Chapter 8: The French influence (Not so much left, though).

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People are kind, life is cheap and the restaurants are fabulous! (I am getting positive!Finally!)

There are hundreds of nice different places where you can eat traditional food - accompanied by traditional music, plus costumes.

Or French food! And I can tell you that in the French restaurants, for half of the price of regular one in France, you can eat the tastiest “cuisine Française”!

There are streets here with different specialities: the street with shoes, the street with towels, the street with decoration, the street with clothes, the street with tools, the street with ... paper for presents… And this means that all along the whole street you can buy only this!

And what is very handy here, is the fact that if your scooter or bike wheel got flat, you don’t get to get angry or to lose time by pushing your vehicle ; at almost every corner there is someone with a pump, someone that for a very small amount of money will inflate it for you and you can happily continue your way like nothing happened.

Taxis you can also find everywhere and if you want to pay even less than 1 $ for about 2 km, (yes this is real!) you can ride on the back of one of the scooter-drivers that stay in groups at the corner of the streets, who will be happy to take you wherever you want. Just show them the address (in all the places you go they give you cards with all the details, it won't be hard to remember a place that you want to go back to) you'll be there before you know it!

There are also places where you can have a suit done in 2 days! For about 60 $... and a real nice material!

Doesn’t it sound a bit unreal? Well, come and see! You will never regret it!

What I absolutely love is the fact that on the streets, when they invite you to buy something or they ask you if you do not want a ride with the bike or the scooter, they address to you with “Madame”; with the French accent!

It has a particular charm on these dusty old streets, between horns and small shops, between old women without teeth carrying their 'balance' on the shoulder with big heavy baskets full of food, fruits, soups or underwear, between laud laughs of girls when noticing you, between curious looks right into your bag and heads that are turning around and follow you for quite a while, between taxi drivers that try to fool you showing you the mileage meter and telling you that this is the amount that you have to pay, well, between all this, the sound of a gentle “bonjour-merçi-beaucoup” (because all of them, as a proof of knowing French, are saying the same words together as I wrote them) it is comforting in a funny, ironic way.

All this adventure has just started! So I am curious: what’s next? ...

And next was a trip: 2 hours with the car from Hanoi and another hour on the river in a small boat.

Both sides of the river are watched over by mountains. With a lot of imagination they say that these mountains have the shape of an elephant back; there are 99 elephants, and all of them are watching the pagoda. Just one isn’t. So the rebel elephant was punished for wanting to be different and a part of his hip was cut. (It really looks like it is cut by a giant sword and on that abrupt cut-side there is almost no verdure).

And then, another one and a half hour climbing a mountain on some stone stairs, humid and slippery, till we arrived on a cave named “Perfume Pagoda”.

It is useless to describe the amount of people that we found there, praying and bringing “offerings” for different Buddha and different wishes. (“Offerings” that are staying there for a while and then they take it and eat or drink it there).

There is a big stone known as the “Money Stone” and one named “the Gold Stone”; people rub with their banknotes to those stones so that Buddha will give them more (you could see the places where they mostly rub it, stone being very flat and shiny.)

We were the subjects of a few laughs of some people who had never seen another human raise.

We also laughed when we sow people pushing each other and struggling, with hands in the air as high as they could, fortunately higher than the neighbour, to catch a drop of water that was dropping time to time from the place in the ceiling that is known as the “source”, “the fountain-head” and it is considered kind of saint.

We laughed again when we’ve seen a video clip (or a movie) that was being shoot on a bridge over the river with traditional costumes and traditional music; there was obviously a love scene as the couple was hands in the air, in a slow motion hug and very languorous looks…

And then we took lunch on a terrace where we could see the animals that we were probably eating from, hanging, with no skin, waiting to be cooked.

I was sick the next day, just me in the whole group. Probably my body was not used with that kind of meat... dog meat, no idea what it was, and still don't want to know!

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TRAVELER MISFORTUNE, Chapter 7: Ha Long Bay-byeeeee!

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I was lucky.
During the trip that we've done in our first weekend here, the guide was a very nice girl that speaks good English and we became friends, so I see her time to time, when she is not working.
( * we stayed in contact all these years and meanwhile she married a Romanian and she's living in Timisoara; life's full of surprises.)

(Remy's photo)

The trip was excellent; I felt in love with the things we saw: mountains growing out of the water in strange shapes and so straight and imposing, fishermen villages floating on the water, children and dogs jumping from a floating house to another - amazing !



(Remy's photo)



It started weird though. We were still at the hotel at the time (before moving in the hotel apartment with the laughing-at-my-ass-guardian) and even if we were living just for a couple of days and left all our stuff in the hotel room, cause we intended to keep the room for at least another week, we had to pay for the time we already stayed and for the night that we were supposed to be away, before going; even if they had the credit card number and could charge it any-time, even if we had all our stuff in the room, even the whole bus was waiting for us and even if we told the receptionist that our computers only, still in the room, costs more than his “putain d’hotel” (meaning of course, like you guessed, his "f... hotel") !

Well, he was stubbornly smiling and writing by hand invoice after invoice, one for each night we stayed in, and one for the night we were going to be away, as we left our stuff inside therefore keeping the room, he explained…

With about half an hour late and an impatiently-hot-waiting-bus, we left.

Not even ten minutes later we arrived in a place where a lot of tourists were waiting and we had to get down. We were waiting now with all the others; we soon found out that we were supposed to change the bus and then go for real.
As soon as we did, the guide, a small Vietnamese guy with the worse accent ever, got up and said: “Nowa weee sayyy byeee-byeee Haaanooi and…”
After this, nobody was listening any more. We were all laughing behind the chairs - I guess because we all had the same image of a bus full of wondering-why-the-hell-we-took-this-trip grown-ups, heads on a side, innocent looks, waiving and saying all at once with girlish voices: “byeeee-byeeee Haaanoooi”…


The fun continued in the back of the bus where we were seated with two other French. And it was really funny till we stopped and the same funny guide invited us at lunch.

Just when we were about to get down, he pushed us back saying that just four of us are going to eat here and the rest in another place.
OK, we said, even if it was weird; we are four (together with the two other French we met) and we would like to eat together.
He pushed us even harder and started to scream that No, the other two French can’t eat with us! That He is the guide so He knows !!!

Nobody understood why and after a long hurry-scurry we finally got the idea: as the other two French were supposed to stay longer in “Ha Long Bay” - the name of the place where we were going - their schedule was different, they were following another trajectory therefore eating in a different place; and they were supposed to change the bus (again).
But the poor guide-guy (fortunately his mission finished at lunch time and the two groups had each another guide) was unable to explain this in his byeee-byeee-Haaaanoooi-English ; explaining often seems the most difficult thing to do, especially when all they see is thy pride being hurt by these ungrateful-always-wanting-to-understand-everything foreigners!
...Well, I'm harsh! So, no, it is not difficult... it is actually impossible!

Most of the foreigners here are trying to learn some words in Vietnamese, so we kind of do want to meet middle-way; but the difficulty of the pronunciation and the contorted faces of the Vietnamese listener when hearing our nonsense efforts, kind of makes you loose the enthusiasm…
You can read on their faces “if you speak in English I don't understand a thing, and if it is my own language, I don’t recognize any of it !”
... So it's our turn to be useless and incapable ...

(Remy's photo)


Well, this last picture, it is not one my condescending jokes, it is actually nature's sculpture in one of the caves we've visited in Ha Long Bay; the lighting and the colours are not mine either, they are exactly like they are shown in the cave, for the eyes of those who could pass by without noticing it.

Thought deserve being displayed even if the photo is not mine either, it was taken by Remy, one of the French we met in the bus and that I accidentally met again on the way back to Paris; so during the flights and the eight hours waiting between planes in Singapore, we exchanged photos and we laughed our hearts out while telling each other our part of the Vietnamese experience.
So thanks Remy, wherever you are, hope you will not mind me using your photos after all these years. :)

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TRAVELER MISFORTUNE, Chapter 6 : Pyjamas, Street Barbershop and The Funny Ass

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The girls here, compared with Chinese girls (as I told you, the previous trip was in China, first Asian country I visited, that's why I tend to compare), are cuter and more feminine.

And they seem to have bigger breasts.

The high hills are indispensable most of the time, even on the scooter, and the pyjama is the most fashionable thing ever!

The pyjama is the every day street wear, most of the times pink and/or with flowers; as for the most sophisticated girls, the silk-pink-pyjama graciously floating in the air on scooters.

People here use to get up early and go to sleep soon. You can say that they live with the sun.

And they live outside: they eat outside, they wash outside, they chat outside, they cut their hair outside and all they do is in front of everybody.

Even the idea of intimacy is missing and people do not seem to need it. The curiosity must be satisfied this way.

Vietnamese do not know that they are noisy - as the Chinese didn't know that they were so many, till they counted themselves, got scared, and the leader decided: “No more than one kid per family! Exception: the rich ones that are allowed to have two!”

Not acknowledging the noise any more and living without the concept of privacy, one simply forget that others might need some space for their own; so in this simple way the guardian came in my apartment, in spite the fact that the door was locked and the key in the door (!!!) and caught me, of course, undressed ! He quickly turned around and left but I guessed he had time to take a good enough look as I was hearing him laugh like a five year old with another five year old, outside the door.

I just had to tell myself that I have a funny ass. ( Really, my ass again?!…)

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TRAVELER MISFORTUNE, Chapter 5: The Spanking!

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Another weird thing that happened to me the other day is that in a pharmacy (where I was buying more medicine for headache) I was surrounded by a few girls that were showing me the nose, my nose; the showing was done by touching theirs and then mine.

I already knew that the European nose, bigger than the Asian button-size-nose, is a symbol of beauty, so I was not affronted. On the contrary, I was thinking that mine it must be quite a Beauty as it's size is not to be neglect.

When I smiled at this last thought, another three girls came around and I found myself all of a sudden in the middle, situation and place that was somehow strangely uncomfortable…
Not that I do not enjoy being in the middle of the attention, but this nosy attention that I was getting made me wish and search for a way out.
And I quickly found one while jumping like hell because one of the girls started spanking me!

Apparently my ass was another symbol of beauty and they felt free to touch it!

I know that Asian curiosity is unlimited but I couldn’t say if this was simple curiosity or they were just making fun of me.
And as I found out later, after the second time I was spanked, this time in the street and again by a girl - please do not understand by this remark that I was secretly wishing to be spanked by a man, cause (this time) I really I wasn't! - in Vietnam spanking it is indeed a very impolite gesture!
So making fun it is!




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