Letter from Vietnam
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Dear sweet lady
How are you? What are you up recently? When you will receive my letter, I hope to be still on the road.
Here in Hanoi it is quiet and peaceful, as a way of saying. Sometimes it is looks like a holiday, especially this few days we got of free rambling around Vietnam.
Me and my occasional mates are spending the time sightseeing this old French town and getting drunk at night, trying to forget for a while the hell outside, and the ones we left on the road.
Sometimes a dark shadow comes, but is last just the time to get our hands on another beer, that the little Charlies here are eager to provide us, and we start laughing again. And we live another half an hour of beatitude.
The bars are on the streets, sitting down on small plastic stools, drinking cheap beer at 30p the glass, while mopeds and motorcycles beep their way around the crowd, and street vendors try to sell you cheap food and whatever cheap you do not need.
Sometimes a moped’s exhaust bangs like a gun.
Food is everywhere here and you would have some problems with your vegetarian habits, but we try and get our teeth on whatever is edible and has taste, before coming back to the flat flavorless canned food when we move around by train.
People are generally kind, and smiling, the sort of smile winners throws over the defeated ones. They smile as I would smile if I had kicked the ass of the (then) most powerful army in the world.
Unfortunately Vietnam for us is still Apocalypse Now and Rambo.
Now they are after the money.
We are not visitors, we are sheep customers.
Fast eat, fast drink, spend spend or go away. Where are you from? You wanna buy? Cheap cheap. Hurry up Hurry up. fiffin dollars fiffin dollars.
We conceded ourselves a few days of sun and sea at Halong Bay, a myriad of small islands one hundreds kilometers from Hanoi. Weather was hot, but foggy, so the colors went away in my camera.
We stayed on a boat, have some kayaking and swimming in a broth hot water, and of course getting drunk at night with cheap rice vodka we smuggled aboard.
According to the law, their law, you cannot get anything on board and have to purchase everything from them, but we were hinted before and we provided for ourselves.
Sometimes locals fisherman come to us trying to sell cigarettes and beer cheaper than on board, but you have to consume it there where you buy, sometimes while still swimming.
Some parts of the bay are quiet and quite desert. Some others are where all the boats go to stay, and they are crowded.
Sometimes the outboard motors remind me of the choppers noise from Vietnam movies, and someone start whistling Ride of the valkyries and we grip on imaginary guns.
In a few hours we will be back to Hanoi, and then to the south or to the north. My plan is to go further north, to the rice fields of Sapa, near the border with China, but I do now know yet.
In the last days I started to thing about coming back earlier; I started to miss my summer, and the red wine drunk with simple cheese and bread, under the vine porch, with a gentle breeze keeping the bottle cool. I miss the raw seafood eaten at the seaside stalls.
I really long for a glass of wine.
I miss all the fun in the streets of Barcelona.
But I have a few months yet to go, before I can come back.
Something has been prepared and we need each man available. I will try to pass to Cambodia as soon as I can, they told me situation is more relaxed there, but before I have to get to Hue and then Hoi An and finally Saigon, and see with my eyes what was Indochina.
The Colonel Sanders has a reassuring smile, as a friendly Ho Chi Min. But I just trust nobody. Neither Uncle Sam nor Uncle Ho.
Actually I would trust Uncle Ho better. I decided I am Uncle Ma.
We, the KFC troops, shooting down McDonald’s in the middle of the jungle.
I am getting tired, of this staying here, of coming back, of going somewhere else in October.
Should I stay, should I go. I am genius at banalities.
Love from the far fields of Vietnam.