LETTER FROM VIETNAM Chapter 9

RUSSKIS,KITE SURFING, AND FISH SAUCE 

Friday 17th March 2009 

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Mui Ne, the beach where we stayed, is one of the kite surfing meccas of the world. Perhaps I should have said one of the meccas of the Russian kitesurfing world.

Attracted by a brisk wind which comes out of the northeast every afternoon, the deserted beach that the Coco Beach people ventured onto in 1995 is now overrun with hotels catering mostly to kite surfers and package tours from rodina, the Motherland. Check out http://www.kiteplanet.ru/ for those who read Cyrillic.


  These kitesurfers, either the small muscular Vietnamese instructors or their big Russki counterparts, are phenomenal athletes, their shenanigans skipping over the waves a constant source of wonder and amazement every afternoon.

I could never quite figure out how the hell they managed to make the things work, an intricate ballet of jumps, twists, flips, complete reversals of direction, straight speed runs in thirty knot mini-gales, and recoveries.

 One of the interesting things about wipeouts was that unlike with normal surfers, where the board (unless attached) gets washed to shore, with kitesurfing in most cases, the kite keeps on flying like an obedient dog above its fallen master.

In order to get back up, the kite surfer has to make the kite dip down close to the surface in order to generate the leverage to pull him back up, like a water-skier behind a speedboat.

You have to see it to believe it.

I watched in fascination, but their antics were about as close to my capabilities (or indeed comprehension) as Pavarotti is to a shower singer.

But I could dream, and it was fun watching.

 Steens and I love to stroll on the beach, and Mui Ne is tailor-made for this. Every morning I got up before sunrise, took my camera, and hurried out.

 There is a different crowd in action at that hour.

This is true in cities, where dawn is the domain of the deliverer, the newsagent, and the coffee purveyor.

On the beach, there are the rakers (smoothing the sand for the hotel), the fishermen (each day yielding me a different catch for snapping sunrises-different boats, different light, same sun), the clammers (old women who burrowed along painstakingly for meager rewards, squatting down in their conical hats, scraping a trail like a mole up the beach), and then folk like me (not many of us , it must be said), an odd assortment of photo snappers, tai chi practitioners, or before breakfast strollers.

 The quiet, the anticipation of the sunrise as the flat light gradually deepened in colour and hue, and the indescribable feeling of well being that somehow you are ahead of the crowd; all make up for those first few moments of doubt when you pass from slumber to semi-consciousness.


Eminently worth it, for me in any case.

 Mui Ne has an entirely different (and perhaps much more unsavoury) body count of creatures on the beach.

To wit: a huge rat, a dead dog, a chicken and random unidentifiable sea creatures.

The first, perhaps a bit shocking, made it clear that this was not your average antiseptic worked-over tourist destination (in spite of our hotel's sand rakers, who were, it must be said, the only ones on a 6km long beach.) This beach was a slice of real life, a source of income for various types of people, The detritus was just an inevitable accompaniment to life in a hot, poor country, the rodents included.

Amazingly, it did not detract from the beauty or our enjoyment. You can easily dodge a dead rat. It is less easy, if not impossible, to dodge the Russkis, however.

 They were everywhere. Of course one should not generalise, but just as you can rightly extrapolate from going to Disneyworld or having a supersize meal at Mickey D's that there are too many fat Americans, there are two words which can pretty much sum up Russkis on a beach: peroxide and paunch.

The former describes the majority of the women, who do not mind the obvious contrast between the roots and the hay on their heads; and the men, who use their protruding bellies as shade for their members which are prominently displayed in too-much-detail speedos.

Lovely. I asked Steens to come up with words starting with S to describe this assemblage, and this is what (under duress, it must be said) together we came up with on one of our strolls. Sullen, Sour, Stolid, Soviet, Stolichnaya.

 I studied Russian at university for one year, and Steens studied it in more detail at uni and indeed spent some time in Kiev, but perhaps I should stick my hand up and come clean on some prejudices.

My grandmother was Anglo-Russian from St, Petersburg and they stole all the family money.

And Steens is Polish, the the Russkis imprisoned her family in Archangel during the short-lived Molotov-Ribbentrop love fest.

So we have prior. However, I still stand by the five Ss.

We also had some interesting encounters.

One night Dung approached me at dinner and said: "You speak Russian, don't you?"

Having heard me speak French and Spanish and take more than a passing interest in Vietnamese, I suppose she though anything was possible.

 "Well, I studied it in college."

This was good enough for her.

 "These people won't speak English," she said dismissively.

"They are rude to me," she added.

 I went over and there was a young couple (20 somethings). He had a teapot which he had taken the lid off and which had 3-4 teabags hanging out of it. Пожалуйста простите. Я изучал русский в университете. Я говорю немного русский. Что вы хотите?

 No shit. This is really what I said.

Please excuse me. I studied Russian at university. I speak a little Russian. What do you want?


The husband/boyfriend stared at me with the look that one reserves for discovering dogpoop on your shoes, and launched into a tirade in rapid fire Russian.

The finer details were beyond my elementary Russian, but I caught the gist.


Мы приказал чая без Пакети. We ordered tea without the bags. Byez pakety.

 This was clearly some sort of major transgression, and the bags offended them both.

What a trumped-up asshole, I thought to myself. I nodded and said: я понимаю. I understand, and whisked away the teapot.

 I walked over to the waitresses' station where Dung stood.

 "The guy doesn't like teabags," I said, making a signal to take them out of the pot and return the pot to him. I winked, and repeated my thought out loud for her benefit.

 "What an asshole."

 Byez Pakety, indeed.

I also rented a bike for ($2 for two days) and pedalled 6km up the coast to the village of Mui Ne at the end of the Mui Ne beach (kind of putting the cart before the horse....er....Welcome to Mui Ne.....not yet.)

On the way I saw the famous red dunes, which looked like...well....red dunes.

I then stood on the promontory overlooking the village and the fleet at anchor in the harbour.

My solitude was enlivened by a minibus of Russians who descended, fired off a few volleys (snapshots, not guns), and then departed.

One of the photos was of a peroxided middle aged women posed seductively in front of a palm tree.

They were friendly enough (at least she was....she offered to take a pic of me in front of said tree).

 I thought to myself how similar the Russkis were to the American tourists, only more arrogant towards the local people.

That attitude always pisses me off.

It is so unnecessary.

On the way back I passed by a village on the outskirts of Mui Ne and caught an overwhelming whiff of the pungent fish sauce, which no doubt would peel paint.

I got off my bike in front of a small factory (by small I mean mini, really...no larger than a corner store) which manufactures the stuff.

I asked the owner (hand gestures) if I could snap some photos of the process, to which he agreed, so I did.

This was a cottage industry not unlike winemaking, only subsituting rotten shrimp for the grapes.

There were progressively smaller vats for crushing, fermenting, filtering, blending, bottling, capping, and packaging. Amazing that the whole thing was done on such a small scale. I thought of the contest between production here and say in a La Choy soy sauce factory. Everything destined for the Western markets is based on economies of scale. Here they are producing the same cheap goods but in relativley minor quantities and no doubt not making all that much. And did I say working their asses off to do it. It was fascinating to watch though.


The fish sauce example helps explain how a country of 85 million hardworking people has a relatively small GDP.

Capitalism is about large scale production, distribution, and consumption.

That is why Walmart sells Chinese goods to Americans. Big stores, big highways, big trucks, big people.

Transporting plastic pipes on motorbikes, or hand crafting basket fishing boats, or distilling a few hundred bottles of fish sauce at a time are not going to cut on the world stage.

A system where a seven year old has to work in a factory in order for the family to survive is harsh, and surely not right.

However, cheap labour is an advantage in attracting industry and tourists as well, and gradually development happens.

 You can't escape economics.

It is what drives us all, just like the painting of the Buddhist and the fractured soul trapped between the lines of the material world.

We may want to live in the world of the spirit, the heart, and the ties of love which bind us all, but we have to deal with the harsh realities of earning a crust.

 And you could do a lot worse by observing the people on or around the beach at Mui Ne to see a microcosm of economic life: the fishermen, the beach workers (clam diggers, trinket hawkers), the tourist workers (beach rakers, waitresses, pool boys, masseuses, chambermaids, kite surfing instructors) and the consumers (big fat Russians attracted by the South China Sea and sun instead of the Black Sea), backpackers attracted by cheap prices, and folk like me.

Beneath this moving theatre of people are two economic systems moving in uneasy tandem with each other, one reluctantly dependent upon the other.

On the one hand you have tourists thinking not in Dong, but in dollars or roubles, and remarking on how a massage seems impossibly cheap compared to the £45 pounds you would have to pay in London.

On the flip side are the Vietnamese, for whom the Dong is impossibly high and who have to work their butts off in order to maintain a subsistence level.

There is such a divide between the two systems that in the near term it is unbridgeable in economic terms.

 In human terms, there is much less of a divide.

As I was standing early in the morning in the airport in Ho Chi Minh City, having passed at dawn through already crowded streets, I chatted with the girl at the check out counter.

The modern airport ( in stark contrast to Hanoi's) was deserted.

 "So how do you get to work?" I asked her.

 "I come on my scooter."

 "Oh yeah? How long does that take?"

I was mindful of the five mile long rugger scrum of motorbikes we had just come through once we got anywhere near HCMC.

 "Oh, not that long," she said.

 "Really? What about the traffic jams?"

 She shrugged. "Oh, there are times when the traffic is not so bad."

 Her colleague next to her, eavesdropping on our exchange, started to snigger.

 "Oh yeah?" I asked. "When would that be?"

 She laughed. "At midnight......for about five minutes."

 Chuckles all around.

 So let me return to my original impression of Vietnam.

It is a land of the easy smile, a land where the people you meet will make you want to come back, and will replace the prejudices or confused images in your brain with pleasant memories and a smile of your own.

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