So This is That Same World? Tam Coc, Ninh Binh - Vietnam

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And so there stood the American, upon the soil that the Americans had so tragically enriched with ash, ‘what are you to make of your legacy here?’ I pondered to myself. And where even was the rubble, had this war been a thousand years ago - where were all the people, the victims, the sad and weary peasants starved and bombed out? Well the wounds are still here, so deeply ingrained that many visitors can walk the streets with barely a notice given, but Vietnam has changed and if you aren’t one for facts, figures and the like, then allow me to bear witness personally on your behalf. Ninh Binh is a reflection of your average American city, albeit a small one whose residence are slightly younger and more commercially oriented, mind you - but if you find a local on the street there is a 70% chance they are under the age of 30 and they are far more likely to engage you in talks the NBA or their favorite Hollywood film than the works of Trotsky or the collectivization of agriculture. Commerce and free trade have dropped anchor here in the urban centers of Vietnam circa 2013, and that’s not to be confused with a few shops selling their wares but a flat out drive to make a buck – a full on endeavor for the American dream by a people who time and again tell you that we all need to move forward from the past without a drop of insincerity in their curious eyes, though at times perhaps a bit too much capitalist cunning - every square centimeter of town filled to the brim with electronics shops, boutiques and other junk that might be peddled to any and all who just may have a dong or two to part with, young and upwardly mobile Vietnamese included, you see.



It took us a day of relaxation in the beautiful Ngoc Anh Hotel and the people here were damn friendly and the rooms so nice that we didn’t even feel too sad about the $20 a night, which might be more than many backpackers would consider but sleeping on a nice soft mattress with the conditioned air flowing down and shower pressure that could knock the soap right out of your hand, a balcony to watch the night pass by and a refrigerator to keep our drinks cold, and free breakfast and complimentary fruit at all meals - how could we complain? It was safe to say we were living the life of luxury here in Ninh Binh province to be sure - and while all of that is well and good of course we had really come through this under-solicited stop on the open tour bus line to see the natural beauty which reigned just outside of town, that which man’s finest in warfare technology had been unable to fell. Even while that created by our own hands collapsed and burned all around – the earth’s mighty and natural shrines stood by as they had long before we arrived and will sure as the sun after we have gone. Indeed, the mighty ranges of limestone karst known as Tam Coc exploding violently from the plains below are not the average - albeit extraordinary - mountain ranges you normally catch in this part of the world. Those looking to pocket a few dollars have designated this place ‘Halong Bay on Land’ and since these very same people have already laid waste to Halong Bay - one of the Natural Wonders of the World which now many refuse to even visit because of the horror stories of consumer tourism gone awry - this is still a profound destination, though one sadly tagged for extermination by its association with those looking to bring you and I in, oh woeful the paradoxes of the world.



Beware of those who may offer you a tour for the seemingly benign price of $27 per person, perhaps even $19 for an all-inclusive tour of Tam Coc or Van Long – blasphemy I tell you, as a group of two tourists can rent a motorbike - albeit for the exorbitantly high price of $10, ride the ten or so kilometers to either site, park for fifty cents and then take the ride for $3.50 per person at Tam Coc plus perhaps a $2.50 tip for the paddle boat captain and be all said and done for under $12 plus have the freedom of a motorbike to drive to the base of a mountain climb perhaps, or to blast through the countryside and dig all that rural North Vietnam has to offer. It is inevitable, besides, that to sign up for a package tour means we must inevitably surrender our freedom – the freedom which allows us to be explorers, free of confines and restraints, to break away for a time from the doomed cycle of society - instead the package tourist simply floats along the stream of petty consumerism and all of its control and constraint, repackaged as some vulgar illusion of travel.



Our first excursion was to Tam Coc, which we had been informed was a bit touristy and we were also warned that boat captains would sometimes stop the boat and demand a tip before they would continue on and so I sat there in the room and envisioned the showdown between ourselves - who planned to bring only enough for petrol, water, entrance, parking and a small tip and not a VND more - and that sorrowful driver with the misfortune of the brokest and most stubburn foreigners they’d ever dealt with, I told myself. And so we roared up to Tam Coc after having been taken for a ride on some petrol - the attendant had quickly begun pumping our gas without resetting the meter from the previous customer, but he spoke no English and we had no real proof should we have made a big show of it and tried to arrange for the police to sort it out, and so we paid the six dollars for the three dollars-worth of petrol and cursed the land of scheming and petty confidence games, as if they had no reason to scorn the Americans joyriding around their countryside - and I’d say ‘mai bpen rai’ except for the fact that we weren’t in Thailand and were damn sure tired of all the same old bullshit ways to cheat you out of a buck in Vietnam, but the anger passed soon enough and we roared on over the horizon where gigantic karst suddenly loomed against a startling blue skyline with glowing, magical creatures posing as clouds.



As we rolled up to Tam Coc we sensed another scheme brewing - damn us and our skeptical ways having one more attempt at some fast cash convince us that the majority of Vietnamese are out to part the foreigner and their dollar. A small, earnest looking woman flagged us down with the national flag, that grand old bit of communist era nostalgia, red with a bright golden star in the center - her sitting in a small bamboo hut next to a monstrous parking lot with gargantuan pillars at the entrance supporting nothing but the heavens above - and with those thousands of square meters of pavement not a vehicle in sight, save for a single solitary motorbike - and her offering us a hand written ticket. We fled alright, explaining to the woman that we were going to head elsewhere before returning to Tam Coc and of course to her parking lot. She seemed to believe the ruse and so we shot up the road until we met the open water which wound out amongst the giants of stone before disappearing amongst them and we also saw a ticket booth and a fair amount of vendors and so we had arrived. Before we could set down our kickstand a middle aged woman in a rice farming hat approached frantically on a bicycle with a hand full of business cards for a restaurant where you can park for free! And guess what, you don’t even have to eat at the restaurant, our benefactor informed us, just tell them no thank you - ‘sounds great!’ we exclaimed to get her out of our faces and Tara went up to buy our tickets, whispering to the woman that we were wary of the restaurant scheme and after some prodding she reluctantly confirmed our suspicions that this was all a scam and the restaurant would, of course, refuse to release your bike until you consumed a sufficient amount of food and drink, and furthermore that the lots down the street were indeed the places to park and so we had no trouble telling off the woman on the bicycle when we left the ticket booth ‘ok, ready to go’ she said and began leading us toward the restaurant and we said no and she nodded her head yes and started grabbing at us and talking fast and so I twisted the handle and roared out of there, her shouts of protest trailing from the cloud of dust behind. So we headed back to the pillars and parked our bike for fifty-cents.



Back at the entrance to Tam Coc we were not overrun by tourists as we had imagined - sure the tourist infrastructure of small hawkers with 'good morning Vietnam’ tank-tops, rice farmer hats and triple priced waters lurked nearby, but it was relatively quiet, albeit a large population of middle-aged Chinese and Vietnamese tourists with huge umbrellas to shield their prized white skin from the treacherous rays of the sun had made their way out, but that is to be expected I suppose. When we boarded the small wooden vessel our pilot, a rugged woman clearly now in her early sixties at the very least, greeted us with a shy smile and asked us in decent English where we were from so we replied that we were American and her response was so ambiguous that I couldn’t tell if she was excited or indignant but she grabbed the long pole and pushed us offshore and began to operate the small wooden contraption which had been rigged up to paddle with her feet and with umbrella over her head and her paddie hat on she was down-right comfortable in the back of the boat but Tara and I could already feel our skin cooking in the oppressive heat and she offered Tara the hat but worried it was a scam for money we refused it and continued to do so until half way through the trip when we were sure we could take it no more - I accepted finally and god damn if the hat didn’t shield not only my head but my neck, shoulders and arms as well if I sat right, and I thought maybe I should bring one back for my father who tucked bandanas into the back of his hat to shield his neck from the sun while working and looked like the only Arab camel-herder slapping shingles down in the central New York summers.



As for the landscape, well there isn’t much that words can muster other than the scene is downright magical, otherworldly as some might have it and the majesty begins from the very outset as the ferry slowly crawls into the valley of the mountains, the paddles slapping gently against the water as a constant reminder of all that’s wonderful in this great world. If only I knew how this fantastical scene had evolved, for it seemed that these great mountains had suddenly been thrust upward by the gods of the underworld in a magnificent gesture of revolt and perhaps they had, but rather than a gentle gradient the angle of their ascent was a near perfect ninety degrees which added to the surreal nature of the landscape. In the meantime, our boat wound between the mountains which, as luck would have it, seemed to be a constantly flooded rice paddy and indeed, rice grew to either side of our watery path, which had been cleared of vegetation so that the boats could pass over the half-meter deep water, budding with its own strange vegetation just below the surface. Small islands protruded from the surface and some held eerie Chinese-style tombs which I learned later are the same style that commemorate Vietnamese who have moved on to the afterlife, but the presence was haunting - what had brought loved ones to bury the fallen here? Had it been where they lay, dying during a massive bombing raid, unable to be carted off to a local burial sight, or were there tombs even older, more ancient even, perhaps, than the flooding and the rice paddies themselves, or did people simply live within the great confines of these mountains – unbeknownst to us, who simply buried their dead here amongst the majesty of the great mountain saints and bodhisattvas, it was too much for us to know or take in, but we sure did dig it with deep wonder and sad, sad eyes.



Everywhere we turned our head it was the same colors - that timeless blue sky that seems it could never end in the clear Vietnamese summer air, the cool reflection off the water and the deep emerald green of the billions of blades which stand up from the water (and who wades out to farm this bounty?) dancing in the wind to the gentle sound of air passing through stone, song birds singing to you, to us, to no one - the timeless anthem of the swamp, everything in transit, everything the same - life struggling on, triumphantly on, while those stark mountains, some nearly white as they reflect the golden sun, stand watch over it all, laughing while man hurls explosives at one another, the time that our kind has inherited these lands a mere joke to immortals like they. And the paddles, gently lapping water against the sides of our craft, rippling through our subconscious, calming like the light jingle of prayer bells high atop a mountain sanctuary, reminding us all of the timeless nature of all that is pure, while we fools grasp upon our cameras - aiming and firing as if we could capture the essence of it all, while the world just laughs at our feeble desires, poor sad little fools.



At the half-way point of the ride there is a little tourist gauntlet, women in boats paddle up with food and drink and bull-shit souvenirs – an ambush really, and it’s all collusion so the boat drivers stop and strand you here for a bit, we told the approaching vendor that we would buy one drink – a water for our driver and nothing more and she said two dollars and we told her absolutely not, one dollar was four times the normal price and that was the most we would pay and she told us the driver liked iced-tea and cookies, but I hadn’t heard the driver say that so I asked what she wanted and she said tea and so I paid one dollar for a tea and gave it to her. When I insisted this was all we would buy the boat vendor, to my great surprise, said thank you and rowed away. Now it was the drivers turn, you see each boat has a little locker where they keep their goods, and some of them, I’ve heard, will refuse to take you back until you buy something - but our noble little lady just tapped me lightly on the shoulder and opened her locker, she had a white blanket with a photograph of her and some family members stitching it – about six people, and she looked at me her proud eyes wincing a bit as if to say ‘see what I have been reduced to’ – I smiled and said ‘no shopping’ and she closed the locker just as quickly without the slightest protest and paddled on, I felt sad and guilty, I don’t know what it was about that blanket, the photo and her eyes – it lingered with me for a while.



For the trip back she began to talk to us a bit more, her English wasn’t great but she managed, she taught us some Vietnamese, asked us about our families, she took our camera and snapped some photos of us, paddling with her feet, balancing her umbrella so that it was out of the way and still managing to capture some pretty good shots. I asked if I could take a photograph of us with her but she shook her head and pointed to her mouth, embarrassed that she was missing teeth – I wanted to reassure her but how? I didn’t press the issue, just smiled and listened to the water lap off the paddles. Tara and I wrestled with how much we should tip her. When we arrived back we handed her fifty-thousand VND, about $2.50 - and she grinned wide and thanked us profusely and even the woman who had helped her land the boat was thanking us and they were all smiles – I don’t think I’ll ever forget how much a couple of dollars means to people in some parts of the world – we read a story in this matter of fact newspaper or that hipster magazine all the time about the billions living on less than $2 a day, setting down the paper and taking a sip from our four-dollar latte – or perhaps even our six-dollar yerba matte latte with organic pressed hemp milk - but when you see it in the face (god knows the size of the extended family her earnings supported) it really helps you to Understand what all those words are about, which is nothing at all since their only words – but there is something very real out there which their trying in vain to get at. We returned to the pillar parking lot and the motorbike was waiting safely for us so we had a sigh of relief.



We climbed on the scorching leather seat, we were out of water and desperately thirsty – we stopped and bought two more bottles. After a year and a half in the region we are used to that feeling of being constantly damp, skin with a layer of sweat that the word sticky can’t describe, a permanent layer of oil on your face, the very real necessity of consuming a bare minimum of two liters of water in addition to all other beverages you might consume each and every day – yet this was some real heat and we had been sweating uncharacteristically, even for summer in South East Asia. Now we hauled it through a mini village and out toward the outskirts of the mountains we had just paddled through, out the backside of the village and over clay roads with giant stones through winding rice paddies the mountains growing in the distance. Our destination was a large statue on the top of the mountain, we had seen this statue and also the statue of a long dragon towering over us from the tallest limestone peak as we meandered through Tam Coc, but it looked impossible to get up there and our driver had told us we couldn’t get up there – maybe she hadn’t understood the question – but our hotel had told us we could and so we decided to give it a try.



We arrived at the base of the cliff and the area was dead to the world – save for a few Vietnamese folk gambling on a straw mat in the shade of a small indent in the cliff-face, we parked our motorbike in the ghostly parking lot and dropped the $3 for the two of us to enter – there were huge green fields of rice to one side and the giant mountains out ahead, once again there were some eerie gravestones set amongst the swaying greenery. There was a hotel and restaurant but both had closed down, an abandoned drink machine in front with a few half empty bottles inside, and what seemed like a priceless collection of beautiful bonsai trees all well potted and maintained around the lot. Before the base of the mountain there was a large pond with a Japanese style bridge, tall trees with their welcome shade, some abandoned buildings and also a strange stage sitting in ruins with a mini open-air amplitheater of some bygone era sitting across a narrow body of water, ghosts watching the dance of ghosts – I walked inside and there were some goats munching at the scrub – there were a few Hindu and Buddhist as well as Vietnamese statues arranged throughout and the entire area had a Zen-like tranquility so we breathed in the sweet air and tried to cool off for a minute – I tossed the empty remains of our final bottle of water in the bin and we made for the monumental staircase, greeted by hell breathing dragons and we felt the scorch as we made our way up the shade-less stretch of steep rock stairs – 500 in all, under that blazing South East Asian sky.



About half-way up the very real fear of dehydration and heat stroke began to flash in the back of my mind – Tara was picking up the frequencies as well. We had each drank at least two-liters of water that morning alone, of no consequence really after a few hours in the sun. My shirt was completely soaked, not damp mind you but stuck to my body as if the world had taken a vast sea and dumped it upon my head, shorts soaked, boxers soaked – we stopped in a small patch of shade from a scrubby looking tree, sweat was dripping off my chin and face at the rate of five drops every couple of seconds – it flowed freely down my arms, legs, vanishing from the stone almost instantly back into the sky to join, perhaps, a powerful storm that might rain right back down upon us that evening, leaving only some salt and minerals behind. I felt dizzy, it didn’t matter – turning back would mean defeat and we certainly weren’t going to go back for water and then venture out here and tackle the stairs again and so we worked our way finally to the top and what a rush as the wind instantly whisked away the sweat sending cooling sensations across our bodies – there was that grand statue and the concrete dragon which to be honest I could have cared less about because far below us and yet right at our fingertips were the mighty mountains we had only hours before gently wound through, we could see the tiny boats working their way down the thin blue arteries, a child’s plaything now. Kings of the valleys - we whipped around and there were the grand fields below us and other mountain peaks staring up at us with awe, towering now at such great heights above them - and Ninh Binh off in the distance, peaceful at last. From this vantage the winds that stirred the paddies below made intricate patterns which danced across the plains, imperceiveable to those below – preformed only for the birds, the gods and the sole occupants of this here great mountain peak. And how could this ever have been a place of horror, where fire rained from the sky – where the young school teacher who had occupied the bus seat beside me and I, casually exchanging our worlds – might instead have been forced by circumstance to point rifles at one another, to plant mines – to hate and demonize one another’s families? Could this and that have been the same world? It seems that it was, it is and it is not – for such are the way of things.

A short video we made to help bring Tam Coc to life.

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Photos

View From the Peak
Looking down onto Tam Coc from the mountains above.

Taking Refuge from the Sun
Photo by my fiance Tara - you can see her photos at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/96278952@N02/

Looking out toward Ninh Binh
They say the town of Ninh Binh and many surrounding were almost completely destroyed by bombing during the war, according to pilots who viewed the destruction from overhead.

View of the Mountain Peak
Looking up through the flowering trees from the gardens below.

On Top of the World
Tara poses for a picture

Strange Stage
The strange abandoned stage viewed from the even more bizarre seating in the gardens at the foot of the mountain.