Goodbye Vietnam

Mekong River near Phnom Penh, Cambodia

3:30 a.m.

Like every night at this time since I left New York, I am awake, alert, and ready for TV, a cup of tea, internet access or a walk. 

However, I am literally moored in the middle of the channel of the Mekong where much of that is just not available. So, after doing some yoga to try to bring my travel jostled body back to equilibrium, I walk the 180 foot long promenade deck from bow to stern barefoot, a shawl wrapped around my shoulders against the night air on the water. I check out the visibility, the night sky and try desperately to imprint the sensory wonder of all that surrounds me.

 I want to take in the river's night rhythm while the rest of the ship is silent save the slightly built older Asian with rounded shoulders, his blue baseball cap bowed as he passes me while swabbing the deck and watering the tropical planters outside each cabin.

 Usually I write in the night to pass the time ( and to keep my promise to myself that I would write at least one hour every day so that I would not lose events/ impressions because I forgot them),  knowing that I won't be anywhere near a wireless connection until the next day. I sit here in my cabin bunk under a ship monikered blanket  very near the ship's bow looking out through my slightly opened sliding glass doors into the deep dark stillness of the Cambodian jungle a quarter mile away.

 It is so quiet tonight ( unike docking in Chau Doc )  that I can hear the cold night wind curling around the bow interrupted with a very occasional fishing boat as it motors stealthily by with no running light of any kind. Every once in awhile, I can hear the plop of a fish jumping in the water. And now an hour later, as first light approach, I can hear male voices singing Buddhist morning prayer from some unseen stilted house on the riverbank beyond, the steady sound of  chant soothing in the stillness. Another morning begins.

 I am reminded again ( as I have been so often during this portion of my journey ) of the frightening shock it must have been for the GIs in the 60s and 70s when they were dropped into the totally alien land that is perilous to our western sensibilities at anytime much less wartime with people that have been slipping in and out of channels of this river for centuries in handmade dugouts like the picture above.

 I opened my laptop a bit groggy. To my surprise, the magic windshield wiper shaped wireless icon appeared asking: Would you like to join the trusted network dlink? Voila! I am in the middle of the jungle and somehow someone  ( and it isn't anyone on this boat since I've done everything but storm the office to be sure there wasn't some kind of satellite arrangement. I could find only a phone connection which won't work with my present set up. I walked the deck as I do every morning when I awaken so early and from the bowsprit  I can see Phnom Penh a few kilometers away which may be the source of my miraculous internet kismet.

I'll miss Vietnam, that small, S-shaped country, roughly the size of Italy. It can boast being the country in the world with the highest density of population ( 68 million ) and one of the lowest per capita incomes ( about $500 per year ). I'll miss the fresh, light, healthy food and the people of the south who generally ( including my friends in Saigon ) love America and Americans in spite of the fact that we left them in the middle of the night as the Vietcong moved closer and closer to the city  in late April, 1975 to fend for themselves, a troubling finale and certain death or "re-education" for the many U.S. informers, guides, interpreters or drivers. 

In The River's Tale by New York Times foreign correspondent Edward Gargan, writes an account of his year long journey down the Mekong from Tibet to the Mekong Delta through five countries and nearly 2000 miles of waterway. Gargan was an antiwar activist in the 60s ( as was I ) and part of his rationale for returning to the region was to reconcile the past with present day Vietnam and the effect on that country of our 15 years trying to vanquish the interpid Vietcong in comparison to the French influence prior ( until Dien Bien Phu in 1954 ). "Despite more than three million people being killed, swathes of the country being defoliated or carpet bombed, there remains, at least in the south of Vietnam a yearning, perhaps an uncritical yearning, for things American.The hamburger has not replaced the baguette, but Coke and Pepsi are everywhere, and English is the second language of choice."

In Chau Doc, I put on my running shoes, disembarked my floating paradise and moved into the morning chaos of the town. I ran along the edge of the street alongside motorbikes, bicycles, some rickshaws, vendors in palm leaf hats pushing hand carts. I ran through the town market, essentially a giant palapa weaving through narrow aisles filled with local Vietnamese women gathering their day's fresh produce--displays at every stand of miniature bananas, mango, freshly butchered pork, grains, gladiolas, bonsai. Past the market, I ran down a street of lean tos where young mothers were feeding their toddlers pho, men were sipping their morning tea, and the local military post was bustling, motorbikes leaving the small compound.

I must have looked strange, my running shorts, pink bandanna wrapped like Axel Rose, Ipod earbuds draped around my neck and my graphite silver sports sunglasses hiding my eyes. Some people smiled, the military vespa cut in front of me in a not too subtle way, children would sometimes wave. But everyone looked. It was a wonderful feeling actually. A triumphant feeling to be parallel to this culture absorbing all that it could reveal to me in such a short time. I felt exhilaration for the first time on this journey--as if I was beginning to be able to adjust enough to penetrate the chaos that anyone feels when thrown so totally out of their element, and the commonality of us all. We all get up, begin our day, dream our dreams, love and hate. All around the world.

M.C.