Sapa Tale

Greetings,

Before shifting my fluid base to Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) this weekend I will post more Sapa material lest it become lost in the dusty archive of a Moleskine. Besides the words, here are three images to share with you. The Nikon and Leica galleries hold extensive Sapa visual stories if you have time.

Sapa is a remote mountain city in the Northwest and a favorite among tourists and travelers. I blogged and linked to Sapa earlier. Fresh air, amazing friendly local people, the H'mong, Red Dzao and Tay. 

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All night a heavy rain decorated the lake. Ripples from the center. Water echoes.

 My room is on the 4th floor of a cheap local hotel overlooking the lake, away from the typical tourist backpacker joints.

Above the lake are heavily forested eastern mountains with high granite ridges running north. Fog and water and low clouds rumble over the peaks, down the valleys bringing rain, fog and mist. It’s a perfect environment. 

The moving, falling water creates whirlpools on the lake with a steady falling mist.

The air is clean and pure. It feels marvelous. 

At 7:30 a.m. I jump in a van for a three hour trip to the Sunday Bac Ha market south of Sapa. It is “famous” for the Flower H’mong women’s elaborate colorful clothing. In the van are four Australian girls completing their nutritional studies program in Ha Noi.

It’s a splendid wild nature ride up, down and through narrow mountain passes, often with zero visibility as we are surrounded by thick cold fog. It is pouring in Bac Ha and the market is flooded with locals huddled under blue tarps buying and selling. There are lots of foreign tourists. It’s the Sunday “happening.”

We drop the girls off in Lao Cai so they can catch the night train to their dietary studies I and return to Sapa through the clouds as twilight sweeps over peaks into deep valleys where roaring rivers sing.

One Morning.

I rescued a brown moth from room #402 so it could fly into the sky.

At dawn I saw a bright white, yellow sunrise over the eastern mountains. Behind me was a brilliant rainbow arching over the high green western hills. Perfect natural equilibrium. 

I met Sa, a H’mong woman and we walked around the cloth market discussing the finer points of fabric quality. She told me a story about a H’mong woman in the far north mountains who was kidnapped by Chinese men from Yunnan, taken over the border and forced into prostitution. When she became pregnant she was taken to a remote cabin in the Yunnan mountains and kept there as a prisoner. One day she escaped and returned to Vietnam. Human trafficking is a growing problem in the world.

Sa also talked about how there is a lack of minority owned shops in Sapa.

By now most, if not all the H’mong women and kids know me. I’ve been here longer than the average tourist who does 2-3 days; takes a trek, explores the area, maybe really gets to know the local people and then they vanish, back on the train southbound.

I smile and speak with everyone along the path. In-out, up-down the steep sunrise street, past tourist shops and restaurants. “Same-same, but different,” goes the t-shirt proverb.

I am just sitting with the mountains, sky, clouds, kids and dancing stories.

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How to travel inside the market. How to carry fresh meat in a box on your motorcycle so you can stop, chop, weigh and sell to the people on the street. 

The village of Sa. Small steps going down, Steep trails, dirt, plants. She identifies wild plants on the hillside used to create the indigo colors in their clothing.

The wild terrain. Rising rice terraces where people harvest. People cut, thresh, stack of stalks and burn them. Isolated puffs of smoke dot the valley below rising green forests and mountains.

It’s a long simple home with a dirt floor and bamboo walls. There are also some wooden walls but wood is expensive. The home is divided into a kitchen on the left, main room and bedroom. The main room has a TV and DVD machine. Under the roof is a storage area.

Outside is a faucet for water, water buffalo pen, pig pen and writing pen. Actually there’s no writing pen. 

Indigo cloth that has been repeatedly dyed in a large vat hangs to dry along a wooden wall. Stacks of straw for winter feeding are stacked. Twenty-five kilogram bags of rice in blue, white and orange plastic bags made in Indonesia are piled in a corner.

Sa's husband returns with the water buffalo and we share a simple lunch prepared by one of Sa’s three daughters. She is 19, a mother, a trek leader and speaks excellent English. Many girls marry at 16. They begin families. We share rice, tofu, and greens.

Metta.

Sa's husband. One harvest per year.

Ghost Stories

Greetings,

In today's New York Times I found my comments included in a section called "Ghost Stories." I would like to thank the editors for selecting my piece.

On October 22, I posted an entry called BEDLAM AND HEALING. It was about the NYT and their "Home Fires," opinion section where Brian Turner, a Vietnam veteran posted his essay and poem. I'd read this and entered a comment and later read all of the postings, numbering 163 at that point.

Here is the entire piece and a link to the site. Read more...

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Hello Brian and Travelers,

I am a Vietnam veteran, author, English teacher and photographer living in Ha Noi after completing a teaching job in Indonesia. I felt it was time to “return” to a place where, as a green 19 year old, I was really on the ground.

I served with the 101st at Camp Eagle near Hue. I needed to get a sense of place and perspective. Nature has reclaimed all the land. Only the spirits and ghosts and memories remain.

I went to the Phu Bai airport. The yellow and green small simple cement building sits next to an “International” box. On the ground I found a discarded paper baggage handling tag. On one side in all caps it said, "EMPTY." I put it in my pocket.

‘Yes, ‘ I realized, ‘this completes the picture of my returning.’

As I wrote in my novel, “A Century Is Nothing” when I returned to San Francisco from Saigon heading to Denver they gave us a new green uniform.

It was a strange flight to Colorado. I grasped the significance of being a ghost. No one spoke to me. They averted their eyes. Maybe I smelled like death, evil incarnate, a green silent demon. Maybe all the passengers were afraid because I represented their worst nightmare. I was invisible, just like now.

Fortunately my “homecoming” was brief, then I continued to Germany where I finished my military time. Two years later while attending the University of Northern Colorado insensitive students, knowing my history, called me a “baby killer.” They had no idea. I didn’t absorb their sense of anger, frustration and illusionary ignorance.

Brian’s poem is a truthful insight how it feels to be invisible after a war. How leaves and rain and medicine birds are all. A cleansing and healing ceremony indeed. 

Bedlam and Healing

Greetings,

The NYT is featuring a blog called Home Fires. It concerns American veterans and their post-war life. I posted a small contribution concerning my adjustment after Vietnam referencing my novel.

Brian Turner,  an Iraq veteran and poet of a book entitled, "Here Bullet," wrote a piece for the Home Fires section and included a prose poem. You may find it worth your time. Since then over 163 posts were made as readers contributed their ideas and perspectives on war, returning veterans, politics and the current situation.

Jeffery M. Hopkins, a veteran and author contacted me and sent along his website to review his book, "Broken Under Interrogation." You can download a free e-book or order a hard copy through Amazon. I was grateful to hear from him.

Here is a short part of Brian's poem. It is about healing.

"Medicine birds break open in orange and red. Medicine birds have eucalyptus leaves for feathers and bandage the air when they fly. Medicine birds fly through the windows in the head, impervious to glass. They are impervious to WAR and hiss and steam and vapor and combat and the circling lost.

"Medicine birds fly through the windows to land in our beds when we’re dreaming our circling dream of Divisadero and Fresno with its lost and circling WAR. Medicine birds have eucalyptus wings and when they fly in our beds they transform themselves into leaves and rain and lovers.

"The lovers in our beds are eucalyptus birds flying medicine through the windows in our heads. The lovers in our medicine beds fly eucalyptus through the circling loss. The lovers in our beds bring medicine to our lips and call it eucalyptus, call it love, call it leaves and rain for our exhausted souls."

Metta.

Pictures of deceased Vietnamese in Ba Da temple, Ha Noi.

A man prays.

New Front Page

Greetings,

So, as usual I'm experimenting with the site design and decided to make the "Living on the edge," blog the "Front Page," that opens when you visit.

'It's like this,' said the seer during discussions discussing this eclectic option. 'Why start with Myths and Innuendos when people can immediately access the blog slog?'

'Excellent point,' I said. 'Everyone already knows about myths because they are alive. Most subscribers, visitors and friends have already seen the Myth page, read the book blurb and assorted philosophical insights.

'They are probably bored to tears wondering, why don't those two genius types get their electronic act together and streamline this baby so we don't have to click through to explore new stuff?'

'Clearly,' said the seer. 'Take the ideas and forget the words.'

Enjoy your travels through the Ha Noi neighborhood of reality and dreams. Feel free to drop us a line.

Metta.

On the sidewalk is a feather and a q-tip. Existential awareness.

A broken building at a temple in Ha Noi. Loving lines.

A man hauls out his heavy trash. His destination is the cart. A distant speck, horizon.

Sapa Theatre

Greetings,

 All the tears, rivers of loss. Introspection.

 Now here below mist mountain market. Java. The Vietnamese tourists pulling around their weekend rolling suitcase carts. They are here to eat, gamble, sing, dance with  strangers, and buy cheap Chinese plastic products. 

They are an army in high heels, floppy hats, sunglasses, shiny belts, and lost eyes.

They run to stand in front of the Catholic Church to have their photo snapped off. Most ignore the local girls. A woman slows down in her long march toward consumerism to look at a H’mong girl’s offerings; a handmade belt, a think colorful wrist wearable, a thin wallet. The wallet is thinner than the girl.

Once the the woman slows down she is surrounded.

A chorus of voices, “Buy From Me! Buy From Me!”

The woman faints. Another buyer takes her place near blue tarp patchwork junk dealers. Watches, cheap imitations, pants, shirts, knickknacks. 

The eyes of youth scanning 6:05 a.m. Elements - elaborate colors and fabrics. Threads. Threads.

Street theatre.

Red tied school kids in uniformed mass hysteria, deprived of sleep stagger uphill to a bright yellow school building where a young boy pounds out a rhythm on a ceremonial drum. Come all yea faithful, joyful and trumpet.

Two big brown dogs dogs hump on the street in front of the stoned church where tourists gather for a photo shoot. Local Vietnamese women selling this market are armed with camera bags poke and prod the women, husbands, boys and girls, lost and found into manageable groups for the moment. The moment they will remember forever. The moment framed on their family alternative votive candle flaming, this moment. Caught in time. Frozen alive! 

Here we are, she said to her friends later. Look. A church. I am in front of it.

A blond European tourist wearing rubber flip flops walks past the scene. Her t-shirt says, “Love My Bones.” I wonder if she is a specialist in marrow transplants.

I am smiling at every stranger along life’s magical story time inside the heavy forested, along steep stone trails. Yellow wildflowers fill the fields where water buffalo graze.

So there I was at 6:16 a.m. as the V tourists poured into Sapa. They poured off the bus, wearing red cotton baseball hats designed for the Great Union Hotel. It sprawls across green hills above the church. A fore lorn bunch of exotic creatures. They travel in bunches, like bananas. 

The economy class of style, luxury, and pizzazz-a-lama and the H’mong were already hard at work - pushing their handicrafts. These ebony, black spinning colors, all the hand made rainbows, skirts, aprons, blue-black tribes, flowering ethnology. Derivations. 

Metta.