Saturday 7 April 2012

The Mekong Delta (1) Cai Be and a Cornucopia of Fruit: Vietnam North to South Part 14

Making Sweets, Eating Elephant Ear Fish and Lots of Fruit

From Ho Chi Minh City to the Mekong Delta


Vietnam
The next morning we left Ho Chi Minh City and drove south west into the Mekong Delta.

We were crossing one of the most densely populated parts of a densely populated country, so even after escaping the urban sprawl we remained in continuous ribbon development. According to the map we passed through several towns, but as in the drive from Hanoi to Ha Long, it was impossible to tell where the ribbon development widened into unmarked towns.

Most of the way we stayed in the outside lane of the dual carriageway, leaving the inside lane to the motorcycles. To overtake our driver pulled right, hoping the shoal of bikes would make space for us – it was in their interest to do so.

Driving from Hi Chi Minh City towards the Mekong Delta

At first the land was merely flat, but as we crossed into Tien Giang Province we passed over several canals, indicating we had reached the delta area.

Entering the Mekong Delta region

Boarding Our Boat

Approaching My Tho we turned right to drive a few miles parallel to one of the delta’s main branches, then left to reach the waterside at a small jetty behind a large car park.

Boarding a local ferry

We said goodbye to our driver, at least for the day, rounded a milling group of French tourists and reached the jetty. After watched people boarding a local ferry, we boarded our own boat. It was large enough for twenty, but for the next 24 hours it would only carry the two of us and Trang.

All this boat just for us

Cai Be

We cast off and pottered upstream on a section of riverseparated from the main branch by a long, low island surrounded by mangroves. We reached Cai Be 15 minutes later. The delta is densely populated but with few nucleated settlements outside the main cities; Cai Be is one of the rare villages.

The village stands at the mouth of a large side-stream. Turning into it, we chugged past a floating market which, at 11.30, was finishing for the day. Markets are always interesting, floating markets doubly so, but we were planning to visit the larger Cai Rang market later so did not mind missing this one.

Going home from market, Cai Be

Passing a church bedecked with Easter bunting.....

Cai Be church

....we entered a smaller stream and moored at a jetty. We were to walk through part of the village, but not before we had waved goodbye to our all our earthly possessions – at least those in the same continent as we were – leaving them in the care of a boatman we had met barely 20 minutes before.

Our boat departs

Making Rice Paper, Cai Be

Spring rolls are ubiquitous in Vietnam and as most of them are wrapped in rice paper, its production is an important, albeit cottage, industry.

We dropped into a one room factory to watch the manufacture of lattice rice paper. The process is simple. Using cans with holes in the bottom, a rice flour and water mixture is drizzled into a lightly greased pan with a circular sweep of the wrist. In seconds the liquid is transformed into a papery lattice which is quickly flicked over. Seconds later it is done and must be removed from the pan before it starts to brown.

The four or five girls working here are paid according to the quantity they produce. The relentless pace of the work - each girl operates two or even three woks - and the utter tedium of the task meant there were few smiles. I could think of no better argument to persuade a girl to stay on at school.

Making lattice rice paper, Cai Be

Fish Sauce, Sweets and Rice Wine, Cai Be

Further down the road we found a fish sauce factory where nothing seemed to be happening. Given the importance of fish sauce in Vietnamese cooking this was a little disappointing.

Idle fish sauce factory, Cai Be

From there on it was difficult to know if we were seeing different parts of one factory, or several different concerns in adjacent huts.

We passed a young man using a rotating machine to rip the flesh from coconuts.

Stripping the flesh from coconuts, Cai Be

In the next room coconut syrup was being boiled up. The resulting slab of toffee was cooled before being cut and packed by hand.

Boiling up the cocnut syrup, Cai Be

Next door was a still producing rice ‘wine’….

Distilling rice 'wine', Cai Be

… and next door to that a manufacturer of the more usual design of rice paper…..

Making traditional rice paper, Cai Be

The door from the yard where the rice paper was drying…..

Drying rice paper, Cai Be

>…led us into another, larger confectionary factory where popped rice sweets were being produced. Black sand was brought to a high temperature in a large wok, then rice was mixed into the hot sand causing the grains to ‘pop’.

The rice goes into the hot black sand, Cai Bei

The rice and sand mixture was dropped into a sieve, the fine grained sand passed through to leave the popped rice completely clean.

The popped rice was next pounded into hot syrup.....

Pounding the rice into the syrup, Cai Be

and the resulting mixture emptied into a wooden frame where it was cooled and rolled.

Rolling out the rice/syrup mixture, Cai Be
The 'packing department' is sitting at the table behind

The rollers, as Trang shows, are shell casings filled with concrete. Inventive recycling is a local speciality.

Trang with the shell casing rollers, Cai Be

The sweets were then cut up using an ordinary school ruler to get the blocks the right size, before being passed on to the next table to be wrapped and packed.

We sat at a small table with a pot of tea and a tray of mixed sweets. I particularly like the coconut toffee and the strips of dried ginger, but they were all very more-ish, as sweets tend to be, and we sat there nibbling long enough to drink several cups of tea (well, they are small cups).

Tea and sweeties, Cai Be

To Lunch and Elephant's Ear Fish

By now one o’clock was approaching and lunch was three quarters of an hour away, so we reluctantly dragged ourselves from the sweets, walked across the road and down to a jetty where, as if by magic, our boat was waiting.

We sailed back through Cai Be, turned upstream when we approached the mangrove island and shortly afterwards emerged onto the Tien Giang, the main eastern branch of the Mekong after which the province is named. The Tien Giang is about a mile wide here and we crossed it angling slightly downstream, apparently aiming at the endless line of mangroves on the far side.

Cai Be

Eventually we could make out our destination, a wooden structure on stilts over the mangroves with a jetty leading out over the water hyacinth that had collected at the river’s edge.

The jetty over the water hyacinths

We landed and walked up into the restaurant, its sides open to the cooling breeze – although electric fans were helping nature along.

We started with fried elephant’s ear fish, pulling the fresh, white flesh from a fish mounted in a swimming position. There was, perhaps inevitably, rice paper to wrap round mint and lettuce, prawns, pork and rice, vegetable soup and, definitely inevitably, spring rolls. European convention demands that soup must be served first. This does not hold in East Asia, where soup can, and will, turn up any time during the meal. Then there was jackfruit and pineapple. As breakfast had finished with banana, papaya, and water melon that made our fruit count five for the day. It was to climb higher.

Elephant's Ear fish mounted in a swimming position

We shared the restaurant with ten Canadians and their guide. Orders have to be placed in advance here, and there had been some mix up. The guide, who may or may not have been deprived of a fish – I could not be bothered working out the exact problem – kept mithering at the restaurant owner; being rude and obnoxious, largely in English and always in a loud voice. Trang went quiet, eventually he said, ‘He’s Cambodian. I met too many like him when I was there.’

Trang seemed rattled. With his eyes on the Cambodian he gave us his opinion of the Khmer Rouge which I might paraphrase as ‘inhuman, murderous bastards’. This is, of course, the received wisdom, but Trang’s opinion came with the force of personal experience, not from newspaper reports. In defence of this particular Cambodian who was certainly boorish but hardly murderous, Trang himself pointed out that he would not have been born when the Khmer Rouge were on the rampage.

When the Canadians had gone, the owner’s young son came and stood by our table. Trang started teasing him in a good-natured way and the child responded by bursting into tears. It had not been a good lunchtime for Trang, and this seemed the moment to move on.

Upstream to our Home Stay

We pottered upstream for a while and then turned into one of the many small waterways that criss-cross the islands of the delta. It was pleasant floating down the channel, surrounded by the dense vegetation and with the boat nosing its way through the water hyacinth. We passed a few moored boats, their owners, who probably lived on them, going about their daily business.

Pottering along the waterways of the Mekong Delta

There are hundreds, more probably thousands, of these channels. Our boatman had lived here all his life and knew his way around, but to us every waterway looked like every other waterway and alone we would have been hopelessly lost within minutes. As at My Son I started imagining what it would have been like if there were hostile eyes watching me from the jungle as I struggled, without the benefit of our amiable and knowledgeable boatman, through a totally alien environment. It was a scary thought.

I was dragged back to reality by coconuts. I am not sure where they came from, but Trang was chopping the tops off and soon we were sucking up the sweet and refreshing coconut water; fruit number 6.

Lynne and a coconut, Mekong Delta

We bumped into the bank by a tiny landing stage; it seemed that we had reached our destination.

Crossing a footpath, we went through a brick arch and found ourselves in the garden of a large wooden house, at least there was a thatched roof and a floor and lots of pillars; in this climate walls are not a high priority. At the front was the ancestor shrine, in the corner of the patio was a brick kitchen, while round the back was a separate shower and toilet block. Along one side a series of bedrooms had been built with rough planks and an external wall with open latticework where the windows might be in cooler climes.

The ancestor's shrine

After we had been introduced to our hosts and selected a bedroom, Trang suggested we rest during the hottest part of the day, and take a walk when it was cooler.

After making appropriate use of the shower block Lynne demonstrated how to relax in the Mekong Delta. She may look comfortable, but she did not stay long in the hammock, soon wearying of the continual struggle to avoid being tipped out onto the floor. I opted out, unconvinced that my weight would not topple the whole building.

Lynne secure in her hammock

More Fruit, Including the Answer to a Mystery

An hour or so later Trang roused himself from his hammock in which he looked only slightly more secure than Lynne, went into the kitchen and returned with a huge mango and some rambutans. Lynne is not a great fan of the mango (she says they taste like swede!) but even she had to admit this one was magnificent. We halved it, removed the stone and scooped out the soft, sweet, perfectly ripe flesh. Rambutans were new to me; a relative of the lychee and longan they have a spiny skin which you peel off to reveal the glistening white sphere within. That brought our fruit count to 8 for the day.

Those who have read Hue(1) will know about the mystery fruit we encountered in the market and later in the fruit bowl in our hotel room. We had decided, with no great conviction, that it was probably some sort of apple. The garden here contained a number of trees from which the mystery fruit hung in profusion. Clearly they were not highly prized - left unharvested they were dropping onto the paths – and, equally clearly, they were not apples. It was time to ask Trang.

An Phuoc plums

I still find it difficult to believe they are actually plums. A decade ago longans were the fruit of the moment and farmers across the delta rushed to plant longan trees. Then the price plummeted. Five years ago An Phuoc plums, for such they are, were fetching a high price, so the farmers chopped down their longans to plant plums, and did so in such quantity they the price of plums collapsed and is currently below the cost of harvesting them. Many small farmers lost money, first on longans then on plums.

A Walk and More Fruit

It was time for a stroll, so we went back out to the waterway and walked along the path between the papaya trees and banana plants.

Trang and I walk between the papayas and the banaas

Turning right we followed a well-made path away from the water. On either side were large houses surrounded by fruit trees groaning under the weight of jackfruit, papaya, pomelo, and mango to name but four. With such a variety of fruit hanging within easy reach of anybody who wanted it, we felt as if we were walking in the Garden of Eden.

Large houses amid the fruit trees

The houses could only be reached down the narrow lane by bicycle or motorbike, and occasionally we had to step aside to let them pass, but that hardly spoiled the idyll. Eventually we reached a road wide enough for four wheeled vehicles. There was a fruit stall on the corner and Trang paused to make some purchases.

Trang buys some fruit

>We walked along the road a little way, then turned down another cycle path back towards the waterway. Trang pointed out two small mounds in a garden, the graves of two villagers killed in the war. What appeared to be rubbish strewn around were cards, cigarettes, money and other bits and pieces required to keep their spirits happy. To entirely dismantle the aura of paradise, Trang pointed out that the chicken wire fences were made from rolls of wire left behind after American bridge building operations, and the barbed wire on top had been recycled from defensive positions. Et in Arcadio ego as somebody, possibly Virgil, observed – I (Death) am even in Arcadia.

Graves in a garden

Dinner - and a Little Fruit

We ate on the patio while Trang joined the family at a table near the kitchen. Our hostess produced an excellent meal of fried perch, lettuce and herbs with rice paper to wrap round them, spring rolls with prawns and beansprouts, chicken soup and duck in a clay pot with rice. It is ‘working duck’ she said, not farmed for the table. By the time we had finished, its working days were over. Dessert was jackfruit, a fruit we had already eaten so could not count again, but Trang also brought us a pomelo and a guava. The pomelo was magnificent, the individual segments required peeling but the flesh inside was juicy and sweet, exactly what a grapefruit would be if it had a less acid temperament. The guava was sadly under-ripe but as it was our tenth different fruit for the day and the only one that was less than perfection, we felt we had done well.

We played cards while Trang and the family watched television, the man of the house lounging in a hammock and occasionally swishing the air with what looked like a stringless badminton racquet. The sharp cracks and occasional flashes coming from it indicated another insect meeting their doom.

Retiring to our wooden box of a bedroom, we discovered the mosquitoes had ambitions to be as well fed as we were. After smearing antihistamine cream on the bigger lumps we ensured our mosquito nets were well tucked in. With plenty of fresh air and cooled by electric fans we slept well - at least I did; Lynne was less convinced.

Friday 6 April 2012

Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon): Vietnam North to South Part 13

The Chinese Market, The City Museum and the End of the American War

05-Apr-2012

Arriving from Da Nang - Sex Tourism & Eel Curry


Vietnam
We arrived back in Ho Chi Minh City - still called ‘Saigon’ by its older residents – a fortnight after we had dropped by on our way north. We were again met by Trang and checked in to the same hotel in the De Tham area, just south of the city centre.

As in Hanoi, we had driven from the airport among a darting shoal of motorbikes. Unlike Hanoi, though, the sky was clear and the air was hot. Hanoi has cool winters – and springs we discovered – and hot wet summers. Ho Chi Minh’s more southerly latitude means it is always pleasantly warm (or downright hot), although the summers are no drier. Ho Chi Minh is also a much more lively and cosmopolitan city; Trang described it as being New York to Hanoi’s Washington. We visited New York in February 2002; it was cold and expensive, two things Ho Chi Minh is not, but that does not entirely invalidate Trang’s comparison.

Ho Chi Minh City traffic

Mid-afternoon found us at the pavement café where two weeks before I had bought my 'genuine' ray-bans. As in our previous visit, several tables were occupied by a group of middle aged Western men who, in our jet-lagged state, we had thought were creepy. Now we realised they were very creepy. Some had been there a while, judging by the row of empties, and others came and went, two or three with a local girl in tow, one with a young Vietnamese man. This, we realised was sex tourism and we were sitting right in the middle of it. The café had ‘normal’ clients as well, both Vietnamese and tourists, but we found it an increasingly uncomfortable place to be, so we drank up and left.

A Fine Eel Curry

Later, we dined in a small restaurant a few doors down from our hotel. Reading through the immensely long bilingual menu I lighted upon ‘eel with coconut’. I had no idea what to expect, but this is what I received….

Eel curry, Ho Chi Minh City

My friend Brian has often eulogised the eel curries he enjoyed in Vietnamese restaurants when he lived in Hong Kong, and bemoaned his inability to find such curries in Vietnam itself. I had, it seemed stumbled across one by accident – and it was magnificent; any dish based on eel and flavoured with coconut, ginger, lemon grass and turmeric makes me a happy bunny. Eating in China I have often been frustrated by the waste of so much excellent sauce; you cannot pick it up with chopsticks, their ceramic spoons are useless and it is bad manners to pour the sauce directly from the serving dish onto your rice (though I have done it). This eel curry came not only with rice but with something unknown in China, a fluffy, absorbent bun. Problem solved.

06-Apr-2012

The Cho Lon (Big Market) Dsitrict

In the morning we drove north to the Cho Lon (literally ‘Big Market’) district. Most Southeast Asian cities have an area where the Chinese community gathers, and it always becomes a commercial and trading centre. Under the French Cho Lon was ruled by criminal gangs. The Americans also trod warily here and the Viet Cong found sanctuary in the narrow streets and alleys. In May 1968 five western correspondents were ambushed while driving though Cho Lon. Only one survived. Today ‘Big Market’ is much safer and outwardly benign. For all I know there may still a criminal underworld, but if so, they were not interested in us.

Binh Tay Market, Cho Lon, Ho Chi Minh City

Binh Tay is the oldest and largest of the district’s markets. They have more dried prawns - all classified by size and colour – than I ever imagined existed….

Dried Prawns, Binh Tay Market, Cho Lon, Ho Chi Minh City

…and dried squid…..

Dried squid, Binh Tay Market, Cho Lon,Ho Chi Minh City

…and plenty of rice. We bought some ‘sticky’ rice, it is about to go in the bag in the photograph. One day we will work out exactly what to do with it. You can also buy shoes and cooking pots and pretty well anything else you like, but it was the food that interested us most and there were enough strange and wonderful things to keep us occupied for a while.

Buying sticky rice, Binh Tay Market, Cho Lon, Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City History Museum

We drove south and around the Botanical Gardens to the History Museum, which has an extensive collection of artefacts from the Oc Eo culture. Archaeological investigations started in Oc Eo, a small coastal commune near the Cambodian border, in 1942 and ‘Oc Eo culture’ refers to the civilisation that produced the artefacts discovered there and subsequently at other sites in the Mekong Delta. Early history in this region is still not well understood and Oc Eo may, or may not, have been part of the Funan Empire which thrived in Cambodia from the 1st to the 7th century AD. Like the Champa , the Oc Eo culture was Hindu, but what we saw suggested less of an Indian influence.

Oc Eo artefacts, Ho Chi Minh City History Museum

The museum takes a more cursory look at later history, the most impressive exhibit being the French cannons by the entrance.

French Canons, Ho Chi Minh History Museum

Jade Emperor Pagoda

A short hop back towards Cho Lon took us to the Jade Emperor Pagoda, a Taoist Temple built by the Cantonese community in 1909 and generally considered, despite its modest entrance, to be Ho Chi Minh’s most exuberant temple.

The Jade Emperor Pagoda, Ho Chi Minh City

Once past the pond full of terrapins and inside the main hall we came face to face with the magnificently moustached Jade Emperor sitting behind a cloud of incense smoke and a screen of sunbeams artfully angled across the front of the altar.

The Jade Emperor

The Jade Emperor holds the keys to heaven and he has two supporters, one with a lamp to light the path of the virtuous, the other with an axe to prod sinners into hell. A series of carved wooden panels describe the judgement that will befall us all, we particularly liked the one in which the irredeemable are cast into hell.

Sending sinners to Hell,Jade Emperor Pagoda, Ho Chi Minh City

Left of the main hall is a statue of Kim Hua, to whom prayers concerned with fertility should be addressed. ‘It really works,’ Trang told us with a smile. After several miscarriages his wife had come here to pray to Kim Hua and they have since been blessed with two daughters.

Notre Dame Basilica and the Central Post Office

Saigon Notre Dame Basilica is in the city centre. Originally called ‘Saigon Chief Cathedral’, it was consecrated in 1880, though the bell towers were not added for another fifteen years. Built entirely of materials imported from France it seems rather plain for the country’s premier Catholic church. The Italian marble Statue of the Virgin Mary was installed in 1959 after which it became Notre Dame Cathedral. It was ‘promoted’ to basilica in 1962. The statue is reputed to shed tears at times of stress, and there was a reputed outbreak of statuesque weeping in 2005. The Catholic hierarchy investigated and came to the remarkably rational decision that the statue was dry eyed. That did not stop huge crowds thronging the square.

Saigon Notre Dame Basilica

Across the road from the cathedral is this rather splendid building. Designed by Gustave Eiffel and completed in 1891 it looks like a railway station from the outside….

Central Post Office, Ho Chi Minh City

… and also from the inside. It is actually the central post office.

Inside Ho Chi Minh City Central Post Office

To Ngon for Lunch

To find lunch Trang led us on a fifteen minute march across the city centre. He was clearly intent on going somewhere, but had not told us where. We passed a few likely looking restaurants and several outlets of well-known fast food chains; every time we approached one we held our breath in the fear that he might think that was what we wanted.

We were underrating Trang. Ngon is a Saigon institution. It is a huge restaurant housed in a colonial mansion with tables in the hall, the ground floor rooms, the atrium and the courtyard and they were all packed. Office workers, students, suburban ladies on shopping expeditions, everybody, it seemed, headed for Ngon at lunch time.

Trang had, we discovered, phoned ahead and made a booking and a waiter led us confidently through the throng to what seemed to be the only spare seats in the building. Ngon specialises in local dishes and, as we looked through another vast menu, Trang ordered, using some of our suggestions and some ideas of his own. The three of us shared tapioca noodles filled with prawns, herbs and rice, fried spring roles with mint and noodles, chicken curry and pork with something resembling paté. And then there was desert, banana fritters for Lynne and sweet glutinous rice balls swimming in a ginger and coconut milk sauce for me. I do not usually get excited about sweets, but they can occasionally be sublime, and this was such an occasion. I have difficulty grasping the idea that, for the locals, such delights are ordinary everyday food.

As we ate we questioned Trang about his early life. He had, he said, been plucked from school to join the army in 1982 and after training in mine disposal had been sent to Cambodia. After some years of border skirmishing the Vietnamese had launched a full scale invasion of Cambodia on Christmas Day 1978 to put anend to the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. By the 8th of January the Khmer Rouge had been defeated and a more sympathetic government installed in Phnom Penh. However, guerrilla resistance continued and Vietnamese forces did not finally leave until 1989. Trang was clearly unwilling to go into details about his time in Cambodia and we felt it was unreasonable to press him.

The Reunification Palace and the end of the American War

According to one view, the city centre is marked by the Notre Dame Basilica, while another claims it is Ben Thanh Market at the end of the park by our hotel. The Reunification Palace is a short step from Ngon and half way between the two, so I might modestly suggest a compromise.

In 1871 the French built a colonial mansion to house the governor-general of Cochinchina. After independence it became the presidential palace of Ngo Dinh Diem, but was so badly damaged in an assassination attempt in 1962 that it was subsequently demolished. The Independence Palace that replaced it is a characterless, even ugly building, but one that had a part to play in 20th century history.

The Reunification Palace, Ho Chi Minh City

The war ended on the 19th of April 1975 when this tank crashed through the gates….

The tank that ended the war

....and the north Vietnamese took the building unopposed and raised their flag. They renamed it The Reunification Hall, but the ‘Hall’ has become a ‘Palace’ again, largely because it sounds better to tourists.

Below is one of the best known photographs of the fall of Saigon. It was taken by Dutch photographer Hubert van Es (and borrowed by me from Wikipedia).

Fighting to leave Saigon, Hubert van Es

Taken the day before the tank crashed through the gates, the helicopter is often wrongly described as taking off from the roof of the American Embassy. The helipad was actually on the top of the CIA offices and unlike the embassy, which has been demolished, it is still there – though the building is no longer used by the CIA. It can be seen in this photograph taken from outside the cathedral; overlooked by newer, higher buildings it now looks remarkably small and insignificant.

The helipad on the former CIA building

The War Remnants Museum

The War Remnants Museum is a short walk from The Reunification Palace. As we passed a plane the Americans left behind and approached the entrance, Trang asked if we would mind if he did not come in with us. He had, he said, seen enough of the horrors of war in Cambodia.

American leftovers, War Remnant Museum, Ho Chi Minh City

Leaving him sitting on the concrete steps we made our way into the three storey, glass box of a museum. It is, mainly, a photographic exhibition, and it is not a great advertisement for the human race. It documents with an unflinching eye the very worst that human beings can do to each other. Among other things, humans can blow other humans into small but gruesomely recognisable fragments, gun down their children, shower them with napalm, tie them up and ‘interrogate’ them or burn, down their houses... the possibilities are limitless.

Lynne questioned the ethics of the photographers – how can they just take photographs and not try to intervene? It is a fair question and one every photographer must have had to deal with. In defence of the photographers I feel there is little one person armed only with a camera can do to influence events as they unfold; their function is to shine a light into the dark places where evil hides. It is a chilling thought that people behave better when the eyes of the world are upon them. What we do not see in photographs is worse than what we do see.

The great villains of the piece are, of course, the Americans. You need occasionally to remind yourself that not all Americans committed atrocities, and – though the Vietnamese authorities would not admit it – not all atrocities were carried out by Americans. The museum only exists because of one of America’s great virtues: it is a transparent society and for every American wrongdoer there are several more whose morality demands they expose that wrongdoing. Having applied that necessary corrective, it remains true that during those years – and despite the peace movement, which is also fully documented - it was America’s dark side that won out.

Some of the most harrowing photographs are of deformed children born after their parents were exposed to Agent Orange, the defoliant that was sprayed over vast tracts of countryside in an attempt to deny cover to the Viet Cong. They are, I suppose, collateral damage – a chilling phrase popularised in this war – as are the similar children born to the American servicemen who did the spraying. The museum notes this fact with sorrow and, here at least, strikes a reconciliatory note.

We left the museum sadder but, I hope, a little wiser. We could quite understand why Trang stayed outside, I would not want to go there again, but I am glad I went once.

Good Friday at St Philip's Church

We returned to our hotel to freshen up. Across the road from the hotel was a strip of parkland 100m wide and several times longer. Directly opposite were badminton courts, which seemed to be in constant use, and a square for public exercises, the exerciser's music quite loud enough to reach our windows at sixth floor level.

The park at dusk, Ho Chi Minh City

After a light(ish) dinner in a nearby café, we strolled across the park, attracted by the garish neon outside St Philip’s Church. It was Good Friday and we found several dozen people, the overspill from the evening mass, standing or sitting outside. We lingered to listen to the service.

Good Friday Mass, St Philip's, Ho Chi Minh City

Just over the road a hat sale was generating more excitement than seemed reasonable. Three days later we passed by again and observed the same excitement. We have no idea what was going on.

Hat sale, Ho Chi Minh City

The next day we set off with Trang for the Mekong Delta.