Our guide was named Anh. Like Anne, but a long a. Ah. Ah-n. She had the look of a backpacker. At first. When I took in the rucksack and light jacket, I thought maybe she was a trekker who’d landed her dream job. Tour guide on a medium-sized wooden boat, fits about 20 passengers, floating up and down the Mekong Delta.
But first impressions are deceiving. Anh was from Hanoi originally, now living in Can Tho. She wore thick flesh-colored socks with sandals. A face mask and a traditional Vietnamese hat to keep the sun off her skin. In Vietnam, the women want to remain as fair-skinned as possible. Stark contrast to the Norwegians who shared the boat with us. The two women in that group tied silk scarves over their bathing suits and sat in the hot sun until the silk turned dark with sweat and their skin a sort of freckled orange-brown.
My friend Marcia says that eventually, given enough time, we will all evolve to look like one another. Vietnamese women will get lighter; fair-skinned Norwegians will turn a crispy brown. We’ll all go after the universal beauty ideal. Add a KFC on every corner of every city in the world and Wham-o!, we’re all the same.
Until then, I will enjoy our differences. And prawns with attached heads, which we had for lunch. And cuttle fish, passion fruit, rice. Meals on the Bassac II are gourmet. How it turned out to be just me and the girls plus a Norwegian family of four—I don’t understand. This is the best boat ever, the best crew. The captain is the same one who steered the boat the last time I was on it, and both times he masterfully navigated our vessel through narrow passages where barges carrying silt dredged from the bottom of the river came within a foot of boats that are floating fish farms. And us.
As we gawked at other people’s lives, all while eating steak and fish for lunch or sipping Tiger beer, I imagined we were a nuisance on this commercial waterway. The Vietnamese float by with all their worldly possessions contained in boats only slightly larger than canoes. And yet, they are so tolerant, even nice to us as we float by in all our laid-back luxury.
The crew of Bassac II recognized me when I boarded, and I reminded them that I said I’d return and bring my girls next time. Dee was enamored by the boat immediately, the cool of the cabin and its smell of hibiscus and lemongrass. She wandered around the boat as if under a spell, that slow walk from this end of the deck to that one, all the while tracing her hand along the deep brown wooden railings. The place suited her internal clock, slow and content to not do much.
Em explored every corner of the boat she had access to, bouncing a few minutes around the upper deck, then a few more on the deck below. “Mom, I’m going to check out the front of the boat,” she informed before shooting off again. She waited impatiently for hours, unable to just rest, before we finally boarded the canoe and made our way to a village along one of the canals.
Not being from Can Tho, Anh didn’t know the off-the-beaten-path spots where you could find a temple that wasn’t officially on the tour. Nor did she have the same sense of adventure that prompted our last tour guide to stop in at a Cao Dai temple while making our way back to the boat from the village.
But that was fine. Anh was calm and friendly, and she loved the girls. She spent a generous amount of time in the floating market, took us to a cottage factory that produced soy sauce and salt, and let us sit for almost an hour eating exotic fruits while she showed the girls how to make jewelry and animals out of palm leaves.
When I asked her if she liked her job, she smiled, shrugged her shoulders, and then looked out in the distance. “I miss my children,” she said, “when I come overnight for the tours.” Believe me, I wanted to say, I can relate. Instead I looked over at my own girls and said, “Bring them with you one day, Anh—they’ll never forget it.”
YB, your photos are beautiful; they leave me breathless, especially the sunset and sunrise! I’m with Dee, I would just relax and gaze out over the scenes as they float by.
That’s my idea of traveling…let the scenery come to me.
Seeing familiar things through the eyes of a child that you love is the best! I’m happy for the three of you.
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I absolutely love this! Your girls will be the envy of the school when they write their “What I did on my summer vacation” papers! How wonderful that you got to share Vietnam with them!
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Thanks, you two. I am so fond of this area of Vietnam, and so it was wonderful to see their affection for it, too. Em said she’d like to live there, and Dee would want to visit a lot but live in the city. (They’ve both decided they want to spend an entire summer in Vietnam.)
But now that we’ve spent some time in Nha Trang, I think this is the place we’d all like to live. 8)
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What a beautiful post, yb. The photographs are stunning. I wanted to wait until I had some time to myself to read and really take in the experience of the photographs. Wow. I’m sitting here in awe that you are traveling though Vietnam with your two girls, teaching them about your love for travel and other parts of the world. When I see your posts from the other side of the planet, it does make the world seem like such a small and interconnected place. Each action we take affects the whole globe. I love the photos of the boats, the elephant fish, and your girls gazing out over the river. I’m going to revisit this post a few more times.
Happy July 4th from your homeland. We are going over to our friends this afternoon to attend a healing for the ravaged Gulf Coast. We will be drumming and saying our prayers. Yes — everything is connected. Miss you, ybonesy!
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ybonesy, I forgot to mention something else that struck me about your piece — the tans. How people are many times reaching for that one ideal look. Not too tanned, not tan enough. Your perspective on it in this piece highlights our differences and our similarities across the globe. And is it mostly women who worry about being in the Sun or not being in the Sun? Or is this something men do as well. Still thinking about that.
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Warren Beatty voiced a similar idea in the movie Bulworth, as a way to end racism, although as a senator gone off the deep end, his phrasing was a bit more prosaic.
Great post, yb.
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Lovely post!
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Great post. There’s something wonderful about a laundry shot eh yb…like you know something your not supposed to. Love the salt basket too! So glad you all are having a grand time.
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We made it home. It’s hard to believe we’re here now and not in Vietnam. Also hard to believe that I made it through the day without feeling horrible. I might have stayed sleeping all morning if Jim and Mia hadn’t suggested I get up at 10 and get going with my day. Good thing they did. Here we are, nighttime, and I’m finally ready to hit the sack.
The trip was too good for words, really. I mean, being in a place I love is one thing, but being there with family is something altogether better.
Heather, so true about the intimacy of laundry. And yet, I always feel whenever I’m in Vietnam that I have a glimpse into people’s lives that I don’t necessarily have here, and I think it has to do with the fact that things seem more transparent there. Not as many inhibitions there, and in a good way I mean that. And so much of living takes place out in common, public spaces.
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Elizabeth, what a treat to hear from you. And QM, I hope some day you might consider doing a post about the healing ceremony for the Gulf. I thought about the Gulf while out at sea in Vietnam. I really did. I thought about how people make their livings on the sea, how they live on the sea. I saw beautiful coral reefs and fish, and as I saw them I thought of the Gulf of Mexico. Very sad.
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Welcome home, ybonesy! Sounds like your trip was wonderful. It’s a good insight about the transparency you feel you witness in Vietnam. It seems here that people are mostly very private and protective of what’s theirs. I hope someday to travel to a few other countries and get a feel for the world beyond these borders. Thank you for sharing your trip with us. I look forward to more of your insights and photographs.
I thought about posting more on the healing ceremony we did for the Gulf of Mexico over the July 4th weekend. I have thought a lot about it since that day. And when I visited my friends the other day, I walked out by the labyrinth and under the prayer flags we left in the hackberry tree. It gave me a peaceful feeling to know that our prayers were on their way. I firmly believe that every little bit helps. It’s just such a sad reality to know the oil is still pouring into the ocean. We are all connected.
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