Backtracking Further

Just back from Melaka where I managed to catch up on some sleep. This might be a good time to wind up my comments on my Vietnam experience. I wanted to say something about the people we met there (specifically the Vietnamese themselves), and the people we didn't. Generally those we met were nice folk to come across. The locals on the boat were particularly pleasant, handling our party with courtesy & good humour throughout our stay. Similarly, Mai (I think that's how you spell it) our tour guide was a really good guy with an unaffected friendliness & warmth of disposition. The hotel staff were a model of courteous efficiency also, as were the various staffs in all the restaurants we ate at. Of course, I suppose with all the above being in the tourist industry, as it were, you might expect smiling faces. But people on the streets were also pretty easy to get along with. We didn't run into any unpleasant incidents in the 6 or so days we were there, and that's good going considering we had 16 lively adolescents with us.

Of those we never really got to meet (millions of course!) two groups stick in my mind. The first are the inhabitants of the floating village, or one of those villages at least, on Ha Long Bay. Mike took us to their museum. There we caught a glimpse of some of the younger villagers who were staffing the place. Funded by Unesco, the museum gives employment to a few villagers, who look extremely bored but stick to their posts manfully, and seeks to develop a sense of dignity & self-worth in the villagers in terms of its memorialising of life in a floating village. The problem is that it already feels as if the real message is that this way of life is coming to an end. It's much harder to catch fish now in the bay as pollution and the degradation of the mangrove forests is reducing numbers drastically. The solution, says the museum, is the development of aquaculture - the cultivation of fish farms. The problem is that over the long term this will create an even heavier burden environmentally in terms of the need for little fish to feed the big fish, at least that's how Mike, an extremely clear-sighted bloke, saw the situation. It was difficult to imagine the younger guys staying in the village(s), especially with the lure of jobs in tourism on various parts of the mainland of the bay. So something that's been there for hundreds of years is coming to an end and I was lucky to intrude upon it while it was still there, I suppose.

The other group I didn't really get to meet (never saw even one, actually) were the miners who'd created the slag heaps visible on the mainland of the bay. There was generally a kind of dustiness on the air and you saw quite a few individuals wearing some kind of face mask almost everywhere you went. The dust came from the heaps. Mike filled us in on the nature of the mining in the area on our last morning on the bay. We'd scaled some kind of hill and had a great view of the bay and its attendant slag heaps. Anyway, the mining is about as safe as it is in China and we (the developed nations) are the ultimate beneficiaries as the mines provide the energy we feed off. Which means the miners lead lives both miserable and dangerous and we benefit, even as we add to the problem of global warming. I suppose it might be useful to feel guilty if only one knew what might usefully be done about any of this.