Music of Australia

Its fun to go back to your home country and rediscover, or catch up on ,what has been going on while you were away. One of the surprises for me has been the steady improvement in Australian music – it always used to be cheap, bland and derivative. I was never a big fan.

But it seems to be getting better. Last year  Geoffery Gurrumul Yunupingu – a blind Aboriginal musician from a remote island singing in his native Yolngu language – had a hit album. It is beautiful, and reminds me of Brazil’s Milton Nascimento. This song has been on my iPOd nonstop, “Gathu Mawula”, and is set to appear on the soundtrack of the new Nicole Kidman/High Jackman spectacular “Australia” by director Baz Luhrman (“Romeo & Juliet”, “Moulin Rouge”).

Japan: amusing to the last

Sign in Narita airport departure lounge; smoking section located “in the depths”. Don your scuba gear to smoke!

Scissor Sisters – Return To Oz

In honor of my own return to Oz – almost as traumatic and disorienting as this one…hahahaha! 🙂

Australia!

How did this:

 

Go to this:

I took a bus straight from the airport to Melbourne’s billowing, futuristic new train station. It was a shock, and not only because it was only 6 degrees. The station was hung all over with huge, fluttering banners urging bi-polar people to call the government’s new manic-depressive toll-free hotline. It was just the beginning.

 In subway stations, posters screamed at passers-by to have regular sexual health checkups and notices in trains showed activities you could do with your children  if they turned out to be deaf.

Worthy though each of these causes is, there comes a point where it makes you think “let people just  take care of themselves!”.  When did Australia  – a rugged frontier culture that celebrated self-reliance and sardonic humor – turn into such a paranoid nanny state? Everything is micro-managed , and over-regulated. I tried to sign up for a 30 dollars a month mobile phone plan and was informed that since I am currently unemployed it would actually be illegal to sell me anything on credit. Even to work in a sandwich shop here, you have to have the right certificate, to show you have completed your food safety course or whatever. Coming from stern, stoic, self-reliant Japan (and freewheeling anything-you-want-no-prescription-necessary Thailand) it all seemed like such…overkill.

I mean, I’m being a bit hypocriticalabout it. I’ll gladly take the government’s unemployment benefits (I’m even considering  one of their heavily subsidized 250 dollars-for-unemployed-people-computers) . And in my younger days I actually ran a government funded “self esteem group for gay men”. But it makes me think…c’mon people! Take some responsibility for yourselves…the government can’t do everything!

It was the first little shock of being back in Melbourne.

 The second was that everyone seemed so young! All around me,  on the streets, or in shops, or on public transport , everyone seemed to be about 20 years old. I eavesdropped, and all they talked about was skipped  university lectures and parties they “raged at” over the weekend (to use the quaint Australian expression). Is Japan really ageing that rapidly that the sight of young people everywhere unnerves me?

The third shock was that my neighborhood, in the space of the last year, has turned Indian. Located right near a university campus, the area has always had a strong Southeast Asian/Chinese presence . This is because of foreign fee-paying students ( Australian universities lead the world in this field – a full 30% of the higher education budget comes from exorbitantly-priced overseas student places).

But suddenly, it seems the university’s recruitment policies have changed because there are Indians everywhere – three new Indian supermarkets (one of them huge), several Indian restaurants, a Bollywood video shop, and signs up on phone poles for an Indian Independence Day party in the carpark of Coles supermarket.  OK.

It was interesting to see all of these changes, and wonder if they really were as sudden as they now seemed. Being back in Melbourne – so soon after my Southeast Asia trip – had a slightly disorienting effect on me. I didnt feel a real connection anymore, I didn’t feel like I was “home”. It was more like, just another city ; Bangkok, Tokyo, Saigon, Melbourne…..

But then as I took a walk through the brisk evening to my old university, and looked up at all the pretty old Vicrtorian buildings, I started to feel the rhythm of the city, and get my old connection back. And then I saw the sky – I had forgotten the beautiful Australian sky – so much clearer and bluer and bigger than it seems in other countries – and I felt like I was back home 🙂

Saigon, Bangkok, Melbourne

Saigon

A Caoi Dai funeral hearse, street scenes in Ho Chi Minh

 

Bangkok

Pink taxis in rush hour, grafitti art and the Arab street, new friends at  salsa night

Melbourne, midwinter

For those of you who have never been to Melbourne: this is what it looks like. It is actually quite a pretty city. Old and new buildings are mixed together in an interesting way – much of the city still dates from its glory days of the 19th Century, when it boomed on a Gold Rush to become the 4th city of the British Empire (after London, Manchester and Bombay). Today, its still the best-preserved Victorian-era city  in the world, but the grand old buildings are complemented with some funky new skyscapers built over the last 10 years, as the economy has boomed. ( One thousand new people are currently moving into the city every week, meaning that in 30 years it could overtake Sydney to become Australia’s biggest city again).

Lydia- So Lonely

Lydia, Thai pop star, rumored girlfriend of ex-president Thaksin and actress, with the English version of her song “So Lonely”. The cute girl I met in Bangkok at the salsa club is the back-up dancer in purple!

The stage changes…

…. but the adventure (I hope) goes on. As I type this at Narita Airport, I want to thank all the people I shared such wonderful times with in Japan. Its hard for me – impossible actually – to imagine what my life would have been like without Tokyo, but it would certainly have been much  poorer. I’ve learnt, and seen, and done, so much here and even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could shake its influence. Its weird, and kind of unreal, to be saying goodbye. And its sad and strange to say goodbye (if only for now) to the wonderful husband-to-be whose arms I’m leaving . Last night I was wondering why Im going, but I do know why. Its time to go. So, upwards (literally)  and onwards. Australia – what have you got in store for me…?

Star!

ปาล์มมี่ – ปล่อย (Palmy- Ploy)

One of my favorite random moments in Bangkok: a chance encounter in a restaurant with my favorite Thai pop star: Thai-Australian hippy-chick, Palmy! She is also one of the country’s best known entertainers, with her sweetly melodic pop rock songs and 70s throwback stoner fashions.

So imagine my surprise, when on my second night in the country,I spotted her sitting a few tables away at an Ibiza-style chill-out restaurant/bar near Khao San Road. Was it..? Could it be…?

I was too shy, but Daisuke marched over and asked her “excuse me, are you Palmy?”

But come to think of it – where better for a Westernized counterculture girl to hang out, than here with her global peers, in a place she is unlikely to be recognised or hassled (um…except by me) ?

She was lovely – very gracious and with a total Aussie accent and attitude.

Last Night in Bangkok

My plane was leaving back to Tokyo at 4am. So, that afternoon I took a four hour “disco nap” and decided to get up for dinner, and one last long walk around Bangkok at night.

Dinner was at  “Cabbages and Condoms”, a Thai restaurant run as a money-and-awareness- raising project for the country’s (highly successful) population control bureau. It is located in the grounds of the Asian Centre for Population Control, on the edge of Bangkok’s Koreatown, down an alleyway of hangul signs and Korean supermarkets (and next to a recruiting office for the University of Melbourne!)

Inside, the tables stand around a courtyard of  banyan trees, in airy tents. Jets spray mist into the gardens around, and colorful little lamps made of condoms shine down, along with strings of golden fairy lights. Dinner is Thai food, followed by complimentary condoms, and photo opportunites with mannequins wearing woven-condom jackets and suits of armor studded with contraceptive pills. It is a bright, happy place with a sense of playfulness that I couldn’t easily imagine anywhere except Bangok.

Afterwards, I decided to continue, going for a walk. As I pushed up the crowded pavements , I noticed for the first time that many of the sellers here – vendors of  fake brandname goods,  cute little home knicknacks, or Tshirts in appalling taste – were deaf . It was as if a deaf mafia had muscled in and claimed this “patch” as their own. A deaf town next to a Korean town next to a population control restaurant.

As I walked by the sellers chatted among themselves in lively sign language.

 Next was a row of Indian tailor shops, a group of middleaged Sikh men deep in a group-hug, then the Arab district at Sukhumvit Soi 3 .  The road had flooded, and Middle Eastern tourists (almost all in sandals) skipped gingerly through the puddles, talking amongst themselves in Arabic, Farsi and African languages. Above, were swirling neon signs in fluid script.  The crowds jostled by , laughing and chatting and occassionally  getting splashed as cars drove through the puddles -intensifying the sense of playful chaos.

I love this street. That night, men sat on terraces, sucking on shishas and watching video clips. On the screen, surprisingly sexy singers from Lebanon and Egypt pouted and showed off their cleavage (or did “wild”, “liberated” things like going bowling – using a lemon as the ball and champagne flutes as the pins!)

Spruikers were shouting out their restaurants’ praises (and pointing out the prominent “halal” signs), beggars wailed, chubby children waddled by with their black-veiled mothers. Groups of women haggled  in bazaaar-like arcades – some were darkclad and faceless, with not even their eyes showing, while others were unveiled with Drag-queen-like makeup and bouffant hair. Groups of men laughed and chatted. Pairs of girls strolled past arm in arm, or applied industrial strength mascara, and handsome boys conspicuously eyed Thai working girls.

A baby elephant passed uproariously, led by the gangly teenagers who sell overpriced bananas to feed them. And through it all was the pungent smell of smoke, Lebanese and Thai cooking,  and Thai street vendors circulating with trays of  gimmicky toys – fake noses, kites, battery-activated fluffy cats, glowing helicopters and flashing Satan horns. 

 In a shop window I saw a Thai woman try on a shimmery, layered head scarf and smile at herself in a mirror , while next door a 10 year old MIddle Eastern boy was getting his hair cut at the barber, into a mohawk.

In a discreet sidestreet, a veiled woman in full black hijab was chilling at a little cafe with a Corona (!!!!) and on the crowded sidewalks Islamic women were literally rubbing shoulders with transexual Thai hookers in barely-there hotpants, and strolling past gay clubs.  Arab men and Thai girls chatted (negotiated?) outside icecream parlors. A car cruised past, splashing everyone. It bore a prominent sign “Embassy of the UAE”, (as if that was alright then), causing one feisty Arab chick to shout out in English “Just back up already!”

I passed an internet cafe called “Harlem”, entirely full of African men (I thought they were Nigerians, but as they were speaking French, I guess not). One of them was barking into his phone in heavily accented English. He actually said: “You are not here to fuck around, you are here to buy heroin!”

In the middle of the street a middle aged American in a white shirt was standing, arm in the air, proclaiming in a  loud voice “There is no God but Jesus! Jesus is your saviour!” over and over again, as a bemused crowd gathered to look on. I shared a smirk with the Arab bystanders (in an almost entirely non-Christian country, why choose this street? Are Muslims less Christian than Buddhists?) Then a hefty African woman ran out and started wailing “Jeeeeesus! Jeeesus!” with emphatic gestures; I thought she was making fun of him until it dawned on me she was entirely serious. An Iranian man took a photo.

This was a city that was hard not to love. But I had to go back to my hostel to pack for the flight. I walked back  to “Suk 11”, 5 minutes away, but couldnt bring myself to go up to my sterile little room, so I just sat in the lobby and waited for something to happen.

It did.

I fell into a conversation with the two cute Thai girls working there. One of them, it turns out, is also a back-up dancer who appears in videos for Thailand’s R&B star Lydia (who I have reported on previously, on this blog). The girls were finishing their shift and going out, to a Latin club just up the street…so I ended up, at 2 am on a Wednesday night in a packed-full club, underneath giant white mushroom installations suspended from the ceiling, dancing to Cuban music.  Also joining us were a Thai-French boy (who turned out to be a salsa dancing machine),a nice German guy who had just finished a year in Australia, and a crowd of Bangkok’s dressed-up, glamorous party people, models and wannabes. A photographer came by and snapped our picture, promising we could see it the next day online on a website called “Last night in Bangkok”. I smiled. It was the last night in Bangkok for me in both senses, and what a night… and what a city…. charming restaurants brightly lit with condoms, elephants on the streets, Arab people, transsexual people, deaf people, Cuban music, fun, quaint wooden hotels and dancing and laughing with international strangers in strobe-lit Latin clubs.

Goodbye Bangkok.  I hope I will be back again soon.

Suk 11

The last few days I have been back in Bangkok, chilling out after my trip and just enjoying the “buzz” of one of the world’s liveilest and most openminded cities. I have been staying in the new part of town, around Sukhumvit, the closest thing this splrawling city has to a main street.

Sukhumvit starts with an explosion of gleaming shopping malls, and follows the Skytrain monorail down through the sidewalks of Nana, crowded with peddlers of tatty souvenirs,  past dolled-up bargirls and delicious streetfood stalls, before continuing out into the suburbs and eventually, all the way to the Cambodian border.

This part of the city is almost a world away from the gently decaying 1920s apartments of Chinatown, and the exotic riverside. Its short on Oriental charm. Instead, it is an eternal construction site, where huge buildings are constantly going up and down, Skytrains whizz by,  and footpaths are torn up and replaced just as haphazardly as before. Jackhammers are always drilling, between vast sparkling malls, new-looking and already derelict buildings, endless hotels and  empty lots covered in  grass and wild palm trees.

It may not have theambience of Bangkok’s “old” side by the river,  but still this side of town does boast its own attractions. There is fine shopping (even the malls here are fun, rather than being soulless comsumer vortexes ) , great restaurants and most of all,  a pulsating 24 hour energy that draws in visitors from every part of the world. It is here that Bangkok is at its most cosmopolitan, and carnivalesque.

My base in this part of the city was the famous “Suk 11” guesthouse  -tucked just behind the permanently thronged main street of Sukhumvit in a little alley. Its on the same street as an  Advocates-style open air street bar, a tapas restaurant and an STD clinic (very Sukhumvit).

Its a funky hostel, built to resemble a wooden Thai farmhouse with shady little verandahs hidden behind walls of tropical creepers and potplants, cats playing, rickety footbridges crossing the street and covered in vines, and inside, dim corridors all lined in wood and designed to feel like little “gang planks”. In the rustic lounge areas, travellers from all over the world chat and hang out, and write multilingual messages of love and goodwill on all the walls. It is all very sociable.

A chilled, and unexpected little place, tucked away in the centre of the Sukhumvit circus.

Random notes: Vietnam

Here are a few little interesting things I noticed in Vietnam, maybe someone with a better understanding of Vietnamese culture can explain them to me:

– Especially in the countryside, many houses have small dog statues outside. They sit on top off the gateposts – one smiling yellow labrador on each side of the gate. Is this just to look cute, or does it have some deeper meaning?

– Before Vietnam I had never seen a life-size giraffe statue in concrete . In Saigon, I saw three shops selling them in a row. Who buys?

– Houses here are tall, narrow and colorgul. Lots of  them have an open, roofed terrace on the top floor, with a statue of Jesus or Kwan Yin (or a giraffe?) on it.    Its a good look.

– When Caodai followers die their bodies are transported in really elaborate golden-dragon-boat-shaped hearses.

-When drivers pass each on the road (almost always done by driving directly towards each other, and then swirving at the last minute, “Chicken”-style,) they make a hand gesture , like a shaking open fist. What does that mean?

– If sophisticated Bangkok is in love with (its projected image of)  Japan, then Vietnam has a major crush on Korea. Korean brands are everywhere – Daewoo, Hyundai, Lotteria fastfood joints, Korean singers. But most notable is the number of shops with some hangul writing on them. Its truly  astonishing.  At first I thought they were aimed at Korean expats, but when I started to see the signs on busrides far out in downmarket suburbs, I came to realise that Korean in Vietnam is like English (often) in Japan. Its not designed to be read or understood by native speakers, it just looks “cool”. I think this is because while the Japan of Asia’s imagination is impossibly high-tech and unattainably stylish, Korea projects an image as much more “one of us”. Not as intimidating. There is a sense that not too long ago Korea was where Vietnam is now, they understand, and if we try really hard, within a generation or two we will be where they are today.

-There are government anti-AIDS posters EVERYWHERE. Its getting a big push here. One or two of them actually have pictures of condoms, but mostly they follow the vague, Japanese public service announcement style of “childrens-drawing-of couple-holding-hands”, or “Little-girl-blowing-on-a-dandelion”.

The Caodai Holy See

Caodai is a Vietnamese religion founded in 1926 by a group of “prophets” in the city of Tay Ninh, about 90 km out of Saigon. Today, it has grown to a religion with more than 4 million adherents. For a long time it was also a powerful political force, with its own army and the right to collect taxes within its district, but these rights were stripped (unsurprisingly) by the Communists.

Like followers of Bahai, Caodaists stress the unity of religions – that many of the great figures of different faiths -Buddha, Lao Tsu, Confucius, Mohammed, Jesus (and more strangely) Jeanne d’Arc and Victor Hugo (!) – were essentially sharing the same message, and should all be venerated. The riotous colors of their temples signify this – each color represents a certain religion, eg Catholicism is red, Budddhism green. The worshippers themselves wear white.

Today the lavish and spectacularly colorful “Holy See” (or headquarters) at Tay Ninh is a popular tourist daytrip from Saigon.

Snake wine and weasel coffee

Vietnam does a quirky line in souvenirs. There’s fake Louis Vuitton (I am now  a proud member of the Japanese Office Lady LV club – with a big hand-luggage bag – and 15 US dollars poorer). Then there’s fake war memorabilia – medals, lighters etc and propaganda posters. And of course those conical bamboo  hats, which much to my surprise, lots of people actually do wear (its as if you were in Tokyo and everyone was in a kimono!)

Then there is snake wine and weasel coffee. Snake wine is superstrength spirits, with a whole, pickled snake inside the bottle. Its not like some gimmicky novelty item either- you see it everywhere.

Weasel coffee is coffee beans ( after lightening growth in the 1990s, Vietnam is now the world’s second biggest producer). The beans are fed to a weasel (hence the name), tenderized in the animal’s digestive tract, shitted out, cleaned up and sold as “weasel coffee”. This costs more than regular coffee because its “better”.

Go figure.

Dalat

After all the stresses and tribulations of Saigon, I was dying to get out. Dalat, it turns out, was the perfect choice. It was everything Ho Chi Minh was not – relaxed, charming, spacious and most of all, green. The sky was blue and the air was fresh and cool. It felt like heaven.

The town was built by French colonists in the early 20th century in the mountains, a 7 hour bus ride north of Saigon. The surrounding area, forest-covered slopes streaked with  splashing silvery waterfalls, were not only beautiful, but provided a cool escape from the humidity of the coast.

Dalat was a resort city for homesick French – a city of spacious holiday villas, planned boulevards, parks and lakes, with a population that was a full 15% European. Today, the French are long gone but the city remains a charming monument to French architecture, (complete with its own Eiffel-shaped radio tower). The villas have now been converted to top-end, beautifully restored hotels, the parks and lakes are popular with strolling Vietnamese honeymooners. The last Vietnamese Emperor also kept a summer palace here, now open to the public.

The ride up was a revelation – passing through some of the prettiest countryside I have ever seen, groves of banana trees and emerald-green fields, with little box-shaped colonial houses painted in pale yellow, blue or minty green. The road then climbs, through jungle and then pine forests, around zigzagging curves, where the road drops away to one side, diving down into the valleys below. Amazingly, there are still wild elephants roaming through these  areas ( my Lonely Planet mentioned one village on the highway where 20 elephants had fallen into a bomb crater – only in Vietnam! – only to be rescued by kindhearted villagers. Unfortunately the elephants have ravaged the village fields ever since).

Unfortunately I couldnt really enjoy all this beauty, because the bumpy busride was making me sick. I puked halfway through the trip.

Still, Dalat was worth it.

I had chosen Dalat for one reason – to stay in the extraordinary “Crazy House”-  a guesthouse built by local architect and eccentric Hang Nga ( also the daughter of a former president ). The house – above – is made out of concrete, shaped into a giant treetrunk, with the rooms carved out like little caves. Purple flowering trees blossom over winding walkways and secret staircases, leading to enexpected views and little nooks. It was stunning and so unexpected, here in provincial Vietnam . At night, with the cold wind blowing and the moon shining over it, I got lost in the winding passageways leading up to my room, alone in the dark in this twisting surreal Through-the-looking-glass world. It was wonderful.

The kangaroo was in my room!

It turns out there was a lot more to do in Dalat – hikes and motorbike rides through the surrounding forests, waterfalls, visits to the villages of the local ethnic minority people (including the excellently-named Chill people, whose village is dominated bya giant statue of a chicken), pagodas and local scenic spots like the Lake of Sighs and the Valley of Love (actually a fairly unmissably kitsch amusement park for honeymooning Vietnamese couples). I just didnt have the time.

I wish I had allocated longer for Dalat.

Chau Doc

Chau Doc was my first stop in Vietnam -a small provincial city in the Mekong River Delta, just past the Cambodian border. It was a cool place I thought, colorful and bustling but still small, with an interesting mix of people; Vietnamese (of course), Chinese, Khmer and Chams ( a Muslim/Hindu people related to Malays who built their own glorious civilization – Champa – before Angkor Wat, but then faded away). There are three hotels that are used to foreigners but thats it – no other tourist industry, no pushy vendors, just a busy market and a constant stream of boats on the river, “floating houses” floating by, Cambodian monks in orange robes, Vietnamese Buddhist nuns in purple gowns on motorcycles, Muslim pilgrims heading to the small mosque over the river, children playing on toy motorcycles, a typically riotous Caodai temple and streets of colorful, pretty houses.

Riverside restaurant

Cham mosque

Choose your idol!

Vietnam

Vietnam marks a turning point in Asia, a dividing line. The gentle, Indian-Hindhu influenced cultures of Thailand and Cambodia give way to the Chinese sphere of influence. Buddhism changes from Theravada ( symbolized by the calm, supple-limbed Indian Buddha) to Mahayana ( with its icon of the fat, jolly laughing Buddha). Stupas make way for pagodas, and the pace of life picks up – everything gets busier.

Its a beautiful country, with a fascinating history, and yet one that I had mixed feelings about. Nowhere else have I seen the negative effects of mass tourism so clearly (and here, its only 10 years old).

The Vietnamese people I met in country towns and sat next to in buses were lovely -they bought me dinner and shared cakes and nuts on long journeys. But as soon as anyone was in any kind of customer service postion, they became a complete asshole. I have never experienced service as bad as Vietnam anywhere in my life. Waiters would take your order three times, and then the wrong meal would come. People looked sulky, and didnt return a  smile. Everybody was always trying to rip you off, or get in your face to sell you something, and yet if you went into a shop actually  wanting to buy something, the shop assistants would stand around gossiping at the counter. In lines, foreigners are treated as invisible, while you stand waving your money and Vietnamese charge through to get served first. Nothing works properly – internet cafes cant send email. It was frustrating, and in the end it got on my nerves.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be in a hurry to go back.

Saigon

Saigon – everyone still calls it that – was once known as the Pearl of the Orient. In the 1930s it was the sophisticated capital of French Indochina, the Paris of the East. In the 1960s it was a turbulent melting pot of Vietnamese, Chinese and American influences, where intrigue played out against the backdrop of a country at war.

Today, it is a city of 12 million people – and three million motorcycles – and the commercial capital of Vietnam, the place where everything happens first, where fashions come from and money is made. The Big Time. It sounded exciting. I had high expectations for the city.

But as it turned out, I was disappointed. Saigon might have a glamorous past- and even a promising future – but its present is less glowing. It is still firmly in the ranks of Asia’s B-list cities; more a Jakarta than a Bangkok. I found it noisy and hectic, but somehow that “buzz” was missing – the fashions were drab and cheap looking, there were no supermarkets or convenience stores, restaurants all seemed to have the same menu, and there wasn’t much choice in the stores. There were upscale areas – the leafy generic-expat-area of Doi Khoi for instance – but they had nothing that couldn’t be bettered in Singapore or BKK or even Phnom Penh. And it was loudy, smoggy, and insanely busy. Saigon looks like this:

This is not rush hour in the main street. Its every street, all the time.

The motorcycle – xe om – is the lord of Saigon. They dominate the city and its culture, vastly outnumbering cars, and changing the way the traffic flows, making it much more fluid and spontaneous. There are no pedestrian crossings. The only way to get across a street is to walk, slowly and calmy, right into the oncoming traffic, and watch as it gracefully swirls around you. Its an unnerving experience, and perhaps the definitive Saigon moment –  horns blaring, choking on pollution, walking calmy through the chaos.

Suoi Tien

Suoi Tien – a Buddhist-themed amusement park – is by far the best thing in Saigon, and a reason to visit to Vietnam in its own right. It is, in a word, stunning. I have never been to a more magnificent themepark anywhere in the world , outside of the Disney parks in Tokyo – which it probably equals. An amazing achievement for a country like Vietnam. Even more amazing is that the park is so little known to foreign tourists. Its not in any of the guides, and I didn’t meet a single other person who had been there. In a whole day there I didnt see another white face.And yet, how could you miss this…?

It is centred around a huge, surreal swimming pool where two 100 metre waterslides in the shape of dragons splash into a lagoon between two cliffs carved into sages heads’, with psychadelic colored flower-trees spraying mist into the air.

From here, you can climb up, up, to twelves storeys above the ground, up wet slippery cocrete steps (lax Asian safety standards!) inside the head, which is shaped into a weird, airy, echoing caves painted in psychadelic colors. From there, you can look down:

The park also has an astonishing wealth of other attractions. You really need two full days to do it justice (as opposed to one at Angkor Wat!) I was pretty systematic, but I still ran out of time to see the wonderful-sounding “Strange Things in Nature” pavilion. But I did see;

Huge golden lions and tortoises – check the figure on the far right for scale!

 

You can walk into the mouth of an huge golden dragon, to where a neon-haloed Buddha sits.

More statues;

The “Palace of the Unicorn” below – sounds cute, doesnt it? – where you unexpectedly descend into a pitch black, freezing corridor filled with ear-piercing, high-volume screams to see the torments awaiting sinners in hell (much like Tiger balm gardens in Singapore).

A delightfully kitsch aquarium with painted-on underwater scenery;

There is an ancient Egypt exhibition…

 

…which, did I mention, is in the mouth of a concrete elephant?

…and theres more!

 A Mardi Gras-esque parade, where all the dancers wore masks (presumably to cover their shame!)

An assortment of gargantuan dog/turtle and dragon-shaped pavilions, in swan-boat filled lakes

Avenues lined with tusks

Hedges in the shape of teapots

Monkeymen

Robots that dance to Vietnamese pop music

A crocodile farm where handlers poked live crocodiles with bamboo poles and happy punters fed them chunks of meat from strings

And this giant statue of a frog with a coin its mouth. Which revolves.

Saigon

The American war

Its ironic that the decade-long conflict the rest of the world knows as “Vietnam” is here known as “the American War”. Even now, the war still haunts Vietnam – anyne in their 40s or 50s lived through it first hand. Saigon is dotted with reminders of this savage and inexplicable past – the War Remnants Museum, (until recently called the Museum of American War Crimes), the soup shop where the Viet Cong kept their covert Ho Chi Minh headquarters and numerous cemeteries and monuments. I skipped most of these, but I did make it to this building, the Reunification Palace:

 

The Reunification Palace was originally built as the headquarters for the South Vietnam government and is widely considered a modern masterpiece- a model of a forward-looking sixties building for the tropics, open and airy and full of wide breezy spaces. It was here that the Viet Cong came first on their arrival in the city, driving through the gates in a tank. Soldiers ran out, bearing the Communist flag, to fly from the top balcony. The last President of South Vietnam, only 48 hours into the job after his predessecor quit, stayed behind to wait. As the Viet Cong burst in he said; “I have waited here to give you power”. The North Vetnamese officer replied “You are too late. You cannot give what you no longer have”.

Today, the building is worth visiting as much for its sixties interiors as for those dramatic events – the whole place is decked out in official meeting rooms and offices that look like somethng out of a Thunderbirds movie or a Bond flick. It would be a great place to shoot a retro-futuristic swingin sixties/scifi click.

 

On the roof stands a helicopter. This also echoes the Fall of Saigon, when the last Americans in the city rushed across town on hearing the secret signal (the radio weather report: “its 98 degrees and rising, followed by Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas”). You can imagine the terror on hearing the opening bars of that song, knowing it ws all voer, the city was to fall, mothers gathering up their children in their arms, South Vietnamese desperately banging on the embassy walls begging to be evacuated, knowing they faced death if they stayed. And the last US soldiers in Vietnam flying off, just hours before the city fell, to aircraft carriers waiting in the South China Sea.

The (North) Vietnamese had won.

Another of the poignant sites of the war – highly commericalised, but still fascinating – is the Cuchi tunnels. Here, you can see remnants of the system of underground corridors and subterranean villages – booby trapped against US invaders – that once stretched hundreds of kilometres all the way to the Cambodia border! From these tunnels the Viet Cong could emerge to strike fiercely against their enemies, and then disappear back into the night, into camouflaged trapdoors leading to suffocating tunnels, many barely bigger than a child’s body. You actually get to run 100 metres through one such tunnel – measuring 120 cm by 80cm (and enlarged for tourists!). You have to crouch down, its impossible to turn around and you feel like you are being buried alive. The most terrifying, suffocating 100 metres of my life!