Coney Island Rest in Peace

I blogged last spring about joining a joyous New Orleans-style 2nd line parade over the Brooklyn Bridge. This Sunday, April 3rd, more or less the one year anniversary of that event, NOLAphile James Demaria is organizing another. This one is a funeral for the late, great Coney Island.

If you are worried that a funeral might make for a depressing Sunday beside the gray and so-far unspringlike seashore, you don't know much about New Orleans 2nd lines. Furthermore, Demaria remarks on the facebook invitation page that "This event is symbolic of our hopes for Coney Island's rebirth. It's joyous. And hopeful. And if you don't agree with sarcastic fun we don't want you there."

Despite just how strongly I do agree with sarcastic fun, I unfortunately won't be able to attend. But you should. Surf Avenue and West 12th, at 2PM.

I've always wanted to know the Secrets of Women

Perhaps they would let me enroll.

Spotted on the Rue Capois, Port au Prince, this wall painted with an advertisement for a gender-specific technical school, presumably on the premises. "The Professional Center for Women's Secrets announces its regular classes," including cooking, baking, haircutting and styling, cake decoration and cosmetology.

Ciné in the Nation's Service

The arrival of exiled former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide yesterday in Port au Prince did not provoke quite the same media frenzy as his similar return in 1994, when dozens of journalists thronged the tables along the terrace at the Oloffson Hotel and I met countless people I am still pleased to number among my friends.

Nonetheless, there were journalists at the airport to greet him, and, according to my friend Daniel Morel, perhaps five to ten thousand citizen well-wishers. Although the few mentions of Haiti in the international press yesterday focused on Aristide's return, the bigger story here is the tidal wave of support for Michel Martelly, the former konpa musician turned political outsider. Barring a fraud of monumental proportions, he is certain to be Haiti's next president. Martelly is the closest thing to a local version of a rock star, and the people treat him like one. He enjoys a sort of pre-emptive cult of personality not seen here since Aristide's heyday. At his demonstrations people swoon and raise their arms toward the sky. On the one hand it is tragic to see the Haitian people once more investing their infinite and exuberant faith in a mere mortal, and one with no government experience at that. On the other hand, it is that very exuberant faith that grabs hold of the visitor to Haiti and enchants forever. So the spectacle is both beautiful and depressing, like so much in this country.

Port au Prince is awash with pink posters of "Tet Kale" (the bald-headed man), Michel Martelly.

For once, I am working on a documentary here that refuses to get caught up in the cyclical vagaries of Haitian political life; the return of Aristide and the cheering crowds of pink-shirted Martelly supporters are things we hear about over dinner at the Oloffson, not experience firsthand. Yesterday, I encountered on the terrace there a television crew who had been at the airport covering Aristide's arrival from South Africa. To my delight, I recognized them and they me; the cameraman and soundman were both alumni of my sound recording seminars at the Siné Lekol in Jacmel. Although both their administrative building and their classrooms were destroyed in the earthquake, often described here as "the events of January 12th," the school's spirit was not. The students immediately set to documenting recovery and rebuilding, filming the living conditions of tent-camp residents and seeking out gripping stories of survival. They have already made countless films.

To see two of my students gainfully employed using the skills I had helped to teach them filled me with pride and hope. Cesar "Bougon" Massena was clutching a boom pole and a shotgun microphone, and threatening my livelihood with his abilities. I couldn't be more pleased.


Crew photo: Pradip Malde

The Don of Flans

Super-delicious Vietnamese street food, example #646B

Flan in bite-sized nocturnal take-away cups near the market in Dalat, fifteen cents per.

I've known a few guys like that

I'm safely back in Brooklyn where it is pleasant, but chilly, at least compared with balmy Saigon. All in all it was a fabulous trip to Vietnam, even if I failed to completely miss the winter. I now judge these things by the wealth of blog-worthy images and experiences that I come across, and in this regard Vietnam was extraordinarily rich. So I still have a number of Vietnam-related posts to dole out.

Here's one, a Hanoi restaurant I didn't eat at.

Why I love the Guardian, dept.

Because they point out that it's impossible to tell the difference between Muammar Kaddafi and Charlie Sheen.


...

A visit to Van Long Nature Preserve

Cuc Phuong National Park, about three hours south-south-west of Hanoi, is visited primarily by birdwatchers and those wishing to see the Primate Rescue Center, where various gibbons, langours and macaques confiscated from poachers or rescued from cages are rehabilitated with the ultimate goal of reintroducing them into the wild. One of those primates, Delacour's Langour, is among the ten rarest in the world, with less than 200 remaining in their only habitat, the karst limestone jungles of northern Vietnam.

They are not doing well, and we are the principal threat to their survival. (Humans are by far  the commonest primate, with over 8 billion of us now having colonized every corner of the globe. We are the Cockroach, Norway rat and House sparrow of the primate world, able to adapt to almost any environment and thrive). Having seen some Delacour's in their cages at the Rescue Center, I decided to try and spot them in the "wild" on my way out of the park. The only place they are regularly found is at Van Long Nature Reserve, a sort of minor appendix to the National Park, some twenty kilometers outside the park entrance. This primeval lake is surrounded by mist-shrouded limestone pinnacles and inhabited by thousands of egrets and herons. It is also what is politely known as a tourist trap.

Turning off the minor highway from Ninh Binh to Nho Quan, one follows a road suitable for tour buses to the lake's edge and finds at the end of it a restaurant-resort complex with too many rooms and overpriced food, and a dozen stalls set up in the dust selling embroidered tablecloths and sun-hats embroidered with the Vietnamese communist star. The only way to visit the lake is to hire a boat. Not a problem; there are countless boats lined up along the embankment and a majordomo who assigns each group their particular vessel and boatman. The price of the boat has already been charged at the ticket desk, saving one the unpleasant task of haggling. (The price is absurdly reasonable, not to say third-world, something like three dollars for an advertised ninety minute tour).

Tourism is, of course, the new colonialism. Here I monkey around taking autoportraits of myself being ferried around Van Long by a diminutive Vietnamese boatlady while she simultaneously scans the hillside for monkeys to show me.

The lake has many boats of many different sizes, ferrying tourists of all nations out onto it, but none of them are motorized, which is blissful, and I appear to be the only one on this particular afternoon who has come to try their luck at seeing the Delacour's Langour, a handsome black monkey with a long tail and, apparently, white shorts. Sightseers are steered east along the lake, while monkey-fanciers bear left, down a spur of the lake trapped between facing walls of limestone. None of the other boats have taken this route, and within minutes of departing the dock I am all alone, surrounded by misty reedbeds and lily-pads. Well, all alone except for the tiny oarswoman valiantly rowing my considerable bulk around in her boat.

The disappointing aspect of visiting Van Long is similar to that of visiting Giverny, where Monet allegedly invented impressionism by painting the waterlilies in his garden. One realizes that, much like Monet, those Chinese painters who painted stylized mountains of dripping rocks, stunted trees and swirling clouds did not actually invent a new way of seeing; instead, they were accurate and realistic painters who sought out, or were surrounded by, incredible landscapes.

Just as soon as we have taken our own route, and the gabble of my fellow dominant primates has paddled out of earshot up the lake, we hear haunting and booming calls coming out of the mountains. They can only be simian in origin. I glance at my guide. She points up into the fog-shrouded rocks above us and whispers conspiratorially to me in Vietnamese. I shrug, uncomprehending. She points again. Does she see something, or is she just indicating the source of the sound? I scan the area of the hillside she is indicating. I see nothing but tortured streaky black and white rock, and vibrant green shrubbery. There are clefts and caves and canyons. The Delacour's could be anywhere up there.

I am certain I hear a return call, coming from the facing rocks to our left; the sound is too present to be the echoes of the first, which we also hear. I point out the other side of the boat. She shakes her head; she does not agree. We row on.  She rows on. Egrets by the hundreds flush from the marshes, fly up and around us, and then resettle a hundred meters further along, waiting for us to paddle up and flush them again. Kingfishers zoom above the reeds. I see white-browed crake, and coots, quite uncommon here in Vietnam.

As I'm watching one bird or another the boatwoman whispers again, urgently. She is now pointing to our left, and from her attitude it is clear that she sees something important. I bring up the binoculars and see them immediately, scampering about on the brutal rock face. All black-monkeys with white diapers, almost extinct, Delacour's Langour.

 Do you see those two pairs of white shorts, below, in this detail from the image above? With tails extending from them?

I'm hoping the wave goodbye means my gratuity was sufficient.

Gassy Feeling

 Today's sunshine in Dong Hoi, Quanh Binh province, was the first I have seen in at least ten days, five of which I spent shrouded in mist in Cuc Phuong National Park. I arrived here last night with rotting laundry after spending all day on the train crossing North Annam on my slow, rail-bound route back to Saigon. Dong Hoi is a pleasant and little visited fishing port city only an hour or so north of the former Demilitarized Zone, meaning it was flattened during the Vietnam war. Now it is calm and balmy; I emerged from the air-conditioned railway car to discover that I had left the Vietnamese winter definitively behind to the north.

Just steps across the street from my excellent and comfortable hotel, the Nam Long, I found the riverfront fishing boat refueling fleet, wooden vessels outfitted with large diesel holding tanks and standard-issue gas pumps sprouting from their decks. Smoking on board is not advised.*

The concept of branding seems to have great traction in Vietnam. As I noted recently on facebook, if I had a dollar for every iPhone I saw on the streets of Hanoi, I could afford my own iPhone. The notion extends to gasoline sales. I have seen many of the small, rural oil-barrel mounted, hand-pumped gasoline dispensers sporting a crudely painted "Shell" logo.

Here in Dong Hoi, the news that BP is responsible for the toxic death of a major world fishery seems not to have penetrated, for the company is still getting free, hand-painted advertising.

Another hand-painted logo, the "P" for Petrolimex, which sounds like a joint Peruvian-Mexico oil company, but is actually Vietnamese.

 Note the gas pump shrouded in blue polytarp, and the two others, one on each vessel in the background. Just pull your ship into the adjacent berth and gas up with the extra-long hose.

*Although I'm told you can stub a cigarette out in diesel fuel and it won't ignite.

And no, I'm not staying there...

 In Ninh Binh, the "Mark of the Beast" Hotel. Just like the Eagles said, the kind you can check into, but you can never leave. 

No Country For Old Birds

Caged Hwamei (Melodious Laughingthrush), Hanoi. I have yet to see one in the wild.

It has been more than ten years since my last intensive birding exploration of Asia, and I had forgotten just how oppressive this continent can be, if you happen to be a bird. It isn't that people here don't love our little feathered friends, it's that they love them so much that they want to keep them in cages at home, or eat them as crispy fried snacks. One Vietnamese in Dalat put it to me this way: "Vietnam people don't want to have to go to the forest to hear birds sing. They like it, and they want to have birds at home, so they can hear it every day!" Between the hunting, the trapping, the snacking, and the shooting of birds with slingshots, a perfectly acceptable pastime for small boys here, the avian world in Vietnam is under constant attack. (Anecdotal reports suggests that in neighboring Laos the situation is far worse; travelers report seeing nary a wild bird there, and of walking in forests almost devoid of birdsong).

The results of this human versus bird armageddon are that even in the deepest, best protected forests, the birds are very, very wary. The innocent birder who wishes nothing more than to see the poor little critters through some high-quality optics must settle for distant views of cautious and skittish creatures going out of their way to place leaves, trunks and branches between themselves and any visitor. Even families of birds that elsewhere in the world are often curious and confiding, like the genus Parus, the titmice and chickadees of European and North American feeders, stay at least three times as far away from intruding humans as they would on other continents. One must be patient and silent.

Here's a compilation of threats I've encountered in my travels here:

1. At a coastal forest preserve near Binh Chau I came upon this concerted effort to catch terrestrial gamebirds, such as pheasants, partridges and silverbacks. I saw similar snares on Sulawesi in Indonesia fifteen years ago. The pictures are a bit difficult to follow, as the whole idea is that the traps blend into the forest background.

Over a long stretch where secondary forest bordered on a clearing, perhaps several hundred meters, someone had created an obstacle course of chopped brambles, twigs and brush. Note the diagonal line of brush running from the upper left to the lower right, above. It is only about eighteen inches high, but heavier, meatier birds like pheasants and partridges are reluctant to fly unless absolutely obliged to, and the spines and tangle of these narrow twigs prevents them from easily hopping over. Every five meters or so the hunter leaves a gap in the "fence" for the bird (or small mammal) to pass through on the way back from feeding in the clearing to the relative security of the forest. Across the gap is the hair-trigger for the snare, below.

Note the horizontal string across the lower third of the right hand half of the image above. When the bird hits this string, the trigger is jostled, and the loop, held in tension by a bent sapling, yanks the bird into the air. Below is an image of the tripwire from above. The vertical string to the upper left is attached to a springy, bent-over branch.

Above is the sapling, bent over by the tensioned string. Below, the taught string, before I released the mechanism.

2. Those birds not destined for the pot, or the skewer, tend to be champion singers, prized for their morning serenade. While life in a cage is perhaps preferable to being eaten, the number of caged birds in Vietnam is staggering. Walking down busy urban streets in the early morning one hears all manner of deepwoods jungle species calling out from tiny wicker homes hung on balconies and from the eaves of homes and businesses.
Below, a bird shop in Hanoi.

Green Magpie. I have yet to see one in the wild.

3. So-called mist nets are used by scientists to catch forest birds without harming them, so that they can be measured, weighed, banded and released. But very fine fishing nets work just as well, to catch birds for food or for the cage trade. At the bottom of a trail outside of Dalat, well-known to birders, at the southern end of Lake Ho Tuyen Lam, I found at least a hundred meters of this netting strung in a loop around a wooded stream. The sites favored by birders are also interesting to the trappers. This netting was in poor condition, and to judge by the dead Mountain Fulvettas it had caught, was not being regularly attended (or perhaps Mountain Fulvetta is a worthless species to the trapper and he therefore had not even bothered to untangle these corpses).

The small white lozenge in the center of this net is a float; these are very fine gauge gill nets used locally for fishing small species of freshwater fish.

I'm afraid I admit to having at it with my pocket knife. I cut down, shredded and balled up all the netting I could pull out of the bushes. Like the thousands of miles of "ghost nets" abandoned or broken off and drifting on the high seas, fishing on and on for fish that will never be eaten, netting like this will continue to catch and exterminate birds indefinitely, until wind and broken branches tangle it into inefficiency.

4. Scene: A long row of foodstalls at the Sapa barbecue pavilion in extreme northwest Vietnam. The vendors clamor for each passing visitor to choose their particular restaurant, which is much the same as all the others.

Me: What's that, next to the marinated pork ribs and the broccoli-rabesque vegetable wrapped in beef tenderloin?
Girl: Birds. Small birds. (I look incredulous, or perhaps mystified. The girl flaps her arms like wings and repeats).

Halong Bay Tragedy

In the budget hotels of Hanoi today the tragedy at Halong Bay is a source of widespread worry and conversation. One of North Vietnam's premiere tourist destinations, these sculpted limestone outcrops are visited by almost all the travelers who pass through the region. If yesterday's terrible disaster, in which at least 11 12 tourists perished in the sinking of an overnight tour boat, made it onto any friend and family radar screens, please rest assured that I was not on board.

A great idea for a Red Hook Bed and Breakfast

Enjoy waterfalls sightseeing, Jungle trekking, Elephant riding, Dug-out boating, and your very own Gongs show. (click image to enlarge).

The so-called "hill-tribes" of Vietnam, numerous ethnicities resident in the most remote areas of the country, near the Cambodian and Lao borders, have traditionally been oppressed, repressed and marginalized by the dominant "ethnic Vietnamese." Adding to their burden of racial discrimination, many of the southern hill-tribes threw their lot in with the South and the Americans during the war, suffering for it after the defeat. These valiant fighters were known as the Montagnards; many of them moved to live in the Carolinas after my government valiantly recognized their unique level of service and extended a green-card welcome in the denouement of the war. Those who remain continue to be treated as second-class citizens, but their "rustic" way of life and "colorful" costumes make them a major draw for tourists, who are offered countless opportunities to experience "authentic" hill-tribe life via visits, tours, sleepovers in long-houses elevated on stilts and the like. The ensemble of hill-tribes are generally referred to as "minority people."

Also on offer, spend an evening with a minority.

Progress is a woman's best friend

The shops in Buon Ma Thuot, a mid-sized city in the hot western lowlands of Vietnam, not far from the Cambodian border, were full of tabletop gas ranges, a critical barometer for a certain level of development. The humble gas range, while not a full on home oven, is a great leap forward in cooking efficiency from charcoal. When an economy reaches the stage where most families can aspire to, and attain, a home kitchen appliance like this, the piecemeal clearing of forests for charcoal production wanes (although valuable timbers are still looted). Those members of the family who do the cooking are no longer at constant risk of tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses caused by smoky cookfires. The kitchen moves indoors. This is modern efficiency, progress.

However, assuming the Vietglish (or Chingrish, for these burner units are likely made in China) on this model more or less accurately reflects the marketing thrust of the manufacturer, gender stereotypes are still firmly planted in the premodern, charcoal-cookstove era.

Trees Growing on, through and over stuff

Bringing you travel news entirely out of sequence with the actual travels...

Every promotional brochure, National Geographic feature and Discovery Channel documentary on the wonders of the ancient Khmer world of Angkor includes photographs or footage of the interaction between the jungle and the ruined temples. Most of these originate from one temple, Ta Prohm. Here the buttresses of vast trees envelop, bend, and sometimes topple the walls of the complex. This impression of the forest slowly consuming this particular ruin was, according to Wikipedia, intended by the 20th century restorers of Angkor; the implication is that not just Ta Prohm originally threatened to disappear forever beneath the forest. Apparently, only the largest temple, Angor Wat itself, was still in continuous use into the present day, despite the collapse of the civilization that built it in the 15th century. Wikipedia sometimes needs a grain of salt, or the application of your personal bullshit detector, to be ruder about it. Of Angkor Wat the collective genius of the world's editing taskforce suggests that this largest temple was protected from the encroachments of the jungle because it is surrounded by a giant moat, as if jungles spread like forest fires, creeping across the land, instead of thanks to the movements of seeds on the wind and in the guano of innumerable birds. The trees do have a chance, and they will take over if mankind does nothing to impede their growth.

It was an inspired choice, to leave one major temple in the managed state of being swallowed. The enormity of the trees growing directly out of the temple complex provide a direct link to the era of its maximum splendor; one imagines the seedlings that became these towering trees taking root just as the Khmer influence was waning. To the rabid environmentalist, they give hope that the natural world can recover from the grotesque impositions of mankind. In the tops of these giants, Alexandrine Parakeets were croaking and cavorting; Robson's field guide to the birds of Southeast Asia actually lists "temple groves" as one of their preferred habitats. Few trees of this stature remain anywhere in the world; only because this is holy ground, and because of the tidal waves of cash that Angkor tourism represents, are they still here.

Laura swears she overheard someone in a group of tourists remark "I don't understand why they don't just get rid of the trees...."

At Ta Prohm, special platforms have been constructed for the express purpose of having oneself photographed in front of the most impressive of the tentacular roots.