Tales from the Swamp

“Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.”

-Jonathan Swift

Well, I know both of the people following this blog (hi Mom and Dad!) have been eagerly awaiting an update from Vietnam, so here it is. The internet has predictably been pretty spotty lately, which is partly the reason this has taken so long (the other being my own laziness). Now then, where to begin....

Many of you are probably aware that Vietnam is a ways away from California. I was aware of this fact too, but only in the abstract, and hadn't really braced myself for the 13 hours of very, very cramped quarters that was our flight from San Francisco to Taipei, Taiwan. Anyone who knows me will know that I do not fit into planes very well. Now, this was a Boeing 737, which is a plane that could probably fit the whole population of my home town in Michigan onboard. If it had been one of the hobbit planes I usually have to fly in in order to get to and from Vermont, I probably would have died. However, it still wasn't all that much fun. The seats are spaced just far enough apart that I can almost, fully extend my legs without colliding with the seat in front of me. Almost. I pity the fool who has to sit in front of my plane, as there are exactly 2 positions in which I can sleep: with my back wedged against the back of the seat and my legs extended into the aisle (not suitable for flight attendants) or with my back on the bottom of the seat and my knees pushing against the back of the seat (not suitable for the poor soul in front of me). Needless to say, I didn't get much sleep.

Nonetheless, I made it the entire flight without jumping out of the emergency exit, and we arrived in Taipei safely. The flight departed at 1:30 AM on Saturday morning and arrived at 6AM on Sunday, meaning that our 12-and-a-half-hour journey was actually 29,5 hours according to the calendar. The International Date Line is weird. I wish we had gotten a little more time in Taiwan, because the airport was actually beautiful. In particular, Taiwanese dumplings are fabulous. I'm beginning to see why Taiwanese restaurants are so popular (Joanne, if you're reading this, GET ON THAT).

Our flight to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam was relatively uneventful, but for the fact that the most powerful tropical cyclone of 2013 was churning towards southern China at the same time. I was kind of hoping to get some awesome view of the typhoon's eye like you see from the International Space Station or something, but all you could see from the airplane window was clouds. Oh, and the turbulence was pretty impressive. It felt kind of like, well, flying through a hurricane. Thankfully, I had just read that it would take something like a 500-MPH gust of wind to actually harm an airplane, so I was more entertained than anything else. There were a couple people with slightly green faces and very unhappy expressions by the end of it though. But then, suddenly, we were in Vietnam.

The first thing you notice when you walk out of the airport in Ho Chi Minh City is the smell. It's a mix of cooking food, automobile fuel, and human waste, and it follows you around everywhere you go. Not delicious, but a little comforting. It honestly reminded me quite a bit of Bolivia; reminders of home, I suppose.

The second thing you notice are the motorbikes. Basically everyone in Vietnam has a motorbike. The government only opened up the economy a couple decades ago, and one of the things that aided the rapid growth was the motorbike; they're cheaper and smaller than cars, and they can be used all year round in this climate. I'd say motorbikes outnumber cars on the streets by a factor of about 15:1. Personally, I think this is great; there would be total gridlock on the streets like in China if cars were used, but this way even though the streets are packed traffic runs smoothly.

One of the little idiosyncrasies of SIT is that they don't really like to tell anyone the details of where they'll be or what they'll be doing until the last possible moment. As a student of SIT, the only thing I really had to go off of was the very vague program description provided to me when I applied. According to this, we were going to be spending most of our time in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), with some outings to the Central Highlands and the Mekong River Delta.

Not so.

Instead, our first destination was actually Hoà Ăn (pronounced HOah anne), in the far south of Vietnam. There, the Đai Hộc Càn Thơ (Can Tho University) has a fourth campus, which focuses on agronomics and biodiversity research. Though Can Tho University is (obviously) based in Can Tho, a large city in the Mekong Delta, this part of their campus is about an hour away, just outside a tiny, rural town. It's a convenient place for researching biodiversity, because it's literally in the middle of a swamp. And by literally, I mean that the dormitory we stayed in was on stilts in the middle of a pond.

With catfish included!

The campus itself was fairly similar to schools I've seen in Bolivia and Mexico; concrete buildings, bare classrooms, and good local food being served right on campus. It was also very humid and leafy, especially since it's the rainy season here in the south. One thing I've learned is that the tropics don't mess around with their rainstorms. At about 5AM on the first day, I was woken up by what sounded like a passing freight train, or possibly machine guns; it was actually just torrential rains on a tin roof. Better than an alarm clock! 

Part of the whole "biodiversity" aspect of the campus was their impressive forest reserve in the backyard. Most of the Mekong Delta was deforested long ago after the many invading empires and foreign soldiers that blazed through it, so it's very difficult to research the original ecosystem of the Delta. The university remedied this by setting aside a plot of land to be reforested, and planting as many native tree species as they could. We got to walk around a bit in the reserve, which was pretty cool because it's been quite a while since I've been in a tropical forest. Apparently it's home to more than 40 species of birds, and several species of large snake, any of which I'd have been thrilled to stumble across. However, instead we had a lot of contact with one of the less pleasant denizens: leeches. I probably could have predicted that there would be some unwelcome hitchhikers after wading around in the tropical mud for an hour, but the sheer numbers were pretty impressive. After picking them off, some people's legs looked like they had been caught in a bear trap. 

This is melaleuca, the main native tree species of the area. Melaleuca forests are suffering because it's also a prime building material. 

It looks pretty, but there are probably thousands of leeches hidden from view in this picture.

We spent about 4 days in Hoa An, which when we first got there felt like it was going to be absolutely enough. The dorms were a little sketchy (I was sharing bunks with the other 5 male students and our 2 male professors), bathrooms smelled bad, and the humidity... Oh, the humidity. Something I learned about myself this summer in Vermont is that I'm not well-equipped for warm weather. I can walk around in sub-zero weather with only jeans and a light sweater, but any more than 5 minutes in New England summer humidity and I start sweating uncontrollably, and turn a really attractive shade of blotchy red. Well for Vietnam, take Vermont summer heat and add about 20 degrees and increase the humidity by about 50%. Any sort of activity (and by activity I mean walking slowly on flat ground) has me feeling more like a wet dishrag than a person. 
However, the more time I spent there, the more I was wanting to stay longer. It was great to be able to explore this little corner of Vietnam with my classmates, and I've always enjoyed rural places more than the city. My favorite part, however, was the opportunity to spend time with the Vietnamese students on campus. Vietnamese people in general are very friendly, and most of the students we met were English students, which gave them even more motivation to get to know the weird Americans coming to a place that rarely sees foreigners. I got to have a lot of really interesting conversations with my new friends, and it was a great way to learn more about the culture and the language. The one problem was that by the end of the day I always had an intense crick in my neck from trying to talk to people so much shorter than me. 

This just about sums it up.

The area was also really beautiful, and I had lots of fun wandering around taking pictures of people and places (my favorite activity!). 

Vietnam is one of the best places in the world for cute kids. It's a little bit excessive sometimes.

Exploring the wilds...

These girls' names are Nhan and Tien, but I eventually just called them Thing 1 and Thing 2 (respectively). For whatever reason, they became enamored with me and followed me around everywhere I went. They were adorable, but after about 15 minutes of little kids using you as a walking jungle gym it gets a little excessive.

The Mekong River Delta is one of the world's prime fruit growing areas. There were so many papaya trees it wasn't even funny.

The most common form of transport.

Probably the second most popular form of transport.

Probably my favorite field trip we had in Hoa An was our trip to an organic farm a little ways outside of the village. In America we usually think of organic farms as high-tech operations run by idealists who drive Priuses and don't believe in showering. In Vietnam, an organic farm is someone's backyard garden that doesn't use pesticides. We took a 10-minute long boat ride on one of the countless canals that crisscross southern Vietnam to get there. That in and of itself was an adventure, especially when the clay patching the large holes in the side began to come off and the boat started sinking lower and lower in the water. We somehow managed to arrive safe and sound, however, and were immediately put to work. 

The farm we visited belonged to a fairly typical Vietnamese peasant family. I'm not sure how I feel about using the term "peasant" to describe them, however, as they make a decent profit off of their produce, and actually own the land they plant on. One of the things that really boosted Vietnam's economic growth beginning in the late 80's was the decollectivization of the land; farmers were finally allowed to own their own fields, and choose what to grow on them. Most of the readings we've had for our classes this semester have been fairly Marxist (something that's getting a little frustrating, to be honest), so that was an interesting counterpoint. Anyway, the family was perfectly happy to let us harvest some of their vegetables for them, and made a really delicious lunch with some of what we picked later. The whole bit about working outside in the tropical heat wasn't so much fun, but it was better with a lot of other awkward foreigners who were sweating just as much.

The plant we were picking here was translated as "morning glory". It looks like no morning glories I've ever seen, but I just decided to go with it.

Preparing dinner

The oldest and youngest generations of the farm we visited.

The finished product. Not bad.

That night, we put on an impromptu talent show together with some of the Vietnamese students (I did a decent attempt at salsa dance with a friend), and celebrated some birthdays afterwards. I'm still in contact with some of the students we met there, and it was really an honor to get to know them. Again, I wish we could have stayed longer in Hoa An. However, we shipped out a couple days ago to Can Tho, to begin "actually" studying abroad in Vietnam. I'll have an entry about that soon, but that's all for now. I hope everyone north of me is enjoying the colder weather while I sit here and swelter. Cheers!