Road Tripping in 'Nam

"You can want in one hand and poop in the other, and in the end all you have is a pile of poop."

-My Grandpa Jarvis

One of the best and worst things about my study abroad program is the constant travel involved with it. We're never in a country for longer than a month, and the coördinators seem to have been distinctly aware of that fact in scheduling. There are at most three days of classes in between field trips, and then it's off to explore an NGO or tiny village in rural Vietnam. I'm constantly learning and discovering more because of it, but boy can it be exhausting. It's difficult sometimes to strike a balance between boredom and stress, and I've been learning to accept that that should be my responsibility, not SIT's. The next step is figuring out how to cope with it without jumping out of a tall building.

That said, it's rare that we're actually gone from our base for more than a day. When we do, it always ends up being an adventure one way or another. This week's adventure was an extended outing to the province of An Giang, which lies northwest of Can Tho, on the border with Cambodia. Our home for two days was a hotel in the city of Long Xuyên, but most of the time was spent in a bus commuting to different site visits. The principle focus of the outing was to investigate aquaculture in the Mekong Delta. The Delta is blessed by a constant influx of nutrient-rich sediment flowing down from the Himalayas, but cursed with acidic soils and seasonal salinization of its waters due to the low elevation and proximity to the ocean. This means that farmers are often forced to search for other forms of income when their rice paddies become flooded or the soil fails to produce year-round. 

The industry of choice is usually aquaculture, an industry that is becoming increasingly popular and productive in Vietnam. For the first site visit of the weekend, it was necessary to take a long bus ride into the countryside to see a fish farm. I use the word "countryside" cautiously, because I don't think I ever saw rural areas of the type I've become accustomed to in the United States or elsewhere. One generally expects cities and towns to be fairly well demarcated, with habitation in one part, and natural areas or farmland in another. In the Mekong Delta, that's not the case. I think every kilometer of road we traveled was bordered by shops, houses, and other buildings. It was like traveling through one long, skinny town. For people watching, it proved to be excellent, but after a while it also became claustrophobic. I never really had a view where the bus was, and the hundreds of kilometers of roads traveled all started to look the same. It doesn't help, of course, that roads are poorly paved, and traffic is so uniformly congested it's impossible to go more than 30 MPH at any time. 

I'm not sure what I had expected from seeing a fish farm, but it certainly wasn't what we got; the "farm" was more or less a couple of tanks in the back yard of a poor neighborhood. The first thing we were greeted by was not a fish farmer or any apparent signs of aquaculture; instead it was a horde of very friendly, giggling children. 

The visit ultimately meant about 2 hours of driving one-way in order to talk to a fish farmer for about 20 minutes and be pursued by enthusiastic neighborhood kids for another 10. It was interesting to see the way aquaculture happens, but I really don't know if I could justify the carbon or time expended on it.

The fish here are snakehead, which are mostly known for being very, very invasive in North America, but it's also a crucial food source in Southeast Asia. 

 One thing that has fascinated me about agriculture in Vietnam is that, even though the country is one of the world's largest rice and fish producers, most farming is done on a very small scale, with farmers raising their own crops and selling them to a middleman. We really saw very little industrialized farming at all. The exceptions to this were our other site visits of the weekend, a shrimp farm and a larger-scale catfish farm. The shrimp farm was run locally, but controlled by the shrimp farmers' union, while the catfish farm was run by a corporation based in the north of the country. Both places paid lip service to using "Good Agricultural Practices" in order to remain sustainable and avoid water pollution, but were never able to come up with concrete examples of what these actually were. 

Countryside around the shrimp farm; the first blue sky we saw for an extended period of time in the South.

Mudskipper around the shrimp farm- not a terribly attractive fellow, but it's kind of cool to see a fish walking around on land.

This is what shrimp farms look like in the off-season. As you can probably guess, it wasn't a terribly enthralling site visit.

Looking back, I can't believe I got as close as I did to this monster. I'm pretty sure it was about the size of a field mouse.

Rice paddies are shockingly beautiful. This picture can't do it justice, but it's truly amazing how many different shades of green you can find on one plant.

The industrial-sized catfish farm. The splashes you see here are thousands of very happy catfish getting their lunch.

Some birds just weren't meant to be kept in small cages, and this mynah was definitely one of them. It kept hopping around agitatedly trying to escape, and just looked unhappy in general.

One of the themes that has frequently come up in every discussion about site visits has been the frustration of how difficult it is to get clear information about certain things. A large part of it is the language barrier; none of us speak Vietnamese, and most of the people we talk to speak no English. In the South, we had to rely mostly on professors from Can Tho University, many of whom aren't entirely fluent in English, and often don't practice very good interpretation etiquette. I spent this past summer working as an interpreter, so it gave me endless frustration to see them answering questions themselves without even consulting their subject, or engaging in long dialogue with the subject, only to translate it with a two-word answer. I've had to learn to adjust my expectations a lot (hence the opening quote), but it's nonetheless bothersome knowing that there are large parts of the stories we've been heard being mistranslated or elided.
Another factor is probably the lack of free speech in Vietnam; the government really is a lot creepier and more powerful than it might seem at first glance. Multiple times a guest speaker has hastily denied any problems with the government or steadfastly avoided difficult questions, especially when there are other Vietnamese people in the room. Apparently the Communist Party has a really great policy of paying people to spy on anyone affiliated to make sure they're not being too subversive. Some things I won't share here for confidentiality and safety's sake, but it's a weird experience having spent most of my life in liberal democracies. 

Our final visit, and my personal favorite, was a visit to the Tra Su Melaleuca Forest in the far northwest of the province, about 20 kilometers from the Cambodian border. On our way out there (and it was a very, very long way), it was a little shocking to see jagged hills jutting out of the sea of flooded rice paddies and small villages. Most of the Mekong Delta region is flat as a sheet of paper, so it was a welcome change to see any sort of relief. The forest itself was one of the few regions of undeveloped forest left in the Delta; melaleuca wood is excellent for house building, so most forests have been chopped down. The Tra Su reserve acts as a natural area and bird sanctuary, which is very popular with Vietnamese tourists. 
As it was the rainy season, the only way to get around the area is by boat. All 30 of us were herded onto very precarious-looking wooden canoes, and motored through the forest to enjoy the birdlife and make our way to lunch. I'm somewhat of a bird nut, and it was pure ornithological bliss entering the forest. It seems to be a prime spot for nesting storks and herons, as well as gallinules, jacañas, and a multitude of others. The herons and storks weren't terribly happy with our presence, and I'm pretty sure some of them tried to poop on us. Unfortunately, I was onboard a moving boat in the middle of the rain, so I didn't get too many good pictures of them. That didn't mean I didn't enjoy myself.

I don't think I'll ever get tired of nature abstracts.

This woman literally shoved her baby in my face when she saw I had a camera. Who would I be to refuse a picture?

Actual hills! How about that?

We passed a bunch of caged birds on the way back from the forest... A bit of a sad contrast.

And finally, to close the story with a bit of intrigue: on our trip to Tra Su, there were two random Vietnamese people who got on our bus and rode along with us, without introducing themselves or talking to us. Our original plan had been to climb the mountain at the top left of the above image, but it was mysteriously canceled at the last minute. It later turned out that those two people had been sent by the government to make sure we didn't do anything out of line on our trip. Apparently, since the hike hadn't been in the original schedule, they forced the leaders to cancel it. Three cheers for authoritarian governments!