It’s a year ago this week since I started to write here.

Someone had sent me a link to Caterina’s site, and I learned there were people out there that I would want to have a cup of coffee with. This woman’s voice was like that of my favorite email friends, and here she was publishing for the hell of it. Then Paul Ford of Ftrain became my web-writing hero, and I forced him to become real-life friends with me on the strength of being a Brooklyn neighbor. I started to carry a notebook to jot my own scraps of books and subway conversations. Late in the office one night, I set up a Blogger account and sent a trial letter to myself.

Blogger took the friction out of writing: there was no pressure to produce paper-quality material in this disposable medium. No one expected a Harper’s essay, because no one expected anything. I liked having yet another outlet to chat in and I found these daily snippets suited my attention span. Matthew Arnold said the Irish excelled at lyric poetry because we lacked the concentration for the novel form.

My shy experiment was aimed mostly at the people who were already email friends, though I didn’t tell them it was here for a month or two. Then more people stopped by, and I got to know some who linked or wrote. Some I even met in three dimensions. I got back in touch with old friends who live far away, and I sparked a few to start their own sites. This site has been a home of sorts now that I have no fixed address, and the daily ramblings have mounted up into a personal history. I feel well-rewarded for a small effort.

So thank you for visiting. I’m glad you’re here.

I would live all my life in nonchalence and insouciance, were it not for making a living, which is rather a nouciance.
— Ogden Nash

It rained for days on end in Hanoi. This was not monsoon rain, whose passionate downpour turns to steam. Hanoi rain is Dublin rain, a constant, dispiriting drizzle. You could film The Commitments under these gray skies. Everyone hunches under rain capes and umbrellas. My hands and feet are cold from the effort of evaporating dampness, even though the temperature isn’t especially low.

At first I was pleased. I am still Irish enough to believe I have to ‘make use’ of a fine day. Finally, after six months, I have rainy days to waste. I have a hotel room with satellite TV, an incredible luxury. I lie on the bed eating Ritter Sport chocolate, drinking beer, wearing a fleece. I am taking a holiday from my holiday. I am very happy.

On Star Movies, I watch a dreadful John Turturro movie, then Spike Lee’s Mo’ Better Blues, then a cringing Liz Hurley vehicle with Denis Leary as an unhappy New York cop. Six straight hours of straight-to-video Brooklyn street scenes. The rain drips outside and I watch Fort Greene and Bed-Stuy, DUMBO and Bensonhurst. I wonder how to get the kind of apartment Denzel Washington’s jazz musician has. I squawk when the Brooklyn Academy of Music shows up, and when Denzel bikes in Prospect Park. I squint trying to recognize Frank’s Lounge, or Five Spot, in Fort Greene.

Still Hanoi drips like a runny nose. I had set myself the task of working on an application essay for teacher training college in Ireland. But given a practice run of a few days living in Ireland’s weather again, I find that all I want to do is huddle in sloth. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what I did there first time around. Hmm.

I used to have a job describing how computer applications that didn’t exist yet would work. I wrote long documents in the subjunctive tense: “If the user presses this button, show the following message…” I drew crude pictures of the screens that didn’t exist. To amuse myself and the engineers, I chose a theme poem for each project:
    “In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse”.

These days my job is simpler. I take buses. The pay is lousy but the shiftwork hours are slightly better. This week, so far:

Hué to Hanoi: 13 hours
Hanoi to Halong Bay: 4 hours (followed by 5 hours on a boat )
Back to Hanoi: 4 hours
Hanoi to Hoi An: 17 hours
Hoi An to Na Trang: 14 hours
Na Trang to Dalat: 7 hours

In Vietnam, it’s easy. Clean buses shuttle up and down Highway One, serving tourists and upmarket Vietnamese. They pick you up from your hotel and drop you in the center of town. Usually the seats recline a little. Once I even had a reading light.

In Thailand, the government buses have a swinging, Braniff Airlines feel. On the night bus from Bangkok to the Lao border, a cross-dressing conductor led me upstairs to my assigned seat. His lurid makeup and beehive were essential elements of the Sixties jet-set atmosphere, and I was excited when he brought a bottle of mineral water and a pink cardboard box containing an apple, a sandwich, and a pastry. He gave me a fuzzy blanket before turning out the lights, and woke me at 6 with a beaker of Nescafé. I slept through most of the speed-fuelled Thai stunt driving.

Burma is different. Roads are maintained by forced labor, often child labor. Not surprisingly, ten-year-old girls don’t keep road surfaces in a condition that’s suitable for a Landrover, let alone a rusted-out fifty-year-old bus with the steering wheel on the wrong side and completely bald tires. The on-board mechanics never showed frustration at the constant breakdowns, even though on one 26-hour journey we stopped five times for them to crawl under the bus on dark, flooded roads. At one point they splashed out and bought a “new” tire, which was almost as ancient and smooth as the one it replaced. Nothing can be wasted in Burma. It is considered a dreadful faux pas to ask the expected arrival time; the nats (spirits) get annoyed at your presumption and you might never get there. When you don’t have capital investment, you must rely on good vibrations.

In Laos, there was a baby gibbon on the first public bus I took. He swung around the bus chattering at the passengers and he ate pack after pack of chewing gum, unwrapping each stick carefully, chewing for a minute, then it spitting out. Meanwhile, his owner vomited cheerfully and copiously every half-hour or so. The Lao are mysteriously prone to travel-sickness, and each bus has little plastic carrier bags hanging from the luggage racks. Other passengers give encouraging shoulder pats, but the buses never make puke-stops.

The best part of chicken bus travel is what I’ve come to call Bus Dim Sum. At every stop (and there are always several) local vendors screech at the windows, hawking their goods. You never know what will be thrust into your lap. Plastic bags full of iced coffee, songbirds on a stick, dumplings. On the way to Paxse in Southern Laos, I sat opposite a woman who bought two large skewers of grilled grasshoppers. She crunched, and spat the legs on the floor of the bus. Then she smacked her lips over a duck fetus that had been cooked in its shell. She ate it whole, rubbery beak, feet, and all. Finally, she bought three wild honeycombs for the bee larvae, another delicacy. I was morbidly fascinated, but not put off my own grilled chicken, spatchcocked flat between two bamboo skewers tied with straw. With sticky rice, of course.

More to my taste were the eggs on a stick. I thought these were plain cooked eggs, but each shell had a quarter-inch hole at the narrow end, from which the flesh had been drained, beaten with scallions, garlic, and coriander, and poured carefully back in. A bamboo skewer sealed the hole and pierced the other end, and they were then barbecued over charcoal, four to a stick. When peeled, they were firm, egg-shaped savory custards, with a slightly smoky flavor. I pictured Delia Smith introducing them as an hors d’oeuvres recipe, forcing thousands of sweating, swearing English women to chip at slippery eggshells on a Friday after work.

Bus Dim Sum is a welcome distraction from the endless waits of the chicken bus circuit. In Laos and Burma, loading up never took less than an hour. No one (but me) ever complained as sack after sack of rice was loaded on the roof, and fighting cocks, piglets, ducks, and VCRs were battened down inside. My record was the three hour loading process before setting off from Paxse to Savannakhet, which would have reduced me to tears if I hadn’t kept busy eating my own body weight in snacks.

Other delays are as predictable as loading. For some reason, every single bus stops for gas only after all the passengers, rice, and chicken are loaded. This was especially odd in Burma, where all the local passengers had to get off outside the gas station for fear that shortages might cause them to storm the pumps. (I was usually left alone on the bus.)

Over the months I’ve learned tricks for long journeys. I keep a comfort kit packed: shawl, blow-up pillow (smelly now), Virgin Atlantic eye mask, sleeping pills (which I haven’t used yet), aspirin, travel sickness tablets, toothbrush, soap, toilet paper, two books, water, sweets. A plastic bag to put my daypack in, in case there are chickens next to me. I check before I sit down that I’m not on the wheel-well, and that the seat isn’t broken. I figure out on which side the sun will shine and sit opposite. Once this brainwork is done, I grow slack-jawed and passive, like the livestock I travel with. When it grows dark at 6 o’clock, I doze obediently. During the day, I read until I feel sick, then I look out the window, thinking about my next Bus Dim Sum. I do stiff-legged yoga stretches at the rest stops while the locals stare.

I always fantasized about having a warm-body job. This isn’t a bad gig, as they go.

My friend Michael is from Munich. His mother’s relations ended up on the other side of the Berlin Wall, and they hadn’t met in 50 years. When the wall came down, the Ossis piled into their Trabant to visit the long-lost family in the west. As they sputtered closer to Munich, they began to realize how shabby they looked compared to the sleek Bavarians. They grew ashamed of their communist-standard terylene pants and plastic shoes. A few miles from the house, Michael’s aunt called to his uncle in excitement. In the shop window, she saw a row of garments hanging in a circle with a price list more reasonable than they had dared hope. Trousers, 6 marks. Jackets, 7 marks. They went inside and asked to try on the clothes.

The man in the shop explained gently that it was a drycleaners.

Michael’s aunt cried with humiliation when she told the story a few days after arriving. I am reminded of her tears in Hoi An, where hand-tailored silk costs less than the price of laundering it in Manhattan.

    ‘You like a bag?’
Would I? I am too deep in retail narcosis to know. She has measured me twenty ways from chin to feet. She has zipped me into and out of twenty sample garments. We have drunk tea and studied bolts of cloth, laughed at the sight of this ungainly foreigner in an ao dai, pondered colors. We are friends in the shorthand of clothes.
   ‘To the hip. Bootcut.’
    ‘Lined. Mmm.’
    ‘Higher in the neck, you think?’
    ‘Fabric better with some stretch.’

I’ve picked out three pairs of trousers, a skirt, a modified ao dai, a jacket and some tops.
    ‘You like a bag, too?’
She is totting up my order on a child’s copybook. It comes to fifty five dollars. I don’t really need a bag, I think.
   ‘Because I am very happy you came into my shop today. I would like to make a bag for you as present.’

It was all ready in six hours. Now I am preening.

In Hanoi, the haberdashers sell rolls of designer label tape. Hugo Boss Hugo Boss Hugo Boss. Just snip and stitch for instant style. Better yet are the trays of metal tags to be attached to shoes and bags—Prada or Polo, it’s up to you.

At every corner, teenage boys flog parcels of books to travelers. They are carefully targeted to the Vietnam circuit: Lonely Planets, The Quiet American, Air America. The cover art is anemic, because these books have been photocopied whole and then carefully bound. Legitimate bookstores offer to swap one of their ‘real’ books for three ‘photo’ books. In your photocopied Lonely Planet, you can read how Le Vie branded mineral water has been plagued by instant competitors called Le Vive, Le Vile, and even Le Viol (The Rape).

Brochures for popular hotels warn fiercely that local fleapits have taken to using their good name. Elsewhere, whole stores are devoted to knockoff music, movies, and software, and tailors urge you to bring in fashion magazines to copy.

In a caf&eacute, Carmen Kass, looking as burnished as the Goldfinger girl, smiles down from a famous ad for Christian Dior scent. Except the bottle of J’Adore has been replaced by a bottle of 777 beer, and it is incongruous in the hands of this lager-colored angel.

Will the real Vietnam please stand up?

The dialogue is Beckettian in spareness and repetition. (Ooh! I finally used that Eng. Lit. degree!) My role is the same in each setting, from a mountaintop monastery in Burma to an island in Laos to a market in Hanoi. My partners in the two-hander have been monks, fishermen, waiters, and hawkers.

   ‘Where are you from?’
   ‘Ireland.’
   ‘I-ya-lan. Ah. Roy Keane!’
   [Polite smile]‘Yes, football.’
   [Vigorous nod] ‘Yes. Football. Roy Keane!’
  [Silence.]

The boats in northern Laos have signs reading ‘No going on the roof.’ The rule is no women on the roof, but foreigners seem unable to grasp this simple gender discrimination so it has been extended rather than risk capsizing. Animist beliefs are powerful here, and people often wear amulets to appease and charm the spirits. If a woman sits above a man, his amulets become useless. This is particularly dangerous for boatmen, since it could cause the whole boat to break down or sink. (An extension of this belief holds that women’s clothing should not hang above men’s on a washing line, though the guesthouses no longer seem to hold with this. Too difficult to tell the sex of cargo pants.)

Despite this belief, on the boat from Paxse to Don Muang on the southern tip of Laos, the captain tried to herd me onto the roof with the foreign men. The boat was packed as usual. No one would consider taking a trip without a 50-kilo sack of rice, a few chickens and ducks, a bag of cabbages, some motorbike parts and a gaggle of toddlers. The Lao would be good people to be shipwrecked with, and their cargo methods increase the chances. There are no seats on most boats; women squat on the ground among the sacks, chatting and breastfeeding. When new people arrive everyone shunts along without resentment. The 6:45-from-Chappaqua notion of ‘my’ seat and ‘my’ space is foreign here, as are the sighs and eye-rolling that go along with it.

I sat on the side of the cargo area, leaning against the wooden column that held the roof up. I had decided to uphold traditions despite the boat captain sending me to the roof. But the ceiling was low and I couldn’t sit with my head upright. Nor could I let my legs dangle since the floor was so packed. I sat in a Beavis-and-Butthead slump until I couldn’t take it any more and climbed up.

The roof was tin and packed with basting foreigners. Lao pople would not willingly expose themselves to sunlight, so presumably the women-on-the-roof ban was overturned to ease space pressure below. The heat, which is not especially intense in November, was worth it for the views up top. Just above the Cambodian border, the Mekong hits middle-aged spread, and I was heading for Si Phan Don, the Four Thousand Islands, which lie in the 14-kilometer span. My out-of-date Rough Guide said these islands were beautiful but rarely visited by tourists due to the distance and the transport conditions, so I was surprised to see a dozen falangs on board. It turns out that the land border with Cambodia is now open for business and Don Khong has become a popular stopover on the Indochina circuit. (And it’s all about circuits. Backpackers hate backtracking.)

The crew of foreigners on the roof was representative. Three Canadians—they are everywhere, this year’s Australians—a Swiss, a German, one Irish, three Dutch (also wildly overrepresented, and my personal favorites), one English guy, a Finnish lad, and one South Korean. Normally I’d expect a handful of Israelis and French, too. Americans are notable by their absence in this part of the world. It’s partly the political and economic climate this year, but more that US culture does not support extended travel breaks as other western countries do. The ‘year off’ does not sit well with puritan sensibilities, and American graduates are too busy working to pay off the colossal college fees that are picked up by the taxpayer in Europe. The working Dutch can save up four weeks vacation allowance to see Laos and still have a week or two left over in a year. Those paltry six weeks were famously hyped as an ‘sabbatical’ at Netscape—unpaid—a perk extended to long-term employees.

The boat broke down, of course, thanks to my presence on the roof. But it’s easier to deal with a stationary boat than a broken-down bus. The river scenery is entertaining, and you can walk about and stretch. River life is the same throughout rural southeast Asia: kids swimming, girls shampooing their hair, women washing clothes and dishes, men fishing from small boats. Everybody waves and shouts ‘Sabaidee!’ Our breakdown brought a bonus: we got an unhindered view of the sun setting on the western bank. The boat guys watched expressionless as all the falangs whipped out cameras.

As we neared Don Khong, a backpacker group started a frantic discussion on the cost of the journey. I had got on at Paxse, and agreed to pay 30,000 kip ($3). They had got on an hour downstream at Champasak and didn’t fix a price, but their guesthouse owner told them 20,000 kip. They are passionate. They will not pay 30,000. The boatman had not mentioned a price yet for this ten-hour journey, but the backpackers thrash the issue for an hour. A dollar has powerful hold on a 22-year-old brain here; these same kids spent much of the trip comparing prices on massages and marijuana pizza toppings.

Finally the boatman came around to collect money, and asked for thirty. After a drawn-out, aggressive bargaining session, they beat him down to twenty-five. The French-Canadian girl leader was still aggrieved.
   ‘I’m giving you twenny and that’s it. Twenny from Champasak. Falang not stupid! Twenny!’
I quietly paid my (fair) 30,000. I was on the boatman’s side.

We piled off in a cloud of bad grace. At the landing, it was getting dark and there was a single pick-up truck, which our guidebook said cost around $3.75 to hire. There were ten of us. He quoted 40 cents each. The baby backpackers started up again, insisting on 30 cents, though our alternative was to walk eight kilometers in the dark. The ringleader got more passionate. She’d been traveling with Israelis, and it was a point of pride now to bargain for everything. We stood there while the spat continued, and I wanted to smack her. Eventually I hauled my pack onto the truck.
    ‘I’ve been on a boat for ten hours. It’s dark. I want to go to a guesthouse. Ten cents is not enough for me to stand here.’
Slowly the others got on the truck. I felt like a blackleg, but didn’t care. The Lao have been unfailingly fair and generous hosts, but these kids have a paranoia that is more appropriate for Saigon or Delhi. ‘They’ are out to rip ‘us’ off. The backpackers do not realize how distasteful it is for the Lao to haggle in this way, or how it sets up the cynical dynamic between tourist and local I’ve found from Thailand to Majorca. I’m glad that hagglers keep prices down for me—and I bargain happily, when it’s appropriate—but I wish they knew when to stop.

I lost my backpackers temporarily when I checked into the Villa Don Khong. At four dollars, in a village where beds can be had for a buck, it constitutes luxury. Cold-shower, rat-in-the-walls luxury, but luxury nonetheless. I had a perfect day there. The room was light, which encouraged me get up at 5.30 and go down to the river to watch the sun come up. Some meditation, then some yoga. Breakfast on the verandah at seven was toasted baguette, two eggs from the hens who roamed very freely below my window, wild honey, papaya, and Lao coffee the consistency of melted chocolate. All for a dollar, since I’m counting now.

At nine I rented a bike and went to the ferry crossing. The ferries here are planks of wood nailed across two or three wooden fishing dories, with a diesel engine attached to one. From the mainland I rode down to the Cambodian border, 30 kilometers or so, to see what was billed as ‘the largest waterfall in Southeast Asia’. By volume, that is, for it’s not very high, but it’s still impressive. A Canadian who had been on my boat ride wondered how you’d get a canoe down there while his Scottish girlfriend looked blank. We Celts don’t think in those terms.

A returning Lao emigrant in Lacoste polo shirt and bermuda shorts insisted I pose in his family portraits, both still and video. These native tourists seem ill-at-ease here, and go out of their way to align themselves with falangs.
    ‘Where are you from?’
    ‘Ireland. And you?’
    ‘Germany. Koln,’ he says, in an accent even I can identify as adult-learned. He’d moved to Germany 28 years ago. It is hard to go back. I know how he feels.

I was whimpering from saddle-soreness by the time I got back to the ferry, and all I could think about was noodle soup (a common problem these days). I picked a winner: Mrs. Somphan made ‘fo&eacute’, Vietnamese-style, and the spiciest green papaya salad I’d had yet. The chili tears that streamed may have been tears of gratitude. Back at Villa Don Khong, I read some old French magazines and took a nap before hauling my weary backside to Mr. Pon’s riverside restaurant for a sunset drink. Lau-lau, rice whiskey, toned down for foreigners with lime juice, wild honey, and ice. It’s the best 30-cent cocktail I’ve ever tasted, and who cares that the restaurant faces east? It gave me time to pre-order the fish steamed in banana leaf, which was worth a two-hour wait. This terrine of the freshest fish imaginable has the texture of custard and a wonderful, delicate flavor. I fought through a few more pages of Ken Wilber’s Marriage of Sense and Soul and wished I’d brought something else to read. And so to bed.

Don Khong is my favorite kind of tourist spot: industrious, switched-on, and moderately prosperous in its own right. The farmers and fishermen here are amused and hospitable but not overawed by the new visitors. The island is paved with immaculate roads—pork barrel, I assume, since the current prime minister grew up here—but in three hours I saw just one pick-up, one huge SUV, and three Honda Dreams. And countless bikes, of course. By the time this trip finishes, I will be able to produce the following in all the major Southeast Asian languages:

‘Hello’; ‘Thank you’; ‘Chicken’; ‘Pork’; ‘Spicy, please’; and; ‘Hey, look! Falang on a bicycle!’

They’d warned me about Vietnam.

“It’s not like Laos, you know. They’re very grabby. Very… commercial.”

Some were more explicit.
“It’s just constant hassle. They try to rip you off all the time. The 5,000 dong bottle of water suddenly becomes 15,000 dong. You have to pay tourist prices for everything, and they won’t let you take the public buses.”

I’d already got stuck in the Lao border town of Savannakhet, waiting five days for the Vietnamese consulate to process my visa. It was twice as expensive as all the other visas I’d got (and I flip proudly through my passport these days). They make you specify an entry and exit date—tough luck if you change your mind and delay the start of the trip. Not a service economy, I noted.

In Savannakhet, where Vietnamese outnumber ethnic Lao, I developed an attitude that was only barely sweetened by the delicious custard donuts. The dogs, so docile in the rest of Laos, barked and chased me. (How do dog memes spread? In one town, they’re groveling wretches, in the next, snarling predators.) Shopkeepers were surly. I was overcharged for my breakfast noodle soup. By the time I caught the night bus to Hué, my Vietnam-related persecution complex was such that I willed them to be mean just to prove me right.

And that bus was everything I dreamed of. It was filthy, falling apart, and jammed with box upon box of chocolate coins. There was nowhere to put my feet, and the seat fell out of my seat when I tried to make it recline. I perched pathetically behind Alice, an 80-year-old Swiss-German lady whose fortitude stopped me dissolving in a puddle of self-pity.

“I lived with my muzzer in Basel and we went to Spain for our holiday every year. I was sixty years old when she died, and so then I decided to trawel because I vanted to see the vurld!”
She’d gone all over Central and South America, Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Russia, and India.

“And you know here they have no running vater in the toilet, but there is no smell, or hardly any smell! In India, there is also no running vater in the toilet and the smell is very bad. Even the Indian ladies, they say ‘Oh, the smell, the smell!’ But India is very beautiful and there are many temples in Mysore…”

Alice kept up a happy monologue for much of the trip, despite the bus staff, who exceeded my expectations in their meanness. Every bus I’ve taken in Southeast Asia has two or three men who are responsible for loading all the freight and fixing the regular breakdowns (in Burma, where the buses are ancient left-hand-drive Japanese imports, part of the job also involves hanging out the door to tell the blindsided driver about traffic coming in the opposite direction). One of these charmers literally shoved frail, hunch-backed Alice into her seat whenever she stood up. Later, as he slept on the boxes beside my feet I aimed a few accidental Timberlanded kicks at his skinny arse. Next morning I wished I’d kicked harder when I realized he’d chosen that temporary sleep spot in order to reach my bag, from which he had taken the rest of my Thai currency and my sunglasses. He smirked and walked away when I challenged him. There was nothing I could do—they still had my backpack on the roof—so I entertained  revenge fantasies as we waited at the border for four hours so the creeps could load and unload more chocolate coins.

When I finally got to Hué, filthy and bloodshot after sixteen hours, I felt like a million dong, as they say. I limped out of the bus-station looking for more opportunities to mutter complaints. Vietnam was an evil place full of thieves and granny-bashers, and now I had proof.

But then I was seduced.

Hué glows. Lemony colonial villas look built just for this light. I couldn’t find a taxi, but for the right reasons—this is a Honda-and-bicycle town. A bicycle culture is already morally and physically superior to a car culture, but in Hué they bike with style, too. Women glide past in high-heeled mules and bootcut pants. Schoolgirls float by in white ao dai costumes. Schoolboys chat to the pal balanced on the back carrier. Everyone shouts hello. The cyclo touts, whose lives are hard, shout “Maybe tomorrow, yes?” to each polite refusal.

Little old ladies dish out magnificent fresh spring rolls and spicy baguette-and-paté sandwiches for pennies. The ice-cream carts play Jingle Bells and Happy Birthday to You. Internet access is 20 cents an hour (though unfortunately that works out at about a cent a byte). I am grateful for the Roman characters on street signs after months of squiggly Thai, Burmese, and Lao scripts. In the Café Violon, a trio performs smoky, sexy jazz sung in Vietnamese.

And the sunsets on the Perfume River…is this getting too much?

This morning I sat in an another café drinking strong, strong coffee and watched men watch Britney Spears, who is apparently still not a girl, not yet a woman, though time marches on. Where were the Vietnamese women, I wondered, at 9.30 in the morning? Then I saw them, leaning out of small tin boats to tend the paddy field opposite while their men played Go, watched Britney, and looked after the kids. If I could overcome that little issue, I thought, I could live here. I could learn Vietnamese and raise a brood of dark-haired kids who would play boules and bring me strong coffee with my breakfast croissants.

It is a shame that Americans got into their worst messes with the people who are most like them in energy and freewheeling spirit—the Cubans and the Vietnamese. If Hué is Vietnam, then Vietnam is wonderful.