Fleetwoods Circumnavigation

All worked out on the space available flights from Saigon via Hong Kong and I arrived S.F. a couple hours before I left from Hong Kong, crossing the dateline. Did not sleep much. I had the middle seat in economy, on the aisle a very large American who slept the whole way and was hard to get around to stretch on my left a charming young Singaporian from the Microsoft S’pore office, enjoyed very much talking with her. Besides a broken laptop it turned out that my cellphone had lost it’s service here after I had a Vietnam prepaid SIM card installed in it. Fortunately a T-Mobile service point on Market street was able to get me going again but I have lost my address book that I had accumulated on it. So I am now double handicapped, on the laptop account.

I take the train this evening and will arrive Tuesday evening in Tacoma.

I am staying at the  Hotel Whitcomb a nice old turn of the century building on Market Street near the Civic Center, on the edge of the Tenderloin district. $ 69.00 plus tax. Skid Road of San Francisco.  All night the sirens of police and ambulance cars were blaring, but I missed most of the noise because I had not slept for 30 hours. Walking the neighborhood, you see the weirdest human beings, lonely, broken, wasting their God given gifts away; contributing little and taxing society resources and tolerance. A stark contrast to the 3 months in Asia where the disadvantaged at least try to make a contribution.

Hotel Whitcomb

If I manage to get a seat on tomorrow’s flight. I’ll be staring out of the window at the first morning light over the Saigon River. I have no idea when and if I’ll be back. I have several years planned for the Mediterranean and South America on “Fleetwood”. This was the third visit and I leave with much gratitude for the opportunity to be here the last three months. I love this country and it’s people.

I stopped at Sheridan’s Irish Pub on Le Tan Thon. There was just one customer and he turned to be a wealth of information on the Vietnam boating scene. Randall, an Australian boat interior carpenter foreman. Thomas Hutchins the American VietVet/author/photographer, who I had met in mid February, showed up later.

The Saigon Botanical Garden/Zoo is just up the street. This is an oasis in this busy city, created by the French in the early 20th century. They planted domestic and exotic trees that are now enormous in size. I shall plant a few Mahogany and Teak trees here and make my great grandchildren millionaires.

I had a lotus salad at Mike’s “Saigon Xua va Nay” (Saigon Then and Now).

I have my flight details and if luck is with me, on the space available basis, I should be back in San Francisco Sunday morning.

Today I went to some of my favorite Saigon sites to take photographs just in the case that I have lost the ones I took in January off the hard drive.

My friend Mike of “Saigon Then and Now”, former owner of Vien Dong in Tacoma, gave me one of the new bright yellow polo shirts his crew wears in the restaurant. Then they had me serve a table of a German couple who spoke little or no English and tied on one of the waiter’s aprons. Everyone got a good laugh out of it when I removed the shirt I was wearing.

Just had a beer with a Macedonian-Australian, Yani, who teaches English here. He explained to me a lot more of the Balkan history, the area I will be spending time in on my way to the Black Sea, down the Danube. Talked my ear off but I did learn a lot. Next to him sat a Polish German bus driver from Duisburg, who did not speak any English and we used my German and his Italian, since Yani and the Duisburger both know about as much Italian as I do, to keep a conversation going. This watering hole is a French hang out, so I had my immersion for the day.

I am still waiting to hear from my favorite travel agent to know when and how I can get back to the West Coast. I’ve got three days left on my Visa.

The nearly 24 hour train trip went well. I got plenty of sleep. The Vietnamese R.R. system works well. So, I spent as much as I would have paid for a hotel room, about $ 17.00 and it took me from Nhatrang to Saigon. I retrieved the bike from the train station and put a for sale sign on it for $ 40.00, wanting a quick sale. My good Vietnamese-American buddy, Mike, who I met in Saigon on the 1st day here, bought my bike. Partly for sentimental reasons. He has been a great friend and I look forward to see Mike when he visits the N.W. in April. I had a wonderful evening with him at his restaurant “Saigon Then and Now”. On this theme I decided to spend another evening on the roof of the “Rex” hotel. Possibly my last night in Saigon. The same entertainers were there as I reported in the week prior to ”Tet”. The Spanish singer hauled me onto the stage for a duet of ”Tears in Heaven”, which I happen to know almost all by heart. Afterwards I found out that he is 100% Vietnamese and he does not speak Spanish. He fooled me. I thought he was Puerto Rican. He looks Latin. The Greek Canadian singer introduced me to the audience when he was telling them the history of the Rex Hotel. I told them that I was part of the very first customers of the Rex when it was still being finished in December 1961. I told the audience that we cooked our Thanksgiving dinner on the roof with our own field kitchen; and that most of the troops had never seen a Bidet before.

I spent most of the day shopping for trinkets and gifts to bear with me to the USA and Holland. Should have had my first wife with me she had that totally emotionless bargaining power that drove the Vietnamese merchants to tears when we lived here in the early sixties. I’m a push over.

I took the laptop to the local doctors but they had no way to help other than to wipe what’s left of my files off the computer. That would be a disaster. All my 3 months travel pictures, new friends’ addresses, the articles I wrote would be going up in smoke. I am resisting and I am hoping for better news in the USA.

So, I’m trying to fly out of here in the next couple of days If I manage to find the address of my favorite travel agent.

This hotel’s computer does not have a slot for my camera memory card or a USB port, so, no pictures.

I have had a serious crash and lost my drivers altogether. I am writing this from another laptop. Not sure I’ll be able to survive mine. I’ll try in Saigon. I am taking the night sleeper train from Nhatrang, taking the bike with me. I’ll be handicapped trying to re-list my flight without skyoe, the phone numbers and e-mail addresses, etc. If you happen to get a phone call from Sea-|Tac in the next days that is the reason. I still have the tooth abscess issue to deal with in either Saigon or take my chances that it will go away. 

I am reasonable certain that I might have accomplished a good part of my second mission, to try and make it easier and cheaper for cruising vessels to visit Vietnam. An insider here gave me a rundown of the actual costs and it turns out that the major expense is the agency fee and that the “under the table” expenses to the various agencies are not all that high. I expect to be able to have the positive information corrected on www.noonsite.com in the next week or so.

Dick and Dung McKenzie had me over for lunch today. Gerard and Nam Mollenhorst also joined the lunch. The Mollenhorsts wil be back in Lelystad in three weeks.

I am not sure I’ll be able insert pictures from this borrowed laptop and not certain I can read my e-mails.

It’s not 7 a.m. yet. Just hang up some laundry on the balcony and then had to close the doors and windows and turned on the a.c. as the sun is already baking the east side. I’ll have breakfast and then gather at the ”Beverly Hills” coffee shop with the “regulars”, next I’ll have coffee with Chien and Chau of the Falcon Shipping Agency. Yesterday afternoon I rode out to the south side of town, across the Anh Binh bridge. In 2006 I took some photos of the fish drying along the river bank. There were none at Tet and there are none yet. T.J. has the best Cha Gio spring rolls and that’s what I had for dinner. The “El Coyote” was alive, with a dozen young Swedes and a similar group of Australians. I wanted to get a picture of Andre Rochette. We met in 2006 when he was building floats in the Boa Dai summer residence bay, where I was anchored. Andre’s life is a colorful as he and his paintings look.  He was born in Vietnam in 1958. His father, a Cheyenne Indian from North Dakota served in the U.S. Special Forces, he went missing in action in Laos in 1962. His mother is half French half Laotian. He grew up in France and took his grandfather’s last name, Rochette. In his father’s footsteps, he joined the French Foreign Legion and made several jumps as a paratrooper over West Africa. He is a talented painter, the walls of his Tex-Mex restaurant are full of his paintings of American Indian scenes. According to Andre the below photo of him and a Cheyenne Indian comes very close to a photograph he has of his dad and there is undoubtedly a resemblance. So, if you happen to be in Nhatrang this is the only place you’ll get a good Margarita and  a good story in Vietnam. 

It is International Women’s Day. And it does not go by unnoticed in Vietnam. Last night it was celebrated even more than today. Boys and men were buying their sweethearts and wives a red rose, wrapped in cellophane. The flower vendors were wall to wall on the beach. The restaurants and bars were packed. But the young who could not afford a restaurant formed parties on the beach. The below picture is of a group of twenty year old students at the Tourism college, just down the block from the hotel.

I am fading fast and will probably do the rest tomorrow morning. I should have never mentioned anything about my tooth ache/abscess, in yesterday’s blog. I woke up in the middle of the night with a worse ache than before. It took a while for the Codeine to kick in. I plan to have it checked in Saigon. I am now planning to take the Wednesday night train. I posted the package with my Basket Boat manuscript and pictures on a CD and the letter to the minister of Culture, Sport and Tourism.

Beach party for International Women's Day

I managed to come up with a reasonably good story and pictures of the basket boats and boat construction in Vietnam in general. Very little historical facts are available on the internet in any other language than French, my third language. I have a couple more projects to work on but I am getting restless and I have decided to try and get back to Gig Harbor/Tacoma earlier than my original plan, March 23rd. The main reason being that I will otherwise miss too much of the choir practice for the Easter Sunday mass at St. Nicholas in Gig Harbor. I plan to be back in Saigon this Thursday evening and I should then be back by the 21st, possibly the 14th., depending on the space available and possible appointments in Saigon.

But “partir c’est mourir un peu” as the saying goes. I will be leaving with a heavy heart, I love Vietnam, the people, the culture, the food and the climate. I will be back. It has been a wonderful experience and I am very grateful to my friends, father “X” and his St.Nicholas consort in Cambodia, my travel companion Iris,  Judy B. for her help, my Hanoi companion Maud and the many new friends I made here.

Mass today at the Cathedral was another treat. It was dedicated to all the Nhatrang high school and college students. The first reading today was from the book of Exodus, Moses being told to lead his enslaved kin out of Egypt. God identifies himself as “Iam who I am!”. Dumb question? Coincidentally Moses was put up for adoption in a …. basket boat on the Nile River. I made friends with a Dutch cruising couple in the South Pacific in 2005.  Stephen and Maria Boonzaaijer. Stephen is a Reformed minister. They named their boat after this Exodus passage: “Yo Soy”. Maria grew up a few blocks from where I grew up in Amsterdam,in the Waalstraat. She was raised Catholic. So she is my Antipode. Maria converted to Calvinism I went the other way. Maria and I are a balancing act on the tight rope to salvation with the same Safety Net. I wrote it before but language is not an issue when I can be part with myVietnamese brothers and sisters in the same rituals I am accustomed to and see and hear how everyone participates and knows the liturgy by heart.

I stopped for another cup of coffee afterwards at “le Petit Bistro” and visited Lionel and Thoa Abbondanza and their almost one year son, Lucas. I met Lionel on the train ride back from Tuy Hoa. They live just a couple of blocks from the hotel. Lionel works as a guide for a French travel company and takes groups on a 13 day tour through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. His office is in Hanoi. I could spend months listening to all that he knows, because of his work and interests, about Indochina.

The tooth ache is still not gone away all together but I have had no need for pain killers for the last week or so. I continue the antibiotics.