The bus journey to Kunming was less exciting than the train ride to Kaiyuan, but was nevertheless very atmospheric. It was quite a small bus with maybe 20 people on it. They all wore thick, warm coats, and looked like important working people. They sat quietly, in a disciplined way, with their hands lightly resting on top of each other on their laps. No chitter, no chatter, no spitting in the aisle, throwing rubbish out the window, or the like.

We travelled for 3 or 4 hours, mainly through cities and along quality carriageways. The traffic was mostly trucks, with a few buses, and hardly any cars. It felt like the whole countryside was alive with industry, lorries carrying important things ferrying them back and forth, to build stuff, to conquer nature, to make China great! All in the thick, misty, cold dawn. You could see your breath.

The silent orderliness inside the bus was only broken when we got stuck in a traffic jam. The whole road was blocked some way ahead, and only single files of traffic getting through. We must have waited about an hour all told, and after five minutes people started to talk a bit. I was looking at the numbered bus rules and regulations on a poster, hence learning the Chinese characters for 4 四 and 5 五 (1 一, 2 二 and 3 三 are easy!). Sitting next to me was a young friendly soldier in a smart uniform. When I got out my phrasebook to look up 6 六, he smiled at me. Soon he was drilling me, counting to the unfathomable heights of one hundred, in a beautiful voice. When you listen carefully to someone speaking Chinese there’s a curious, simple, tuneful life from the tones. Just as I am always impressed by perfect French rolled Rs, any well made sound that you can’t make is surprising and beautiful. We must have driven the people in the quiet bus mad by my repeated attempts to ennuciate the numbers, but did cause occasional bouts of friendly laughter.

I’m now staying in Kunming, at a curious hotel / student lodgings run by Yunnan university. My plan is to spend a month here, taking a Chinese language course. My first two nights were in a pretty grim room, but I’ve managed to change to a much nicer one today. Strange to unpack into a place I won’t have to move out of in a few days time. It has been bitterly cold, but now it is sunny in the afternoons. There’s the most heavenly bookshop in the world, which even stocks guidebooks that are meant to be banned by the government because of their history section and pictures of the Dalai Lama. That traveller’s rumour is either untrue, or the place will be shutdown within the week, as it is recently opened – perhaps the right bribes have been made. Especially astonishingly, they have Lonely Planet Tibet! I resisted the temptation to snap up a history of China and SE Asia, some kanji flashcards, and the complete works of Tintin in Chinese.

The Journalist enthusiastically showed me round Kaiyuan in the evening. It’s a clean, bright, bold place. With wide boulevards, and cruising cars. Lots of pucker shops, but not at the gluttonous extremeties of a Ho Chi Minh City department store, these were clearly targetted at a substantial middle class. People were all smart and confident.

My slightest whim was catered for by The Journalist. For example, I had trouble looking up a word in my phrasebook, and had indicated that I needed to buy a dictionary soon. Next thing I know he was confidently asking all sorts of people in the street for directions, and we arrived at a bookshop. It did indeed have English-Chinese dictionaries, but I thought I’d wait for both better choice and advice in Kunming. So, he took me to another bookshop, which had a different choice. I had to say “Kun-ming” very clearly, and indicate that I quite wanted something to eat.

Food was obviously very important business to The Journalist. He chatted up some more people in the street, and marched at a pace round town, eventually finding what in Thailand would be described as the night market. This is somewhere with lots of simple restaurants and stalls, and wide selections of cheap, tasty food. We walked all back and forth along both perpendicular streets of it, and at every stall he went in, lifted the lids off pots, sniffed and asked the keeper questions. I wanted to go to one of the places with lots of fresh vegetables and flaming woks, preparing delicious hot, new stir fries. He seemed more keen on the places with the prepared stewed dishes, which Burmese or Cambodian style sat cold in pots out the front. Eventually he settled on one of these, selected lots of dishes for us, which were accompanied by hot rice. It was delicious if salty (or is that MSGy?), and there was lots of it and green tea to wash it down. Even though it would have been very cheap, The Journalist paid for us both, which made up somewhat in my mind for him blagging a free half a hotel room off me.

We went back to the hotel room and to sleep. His travel arrangements were of some interest to me. He had a small rucksack, which mainly seemed to contain a train time table and a road atlas of China. There was also some toothpaste. No change of clothes. He took off his top layers of clothing, and went to bed in long johns (they were very long, and worn under his quite thick cord trousers), without having a shower in the evening or the morning. Mind you the shower did look a bit useless, and I skipped it as well, so perhaps he thinks all white people are not only smelly, but have far too much stuff with them. (Actually, by backpacker standards I’m travelling quite lightly, and by tour bus tourist standards extremely lightly).

I was usefully shown how to abuse a hotel. Hotels in China seem to have bottled mineral water in a dispenser, which can heat it for you as well, so you can make green tea with the provided tea bags. This is excellent, and in many ways more sensible than purifying all tap water to drinking standards as we do in Europe. He rang reception several times – to order a refill for the water bottle, and more green tea bags which he tried to persuade me to take with me. He kept trying to retune the TV, I assumed to get the English language evening news for me. There was a curious electric smelling thing, which you opened a little bar of soap like stuff and put it on top of it, and it made a nice smell. Just think, I could have gone for months and never known how to use it!

I went to the toilet and brushed my teeth with my trousers and money belt still on, and made sure they were right near by my pillow, on the other side of the bed from him. The aim was to ensure that any attempted thievery would make enough noise to wake me up. Frankly a futile exercise, as I’m a very sound sleeper, although perhaps a touch less sound this night.

I awoke in the morning money belt unslashed, throat unslit, and with a good long rest to boot. Subsequent checks have shown that my luggage has been untouched, so I proclaim The Journalist to be Trustworthy. He also gave me his address and phone number in Haerbin which is in the NE of China. I think I’m meant to visit him if I go that way. Oh heck, I’ve just thought, perhaps he wanted me to phone him when I safely arrive in Kunming? It would be a futile exercise, as telephones don’t convey pointing fingers and dictionaries very well. I’ll just have to learn Chinese first.

At 6am we went to the bus station, he organised my ticket, put me on the bus and shook hands goodbye. I was grateful, and also moderately surprised that he didn’t follow me onto the bus. I’ve no idea where he was going or what he was doing, but thank you anyway, The Journalist!

The train journey along the Red River from Vietnam into 云南 province (Yunnan, Cloud South) is stunning. I embarked at 河口 (Hekou, River Entrance) , the border town, armed with only half a bottle of water and no food. The Playboy kindly met me in the morning, albeit half an hour late. I’d given up and gone to the station on my own, but he found me half way there. To get in with the spirit of things I checked to see if he’d been with a girl, but he denied it. He helped me buy a ticket and get on the train. Immediately the station was impressive, clean, organised, with neatly tended plants. A security guard searched my luggage before boarding. The Playboy wrote a note in Chinese to help me later on with the second leg of the journey, but I put it away thinking that with my phrasebook I wouldn’t really need it.

Fat guards with well made uniforms whistled for the train to leave. As we pulled out into the countryside, everywhere outside felt vast and cold and misty. Pucker signalmen stood precisely on their designated spots by the track. The soft dawn light hurtled past. Inside it was brightly lit and clean. I managed to buy some pine nuts and extra water from one of the stour staff, and then a bit later on some excellent thick noodles in a spicy sauce. Everything so disciplined. It feels like an empire.

I had no idea how long the train journey was going to take, but after a few hours it becamse clear that it would be all day rather than just the morning. As a policy I don’t look at my watch on public transport, or even ask how long it is going to take. A policy that was essential in unreliable Ghana or Myanmar, and psychologically makes journeys anywhere much more enjoyable.

The Chinese were very friendly on the train, so if anyone ever said anything to you about them being unfriendly people, forget about it. A few different groups of people and individuals sat near me. For most of the journey, The Journalist (as I shall call him) was opposite. He gave me a great Chinese bun thing with a tasty meat paste in the middle, and some pineapple. When I got out my Chinese characters (for the last couple of weeks I’ve been learning some, and am up to maybe 50) he helped show me how to really draw them.

The train tracked the Red River into China. There were incredible terraces in the river valley, growing all kinds of crops. Exciting to see wheat, and cabbages, and all sorts of others, grown in a patchwork, after the monotonous rice-everywhere of Vietnam. Beautiful irrigation systems with photogenic dams redirecting the small river into channels, sometimes lifting it half way up the side of the deep valley and sometimes letting it flow the natural course.

In the mountains the train weaved in and out of tunnels. Suddenly, I looked out the window and glimpsed below us a vast gorge, so steep as to nearly be a waterfall. Everything lush and green and wet. Out the window the other side we sometimes hugged the edge of the hills, giving an epic but not so good view down across the wide, cloudy plain to the west. A mountain on our right so large I can’t quite believe it and have to keep looking back at it. Back into the tunnels, then without warning hills around, speckled all over with small white boulders.

Suffice is to say, this is a recommended train journey. And I haven’t even mentioned the numerous small stations, with confident, well looking mountain people, getting on and getting off. Workmen with flasks of green tea, refilled by a guard with a kettle. Huge earthworks of unknown purpose, perhaps new dams. Down on the plain, massive agricultural areas – there were some crops protected by a sort of cloth greenhouse that went on forever.

The train pulled into its final stop 开远 (Kaiyuan, Open Distant) in the early evening. Attempts at communication between The Journalist and I had been less than successful. They consisted of either him talking in Chinese, and me not understanding, or him writing a simple sentence in Chinese, and me not understanding. The sentences were a bit better as sometimes I understood a couple of characters, and I could recognise place names and times. My phrasebook was less than helpful at everyday conversation. Anyway, somehow he made it clear that when we got to Kaiyuan he would come with me, I thought perhaps he would show me a good hotel, or we would have dinner together.

He walked me to the bus station. Two American travellers in Hanoi had said that the train from the border to 昆明 (Kunming, Multitudes Bright) wasn’t running at all; I assumed that was a half truth, and it only runs to Kaiyuan, hence the need now for a bus. Anyway, by this point I was thinking I might not go straight to Kunming and instead try and get a bus westwards, and explore a bit more of this area. None of this stuff is in my China Lonely Planet; it briefly mentions the existence of Hekou, but otherwises mentions no places in the intervening area. This is why I kept having to wing it. Doing things that are Not In The Book, is obviously Dangerous and only to be attempted by Very Brave Travellers. Obviously this is much more fun.

With infinite patience The Journalist made it through another rupture in communications with me, and managed to explain that the next bus to Kunming was at 10pm that night. Since I wasn’t sure that I wanted to go to Kunming at this point, and I was tired after the unexpectedly long train journey, I instead managed to convey that I would spend the night in a hotel. I failed to convey that I would then decide what I wanted to do in the morning.

We went to the hotel next to the bus station, and from handy pictures I selected a cheap room (70 yuan, or about $9). There was some confusion at this point because I had to hand over 200 yuan, and I couldn’t work out why, but in the end I just went for it to see how events took their course (the next day it turned out to be a deposit which I got back). The Journalist insisted on coming up to the room with me, and I looked it over and said it was fine. Then he put his bag down, and he kept trying to communicate with me about buses, or days or something. I was trying to explain that I might stay a couple of days in Kaiyuan, as in the sun it had looked quite bright, clean and interesting, and I needed some time to rest and acclimatise to China.

He got increasingly confused, and in the end looked through my notebook, and found the note that The Playboy had written to expediate my onwards journey. Ah! Now I remember, he’d read it on the train! The Playboy had obviously written in no uncertain terms that I needed every assistance on my journey to Kunming (this isn’t true, it’s not that hard to buy bus tickets with the name of the destination in Chinese characters from your guidebook), and so The Journalist was kindly doing everything he could to help me out.

Then it dawned on me that he intended to stay the night in the same room. There were two problems with this:

1. I didn’t want him to.
2. He hadn’t paid.

By this point I’d collapsed on my bed, half groaning, half laughing. I wanted to ask all sorts of complex questions, like where would he be if I wasn’t there? Didn’t he have work to go to, or another train to catch? It was at this point that he did show me his card that amongst lots of Chinese said “Press Pass”, hence my name for him. Without being really rude and physically throwing him out the room, and then with the loss of a probably entertaining evening, I didn’t know what to do.

Chinese people when they help you are obviously very helpful, and very clingy. I’m sure to him it seemed quite the natural solution for him to stay in my room, most economical and convenient for us both. In the end I decided to let him stay, but to take reasonable precautions that when I use the bathroom my money belt and passport are with me, rather than in the room. My main fear was that this was an elaborate con, but it seemed unlikely, and anything would be better than my previous nights sleep…

The population of all the other countries I’ve been in during the last three months (Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam) is about 200 million. The population of China is about 1250 million. If I took the perhaps reasonable attitude of spending time in a country proportional to the number of people who live there, then I’d have to spend the next year and a half here.

When I got to the border town of Lao Cai, I had one day left on my visa so headed to Bac Ha to see some countryside Vietnam. This is the upcoming place (now Sapa is getting too self-contaminated by the tourists) to look at the beautiful mountain scenery and check out the ethnic minority hill tribes. Midweek, when I was there, it is completely empty, and I didn’t see another white person for a whole day until I found two on the bus back to Lao Cai. At the weekend there are colourful markets to which people come down from the hills, and some tour groups arrive to photograph people in their traditional costumes.

I only had one morning before having to go to the border, so I took the shortest walk up to a village called Bam Pho (I think) 5km from Bac Ha. The people were obviously used to seeing westerners, but not midweek, and were very friendly and kind. I ended up following two up past the village to some fields on the hills where they were going to work in the morning. Hill farmer commuting. They kept going up to the highest peak, but I didn’t have time to follow. They were Flower Hmong, and the women wore bright colourful clothing. Compared to villages that I saw in Myanmar, this one was very well organised. The houses seemed better built, and the village was kept cleaner, with better managed paths and roads. I’d be interested to find out whether this was because of Communist rural influence (near Kengtung in Myanmar where I saw other villages has been largely untouched by any government, if anything actively harmed), larger quantities of proximate tourism over a longer time, or simply a better organised / technologically advanced ethnic minority.

The terraces they farm on are incredible. There was a man with an ox ploughing a hill. At first I couldn’t quite believe what he was doing. He was standing on a very steep hill, it felt like 70 degrees, but of course it probably wasn’t, standing on a wooden ploughing device yoked to the ox. Amazingly the ox managed to walk along the contour of the hill, and the man stay balanced on the plough to give it weight, churning the earth underneath. I’m not sure if he was making a terrace, or if there’s a crop which can grow on the slope.

Land borders are fascinating places. Border towns have a unique character, quite different from either country. There’s a strange feeling of freedom, as to enable trade people of both nationalities can cross quite freely. It’s only foreigners who have to have the right visa, and wait for lots of stamps and paperwork. Lao Cai on the Vietnamese side had motorbike riders who wore helmets, and didn’t speak any English at all. This is unprecedented – every other moto-taxi driver in Vietnam can say at least the word “motorbike”, and they never wear helmets, it would be a terrible fashion faux-pas. The Chinese helmets are only half the size of motorbike helmets in the UK, so you get decent all round vision which would be essential in Vietnamese city traffic. It is actually illegal to not wear a helmet in Vietnam, just never enforced, it looks like it may be enforced in China. Many more people use cars, buses, and have access to decent trucks though, so it’s hard to tell. And walk, people in China actually walk places – a very strange thing to do in Vietnam.

As I was waiting for my passport to be stamped, a passing classical looking Chinaman shook my hands to welcome me to his country. He had one of those fantastic oriental moustaches, and I felt like I’d had just the right welcome to the new. Hello, China!

The no-man’s land between the two countries is a small bridge across the Red River (it really is red), with two grand arches demarking your exit from Vietnam and entrance to China at each end. These huge monoliths are a largely successful attempt to make a virtual border on a map a real one in the world, cartography escaping from paper. At the other side, just as I was taking in all the smart buildings and Chinese writing everywhere, I was met by a beamish English speaking man who called himself Mike.

Mike proudly described himself as a “playboy”, seemingly thinking this would endear me to him. As if to prove it, he would sometimes rush up to young women in the street, entreaty them to spend the night with him (yes! I can understand Chinese without even knowing any!) and take their curt refusal buoyantly. He took me to his father’s hotel just round the corner, which was a bright but basic place. Feeling a bit out of options, I negotiated for a long time (Mike insisted on this), and ended up paying 40 yuan to stay the night, and he would take me to the train station in the morning for free.

He was very clingy, and would have walked round town all evening with me to practice his English. Good though he was at speaking, he wasn’t so good at understanding, and I felt tired and overwhelmed by things anyway. So I managed to get rid of him, and he said he’d meet me later at 8 o’clock (we both flunked the meeting, I fell asleep, he woke me up, only to say he had to go to do his other job at the bus station, getting tips from English speaking foreigners there). The town, by the way, was astonishing to me, with all its clean, crisp buildings, made by an engineer not an artist, but still strangely charming to me after the roughness and dirt of even Vietnam. I fell asleep properly, unhappy with the room (I couldn’t find the bathroom, and it was noisy with a paper thin wall to the room next door; the hotel wasn’t quite convincing), and ready to move on the next day.

Last weekend, Nat took us further along the coast to Cam Pha just east of Halong bay. The area is where they mine coal, and it adjoins the beautiful Bai Tu Long bay which is just as fantastic as Halong. I predict that within a few years Lonely Planet will tell everyone to go there for the authentic experience and skip Halong, then in another ten years it will be completely touristy. We went up to a cave where the guide kept pointing out dubious animal shapes in the rock which Nat had to translate from Vietnamese. Bizarrely, at the end of the cave there was a big open area with a huge atmospheric bar and no doubt karaoke if you come at the right time. On the Sunday we went to another island in mid-development off Halong bay and saw a dolphin show. I haven’t seen dolphins before, and found them really amazing. I was surprised by their strength, and also impressed by the agility of sea lions.

Since then Gavin and I have mainly hung out in Hanoi, going to museums. We took a day trip to Tam Coc, which has the same limestone rock outcrops as Halong only on land. There’s a river for irrigation which has been made to flow between the outcrops, with paddy fields on every side. Being rowed along the river was also quite eerie, and just as impressive as Halong. Occasionally the river went through a cave underneath an outcrop, where the light shining in from each end produced a fantastic contrast of colours. (Picture is of me on the boat, with one of the caves behind).

Overall my impression of Vietnam has been that it is an interesting and rewarding place to travel. It seems to be developing economically. I’ve spent too much time in the cities though, and not enough getting out into the country. After he finishes his work, Nat (who speaks Vietnamese) is going to make a motorbike trip round the north-west, and I look forward to hearing more about how people there live.

People here work very hard, seemingly for every hour of the day. The staff in guesthouses and shops get up at dawn, open up, and close just before bed time. People have to live in large numbers in small houses – in hotels the staff usually sleep in the lobby. This is striking to me, how lucky I am to be able to do what I want and go where I want, when those around me work every hour of the day, and still can’t save up enough for a foreign holiday.

Gavin left to the south of Vietnam two days ago, and we bid our farewells to Nat. Tomorrow I’m going to China, getting the train to the border at Lao Cai. The railway the other side is currently closed so I’ll be travelling onwards by bus.

War looms.

I spent the last two weekends with people from the expatriate community; first in Halong bay and then in Hanoi. Being an expat is pretty different from being a tourist. You are away for so long without the constant newness of travelling, so finding places with home comforts is more important. And western comforts are very much available in Hanoi, and in a form even in Halong.

If you work in Vietnam and are on a European wage, then locally you’re very rich. For $30 a month you can employ a full time maid to do your cleaning and washing. The office by necessity employs cars with drivers to transport staff around, but they also get to use them in the evening and at weekends. No need for taxis or to buy a car.

Travelling in a car in Hanoi is an eerie experience. Usually I’ve been getting round by Xe Om (literally “motorbike hug”), which is a scooter taxi that you sit on the back off. Almost all the vehicles on the streets are very low power motorbikes, buzzing about at 20mph. A Honda Dream is the dream purchase. Powered bike traffic has many advantages; it’s cheaper, many more vehicles fit on the street, it is environmentally friendly, it is point to point even going down narrow alleys. Of course it isn’t so good in the rain, or for old people, and it is dangerous. You’d be amazed by the luggage people can fit on a motorbike – I’ve seen entire chicken coops with chickens, a very large pig in a cage ready for slaughter, and Gavin even spotted someone transporting another bike on the back of a bike (OK, it was a pedal bike).

The world of the larger vehicle, bus or car, ethereally intersects that of the motorbikes. You constantly honk your horn, and the motorbikes flow round you, as if you were driving through syrup. It’s a quite different experience being ferried to an expensive restaurant, compared to moto’ing your way to a Com Pho (rice/soup) shop. The moto is much more exhilerating, the car feels calm and magical. One day there will be too many cars and the current system will become really dangerous, everything will have to slow down, and more traffic laws will need to be enforced.

To achieve home comforts, expatriates often head for restaurants serving Western food, and bars in a European style. There’s also a strong link with Vietnamese culture, as many learn the langauge, and in business have to deal with the Vietnamese. However it is fundamentally hard to really get into it. For example, women tend to be either prostitutes, or very traditional that you have to court and marry before you get to know them. It’s difficult to relate as an equal.

The lads took us to the bar at the bottom of the Fortuna Hotel in Hanoi at about 7:30pm, just for the experience. Extraordinarily, there were maybe two hundred girls there, all stunning and dressed up, being counted off by their motherly minder. It was Gavin’s birthday, so she tried to parade the girls in front of him for him to choose a favourite. Because the lights were dimmed, she had a torch to shine in their faces so we could properly size them up. It made me feel quite sick; although the girls looked bright and happy, and are no doubt relatively well paid in total, I felt more like I was being showed chattel than introduced to people. They were available either to keep you company for the evening or for more, as a service offered by this swanky four star hotel. Just as the Hong Kong businessman can pop down to the 24 hour bar for a drink after finishing business at midnight, he can also pop down for something else.

It’s important to note that this is a regional phenomena. Asian prostitute mainly caters for Asians, and exists for Asians. Many Western tourists and many expatriates love it, and that is why they come to the area. But this sort of service at a posh hotel would be a bit much for most European staying there, I think it is more expected by a visiting Chinese businessman.

Another service popular with the Chinese is gambling. There’s a brand new casino in Halong City. It only opened a few weeks ago, and I met a black African employee in another bar. It was really really great to see a black person, I realised that I’ve missed the racial diversity that I take for granted in the UK. He worked for a South African gaming company, in Vietnam for a year to train the local staff. We all went to visit the casino the next evening, and the croupiers certainly looked like they needed a bit more practice before they were ready.

The casino manager chatted to me for a while. He was most dismissive of us (the expats were gambling away “small amounts”, such as $50 all told). He said nearly all the money they will make is from Gaming Junkets. These extraordinary operations bring busloads of gamblers. An organiser takes all their money, hundreds of thousands of dollars each, and administers buying gambling chips, as well as transport and hotels. I got the impression they were also a sort of competition between the gamblers, with the organiser keeping track.

Some people have more money than you or I can imagine, the manager said to me.

Vietnam has been ravaged by first of all war and then the poverty of an undeveloped economy. Unlike Cambodia and Laos, or even Myanmar, it has managed to rebuild lots of infrastructure. The roads are universally excellent, with flat tarmac surfaces. Bridges are easily destroyed in war, but now there are many new ones, including a magnificent one that I went over in the Mekong Delta. I’ve seen maybe even a dozen new bridges being built in my short journey through Vietnam.

Halong City has a population of 150,000 people, slightly more than Cambridge in the UK. Its water system has been badly maintained over the years, and so has been recently refurbished. What’s curious is how the refurbishment was funded… 90% by the Dutch government via a World Bank loan, and 10% by the local state Vietnamese water company. Evidently the people of Halong City needed an update to their water system, but it isn’t entirely clear to me why the Dutch government funded it, especially when it is considered doubtful that the loan will ever be repaid.

There’s more to this. It must be for industrial economic development, as it is essentially for an urban environment, rather than the much poorer rural Vietnamese. Also, it doesn’t seem a sensible use of development money as it isn’t very catalytic, like education would be. To back this up, the project isn’t very strong on training; the contractor doesn’t have to train Vietnamese people to replace it in future.

The project is managed by a Dutch consulting company, and run by a French contractor, SAUR. On Saturday I visited the French company’s offices in Halong City. They have 12 expat staff, mainly French but also some others, and 50 Vietnamese staff.

From a technical point of view water engineering is actually pretty interesting. There are lots of strategies to fixing damaged pipes. For example, you can slipline them by inserting a new rubbery pipe inside an existing pipe, or you can send a device down to spray line them with epoxy resin. To find the problems, one technique is called the pressure test, which involves sending high pressure water down to break the pipe. Then you look for where the water squirts out the surface in a fountain, and go fix it!

The water project has two major sources being a dam in one area, and a river in another. There is also some extra water gathered from boreholes. As well as fixing existing pipes, they’ve lain large tracts of new pipe (manufactured in Malyasia). This involves fun things like temporarily damming rivers so you can run a pipeline under the river bed.

Physically the pipe laying is very easy, as labour here is cheap. At the flick of a hand, an arbitary number of digging people can be mustered. The hard bit (for the contracting company, rather than the sweating labourers) is negotiating permits. Often while doing works people will come out of their houses and physically stop them digging in the back of their garden, demanding more compensation.

If you’re building a house, then once the site is secured and cleared, it is like painting a picture. With pipelines the environment always affects your plans while you are laying them – performing a thorough underground survey would be as expensive and disruptive as actually just trying to lay the pipe.

Me, mindlessly propogate links? I’m going to make an exception to the byline at the top of this page. It relates to both Vietnam (where I am at the moment) and to the impending Iraq war, so perhaps we can forgive me.

‘Quiet American’ Irony article. Seeing the film “The Quiet American” in Vietnam months before its long-delayed opening in the United States, PNS Associate Editor Andrew Lam finds a country where activists and artists risk government crackdown to promote freedom of expression. Back in America, though, self-censorship is rising as an anti-war masterpiece is draped and a poetry reading cancelled.

I found the article while using the fantastic Google News Search. Every week or so I punch in Vietnam and China, and it gives me all the articles relating to where I am, and where I’m soon to be. These searches are particularly good at rooting out less common news sources, such as Asian English language newspapers. The front page of Google News is less good at exposing non-US perspective stories.

Last week, I made my way into the old North Vietnam. I went on a tour of the old DMZ (Demilitarised Zone) which separated the North from the South, and across which the Vietnam war was fought. The trees are starting to grow back, and replacement houses in all the bombed towns have been largely rebuilt. Our guide was a child during the war, from a village near the border. He was moved several times when fighting came too close, ending up as a refugee far away in the South, separated from his parents.

The North isn’t so different from the South. The weather is cool, it feels like a dreary late winter or autumn day, with clouds and rain. It’s nice when it is sunny though. If partly because it isn’t sunny, people are perhaps slightly less smiley here. Hanoi is the capital of Vietnam but doesn’t feel any more important than HCMC (Saigon), almost like Vietnam still has two capital cities.

The communist party presence is stronger though, and you can tell Hanoi is the political capital. We visited Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, where his body rests embalmed. This is done by the Russians, and every summer he goes on a holiday there to be touched up again. It was explicitly against Ho’s own wishes; he left instructions for cremation, and modest orders in relation to memorials to him. The communist government must have felt that they needed his charisma even after he died.

Viewing his body is a reverential occasion, with huge numbers of Vietnamese visitors. If you made a move for the body, the utterly still guards would bayonet you in an instant. Should you be a far-right, terrorist, old-communist-leader-corpse-desecrating fanatic, then you’d have to add “suicide” in there as well. Uncle Ho looks a bit wax like, but also peaceful and serene, still with his whispy beard, resting from the world’s turmoil.

We? I’ve now met up with Gavin, my friend who also used to work at Creature Labs. We’re going to spend two weeks together in the north of Vietnam, before he heads south and then to India, and I go to China. Say “hello Gav!” if you know him! At the moment we’re in Halong Bay, world heritage site, and home of Gavin’s French friend Nat. Nat works here for a French company, and we’re staying for free in a guesthouse rented by his company. It’s really good, and strange, to be suddenly welcomed in a foreign land. It makes me feel a bit colonial, but more about that another day.

Halong Bay is a fantastic erie place. Weird limestone rocks form thousands of islands in the mill-pond still sea. We went on a two day boat tour, sleeping over night anchored off from an island. There are excellent cave systems, with huge chambers very near their entrance, feeling like something from Jules Verne. Sailing through the bay itself it had clearly once inspired many legends, then fantasy novels, and no doubt now computer games. All these things have slightly less imagination than I thought, and the world more.