fish sauce

emerson and i arrived here in mui ne yesterday afternoon. we rode motorbikes around for about an hour and a half trying to find a place to stay that was reasonably priced. it's just a strip of beach about 3 miles long on the southern coast of vietnam and there must be about 30 queerly desolate guesthouse ventures all wildly overpriced considering that the strip of sandy beach between the accomodations and the ocean is very small and littered with the refuse that washes in from the fishing village about a mile north of here. something about this place makes me very sad for reasons that i have a hard time pinpointing.
it could be the omnipresent smell of fish sauce that permeates the air; i guess fish sauce is one of the things that this town is known for. all along the side of the only blacktop road that traces the coast there are tiny stores selling plastic bottles of the brown juice. fish sauce might not sound that threatening to you all, but anyone who has smelled a fish sauce refinery will understand what i am talking about. it doesn't smell like fish. the smell of a briny fish boat in the hot sun would be a welcomed respit from this particular smell. no, fish sauce--when it's being manufactured--smells something like a slaughterhouse times ass.
the smell reminds me of when i was a little girl in colorado and we used to drive by the purina pet food company, and we had to roll up all the windows in the car, and i would cover my nose with my shirt and still it would be impossible to escape that smell. it reminds me of the tannery that i lived about a mile from, between wicker park and lincoln park in chicago. there is no logical reason for this smell. i know what fish smells like, and i know what dead things smell like, and i know what animal waste smells like, but this smell boggles the mind. it is something far more sinister, something utterly foreign and sad.
maybe this place makes me sad because of the particular juxtaposition of broken-down and over development. emerson and i rented a motorbike today and we went exploring. first we drove down to the (questionably?) nicer beach to the south of our guesthouse and had lunch at this posh resort with a swimming pool and a spa and a little manmade river with goldfish and lotus flowers that cut through its perfectly manicured lawn. the food was mediocre but incredibly expensive, but okay--we only ate there so that we could use the resort's (questionably?) nicer beach. after lunch we went swimming as the tide was going out and as we waded in i noticed that there were scraps of clothing and the remnants of a snack bag moving near us in the surf. later i felt something plastic brush against my leg then float to the surface. it was a ziplock bag. i picked it out of the water and made to throw it away from me and i noticed that there was some kind of brown juice inside of it.
garbage aside emerson and i had fun swimming and playing the game where one of you stands with his/her back to the surf and the other watches the waves come in and tells the one who can't see the waves when to jump so that the wave doesn't come over the head of the one who can't see. we mostly tried to trick each other into getting doused. the waves moved us south with the current.
later we rode north past our guesthouse to watch the sunset from the sand dunes that are somewhere around here. we never found them but we did find the fishing village that is so tiny and beautiful. all of the boats are painted the same color and lined up in the water--there is no warf or dock. we rounded a bend and decided to walk down to the beach and watch the sun set from there. behind a row of tin-roof houses there was the beach and the ocean and a cess pool of garbage and refuse. the people in the village just throw everything into the ocean and the ocean spits it back out as if to say, "i don't want this, this is YOUR problem." it's kind of depressing.

maybe i was spoiled for beaches in thailand--i know, i know, vietnam is not known for its beaches. the beaches in thailand--especially the lower islands--were so pristine and the water was so clear and blue--like a swimming pool or a dream you might have had about the way the ocean used to be before people were invented.

use less everybody.

on a happier note, we had a totally RAD tome in saigon--mostly due to our new friends gretel and grace. they are two lovely sweet women from the phillipines who are teaching english in vietnam.
we met them on the bus trip from phnom penh to ho chi minh city. they had also just returned from angkor wat, so we all had that "just returned from angkor wat, one of the 7 wonders, traveling by bus through cambodia afterglow/disorientation" going on. we gave to them the telephone that i won and they shared some crackers with us and we made lovely conversation during the two hours that our bus sat at the border without moving, (why did the bus sit at the border? you may as well ask why did the bus make us get off and walk a kilometer across the border in the noontime vietnam/cambodia sun). we noticed right away that gretel and grace were not only beautiful but also very smart so we made plans to go to the saigon waterpark the following day after we had all recovered from the trip.
grace was indisposed the next morning so gretel was our companion for the day, and i do not think we would have survived the exciting/insane waterpark if it were not for her super-power negotiation skills, we probably would have been trampled to death in the ruthless crowd of teenage vietnamese boys, all fighting to secure a locker. it was all one big adrenaline rush of water-slide/fight or flight giddiness.
gretel took photos of us on the slides and told us about her family and her boyfriend and her life here in vietnam. after the water-park she took us to the war remnants museum, then we broke to freshen up and met her and her friends after dinner at a popular phillipino bar.

chris rejano, it was rad.

chris rejano, you will be so jealous to learn that i witnessed a phillipino cover band with a girl singer belt out a rendition of the scorpions "still lovin you".

it's late and we have to return the motorbike, love to you all.