Big Chief 'Runs with Scissors'

What's this? A year and a half of nothing and then two posts in one day?! Ridiculous. 

There is a reason I promise, I've added my new A3 Native American prints to my online shop and there'll be more appearing on there soon.....

I'm back baby!.....

...and so much to tell you all, but for the time being I shall leave you with some recent stuff that I've been doing.

Here is the EP cover that I created for the super talented Jake Morley, if you want your very own copy, you can find a list of stockists here. 

You weren't there man

The Internet in Vietnam is shit. And I mean really, truly bad. I've been trying to write a new blogpost for the last two weeks and whenever I actually managed to find a fully functioning Internet-connected device thingy, it refuses to let me look at anything. Apparently the government here aren't huge fans of free speech and the like, and have therefore banned websites such as Facebook and blogger, making it nigh on impossible for a geek such as myself to talk to anyone.

I was planning to regale you with tales of lunatic bus drivers, moonlit beaches and New Year's Eve in Halong Bay, but I've just got back from Sapa and my little brain is filled with what I saw there. Let me just say that all bus drivers should be banned from playing Grand Theft Auto, oh and if they must smuggle drugs on their vehicles, they should at least try to be subtle about it. Asking your passengers to stand up, before lifting up their seat to reveal a suspicious looking package which you then pass over to a burly man in exchange for a large roll of banknotes, is hardly clandestine my friends. When not up to such nefarious shenanigans, these chaps enjoy playing a spot of chicken with the motorcycles, many of which are carrying small babies and which are never going to come out of the exchange very well. One of our drivers actually got out of the bus on the main highway from Hanoi to Hai Phong,walked across three lanes of moving traffic -shouting incomprehensibly the whole way- before being hit by a car. It was only a glancing blow and he got straight back behind the wheel, but boy would that have been a big bruise in the morning.

Were the bus to be involved in an accident, however, at least you'd be happy in the knowledge that there are lots and lots of other bodies to cushion you. The number of seats is only very loosely related to the number of people actually on board, since once the traditional places have been filled, there's a handy store of small plastic stools that can be placed all the way up the aisle. Get some of your passengers to sit on each others laps and you can shove an extra 20 odd people inside. Yes, they may grumble a bit, but what do you care, you're nearly at that bit where you get to kill a prostitute before being chased across Vice City by police in helicopters...

All in all, I have found that the only way to survive such journeys is to plug in the old ipod and never, ever look out of the window. Thankfully I had some fantastic companions with whom to share the horror of these journeys, and with whom I could also enjoy a fortifying drink or two (ahem!) afterward. I managed to spend not only Christmas but New Year too with the uber excellent Michaela, Peter, Chris and Caroline, all lovely Aussies who didn't mind putting up with me over the festive season. Though by contrast to the death bus, the night train to Sa Pa was an absolute joy, it was sadly lacking in good old Australian companionship, my new chums having left me to go back to the sun.

Pete, Caroline and Chris on our boat in Halong Bay, New Year's Eve

Sa Pa is cold. This is what everyone in Hanoi tells you, though they fail to explain just how cold. Besides, I'm an idiot and scorned all warnings. Aren't I an English girl after all, used to everything our famously foul weather can throw? Hmmm, yes, as I said, I'm a moron. I began to realise the extent of my stupidity when the train arrived in Sa Pa at 5am on Friday morning and it came as quite a shock. Sa Pa is a mountain town in the very North of Vietnam, supposedly surrounded by stunning scenery-sadly when I arrived this was entirely obscured by the incredible and all pervading mist that lurked everywhere.

When I'd originally organised this tour, I'd imagined that there might be others joining me. However when the time came for me to set off with my H'mong guide, Su, I was entirely on my own. Su is one of the smallest adults that I have ever met and her tiny feet in her child-sized wellies managed to gain purchase on the most minute of footholds, that my galumphing size 8's entirely failed to locate. If it hadn't been for my incredible army boots, I doubt that I would have made it up or down the slick clay mountain tracks, which at many points were almost vertical. Even with my superior footwear, there were occasions when the two other tiny H'mong ladies; who had mysteriously appeared beside us, had to hold my hands to prevent me from slipping. One of them carried a baby asleep in a sling across her back, yet she tripped up and down the treacherous slopes like a mountain goat. I was like a lumbering Gulliver stuck amid the Lilliputians and boy did I feel like an idiot. The only jacket that I have in my meagre wardrobe is a beautifully tailored piece that I had made back in Hoi An as a little Christmas present to myself- it looked extraordinarily out of place in this demanding landscape. My two little helpers left us when we stopped at a little hut for lunch. How could I refuse their pleas for me to buy something from them as they held out small embroidered trinkets for me to see? All the H'mong women make their own clothes, dying the hempen fabric with the indigo flowers that grow all over the hillside. They also sew bags and belts and create 'silver' bangles to sellto the tourists, it's the only source of income for the non English speakers in the winter time, since their are no crops to tend and they can't act as guides. I bought a brightly coloured headscarf, just like the ones that all of the ladies wear on their own heads, in the hope that it would protect me even slightly from the worst of the icy mist. This absurd addition to my already confused ensemble only served to make me look even more ridiculous, but by this time I was beyond caring.

Lam, myself and Mee, sporting our very fetching headscarves

After six hours of trekking up and down the mountain side; which here is cut into plateaus like shelves where rice paddies are formed, we came to a narrow clay path and Su's own house. She wanted me to meet her family. Call me naive, but I didn't know that there were people who still lived like this, or at least not in places where the temperature gets this low.

Pathway to Su's house

Su's house is essentially a wooden shack made up of a single room, with a small corner partitioned off, which is where her four children sleep. The main part of the room contained a small, very low table which had been tipped on its side, so as to conserve space and a group of very low wooden stools; no more than 15cm tall, pushed against the wall. Above the children's sleeping quarters there was a mezzanine floor with a rough bamboo ladder leading up to it. Here the previous summer's harvest of maize and rice is stored. The only other feature of this bare little house was a bed, pushed into a corner and covered in an assortment of large blankets and odd bits of clothing. There were no windows, no chimney, the only tap was outside, set into a low concrete wall and the fire; on which all the cooking was done, was outside, under the small overhang of the bamboo roof. The only electricity in evidence here, was a solitary, bare light bulb that hung above the opening that led to the fire and a single plug socket from which Su's mobile phone charger dangled, an object shockingly out of place in this little house.

The table is set for dinner at Su's

There were people everywhere. Small, grubby, giggling children dashed about, many of them barefoot despite the cold. One beautiful little girl with huge black eyes, was completely naked from the waist down, though none of the other, permanently shouting adults seemed to be concerned about this.

Fancy doing the washing up? The house's only source of running water

Su explained to me that they were all here to help build an extension on the house. She wanted somewhere to have her kitchen, so that she would be able to cook indoors. Whilst the men gathered around with their machetes, stripping the bark from lengths of wood and cutting huge bamboo poles to the correct size, I picked up one of the shovel-like implements and helped the other women to level out the clay swamp in front of the house where the structure was to be erected. Su's youngest child, 4 year old Mi, joined in enthusiastically with a shovel of his own, hacking at the earth with such energy that I was fearful, not only for his bare little toes, but for my own booted ones. Mi had taken quite a shine to me and came to sit on my lap after dinner, chattering away to me in Vietnamese, whilst I jiggled him up and down.

At least the people here have no shortage of food and this is in part due to their using up of every part of the animals that they consume. We crouched around the low table that evening with our rice bowls, Su and the other women continually placing morsels in my bowl for me, making it very difficult to abstain from the dish of chopped up chicken intestines that I'd been trying to avoid. The rest of the chicken had been dismembered using the ever useful machete and cooked up bones, skin and all. The meat and skin was gnawed off with varying amounts of delicacy and when there was nothing edible left, the remnants would be thrown onto the concrete floor for the dogs to pick over. There wasn't enough room at the table for the children, so they took their rice bowls and placed them on the floor, squatting around them and picking up bits with their chopsticks.

Mi and his brothers eating their dinner

It was dark dark by the time Su and I left for the home stay where we were to spend the night. I was fairly concerned, since we'd both consumed rather a lot of the home brewed rice wine and the path had been difficult enough to traverse in the daylight. Luckily though, we managed the 15 minute journey without incident, although it had felt that it lasted considerably longer.

The home stay was basically a slightly larger version of Su's home. The fire was indoors, but since there was no chimney, the poorly fitted door could not be closed whilst the fire was lit, or else the whole place would have filled with smoke and so the building was no warmer than the air outside. I was too tires by this time to care too much, however and so fell into my bed, pulling the two heavy blankets over me in an effort to get warm. I didn't even get undressed, it was too cold to even consider removing any garment bar my slightly damp socks, which I hurriedly replaced with two dry pairs.

I wonder what the people in the Domestos ads would make of this kitchen?

The next morning I was woken very early, by an assortment of sounds- running children, shouting adults and the inevitable crowing cockerel. Reluctantly I left my nest of blankets and went off to find the family by the fire. That day's walking followed a very similar pattern to the previous one, though the ground was, if anything, even slicker than before and the weather even colder. Yet again we were joined by two quiet little women, one with a bright gold tooth in the top left of her smiling mouth. Every so often I caught glimpses of the hills in the brief holes in the mist- a cruel hint at the stunning but invisible landscape around me. It was a gruelling 6 hour slog to the village of Ban Ho, where we spent the night. As we came down the hillside overlooking the village, the mist finally cleared and we were able to see the river mapped out beneath us.

This home stay was slightly bigger than the last and it even had a chimney, though since it entirely lacked a fourth wall, leaving a whole side of the building open to the elements, this didn't aid things much. We arrived earlier than Su had predicted (apparently I'm a fast walker, though this was presumably because I was trying to keep warm!) and I quickly leaned that this home stay had a hot shower. Joy of joys! Admittedly it was outside and the time it takes to go from being under the hot spray to being fully died and clothed is far, far too long, but it was still one of the best showers that I have ever had!

The room in which Su and I slept was a sort of loft area, built above the main room. The roof didn't quite fit properly and there was no glass in the windows and so I spent another restless night desperately trying to keep warm.

At breakfast the next day (plain rice, boiled courgette and unidentified meat, stir fried with ginger, garlic and cabbage, mmmm) we were joined by a laughing girl of around 19, wearing a Britney Spears t-shirt beneath her brightly coloured anorak. Although she spoke no English, I could tell by the was she talked with Su and the daughter of the women who ran the home stay, that she was a favourite amongst them. Later, Su told me that she likes talking with the other girls like this because they make her laugh and "I am too old to laugh now, sister"- Su is 28 years old.

We explored the village that morning- it was clearly a much larger and more wealthy area than the one in which Su lives. She kept looking wistfully at the houses we walked past, some has carved wooden doors and bamboo fences and she commented occasionally with a sigh, that one or other of them was particularly beautiful.

We ate lunch in a house-cum-cafe back at the main road (which was really a mud track, but not too steep for vehicles to travel along it). Whilst we ate our noodle soup, the old lady and her daughter-in-law were washing a tiny boy in a large tub by the fire in the centre of the room. Great clouds of steam eclipsed the laughing child as his mother tenderly soaped his hair, and his grandmother held out a towel near to the flames, in order to warm it.

The motorbike driver who took us back to Sa Pa, seemed to have been to the same driving school as the mental bus drivers. I was squashed behind the driver, with Su clutching desperately to my waist, her face buried in my shoulder. It was freezing. The mist had turned into a miserable, drizzling rain making the pitted mud road even slicker than before. It wound sharply around the side of the mountain with a sheer drop to our left the entire way. Regardless of these conditions, the driver kept reaching into his pocket to tap away at his mobile phone, whilst lorries and other bikes cane careering around toward us on the wrong side of the road. It was all that I could do to keep from screaming at the man. Instead, I balled my fists into the sleeves of my jumper and relied on the technique I'd adopted for surviving bus journeys- i.e. screwing my eyes tight shut so that I wouldn't have to look at what was happening.

Su and I safely back at the hotel- yes I know I look demented, I just wanted to show you the height difference (I'm only 5'6)

A couple of hours later I was sitting in a warm cafe, freshly showered and drinking a hot chocolate. My trip to Sa Pa was the last of my adventures in Asia and what a way to end my trip. Never have I been so happy to be back in the warm, but I was also acutely aware that whilst I sat there, Su had set off back out into the cold.

Part Two- In which our hero travels to Vietnam and spends most of her time being perplexed and frankly, well, terrified

Good Morning Vietnam!

(sorry I know, I couldn't help it it just slipped out, honest... *hangs head in shame*).

I was in Saigon for three days and I have to admit that it is one of the scariest places I've ever been to.It's also one of the most confusing. Even the name is a conundrum, sometimes it's referred to as Ho Chi Minh and sometimes Saigon, though there is not discernable pattern to the choice. Since Saigon is easier to type I'm going to stick with that, though to my romantic sensibilities this name conjours up images of colonial beauty and elegance, whereas today's Ho Chi Minh is most definitely more 'Apocalypse Now'. My flight arrived at around 9pm and after a worrying 10 minutes at immigration; during which a rangey man in an official looking uniform silently looked from me to my passport photo and back again, over and over, I was eventually let into the country. (He had absolutely no sense of humour and my oh so witty comments about jungle chic did not go down so well.)

At this point, I was attempting in my fragile little mind, to juggle the conversions of four different forms of currency. I'd had to use American dollars at the airport to pay for my visa, so changed my left over ringgit to both dollars and Vietnamese dong at one of the many hundreds of money changers that line the streets of Kuala Lumpur. I've finally worked out that 200,000 dong is roughly $10, and is approximately 7 of your English pounds, but that took a while to sort out in my mind and I don't even want to bring ringgit into the equation- we'll leave that in Malaysia. Suffice it to say that I was in no fit state to bargain with the taxi driver who attempted to rip me off royally for my hair-raising ride to the hostel. Luckily a lovely English speaking Vietnamese man stepped in and prevented me from parting with too much cash but I was quite shaken by the experience.

The first thing you notice about Vietnam are the motorbikes. They're literally everywhere and as far as I can tell, don't seem to obey any traffic laws at all. I tell you trying to cross the road is beyond terrifying- shamefully, the first time I attempted it a little old lady had to come over and help me across! The technique that the locals use is to walk very slowly, not make any sudden moves and hope that the bikes wont hit you. With no lights at the pedestrian crossings you have to pick your timing carefully and not panic as the great shoal of traffic weaves around you. The bikes are used to transport everything, from huge cages filled with chickens and ducks, to Buddhist shrines. I've seen a family of five all crowded onto one, two children packed in between their parents and one sitting on the handlebars.

Everything about this city frightened me. The constant beeping of horns from the tide of scooters, the incomprehensible warren of street, the pavements of which are constantly blocked by more scooters either parked, in motion or in the process of being repaired. There are people everywhere with trays of cigarettes, fans, sunglasses and every other piece of tat you can imagine. They come up to you while you're trying to eat and most of the time a shake of the head just isn't enough of a deterrant for them. I felt like a bewildered child, bumbling along the streets, trying to make some sort of sense of the noise and the bustle.

In an attempt to escape the mailstrom for a while, and in order to get in some much needed culture, I took a day trip to the Chu Chi tunnels. On the way we drove down the road where this infamous photograph was taken.

Chu Chi was a key area during the war. Despite it being in the South the Vietcong had a stonghold here, which was a worry for the Americans, especially given its close proximity to Ho Chi Minh. Now there are still sections of the intricate tunnel system remaining and it has become quite the tourist hot spot. There are some excellent, if disturbing displays of the various ingenous bamboo traps which the Chu Chi guerillas secreted all over the forest and in the rivers, ready for an unsuspecting American soldier to fall into (shudder). They've also made special 'tourist sized' tunnels, for us giant westerners. These are twice the size of the originals, yet you still have to bend double in order to shuffle through. How the villagers managed to get through them with weapons is beyond me.

At the end of our visit, we were treated to a grainy black and white video, which looked as though it had been made in the 1940's, though of course it was created much later. 'The evil Americans wanted to destroy beautiful Chu Chi, but little Chu Chi would not die" and other equally brilliant phrases peppered the voiceover, accompanied by visuals of Vietnamese women harvesting rice in picturesque paddy fields, or picking fruit from bountiful trees, before showing images of the destruction left by the Americans after Napalm or Agent Orange had been dropped. As propaganda films go, this one was rather compelling. It showed pictures of school girls weilding machine guns. One such warrior, who could have been no more than 14 years old, was awarded a medal for being 'champion American killer' having taken out tanks with her carefully placed mines. The American girls in the audience, who had earlier been so keen to clamber over a destroyed tank and have their photos taken on what had been the American crew's firey coffin, were suitably silenced by what they were seeing. Finally.

All in all, I've decided that I'm just not cut out for the city life. So as soon as I could, I found a bus and was on my way out of Saigon and off to Da Lat.

Da Lat is a strange little place. It's set in a series of stunning hills in the centre of Vietnam and the average temperature here is around ten degrees cooler than in the rest of the country. This means that it has the perfect climate for growing more European-style crops. There are tiers and tiers of potatoes and spinach, strawberries and cabbages growing all year round.

I was sitting in a cafe, eating breakfast one morning, when a man approached my table with a small black portfolio. This was Titi, one of the original 'Easy Riders' a group of motorcyclists who have been taking people on tours of rural Vietnam for the past fifteen years. I'd already been accosted by others of his bretherin, who seem to line every doorway in the winding streets of Da Lat, but Titi was more insistant than the others and besides, I was tied to my place by my half drunk cup of coffee, and so I looked at his book of testimonials and I thought, why not. At this point, I'm fairly sure that my Mum is yelling all sorts of perfectly valid reasons at her monitor- sorry Mum, but my sensible side is being thoroughly quashed at the moment. I've never been on a motorbike before and the idea has always frightened and intreguied me, so rather than shrink away and make excuses, I signed myself up for a two day tour of the central highlands on the back of Titi's old Honda.

It was one of the best things that I've done so far- though I'm not entirely sure that my arse would agree with me. I can't imagine any better way of seeing the remote areas of Vietnam than on the back of Titi's bike. He is an amazing guide, stopping regularly to show me the crops, elaborate temples, or local crafts people at work. I saw silk worms being raised and their cocoons spun into silken threads before being woven into patterned cloth on great looms. I've walked in tea plantations, seen curry trees and looked out onto the blue hills with their plateaus of coffee which stretch as far as the eye can see. Almost every house that we passed had bamboo mats outside, covered in coffee beans that were drying in the sun. According to Titi, the government relocated a lot of ex soldiers from the North and gave them coffee plantations here in the highlands as a form of reward for their loyalty during the war. Now these people are earning a fortune and Vietnam has become the largest exporter of coffee outside of South America.

Fresh curry pod filled with seeds

The downside of course, is the impact that the ever growing coffee industry is having on the local wildlife. Until the end of the war, this area, including Da Lat itself, was covered in jungle complete with tigers, elephants and all manner of other exciting beasties. The only people living here were those that Titi now refers to as 'minorities', local tribes people who used to live off the forest. They are still here in their little bamboo villages, with their chickens, cows, pigs and children roaming about in the dust, but their jungle is gone and they now work in the plantations for the wealthier landowners. As we passed them on the bike, with their sickles and their conical hats, driving their buffalo or cutting granite slabs out of the hillside, carrying sugar cane or driving their carts, they all waved and smiled cheerfully, occasionally calling out a greeting as we flashed by. It was such a relief to have the wind in my face rather than the constant bombardment of people trying to sell me things. Around every corner, there was another stunning vista: hills and lakes, paddy fields and rivers all flew past my greedy eyes. Even the barren hillsides, which still bear the scars of the chemical bombs are beautiful in their own way. They serve as a reminder of the damage that Agent Orange is still causing here, in what used to be no man's land.

Happy Buddha

The tour with Titi ended all too soon, in the coastal town of Nha Trang. My two day adventure with him was definitely one of the highlights of my trip and, in the end, was far less terrifying than simply walking around in Saigon.