Box Of Uncommon Genius

(There are certain people I know, who enjoy the 'science' of hair-colouring and the 'physics' defying make-up that's advertised, a whole lot. This one's for you.)


The things I don’t know about science could fill… well, all the science books in the world, but I’ve gotta take exception to what I’m seeing here.


This box contains plastic bottles that in turn, contain water. Let’s work through it:


Japanese technology: Water, that has undergone hi-tech miniaturisation? Three cups equals your prescribed eight? All you have to do is just add water?


E-Water: I’m thirsty. Can you email me some water?


Electron Charge: Holy crap where can I go with this one. Water that’s been charged to be a bit heavier? Water that now has positively charged electrons? Water that promises to ruin the delicate balance of everything that my homeostatic system is working on by confusing the underlying physics of my body?


No. 


Water.


Common as muck and you are walking through unreasonable amounts of it suspended in the air, every time you step outside an air-conditioned building in downtown Saigon. 

It Can Leave An Impression. Right There On The Road

Kitchen Guard Snake (left of pic, in cage). Faces his reward.

Vietnam continues to impress. I went down to the Mekong Delta on a tour and saw some tropical madness.

It’s actually an industrial area. Anything that can be an industry, is. 

I had lunch with a large snake sitting behind me. The snake was going to be highly industrious for the group who live on Phoenix island in the Delta. He was going to be, in this order.

1)    Tourist photographic draw card when draped on unsuspecting passer-by
2)    Kitchen vermin deterrent
3)    A belt 

 and
4)    Lunch

I saw a backyard industry to dwarf most. A guy with standard one-room-dirt-floor shack, with three hulking dredging-barges about 120 feet each, in his backyard. He was putting the final welding touches on them and judging by the tide marks on the walls of his shack, was going to wait for a change in the river level to float them off to his customers. This will be a particular nightmare to my sister. Giant ships already in his own backyard, Span. Not even having to come down the street!

Our little thrown together tour group had another member in it, who guaranteed we were going to be the butt of jokes for the whole day. Hamun was a representative wrestler from Iran. My, how the Vietnamese enjoyed loading him and me into tiny boats, miniscule plastic seats and donkey-drawn carts. Donkeys apparently like being lifted into the air by their harness, judging by all the leg waving and noise. Not many people know that.

I have travelled on the Highway Number 1. This is the road that the Top Gear scallywags used for their Vietnam adventure challenge. I have also seen a trillion of the model boats, paintings, statues and bad suits that they bought each other as ‘presents’. In a classically Asian tilt-of-the-hat to tragedy, you can pick up a hundred different versions of the Titanic, if you want to take home a tribute to grisly failure.

I mentioned at the start that Vietnam continues to impress - as in, it leaves an impression. I will be taking home a particularly grisly one of my own. On the way back to Saigon from the Delta, we came across a fresh accident scene. A semi-trailer carrying a shipping container had run over a man on a pedal powered tricycle. The bike was pulverised and he was mashed into the road, the axels and the wheels. There was a growing mob only slightly smaller than the blood lake. Unsurprising as it is awful, it’s apparently pretty commonplace. I told a Japanese colleague who’s been here for a while about it, and he said,

“Yes, whenever I go to play golf, I make sure I go to sleep in the car so I don’t have to see those things.”

The Internets. I Has Found Them

There's a lot of guff spoken about the internet. It's eveywhere. It's peer to pier. It can't be measured tracked stopped or defined. It's a neural network. Tosh. It's up a pole in Vietnam.

Sigh Gone

Hey, it's lunch time. You know what that means? Time to pull up a comfy lump of rubble and have a nap. (I'll stop going on about this now. Promise.)

I'll Huff And I'll Puff And Then Get Raging Head Spins

In an unlikely turn of events, I ended up talking to one of the project leaders of the giant building going up across the road from my hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. A Scottish bloke, who was impressed with how much he could sweat in a day. (I lost two and half kilos today, he boasted.)

I had been running into a particular sort of Vietnamese behavioural idiosyncrasy all day and was feeling frustrated. When he admitted his job, I said,

“Oh yeah? How’s that working out for ya then?”

“Right. I know. It can be tough to get stuff done. I’ll be sorting some health and safety issue on the building site, and I’m actually having to tip-toe around all these sleeping bodies lying all over a working construction site. They actually just lie down at 12 on the dot, no matter where they are or what they’re doing.”

The reason they have a little lie down in the day, is so they can jackhammer all night. Twenty-four-hour-a-day construction zone.

To be fair, if I had to do manual labour in this weather, I’d do it at night. Screw the insomniac round-eye across the road.

Sure, Tease The Wookie. Hard To Pick Up Your Knight With No Arms

I am doomed to be a curiosity to the diminutive races. They treat me as a semi-intelligent piece of industrial machinery. I don’t actually mind. I kind of think that my natural abilities tend toward ‘beast-of-burden’. As they say, not real smart, but he can pick up heavy things.

In Hong Kong, an argument broke out between my colleagues as to whether I looked more like, and I quote, “Buss Lightyear or Mr Incledible.”

In China, they said that they would have to limit the number of people in my hot-air-balloon basket because I was worth two people. The nickname One Per Basket (later shortened to One Basket) was born.

Today, I was going to lunch with Vietnamese colleagues, and one of the onlookers in the office laughed and said, “Look, the ants have made friends with the elephant.” (I just smiled and Ganeshed my teeth.)

I told them that I used to own a Mini. That showed ‘em. Nothing sorts out those pesky Vietnamese like making oblique references to elephant jokes from the 70s. (And no, I wasn’t wearing ripple soled shoes.)

City of Might

Q: How many Vietnamese does it take to change a light-globe?

A: No one knows. The strobing from the working light-globes makes them impossible to count.

The power grid in HCMC is a moody bugger. It’s like living in a Chemical Brothers filmclip.

Hey Boy.
Hey Girl.
Gotta Have a Shower.
Where’d it Go?!

I can tell when the boys building the enormous tower over the road have fired up the plasma-lance because I can’t read my book.

Actually, that’s not true. I couldn’t read my book anyway. The constantly changing output from the lamps in my room gave me epilepsy.

Sit Down, Class

What I know about Ho Chi Minh City after being here for two days, seen three streets, had six meals and met eight locals.

It’s muggy. There’s a reason why the business suit, as we understand it in the West, has not really made a total, global conquest.

English is written everywhere.

Just because English is written like you’ve seen it written, don’t mean they pronounce it in any way that you can understand, lumpy round-eye. Still, having it written is far better than not. It gives the uninitiated something to point at on a menu.

After China, it’s clean and quiet. They don’t smoke (I mean, they do, but they’re amateurs compared to the Chinese). And I can tell when they’re having an argument or just talking.

They are unfailingly polite and rude at the same time. Solicitude mixed with utter disregard.

Stop Press: I just saw an overly tanned Englishman in a singlet top that said, “The Man”, with arrow pointing up to ugly head. “The Legend”, with arrow pointing down to probably uglier crutch. Oh yes, whitey continues his illustrious incursion into the Delta.

Lunch. They close the office. No shit. They close the doors, turn off all the lights and those that don’t go out for food, lie down and have a little sleep! It’s so civilised. I’d like to run the lunch nap into a siesta and just nap on through to dinner, then put in a hard evenings dozing before pushing off to bed.

My nickname in China was “One Basket” (For why, click here). Anyway, to continue a well worn theme, One Basket doesn’t fit in Vietnam. They keep giving me tiny, tiny, kid-sized plastic chairs, designed to carry the full weight of a grown Vietnamese man, at about 45 kilos. I’m going to get something wedged into me, I just know it.

Fringe Benefits

There are advantages to keeping your passport safely tucked around your goolies. I don’t actually do that anymore but I used to, and it has aged the document in a certain way.


I grew up in an era of travel where all foreigners, even in their own home, were hopeless miscreants and were going to rip you off as soon as you ambled off an aeroplane, up to a cab and said, “Par Lez Voos Portonesian?”


I also developed some of my travelling habits in an era where you couldn’t just go to an ATM. You had all your freakin cash for a jaunt through the malaria territories, on you. Money belt technology was the most interesting travel topic there was. One of the subsets being, “How good is it to sleep in?” (It’s just not a challenge anymore. In Ho Chi Minh City there’s an ANZ bank two blocks down. I swear, one of the tellers looked familiar.)


Sure, not all of this paranoia is ill-founded. If your hobbies are falling down drunk in a third-world kidnapping hotspot, then I guess you do stand a chance of losing your kit. I don’t tend to do that and also load my personal chattels in sensible, hard to pilfer ways because of the afore mentioned formative influences.


So, my passport has done a bit of time secreted around some of the more humid regions of my person and it has aged it. The fabric of the cover is fraying around the edges. It gives it a romantic, well travelled, designer-tattered look. Up until yesterday, I wasn’t so pleased with that. (It also doesn’t scan that well anymore.)


Yesterday, at HCMC International Airport, I got into a ‘as you land, pre-approved, won’t take more than 15 minutes, visa’ thing. (And before you start, I didn’t have any choice in that.)


An hour into the 15 minute wait for my passport to be stamped with the visa, the badly organised team of American hippies ahead of me seemed to finally get their act together. After they had found the lost envelope of money (in the toilet), the missing passport (it wasn’t missing, it was the person who was missing*), and started to make their way en-masse to customs and freedom, I noticed the familiar fringed-edge of a saggy Australian passport, disappearing into the group’s travel-document bag.


If it hadn’t stood out like Jeannie Little in a one-piece at nippers, I wouldn’t have noticed it and Uncle Sam’s latest charm offensive in Indochina would have disappeared into the night, leaving me massaging my gentleman’s area and explaining to the local immigration that, “It’s the last place I can look. It was around here somewhere, I swear.”

*Turns out, you can't find a passport by just standing there and shouting the persons name.

It's Despicable

A critical schism has appeared in our society.

Listening to a young news reader this morning tell me that the Victorian duck hunting season had opened to howls of protest, the radio "personality" cut in with,

"Are you sure it's duck season?"

"Yes," she says. Wondering why it would be questioned.

"Are you sure it's not wabbit season?" labours the personality, pulling the gun into his own mouth.

Pause.

"Look, 'duck' is what I've got here and I had the Victorian Government press release, Ok?"

Let that be a warner to all of us.

Mekong, You Delta

I’ve done my research, I’ve seen the documentaries (Platoon. Apocalypse Now) and now they’re sending me in.

Because my employer has an absolutely wicked sense of humour, they’ve seen fit to send me to Vietnam to shape hearts and minds.

This is a country that has famously dealt with all outsiders from the Chinese to the French and some other mob, with the kind of ruthless efficiency that makes them the envy of all despotically run, third-world countries the world over. I’m going to fit right in. Not stand out at all. 190cm of pure Anglo-Saxon. The only thing I can think of doing is hiding behind Jeremy Clarkson. What? He’s been? They’ve done that one? Right… plan B.

Anyhoo, what this means for the Grey Area reader is that I’m going back on tour.

The last tour, through China, was a holiday. I had time to sit back of an evening and craft some of the most sloppily researched reportage of the modern era for your entertainment because all I had to do was look, eat, soak-up and synthesise.

This time, as indicated, it’s a professional visit. There needs to be output. This usually leaves me drained and slightly depressed. I will do my best though, folks.

A Grey Area.

‘In Country’.

Elevators Doing Art Projects For Their HSC

The Bay Leaf Commeth

As I was serving up dinner to Emergency Contact, I said with all the thoughtlessness of ancient, handed down wisdom, "Careful, there are bay leaves."

Remember kids, Loose Bay Leaves Sink Ships.

Duck, roll and don't eat the bay leaf.

If a bay leaf touches you, rub sand and vinegar into the wound.

One toke on a bay leaf ciggarette can lead to unwanted sexual thoughts and madness.

Don't have your bedroom door closed when there's a bay leaf in the house.

Attack Of The Tiny Centaurs

It's pretty dangerous where I live. You don't know who's going to mug you for a lump of sugar.

Moderb As

Being a totally moderb guy and bit of gadget freaj, i got a phone wth a qwerty keybord. some say theres prollems with teh size of the kys. I rekon it's one of the best thngs i've ever got and i can now post blobs on the rode. you wont even be able to tell wen i'm doing it, bitches.

A grey are. reportng from the techy fronline, so you don\t have to.

Shut Up Shut Up Shut Up And Go To An Instant Election

I'm already sick of the hospitals health thingy. One news cycle and I can't hear any more.

Just do it! Just have a full, stinking, double disappointment election. Chuck in a couple of impossible referendum points while we're all there. Spare us this endless polls analysis and venal grasping for approval.

I pretty much dislike you all anyway (Not you Tony. It's deeper and nastier when it comes to you. There's a special place on my shit-list for you) so it's going to be another round of trying to pick who isn't actively evil.