The Peace Correspondent (22 page)

But there is more to Samui than this intense beach-and-town scene. Small Japanese pickup-truck buses, called song-taew, circle the island. So, leaving behind the aromas of suntan lotion, the sea and fried garlic, I hit the road to explore the island.

With coconut plantations covering most of Koh Samui, it lacks the natural, jungle-clad appearance of many Thai islands. With such a supply, roadside vendors sell fresh, green coconuts for just 15 baht each. The clear coconut water is deliciously chilled, the slippery white flesh smooth as silk.

Even the island's south end, away from the main resort beaches, is being developed with small restaurants, resorts and craft shops. And the resourceful locals now display monkeys, once used to harvest coconuts, in coconut-picking performances, along with elephant shows and rides.

Nathon, the island's main town, bustles around the pier, where boats arriving from Surat Thani on the mainland dock. Unlike Chaweng, it has a reason for existing aside from catering to tourists. A few solid concrete four-story buildings front the harbor, but on the quiet side streets, pleasant, slightly seedy two-story teak shophouses recall a Thailand before the tourist boom.

At the north end of the island, away from the swimming beaches, fishermen unload nets from wood-hulled fishing trawlers draped with colorful bunting, while small boys play with Styrofoam boats. Squatting before ramshackle huts, they mend nets and sort the catch.

Outside Bophut village, I encounter a bizarre sight for Southeast Asia: a miniature Eiffel Tower topped with a satellite dish. Bophut is a small French enclave, with notices advertising balades (hikes), a large sign boasting “Recommande par le guide du Routard” (a French guidebook), and an Ecole Francaise de Plongee (scuba-diving school) along the main street. In front of a small restaurant, several men play boules, the game from southern France and Italy, throwing the big, silvery balls onto the uneven, sandy road, where they wobble and roll erratically. The players, imbued with a tropical torpor, don't seem to mind much.

It is quieter than Chaweng, but with enough bars, clubs and restaurants to suit all but the most ardent party animal. Leaving La Sirene and Les Gourmets restaurants for a later date, we stop at the Happy Elephant. Our terrace tables overlook the long, empty beach, with not a single hawker in sight. The late lunch of Thai noodles with shrimp, beef with green curry sauce and chicken with cashews is exquisite, and reason enough to visit this island.

Past Bophut, on the island's northeast corner, Samui's main visitor attraction is set on a small peninsula. Here, the giant 15-meter-high Golden Buddha (Phra Yai) sits serenely atop a small outcropping, the former island of Koh Fan.

Among the T-shirt and soft drink shops, the monks and nuns have set up an ingenious, automated alms-giving device next to a sign, “Please offer rice for doing merit for yourself and your dearly departed ones.” To gain merit, visitors deposit a 10 baht coin and uncooked rice kernels shoot out of a spout into a big pewter bowl. Adjacent to this, monks begging bowls go around on a conveyor belt, like in some Japanese sushi restaurants. After buying the rice, merit-seekers scoop it into the passing bowls (to be deposited back to be resold, again and again, in a form of Buddhist rebirth). Small golden statues of standing or lying Buddhas decorate the small sanctuary.

Under a shade tree, a coin-operated fortune-telling box is less interactive: put a coin in and some twirling lights come on and halos on Buddha statues begin to flash, like in a carnival sideshow. In the same courtyard, visitors are writing their names and addresses on red bricks with felt pens (“donation, any amount” the sign says). An orderly pile of bricks daubed with names of visitors from everywhere from Scotland to Hong Kong sits in a corner, presumably to be used to build future temples.

The entrepreneurial nuns also rent long-sleeved shirts, skirts and pants for those inappropriately attired, but many farangs (foreigners) simply just ignore decorum and approach the Buddha in brief shorts and T-shirts. Gingerly, we walk up the steps baked hot in the tropical sun and hard on tender city feet. It is worth the small climb to the golden statue. The reward is a fine view of the sea with fishing boats setting out, chirping of songbirds and a sense of peace far removed from the tourist bustle.

Leaving the somewhat gaudy spiritual site, I spot a billboard: “There is a local saying, ‘Whoever comes to Koh Samui must visit Phara Yai on Koh Phan or else it's just like he has not reached the island.'” And I think of those still roasting on Chaweng beach.

When we return to Chaweng, the French women are a little more leathery and the Germans are launching into evening beers. The Australian girls, a covey of pink-skinned Bob Marleys, flaunt their braided hair and the Hong Kongers are talking about what to have for dinner.

IN Saigon, it always comes back to the war. I was sitting on the patio-sized rooftop of the Rhythm and Booze bar, trying to gulp down iced 333 beers before the steamy night air could turn them as tepid as Mekong River water, when the congenial proprietor brought out his scrapbook. A younger version of the middle-aged Vietnamese beamed out from the “Bao Chi” press card pasted to the front.

Hoang Van Cuong was a UPI photographer. His faded, almost sepia-tone war photographs recall a generation of turmoil. Flipping through the pages is like reliving newspaper war reports of the Americans' defeat. There are journalists in bell bottoms and 60's long hair scrambling aboard a bus with protective grills over the window, fleeing Saigon. Tanks bashing down the gates of the presidential palace on that fateful day 17 years ago. Barefoot soldiers in pith helmets and battle fatigues smoking cigarettes around President Nguyen Van Thieu's empty chair in his abandoned office, A famous photo of the war shows a fat, balding American on a helicopter punching a small Vietnamese
trying to get aboard. And one of my favorite, taken by a friend, Dutch photographer Hu van Es, shows an ant-like line of desperate people climbing up from a rooftop to a waiting helicopter.

The Vietnamese don't dwell on the war, unless they can profit from it. They show no rancor against the nation that dropped so many tons of explosives on them, and are anxious to have the rich Americans back. Everywhere in Vietnam, eyes light up in delight at the sight of foreigners. This isn't just affection, but an eagerness to hustle them, without the horrors of napalm, bullets and bombs.

“This time the Americans will really pay,” an eager Saigonese businessman told me. The aggressive yet friendly hustle on every level, from bureaucrat to street hawker, is part of the Vietnam experience for Western visitors.

But ghosts of the “American War” haunt the country, even for those who only lived through “Nam” vicariously, through newspapers and TV newscasts. I was settled back in a Cathay Pacific L1011 Tristar dipping into the caviar trough as the smiling hostess replenished my glass of Krug Grande Cuvee, thinking how much better this was than arriving in a grim C-130 troop plane, when the announcement came.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we will soon be landing at Tan Son Nhut airport.” The name hit like a blow to the midriff, evoking visions of exploding mortars and aircraft going up in huge orange balls of flame. The wrecks have been moved, but the moldering stucco aircraft shelters remain from the dangerous days of the mid ‘70s. Other Vietnamese names I would hear over the next few days are as powerfully evocative: Da Nang, Cam Ranh Bay, Khe San, Ban Me Thuot.

Outside the Saigon terminal, hotel, restaurant, bar and nightclub touts press their cards into my hand. Flipping through them later, I find a Canadian Hotel and a Toronto karaoke club, reminders of later realities, of refugees fleeing by boat to the West, and returning as successful investors.

A nostalgia for a world I never knew took me to the Rex Hotel,
formerly the U.S. Army bachelor officer quarters and site of the infamous Five O'Clock Follies. Here, U.S. Army spokesmen briefed the press with military and bureaucratic double-talk: kill ratios, body counts, ordinance expenditures, sorties flown, structures destroyed, enemy contacts made.

The modest Rex, now one of Saigon's top hotels, is agreeably dated, its dark wood interior embellished with intricately carved ornamentation. My dark, musty room is just like the one where, in Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen went one-on-one with a mirror, and lost. American officers stayed in these rooms during the war, on frenetic leave from the horrors of the jungle.

Correspondents such as Peter Arnett, Morley Safer and Neil Davis reported the last days of the war from the rooftop bar, as bombs exploded and clouds of smoke rose from the city suburbs behind them. The old wartime hangout is now a garish restaurant/bar, with deer topiary and bonsai trees, deer and elephant statues, and crass, white plaster maidens, in natural and futuristic socialist-hero styles.

Piercing jungle skrawks come from mynahs in bamboo cages, tropical fish swim listlessly in large, tiled, crown-shaped tanks. A huge, slowly twirling yellow and silver crown outlined in tiny twinkling lights and a giant, flashing red Rex sign give the venerable venue a gaudy, carnival feel. Still, the view over the flat city is pleasant, and good steaks are less than $5.

Outside the hotel, persistent beggars, money changers, postcard and T-shirt salesmen, and especially drivers of cyclos (three wheel bicycle taxis, with the seat in front) pester guests relentlessly whenever they walk out the door. A tenacious urchin follows me down the street waving a library of international magazines and newspapers. The miniature media mogul has publications from Asia, the U.S., Europe and Britain; the Asian Wall Street Journal, the International Herald Tribune, the Far Eastern Economic Review, Singapore Straits Times, Le Figaro, Le Monde and Der Speigel.

I brush him away. He persists. Where did I come from? Hong
Kong. He immediately whips out a South China Morning Post. I could appreciate the grumpy foreigner I saw whose T-shirt read “Don't Hassle Me.”

A block away, I lunch on excellent, crisp baguettes and mutton stew with white beans in a cheap cafe on Le Loi Boulevard. The bill says it is Givral's, and I realize with another jolt that this is where Graham Greene set an opening scene of his classic Vietnam novel, The Quiet American.

The colonial Continental Hotel across the street was a favorite meeting place of the expat community in both French and American colonial eras. Greene whiled away many gin-soaked hours on the open-air terrace (then known as the Continental Shelf), looking out on the broad street at the delicate young Vietnamese ladies in cone hats peddling their tiny bikes, filmy ao dai dresses fluttering around them. They've closed in the verandah, turning it into a posh, but affordable restaurant, but the view of street, and the bicyclers, is largely unchanged. And they still serve the strong, black filtered coffee with rich condensed milk, which tastes almost like chocolate, and is said to be the best in Asia.

Later, a U.S. greenback buys me an hour's ride on a cyclo. We roll along the tree-lined boulevards and hot, sunny side streets as the driver, angling for a tip, relates his tale of woe, including years in re-education camps. Saigon, with its French colonial architectural heritage, is among Asia's most attractive cities. Blocks of low stucco buildings with small balconies and shuttered windows that survived the war now slowly decay from neglect.

Sitting out front like that is relaxing on the quiet boulevards, more stimulating at intersections, exposed to the chaotic traffic. Women ride small motorbikes wearing long, elbow-length formal gloves and big floppy hats, farmers push carts piled high with bananas, bicycles, cyclos and motorcycles drive all over the road, weaving in and out, moving around each other, coming near to collisions.

After cruising the suburbs, the driver stops for tea at a roadside stand, outside the Exhibition House of Aggressive War
Crimes, better known as the Museum of American War Crimes. Housed in the former U.S. Information Service building, it is a junkyard of war machines scattered around the lawn: an attack helicopter, jet fighter, Cessna spotter plane, tanks, flame throwers and anti-aircraft guns. Several rooms display small arms, photographs of the war, and displays of the “crimes” of American and later Chinese invaders.