Mekong Meanders

Today I have had one of the most fantastic taste adventures: Mangosteen. It is a tennis ball sized, dark purple fruit with thick skin. I have been wanting to try one since I had a mangosteen juice smoothie at Smoothie King 5 years ago. We saw them in Saigon, but the merchants tried to charge me $2 for one. One! That's pretty absurd considering you can get around 10 bananas or 2 pineapples for $1 usually. So we passed that time, only to see them again while we were waiting for the ferry to Phu Quoc Island. Travis has found them and bought 1/2 kilo for $2. We break one open, and an incredible taste sensation hits me. It's sweet, tart, and intensely tropical, yet mild and succulent. I then proceeded to dub it my all time favorite fruit and eat 4 more. Wow.

As we realized that 4 weeks was not enough for us in Vietnam, we had to get a visa extension. We found that it was to take 7 days, so we skedattled from Saigon for more adventuring while they were processing our visas. We headed to Soc Trang and the watery world of the Mekong Delta. It was swelteringly hot, and we dared not swim in the river after it had passed through China, Laos, and Vietnam. Not the cleanest of countries.

Can Tho: the largest city in the Mekong Delta, but with a small town vibe (eg:chickens in the street). We found a cheap little guesthouse down an alleyway and booked a boat tour for the next day. We arose before the sun and headed down to the pier with our jolly but non-English-speaking guide. No matter, we began our cruise as the sun arose over the Mekong. It was only the 3 of us in a tiny little motorboat chugging down the river past other tourists on day tours and locals with boats laden heavy with produce. He steered us close to the bank to see the houses on the side; all of them had 1/2 of their house over the river and supported by stilts, and a little pier coming down from their back porch! Mekong river culture at it's finest.

We come to the main attraction, the floating market. It is around 7 AM, and it is bumping. Floating market? I had no idea what to expect, but here is the concept: there are big vendor boats with tons (literally) of one or another sort of fruit/vegetable. There were boats with huge piles of coconuts, carrots, durian (stinky), turnips, watermelon, and many many more. On the end of a long stick standing vertically from their boat is a sample of the merchandise so that customers can see who is selling what, like aisle signs in the supermarket. Smaller boats plied agilely between them, buying these foods in bulk to take to another market, to their restaurant, or perhaps to feed their massive families. We supposed that these vendors were farmers selling their crop and it is probably easier and cheaper to get 2 tons of watermelons to a city by boat than buying or renting a huge truck.

We saw another floating market about an hour upriver. This one was smaller, and more quaint. There were less tourists and a more laid-back vibe. Little old Vietnamese women in cone hats waved at us and laughed at Travis's hair. We turn off into a small canal. Along the banks are peoples houses, and they are going about their lives as usual: cooking, bathing in the river, washing clothes, and fishing. Little children yell "Hello!" to us and we reciprocate. It was vouyeristically exciting to watch these villagers whose lives must be so different from my own. Fruit trees and palms line the channels, and we glimpse lush flower gardens in some of the yards.

The sun has risen high in the sky when we turn back, and  Travis decides to roll up his sleeves to get rid of that incessant farmers tan. It works a little too well, and when I tease him he says "I'm not sunburned, I just have a red tan!"

Our next destination in the Delta is Vinh Long. We step off the bus and a humble yet kind man approaches us and asks up to come to his homestay. It was a little expensive but we agree, as we had good feelings about it. We bypass Vinh Long and head immediately for the tiny island across the river. The homestay, called Ngoc Sang, was a dreamy little place from another world, set amongst fruit trees and meandering little rivers. Our main activity here was biking around the twisty turny "roads" (I would call them sidewalks, but people drove bikes and motorbikes on them) over questionably sturdy wooden bridges, stopping to drink young coconut or have a shot of the local moonshine with super friendly locals. The homestay included our dinner, so in the evening all of the guests congregated to eat the divine food cooked by the lovely family. We met so many interesting people there, including an Israli couple, Anat and Yosi, a Californian named Sean, and Kai, the smiley German touring Asia on his bicycle.

We went out on another boat trip with some of these people the next day. It was similar to the one in Can Tho, but minus the floating markets and plus a coconut candy making factory. The sticky liquid was mixed in big bowls, laid out in strips to dry, then cut and wrapped lightning fast by highly concentrated Vietnamese women. My favorite part was the free samples! I bought some but it ended up being durian flavor. That's ok, makes my life a little more exotic I guess. We also got to hear an impromptu concert of classical Vietnamese music by a thin older man when we stopped for a fruit-and-tea break. Then Travis got to play the funky, 2-stringed Vietnamese guitar. That was his favorite part. Also, I held a bee hive.

We are so glad we got to see the Mekong Delta, we found it was warm and friendly, with beautiful shining gold temples and amazing Vegetarian food. After smoothly getting our visas back, complete with that handy little stamp, we are off to Phu Quoc Island! 

Delta photos: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.893441573945.2389419.18403674&l=e3e2f877f6

Gone Battty

I'd like to tell you a story. It's about a little place in southern Vietnam called the Mekong Delta. Any of you who've been following our adventures might remember the mighty Mekong River as "the life-force of Laos," which we spent two day drifting down to the beautiful colonial city of Luong Prabang. Well now it's come back to us in Vietnam, this time with a vengeance! In southwest Vietnam (see attached map irrelevantly displaying the top 8 of the 54 different ethnic groups in Vietnam), the Mekong River breaks off in wild "distributaries" that vary from little creeks to Mississippi-wide muddy waters (take me home, Huck!).

The Mekong Delta is an interesting site of cross-culture between Cambodia and Vietnam, as the region used to be Cambodian from the 9th-17th Centuries, hence there is a booming Khmer (ethnic Cambodian) population. The Mekong Delta was ripe with trading ports and canals as early as in the first century CE and extensive human settlement in the region may have gone back as far as the 4th century BCE. We were planning on only a couple of days in this beautiful region of unique river-culture but due to the one-week-visa-extension-wait (great success) we got to spend an entire glorious week here.

First was Soc Trang. I kid you not, this place couldn't be more gimmicky if it had neon glowing signs on fire with tigers jumping through and landing on running white elephants. But it's incredibly authentic and little visited by foreigners (we saw absolutely none, but a fair amount of Vietnamese tourists). We first went to the Khmer Museum, where we saw colorful electric Day-Glo intricate woodwork of model boats and friezes as well as ornate sequined clothes and flowering carved stone statues. We then got a bit more context in an actual Khmer temple, with radiant neon murals of the Buddha and elaborate carvings on every surface, not without appropriate use of negative space.

Gimmick number one: the Clay Pagoda! Very kitsch, absolutely chocko (that's Australian slang for "chock full") with an endless tableau of painted clay statues: from tiny dioramas of Bodhisatvas and monks to snaggle-toothed tigers, a giant white elephant, and hundreds of variously shaped and sized meditating Buddhas. Apparently this dude, Ngo Kim Tong, a devout monk who probably wouldn't like to be called a "dude," spent 42 years of his life making the ornate brightly painted clay sculptures. He even sculpted the pedestals, alters, columns, and incense urns; every surface was a work of art. We played with an adorable puppy out back, in the spirit of Buddhist compassion of course.

From there we caught xe oms (motorbike-taxis) to gimmick number two: an enigmatic temple of unimaginable mystery that will make your heart flutter like a thousand frantic wings. "Dusk! With a creepy, tingling sensation, you hear the fluttering of leathery wings! BATS! With glowing red eyes and glistening fangs, these unspeakable giant bugs...(sic)" Right: BATS! This temple is so known as "The Bat Temple," as the monks keep a fruit forest to feed the giant fruit-bats, flying foxes, keeping them safe from the neighboring farmers who would like to kill them for eating their food and also to make them their food.

At first we were sure we'd gone to the wrong place, as loud Vietnamese dance-pop music was blaring at top volume from an admittedly elegant temple (more Khmer Day-Glo murals). But the music subsided and in short order Sarah used her sonar to ping out the bats: they were hanging above us in the trees. They were big buggers and as the sun set they were increasingly restless, often bickering with each other as if to say, "Hit the snooze! Five more minutes!"

Then a local guy we'd been talking to ran up and led us to the temple, where four dozen Vietnamese were gathered around a chanting monk in nuclear orange robes as he flung water upon them with a big green tussle of leaves. "Cambodian New Year," our local amigo explained, "Water for cleansing." I quickly jumped into the crowd and promptly got soaked by the splashing of the monk as he chanted, pausing only an instant when first spotting my bright white face in the crowd.

When I returned dripping into the darkened night, I hugged Sarah tight, so as to soak her too, and got to witness the magnificent flight of scores of enormous bats. They screeched and soared back and forth amongst the fruit forest, over the pagoda, eclipsing the moon. 'Twas an incredible sight to see.

Also in Soc Trang: Sarah briefly had a pet snail named Slimey that she rescued from a restaurant's squirming tank.

Saigon Bygone

After laying on the tranquil beaches of Mui Ne, staring up at the palm trees swaying in the salty breeze, the roaring streets of Saigon really came on fast and hard. An hour and a half before we even stepped foot off the bus in official Saigon (District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City is still referred to as "Saigon," although almost everyone will regularly refer to the whole city as "Saigon," as it was before the communist takeover in 1975) the streets already seemed overwhelmingly busy.

When we did step off the bus, it was into a raucous tourism festival swarming with the burgeoning middle class of Saigon. It was quite loud, between the blaring car horns (more often motorbike horns), the cacophony of overlapping Vietnamese pop music and the unrelenting construction. We quickly located a room for USD$8/night, which is more than we usually pay but it's the big city so what can you do. The diversity here is astounding, from the height of decadence to the divest of the absurdly cheap (which we've come to deem "reasonably priced" under our budget). We braved the festival for dinner and scored some reasonably priced weird sweet soup with lotus flower bulbs from the temporary food stand of a 4 star restaurant/hotel trying to coax people into their expensive rooms.

The tourist district is like that: everyone is trying to sell you something. Whether eating dinner in a restaurant tucked down a small alley or walking down the broad busy streets, people with huge stacks of books, racks of sunglasses, wallets, candy, gum, cigarettes, nick-knacks, and massages ready to order off the street will accost you, in the friendliest way possible, of course. Did I mention it's very loud? We were awoken before 8am every day by the banshee screaming of a drill and erratic pounding of hammers from the construction crew next door. Walking down the streets, we often had to shout to talk over the din of traffic.

But it really is an interesting and exciting city with several lifetimes worth of exploration available. On several occasions we found ourselves wandering through mammoth markets,   twisting down endless labyrinthine narrow isles with a preposterous diversity of products available. There is such hyper-specialization here that we saw a store that sold nothing but scissors and one with only elaborate Day-Glo dragon masks and accompanying sequined robes. The food stands here are ridiculous, offering up so many delicious fruits that I'm fairly convinced do not exist.

We sauntered through the Ho Chi Minh City Museum of Fine Arts, where we enjoyed witnessing the progression of Vietnamese art until 1955, when it became invariable war propaganda until the mid-to-late 1980s when people again resumed their creative pursuits. To be fair, even the most propagandistic paintings were far more interesting than a lot of the stupid modern art at the MoMA, although many artists really liked golden brown Picaso-esque depictions of soldiers helping the common people.

We went to the first active Hindu temple I've ever witnessed. It was elegant, with beautiful statues of various gods (many of which were flailing four arms) on the ornate friezes. The next day we went to Cholon (Sholom Cholon!), Chinatown Saigon, to check out the Chinese-style Buddhist temples. The temples were elaborate, with ceramic figures of fishermen and deified generals lining the ceilings and the air thick with incense burning in long hanging coils, also from the ceiling. The floor was mediocre tiles but the walls had  elaborate bass-relief dragons and tigers---RAWR!

We spent a while meandering misguidedly through the streets of Cholon, where we happened upon a craft market with the most vivid array of fabrics I've ever set eyes upon. Sarah bought several balls of yarn, which she forces me to schlep around in my mochila (backpack), which she uses to make colorful bracelets of increasingly complex design as her fingers fly into wild patterns. She even sold a couple of bracelets for USD$6 (I mean legit U.S. dollars) to a couple of Australian women on a bus; quite the entrepreneur.

Water puppets once again filled us with wonder and awe as we marveled at the incredible ways they can depict traditional Vietnamese life, farmers sowing and growing rice under the pouring rain, and fantastical folklore, unicorns playing with balls (as often depicted on elaborate brass incense burners in museums and on the streets). They had cool special effects too: dragons that spit raging sparks, a fisherman smoking a bong (presumably tobacco, which is actually somewhat common), and a fox nabbing a floating duck out of the water and running up a palm tree.

Continuing with wild animals: the next day we explored the Ho Chi Minh City Zoo. We saw giraffes munching, zebras grazing, gemsboks and blesboks with big horns, and a variety of Asian reptiles. A Burmese Rock Python had just strangulated an adorable little rabbit and was drawing a big crowd. We watched Silvered Leaf Monkeys playing in the setting sun as the bats and birds mingled in the twilight. Then we visited the white tigers in the dark, them looking at us with as much interest as we had in them (I think they wanted to eat us). But I think we were the biggest attraction amongst the swarms of local youth; actually people of all ages. They came up to us in droves, requesting we be in pictures with them and commenting on our outlandish hair. One girl even paid Sarah in cotton candy---YEAH!

I'll spare you the details of the history museum, which gave us a good perspective of the development of the many ethnicities that have occupied this region for the last 3000 years, leading to the domination by the Viet people and the ultimate creation of Viet Nam. I won't spare you the details of our Visa Extension process: it was tedious.

Vietnam is so vast and diverse that we just didn't have enough time to explore it all in one month and had a great time at the Immigration Police, MVA-like in its inefficient bureaucracy. We waited for 2 hours only to be told that we had to have a "sponsor," meaning we had to pay a travel agent. That is what we did and are now exploring the Mekong Delta for a week before returning to Saigon to retrieve our passports and shiny new visas (they really are shiny).

More Photos of the big city:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?fbid=893441573945&id=18403674&aid=2389419&l=e3e2f877f6

Horay for Mui Ne!

 Greetings from a warm and lovely place: Mui Ne, Vietnam! After the hustle and bustle of beach town Nha Trang, Mui Ne is a breath of fresh sea-salted air! It's a tiny little town, stretching languidly down 10  kilometers of beach. We arrived mid-week, so the tourists from Saigon (about 3 hours away) are all at work right now, so we have the beach nearly to ourselves. We arrived, found the cheapest accomodation in town (right on the beach though!) and set immediatley to work relaxing.

One of the highlights of this town is the Fairy Stream. We rented bikes and rode for a few kilometers to the tiny bridge, nearly missing it, and walked down to the flow. We were a bit confused as to why it was an attraction, since it was muddy and lined with trash, but we gamely waded through the 5 inch deep stream. Soon the trash disappeared and the magic began. The water became clear to reveal bright red sand underneath and the landscape became quite strange: dunes in tie-dye swirls of yellow, white, red and tan appeared to our right, with stalagmite-esque rock formations jutting up. The fun doesn't stop there...

We see a sign next to the river that says: "As skin conditions" and a photo of a girl riding an ostrich. We peer in and see a pen of ostriches with saddles on... "You wan' ride ostrich?" says a small Vientamese woman. "Bow nee-oo deun?" We ask. "Forty thousan" She says. We were thinking about doing it but we decided we were too afraid.

JUST KIDDING! We rode those ostriches so good! Come on, like we would miss a chance to ride an ostrich! It was pretty wild, lean back and the ostrich runs, lean forward and he walks. Our ostrich was a gentle bird, the most mild-mannered ostrich I have ever met, a glorious male with black body feathers and a silky gray neck. Neither of us fell off, and it was totally worth the USD$2. No longer shall I say in shame "I have never ridden an ostrich". After we descended, a jolly drunken sort of man came over from where he was drinking and read our palms, but unfortunately we had no idea what he had declared.

As we waved goodbye to our feathered mount and his tamers, we splish-splashed our way right into a whole patch of four leafed clovers! We decided we were the luckiest people in the whole world. Also near the fairy stream were sensitivity plants, some interesting legumes that when you touch them the leaves clamp together quickly to protect themselves.

We came to a place where there appeared to be a small tributary to the fairy stream and we were a bit confused, since there was only a huge orange dune right in the place it was flowing from. We went to investigate and found that there was fresh water seeping directly out from the dune itself! Water appearing magically, as if from no where! This was truly a magical place! One could very nearly imagine a troupe of glowing fairies playing and flitting near the water. The sun was beginning to set, so we decided to go back. Right next to the stream was a woman selling fresh coconuts. We were very thirsty, so we bought one, for about $.75, and she just lobs off the top with a machete and lets us drink the sweet water inside.

The next day we decided to rent a motorbike and go to the sand dunes. Along the way we stopped at a little fishing village and paid a man USD$2 to row us out in a little round boat that looked very much like a basket. The panorama was amazing, we could see hundreds of boats of similar shape and color, giving the whole scene a very authentic and coordinated look.

Next we arrived at the red dunes. We were immediatley offered plastic sleds by some little boys. Sand sledding? we couldn't resist, and we set off through the desertous dunes with our 9 year old guide. Not quite as effective as snow, but fun nonetheless. We were lucky to have our guide, as we wouldn't have known half as well as him how to get the sled going fast. It was very hot, and the sand was burning our feet. After 10 or 12 slides and hikes back up, we were ready to move on.

We drove on, and Sarah had her first go at driving the bike. It wasn't very hard, and she quickly got the hang of it. We stopped in a little village for lunch, lured by the beach. We drove down a hidden hill and came to the beach where all of the locals were hanging out. The sun glittered on the green water as little naked children ran by ecstatically. We walked along the beach, collecting shells along the way, and molesting some hermit crabs.

After a few more distractions, we arrived at the white dunes just in time for sunset. On the way up the dunes there was a little canteen. Next to the canteen there was a captive monkey jealously guarding some coconut shells against a turkey, who would repeatedly charge the monkey, only to be bonked on the head. It was quite entertaining in a monkey-vs-turkey gladiator kind of way. We bought some ice creams and walked up the dunes to watch the sun set. There was a lake in front of the dunes, the ice cream only had a little sand in it, and the sky was pastel-rainbow stunning. We did a little dance on the dunes to celebrate our marvelous day! 

Marvel at our other pictures from Mui Ne:  http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.893441573945.2389419.18403674&l=e3e2f877f6

We like Dalat a Lot!

I hope you've all been enjoying your rock 'n roll lifestyle. The only music we hear here is godawful pop music leftover from the 90s (Backstreet's BACK! and they're touring Vietnam. Seriously.) and the music I play on my little Thai Dream guitar.

Other than that everything has been terrible.

I lost my language book in Laos and couldn't find a new one for 10 days of stumbling around with the same few stale phrases mumbling out my mouth in all circumstances. The problem was only compounded upon arrival in Vietnam, knowing literally nothing and finding communication reduced to crude pointing. Even with a new book, subtleties in the tonal pronunciation and regional differences make saying even a few words a difficult endeavor. Getting around is always a confusing ordeal, where locals often gawk at a map of the area and appear more baffled than we are. Everything we want to do is hampered by uncertainty and miscommunication. We rarely know what we're eating at markets.

And it never stopped raining all the way through North Vietnam. It's the dry season so we thought we'd be safe but no, it was cold and raining every day. Sarah bought another sweater and we both had to buy umbrellas. Getting around is easy on the back of a local's motorbike, but in the rain it's a wholly unpleasant experience. Also, people here drive crazily, seemingly blind, using their horn as echolocation. Constant horn blaring and swerving around motorbikes makes sleeping on buses exceedingly difficult. And the distances are so vast in this very lateral country---one bus ride was 20 hours long.

We never have friends for more than 3 days on the road. Everyone must go their separate ways. There are days where we scarcely get a chance to exchange any English at all. We have only occasional access to the news via the television, which has provided us a bleak enough view of flooding and radiation in Japan, civil war in Libya, massive protests in Syria, flash flooding in South Thailand, and near-civil-war in the Ivory Coast. We rarely hear from our friends and generally feel totally disconnected from everyone we know and care about. We've both gotten sick several times, usually chained to the toilet. And now that the sun has finally returned, I'm sunburned.

There. That was all the awful stuff I can think of. It occurred to me that a story without drama, conflict, or strife is scarcely realistic and certainly uninteresting. Also, we thought maybe people had stopped reading 'cause it makes the home life sound "dull and dreary" (the weather forecast here last week). But that's all, awful stuff finished. Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

;)

Dalat was amAzing! We arrived late in the evening, snaking through the misty mountain roads until we came upon vast hills illuminated from enigmatic bubbles in the darkness, lighting up the whole countryside: hundreds upon hundreds of luminescent greenhouses lit up the night; a magical sight. To explore this fantastical mountain land, we hired a couple of savvy freelance motorbike tour guides, Viet and Chili, to lug us around to the hip sites in town.

After exploring the beautiful rows of flowers in one of the countless greenhouses, Viet and Chili took us out to the country, with a beautiful vista of the thickly forested mountains and the valley below, where they grow bananas and coffee. The fruit and coffee here are so fresh. We visited a whiskey distillery (abstaining due to a recovering stomach) that doubled as a silk-worm nursery and tripled as a mushroom farm; it also had an adorable little chihuahua puppy, which was difficult to drag Sarah from. But the lure of the waterfall never fails to light a fire under her and we zoomed off to Elephant Falls, so named for the silly cement elephant statues nearby, typical of statue-loving Dalat.

We climbed down the stairs carved into the boulders and marveled at the awesome power of water falling. Then we climbed down into a crevice made by the huge snaking roots of an allegedly 300-year-old tree, where we could stand under the raging waterfall, looking up in awe at its sheer magnitude as our clothes quickly harvested the mist out of the air. Walking to the top of the hill, we found a big red-roofed Pagoda guarded by massive realistic dragons (as realistic as dragons can be). Behind the Pagoda we walked through another gnarly banzai garden and came upon a gargantuan "Happy Buddha" towering over us with rolls of jolly fat and wrinkled eyes frozen in merry laughter.

Chili and Viet then scooted us on over to a silk factory---very fascinating. We witnessed the sleeping larvae in cocoons, which Viet shook, rudely I thought, to prove their slumbering contents. Once mature, nearing awakening, they soak the cocoons in warm water and grab the end of the cocoon, an incredibly fine thread that unravels to about a mile long, and throw it into a spinning machine that wraps 8 threads together and spools them. They have huge automated loom machines that create intricate patterns out of the silk. We saw the exact same pattern being made that Sarah's swishy orange silk pants from Hoi An are made of.

We capped the countryside tour with a visit to a cricket farm, where Sarah played with crickets and baby chickens before she actually ate a fried cricket (with chili sauce, for flavor). Woah.

We enjoyed the fine fun antics of Viet and Chili so much that we opted to explore the city of Dalat with them the next day. We went to sleep early after an exciting night at the weekend market, where the Vietnamese tourists from Saigon crowded around huge piles of everything (clothes, fruit, jewelry, bonzai trees) and glowing toys lit up the night. Viet and Chili arrived bright and early and wheeled us over to the "Dragon Pagoda," where huge statues of dragons, lions, and Buddhas dominated the courtyard, encircled by the snaking serpentine statue of a 50 meter long dragon. We ate soy pudding!

We then visited a museum of embroidery (boring, say you? Think again!). The things these people can do with mere needle and thread are absolutely astounding. They stitched incredibly intricate artwork on the level of detail of realist paintings, some of which were huge floor-to-ceiling forest-scapes with animals and shimmering waterfalls (using shiny thread!).

The hokey hill given the misnomer of The Valley of Love was our next stop, where we saw the culmination of the manicured gardens and statue scene that dominates Dalat. It was a funny place. But it was there, on the hill called a "valley," that Chili serenaded us upon my guitar in classical style, very romantic, and we traded turns rocking out, leaving in laughter, "GUITAR MASTERS!"

After an amazing (but not uncommon) vegetarian buffet lunch, we headed for a view of the brightly colored city (reminiscent of Rio de Janeiro), where the shack leans next to high rise condos and French Chateaus sit pretty beside ornate banzai-filled pagodas. We hopped in a gondola and rode the long cable across the pine forests and villagers below, traversing a surprising distance before arriving at a beautiful pagoda atop a hill, where the gardens were breath-taking (especially after climbing to the top).

Last thing, and it's worth it: CRAZY HOUSE. It's been described as Antoni Gaudí on acid but this hardly begins to describe the bubbling organic flow of this giant gnarly termite-mound-esque labyrinth. The entire place is a maze of sinuous stairways and arching bridges in and around the bulbous building, with flairs of eccentric style at every turn. The whole place is a[n expensive] hotel and each room has its own quirky theme: bamboo, bear, tiger, eagle, termite, etc. It was a very disorienting and magical place.

And I'd say the same of Dalat: a disorienting and magical place.

Photos coming soon - computers in Vietnam not so good today!