Sand Dunes in My Heart
What can we learn on our travels, in our moments of transcendence into different worlds, through space and time, as we build onto systems of understanding? These influence the ways we continue to navigate life, interact with people, visit places, and experience culture.
This is a quick look back at my 2013 Family Trip, to Saigon, Vietnam.
A trip usually starts and ends so fast and the “return to reality” after that vacation break, everything gets nearly forgotten.
One of the most memorable things I remember from Vietnam are the motorbikes and mopeds.
They speed by all the time and somehow find a way to navigate anywhere, carry everything needed to furnish and operate a whole household, load a mountain of goods for delivery or purchase, and even balance up to 7 family members between picking up a month’s worth of groceries.
It is the people, their sheer determination, willpower, and ingenuity combined that I extra appreciate.
Some other types of attachments to motorbikes and carts or to bicycles and trucks on the road are both interesting and perhaps questionable on some safety regulations. Since it was a family trip where I had no self-determination and no understanding of Vietnamese, I spent a lot of time watching these inventions and custom modifications while taking a hundred pictures through the windows of the minivan.
Day Trip: Cu Chi Tunnels
Just a short (~2 hr?) car ride from Saigon / Ho Chi Minh City. We left behind the city roads and buildings, winding down jungle-roads.
I fell asleep in the car, so I don’t know the the actual distance and time it took by car.
With the coordination of my dad’s cousin, we arrived at the Củ Chi Tunnels visitor centre for tourists, for a local guided and interpreted tour.
At the Củ Chi Tunnels visitor centre, the staff explains that there were miles of underground tunnel systems made and used by the Viet Cong in the area. We head over through the jungle path to displays with spent bombs, old guns, and examples of booby-traps used by the Viet Cong. Then we enter the tunnels through a trap door hidden in the ground.
War Remnants Museum & Independence Palace
My two sisters and I traveled for a few weeks with our dad to Vietnam, but it would be a decade later that I finally revisited this pile of memories in a very dusty corner of my mind. We did our best, tagging along on this learning trip and sharing in an experience of a lifetime.
This was a trip down memory lane for my dad. Decades of gaps to fill in a few weeks’ time, at a moderate-to-high intensity pace. There were bittersweet moments of laughter and tears.
Over 35 years ago, he left his hometown in a different state of mind, as a teenager. The Vietnam War had officially ended but the family’s decision and plans were already in motion for him and his second brother to officially GTFO. They became some of the “Boat People” whom the UNHCR processed through the 1970s and ultimately these diaspora communities resettled around the world, including in the US, Canada, Australia, UK, France, Germany, etc.
5-Day Getaway: Beaches & Sand Dunes
We took a multi-day road trip around the Phan Thiet beach resort and area on the South East coast of Vietnam, leaving behind the bustle of the city noise and humid nights of Saigon for a few days with an ocean breeze.
Our local guide and driver navigated with the only map he had, and my dad translated a little between English and his rusty Vietnamese! My aunt, grandma, and great-aunt could speak a bit more so they also dealt with the whole process.
This was the reverse of how my sisters and I spent many years of our youth supporting my parents, training as unofficial, on-demand English-Cantonese language interpreters.
This time, the three of us were just backseat passengers, trying to understand a world of unfamiliarity that was yet another form of “home” for our family.
The curated gardens of the resort were meticulously maintained by the staff. I stopped to admired the dragonfruit plant at the bottom of the stairs daily. The dragonfruit plants looked like Medusa’s head and dragon-tails.
Going quickly between pockets of water or lakes, some inlet rivers or waterways, then suddenly giving way to dunes, and then back to flatter, arid landscapes of copper and sand along the road.
The shifting landscape in this area was both odd and interesting.
After two hours of driving, we arrived at a place to charter vehicles and drivers that would take us out to a section of sand dune. I’ve never experienced anything like it before.
We could have slid down a dune with mats such as one tucked into the front of one of the Jeeps. Similar to the tobogganing or crazy-carpets on snow-hills that I grew up doing back in Canada. We didn’t, though, and I regret it. Something for next time.
The heat was a bit too much for my grandma, who stayed inside the shade of the vehicle, so we headed back to the beach resort shortly after taking some photos.
The dunes are a neat backdrop for wedding or engagement photos, and we saw someone taking some. The sand becomes more orange as the sun sets, and I fell asleep again, thinking about how some scenes from Star Wars or movies could be shot here too.
En route back to the Phan Thiet beach resort, it was sundown and fishing boats were departing out onto the distant ocean horizon for a night at sea.
I sometimes reminisce about one late evening meal with a $1.20USD Heineken, sitting at the beachfront view of pitch black darkness of the ocean. I could only hear the lapping of the waves in the dark.
…Was that how it felt, when there was only unknown sea around you?
Over three decades ago, my parents set out into that darkness of the unknown.
I don’t speak Vietnamese, but I have a mixed understanding from my heritage, family history and cultural identity around South China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Vietnam and the Vietnam War.
Today, I reconsider my extended diaspora communities around the world (in USA, France, Germany, Canada, the UK and many more places) who share these similar intersections.
Mornings on the beach, workers gather seashells that washed up to shore and take them away. They will get processed for various arts, gifts, decorations, souvenirs, etc.
Blurry Memories
…sitting on small plastic chairs in a dark alley lit by street-lamps; slurping various types of sea creatures in shells and snails, using a toothpick-like tool.
No idea what I ate, what it was called, nor where I was that night. Could have been anywhere. These moments made me realize how necessary it was for my future travels to have data roaming or an international SIM.
I remember it just felt like we were in another world, it spins and swirls by you because you cannot understand the way things work.
Who to order from, what did they say, what is what? Language, culture, context. Fish out of water.
But, we just decided to go with the flow. Young and useless approach, when traveling and being parented on family trips.
Blurry Memories
…touring a few factory floors of clothing and metalwork fasteners.
The ways that these things are often out of sight, out of mind.
Different types of industries and labour history, from textile and manufacturing, industrial fabrication, and things all to make our worlds go round.
The workers, the people, the everyday moments that connect us all.
I am lucky to be where I am and do what I get to do. Thanks to the change, sacrifices, and determination of my family to give me another route in life, whatever that may be and has become.
Blurry Memories
…wandering the neighbourhood alleyways and strange streets that my dad grew up on, played games on, and seeing the houses and family homes of my paternal grandparents and meeting many extended family members.
These little glimpsed into the past were just the tip of the iceberg.
So many times on this trip I heard my family say: “oh how all these changes are night and day to back when they were just kids.”
None of these were overnight. Bittersweet tears and nostalgia for my dad: he blinked, grew up, and realized that three decades of another lifetime passed him by.
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Returning
One of the regular moments of this trip that reminded me, anchored me, and pulled me back to this dusty corner of my brain, was a memory around moments in this photo.
We were just going along with my grandma and aunt through a neighbourhood market that was inside of a building that used to be an airplane hangar. I have no idea where this was, I believe it was in Ho Chi Minh City. But it could have been another city on the road, en route somewhere.
It was surreal, I can still see piles of food that I cannot name, and endless rows of stalls with everyday people just chatting and occasionally calling out an advertisement of what they had to sell as we wandered by. The fish sauce from Vietnam is an unforgettable taste.
I hope to visit more of Vietnam again one day, better equipped with a few more phrases, and ready to try a big plate of food, have some conversations about heritage, culture, history, and life. Especially since after this year, it is now 50 years since the end of the Vietnam War.
— Vietnam War. 1954 - 1975.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War