Vietnam Red Hot & Cool

Vietnam Red Hot & Cool

by Sam Bleakley

I have experienced a lot of heart-stopping moments on my travels, but crossing a main street in Saigon, Vietnam is at the high end of the fearometer. The city hosts eight million people, and is infested with four million motorbikes - a second life form on which the first depend. The streets and sidewalks swarm with motorbikes. There are no traffic signals, pedestrian crossings, or breaks in the flow. You have to greet the infestation head on, conjuring up immunity, confidently assuming that it will move around you. A friend even suggested reading a book while crossing the road to prove the point. This is impossible of course, as your instinct is to run. John Callahan, Taiwanese surfer Baybay Niu and I wade into the stream of fast-moving metal and they do indeed snake around us. But then we get cocky, lose our rhythm, and nearly get bitten, smacked and grilled.  I turn to John and Baybay and remind them that my uncle lost his leg in a motorcycle accident at age 17. ‘The only thing my folks ever agreed on,’ says Callahan, ‘was that Johnny must never ride a motorbike – ever.’ In Saigon, the pedestrian is likely to come off worse. Meanwhile, species of motorbike continue multiply in factories, while pedestrians fight for survival.

Any trip to Vietnam will usually begin and end in Hanoi or Saigon – testbeds for buzzing Hondas and electric fusion cuisine. You can feel the alternating current flowing through bundled wires overhead feeding the overheating city development, draining away into every conceivable appliance. You can hear the incessant hum of neon signs set at the hot end of the spectrum – cerise, violet and magenta. We stop for a roadside ca phe sua da, literally ‘coffee milk ice’, on Pham Ngu Lao street. Brewed with a small metal French drip filter, the caffeine meets a base line of sweetened condensed milk. We stir in the ice, and try to get wise on Vietnam’s traffic test – the equivalent of a driving license for pedestrians. We rehearse the theory that crossing the road is a little like paddling out between set waves on a big day – timing is everything. But this fails the reality test, as there is no space between sets here – just a relentless flow of Suzukis, Hondas and Vespas spitting sour smoke.

I ponder another strategy, drawing on timing in music: ‘Maybe it’s all about getting the timing of the flow right.’ In jazz, the master of rarely used and challenging time signatures has been Dave Brubeck, often inspired by his drummer, the late Joe Morello, on tunes like the famous ‘Take Five’ that works in five/four time, where five notes are played in a four-note bar. Once you get the strange timing of the flow of buzzing bikes just right you can weave your way through like magic. ‘Expect one more bike than you imagined in any one clump and that’ll keep you on your toes; otherwise you’ll lose your toes, run over by that odd bike,’ says Baybay. ‘It’s just like stepping up to the nose and hanging five on a wave with crosswind chop,’ I add. This proves to be a good strategy for Saigon – check out the tempo of the crosscurrents and adapt your dance accordingly. Perhaps it is a rule of surplus that you learn from listening to John Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’ – always fit in more notes, more phrases, and more overlays, than you might expect. Listening is then a matter of shedding, letting go, rather than building up and filling in as you might do with minimalist music, or any approach that creates space such as Gil Evans’ orchestrations for Miles Davis in ‘Birth of the Cool’, the bluest sound in jazz.

Brubeck took another, similar route, to make the music complex through time signatures in albums like Red Hot & Cool. Often knocked by hard bop jazz fans as ‘lite’, and acceptable in 1950s America to the public face as a white player, Brubeck’s approach is nevertheless interesting and of value to any surfer in any walk of life. Surfing can also be about complex rhythms and is rarely about four beats to a bar or straight down the line. Food is like this too, and part of travel is the rich experience of tasting the local cuisine, usually the ‘street food’. Vietnam has some of the best street food in the world.   

We soon find out that Vietnamese food is like Brubeck’s rhythms – at once delicate and robust. If you are prepared to listen, these twisted time signatures stick you to the music, and the food works in the same way, as flavours work like rhythms. The meals are so beautifully flavoured, with such an internal tension, that they leave you with a paradoxical red hot and cool blue taste. This was precisely what American West Coast ‘cool’ jazz players Art Pepper, Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan achieved – a sinuous, open sound that delivered through strange, spiky phrasings and a hot internal tension. Surfing draws on the same languages, the same metaphors, and has developed a syntax that we can compare to music performance and good cooking. Far fetched? Well, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

West Coast ‘cool’ was criticised by many hard boppers as soulless, too intent on thinking the music and not feeling it; but the best of the West, like Pepper and Getz, showed off chops as good as the resident New Yorkers such as Cannonball Adderley and Hank Mobley. Miles Davis said, ‘music and life are all about style,’ and embraced the more open sound of the ‘cool’ players. Their heritage was in the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young, whose trademark ‘pork pie’ hat became an emblem for jazz cool. East and West is also the ‘fat and lean’ describing two kinds of sounds – east coast cityscape with the rich, sometimes frenetic, tumble of notes that defines bebop and its legacy in hard bop; and the west coastscape with an open, spare and studied sound - cool jazz. In Vietnam, slow-cooked stews and stir-fries from the north meet flash-grilled seafood in the south. At the confluence is the signature dish - a steaming bowl of pho bo (beef noodle soup) – both red hot and cool blue. We need bop and we need cool, one to drive you on, while the other opens you up and asks questions – action and reflection.

There is a magic number in Vietnamese cooking – five; five spices in five colours matched to five senses create the basis for this food. Five tastes are paired with five elements: spicy (metal), sour (wood), bitter (fire), salty (water) and sweet (earth). These, in turn, correspond to gall bladder, small intestine, large intestine, stomach and the bladder. The five nutrients are said to be stored in five forms: powder, liquid, minerals, protein and fat. The corresponding five colours are white (metal), green (wood), yellow (earth), red (fire), and black (water). Take that five, Dave Brubeck. My first bowl of pho bo is a Take Five sensation, at once light, complex, but snapping back at the core. The charred onions and oxtail broth hold the flavours of fennel, clove, star anise, roast ginger and black cardamom. This soaks into sliced raw beef, white rice noodles, fresh mint, coriander and bean sprouts, to explode as a welcome swarm of honeybees, and not buzzsaw mosquitoes. Sharp, snapping chilli peppers and sour but soothing lime make up the explicit red hot and cool blue. Pho bo expresses a sound fusion of Chinese, French and local.

Sipping local Ba Ba Ba (333) beers from the rooftop terrace of ‘The Rex’ we discuss more musings on the complex adaptive system that is Saigon traffic. We find a redeeming feature - a set of complex rhythms within the overall drone. We recognise a kind of intimacy and restraint in the behaviour of these motorcyclists and this accounts for the fact that the traffic does flow without great mishap. Aside the traffic and the continual consumption of dazzling food, Vietnam has an overwhelmingly young population, carving a new style market economy communism (a kind of libertarian communist state). There are downsides. As post-colonial scars heal, new wounds are created - pollution from heavy industrialisation and an over-dependence upon the new imperialism of global tourism. But Vietnam offers great promise for surfers, with clusters of spots coming to life in the typhoon season along the 2,000 mile long coastline. We are on a reconnaissance mission to explore the left pointbreaks between Vung Tau and Ke Ga, where November through March northeast monsoon wind swell swings cross-shore and sometimes offshore, mirroring the conditions in Hainan (China) and east coast Malaysia.

We set out for the coast, travelling a few hours by van. Vung Tau is kite-shaped, with a straight stretch of bronze sand called Bai Sau (back beach), and an arcing Bai Truoc (front beach). Vung Tau means ‘anchorage’ and there is a working harbour, and fishing fleet of round, basket boats crammed with new yellow-green-red crab nets. In the sightline of crude oil extraction is a good looking left pointbreak - Lan Rung (the kite-handle of Bai Truoc) - that we had highlighted on our meticulous map work. At low tide the point is alive and kicking. We paddle out and confirm the superb potential, patiently trading waves until the tide rises over the rocks where fishing families gather oysters and repair nets.

By midday, it is sizzling hot. The light is high and flat. We climb the hilltop that marks the peak of town to see a towering Christ statue – built in the 1970s by the Christian minority. Back at sea level, the Mui Nghinh Phong (literally ‘cape of breeze welcome’) cliff face blocks any breath of wind. Our necks roasting, we walk along Bai Truoc where glitzy, but empty, restaurants, wait for the wind of foreign tourists. In contrast to starchy Bai Truoc, Bai Sau is seedy and relaxed, the soul of Vung Tau, and apparently the lively meeting place for flocks of locals taking a weekend break from Saigon’s traffic jazz.

Against a beautiful evening light at the beach break of Bai Sau, Baybay surfs what is on offer elegantly, while I whisk some small soft foam lips, back-and-forth with tight rollercoasters and cutbacks. We get a lot more from the waves than we expected at first sight. But then, all waves have an enfolded quality, something wrapped you can often eke out and enjoy with the right attitude. The sea turns mustard green. No one else is surfing, and we enjoy an all-you-can-eat session, inventing our own time signatures, free from the traffic swarm and in the fold.

As the sky ushers in a new moon on Friday night, Bai Sau becomes a street food haven. Hundreds of vendors line the beach, grilling fresh squid and crab with lemongrass marinade. Narrow kitchens deliver hot bowls of lau - sweet and sour broth with vegetables, seafood and herbs. Unlike its well-socialised sibling Bai Truoc, Bai Sau is not for the easy-listener. It is rather rough and searing, yet intensely lyrical, the bad sibling. Sitting over low plastic tables we try everything. There is not a flavour out of place, or a single ‘foreigner’ in sight, except ourselves. Instead, honeymooners rent two-seater bicycles, peddling past picnickers on the hillside and slow drinkers gambling on the beach, while ice cream sellers slip delicately through the crowds with a recognisable jingle. You can sense that happiness is valued above material wealth in Bai Sau.

There is the occasional unwelcome stare, questioning why we are not on the ‘other’ side at amenable Bai Truoc. But we like the searing as much as the lyrical. Alto saxophonist Art Pepper was the West Coast jazz great who brought together the lyrical and the searing in one voice, and was perhaps the most talented alto player of his generation along with Cannonball Adderley, in the wake of Charlie Parker. Pepper played his life like he played his horn, with intensity, but fuelled by self-destruction. For many years Pepper was ‘striped by shadows (prison bars)’ but could see a California beach from his cell window, mesmerized by the ‘heat, blue water, spray.’ Pepper’s autobiography - Straight Life - remains a classic in its field. These long spells in jail for drug offences - Pepper was a heroin addict - meant that he was not able to record, tour or play gigs regularly. And when he did, it was often on borrowed instruments with B-grade players. But what came out were some of the most enduring jazz sounds in history – wrought with emotion, rich and stabbing. ‘If he can stand up he can play, and if he can play he can play beautifully,’ wrote Geoff Dyer in But Beautiful.

With Pepper and Brubeck on the iplayer, we head north to Long Hai. Under a run of burning days with big skies, we sample the three excellent pointbreak sections, guarded by Buddhist temples and the occasional tamarind tree. Delicious lefts spread out like full plates at a wedding, and we devour them, before the wave expires on the beach at the base of a Kwan Yin (Quan Am) statue. The local audience are suitably impressed with Baybay, surfing like a jazz chanteuse, and celebrate when we come ashore. The beach is rich with its natural wares of seaglass and beige spiral shells. Onshore, sporting a range of bright pants, the Long Hai women sell their wares – an array of fruit and grilled fish, mini baguettes, sweet pancakes, roasted chestnuts and corn cakes. They go to great lengths to stay pale, wearing conical hats, and covering their arms and hands with silk gloves. Bike tyres wrapped in bright paper are for sale on tree branches beside men playing chang chi (Chinese chess) on heavy stone tables while sipping ca phe sua da.

The street food signs are single syllable rim-shots - com, lau, pho. While the Vietnamese language is characterized by monosyllables, it offers an abundant, acoustic and imaginary vocabulary with a rhythmic form of expression. In the seventeenth century, the quoc ngu writing script was developed by European missionaries cooperating with the Vietnamese to transcribe the local language on the basis of the Latin alphabet. Under the French colonial rule, quoc ngu was perfected and popularized, boasting the advantages of simple composition, spelling and pronunciation. Three layers of culture again overlap – the native, the Chinese, and the French colonial. And the Vietnamese have cunningly utilised these to enrich the national style. Baybay, who speaks Taiwanese, Mandarin, English, some Cantonese and good Japanese, remarks how similar the Vietnamese language and food is to the Cantonese. Chinese character paintings of phuc, loc and tho (happiness, good luck and longevity) are ubiquitous.

For Vietnamese schoolchildren, quoc ngu is much easier to learn than Cantonese or Mandarin. Spelling things out is never easy. I have always admired the fact that Dave Brubeck was nearly expelled from music school when one of his professors discovered that he could not read music (which he attributed to poor eyesight). But Brubeck’s ability with counterpoint and harmony more than compensated, and the college eventually agreed to let him graduate only after he promised never to teach piano. John, meanwhile, exercises his own visual language, seeking out patterned doorways and basket piles to photograph. A group of kids amble to school after a lunch break with books over their head to keep off the relentless sun.

With an enthusiastic driver called Ju, we travel up the coast towards Ke Ga. ‘Don’t worry. I know everything,’ is Ju’s reassuring catchphrase every time we pull up alongside something interesting around Ho Coc. He describes a coast primed for hotel complexes and beach apartments, funded by Vietnamese business as the Asian tiger turns its profits back on itself. We are soon in wind-battered Mui Ne - a coastal resort town made famous when visitors flocked to view the total solar eclipse in the 1990s. Its signs are all in Russian, catering for its main body of tourists. Kitesurfing is in vogue, with shops, schools and a beachfront filled with first timers to full professionals. We settle for a ca phe sua da with Ju, and decide that the Ke Ga Cape, 15 miles from Phan Thiet, will have a better range of flavours.

Out of Phan Thiet and deep into the Binh Thuan countryside, the earth’s hues are crimson while deep, wild forest greens are tamed as pea-green agriculture. Rubber trees and ginger gardens become cactus farms growing dragonfruit, and then fields flattened to pan salt. Drying peppercorns mark the road to the Ke Ga Cape - a wild, almost deserted stretch facing into the northeast monsoon. We check into an empty hotel and paddle out for a disorderly evening session negotiating unpredictable foaming lips and sucky chop (sounding like something we might eat later), and fall asleep that evening to the sound of these saltwater gongs. The next morning the hairball lips have faded. With nobody else in sight, we set out by foot towards the tip of the Cape, planning to inspect two pointbreaks spread over a three-mile stretch. The main beach is completely tar-balled and thick with plastic litter washed up from near-shore fishing fleets. But it is rich in rock forms. The Ke Ga lighthouse stands 60 metres high on a small island, marking the tip of the Cape – and one of the windiest places in Vietnam.

We walk into the deep bay, to a fishing village where we refuel on water. There is a gathering of round fishing boats piled onboard the main boat, the smaller craft used to bring the catches ashore in shallow water. They clearly have neither speed nor stability, so the fact that they are lightweight, easy to carry and pile up must be the only attraction. We continue in front of the luxurious Princess d’Annam resort ($500 a night … no thanks!) and keep hiking, finally rounding the last main pointbreak. It proves to be seriously wind blasted, and our legs are now ravaged by sand flies. Badly ravaged in fact. We head back to the fishing village to negotiate some motorbike rides back to the hotel (combating our motorbike fears), refuel, and get back to the Ke Ga Cape. The lighthouse - the tallest and oldest in the country, built with French granite in 1899 – oversees our last surf. The massive granite spur forms sweet sandbars, and the waves are fluted by the wind. We paddle in at sunset, having made the most of every stretch of surf we could find.

Back in Saigon, Pham Ngu Lao street, as ever, is humming with bikes, riders ditching their highway codes, and backpackers learning their survival skills. We have by now figured out the puzzle of double-crossing the roads, practised our footwork in crosswind choppy seas, and navigate the traffic in good rhythm. We walk passed the Reunification Palace (liberated by USSR tanks in 1975) to the War Remnants Museum (formally known as the ‘Museum of American War Crimes’). Here are the raw scenes of the atrocities of the Vietnam War. Every battle, bombing raid and artillery barrage graphically illustrated. Photographs of deformed ‘agent orange’ victims are exhibited aside portraits of the grim fog of war. My parents protested this war, some friends’ parents had to fight in this war, but for my generation it is a mixed-up memory re-presented through various films, most obviously for surfers Apocalypse Now with its infamous ‘Charlie Don’t Surf’ insult. The horror! The horror!

The Vietnamese believe that the soul of a dead person, even if dead for many generations, still rests along with their descendants on earth. They value emotional ties and attachment to relatives and the community because, as local sayings spell out, ‘there would be no home in a lost country’ and ‘the whole village rather than a sole roof would be engulfed by flood.’ Similar to Haitian Vodou, the dead and the living still have spiritual communion in everyday life, so people must not forget that what they enjoy and how they feel is the same for their dead relatives. Perhaps that is why Vietnam recovered so well from the war.

Like many other fascinating and often turbulent tropical places, Vietnam infected me in a way I did not readily shake off after coming home. While we did not toast the finest of surf, we mapped the potential and left feeling wholly rewarded, remembering that surfing is just one part of the music of travel. Despite those irritating Saigon bikes and ankle ravaging sand flies, Vietnam is another centre of gravity that will linger as a positive in my psyche, drawing me back to travel, to experience, to work. Right now my sand fly bites are flaring up in a complex rhythm, a signature itch left by a time and place that is both red hot and cool blue.