Michael Batson

At Ho Chi Minh City airport the woman from Vietnamese Airlines, resplendent in her national costume of white trousers with ankle-length dress split to the waist, struggled with an elderly Russian couple.  “Do you speak English?”  They spoke none and no Vietnamese either, not a word, so communication was reduced to sign language.  The man wore dark glasses throughout the entire exchange.  The woman had bright orange hair.  Together their skin was so white it gave new meaning to the term “White Russian”.

A reminder then of the privilege which comes from being a native English speaker, where communication in such far-off places can be of relative minimum effort.  For when it came to the turn of my mate Paul and I, she opened our passports and said hello, smiled a wonderful smile, and asked if we wanted the seats near the emergency door “more leg room.”

When airline staff in Vietnam hand you your baggage receipts, don’t lose them, or you’ll never get out of the terminal at your destination.  Lucky then the Vietnamese man following me through the security check noticed that the flimsy gum holding the receipt to my passport had released the all important barcodes, and picked them up from the floor handing them back.  I suggested that we buy that man a beer, but in an instant he was gone.

In Vietnam, economy class passengers board the plane first while business class passengers are asked to wait.

As a foreigner you are required to produce your passport at airports even for internal flights.  The Vietnamese carry their identity cards.  At hotels you hand over your passport to the reception when checking in and it’s returned after you check out and pay the bill.  The bill can be paid in dong (currently 19,000 to the US dollar) or in US dollars.  While Vietnamese are happy to receive US dollars – that most notable of international currencies – for tours, travel and other large ticket items such as accommodation, they are reluctant to give any in change. 

Our plane to Phu Quoc belonged to Cambodia Angkor Air.  Curious then to be flying internally in one country, in a plane registered to another sovereign state.  Especially one from Cambodia, whose last attempt during recent times in 2005 at a national carrier had been Cambodia First Airlines, 51 percent owned by the Cambodian prime minister’s then 23-year-old daughter.  Cambodia First followed Cambodge Airlines which had gone bust in 1994 due to poor management and corruption, with debts of US$20 million.

At 593 square kilometres, 46 kilometres from top to bottom, Phu Quoc is Vietnam’s largest offshore island.  Virtually unknown to visitors a decade ago, the island’s soft sand beaches and swaying palms are attracting the attention of overseas developers, with construction of an international airport already underway. 

The rolling topography and jungle vegetation of the island differs from the rest of southern Vietnam.  Flying over the Mekong Delta, the land is pancake flat and made up of thousands of rice paddies.  Vietnam is the world’s second-largest rice exporter after Thailand.  Waterways criss-cross the terrain.  Canals, lined with houses, in some places stretch dead straight for miles.  This is the region where the mighty Mekong ends its journey from the foothills of Tibet at the South China Sea.  This wonder of the world’s rivers takes its own path breaking in several directions, historically beyond human control.  The world’s seventh-longest river way, it is during the height of the monsoon, the world’s most voluminous.

The Cambodians who call Phu Quoc, Ko Tral, also claim the island (it’s only 15 kilometres from Kep).  At various times it has been fought over by both countries as well as Thailand.  Cambodia also lays historical claim to the entire southern part of Vietnam, Cochin China under the French.  These nationalist tendencies have been exploited by various Khmer regimes.  From the northern tip of the island you can see the Cambodian flags on nearby offshore islands.  During the Khmer Rouge era, errant Vietnamese fishermen straying too far were likely to be decapitated by the unforgiving Cambodians. 

In 1975, Khmer Rouge forces landed on the island in one of numerous cross-border infractions, but were repelled by Vietnamese forces.The Khmer Rouge may have moved on but nationalist tensions remain, and the Vietnamese military maintain a visible deterrent presence on the island.

Phu Quoc is home to some 80,000 people and a large population of indigenous dogs. 

Phu Quoc dogs, a distinct breed, look like a smaller version of the Rhodesian ridgeback. They come in a variety of colours, and are much valued here and on the mainland for their intelligence, agility and guard dog abilities.  I’d been on the island barely two hours before one of the hotel’s dogs attempted to make off with my shoes.  It’s not what you say to a dog but how you say it.  I speak very little Vietnamese, but that dog knew I wasn’t best pleased and dropped my footwear.  The next morning it sat outside my bungalow eating what appeared to be an octopus tentacle, looking well pleased and satisfied.

Anh ran the restaurant attached to the bungalows.  The lease of the restaurant was held by a Spanish man married to a Vietnamese and living in Ho Chi Minh City.  During this, the low season, he phoned weekly to get the accounts.  During the high season he made weekly trips to the island to receive the takings.  Born and raised on Phu Quoc, Anh was 27 years-old and had only left the island once for three days to go to Ho Chi Minh City, which she had hated – from one extreme to the other.  She was engaged to be married.  Her fiancé, an official with Viettel, a mobile phone provider, lived in a province west of Ho Chi Minh City and when married they would live there with his family.  It was unclear whether the marriage had been arranged, but Anh told us she was not looking forward to leaving the island.  Once there her in-laws would treat her much like a domestic servant.  If they had children the in laws would raise the children and she would go out to work.  It would be unlikely she’d visit Phu Quoc again often.

Phu Quoc is famous for black pepper and its fish oil sauce (nuoc mam), which is graded like olive oil and sold all over Vietnam.  Pepper grows on carefully maintained trees about three metres tall and grown tightly in rows. The pepper farms line the roads on the island.  On a motorcycle tour of the island, the owner at one farm plied me with home made liqueur while showing me the display cases filled with ground pepper product and peppercorns, and honey also sold in recycled water bottles.  The fish oil sauce sits for 12 months in huge wooden vats before three batches are drained off at various times, the first being the most prized.  It’s possible when riding by to smell the fish oil, the distinctive odour resembles Vegemite concentrate.

Riding along the road parallel with Bai Trong (Long Beach) which stretches for several kilometres south of the island’s main town, Duong Dong, we passed pearl farms near the beach.  One, a joint Vietnamese-Australian venture, advertised drinks for its customers and New Zealand ice cream on the sandwich board by the roadside.  We stopped at another establishment and under the display cases packed with pearl necklaces and earrings there were the distinctive shells made into earrings.  When I informed her what I called it, the Vietnamese working behind the counter asked me to write down for her the word “paua”.

Once outside Duong Dong many of the roads on the island are unsealed.  We crossed a bridge the surface of which consisted of several loose metal plates laid haphazardly across the bridge’s main beams, with gaps wide enough for the bike’s tyres to disappear into completely.  Later on the road we were overtaken by two Vietnamese on a motorbike.  The woman passenger looked like she was off clubbing except it was 10am.  She wore tight jeans and high heels and sat gracefully side saddle (unusual in Vietnam) with her legs crossed, their bike kicking up dust doing about 50 kilometres an hour on the uneven dirt surface, on tyres as narrow as that!

While Phu Quoc is publicised as paradise for tourists today it was once hell on earth for many Vietnamese.  Tens of thousands were jailed here first by French colonial forces and later by the US-backed southern Vietnamese regime.  The French first built a prison on Phu Quoc to keep insurgents, but during the American War, the structure was expanded to cover an area of 40 hectares and was the largest prison complex of the US forces. 

Cay Dua (Coconut tree) prison is about 5 kilometres from the town of An Thoi at the southern end of Phu Quoc.  It once held up to 40,000 Vietnamese political prisoners at any time.  After the Tet Offensive in 1968, the prison was quickly filled with captured soldiers and was at its peak in terms of prisoners held.

The US military presence in South Vietnam had nothing to do with maintaining democracy, as little matching that description in reality existed.  The country, a creation of the 1954 Geneva Accords, and divided between north and south along the 17th Parallel, was little more than a corrupt police state, something even the US acknowledged. 

South Vietnam’s first president (the country officially existed from 26 October 1955 until 30 April 1975), Ngo Dinh Diem, was dictatorial and his rule corrupt.  It was his repressive measures that prompted the public self-immolation of some of the country’s Buddhist monks in protest.  It’s estimated that between 1954 and 1960 the Diem regime had seized, detained and tortured more than 800,000 people in over 1000 small and large prisons and killed 90,000.  He was so hated by his own people the country’s air force bombed his palace with him in it.  Later, he was murdered by his own troops in a military coup sanctioned by the US in 1963.

The state’s longest serving leader was the pro-military Nguyen Van Thieu (1965 to 1975).  To maintain power, Thieu enlarged the network of spies and informers exploited by Diem and expanded the prison system utilized by the French.  In the Republic of Vietnam during his rule there were 176 district jails, 44 provincial prisons and five major detention centres, not including “secret” prisons like the one at the Saigon Zoo.

The most notorious were the major detention centres, particularly those like Phu Quoc and Con Son Island in the South China Sea.  Here were built the notorious “Tiger Cages”, tiny cells where prisoners were kept manacled to iron bars and deprived of adequate food, water and ventilation for long periods.  There were other cells with no ceilings at all and open to the hot sun, day after day.  Walking around the prison grounds sweating in the late morning heat, I can only imagine what that must have been like.

The entrance fee at Phu Quoc’s Cay Dua Prison is 3000 dong, or about US$0.15.  The small museum was full and I was the only foreigner there.  There are several photos on the walls of the prison as it was when used by US forces.  One photo shows the uniformed jailers lined up as if up on parade with the caption in Vietnamese and English “the African and American jailers” though most looked Vietnamese to me.  Portraits of some survivors line one wall and the names and home towns of many inmates are also given.  The exhibits are given over the various torture techniques employed by the authorities.  Medieval in nature, prisoners endured nails hammered into joints, amputations, blinding, broiling in water, flaying by various methods and having their chests cavities crushed between boards as screws were gradually tightened, causing death.  It is estimated over 4000 died with the survivors maimed for life.

Phu Quoc may be heralded as part of Vietnam’s future tourist industry, but my lasting memory will be its rubbish.  A short walk from the bungalow complex to the water’s edge reveals a sorry sight.  There wasn’t one square metre of surf where I couldn’t see some form of plastic rubbish.  To illustrate the depth of the problem, I spent a few minutes retrieving what rubbish I could and laying it out before my bungalow, and then photographed the result.  There were about 20 items including a large cement bag retrieved from the surface of the sea, and I ignored the small items and anything below the surface.

Once, the people of this region lived pretty much in harmony with their environment, much of their living was environmentally sustainable.  For example, you can still see people in Vietnam and other countries packing rice into banana leaves for transport.  When used, the leaves are thrown away, where they are degradable.  That same principle is now applied to the new packaging, plastic, when finished with, it’s disposed of, but there are no formal systems for the processing, recycling or environmentally friendly disposal of this product.

Every purchase made is placed in some plastic bag or other, which presents the problem of what to do with that plastic, not to mention the packaging of the items, which are overwhelmingly plastic as well.  Levels of environmental awareness need to be raised dramatically and urgently, it really should have happened years ago.  This needs to include public awareness and government regulations especially with respect to the manufacturers of these products, who otherwise will keep churning out their produce to satisfy stockholder returns, which are too often incompatible with ecology.