Sapa.

We took the 9:20 train to Sapa, and did our best to sleep through nine hours of clangor. The drugs were somewhat effective, and the persons with whom we shared the sleeper car were just fine. I read from Sartre's The Reprieve, and it bored me to shit. On the whole, Sartre was a very poor novelist and should have limited himself to longwinded ramblings on the character of that which is entirely without character. His works lack the slightest kernel of humor, and any account of being ought to include the very thing that makes it tolerable. Anyway, it's no way to write a novel.

Sapa is a mountainous town straddling the Chinese border, and is home to a number of indigenous hill tribes, notably the Black Hmong. We spent the day hiking through the tallest peaks in Indochina, through dizzying green terraced valleys and through various Hmong villages along the river. However easily amused, I am not frequently astonished; I live in California and am accustomed to natural wonder on a grand scale. But these stepped valleys are a masterpiece of human engineering, and other architectural marvels, pyramids and such, seem to me insignificant in their shadow. We retained a learned young guide named Kang; I can only infer from this moniker that his parents were avid appreciators of The Simpsons. Kang taught me how to say prick and shit in Vietnamese and a number of other fascinating lessons I've since forgotten. At several points along the trek I was again forced to confront my chronic acrophobia, crossing shaky makeshift suspension bridges over deep mountain gorges. It always exhilarates me to proceed in a direction that is entirely counter to my instincts.

Oddly, many of the Hmong women speak a bit of English, a talent they've obtained from recent years of exposure to flocks of tourists. And the uniform of the Hmong women is startlingly hip; with their cylindrical headgear and patterned legwarmers, they'd look just as at-home on some Tokyo runway. I observed them manufacturing and coloring these garments by hand from the hemp and indigo crop that they cultivate among the rice and the opium. As the Hmong believe cameras are able to actually steal one's soul, most of my photographs were obtained either surreptitiously or through bribe. It is remarkable what a few dollars can do to change one's beliefs.

The Hmong belief in the extraordinary ability of digital cameras to act as avaricious soul-gobbling deities prompted me to think of ghosts, and why it might be that humans are almost universally afraid of them. It is quite more in keeping with our condition that we should be considerably more afraid of an absence of ghosts, rather than maintaining any childish trepidation of their presence; the bulk of human history and effort has been thrown behind an attempt to affirm a posthumous persistence of identity, toward establishing any little strand of evidence that might suggest some post-physical continuation. Yet ghosts, perhaps more so than any other entity (or more likely, non-entity), are most closely associated with evil and are generally regarded as a thing that ought to be kept at bay via any number of dances, rituals, medicines and other little methodologies. In the immortal words of Ray Parker Jr.: I ain't afraid of no ghost.

I slept well, and in the morning read an essay on anarchism. I thought about the uselessness of anarchism, and of doctrines in general. I thought about sending proponents of anarchism on a plane to Somalia as a succinct demonstration of just how useless their doctrines are. But I am tired of people and don't really care enough to teach anyone a lesson.

Another night train and we arrive again in Hanoi at four A.M. The Ambien® has not yet worn off and all the hotels are closed. The next hour is spent banging on doors in darkness and attempting to wake various proprietors. No one speaks a word of English, and despite ten years of training in Los Angeles, this lack of available correspondence is beginning to weigh on me. Jasmin's disposition is generally less rigid than my own and she is able to negotiate such difficulties without being phased. We eventually succeed in rousing a hotel staff worker sleeping in a lobby, and the roar of Hanoi rises around me just as abruptly with the sun.

Hoi An

10/18/07