Waiting for the Miracle

Inter-species chinwag
Paying homage to the Seventh Day, I took it nice and easy today.

First off, that meant saving my legs today and grabbing rides instead. It's not hard to do. The entrance to Miss Loi's (it may sound like some seedy establishment, but it's as far from that as you can imagine) is in a narrow alleyway just wide enough for two mopeds to pass one another. This means whenever you step outside there is a man sitting on a moped, reading a paper and waiting to get a fare.

I showed him the location of a curry house recommended in my Lonely Planet guidebook, got a price, and climbed on the back. The roads were much quieter than the day I arrived, but we were still one amongst thousands of other road users, and we weaved through the traffic like corpuscles of blood around the body.

A small aside about travelling with guidebooks. I've often heard it said that carrying a Lonely Planet is the wimp's choice; for somebody who is not blazing their own unique trail but instead is following the usual tourist rut. Kind of like taking the Kama Sutra to bed and reading-up as you go. I understand the sentiment, but I think many people who espouse this philosophy don't really go on and live the reality that it entails. As I see it, with limited time, language competence, and knowledge of a place, the guidebooks provide an almost essential reference. People who don't have them invariably sponge the information from those that do. And how do you find your way around a huge city without a map?

Maybe there are travellers who really do it. Boldly trek into the unknown, not knowing if that night they will lie in a guest-house bed, on the floor of a local family's house, or in the gutter with the dogs. In a way I envy their power, their shedding of practical concerns, their chance of an especially weird or wonderful experience. Maybe one day I'll try it.

The restaurant was tucked behind one of the city's few mosques, and I sat alone in an arched courtyard area and was given the full attention of the waiter. Plates of curry were ferried out from inside the mosque to my table, and I ate the spicy food wondering where everyone else was. The meal was tasty and I washed it down with a gorgeous mango lassi, but I think I felt the first stirrings of some kind of stomach bug there. We'll see.

After lunch I headed to the zoo/botanical gardens for a stroll and a little education about Vietnam's flora and fauna. I've never been a big zoo fan, and this visit didn't do anything to change that feeling. Listless animals cooped up in tiny enclosures, with hundreds of people gawping at their every move. The reptile house was in a particularly sorry state. They're the modern equivalent of the human freak shows from the nineteenth century. I've got no idea if they suffer out of their natural environment, but I do know the amount of learning going on at zoos is minimal. Much better to pick-up a David Attenborough series if you want a general introduction to the lives of animals.

The alledged botanical gardens were practically non-existent, a few trees and thickets peppered between the lame amusement rides and candy machines. It seems to represent that perennial question about what we should view as progress. Economic growth or preservation of the environment? They are mutually exclusive ends. Which one do we want? And if it's the latter, how are we can going to stop capitalism, the most effective force in mankind's history?

Dinner with Francis in the Bodhi Tree seemed to gravitate to the topic, because he ended up outlining his plan to save humanity. His idea was that since religion seems to have such a persuasive hold over so many people, the way to engineer change for the better is to found your own religion, convert people to your faith, and then use this swell of political power to influence the world in the way you see fit. Sounds a bit like a dictatorship, but if anyone truly has society's welfare at heart, I think it is Francis.

How's it panning-out, Francis?

Francis, a man on a mission