Back to Beyond

Well this short blog is dedicated to the colour green. It was hard not to see all this rice field green without thinking about listening to a young Van Morrison putting soul into his version of the song and putting Frank and Ray and Kermit to shame. But possibly I digress. What I meant to say is that red is ever present here, the slightly orange red in the national flag and party flags, with their slightly egg-yolky yellow star and hammer-and-sickle, and green is the complement of red, so green is practically the national colour here, right?

Anyhow, we left Hanoi in the rain, and wisely set off during the morning rush hour. Perhaps “sat” off would be closer. The traffic was not as purely anarchical as in India, but it moved at about the same walking speed, with what looked like impossible bottlenecks slowly resolving themselves into forward motion and scooters moving like water spiders, with one, two (the legal limit), or three or more riders (the law is flexible) sharing rain ponchos that flapped behind them. But eventually we cleared the city, if not the rain. And then saw our first rice fields, which we tried to photograph from the moving car since it seemed unlikely that there could possibly be any more ahead of us…

But more there were! We had a chance to walk through one district, in the rain, and then through another the next day in dry but cloudy weather. This is the time of year for planting – so fields were either dry and flat; dry and tilled, either by a kind of rototiller thing or apparently still by water buffalo; flooded; or flooded with small 4-6 inch plants shooting up. Harvest is 90 days after planting, and they get two per year. People out in the fields, in rubber boots or bare feet, were checking the young plants to make sure they were thriving and looking for snails, an invasive problem (they eat the rice plants) from “up north”. Vietnam has many problems that come from “the north”, aka China, but does not like to be specific about naming the source as there is a fraught but critical relationship with the place. Sound familiar? Of course, as there is only one country north of Vietnam, it is not all that ambiguous a description.

Here are your greens for today.