Turkoise, take 4

Juvenile Drumfish

Diving the Shark Hole in Grace Bay with Fifi

(Fifi est là, au bas de la photos de l'arche, avec son couteau de plongée!)

San Francisco, ACEP Oct 2004

Lombard Street

Very fat seals at Fisherman's Wharf

The Golden Gate, of course

A short visit to the Torngats

JD from James Bay likes to organize an annual summer fishing and canoeing trip to the most remote place he can find - this year it is to the Torngats, the highest mountains in Quebec, on the northenmost part of the border of Labrador and Quebec. The Inuit fear the Torngats, calling them the devil mountains; it is true that they are mostly known for brutal windstorms. Torngat in Inuktitut means 'Home of the Spirits'.

So the adventurous team has chartered an Air Inuit twin otter plane to fly from Kuujjuaq to the valley of the Koroc River, flying past Kangiqsulalujjuaq (George River). They will disembark there with their foldable hi-tech canoes, tents, guns for polar and black bears, and other wilderness gear. They are planning on summitting Mount Iberville (the hightest mountain in Quebec) if weather allows. And then the plane should pick them up in 10 days later much further downstream still on the Koroc River after 10 days of canoeing and fishing. If they don't to make it, we'll call the RCMP!

Because I happen to have booked a week of work in Kuujjuaq at the time that they are up, I had the honor to transport the foldable canoe in a hockey bag (it fits!) as part of my luggage on the flight to Kuujjuaq – I usually travel quite light when I go Up North. When the boys arrived a few days later, they opened a few seats on the chartered twin otter plane for local friends to fly back and forth to the Torngats and take some pictures. This happened 2 days ago, on August the 8th.

We landed on the Koroc Valley and it felt like a crowd - there were more tents there, belonging to the search party for the two expeditioners who disappeared somewhere on Mount Iberville just about a year ago. More details on this story here.

I got sick on the plane when the pilots were chasing black bears and caribous running on the toundra. Otherwise, here is a set of my pictures of that memorable trip.

This is where I'm talking about:



Northenmost fjord of Quebec

Glacier valley

Landed on the valley of the Koroc river

Upstream (more South) on the Koroc

Malaysie – Sabah

Vue des jardins équatoriaux de Sepilok.

Vue ennuagée du mont Kinabalu, que je ne gravis pas ce séjour-ci.

Bébé orang-outang de la réserve de Sepilok. Une semaine plus tard, un collègue de Puvurnituq (du Grand Nord Québécois) passe par Sepilok aussi avec sa femme d'origine Indonésienne et trouve mon nom dans le guestbook et m'écrit par courriel. Qu'est-ce que monde est petit!!!

Malaysie - Layang-Layang

Last day in Hanoi

Greetings again from Hanoi,

Today is my last day here in Hanoi and I shall be leaving for Kuala Lumpur tomorrow.

It’s been quite a trip. My friend C from Belgium, who works for the UN, is renting a nice four storey house with four bedrooms near one of Hanoi’s many small lakes. So I get to use one of her guest bedrooms, which is amazing. As she has lived in China for a year, she is quite used to the Asian way of life. So, with her, we eat on the little spots on the streets without a second thought, which not many tourists do; we had chicken legs for 8$ US – for 3 hungry people, two of whom were of the tall Belgian kind. Viet Nam is incredibly cheap. She also owns a motorcycle, which is very convenient as it is the main mode of transportation. I very much enjoy spending my evenings with her and her friends, living the expat way of life, which reminds me very much Cameroun and Up North: meeting nice people from all over who are very welcoming and eager to meet new faces and make new friends very easily. C’s friends are mostly Belgian and French and I am known as the Canadian girl who speaks a very bad Vietnamese.

Yesterday I accompanied my parents on an important trip. We visited the village where my Ong Noi (paternal grandfather) came from before he went to Hanoi to start his textile business. It is a tiny village outside of Hanoi where most people still make a living of growing rice. We saw in the village pagoda a decorative golden plaque with Chinese characters which was purchased with money donated by my Ong Noi. We also met second and third cousins still living in the village, and visited the ancestors' cemetary and mausoleum. Even if I do not feel like I belong here at all, it was important to see the origins of my family. We also did the same on my mother’s side. However there was much less to see as they were city people and high dignitaries who were expropriated when Hanoi became communist in 1954. My mum, who had lived the first seven years of her life here, back in the fifties, wanted to see the ancestral house of her childhood, still in the 36 historic craftsman’s streets in the old Hanoi. It had belonged to no less than four generations of her family - that is, until the communists came. We found it, but of course, it is unrecognizable as the communist separated what used to be a large house with an interior garden into several lodgings for several families in 1954. It now holds an souvenir shop, ironically selling T shirts with Bac Ho’s photo (Ho Chi Minh being the father of Vietnamese communism). The Vietnam of today has so little to do with the Vietnam that they left. Even my parents, who speak fluent Vietnamese, seem very westernized and different from the local Vietnamese. And even the Northern Vietnamese accent that I grew up with and that my friends use is no longer spoken here. It's as if we were stuck in time from the Vietnam of the fifties and things have changed here.

I do not know what to think of communism. Seeing as my parents’ families lost a lot to the war and that we count several Boat people in our relatives at home, communism is generally viewed as a terrible thing in the Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese). And here as well; some of the locals with whom I spoke, like the xe om drivers, still complain that they do not have much freedom of speech or movement, something that we take for granted in the Western world. However with the country opening up more and more and trying to attract foreign investors and tourists, there is definitely a facade of freedom and capitalism and happiness, which is all that the tourists and even the Western expats see. Cars are starting to appear, and generally speaking people work hard but do not seem to live in misery. But there must be things that I am not aware of, like spies and denunciation boxes, neighbours potentially spying on each other etc... etc... At the same time, even if my family suffered a lot from the war because they were part of the educated minority, I can see how the country overall improved the condition of the majority – the extremely poor country folk. Anyways, I will go home with a nuanced, complex picture – and will try to educate myself better on the topic.

As for my impression of Viet Nam as a tourist, I understand why most people are so enthusiastic about it: everything is dirt cheap, the food is amazing, and the landscapes outside of the city are like Chinese ink paintings: small rocky mountains, emerald green rice fields, and women in typical outfits with the conical hat. But my travel here was tinted by the fact that I wish I could have fitted in more or found more commonalities with the local Vietnamese. Mostly because my Vietnamese is quite weak, I felt quite awkward at times. The locals in general are quite blunt and more than once, they have asked me why I don’t speak a better Vietnamese. They are quite hospitable to foreigners (with money) but are quite more critical of the Viet Kieu. It is a strange, fairly close-minded culture, rather different from the open Canadian multiculturalism that I am used to. I would come back very happily – I have yet to see the Centre and the South – and I would consider working here as an expat, but with the full knowledge that it may hit sensitive points in my identity much more than, say, Africa or Afghanistan. And living with expats really gives me the taste for the expat life as well; once again... who knows what the future holds...

That is it for now. I may write more from Malaysia next week - between dives if I can find time. I hope that you are all well!

Greetings from Hanoi!

Greetings from noisy, sticky and honking Hanoi. I have spent many days walking the city with my parents looking for the old places where they used to live, but really, the Vietnam of today has little to do with the Vietnam that they left back in the fifties. Even the accents are different!

It's quite something being here. Hanoi is a developing city, full of motorbikes, no traffic lights, and narrow streets full of noisy shops. The sensorial overload is staggering. My friend C from Belgium who is hosting me and who used to live in China tells me that it's very similar to the China that she knew: polluted, noisy, and in full development. My parents barely recognize the place, and it is changing so fast that in five years it will be so different. My vietnamese sucks, and I look so westernized that at all the cyclo's and the shopowners speak to me in English!! Thank God for my mum who will rightfully lower the prices :)

We did the obligatory ride to Halong Bay with my parents and another bunch of their friends who are Viet Kieu - expat Vietnamese. It was quite interesting to walk in the grottoes hidden within the beautful islands of the bay. Unfortunately, I was too late to catch a picture with a junk boat - they are now forbidden as many junk boats owners used to sail to the tourist boat, sell goods and sail away quite fast before the client noticed that he didn't get his change back. So for the sake of commercial honesty now the boats are forbidden! We still got to see the little floating villages of the fishermen in the bay, and they sold us some extremely fresh seafood which we enjoyed on the boat. Quite the ride, in the end.

My favourite part of the trip so far (aside from Halong Bay) is to take the xe om ie. the taxi-motorcycles to go home to C's place every evening, and every morning to meet my parents at their hotel. Aside from that I did some major shopping and indulged in many pirated DVD's (for the price of 1$ us each!!!) and some silk stuff including a traditional

Vietnamese outfit (an ao giai) made to measure in local Ha Dong silk. Quite nice.

Anyways, my time is running out at this internet cafe so I must go. I will write more the next time. Tomorrow and the day after I'm going on day trips with my parents again to areas outside Hanoi, and then Saturday I am heading off to see more friends in Kuala Lumpur and dive Malaysian Borneo. I am soooo thankful for having all these great friends scattered around the planet - just finding excuses to come visit them :)