PETER MOORE
From the author of travel classics like No Shitting in the Toilet, The Wrong Way Home, and Swahili for the Broken Hearted. Peter Moore tackles Vietnam in his latest work, Same Same But Different.
Having lived (and survived) the mad, lawless and often video-game like streets of Vietnam, where people think nothing of carrying pigs over the handle bars, or transport jagged mirrors with an air of unnerving nonchalance, I was unsure of how close to the petrol fumes this story would get.
I wasn’t disappointed.
Beginning in the urban tangle of Pham Ngu Lao street, Saigon’s answer to Khao San Road, Moore gets behind the wheel of a vintage Vespa, and heads south towards the vibrant, watery Mekong Delta, with Marlon Brando’s words, ‘the horror, the horror…’ whispering through the hot humid air. (but not before a quick dunk down the rabbit hole of Saigon after dark).
Once free of the many suckered tentacled monster that is modern day Saigon, Same Same but Different visits Ving Long, Phung Hiep, Soc Trang, stopping off at the Bat Pagoda, and then the Bone Pagoda along the way, taking in the beer chugging culture that is the cornerstone of every upstanding and self respecting Vietnamese man, and the often poignant history of revolutionary struggle and ethnic violence in the late 1970’s.
As a microcosm of Vietnam, the Mekong Delta is a perfect, compact example, best explored, like Moore, with at least a week to get a feel for the waterways that replace roads; the Khmer culture all around; and the tropical fruit orchards, rice fields, monkey bridges and thatched villages that are fast disappearing in Vietnam. Moore captures this with plenty of wit and sharp observations on the Vietnamese whose often tempermental and impatient nature offer plenty of entertainment in their own right.
Same Same But Different is well worth a read, and definitely a head above the travel books trying to reach the ‘real’ Vietnam.
Vist the author’s website at www.petermoore.net for more information, photos, etc, from Same Same But Different, and the author’s other books already in print.