Alicia and I were squid fishing one evening off the back of our boat. We were staying on a small cruise boat to explore Ha Long bay. The day was taken up with exploring the world heritage bay, but the evenings offered little activity unless you fancied jumping ship and joining a Korean karaoke party on a neighbouring boat. So we fished in the evening to pass the time.
We weren't having much luck. The technique involves putting on a bright light at night off the back of a boat and gigging a bright green lure off of a bamboo pole about six feet down. Not the most interesting kind of fishing. The sky was black and the full moon was concealed by cloud. So when we saw a small women-powered traditional bamboo boat coming towards us with lights on, it caught our interest. Although the turtle shaped boats (about the size of a double bed) are a common sight in the bay, this one was coming right at us.
'Cold beer' she shouted from 40m away.
'Khong, cam on' we replied (no, thank you).
We had cold beer on our boat you see.
'Cheaper cold beer' she said.
Suddenly, we were interested. Why pay 50p a can when you can pay 25p? Although we felt a bit naughty buying cold beer off the back of our boat, we justified it by saying we were supporting the local economy. Quite what that economy is, or will become though, we weren't sure.
It became even less clear the next day.
[The rest of this post is about the community of floating fishing villages we saw and my ponderings on why I was able to buy a beer off of the back of the boat.]
The next day we did a kayak 'tour' around a small floating fishing village - it was like something out of 'Waterworld'. A strange mixture of traditional subsistence living and tablet computers.
It was interesting to look around but I'm always uncomfortable taking photos of people's lives in a very direct and obvious way. I'm not a national geographic photographer (yet...) capturing a disappearing culture, I'm just a visitor to a country where people are living their lives.
But I was interested to learn more about these people who lived in floating villages though.
It seems that people have been making a living from fishing in this bay for thousands of years, with a culture stretching back into pre-history. Traditionally, communities of less than a hundred would live around a small central barn like-structure, with families living, cooking and sleeping in their respective boats.
When the site became a world heritage site, the single party Government decided that these scattered communities needed to be centralised and they 'rehoused' people.
They have been housed in floating metal shacks and everyone seems to have a private generator. They are laid out in more centralised and larger settlements. Having visited the Ethnology museum in Hanoi, there seemed to have been little attempt here to preserve some of the traditional architecture or layout, or even to recognise the people as part of the environment and keep them in the bay.
So now, they buy in water and fuel with the money from selling fish and in return, the Government doesn't tax them. The Government collects litter and empties septic tanks and evacuates them when a typhoon is coming. There is even a floating bank with a cash machine. In addition, an Australian university built a school. These are surely good things. Education is always precious in any form.
That said, you sense a certain way of life is being lost, but there is no point pretending it wouldn't have changed anyway, with new technology and materials available. Bruce Parry explores this in his series 'Tribe'. As a visitor, the worry is that you become part of a planned exploitation, where people become an exhibit, as if they are part of the natural history tour.
The Government are considering rehousing all the people from the fishing villages in the city to work. Aside from wondering who might catch the fish for the people in the city (other than trawlers) I wonder who thinks this is a good idea, why, and who has a say in a non-democratic system. No one seems entirely sure.
Trying to see both sides of this, clearly there needed to be some change. Aside from the huge numbers killed every time there was a typhoon, there were issues with poverty and access to education. In addition, the Goverment likely feared that the environment of the bay and therefore the status as a world heritage site would be threatened if people were living here and polluting. As in so many other parts of the world, cultures and communities that were once in balance with the environment now pollute as they make less and import more.
As Bruce often concludes, it's just changing.
They say the children here can row bamboo boats before they can walk. I hope they have the choice to be fisherman as well as anything else they want to be, not just put into an economic position where it makes most sense to adapt fishing boats to row tepid beer around the bay for the whim of tourists.
