Charades

Day 66: Ho Chi Minh City (VN) – An Binh (VN). “I think we'll audition for the Morden Players when we get back home!”, Karen quipped, referring to the village amateur dramatic society back in Steeple Morden and our new found acting and improvisation skills.

Leaving behind the chaos of Ho Chi Minh City we headed south, deep into the Mekong Delta: a watery landscape of green rice paddies and sleepy villages, everywhere criss-crossed by the brown canals and rivulets fed by the mighty Mekong River. The further we travelled – the more remote our environment. By nightfall Karen and I had reached the tiny island of An Binh were we were fortunate enough to find a room with Tam Tien and his family. During the Vietnam War (or American War as they call it here), both Tam and his wife had been freedom fighters for the Viet Cong, but with the coming of peace they took to fruit farming and settled in the delta to raise their family of three sisters and one brother.

And now as the evening took hold and with dinner out of the way, we sat out on the terrace with Guyen, one of Tam's daughters trying to understand a little more about each other; even though our Vietnamese was confined to 'hello', 'thank you' and 'two beers please', and Guyen's English, whilst certainly more advanced that our Vietnamese, was still fairly rudimentary.

We filled the table with every prop imaginable to help our fragmented conversations: a map of Vietnam, photographs of our life back in Steeple Morden, digital images of our travels so far, a bowl of fruit and here and there; pages torn from a notebook containing symbolic scribblings of anything that we felt would assist with our communication.

But even with all of this, it was our two hour marathon of 'charades' that made the evening so entertaining (Karen does a wicked cow, indecently!). Amongst other things we learnt about our hosts we discovered that Guyen was 36 years old and was looking for a tall, dark, strong, handsome husband with lots of money and between the age of 40 and 45 (not too particular then!)

As we retired for the night we were reminded of just how rural our host's farm was. Between the insatiable appetite of the Mekong mosquito's, the swarm of cockroaches that got in to our room courtesy of an ill fitting bedroom door and the rat pack that spent most of the night scratching at our door, neither Karen nor I got very much sleep at all that night!