Pond netting with a sideshow.

Uncle Dung phoned this morning at 7.30 to let us know he was going to empty a pond and there are some big fish in it. He said we should go along, so I put a rocket under Dung and an hour and a half later we were there. It is 10 minutes from home. Dung wasn’t sure where it is, so she phoned Uncle Dung when we were near his house and he said call in and pick up his wife and she would show us the way, so we called in and she had a shower and then we left, 3 up on the moto. I am getting used to it now, but there is a lot of dry gravel on the track, which always makes me wary and go slow, not a bad thing I suppose.

We got there and the fish were already being transported into the back of the wagon filled with water. When Dung peered in the back her eyes nearly popped out of her head. The ca yo, a fish called yo, are bigger than she has seen before. We went over to the pond, Dung easily, me stumbling through the long grass, but we got there. The ca yo coming out of this pond are between 5 and 10 kilos, big fish like the bloke who owns the pond. He is perched on a little crocket and I felt sorry for the crocket, but I am glad I never said anything, more of that later.

The owner's and the buyer's wives.

The lads who empty the pond work hard. I have no idea how they get from the pond to the top of the bank. It is slippery mud and not flat. I would be like a mud wrestler within 5 minutes. The pond level is down too making the ascent even more difficult. The pond gets partially drained to make the netting easier. This pond is a serious concern. I was given a tour. They have breeding pools where they bring on some kind of turtle for eating, mind you, why else would anyone keep anything in Vietnam, eating is a priority. They have some other big tanks for fish, which may get transferred to the pond at a later date. They have a generator for the times when the dodgy electricity goes dodgy and a mincer for all the chopped off bits they buy from the market and feed to the fish. There are large feeding platforms for this food and some boats made from halved plastic barrels lashed together used for feeding the fish. I found out why I was given the tour, the owner is selling the land and wants me to buy it. I think the Vietnamese vision of westerners is that they all have money to burn. The owner’s wife tells me they will sell it me cheap and all I have to do is hold onto it and sell it in a few years to make a few bob. When the Vietnamese say cheap, some bells start to ring in my head. We have already been offered land cheap, because we are family, only to find out later that it wasn’t so cheap. So much for family.

The silverback and his daughter.

The lad who owns the land used to do pond netting for a living, so is giving the lads some grief, because they are too slow, but I think this is a grumpy old man recollection of how things were always bigger, better, faster when he was younger. 

The owners are from HCMC and moved here a couple of years ago to try and make some money, but the husband wants to move back now. He is a big lad, like a sumo wrestler, with a big gold, Del Boy chain around his neck. A young lass scuttles around from the other side of the pond with a big bowl of chao for him, which fair enough, he shared with his wife, then she scuttled around again with a ca phe da and some cigarettes. It is no mean feat for me to get around, but she scuttles back and forth no problem. She noticed the scales were a bit sticky, so off she went again and came back with a little shot glass of oil to sort them out with the wife, who I now find out, is  her Mam and the big lad is her Dad. She cleans the scales front too, with a ripped off piece of banana leaf. The banana leaf seems to be the staple supply of tissue around here. The lads netting the pond must have netted a snake, because one of them handed it to the daughter to take away for cooking, but she is not keen, so rips of another piece of kitchen roll banana leaf and holds it with that. It is dead, but she is still not keen. One time she didn’t scuttle, but ran. I struggled to stumble, but the Vietnamese have great balance in any kind, or no kind of footwear, in any kind of terrain. She is a good daughter, very attentive to her parents, nothing seems too much trouble to her. She is the one with the red sun hat in the photos, if I remember to add them.

2 ca yo

Here is why I am glad I never mentioned being sorry for the crocket. A young bloke turns up and nonchalantly walks into the pond area. He asks Uncle Dung to sell him some fish, apparently his attitude is that he expects to be given them, so Uncle Dung tells him it is not his pond and that he should ask the owner. “Who is the owner of this pond?” he asked generally, but the owners say nothing. “I can eat an elephant easily, so why am I having so much trouble getting a few fish to eat?”. A big mistake. This young bloke is some low level, local, police and is trying to extort some fish using his authority. The big lad and owner has had enough now and tells the whippersnapper that he should show more respect when he is on his land and to leave now, or there will be trouble. The young lad tried to throw his virtual, authoritative weight around. Mistake number 2. The big lad takes off his Del Boy chain and shirt and goes nose to nose with the young lad. The fire he was breathing from his nostrils should have been a good give away to our policeman, but he must be a thick Mr Plod, because he pushed his luck and then, despite the efforts of the others to keep them apart, the owner barrels through to him and starts to nudge the local bobby off his land at a great rate of knots through the undergrowth. There is no way I would have said anything once the owner had stood at the beginning and said his piece. He looked a very mild mannered man and was until the wrong buttons were pressed, then he transformed and so did his face. His eyes bulged and he looked very much the king silverback gorilla part. Come to think of it, I wouldn’t have gotten in the ring with his wife. She backed her husband up with equal fury. This is my first sight of hassle in Vietnam. It was very entertaining and a good aside to the fishing.  The young lad still didn’t learn his lesson. He tried to intimidate the owner by phoning someone, but the owner gave him another blast. I hope the policeman has learned his lesson. Alas, I think there are quite a few more around who would benefit from a similar lesson. He tried to come back and make his peace, saying he didn’t say some of the things he had, but the silverback sent him off with a flea in his ear.

Before the sideshow turned up, Dung the “ever on the look out for food” got a plastic bag from somewhere. I enquired why. She has spotted some flowers on the trees circling the pond and her Mam likes these in a soup. She misses nothing as far as food is concerned. We were in Tan An yesterday, we pulled up at some traffic lights and she spotted a bloke selling something. STOP, STOP, STOP Gil. Luckily the lights went onto red. She was off the moto and over checking it out. The lights went to green, so I pulled up onto the path and waited. Not a problem here.  They were freshwater mussels. Some bloke pulled up at the lights and enquired what they were that the white man and the well dressed lady were buying. Keep me out of this. When he was told, he beat a hasty exit stage left, but this didn’t deter Dung. They were cheap, but this didn’t deter Dung. When we got home she told her auntie about them. She told her that they are rubbish, that’s why they are cheap, but this didn’t deter Dung. She cooked them, ate one and then took them to her cousin to see if he was daft enough to eat them, but she never made it there. Here daft enough auntie stopped her and said she liked them.

The failed mussel saga was quickly cleared out of Dung’s memory today at the fish netting. She decided to buy one of the ca yo and got it very cheap. 6 kilos for 100,000 dong, about £3. Enthused by this bargain, she took some ca fe and ca tuong, a fish called fe and another called tuong, again a bargain at 100,000 dong. A real catch, half the price of the market. At home we don’t have a barrel big enough for the ca yo, but this is only a little marring of the coup. I was told to put my foot down on the way home, in case the fish in the hessian sack died. It didn’t matter if we were killed on the way, so long as the fish survived, at least until eating time arrived. I told you food is a priority in Vietnam and fresh food is the number one priority. We made it though and so did the fish, only for one of the ca tuong to die later. The funeral will be in ca lau tonight, a kind of fish fondue, but in a bigger way. Off to another dam do now. Another remembrance of someone dead, in this case a husband who died 100 days ago.