The government suggested they could turn the whole country into a Walt Disney theme park – the whole country

Children (not Mouseketeers) in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 1989

This is a true story.

In 1989, I was in Cambodia and Vietnam.

Eleven years after that – today fourteen years ago – in the year 2000 – I had lunch in London with a chum who had recently worked for the Walt Disney company, dealing with licensing for Walt Disney in South East Asia. He told me that, in Cambodia, a government official had suggested they could turn the whole country into a Walt Disney theme park – the whole country.

After some consideration, the idea was not proceeded with, possibly because of the thought of land mines. Mickey Mouse having his legs blown off is probably not an attractive PR image.

But it is interesting that basic capitalist ideas – even then, in 2000 – were spreading across South East Asian countries.

In his South East Asian Disney hat, my chum also wanted to hire the Rex Hotel in Saigon, Vietnam, one morning for a presentation. Unfortunately, the Rex Hotel was owned by Saigon Tourism, which owned large chunks of real estate all over Vietnam and was probably second only to the government in political and economic power. This inevitably meant bureaucracy.

Saigon, as I saw it from the roof of the Rex Hotel back in 1989

So, when my chum phoned to ask the cost of renting the Rex, he was called in to a meeting with the boss of Saigon Tourism. My chum arrived with his translator and was shown into a boardroom with a vast rectangular conference table where, inevitably, they were kept waiting for ages. Eventually, the bossman came in with twelve advisors, heads of departments and top executives. My chum and his small translator sat on one side of the table; the bossman and his twelve executives with briefcases and bundles of papers sat on the other side.

Remember this was not even to book the Rex. it was only to ask how much it would cost if my chum did want to book it.

Eventually, after tea and all sorts of interminable preambles, the boss of Saigon Tourism said he thought it would be a good idea if Disney opened a theme park in Vietnam. My chum explained it was not his section of Disney which was involved in the theme park side of the business: he only dealt with consumer goods licensing. He said he would pass on the suggestion but said he knew Disney took about ten years – literally ten years – to evaluate theme park possibilities. The parks were very big, very complicated to build and to run and very expensive, so decisions could only be taken carefully. But he would certainly pass on the suggestion.

“We could have a smaller theme park,” the Vietnamese tourist boss suggested.

A typical children’s playground in Saigon, Vietnam, in 1989

My chum explained again that it wasn’t really his area, but he knew Disney only really thought in terms of big theme parks. However, he said, he would pass on the idea and he knew it would be considered very seriously by the top Disney theme park people.

The Vietnamese tourist boss replied: “You could just give us the rides rather than build a theme park round them.”

My chum again explained it wasn’t really his area of decision but he would pass on the suggestion.

“You could just sell us the technology for the rides and we could build them ourselves,” the Vietnamese tourist boss persisted.

My chum went through all his polite rigmarole again.

“You could just give us one ride,” the Vietnamese tourist boss suggested. “Just one ride. I have been to Disneyland. The ride we would want would be the Earthquake Ride where you go in and it simulates the feeling of an earthquake.”

B-52 bomb craters seen from plane in central Cambodia, 1989

My chum was a bit taken aback, but did all the polite rigmarole again about how he would pass it on but pointed out that one reason why Disney included the Earthquake Ride in their Californian operation was that California was in an earthquake zone – there was the San Andreas Fault – and, in a sense, it was educational for the children who went there whereas, in Vietnam, there were no earthquakes and no history of earthquakes, as in California, so it wasn’t quite the same.

Immediately, the Vietnamese tourist boss suggested: “We could use the sensations to simulate the effects of carpet-bombing by B-52 bombers.”

My chum never did find out the cost of renting the Rex Hotel for an afternoon.

I have a flashback to Vietnam in 1989…

On YouTube, there is a video of the last flight out of Da Nang in 1975

Fourteen years later, almost a quarter of a century ago from today – in November 1989 – I was in Da Nang. This is an extract from my diary.

Three of the American ‘journalists’ I saw in Cambodia are here with a lady from the Vietnamese Foreign Office. They are ex-GIs and have been touring former places they were based and fought in and around Huế and Da Nang…and meeting some former Viet Cong fighters.

They have interviewed the Foreign Minister who apparently said little except that the Japanese are “animals”. This was in an on-the-record interview.

The Foreign Office lady was interesting. She had shown film director Oliver Stone (of Platoon and Salvador) around and had a VHS of Spitting Image in her office – she thought it very funny. She had started reading Animal Farm but had got bored. She also went to North Korea last year and had been regaling the Americans with stories of how OTT it is. She said they had eaten potatoes every single day for lunch, so she and her room mate went back to the privacy of their room and talked about how boring potatoes were and how they wished the North Koreans would not serve them. Sure enough, the next day…no potatoes were served.

The Americans told the Foreign Office lady they could have easily won the Vietnam War, but the moral and political price would have been too high.

The most philosophical one of them told her quietly and amiably: “We could have obliterated you. We could have wiped your country off the map.” She smiled politely.

It strikes me the Americans still have not realised (even after the Russian debacle in Afghanistan) that money and might and technology alone cannot defeat motivated individuals. Also, the more I see of this country, the more insane the American tactic seems – staying in fortified enclaves. They could never have won the Vietnam War any more than the British forces on their own can ‘win’ in Northern Ireland. The difference is we know it but have no alternative. I suppose the problem is the Americans don’t understand guerrilla wars. They’re pumping money, arms and equipment into Central America, assuming quantity will triumph.

Anyway….

It was monsoon day today. I woke up at about 0300 in the morning with rain chucking it down. This continued for most of the morning. Sheets of it coming down. I got a chance to wear my waterproof top and leggings. I suspect the locals thought I looked distinguished – if hysterical tittering is a compliment over here.

An old guy attached himself to me as I wandered around. He said he occasionally goes to Saigon “but the crime is bad there. People have guns and sometimes policemen are shot by robbers”. He seemed to be talking about more than one isolated case. He asked me to send him “two movie magazines – American.”

He said only newspapers get censored, not movie magazines, and there is no problem sending him things.

Last night, after I got back to my room, there was a knock on the door.

A young-ish woman.

“Yooseepwon?”

“Sorry?”

“You sleep one?”

Aha! I possibly already have AIDs from the acupuncture needles; I don’t need this.

“No. Sleeps two,” I said. “Two people here.”

She wasn’t convinced, but said, “Ah!” and went away. After I closed my door, I heard her knocking on another door along the corridor. Presumably she had a list of all the rooms occupied by single men and says: “Can I sleep here too?”

Uncle Ho Chi Minh must be turning in his mausoleum up north in Hanoi.

I met a couple of British expats (they’ve been away from home for 37 years) working for the UN who reckon Vietnam could start to flourish within 18 months. In one Hanoi hotel, they told us, twenty rooms are on a retainer to Japanese companies waiting for the right time to move in their businesses. They have retained the empty rooms for six months to see how the Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia goes and are waiting for US pressure on Japan to lessen. (ie “Don’t trade with the Viets!”)

I also met a local teacher of English. He has the top teaching post on the highest grade at the local college and earns $10 per month; he has a wife and four children. He does occasional tourist work for meals, not money. He listens to the BBC World Service (illegal, he says) and gave me his business card, printed free for him by a student’s father.

“Don’t write,” he told me, pointing to the address on his card. “It would not be good for me.”

I have been warned about pickpockets in Da Nang.

I had a walk around town. Everyone ignored me. I assumed this was because they thought I was a Russian. The Russians took over the vast US naval base and airfield – I think it’s a main port for their Pacific Fleet. People who did look at me did so without expression or with a slight scowl. On some of the secondary shopping streets, though, I got some “Hello”s followed by smiles when I replied in English. On four occasions, when I said I was “English” they insisted on grasping and shaking my hand. I have never had this before. One bloke, discovering I was English, tried to sell me “real Viet Cong’s jacket…with holes in it…Real holes!…A memento…”

Only a couple of kids half-heartedly asked for money. There are more brightly-coloured Saigon consumer goods here than in Huế. More hustle and bustle. More money, I suspect…unless you teach.

The sad teacher said he agreed with Tolstoy: “Life is a dream.” He was an amiable man unable to control or affect his own destiny because of history, politics and lack of money. An intelligent man trapped below his ability and unable to do anything about it.

UK comedian Matt Roper has ended up in a wheelchair in a hospital in Saigon

Matt Roper in hospital yesterday in Saigon (Photograph by nurse Than Thiet Sang)

Oh the joys of modern communication via the internet.

The last I heard from British comedian Matt Roper was just over a month ago when I blogged that he had diarrhoea in India after a rather too enthusiastic encounter with a local drink called Fenny.

Imagine my surprise then, yesterday, when I received an e-mail from Saigon… and the cyber conversation that ensued.

MATT: I am hospitalized in Saigon. God giveth but he doesn’t piss about when he takes it away again… But I thank him for Cuban trained nurses and free wi-fi! Hope you are well!

JOHN: You are hospitalised? Seriously? With what? Are you insured? Are you OK? If there is a ceiling fan, you can live the start of Apocalypse Now! – “Saigon… Shit, I’m still in Saigon…” Are you OK? (Given that you are in hospital) Actually, yes, Cuban levels of healthcare will be a bonus point.

MATT: Cubans train some of the finest doctors and nurses in the world. Latin America is very, very lucky to have them. Some of the staff here trained in Cuba, Vietnam being communist and all, the two countries have a strong relationship. They’re amazing with me.

JOHN: So how are you?

Matt is in the Franco-Vietnamese Hospital – officially in Ho Chi Minh City – but it is still called Saigon by almost everyone

MATT: I’m fine but for my right leg. Deep vein thrombosis. Specialist reckons it can be healed back to normal 100%. But then she also thinks footballer Wayne Rooney is the British prime minister. I’m in a fucking wheelchair and on a drip. But strangely enjoying being waited on and given the opportunity to rest as much as I want. Franco-Vietnamese Hospital, Ho Chi Minh City. Fully covered for travel insurance. Thank fuck.

JOHN: How/why are you in Saigon? Your trip was to India.

MATT: I don’t fucking know. Why does the sun rise in the morning and then set again in the evening? Life leads me John and not the other way around.

JOHN: Deep vein thrombosis? Jesus. That’s the thing you’re supposed to get from long-distance flights, isn’t it? Keep a diary of your stay. It could be an Edinburgh Fringe comedy show.

MATT: That remains to be seen.

JOHN: Have you been elsewhere in SE Asia? Laos is interesting.

MATT: I spent a week or so in Bangkok. From there I came here. First time in Vietnam for me. When a new nurse comes to deal with me they ask if I live here in Saigon. When I say “Just a holiday” they sort of throw their heads back and laugh. What luck I have! What sort of a man gets deep vein thrombosis from a 90 minute flight? I ask you.

JOHN: What are your impressions of Saigon?

MATT: The ceiling in my room. The pisspot by my bed. The steady wheels of the commode, gliding gently across the polished floor of the ward. Seriously, the night before I was in the hospital, I was in the rooftop bar of the Caravelle Hotel sipping coffee, looking out over the rooftops of the city, my heart filled with joy. Isn’t there an Arabic proverb? One minute your hand is in your pocket, the next it’s up your arse… ?

Saigon as it was in 1989, from the roof of the Rex Hotel

JOHN: I was in Saigon in 1989. I remember having drinks atop the Rex Hotel.

MATT: During the Vietnam War (it’s called the American War here) the Caravelle Hotel was the base for all the foreign journalists. That hotel was bombed, they managed to hit one of the rooms, but they reckon if they’d have targeted the bar instead they would’ve taken out every last one of the hacks.

JOHN: How did the hospitalisation happen?

MATT: I thought I’d torn my calf muscle. After three days I couldn’t walk, so I ended up coming in for a check-up. They gave me an ultra-sound scan and it turned out to be thrombosis. A public statement to the fact that I am suffering and I continue to suffer. Even Lewis Schaffer couldn’t lay claim to this.

JOHN: I wouldn’t be so sure.

MATT: I have only just let go of the notion that actually they’re going to amputate my leg. The things that have crossed this restless mind… If they did amputate it, would they show it to me afterwards? Would I want to see it? I doubt it. But, on the other hand, my chances of getting a series with the BBC would increase tenfold.

JOHN: I will blog about this tomorrow. Do you have a picture of yourself in a wheelchair or similar?

MATT: You’re a sick man, Fleming.

Modern-day Saigon, fortunately with Cuban-trained nurses

JOHN: Seriously. Send me a photo. When are you out?

MATT: When I’m allowed out. I don’t know. I think maybe a week or so more. I still can’t walk proper, so…

JOHN: Are you going elsewhere? Or coming straight back to the UK?

MATT: I really don’t know. I have either to stay put in Vietnam as they need to monitor my blood regularly or get back to Bangkok overland until it’s safe for me to fly again. Still, there’s stacks of material. Stacks of the stuff.

JOHN: It is an Edinburgh Fringe show. Trust me.

MATT: Nurse Than Thiet Sang must be credited for taking the attached photos of me. She was on a mission checking blood pressure before she was stopped to take these. If you really want a wheelchair shot you will have to wait until the male nurse who wheels me out for a strictly forbidden cigarette is on shift (later today).

JOHN: Too late. I will survive. I hope you do too.

The poor Vietnamese woman, the Gilded Balloon & the millionaire Iranian

Yesterday evening, American comedian Lewis Schaffer (who, like all other self-obsessed comedians, likes to be name-dropped at every opportunity and to get a link) sent me a text message about my blog:

It’s amazing you can keep on doing it every day.

Well, I can tell him and you it ain’t always easy.

Yesterday, I moved a friend’s sofa from Essex to Greenwich and was helping clean up a house. Not a good subject for blogging.

So, this morning, I looked through my e-diary for what had happened around this date in previous years. These extracts are the results:

1989

In Hanoi, my local guide tells me:

“This is still a Socialist country – like Russia, da.”

He keeps absent-mindedly saying “da” instead of “yes”.

Fat woman of money in rickshaw in Hanoi, Vietnam, 1989

I think I now eventually have the economics worked out.

Beggars ask local people for money but they don’t ask me. They assume I am a Russian, because I am a white-skinned foreigner.

The Vietnamese have no time for Russians because they (a) don’t smile and (b) have no money. No-one wants roubles, only dollars and, even if they did want roubles, the Russians don’t have spare cash.

The problem with using travellers cheques here is the US economic embargo on Vietnam – US companies are banned from trading with the Vietnamese. (This does not stop the North Koreans accepting cheques, though – they deal with American Express via Moscow.) My Hanoi guide tells me credit cards here are “many many years” away because there are very few computers in Vietnam.

When we pass the very flash Hanoi Opera House, he tells me it was intended for the people, but only the very rich can afford it. This implies there is a group of very rich (as opposed to just very privileged) people.

At lunchtime, I took a walk and met Hanoi’s equivalent of a bag lady in ragged-sleeved jacket, the bottom half of her face entirely red. Her face was like a robin redbreast. Brown top half. Red bottom half. I think she must have been knocking-back some particularly brutal local equivalent of meths. She muttered (and probably cursed) at me a bit, then staggered away.

The ‘Hanoi Hilton’ prison – not taking foreign ‘guests’ in 1989

My local guide asked me if he could use the shower in my hotel room. Perhaps it is a perk of the job – a glamorous Russian shower. He told me he lives on his own in a Tourist Office room with no cooking facilities – presumably he can always eat in hotels……I think he agreed when I asked about this last bit.

I was writing a postcard on the balcony of my hotel when bits of brick started falling on me: they are building a new storey above me. I had to go to two separate buildings to send the postcard. One to buy a stamp and another to hand it in for sending. There was a power cut halfway through this process.

I had dinner tonight with the two Hong Kong Brits I met in Da Nang – plus a couple of Canadians. When he was in Da Nang, the Canadian bloke told me he had had a T-shirt printed saying in Vietnamese I AM NOT A RUSSIAN.

He lives in an apartment in Calgary with a one-metre long iguana which, he says, craps in a sandbox behind the television set. He feeds it on cat food and says it can sense when he is about to go away because it pines and goes off its food. The iguana has its own dead tree – “well, it’s dead now,” the Canadian said – in the apartment, so it can climb occasionally. It normally sleeps on its own heated pad although once the Canadian found it curled inside his pillowcase. The only problem is it likes to climb up the Canadian’s leg and has sharp claws.

In the same apartment block, a neighbour keeps a pet boa constrictor.

I must remember to avoid Calgary.

2000

A taxi driver told me that lap dancers at Stringfellows nightclub in St Martin’s Lane pay £200 per night to work there, then make the money back by commission on drinks bought by punters and tips from punters. Competition among the girls is cut-throat… not surprisingly, given that they have to make £1,000 in a five-day week just to break even.

2001

I went round to an interesting Iranian woman’s home. She is thinking of writing her autobiography… but will probably not.

“I am not rich,” she tells me. “If I get £100,000, I spend £25,000 here and £25,000 there. It soon goes.”

She has what appears to be a part-time Kosovar maid, pale, white skinned, hook nose, melancholic hang-dog expression, cavernous eyes with black lines in the skin underneath as if on drugs.

Also there was a Kosovar translator from Pristina.

The Iranian has a British and (as of two years ago) an Iranian passport. She is thinking of publishing her autobiography when her son is 21 because he will be “more able to take things” then. He is now 16. Her family is related to the former Prime Minister of Iran assassinated by Khomeini’s agents in  Paris. Her grandmother was a Mossadeq – as in the Mossadeq who was overthrown by the CIA to install the last two Shahs of Iran.

She lived in Dubai with first husband. She once had to go to China to buy a plane – she knew the Chinese general who was selling it.

If it gets around that she is writing about her life, she says, there will be panic calls from Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Saudi offering her millions not to publish. She has lots of dirt on the Saudi royal family.

A former Swedish boyfriend found oil in Texas and she spent one year in LA after her son was born (by her second husband). She has stories of the Playboy Mansion and Hugh Hefner’s parties.

“I always went for the wrong men,” she told me.

Once, she says, she lost £5 million in a London casino.

She has a tiny and very amiable shih tzu dog which came from the US. She flew with it to Paris, then drove to the UK, hiding the dog under her armpit to avoid the six-month quarantine restrictions aimed at stopping rabies.

2002

I heard a radio report that a big fire in Cowgate, Edinburgh, had destroyed the Gilded Balloon venue last night. I phoned comedian Malcolm Hardee, who phoned his Edinburgh friend Maurice The Fireman. When Malcolm phoned him, Maurice was still fighting the fire.

The bestselling hardback version of Janey Godley’s autobiography

2003

Comedian Janey Godley is writing her autobiography. I have a terrible cold. My advice to her today was:

DON’T DON’T DO NOT GO BACK AND RE-WRITE THAT BIT. YOU CAN SORT IT OUT IN THE NEXT VERSION YOU WRITE. KEEP GOING EVER FORWARD LIKE THE SNOT DOWN MY NOSE. 

But just remember I am either a man living in New Zealand who has never seen the building you are writing about nor heard your life story… Or I am a housewife in Gloucester reading the book in bed at night before she goes to sleep. And, frankly, the way I feel I would prefer to be a housewife in Gloucester. Lead me to the sex-change shop. Bring on the Rabbi with the meat-cleaver.

I will read tonight’s (I’m sure excellent) piece tomorrow. If I live. Which seems unlikely. I don’t so much shiver as wobble around the waist and shoulders while an invisible Grimm giant takes an axe to my throat. Childbirth? Pah! NOTHING compared to the suffering of men with slight chills.