Going hungry for flashbacks
in all the Nam places.
Mike Losness and his girlfriend Ally were playing Scrabble in the front room of their South Vietnam “hotel” wondering why sketchy, older men kept checking themselves into rooms for just an hour at a time. These are the types of scenes you come to expect when you team up with Dustin Humphrey and Taylor Steele to pioneer the perimeters of surf travel. Who surfs in Vietnam anyway? Hump-n-Steele are hopped up on Apocalypse Now visions and Full Metal Jacket flashbacks in their quest to re-invent rambling on film. And nice guys like Mike and Dion sometimes pay the price of believing.
They arrived after 20 hours of flying, blind with fatigue and dazed by the whirlwind of Asian neon and foreign crypto-scribble. A baggage delay. Two hours in customs. And then what? They stumble into the wicked-hot Saigon dawn to find an old Vietnamese man and his young son holding a sign with just one word: LOSNESS. He spoke no English. So they simply got in his car and rode along with him for the next 10 hours. Ten hours! Straight into a Chinese New Year celebration somewhere painfully remote and disturbingly crowded in South Vietnam. Fire balloons in the sky. People and music and motorbikes everywhere. Dragons dancing in the street and deep fried dogs on a spit. Mike and Ally are starting to lose it. Meanwhile, Taylor and Dustin are straight out of Indiana Jones. They’ve spent the last two weeks roaming the vast jungle mountains of Sappa to the north, drinking cobra venom and filming extreme scenics for their upcoming chaser to Sipping Jetstreams, called Castles in the Sky. The title says it all. Who surfs in Nam? Dustin and Taylor are convinced they’ve pinpointed a series of secret pointbreaks even Colonel Kilgore never dreamed of.
Ally and Mike stumble back to their hotel room, with no equation for how many jetlagged hours they’ve gone without sleep, only to be kept awake all night by the fireworks and human belligerence of the Tet Festival raging outside their window. They toss and turn, insane with exhaustion, until…
South Vietnam is a footnote in most travel guides. It’s a question mark. A DO NOT DISTURB sign. Unless you speak Vietnamese, you can’t book a room in advance. Unless you eat Vietnamese (like, the real Vietnamese food), you’re about to lose a few pounds. And unless you are Vietnamese, you can’t rent a car there, so the entire 12-person crew ends up packing all their gear into one, big equipment van.
Navigation was a game of charades, pointing to places on the map where no roads go with a no-English driver who had no idea what they were doing here. Pointing to surfboards and making sick carving motions with your hands only complicates things further. They found the pointbreaks by matching the headlands against the images they’d stored in their iPods. But there just wasn’t enough swell to light them up. So, they ended up paddling out at some playful little beachbreaks, with Mike and Dion doing their damnedest to make some scenes for the film on the wind-warbled scraps.
Still, there was the unfiltered beauty of strangeness entwined with everything. Comic collisions with karma as they tried to finally nourish themselves in the local farmer’s markets. Gorgeously oddball encounters with local fishermen and the ritual weirdness of fishing from a wicker soup-bowl. And wild motorbike adventures in search of suitable lodging. Remote South Vietnam had so much to offer, you just needed a hammer and chisel of will-power to tap its heart of darkness.
And that’s when their driver explained to them: “this place” (he points to their hotel) “is not” (shakes his head) “for sleeping” (hands against his cheek). The next gesture you can make at home: it’s for fucking.
Even after they realised they were staying in the local brot
hel, what were they to do? There was nowhere else to stay. This was it. And this was the project. So, hunker down and do it. They got the surf footage. They shot the lifestyle photos. And then they got the hell outta South Vietnam.
Note to self: cross Vietnam off your surfing “to do” list, like, longtime. Another note to self: don’t miss this section of Castles in the Sky. Somehow, it’s still freaking gorgeous.
Posts: 3
Reply #3 on : Mon May 26, 2008, 17:04:29