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Tiger Sport

EACH person in my group hung on to our riders for dear life, wondering where we were heading next. I thought the motorbikes we were travelling on sped rather too fast along the narrow muddy trail through the forest.

The forest began to give way to the huts of local peasants on the outskirts of Hue. Now I had seen plenty of houses out in the cities, and along the main roads of Vietnam, but those were all tall and very narrow brick buildings. These houses were different. Tucked away from the main roads they were single storey shacks in a state of decay from the tropical jungle weather. They had small yards around them with vegetables planted in the muddy dirt. There were doorway and window holes, but often no doors or windows or sometimes shutters instead of windows. Each house had a small satellite dish for television reception. Every yard had a vegetable garden. Obviously the people who lived here were quite poor, so it made sense to them to be growing their own food. Perhaps they would just need to buy rice.

I was really enjoying the ride on the back of the motorbike, but by now I was concerned that there were quite a lot of people around, especially when we nearly ran some of them over. We crossed other dirt paths just wide enough for motorbikes. There were no give way signs so we had to approach each intersection careful to ensure we wouldn’t collide with anyone zooming across it.

Somehow we made it through weaving our way through the village, finally stopping at a large round stone structure some fifteen metres in diameter and four metres high. Several arched entrances were evenly distributed around the crumbling structure. Each had a pillar on each side with a stone ball on top. The pillars had the faint outlines of inscriptions now too eroded to be readable. We climbed off the motorbikes and explored it. All the entrances were boarded up so we couldn’t enter it at ground level. Instead I climbed one of the stone staircases steeply rising to the top. Although the top was boarded up, I got a good view of inside the building.

My tour leader Danh explained this had been used as an arena for sport with tigers. The details sounded a bit cruel, but as they were now a severely endangered species, the sport is now highly illegal. From the top I could see there were two levels, the top level about three metres above the ground was where the spectators sat. There was only one layer of seating though for perhaps fifty people. Under the seating area was a vertical wall down to the ground level, where numerous small tunnels coming out into the stadium would have housed the animals ready for sport. The bricks above the tunnels appeared quite smooth indicating these had been sealed off by trapdoors which were released when the animals were needed in the arena.

I found the stadium being surrounded by houses a bit of a curiosity. What if a tiger had escaped? The abundance of locals would have made for easy food. The huts were derelict and flimsy, no match for a hungry tiger. By western standards these houses were totally unliveable, but I’m sure these people didn’t know any better. I guessed they had absolutely no idea of the huge houses we occupied in Australasia.

Two small children approached us begging. Obviously we didn’t give anything to them. The mother stood in the background looking very forlorn. That was a bit of a sad act really. I’m of the opinion that the one crime that is worse than begging is actually giving something to the beggar to encourage them to continue begging. No doubt some tourists have taken pity on these beggars and given them something. I know in my home town Brisbane beggars make about four hundred dollars a day tax free from begging. It’s absolutely criminal anywhere in the world, so that’s why I never have, and never will give to a beggar.

Once more we climbed onto the motorbikes and continued going through the village. By now I was no longer convinced this was a village, but in fact we were going through suburbia of Hue, one of the main cities in Central Vietnam. We continued along the muddy dirt track for about two kilometres before reaching a gravel road wide enough for cars to drive and pass each other.

There was a row of timber buildings on either side. The timber was rough sawn and no doubt untreated. Each building contained a small souvenir shop, so now we were now back in the tourist precinct.

The motorbikes parked by the side of the gravel road. We climbed off them and walked a few metres to the first of the shops on the left hand side of the road. This shop had a lot of Vietnamese woven clothes, small paintings, incense sticks, and accessories. Here the lady in the shop demonstrated how to make incense sticks. I had a go at making one myself, though obviously mine wasn’t as good as the sticks she created. Then we did an exercise where we took a bunch of sticks and placed the ends on the ground, then quickly let them go so they would fall in a radial pattern.

We then went to another shop where they were making Vietnamese conical hats. Danh had a go at weaving one. The slats were covered in some kind of banding, and the banding was then covered with straw. As he was creating the hat, I had a look at some of the other shops with displays of brightly coloured artwork and equally colourful Chinese lanterns. The motorbike riders were now on the road in a circle playing hackie sack. A couple of the guys in our group joined in.

Another shop sold fans, many of which were intricately painted with amazing landscape designs. All the shops were of a very simple construction, built with the raw trunks of young trees, and covered with corrugated iron on the walls and roof. There were numerous other shops around, mostly selling paintings. It was a very relaxed area and we saw a family of chickens crossing the road. Of course I believe strongly in a world where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned.

After a quick look around the shops, I returned to the hat shop and saw that Danh had completed creating the hat, so we were ready to go.

Once we had finished at the shops, we followed the road by motorbike for about a kilometre before turning off the road to follow a rough dirt track. We passed through the scrubby forest towards the top of a hill. Once we reached the top, we parked at a small clearing and walked along a short path down to a spectacular lookout over the Perfume River.

In front of us the river flowed sluggishly towards us from the low triangular mountains bordering Vietnam with Laos. Upon approaching our hill, the river veered to our right for about two kilometres before turning behind the hill towards the city unseen behind us. From here, we could only see the scrub. We walked about ten metres down the hill to a small clearing that provided a fantastic vista looking up the river. The mountains in the distance were covered in forest, whilst the valleys were cleared and used for farmland. It was obvious the area had recently been flooded, with new silt banks and displaced houses and trees washed up on the river bank.

We left the lookout and returned to the motorbikes where we were all photographed with our riders. Nothing like a group shot. Danh also did an individual shot of me with my rider before we set off again speeding down the hill in pursuit of another adventure on the back of a motorbike.

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