Since being on Phu Quoc Island, An and I have had meetings with several high-ups at the Marine Protected Area office (which took a few days to coordinate), plus two different Coast Guard offices to make sure we don’t get arrested when we start diving. Then there’s the madness of organizing dive gear, then transporting that dive gear an hour northeast to the dive sites, then actually having a boat to take us to the dive sites. Sorting that out has been a bit nuts, but I am ALWAYS grateful that I have an amazing, Vietnamese-speaking assistant who helps make everything happen. Without him, I don’t think I’d even have made it from the ferry to the main town on the island.
Today, we rode a motorbike for an hour and a half to the main fishing dock where seahorses are landed. We spoke with several different fishers, who were keen to share information about seahorses (yay!). Then we spoke to different boat owners, and haggled for low prices. We’d managed to get a pretty good deal by about 3:30pm. I wanted to head back to town, but An convinced me to wait.
“I want you to see seahorses,” he said. “Also I want to see seahorses.”
So we hung out in the shade with a few fish buyers, and An started talking with them. They warmed up to us and soon enough were chatting and even singing happily. One of them gave An and I some berries that he had stashed in his motorbike helmet. An told me a broken story about how the berries represented long lost love. He said to be careful, when you eat them you might fall in love with someone.
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| Cupid berries? |
I hadn’t actually come prepared to collect any data, since I thought An and I were mostly there to chat with the fishermen and make a good impression. But our new friends shooed us off to check out what was on the boat. As An distractedly chatted with someone about clams, I saw a woman in yellow polka-dot pants approach the boat, and in a split-second exchange, her gloved hands held tightly to something. My stomach churning, I saw tiny little curled tails poking out from between her fingers.
“An!” I called to him, pointing. “Look!”
He ran up to the woman and asked if we could see the seahorses. She happily obliged, and we lay the four little creatures out on a piece of paper and I took a quick picture, with a pen as a size reference (as I said, I hadn’t brought any materials for actual data collection). Over the next two hours, nine more boats arrived, some carrying seahorses, some without. Whenever we weren’t investigating the catch from the boats, we were back on the dock with our new friends, who had cooked up a feast of fresh seafood and were eager for us to try it.
I ate a several different kinds of clam, snails, conch, and even a small shark – as the foreign guest of honour, I was privy to the dorsal fin. An was jealous. I gulped it down, gave a queasy smile, trying my best to make friends with these men who would make or break the next four months of my research. In the end, I must have done well, because they were very pleased with us. One of them, their “leader” if I can describe him that way, kept telling me (translated by An) that I needed to stay in Vietnam and get married, to form a proper partnership between Canada and Vietnam (he clasped his hands together in a gesture of harmony). I was reminded of the Director of the Research Institute in Hai Phong, who’d said a similar thing – that he’d hire me to work there in a second, and that there were plenty of young male researchers to choose from. The number of times I get asked if I’m married or whether I have a boyfriend is a bit alarming. Normally I brush it off as best I can, trying to explain that I’m in love with my research, that seahorses take up all my time. I don’t think it makes much sense to the Vietnamese…
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| An (in the blue shirt) with our new friends, enjoying a feast of fresh seafood. |
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