We rolled into the Patthumwan Princess Hotel, another 4-star cozy home-away-from-home, at 1:15 this morning. (Scott and I are on the 28th floor.) We were greeted by a tall and gracious woman who distributed chilled glasses of guava juice, lime-green and wonderful, and then went through the passport and credit-card routine. Lights-out was at two for me, after a soak in a tub with Graham Greene's Quiet American of 1955, which I bought last night, on the street, in an obviously pirated edition, dotted with broken type and misspellings. I read it on the plane too, and it was a dose of something very familiar - Greene's view of life I mean, which meant a lot to me when I read his novels as a teenager. I was surprised to see that when I write fiction I use a voice that is much like this.. I guess The Power and the Glory made a bigger impression on me then I realized when I was 18.

For me it was nice to say goodbye to Binh, our guide from the Vietnam-US Friendship Society. Bright and eager as she was, she was the embodiment of the fabled "Intourist" guide from the cold war years, and I will be very glad to leave the war, and the cold war mind set, behind. Our official itinerary, despite the slogan "Vietnam is a country, not a war", was heavily focused on the war. And of course, on the atrocities laid at our door...

The day began with a trip to the near parts of the Mekong Delta. First we visited a high school. Sadly for us, it was almost empty of students, since this was a holiday. The headmaster was there, a gentle man, with a speech written out in a composition book. Given in Vietnamese of course, with Binh to translate. Also there were four Party officials. The school was an old one, begun in 1879, and switched over from the Lycee model in 1954. Currently the school has about 2,000 students, 30% of whom go on to university. Drop-out rate: 0, said the headmaster. Homework: about three hours a night. Shades of Saint Stephens! Discipline figures, given dutifully along with percentile scores on national exams, were also well below 1%. Hmmmm.

We looked at textbooks, paperbacks, light and compact in unit editions. They looked OK and they were recent, mostly from 2000. There were bowls of fruit and cold water to welcome us, but sadly, most of us did not know how to negotiate the fruit without making a mess (no utensils and no napkins), so it saw little action. Nobody wanted to make a fool of herself while four Party officials sat on the sidelines and watched.

The Party slogan over the white marble bust of Ho Chi Minh in our little meeting room: "Long live the Communist Party and Revolution of Vietnam." I liked the man, and I thought he was a little embarrassed when, at our request, he told us what the slogan was. But I felt it was culturally wrong for us to pepper him with detailed and specific questions, just as we would have at home, without a few of the flowery compliments that seem to be the proper preamble to a discussion in these parts. He had been a physics teacher before he was administrator. I sat on Binh's left, a few feet from him, and he had kind eyes.

As the headmaster had warned us, the infrastructure had not kept pace with the growth in numbers in his school (Oh, Florida!). We saw wooden bench/desk combinations, dreary classrooms with newspapers glued on the high windows to cut the morning glare, a single green-board in each room. No storage. No AC, anywhere. No posters, no maps, no visuals of any kind, either. No electronics in the classroom, and no screens, not even for film.

Class size, we learned, was typically about forty. We were told there were several classes for gifted and talented, and some for remedial work too. But all handicapped children, he said, attended a school of their own, with vocational training the goal, and eight years of schooling the norm for them. Apparently there is no recognition of "learning disabilities" as distinct from mental handicap. None of this actually distressed me. The man seemed to be good human being and I have no doubt that he was an educator much as we are, doing his best with the society he has to cope with. He told me about thirty percent of his parents have high school diplomas. Only about ten percent of the students are from farm families, he said.

Then it was on to the river and a tourist boat out to an island resort. The river was swift, wide, and brown. Cranes and industrial plants lined both sides. Tugs, barges, and small freighters were everywhere. They all flew Vietnam's very Communist flag, a yellow star on a red field. The tourist boat was a homegrown number of rough-cut wood, and the little sampans we boarded to travel the jungle canals were likewise homegrown. Each was paddled by one rower fore and aft, mostly women, barefoot, who worked squatting on the little covered-over triangles at either end. They were good, but awfully well-dressed, I thought. The canals were close, only a couple of meters wide. The water was brown and the vegetation overhung on both sides and sometimes arched overhead.

Once unloaded we traveled a path through a series of shops (eat coconut candy, buy, look) and finished up at a restaurant/home for lunch. There was a family orchestra with the same traditional instruments we have been hearing, and two children for the vocals, very nice in this setting. I bought the cassette to use in the classroom. I also tried with my wide-angle to capture the feeling of the kids in front of the orchestra to use with the cassettes; I hope I got it. Dad's guitar was a big-bellied acoustic with dark wood accents where periling would ordinarily be; I was fascinated by that. He also had a spring-loaded temple block that he operated with his big toe as he flat-picked the guitar, no chords, all arpeggio. Traditional Thai music, like Chinese, does not do harmonies. Some of us bought examples of the temple block instrument as souvenirs.

There was honey and a kind of honey-brandy to buy too, and it was very good. This plus the brandy with the cobras inside the yellow liquid were also very much in evidence. Jerry told us it was mellow but I was among the ones grossed-out by the snakes.

The home was large but simple. The roof was thatched palm over woven palm mats (good for five years, the guide said), there were large altars and platform beds, the interior walls were slats. School diplomas and certificates, all supersized, covered one wall. There were no pictures of Uncle Ho but there were photographs of an older couple under glass. It was obviously home to at least three generations and a young father was putting an infant to sleep in a hammock as we wandered through - it was nice. The family wardrobe hung near the kitchen space and there were lots of clean clothes on western-style hangers there too, all on a long rod. The floors in the cooking area were stamped earth but there were planks elsewhere. The family was clearly used to tourist parties. The dogs didn't even wake up.

Rain came and went, and the feeling of being under thatch while the rain hammered palmettos outside was lovely. The drum of rain on a palm-thatch roof drowned out all conversation - they must miss it when they go away.

Then another huge, multi-course meal followed. This one was built around a fish that stood up and looked like it had been rolled in crumbs, then torched. It was spectacular to look at but there wasn't much meat there.

What else? Gibbons in cages, a python to wrap around your neck, tiny finches too. We exited through a garden that surrounded the main buildings of a resort, with little arched bridges made of phony concrete logs - Gatlinburg style - and we were back on the boat and crossing the river, stuffed of course.

We had a long drive back to HCMC, stopping once impromptu to photograph Buddhist graves set in rice fields. This was fun and I took a picture I enjoyed very much, of Linda photographing a family of amazed - and amused - farmers. We skipped dinner, and had an hour's quick shop downtown. I bought film, scanned the used cameras in a series of shops (just like home really), and bought The Quiet American. This I read on the bus and in the airport and enjoyed very much.

Greene not only told a complex story with wonderful economy, he was totally prescient about the style and the content of American intervention. He was also both kind and convincing about the French Legionaries his reporter protagonist was covering. It was not hard for me to picture Capa and the manner of his death as I read the parts about desultory and inconclusive combat around Hanoi, and he included a shabby, wonderfully brief, snapshot of the fall of Dien Bien Phu. Even the Cao Dai temple made it into the story, in a not-too-flattering portrait. This was complete with details about the private army of 25,000 the cult operated in the fifties. The heart of the story was a picture of the reporter's relationship with a Vietnamese girl, a match for the stories I heard from my brother and others. The protagonist wound up delivering his rival for her, to a Communist assassination, in a most human way, telling himself all along that maybe he wouldn't, or maybe God would intervene and save the man...

Security was tight as we left Saigon. Our carry-ons were X-rayed no less than three times. I worried about film and cumulative fog levels. I was also worried about Scott, who was clearly ill, and he was not in sight when I took our bags through. But he turned up at the gate, pale and sweaty, and he was besieged by a dozen teachers, offering Echinacea, Cipro, Ibuprofen, etc etc. He handled it all with humor but I still felt sorry for him.

The flight was easy, only an hour more or less, and I enjoyed seeing numbers of old double-decked 747's around us in Bangkok when we landed. Our new bus was double-decked too and all upholstered in fabulous colors, with two twisty stairs to the upper levels - we had reached new heights of flashy tourism. On the lower level, between the stairs, was a honeymoon suite, a pink salon with a card table and settees. I peeked in to be sure that's what it was.

I was tired today and grateful for a late start. We went to the embassy, listened to a second secretary try to give us a briefing. He was refreshing and it all felt a lot better than it had in Hanoi. I have detailed notes elsewhere on a handout. Thailand is not a "donor nation", but a prosperous one, and proud never to have been a colony. He spent considerable effort on the huge love the people have for the King and the royal family, and how much we must respect that. The history, Thailand's alliance with the Japanese in WWII, for example, and its difficulties with its neighbors and its generous attitude toward its many ethnic refugees, was familiar to me.

I asked about size and disposition of the Thai armed forces. "Substantial," he said, "Certainly more than 200,000." And it seems they have never been deployed in a modem war, but only deployed "for internal control", he said, and he let his face show his wry feelings about that. The Thai army is certainly a tight-pants outfit, that much we have seen just getting about town.

A quick one: as we climbed the stairs to the pedestrian bridge over the road by the embassy, we came upon three American naval officers in khaki. I was surprised and blurted out to Libby, "Oh look! Some of our folks!" and the one nearest me turned over his shoulder as he passed and smiled and said, "Yes, we are." It was a warm and unexpected moment and I needed it somehow.

In the afternoon we had a round-robin conference in the hotel. This was our last session with Jerry Fry. This was a good professional conference and we shared concepts, books, and classroom lessons, both new and used. **1 have separate notes.** Then we scattered for the Asia bookstore and Cabbages and Condoms restaurant. I stayed at the hotel to write instead, but wound up sleeping two hours first. Yes, a little tired and a little stressed by looking, looking, looking.