A portion of an E-mail written by Patrick Martino…

Karaoke and a Yellow Submarine

I visited the cool central high land city of Dalat, which once served as a hill station for the French and then made my way to the coastal city of Nha Trang.

Nha Trang has a gorgeous stretch of beach overrun with far too many people and with a plethora of too modern hotels running along the strip. The beach and the ambiance of paradise were exploited to perfection. Man had again dumped the dime store on a gift from nature.

The beach was nice but nearly as nice as some of the remote spots I have seen in the pure azure waters off the coast of Thailand. Nor did it compare to the coral reefs I came to love off of the Perinthian islands in Malaysia.

With its large ensemble of tourists, Nha Trang was a party town. It is the place in Vietnam, where young English lads! and young English girls on their three-month marathon tour of the world along with a spattering of Irish, Swedes, and Dutch come to drink cheap San Miguel beer in the evenings and lounge in the sun in the afternoons.

I gave up trying to relax on the beach. For one I fry. Secondly shooing away the book hawkers trying to sell the same three illegally photocopied novels, The Sorrow of War, The Quiet American, the Girl in the Picture, and of course bootleg copies of the Lonely Planet for Vietnam was too much of a full time task.

I did what all of the before mentioned tourists do then in Nha Trang: party or at least try to party.

I was far from a fish in college. My mates on the crew team in college called me slow drinker and unfortunately I have only gotten slower. I made a valiant effort in Nha Trang and even persuaded myself to take what I thought would be a raucous boat ride into the waters off the Vietnamese coast or so it was described in my Lonely Planet as being. And I quote.

"The hottest ticket in Nha Trang is Mama Hanh's trademark "Green Hat boat tours" Mama Hanh is a Nha Trang legend who went from running a tiny seafood shack to operating a flotilla of island hoping party boats.

Mama Hanh's tours seem to get more rave reviews from travelers than anything else on the coast. From guzzling fruit wine at the impromptu "floating bar" to deck side dancing. How she does it seven days a week is a biological mystery. "

To me this appeared a shining endorsement. It sounded like a bonnified good time. Given the high percentage of long legged blond Swedes on the beach that inadvertently caught my eye in the last few days I thought the boat trip would be very fun indeed. I pictured spring break, Cancun in Nha Trang complete with MTV coverage and a crazy floating party that would last until dawn. It would be food, libation, dancing, and swimming in the sea.

Nha Trang is not Cancun. It is nowhere even close. Asia and Vietnam in particular is never what you anticipate it to be. It defies prediction and either grossly underachieves or exceeds expectations.

My boat cruise was an underachiever. It was far from worthy of mention in the annuals of party lore or an MTV Spring break special. It would have been more appropriate for Lawrence Welk as it was punctuated with that most peculiar of Asian pastimes Karaoke!!!

My boat was perfectly suited to the demographics of the geriatric Mr. Welk, as it was laden with nuclear families of Vietnamese tourists and not the Swedish bikini team as I had hoped. Oh there was a Swede on board and another American but unfortunately they lacked the accruements of the fairer sex. They were guys. Guys with the same party centered logic as I had. Examining our fellow passengers, children blotted with sunscreen, grandmothers with sun visors, husbands with dress shirts and slacks perfectly outfitted for swimming and moms in floral print dresses the Swede t! urned to me to beg the question. "Are we on the right boat?"

The famous Mama Hanh was nowhere to be seen and our vessel was not named the barnacle but it could have been.

It was a converted fishing vessel. The deck had been cleared of lines and fishing nets. Benches to sit on replaced the old gear. A roof protected us and blotted out the sun.

The paint was glossy blue and thick enough if you chipped away at it it would match the thickness of a quarter. The boat was roughly 48 feet in length. She carried a crew of four and had roughly 25 passengers.

We left Nha Trang harbor chugging away, the large clunking engine choking and coughing on a fur ball of exhaust with every rhythmic thump thump thump of its aged pistons. Our progress was painfully slow but the journey was made all the worthwhile because of it. It was a fine languid day. I relaxed with a large grin on my face and admired the view of the cobalt blue waters and the stony rebouts called islands swimming in the wake of tropical splendor.

We stopped and snorkeled, ate, drank, and did everything Mama Hanh's brochure said we would. The only thing missing from our grand festivities with the five or so families of domestic tourists-a real wild bunch-were of course any remotely attractive women and the signing. Oh yes signing!!!

Westerners for the most part I think don't like to sing. We find it embarrassing. Maybe it is because so many of us are terrible at it. Standing up and belting out a golden oldie in public to which we have probably forgotten half the words brings great shame. I suppose if we sang more often we would have more fun, sound better, and enjoy it more. Somewhere, somehow, though in America we lost our enthusiasm for singing. Perhaps it was when TV came into households and families no longer sang round the piano in the evening for entertainment. Perhaps it was when Mr. Welk came on television and made us realize just what bad signers we were. Whatever it was singing has long since been regulated to the privacy of the shower, the car, and the baseball stadium where we can anonymously belt out the words to the national anthem with 40,000 ! other voices with no fear of shame because no guy without his nuts in a vice can hit that high note "to the land of the FREEEEEE" anyways.

Asians seem to have no shame. They don't care if they sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks. They love to bust out in sonerific poorly pitched versions of the ballads they hold dear. To the untrained ear it sounds like nasally whining, whale singings at great depth, or a bent and rusted saw played with a fibrous bow. Wing Whinny Wang Wong I call it. Add to this a music accompaniment, which lacks any real instruments. A steady drum machine creates a back beat while a synthesizer plays the annoying melody. Karaoke is positively dreadful. Give me Chinese water torture any day over having to be any where near the vicinity of a Karaoke lounge.

On our little sampan floating on the sea the crew saw the majority of the passengers were not sloshed hard drinking Westerners who had quaffed every last brew on board and were consequently jumping off of the top deck screaming "Cannonball!!!" The crew thus sought to naturally entertain us with what? Karaoke of course!

Technically it was not Karaoke. There was no Karaoke machine on board with a TV monitor and white text scrolling across the screen. There was not a seedy lounge or black leather couches in a dark lit back room. This however did not dissuade the captain and crew of the Barnacle like boat. Karaoke conquers all!

It was immediately after a fantastic lunch of baked fish, rice, fried spring rolls, vegetables, and fruit that the master of ceremonies, the purveyor of fun, our cruise director first announced "Now we have entertainment for you. Very funny. You like very much. Funny funny. Very funny. Very funny." Funny, funny funny and very funny seeming to be the only descriptive words in his lexicon.

If Vietnam had a version of the love boat the cruise director surely would have been on it.

He wore a golf shirt, sunglasses, a white baseball hat and a whistle round his neck. He looked a bit like a track coach and was fully prepared with his little whistle to whip us into shape by signing Karaoke.

With the dishes cleared form the tables and the rest of the crew assembled he blew his whistle, a sharp rasping thrilling note that seemed to pierce the ear and float in air before he announced. "Now we have entertainment! Karaoke!"

Oh the horror! Karaoke! I was on a floating Karaoke boat from hell and to imagine I paid for this.

He smiled and enthusiastically belting into a microphone told us "We sign Vietnamese song. Words Vietnamese and English."

The Karaoke machine and its TV monitors on our tiny vessel had been ingenious supplanted with song sheets and the ships crew now doubled as a rag tag band. The cook a wiry fellow with gaps in his teeth strummed away at an electric guitar while the first mate banged away with strips of bamboo on an eclectic mix of broken steel pots and pans which formed his makeshift drum kit. He even had a base drum made out of a large white plastic barrel labeled Castrol motor oil. He banged away at the bass drum with a hand made kick pedal fused together and welded from rusty boat parts. The band played and the agony began.

Terrorists aren't gun-toting vigilantes. They are off key Vietnamese tourists. The entire host aboard our tiny ship knew the words. They sung with gusto from the youngest child to the oldest man. Wing Whinny Wang Wong!

When would it end how could I escape. Where were the Swedish girls? Where was Mama Hanh and the incredible drink fest I had imagined. Karaoke wasn't mentioned in the Lonely Planet or in any of the brochures I had read. Could I magically open a can of beer and be transported to some beach full of young co-eds bouncing about playing volleyball like every beer commercial of this past century. Please to escape. Oh the humanity. Anything but Karaoke!

It only got worse.

The cruise director began looking for volunteers to sing another sing as soon as the Vietnamese/ English nightmare, without a word of English, was completed.

"Ok" our cruise director spoke "Ok ,Ok, Ok, " Ok was his monosyllabic filler. "Ok, Ok, Ok, Now we sing song from everyone of yours country. Ok. Ok. We sing different song Ok."

The cruise director was looking at the only two guests who were not Vietnamese, American, or Swedish. They were two Koreans who also shared a mutual affinity for this strange Asian pastime.

"Ok where are you from?" he mumbled into his microphone. The two Korean men with round apple faces replied simply, meekly "Korea" "Ok, Ok then we sing Korean song!!!"

The cruise director seemed elated to impress his guests with a song from their native land. So the cook as lead guitar began to sway, while the drummer slashed away at his makeshift drum set. The cruise director sang.

The Koreans instantly recognized the song. They were handed spare microphones and belted out the words with undaunted courage and a scant sense of humility or musical style. They danced, jumped on the tables, and made a greater raucous than the entire chorus of the Vietnamese tourists a few moments before. It was awful.

The Swedes turn was next. The blonde hair blue eyed Lars or Yon or Clause I forget his name was asked by the boisterous master of ceremonies "Ok, Ok Where you from!"

"Sweden" the mild mannered Swede responded.

"Ok Sweden " the MC shouted at his band "Now we sing a Swedish song!"

I was shocked, seriously impressed. If this paltry band really knew a Swedish song or at least did a rendition of an ABBA classic I would eat my hat.

The band didn't know one. "But I don't know Swedish song. You speak English yes? Ok! Swedish English- Same Same but different. We sing English song OK!!!!" The master of ceremonies kept shouting as if to infect the entire ocean with his too happy constitution.

He was not finished with his questioning.

"Where are you from?" he asked me and my fellow American passenger friend. "America" we responded in unison. We should have said Botswana just to see if he knew a song from there.

"Ok! Ok! We sing American song Yes? You know American song Yellow submarine?"

Of course every one knows the famous American song "Yellow submarine." It is reassuring to know the British rock invasion never occurred and the Fab four were really born in a steel town near Harrisburg Pennsylvania.

I protested. Never try protesting in a communist country. It doesn't work.

"Yellow submarine isn't an American song. It's a British song. The Beetles were British."

The master of ceremonies mockingly chastised me, laughing, grinning, and smiling as he wavered back and forth gleefully with his microphone, confident in his prowess as cruise director and bestower of fun. Could this maniac of Karaoke perversion ever imagine some people might not actually like signing Karaoke? It would be a foreign concept, completely alien, akin to a Vietnamese misunderstanding why Westerners might find eating dogs so wonderfully strange.

"Same Same" he scoffed before I could protest further. The second coming of the beetles then struck up the melody. Ringo banged away at the Castrol plastic drums. McCartney our cruise director was without a bass but attacked the lyrics and played the tambourine instead. Lenin the cook was without a Beetle mop like hair cut but played the guitar with gusto. The fourth beetle whose name I always forget was washing dishes.

Swedes don't sign in general unless there drunk or in the process of getting drunk and with no women on bored their was no reason to get drunk. My fellow American was just as reticent as his Scandinavian friend. I was the only one who even attempted to sign. I credit it I suppose to having been in the chorus in high school. Girls like to sing and there were lots of them in chorus.

So I sang alone accompanied by the second coming of the Beetles and the cruise director who didn't know any of the words beyond "Live, Yellow, Submarine."

There were no verses, no "In the town where I was born, Lived a man who sailed to sea, And he told us of his life, In the land of submarines."

It was just the chorus. "We all lived in a yellow submarine," which the band and the manic master of ceremonies thought perfectly wonderful. He was signing the greatest of American songs after all.

"We live all in yellow submarine. We live all in yellow submarine. We live all in yellow submarine!!"

The drummer was rushing, the lead guitar missed his notes and everything sounded just about as terrible as terrible can get.

But the absurdity of the whole situation, a karaoke boat on a tropical sea. The awfulness and yet the smiling happy faces of a boat of Vietnamese tourists and a MC with no limit to his cheer eventually made me smile, laugh, and then guffaw. Only in Asia. My spirits were lifted and I belted out the song louder and more off key than could be compared. I belted it out like a religious chant and gleefully laughed myself to joy. I had succumbed to Karaoke madness. If you can't beat them join them. I still would have preferred a boat full of tall long legged blond Swedes though.

Index of Patrick’s Stories