I'm not the type of person who goes on a holiday to a tropical island or any other beach destination to spend time off the sand away from the water. I want to see that blue liquid surface, choppy or glassy, every waking moment of my time there, to be hypnotised by the ebb and flow of waves, to feel my skin taut with dried salt water.
A beach holiday should be enjoyed prostrate, turning pages, elbow bending a beverage to one's lips – totally sedentary. I wouldn't even throw a frisbee. But when your travelling companion has a tendency to hyperactivity, a stinking rotten compromise must be made.
When I was forcibly wrenched from my banana lounge, it was not unlike a surgical procedure, the wooden slats of the chair leaving a lasting impression on my ample thighs.
And then I had to walk!
To the motorbike.
For we were journeying inland, on a dusty trail in search of pepper.
Just out of the main town, the road was unmade and the colour of Uluru. Not a drop of rain had fallen on Phu Quoc for several weeks. We knew it would be downright dirty. White safari suits and matching pith helmets were definitely out of the question!
An expedition ensued though. Our map was rather vague in its depiction of the location of the pepper farm. The map reference from memory was F5, which had not a road running through it. Vietnamese strategies for finding the way would need to be deployed – the good old common denominator technique in which a bunch of assorted locals are consulted along the way for their 'interpretation' – a bit like a game of charades. The problem is that many of them had not been to the pepper farm before. Some of them thought for inordinately long periods of time and then pointed in precisely the opposite direction to the one we were headed in. We persisted, southerly, where the majority of the fingers were pointed.
Along that southerly route, every feature of the roadscape was milk-chocolate brown. What would be green was brown, every surface tarnished. Clouds of dust swirled, lifted and descended behind each passing vehicle, eventually settling to create this brown colourless world. Travelling the dusty slipstream, where the brown powder attached itself with vigour to my sunscreened skin and was fast turning clean clothes into brown ones, could only have been worse had it been raining.
The further we ventured on, the more we felt that the pepper farm had perhaps been entirely coated and thus camouflaged in brown. Just before we were ready to retreat back to my preferred location – horizontal by the sea – a crude board with the word tieu (pepper) appeared attached to a fence at roadside. At this stage, we weren't concerned about whose pepper farm it was, whether it was the pepper farm or a pepper farm.
There was pepper in groves, dusty near the road, green and clean deeper in.
In a hot sunny courtyard, the male pepper folk were swinging in hammocks under some shade. Peppercorns, recently harvested from the trees, were being sorted in all manner of bamboo vessel, some still bunched, others rolling around like tiny fruit marbles. The red fruit is ripe and produces white pepper, the green produces black. Processes involving soaking, rubbing and sun-drying take place over a period of days. Keeping the dreaded brown road dust out of these steps has added further time and complication. The women pepper folk are soldiering on, crouched over and probably sick of the sight of these little heatballs.
It is not a crop of gold, with a kilo of pepper going for 120,000VND (USD.35, AUD.95). And that's the price for dumb tourists who ride miles on pot-holed trails, lungs full of dust, arriving like they've just come up from the mine. The majority of their crop must be sold for a song.
We buy up big. The mortar and pestle is going to get a right royal workout this year!
