I am into our new house and sitting in my room looking out through the star fruit tree at the near setting sun. The tree is helping reduce the effects of the oppressive heat and lapping up the energy as demonstrated in a burst of growth; shoots all over directly from the trunk. The origin of Star Fruit Trees (Averrhoa carambola) is unknown, but it is probably native to Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and Southern China. It has never been located in the wild, but is known to have been domesticated throughout India and southeast Asia in prehistoric times, and was established in the American tropics 150 years ago. Locally its claim to fame is that it flowers and fruits all the year around, only stopping when the temperature drops below about 15 degrees: a temperature only reached for a month or so in a normal year.

At present we would love to get down to 25 degrees let alone 15. Two years ago there was a prolonged, maybe six week, period when it was 12 degrees or less - not enough to kill the tree, but it had a long holiday that year. What might kill it now is the fact that half its air space has been taken over by the building of our house, and that the ground around it was raised by two feet; we hope it does not experience this as trunk rotting damp - apparently that is where its tolerance ends! At present it is filling my large window (some two by one and a half metres) and bearing flowers and fruits.

While I write the sun has set, the mosquitoes are emerging, and the air is, thankfully, cooling as it gently moves. It is that lack of air movement that is the killer in Ha Noi, but here we are only three miles from the sea, and it seems that the differential pressures are enough to generate movement as the land and sea change relative temperatures.

Beyond the tree there is a small patch of ground which separates us from a busy side road and on the other side of which there are still a couple of hundred metres of paddy fields before the local junior school and other public buildings. The fields will no doubt be built on, but not yet and if I had been here a few weeks earlier I would have been watching, through the tree, the ox ploughs turning the soil and the (mostly) women painstakingly placing each small paddy seedling into the ground in the amazingly neat rows that they construct by eye alone. Now the seedlings with the heat have shot up to a foot or more and the work is over until weeding is needed. And anyway we are into the Tet holiday. Not much work in the fields will be done now for a couple of weeks. Everyone is too busy cleaning and polishing, buying and selling, wheeling and dealing, before the big event.

And so to Tet.

index