In an inauspicious start Lewis realised just as we were poulling out of the bus station that he'd left his passport at the motel. Up north they're pretty vigilent about taking your passport over night in the motels, but in Sai Gon not so. Lewis had automatically handed his over, but when Ossie and I tried to do the same about ten minutes later they wouldn't take them. Since no-one else had handed theirs over either it didn't occur to me to ask for Lewis' back when I paid up the next day. So we made a big fuss and leapt of the bus and removed our carefully stashed packs and agreed to met up with Ben, Jen and Ossie in Chau Doc.
While Lewis got a moto back to the hotel to pick up the passport I sat with the bus station guards drinking Pepsi and reading the Canterbury Tales. The guards were friendly and helpful, insisting that I sit at their little table and monopolise all the available space with my bags. when Lewis returned we discovered that one of the other three had all five ticket stubbs and we were expected to buy whole new tickets. It took around half an hour to convince the very helpful guard who had arranged the moto to the hotel as well as the first round of tickets that we should be allowed on anyway. The trouble seemed to be the ticket lady, who, although she was not disputing that we had indeed shown her tickets for the first bus, and had undeniably not stayed on that bus, simply would not agree to letting us on the next bus. By the time the guard had managed to satisfy her with some kind of handwritten ticket we were at least two buses behind the others and had managed to end up on the crapper of the buses.
The trip was nothing short of amazing. We spent most of the trip glued to the window looking out into the incredible delta of the mighty Me Kong. Stilted houses, boats, fisheries, footbridges, marshes, water buffelo...it was everything I had expected and more. I won't try to descibe it here because I am short on time and will inevitably fail. We immediately regretted our decision not to take the Easy Rider trip all the way to the border as we saw little dirt roads winding through the delta across rickety bridges and between lush rice paddies. The biggest surprise was how densely populated the area was. Little stilted houses were packed in side by side all along the river road. Every piece of available land and water was being used. Obviously the place is incredibly fertile and produces most of Viet Nam's wet rice.
I'm afraid there's not much to this as it's 3.56pm, I've been here since 11aqm, I haven't eaten all day, I'm hot and tired and can't actually be arsed. But I have to get this up to date now before I lose it completely
So the bus trip was amazing, inclusing a bus-on-ferry- crossing of the river at Long Xuyen which was very exciting in principle but not so in actuality. We arrived to find that Ben, Jen and Ossie's bus had got a flattie and been delayed such that they had arrived minutes before us. Despite this we managed to pass by them drinking beers waiting for us without either party realising and didn't meet up for another two hours, as which time they were still trying to find a hotel. It was Saigon Liberation Day and the place was packed.
Not much to report about Chau Doc itself: we booked a boat across the border for first thing the next morning and retired reasonably early.
Here ends the Vietnam section
I've not heard a single Vietnamese person since Ha Noi refer to Sai Gon as Ho Chi Minh City. Even many of the tour advertisements use the old name.
Sai Gon is a reasonably vast city of intensly mad traffic. We really did little more than chill out and plan our next few moves so my only sense of the scope of the city comes from the motorcycle ride in a few taxi/bus rides in and out. The republican and AMerican influence is still evident; it is much more developed than Hanoi and the people are much more metropolitan. Flasher cars, finer clothes and more attention to exteriors as opposed to interiors.
On Friday at about 4pm it started pouring and continued to do so for about another two hours. The streets filled and people were sloshing around knee deep in water and rubbish. We headed to a restaurant on the corner to watch the fun and found our table submerged in about a foot of water. SO we put our feet up and watched as hundreds of scooters, motorbikes and cars churned their way along the swirling river. Every successful pass brought waves crashing around our calves and everytime someone had to stop their exhaust pipe flooded and they had to push their bike home. Folks persevered though, business as usual. While kids formed makeshift body-boards out of plywood the shopkeepers built barracades or swept water continously out the door. The restaurant was still serving food, and the traffic just kept coming. The manager of our motel, inexplicably named Betty (the motel not the manager), said it happens often though not everyday, and that it always lasts just a couple of hours and then subsides. True to form the rain stopped after about and hour and a half and half an hour later there was no sign it had ever been there.
From Sai Gon we organised a failed boat trip to the Cambodian border. The trip was supposed to involve a two day boat tour: the first day around the Me Kong and staying the night in Chau Doc and the second day crossing the border and heading by boat to Phnom Penh. We wanted to head straight to Kampot, down south, so we arranged to do the first day and as far as the border on the second day and arrange our own transport from there. Unfortunately the 'boat tour' turned out to be a bus tour with a couple of hours on a boat for good measure. We were told that we would travel from My Tho to Chau Doc by boat but when we got to My Tho it became apparent that we would cruise on the river for a bit before taking a five hour bus ride to Chau Doc. We ranted ands raved and phoned the tour office in Sai Gon but eventually we had to let the tour go. Hanh Cafe, who had booked the tour for us, was just the agent, the guy runningn the tour didn't really give a shit if they'd fucked up; it wasn't his problem. SO we bussed back to Sai Gon and made it Hanh Cafe's problem and they promptly returned our money and paid for the bus back and even apologised profusely. The twat who'd sold us the tour had made a mistake. Alas he wasn't there to face the music.
Since none of the tour groups were offering the kind of boat trip we were after we decided to get a local bus to CHau Doc where we'd heard you could more easily arrange a border crossing by boat. Thus we drank yet more pungent yet weak (and possibly still fermenting) draft beer, had a pizza or three, watched some travelling performers swallow knives and snakes and things and agreed to met earlyish the next morning and head to the local bus station.
Part adrenalin rush, part scenic drive, part field trip and part social outing the trip with the Easy Riders was simply awesome.
Hooning around on the bikes was supurb. It really it the best way to see the countryside and, despite the sore arse afterwards, it's a very enjoyable ride. The aircon on the bikes is better than any stupid tour bus, you have a 360 degree view and the added bonus of sounds and smells and people calling out to you. But I've waxed lyrical about all this before so let's just leave it at hooning around on the bikes was supurb.
The scenery was really interesting. Rural life went on all around us, old jungle and new pine forests flourished, acres and acres of coffee plantations carpeted the hills and perfumed the air. Little wooden houses dotted the landscape and little black pot-bellied pigs scampered about the place. Wet rice agriculture was marginalised by cash crops like rubber, coffee, pepper and cashew trees. Cows grazed along the roadside and meandered back and forth at will. The effects of agent orange and napalm were visible on hilsides where blackened lifeless trees jutted out of scrubby infertile land while the slash and burn agriculture practiced by relocated minority groups left similar hillsides blackened and empty--a different method of deforestation, a different kind of destruction. Very little of the original jungle remains, but the government has tried to restore the land using an immense reforestation programme involving pine. Much of the land has recovered and is now rich, red, fertile farmland onto which thousands of people from all over Vietnam have been re-settled. The central highlands are fertile, lush, quaint, idyllic, but also hard.
The trip from Da Lat to Sai Gon is almost an advertisement for Vietnamese communism. Recently the government has liberalised agriculture such that farmers can now grow and sell cash crops for their own profit rather than having to produce exclusively for the government and survive by subsistence farming alone. During the four days we were on the bikes we saw many of the ways that locals support themselves from cottage industries like rice products (noodles, crackers and wine) to more considerable enterprises like cashew orchards and factories and silk worm farms. Families or whole villages run these operations out of their own houses and usually only one step in a given process is undertaken by any single group. For example we saw one family making the bamboo shelves used for keeping silk worms, a second family raising silk worms in the shelves on mulberry bushes grown and harvested by another family down the road and yet another family running the factory where the worms are divested of their silk and the threads are spun and woven into cloth. Later we visited ethnic minority groiups who buy the silk thread, dye it and make various beautiful articles to sell to the tourists who regularly visit their village. Nothing is wasted and everything fits together like kitset to make a closed system. The slushy leftovers from the ricewine distillatioin is fed to pigs, keeping them placid and lazy so that they don't resist or burn off too much valuable fat. Cashew and coffee husks and scrap from the lathe at the plywood factory are used to fuel ovens in cashew factories and brick factories. Most byproducts of the various production processes are recycled as pig food, fuel or fertiliser. To a certain extent everyone is winning. While it is not strictly communistic it is still pretty far from capitalism where one large company would control the whole process and use cheap imported materials to reduce costs and increase production. Somehow the cold efficiency of capitalist production seems incredibly wasteful when compared to the holistic, integral efficiency of the rural ecomony.
That said, many of the machines the people are using, thrown together as they are out of salvaged parts and diesal engines, are ingenious yet incredibly dangerous. Khoa himnself is missing half of the index finger on his left hand after a saw mill accident many years ago. Obviously it comes down to making a living: safety gear and standards are expensive, inconvenient and basically unheard off. Much of the labour in the factories responsbile for turning the raw materials into sellable products is provided by young kids. Watching a boy and a girl, maybe ten or twelve years old, putting together wooden crates by hammering nails in with three swift hard strokes was a little surreal. And then there were the fifteen year old boys drilling holes in the tops of large cable reels with a huge scary looking machine and no safety gloves or glasses. Of course in Vietnam there is no such thing as ACC
Checking out the local enterprises was really interesting, but so was meeting and hangin out with the four chaps from the Easy Riders. Binh, the senior driver of the four, was a co-pilot for the Republican Army to an American Pilot during the AMerican War (aka the Vietnam War).He'd spent 4 years in a re-education camp after the war during which he was taught to do everything from build a house to survive in the jungle for days at a time. He was born in ther Me Kong Delta but his family moved into Sai Gon when he was a boy and much later he was drafted into the Republican Army at the age of 19. After the re-education camp he moved to Da Lat looking for work and pretty girlsd (for which Da Lat is famous). He has a phenomenol knowledge of the area, the war, and the modern issues facing VIetnam. He has the kind of colourful colloquial English that is distinctively American, but also a much more sophisticated political language which perhaps reflects his time in the re-education camp. He's a tremendous guy, always smiling, always joking, yet never speaks a trivial word.
The day trip had me on Binh's japanese bike, Lewis with Trung, and Ossie with Thien. The trip to Sai Gon clashed with Trung's job driving a Danish family around so we swapped Trung for Khoa who, because there are so many Khoas in the Easy Riders, has taken the nickname David. All the guys were safe, reliable drivers, to the point where we even urged them to be a bit less responsible. Trung and Khoa spoke extremely good ENglish and were both very polished and articulate. Thien had only recently joined and was learning the ropes. He was generally pretty quiet and reserved but was also incredibly helpfuland respectful. Football games, beers, incredible meals, jokes and stories were the order of the days, and it was all good.
Eventually we made it to Sai Gon in one piece, despite the manic rush hour traffic in which we arrived, and mananged to successfully meet up with Ben and Jen. The lads were exhausted and suffering in Sai Gon's opressive heat hailing as they were from cooler climes. As always it was wierd saying goodbye and the nasty business of money seemed to make everyone uneasy but after dollars were exchanged and thanks and good wishes expressed the lads departed and, much to the relief of my aching bum, the trip was over.
It is a sobering feeling to realise you have blown your travel budget, especially when it seriously jeopardises the rest of your trip. There's nothing worse than having to go home with your tail between your legs. We simply spent too much time and money doing cool shit in CHina and Vietnam. It is the budget travellers dilemma:pass through quickly and cheaply, or invest time and money to see the sights. A trip without sight-seeing is still only half a trip no matter how noble the rhetoric.
For me more frustrating than blowing the budget was the realisation that we'd spent so much time and moeny in Vietnam and had still managed to miss the point. We could have got a bus straight from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City and onto the Cambodian border and saved ourselves a considerable amount of trouble, time and dollars. Somehow we'd ended up on an Open Bus tour doing the Highway 1 tourist trail.
Don't get me wrong: we've had a ton of fun and the tourist trail is as much an authentic part of modern Vietnam as the less beaten path. I am no rmomantic looking for 'untouched' environments and 'unchanged' peoples. I am not the kind of anthropologist who dreams of first contact. Tourism in Vietnam is an economy7 unto itself and no impression of modern Vietnam would be complete without. Just because tourism is a dirty word doesn't mean it has nothing to teach us about the country.
In Vietnam concepts of tourism have been reversed. Budget travellers (backpackers etc) are so prevalent that tours are not only the easiest but the cheapest way to get around. In CHina tours are overpriced, inflexioble and frequently riddled with hidden costs. By taking local buses and remaining independant yopu have more freedom and save time and money. In Vietnam local buses are generally not cheaper than tour buses and are mor prone to hidden costs and scams. Added to that is the fact that to get from wherever they drop you to wherever you need to go usually involves being harassed and/or ripped off and/or intimidated by the motomafia. There is always a local price and a tourist price for any product or service and it becomes very tiresome and expensive to navigate the hazards oneself. Often it's just not worth it. So we became disillusioned and lazy and followed National Highway 1 towards Saigon.
We never did really make it really off the beaten track. OUr walk out to Vinh Moc was the closest we got really, and it rocked but by god was it hard work. Our failure though was not so much about not going to obscure places on obscure buses. The problem was that while accepting defeat on the independant travel front we never really gave the tours a chance. We went from place to place by Open Bus, frustrated, hot, tired and cynical. We saw very little because everytime we left the hotel we got screwed somewhere or sweated away all of our energy. In CHina we arrived at bus stations and stayed near them, in the midst of mundane city life. In Vietnam we got dropped in tourist zones and couldn't be arsed trying to find and reach locations outside of them. It sucked.
The motorbike trip from Hue to Hoi An really showed us the other side of the tour industry. The boat trip in Nha Trang was also a success. Keen to see a bit more of the countryside we headed to Dalat, in the centrsal highlands, with dreams of the Ho CHi Minh trail.
And so evolved our predicament: sitting over beers negotiating with the easy riders. Having realised that motorcycle tours were about the best compromise between guided and independant travel we were now in a position to rescue our Vietnamese experience. And so we contemplated the budget travellers dilemma: to spend or not to spend. The Easy Riders are a bunch of motorcycle tour guides who run out of Dalat. The first easy riders were all ex-republican soldiers of mid to high rank who needed to seek alternatives to the many jobs blocked to them. These days many younger guys have joined them and the squad is about 70 strong.
The Easy Riders are not cheap. At USD50 a day there are cheaper tours in Vietnam. What they offer, however, is a set of very flexible tours, around Dalat and even further afield, aimed at seeing local people doing everyday things. Whereas much of the economy along National Highway one is tourism based most folks in the highlands have to make a living off the land. What we saw was an opportunity to balance out the rat race of the considerable tourism based economy and lifestyle with the equally considerable rural production based ecomony and lifestyle. Alas, at fifty dollars a day, having already blown the budget, it was out of our reach.
We compromised: we took a day tour around the Dalat region. Halfway through the day we sat in a very modern Buddhist temple on top of a large hill and admitted that ity wasn't enough. After much deliberation we decided to take the 2 day trip to Saigon. Further discussion with the lads revealed that it didn't include much of the war torn region or the all important Ho Chi Minh trail. We twisted and we turned and we managed to negotiate to do the first 2 days of the 3 day tour to Ho CHi Minh city, which would get us as far as Gia Nghia from whence we could get a bus to Saigon. After Day One of that trip we reconsidered and signed up for the third day to get all the way to Ho CHi Minh. An extra two days woulkd have got us all the way to the border at Vinh Xuong via the Mekong Delta (the lead driver's home region) but, although we were dying to take them up on it, by that time we were really really over budget and really really couldn't afford it.
Here ends part one of the Dalat to Saigon story. We're now in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and our computer has died. It will be very difficult for me to update henceforth, but I'll try. I'm out of time now as we're meetin Ben, Jenny and Ossie for dinner soon. We've been in the Internet Cafe for two hours. Th power seems to go out in Phnom Penh at least once a day. Thank god for auto-save! Tomorrow we head to Kampot to hire a pick-up and cruise around Bokor National Park and environs. SO far Cambodia is opressively hot and humid. The Mekong Delta was out of this world and I wish we'd taken the damn motorcycle tour through it. Neapl has a ceasefire and is back on the itinerary. It looks like we may have to stop in Thailand or China to teach and earn more money. Sigh. All that and more later.
Hope you are all well and enjoying life. deb/debs/debbie
After a particularly bad lunch at an 'Indian' restaurant in Hoi An we swore off all restaurants with English menus and/or especially serving western style foods. Terrible pizzas, unrecognisable steaks, bland brushetta and garlic bread: we've had it all. The Indian meal completed the circle. The menu was expansive and we ordered up a storm: mutton tikka masala, chicken tikka masala, mutton rogan josh, mutton korma and some kind of mutton-spinach thing along with garlic nan, keema nan and kashmiri nan, pilau rice and raita. We rubbed our hands in glee and made bets on the length of time we would have to wait. In the end everybody was right at least once as the dishes arrived one by one at random intervals. The rice was pretty good. The keema nan was passable. The raita was some kind of yoplait rip off with cucumber and extra fruit added. The garlic nan had margerine smeared all over it and the kashmiri nan had fruit salad on it. The real let down though was that the sauces were all identical and made from curry powder and yoghurt, and this set the scene for the real shocker: all the mutton dishes were made with pork. Even Ossies Spinach number had been made from the same base, but had food colouring added. Disappointed we were, but not surprised enough to complain. We paid our money and moved on.
Somehow having failed to learn our lesson we ventured to Restaurant 7c in Nha Trang last night: this apparently being a gernman sausage restaurant. We were pleasantly surprised. All the sausages were indeed sausagey, the fried potato and bacon was scrumptious and the garlic bread with shark was excellent. My pork chop (thin like schnitzel, naturally) was a weeny bit tough and Jen claims the mashed potato was powdered but it was otherwise awesome. The owner/operator appeared at the end of the meal to ensure we were satisfied and it suddenly all made sense--he was actually German!
Anyway, we had a lovely day out on the water today. We signed up for a speedboat tour involving fishing and snorkling. It was my first time on a speedboat and it was ace! It was a bit like an amusement park ride at times with the lurching and tilting and occasional liftoff. We stopped for a spot of fishing with plain reels and shrimp for bait. When Ben caught a sprat as soon as he put the line in the water we thought it was a sign of things to come. Alas it turned out to be a bad sign: after almost three hours of fishing Ben, Jen and the driver had caught a couple of sprats each and the rest of us had nothing. We gave up the ghost and headed to a secluded island to have a barbeque lunch, minus the monsters we were going to catch, and followed it up with a couple of hours of snorkling. Snorkling, also, was a first for me and it exceeded expectations. Honestly, it's never really been high on my list of things to do, but it was super cool. The area we were snorkling in was not fantastic, actually, and at first there appeared to be absolutely nothing to see but with a bit of patience schools of tiny fish and a few larger fish of several varieties appeared out of the weed. Ben even managed to catcht a crab but liberated it soon after. All in all a good day out despite the disappointing fish yield and the inevitable sunburn.
The boys have just finished watching Arsenal versus Tottenham and we're off out to dinner. Ossie, Lewis and I are off to Dalat at 8am tomorrow while Ben and Jenny are hanging around to do some diving and such like here. We'll meet up in Ho Chi Minh city in a few days.
After a shitty overnight 12 hour bus ride we're finally in Nha Trang, beach resort and all round foreigner magnet. The bus ride along the hilly, twisting coastal highway was uneventful until about 2am when the bus hit something. There was an alarming thud, and then the sickening sensation of something going under the wheels. My imagination went wild as the bus driver flinched but didn't stop and his co-driver woke up and headed for the front of the bus at light speed. In the dark of night I wase concinved it was some unfortunate soul on a motorbike, but then I reasoned that I'd not heard the smashing of glass or plastic that would surely occur during such a collision. Five minutes later as I was still wondering if the driver would ever stop we passed an old man on a bicycle with no lights at all (I'm sure I don't need to mention that he also had no helmet) and my blood ran cold. It could easily have been a person on a bike, or even a person walking. Ten minutes later the bus finally pulled off the road and the three bus-dudes got out and had a cigarette while they inspected the bus for damage. When it had been established that the bus was fine they got back on and we got back on the road. I noticed the 2IC didn't leave the drivers side again until we pulled up at the drop off point in Nha Trang. In the cold, hard light of day we casually looked the bus over but found no sign of blood and all agreed that if we'd hit anything alive the driver would have, if not stopped, at least registered a bit more shock. Needless to say not much sleep was had on the bus and when we got in at 6 this morning we had coffee, beer and breakfast and then booked into a motel and went to bed.
Got up again around eleven and have been writing all day. Is now 7:05 pm and I'm finally up to date, all except for the photos and the actual physical posting to the site. Still, I should be able to get it all up and finished before we got out at 8. Ahhh the relief. Now if only I can keep it this way!... Possibly heading to Dalat tomorrow depending on what we find in Nha Trang...
Hue: city of world heritage sites/sights. Unfortunately we ended up stuck in tourist central, bogged down by laziness and inertia and overwhelmed by heat. This is fast becoming the story of our Vietnamese leg actually. Trying to organise five people, coupled with heat and massive local resistance to tourists just doing their own thing is resulting in a wierd kind of experience where we stay at our hotel to avoid being in a tourist trap. It really is very difficult to just do it yourself in Vietnam, and trying to do so just sets you up as a target for the locals. We are finally coming face to face with desperate cynacism that is the legacy of hundreds of years of war. Pleasant seeming locals turn out to be scamsters, moto-taxi drivers rule the streets and two minute noodle inspired Pho Bo (beef noodle soup) at a small family joint cost as much as bifsteak at a fancy restaurant. It's a mad world where even upmarket tourist restaurants do not deliver: Pork Chops in Garlic Sauce and Banana Grilled Pork turn out to be the same five small slivers of flavourless pork schnitzel on wilted lettuce. After several mediocre to apalling meals at stupid expense we resorted to the Lonely Planet restaurant guide and finally had an outstanding feast for not much more than a crap one had cost. Exhausted by the heat and the constant nagging of hawkers we hid in our hotel rooms and avoided putting out too much energy lest it not be rewarded. Ironically, even leaving seemed like too much of an effort.
After our authentique rural experience heading to Vinh Moc required so very much effort, including having to just plain walk the distance, and in accumulation with fairly consistant efforts to screw us over by almost everyone since Lang Son I was feeling very bitter and disillusioned. Lewis and I discussed the idea of just heading off the National Highway away from the tourist trail looking for places untainted by the rabid greed the tourist dollar brings, but once again we faced the issue of how to get there and around without getting screwed by taxi-drivers or fucked with by the moto-mafia. And then there is the reality of it all: this seething, clawing, grabbing Vietnam is more real than the humble peasant communities that we romantically yearn for. Even those who rarely see tourists recognise the potential for profit when you roll up. These people who have done nothing but fight--for independance, for freedom, and for survival--for hundreds of years are still fighting and tourists are the new enemy. And we probably deserve that; as a reward for our reducing places and people to commodities to be consumed and transmuted into kudos we have become to these people walking dollar signs. Who are we to step outside the systems they have put in place for managing us?
Having tried to rebel against the package tours we finally gave in. Thuan is a motorcycle tour guide associated with the Duong Tam motel where we stayed in Hue. When I say associated with I mean he has an arrangement by which the motel promotes him and allows him to solicit the tourists staying there for his tours. He came to bother us while we were taking refreshments (i.e. necking beers) at the outdoor restaurant at Duong Tam. He does tours around Hue and also out to the famous Nguyen Kings' tombs on the ouskirts of the city. Like all other independant tour operators he has an album of photos showing beautiful places, impressive architecture and happy tourists, and a small notebook full of the good reports of his clientele. The boys being keen on motorbikes Lewis, Ossie and I decided to give Thuan a go.
On Monday 17th we got up fairly late and arranged with Thuan to head out to see three of the tombs and the ruins of the Temple of Heaven. Thuan took Ossie on the back of his bike and Lewis was entrusted with a second motorbike and me. It was a good day: motorcycle turns out to be the best way to enjoy the scenery and see people just doing people stuff. It has the advantage of being exposed to the world (unlike a bus) whilst being unobstrusive (like just bowling in). The first tomb, the tomb of Emperor Tu Duc, was really something. The Vietnamese, unlike the Chinese, have mastered the art of protecting and restoring things without reinventing them. To mtheir advantage is the fact that they're dealing mainly with brick and stone rather than wood and paint; much easier to restore without loosing the imposing sense of age and accomplishment. The other two tombs I had selected (mainly due to their proximity to the first and their low or non-existant entrance fees) were in various staes of ruin and restoration and much smaller and less grand, but still somehow striking and communicative. It helped that there were few people there except locals performing prayers and a smiling girl who instinctively climbed up on the stone horse standing at the ready with the mandarins at the tomb of Thieu Tri. The remains of the Temple of Heaven (Nam Giao) were, well, non-existant. See the photos to see why Lonely Planet's statement "Nam Giao remains unrestored and crumbling" is the understatement of the trip.
Sensing that Nam Giao had not lived up to expectations Thuan suggested we stop by the Japanese covered bridge on our way back and it turned out to be lovely and picturesque and accessed by a really interesting stretch of road with rice paddies, water buffelo, local colour and many private ancestral temples in clusters along the way. Near the bridge is a pole showing flood level of the river over the years including an astonishing entry which would have out the entire community around the bridge underwater. All in all a good day was had by all, and since it was Ossie's birthday Tuan invited himself along for drinks with us that evening; prompted by his exhuberance, easy going nature and sense of humour we happily accepted.
As you might expect it was a long night. Thuan took us to his favourite local joint where we sat on midgit stools under the stars and drank beer, ate delicious fried pork bits wrapped in leaves and dipped in spices, and made friends with the kids selling peanuts and the local dog. From there we headed to a hotpot restaurant, again recommended by Thuan, which was supurb and ended with some random drunken French guys joining us and picking up the tab. The poor chap tried to pay 200,000 Vietnamese Dong with 20 Euros, but the lady (ignorant of the exchange rate) wasn't having it. Spotting an opportunity Thuan quickly grabbed the euros and paid the dong amount. Such quick thinking was heartily applauded by the rest of us when Lewis related the tale the next morning. After the hotpot the French lads joined us at the DMZ Bar and we played pool, arm-wrestled and had beer-shower fights until all hours. In between beers Thuan managed to keep his work shirt on and gently talked us into a motorcycle journey from Hue to Hoi An: our next destination.
Tired and hungover we three dragged ourselves out of bed (but only after Thuan banged on our motel doors at 11am) and onto the back of three motorcycles around midday the next day. Ben and Jenny weren't keen on the bikes and so elected to get the bus instead. Thuan was joined by his moto-mates Nam and Hoa and our packs were somehow loaded onto the front between the driver and the handlebars and we were off! What a trip! We stopped for a an hour or so at Elephant Springs where we swam in a cool, clear swimming hole among smooth, soft-curved, slippery boulders and stones. It was really lovely, especially because we were lucky enough to be the only ones there at the time. The road the bikes take goes over the Hai Van pass which offers misty mountainhood, bay views and lots of green. Due to the elevated and windy nature of the road the bus instead goes through a long tunnel underneath the pass. The top of the pass is 496 metres above sea level, and unfortunately when we were there low cloud obscured almost everything, including the French and American bunkers on the hillside above where we stopped. The breathtaking misty vistas coming up the north side of the pass turned almost instantly into clear, sunsoaked views as we came down the south side. With the wind in our hair (or what of it was flapping out from under our helmets--safety first folks!), the countryside laid out before us and a top speed of about 60km an hour (tour operators can't afford to be anything but responsible drivers) it was a really fantastic experience. Now the number one experience in Vietnam with the beach-camping at number two and the trip out to Vinh Moc a close third.
Naturally Thuan and Duong Tam Hotel had an arrangement with a kind of sister motel in Hoi An called Thao Nguyen (aka Grasslands) Hotel which we had agreed to meet Ben and Jenny at. It had a swimming pool and internet in the rooms and was only USD10 a night so we went ahead and booked in. About an hour after we arrived Ben and Jen turned up at the bus drop off point and were mobbed by moto-taxis. As they were desperately trying to call for a real taxi they spotted a minivan with a sign in the window anouncing in bold letters "Ben and Jenny (2 pax)." Confused but relieved they junmped in and were delivered to the motel for free. Thuan, completely under his own steam, had arranged the pick up by the motel's minivan. Since we had gotten up late and therefore left late from Hue the boys couldn't make it back that night so we borrowed a fourth bike from the motel and Lewis was again recruited as a driver for a trip into town to a midget-stooled local joint where we had awesomely good Com Ga, a local specialty of roasted chicken with lemongrass, lime, ginger and mint on rice. Ah bliss! After dinner we headed to Thuan's old family friend's (of course!) tailor shop (Hoi An is the tailor-made clothing capital of Vietnam) where we all ordered various items at cut rpice rates and were duly measured up and told to return the next day for fitting and pick up. The boys dropped us back at the motel and headed off to find some cheap accomodation for themselves.
The next day we made up for causing Thuan, Nam and Hoa to have to stay overnight in Hoi An by hiring the lads to take us out to the Cham ruins at My Son. We again borrowed an extra bike from the motel and Lewis drove one. It was excessively hot, making it difficult to concentrate on the amazing ruins but we managed to eke out an hour and a half before returning to the bikes for some all-natural air-con. When we got back to the motel the lads were clearly keen to return top their families in Hue but, as he had consistantly done since first agreeing on prices, Thuan refused to talk turkey until the very end, to the point of insisting that we eat lunch (they declined to join us) before settling up with them. Settling was an uncomfortable process as Lewis and Thuan half-heartedly bargained over the price, both clearly finding business distasteful after so much enjoyment and comraderie had been shared. Thuan is just 25 and has only been in the business for a year and half since he got married and needed and income to support his new family. The glum look on his face as we overpaid him and the slightly bemused look on that of older and more experienced Nam suggested that Thuan was yet to come to terms with the moment when the party, and the deal, were over. Certainly for Thuan, Lewis, Ossie and I the line between business and pleasure had become blurry at best and it was a parting that left both Lewis and I feeling a little melancholy.
From this wildy unexpected, gentle and fulfilling experience of tour-ism we gained also a new optimism about and perspective on Vietnam. Okay, so the old take the local bus and choose your own restaurant approach wasn't working. What we'd found though was that while some folks prey on tourists as if they are sub-human other, more savvy and forward thinking Vietnamese are pushing a different method for cashing in on tourism. We'd seen signs of it at the Old Darling Cafe and on the Halong Bay tour, but they were coupled with a slickness that left us feeling greased. On the other hand these lads were part of a growing symbiotic approach to tour-operation where the personable nature of the tour guide is more than just a front; it's a genuine attempt at cultural exchange. Thuan asked me a million questions about my family and told me all about his. Through the tour we got to meet these three locals, hear all about their families, drink and eat with them and have them take us to their favourite local restaurants where the food was good and cheap. There was plenty of network plugging going on with motels and the tailor but it was clearly the back-scratching everybody wins kind of situation not the kickback tourist-cash-cow kind. A new generation of tour guides has figured out that the best way to get money out of foreigners is to draw on commonalities and treat them like people: that way everybody wins. It was refreshing and convenient and rewarding and when an old chap approached us in Hoi An armed with a photo album and a notebook full of reviews and invited us to his fishing and village for a homestay and some bamboo pole fishing I was sorely tempted; alas we had already booked the bus out to Nha Trang. What we did do was hire motorbikes from the motel and go for a burn around Hoi An on our own.
written restrospectively
Got into Ho Xa around 8am and breakfasted at a small joint with the most ethnic toilet Ive seen yet. Way down the back, past the shack with the owners old mother crashed out on a cot, past the chicken coop and just behind the pig pen was a grubby little brick room with all kinds of insects, scented toilet paper and the cleanest squatter in all of Asia. After instant noodle soup masquarading as Pho Bo we arranged to leave our packs with the sweet woman running the place and proceeded to haggle frantically with the moto-mafia. They wouldn't give us a good price so we starting walking to the Vinh Moc tunnels all by ourselves. Despite their repeated attempts to negotiate we percevered, however wisely or unwisely, and after trying several times unsuccessfully to hire bikes or motorbikes along the way we eventually caught a free ride with a truck driver in a huge german vehicle carrying a full load of wood. Lewis, Jen and I got in first and squashed into the cab, then another kilometre or so down the road we picked up Ossie and Ben who had to clamber onto the woodpile, lay on their stomachs and hold on to the edge for their dear lives. Luckily the age of the truck and the condition of the road meant we were not exactly going hell for leather, but by the time the driver dropped us at a fork in the road the boys had had enough of the hard, spikey matress.
We walked the rest of the way and had quite a time along the way. We stopped in at a village for some beers and ended up chatting for a long while with the local kids, several of whom had excellent English. As we headed on from there an old man beckoned us into his home for some brackish water and a look at his sons supurb wood carving. He was genuinely interested in us and had nothing to sell and it was a very pleasant, if a little odd, experience. We walked for what seemed like miles along a goat track amongst rice paddies and scrubby red dirt until we finally found a rugged looking sign directing us to Vinh Moc. A little further on we arrived at the tunnels but after the two hour trip there the ten minute tour was a wee bit of an anticlimax. Hard to imagine how so many people lived in these tunnels for 6 years--we were very keen to get out after about 5 mins. Very interesting and worth the trip in the end, especially as the trip was an adventure in and of itself.
Naturally enough getting back to Ho Xa was also an adventure. We haggled with mini-bus drivers and taxi drivers but all were taking advantage of our stranded situation. Finally a small tour turned up in a sedan and the driver settled down to take a nap while his customers headed for the tunnels. We convinced him to zip us back to Ho Xa in the interim for a good price--a win win situation. Alas the poor chap didnt actually know the way back to Ho Xa and once he got us, via a circuitous coastal route, back to the main highway he realised he was running late for the return of his tour group. He gave us our money back, kicked us out of the car and zoomed off looking very worried. Poor chap had been so frantic he didnt realise that we hadnt actually paid him yet, so we came up ahead on that to the drivers loss. Poor guy.
Stranded once again we managed to stop a packed minbus and pay the money the tour driver had given us for a lift back to Ho Xa. Who says there are no free rides in Vietnam! Jen was sitting ON a motorbike in the bus, I was on a box of something and Ben was just plain stooping minibuses are small). Still, it got us there and the locals on the bus thought it was hilarious.
From Ho Xa we flagged down a large bus heading for Hue and a couple of
hours and a fair few laughs later later they dumped us unceremoniously 6km out of the city where they were turning off for Da Nang. We were instantly surrounded by the moto-mafia who tried to tell us it was 20km to the city and wanted to charge us as much for the 20 min trip as we'd just paid for the 2 hour bus ride from Ho Xa. When we refused and tried to call a taxi they tried to menace the helpful telephone lady into talking the txi-bus price up, but to no avail. They then waited around us generally being intimidating and macho until the mini-bus arrived and intimidated the driver into paying 20000 dong (just over 1USD) for the priviledge of taking us. It was all very strange and very frustrating.
We have come to understand why everybody does Vietnam by tour--it's not just easier it's also much cheaper and safer. Since there is no real public bus system you're at the mercy of the moto-taxi drivers most of the time and they are just plain thugs out to rip you off. Later, in Hue, Lewis almost got stepped out by some moto-mafia boys at a cash machine in the middle of the night, but luckily the machine was out of cash. Yucky.
written restropectively
The ten hour bus trip from Hanoi to Dong Hoi was a nightmare. The seats didn't recline, the bus was packed and the driver was a maniac, however despite my certainty that taking a ten hour night bus in Vietnam (land of crazy drivers and bad roads) was almost as insane as driving ourselves to Ho CHi Minh City the trip was perfectly uneventful. We rolled into Dong Hoi at about 6am having slept badly and wondering whether we wouldn't be better booking into a motel and going back to sleep than trying to build a shelter on a beach in the already ridiculously hot weather. After some alarmingly strong Vietnamese coffee things got back on track and the boys tried to sort out transport. Alas no jeeps were available and three motorbikes just weren't going to get five people and five large packs the 5km out to the beach. Having decided to go by mini-bus instead Lewis, Jen and I headed to the market to get the rest of the supplies we needed.
Several hours later we had ourselves set up among some trees on a beach. The shelter was marginal but after Jen and my abortive attempts to bury the food and drink in the sand under the water Lewis managed to rent a chilly bin so we at least had cold beer and water and somewhere to store the meat. After all the hard work we cooled ourselves down with a swim and were pleased to find that the vicious dumpers that had battered Jen and I earlier had eased into lovely rolling waves as the tide had risen. It was far too hot to spend any time on the beach itself: between the scorching sun and the scalding sand it was mad dashes too and from the water across a near desert whenever you absolutely had to swim. Thus, after all our dreams of beaches we spent most of our time under the relative shelter of the trees drinking cold beer and telling tall tales.
Dinner was miraculously good. We got started building the fire too late and put the food on too early so while the shish kebabs of water buffelo, prawns, eggplant and zucchini were cooking Ossie and I were collecting more kindling, Lewis was collecting more wood and Jen was making more kebabs. All of this in almost complete darkness. It was the kind of madness that is so very satisfying when it actually works, and work it did. The kebabs were delicious, the beer was cold and a good night was had by all.
Not all had the faith or the constitution for a night on the beach so Ben and Jenny headed across the road and booked into a luxury motel. The shelter turned out to be much smaller than we had hoped so Ossie grabbed a sleeping bag and headed for the beach proper while Lewis and I set ourselves up under the multicoloured tarp. The vodka that had finished the night off assured that it was a sound sleep if not a comfortable one.
The morning brought ten thousand mosquitos, more unbearable heat and a three hour wait until a respectable time to go and wake Ben and Jenny and use their shower. Alas their shower was shit and we were filthy and within twenty minutes of getting out I was drenched in sweat again already and feeling increasingly seedy. As we headed back to town Lewis returned the chilly bin only to find that the kind old lady he'd dealt with yesterday had turned into a steely old dragon today and had no intention of returning his bond. When he tried to leave with the chilly bin instead the rest of the family scuttled out of the woodwork and made it clear that that was not going to happen. Despite all the warnings and bad reports this was only the second time in Vietnam that someone had really tried to screw us, the first being the taxi ride from Hanoi bus station to the Old Quarter where they tried to add and extra '0' to our fare. In that case we refused to pay what they demanded, left what we thought we owed on the roof of the car when they wouldn't accept it and walked off. In this case there was nothing to do but accept the situation and move on. You win some you lose some I guess.
To remedy our tiredness, wretchedness and extreme filthiness we decided to stay another night, but this time in a motel. After afternoon naps we headed to a floating restaurant for dinner only to find it was not so much floating as bobbing unsettlingly and that they only had about three dishes on their menu, which kept changing everytime we asked. Everytime we checked the order something else became unavailable, and then out of curiosity we rechecked the unavailables and found some of them now back on the menu. It was extremely confusing and the staff made little effort to clarify anything or understand our attempts to communicate. What we did manage to understand through a process of elimination was that they only had seafood and a (very) limited repertoir of methods for preparing it. Eventually our food turned up and our two single orders of prawn turned out to be two single prawns, albeit enormous ones, while the 'grilled fish' and the 'fish with vegetables' were identical except for the side dish of soggy greens that turned up with one of them. The food was fairly decent but by no means impressive and not really worth the dong we paid for it
Vietnamese food is reknowned for its excellence--oh that delicious marriage of french and south-east asian flavours! So far we have been less than impressed. We've treied mid-range tourist restaurants where all they want to make is hamburgers and pizza and the vietnamese food is uninspired, in tiny pretentious servings and all much the same; we've also tried small local joints where the vietnamese eat and found pho bo (beef noodle soup) made with instant noodles and very few other options. We must be missing something somewhere. Perhaps peasant food is poor out of poverty and restaurants are crap out of tourist apathy and we need to try haute cuisine at the 'imperial style' fine dining restaurants to see what all the fuss is about.
So at 3:30am on the 14th we headed for the cafe where the open tour bus picks up and waited for it to arrive. Just as it had when it dropped us off it didn't actually make it until 6-ish by which time Lewis was dozing in his chair, Ben and Ossie were asleep propped up agains their packs and Jen and I had our noses deep in books. And so on to Ho Xa from where we would try to find the elusive Viet Cong tunnels at Vinh Moc...
Things are good: we have a really good little group and we're having loads of fun and we may even get all the way to Thailand together before we go our separate ways.
written retrospectively
Alas when we got back to Old Darling Cafe there were no rooms for us so we donned our packs and went in search of another. The tall thin buildings of Hanoi Old Quarter mean few rooms per hotel, so getting three rooms in such a heavily touristed area is not so easy. Full, full full we got, meanwhile a million hotel hawkers followed us around like flies trying to take us to their hotel. The problem with these guys is that they usually work quite far from their hotel, ninety percent of what they say is bullshit and they don't take no, go away or fuck off for an answer. After a fair bit of wandering and a fair few hotels we finally found My Kinh, a large (by Old Quarter standards) hotel in a beautiful old building with the centre open to the sky, and settled in. Like every other tourist hotel in Vietnam My Kinh (pronounced mee king) arranges tours and bus and train tickets but unlike the Old Darling Cafe the guy wasn't on at us 24-7 to take advantage of this. Ben and Janny had trouble with their air con and the shower wasn't much to write home about but otherwise it was all good.
We spent another couple of days in Hanoi trying to chill out as well as get stuff done but it was just so opressively hot and humid that everything took longer and more effort that really necessary. New Zealand has very strong direct sunlight in summer but not terribly high ambient temperatures whereas Korea has imcredible humidity but no hope of direct sunlight through the smog. Either of these things is manageable although quite painful for me, who prefers to be cold than hot. In Hanoi you get both and it's fearsome. In all the time we spent in Hanoi, both before and after the trip to Halong Bay, we say very little of it because we simply couldn't be arsed trying to get around in the heat. It's opressively hot from 6am to 8pm every day and no-one serves refrigerated drinks. Pure, anadulterated madness.
Vietnam is the land of endless motorcyles. I guess once it was all bicycles, and there are still a fair few left, but most have traded up to motorcycles and they rule the streets in the cities. The most common kind og taxi is the moto which is fine for the locals going about their business but useless to five stupid foreigners with enormous packs. Getting car taxis or mini-bus taxis around cities is difficult and very expensive, often more expensive than joining a crammed mini-bus going intercity. The traffic is as insane as they say it is and the driving is out of this world crazy. On the (few) highways various kinds of packed buses, laden russian trucks and the occasional (relatively empty) troop carrier simultaneously hurtle, careen and weave their respective ways to their destinations on less than ideal roads, and always the constant stream of motorcycles on every side.
Despite all this madness a joke I made on the boat was rehashed as a plan (over more beers in Hanoi) to replace the clearly impracticle 'hire-a-boat' plan. It shall henceforth be known as the 'hire-a-jeep' plan. The hire-a-jeep plan started as a scheme for making our own way to, from and around Sapa in the north-west. It was canned due to the amount of time it would take before placing us back, yet again, in Hanoi. The boys were quite hung-up on the driving-a-jeep aspect of the hiring-a-jeep plan so I, humourously (or so I thought), commented that we could always hire a jeep and drive all the way to Ho Chi Minh City. Laughs were had and then the hire-a-boat plan took centre stage. When, in the hot, harsh light of day, the hire-a-boat plan looked much less attractive Oswald came up with a new, brilliant scheme which he proposed with a flourish: we could hire a jeep and drive all the way to Ho Chi Minh City, stoppoing wherever we so please along the way! It was heralded as a great plan, despite my frequent and persistant objections that it was Pure Madness. This time it was me being conservative and Ben and Jenny being adventurous: I was absolutely terrified of the idea of driving ourselves on the insane Vietnamese roads. Lewis too started off doubting but soon jumped on board, unable to resist the lure of the 4WD. It looked rather like I might have to exercise my veto, but for the moment I sat back and waited for it to run its course.
And run its course it did. Investigating the prices it turned out to be too expensive, too complicated and too easy to get screwed over. Thank god for that is all I can say.
So the hire-a-jeep plan died a natural death and was replaced by an 'oh my god it's so hot let's get to a beach pronto' impetus. Over yet more beers this evolved into the 'build-a-shelter-like-on-survivor' plan. So supplies (surplize!) were gathered and bus tickets booked and pretty soon we were on our way to an obscure place called Dong Hoi which apparently had a nice but reasonably obscure beach. At this point all we had was a machete, some string and big, big plans.
Written in retrospect.
We decided to go on the Halong Bay tour with Ben and Jenny in the end because we did want to go to Halong Bay and getting there on our own was looking difficult, expensive and time consuming. We five booked two days and one night, while Taiji booked three days and two nights putting him on a different tour and hence a different boat. We swapped email addresses and agreed to meet up in Ho Chi Minh City before heading to the Cambodian border.
Predictably, as we checked out of Old Darling Cafe at 7:30am we discovered that only the first bottle of water had been free--"Of course mate!". Ben and Jenny fought spiritedly but in the end we all paid for the second and third bottles while half a dozen freshly recruited customers sat around breakfasting, waiting for rooms, and wondering what kind of spoilt, penny-pinching foreigners expected bottled water to be free. The kind who had been lured in with the promise of free breakfast, free coffee and free water, that's what! But after all it was only 8000 vietnamese dong (fifty US cents) for 1.5 litres, so we gave up and paid up and waited patiently with our free bread and jam for the bus to Halong Bay.
Also predictably, the bus was late, finally arriving at about 8:30 already fairly packed. Luckily the Old Darling Cafe was kindly looking after our bags for us so we filled the last remaining seats (bringing the group total to fourteen) without too much fuss and headed off into the wild blue yonder.
Even more predictably, mid-way through the trip we stopped at a huge tourist-tat warehouse with row upon row of glass cases bearing all manner of gift paraphernalia. They also sold camera film, compact flashcards and battaries--of course. We loitered at this Mecca of souvenirs for twenty-five whole minutes along with a dozen or so other buses, most of which bore the same tour company logo as ours. It was the first real hint of just how many identical boats would be out on Halong bay that day.
When we finally arrived at the chaotic dock of Halong Bay it was approaching midday and we were all hanging out for our free lunch. After standing around for an eternity waiting for the captain to resolve some issues relating to the size of our group we finally clambered over several other similar boats to board a well maintained classic old wooden boat with a slightly lighter shade of mahogany paint to the millions of others currently docked nearby. Further fucking around with officials was now in order and so our group of (now) 12 all sat round sizing each other up while passports were checked, 'i's dotted and 't's crossed.
Things seemed all set to go as we pulled backwards out of the harbour until there was a sickening crunch from behind us. Our captain had plowed into a small wooden rowboat which came out of nowhere and as we all rushed to the side to peer at the apparantly fine boat everyone else on the docks started shouting. A few seconds later a head popped out of the water near the boat and the remaining occupant pulled the man-overboard back on board. As he howled in pained and slumped over on his side into the boat it became very apparant that his lower leg was very badly broken and the hubbub around the dock became much louder and more agitated. The waitress, who determinedly kept setting the tables for lunch, was almost in tears and the captain himself looked very very scared. After a small huddle with the rest of the crew the captain started backing out again and we got perhaps two hundred metres out before he was called back in and some uniformed chaps boarded and took him away. A young guy who must have been the captains second steered us out into the harbour as we ate lunch amongst the kind of poor taste jokes and nervous laughter that can only emerge from stoically (and very Britishly) suppressed shock and concern. Before lunch was over a new captain arrived in exactly the kind of vessel that the first one had collided with and things continued as if nothing had happenned. Later that night I asked the tour guide what would have happened to the captain and he speculated that the man would be under house arrest for some time, lose his licence temporarily and have to pay damages to the victim. To be honest, I'm not sure who I feel more sorry for. Both vitim and perpetrator have just lost their livelihood for some time. I got the feeling such incidents are not at all uncommon.
The cruise itself was lovely. With mist shrouded kaarst mountains erupting from emerald green water and pictureque old junks slipping idly (but noisely) by the scenery was quite breathtaking. Lots of time spent relaxing on the top deck sunning, talking, photographing, or just ruminating on the water, the land and the sky.
We visited the Hang Sung Sot caves, formed in limestone millions of years ago and now plastered over to prevent something I can't quite surmise. In the tradition of the top Asian World Heritage Sites the caves are disco lit, tour group saturated and immortalised in dozens of badly taken, out of date photo-postcards sold at every entrance and exit in packs of ten. There are three caves, each with their own theme and story, charismatic guides reproducing the same set spiel in unintelligible English for each one. We were rushed through the first two and my only knowledge of what they are supposedly about comes from the Lonely Planet guide, which seems to have somehow gotten hold of the official Textbook of Vietnamese Tour Guide Spiels. The third cave we went to was referred to ominously by our guide as the Surprise Cave.
It is necessary here to break for a joke. It's one of Ossie's specialities which I'll try to do justice--so "stop me if you've heard this one":
There once was a factory in Ireland where they upheld equal opportunity employment, so when they needed a new general hand they hired a Chinaman called Hong. Hong was a fairly industrious chap and got on with things as he should of until one day he was suddenly nowhere to be found. The foreman was perplexed and asked some of the gang if they'd seen Hong about but no-one seemed to know. Eventually O'Reilly turned up and complained "Hey Boss, I sent Hong down to the basement two fickin hours ago to get supplies and he never bloody came back." The foreman figures he'd better go see what the Chinaman is up to and wanders on down to the basement to find him. He looks around a bit and calls for Hong but there's no Hong and so, now quite concerned, he turns to leave. Just as he's walking past some barrels along the east wall muttering away to himself about the disadvantages of hiring immigrants Hong emerges triumphantly from the nearest barrel and yells at the top of his wee lungs: "supplize!"
Alas I wasn't supplized because I'd already read the blurb in the Lonely Planet guide, but some others were supplized and a few were even shocked and dismayed. To be supplized yourself see the photos. I won't spoil it for you here.
Half the group had paid extra for kayaking (i.e. us) and the other half were to climb some peak on an island as a consolation prize so while they did that we sat around on a beach by some fairly skanky water and had a beer. The water was not really swimmable so Ossie and Lewis joined some local boys on the beach for a game of soccer. About twenty of them vied for glory on a very small pitch, one edge of which was formed by the sea. Despite protesting that there was nothing wrong with playing barefoot as long as you knew how to strike the ball correctly Ossie managed to break his toe on a particularly energetic shot and was hobbling around for the next two or three days.
Kayaking was definitely the highlight of the trip for me, although I certainly wasn't impressing anyone with my technique. It was a fairly basic affair; no space age fiberglass or life jackets just two people to a hollow injection moulded plastic kayak unleashed on the empty water and told to return in about half an hour. Lewis and I went in one direction and Ben and Jenny went in another and we just paddled around and in between the kaarst islands and saw surprisingly few other people all the while. We did see crabs scuttling up the sheer cliffs and fish milling in the caves and some kind of long legged crane like birds nesting on some rocks. Ben and Jenny saw a jellyfish just below the surface and watched it cycle through a rainbow of colours. It was all very magical actually and we got back to the boat, exhausted but exhilerated, just on dusk.
We recruited Oliver, a swiss lad and the only other young person aboard not part of the crew, and drank beer under the night sky surrounded by at least twenty other boats just like ours. The darkness created some sense of isolation and the lights in the boats shimmered prettily off the water. It was fairly idyllic in a hedonous kind of way and lead to grand and somewhat unrealistic plans about hiring a boat and cruising the area ourselves. In the light of day the plan was transformed into a camping mission, but that is most definitely another story.
The next day involved nothing but cruising idly back to the docks stopping briefly for a swim during which Lewis and Oliver almost got dragged off by a strong tide and getting burnt nearly to a crisp by the fierce sun of the new day. Just to make the journey complete the minibus bowled a very indignant white businessman from his scooter whilst turning into a posh motel. No-one was hurt this time and the uptight gentleman zoomed off after yelling briefly about some alien notion called "right of way." The bemused minibus driver was not taken away but safely delivered us back to the Old Darling Hotel where our unpilfered, unrifled packs were patiently waiting.
After just two days I think I'm falling in love with Vietnam. It could be the jutting karst mountains, or lush farmland with marked crop diversification. It could be that every single Vietnamese person I've seen has had a very beautiful smiling face. It could be the tall thin brightly coloured French townhouses with plain grey concrete sides exposed scattered through the countryside. It could be the French influence making the place and the people a little less alien, a bit more comprehensible. It could even just be that we have been scammed less, ripped off less, stared at less, and generally treated more like human beings since we got here than we were in China. That I haven't seen a single person spit or piss or shit in the street since I got here is definitely a factor. Whatever it is, so far I really like it here.
Lunch in Lang Son yesterday revealed the specialty of the area to us: dog. We ordered fried vegetables, two bowls of noodle soup, spring rolls, rice and bread and we got cold sliced dog, dog shish kebabs, deep fried tofu, some kind of boiled green muck resembling spinach, rice and bread. The spiced dog kebab meat was quite delicious: looked like and had the texture, rind and fat content of pork but tasted more like lamb. The sauce which came with the meat was seriously nasty even once diluted with soy and lime but Taiji seemed into it and wrapped his sauce dunked dog in the bitter green leaves provided like a pro.
Getting a mini-bus to Hanoi at the right price was easy, getting in was not. Six people, six packs and they squeezed us into this van with four others and just kept picking up people. It was a tight fit and I had my knees round my ears and nowhere to put my feet but thankfully the five hours mentioned in the Lonely Planet Guide turned out to be more like two and a half hours.
Hanoi, and particularly the Old Quarter, is tourist central. Bustling with markets and hotels and restaurants, bars and cafes there is pretty much everything a tourists could want or need here and if you're not here to stay you're here to do the walking tour and see the gates and temples and galleries. Last night we drank Vietnamese draft beer at 3000 dong a glass along with thirty other white folks on miniture plastic chairs across four facing street corners. It's a bit surreal.
We're staying at the Old Darling Cafe which has decent, basic, air-conned rooms and a frontman who claims to be able to provide just about any service you want. He and his family run the place, but I suspect most of their money comes from the plethora of tours they run out of the place. The guy is friendly, personable and quite humourous but there is something slightly slick about him and his "of course, mate" persona. We'll see I guess.
For two such tattoed and pierced people Ben and Jenny are surprisingly conservative. They have every immunisation known to man and prefer to do everything by tour because it's easier and sometimes cheaper. They're grand folks--interesting, funny and smart--but I think their tour to Halong Bay tomorrow will bring this collaboration to an end. As for Taiji: well I'm just not sure. He's a very interesting and incredibly ballsy guy with pretty bloody good English but it can be difficult for him to follow the conversation when it gets up speed and he doesn't drink and spends a lot of time studying Mongolian so I think he may prefer to go his own way soon too. It has been lovely having comrades for a bit but co-ordinating six people anywhere is difficult and under these conditions it's just plain madness.
According to the Lonely Planet Guide and various internet sources Friendship Pass is the busiest of Vietnam's international land borders. Crossers-to-be are warned to expect scams, shake-downs, black market money exchangers and considerable customs delays. At approximately 2:30pm yesterday Lewis, Ossie, myself, an English couple Ben and Jenny and a Japanese science teacher called Taiji walked into Vietnam together almost completely unhindered. We were the only foreigners for miles around in either direction. We wandered straight through Chinese customs and out the other side then, suspecting something was not right, we walked back in and bothered the idle officials into giving us the appropriate declarations and checking our passports. Once reminded of their job they did it very thoroughly, but since we were six of nine people clearing customs at the time, and the only foreigners, all the foot-dragging they could muster amounted to a mere fifteen minutes delay. A particularly officious official peered in our ears and took our temperature and sent us on our way. Well trained by the procedures for entering Chinese train stations we had automatically put our bags through the x-ray security check the first time only to find an empty chair on the other side; no-one seemed interested in having us do it again. All Ossie's stress about taking 4500 yuan out of China turned out to be unnecesary as we meandered on down the road with our luggage completely unchecked. A little further down the 500 or so metre no man's land we entered immigration and ten minutes later we exited through a large hole in the side wall having just successfully and officially entered Vietnam.
We had met Ben and Jenny on the train to Nanning and had breakfast and a game of cards together at a fairly dicey restaurant opposite the railway station while we waited for the train to Pinxiang. They've just finished a stint on the trans-siberian/mongolian railroad and are heading to Cambodia, Thailand and eventually Australia where Ben has a job lined up. We picked up Taiji outside the train station in Pinxiang where he was beseiged by a pack of taxi drivers. He's travelling around a bit before starting a job teaching science in Mongolia. The six of us found a place with a steady supply of cold beer and parked packs so that Ben, Ossie and Taiji could head off to find a Bank of China to exchange money. As it turned out even at the border foreigners can't change RMB in China, although you're also not really supposed to take it out of the country either. Go figure. But change money they did; a money changer/taxi driver gave them a good rate and the Bank of China kindly verified that the money was not counterfeit. Two gutsy little moto-taxis (kind of like a motobike with a trailer) rattled us to the border and a couple of taxi cars on the other side took us not to the bus station in Lang Son but to their mates mini-bus as a gas station on the outskirts. After a lot of bargaining, posturing and a fair bit of walking away we tossed a coin and decided to stay in Lang Son instead. The mini-bus price plummetted as they followed us down the street calling out the window. Eventually they realised we were not just playing and gave up, but not before we'd got them from 200,000 dong each to 200,000 dong for all six.
Lang Son itself doesn't see many tourists as most pass straight through. It's a small but pleasant place of which we saw very little but probably missed even less. We stopped at one of the many gayly painted French townhouses, the business of which was unclear, and raised glasses of warm beer with to our safe arrival in Vietnam. After a wee bit more wandering we found a motel called My Son (that's Vietnamese not English) and settled in for the night.
Although hotel My Son has mosquito nets conveniently mounted above the bed we forgot to use them and as a result I have a zillion more bites to add to the zillion I already had. We've got some crazy green Chinese mosquito repellent which seems to do the trick alright but doesn't last very long. We started taking doxycycline (Malaria prophylactic) yesterday.
Righty-o: off to have lunch and catch a mini-bus to Hanoi.
Back to three our heroes now brave the land of the lotus eaters: the lazy Laos People's Democratic Republic 20060602-present.
in which the five make their way to the Thai border swearing the whole time to cut down on beer 20060501-20060528
In which three intrepid exlorers set out upon an overland journey from South Korea to the British Isles and safely reach the Vietnamese border. 20060131-20060405.
...liminil...
