Bound for Vietnam

by Lydia Laube

  We hadn’t gone far when the bus blew a tyre and all the passengers had to get out and sit on the side of the road while the wheel was changed. Then we were herded back in and continued on until we came to a boom gate that had been lowered to halt us at a check point. This place looked like something out of a cowboy film– a fort at the Mexican border. The only thing missing was a bloke sitting against the outside wall with a sombrero over his face. A rough wooden fence encircled a low, white-washed building that was surrounded by a rickety, thatched verandah held up by crooked posts that had been made from narrow tree trunks. Woven rattan had been tacked between the posts to enclose the sides of the verandah and a Vietnamese flag flapped lazily from a sapling anchored in the baked, flattened earth of the courtyard.

  The passengers were ejected from the bus to be checked over; the men and the vehicle were thoroughly body searched. The soldiers even inspected under the bus’s engine. Luckily we passed the test and were allowed to drive on. Leaving the yard we came to the boom gate. Our driver got out, lifted it up himself and we were off again. By this time my weeping neighbour had exhausted her passions. Now she turned her attention to a mammoth stick of sugar cane that she had brought along as solace. She chopped and chomped this in my ear until, having totally worn herself out, she went to sleep on my shoulder, only waking now and then for a further sniffle. I could feel the dampness of her tears seeping through my shirt, but by the time she got off the bus she had recovered and my shirt was dry.

  On and on, along shocking dirt roads, the bus bumped and jolted in clouds of dust with all the windows down. I had no idea how far it was to where I was going. In fact, I had no idea where I was going at all! I hoped we would stop soon though, because my bladder had started to demand attention.

  It actually took six hours to reach Halong Bay. At first the countryside wasn’t all that different from China – rice grew lushly in paddies and there were fields of waving green sugar cane. But the housing was very different. It had become far more picturesque. Among the fields I saw adobe houses and quaint little places of atap, woven palm and rattan. The villages were a haphazard arrangement of either diminutive square houses or the same tiny houses that were another two or three storeys higher.

  After a while we came to low terraced hills and further on heavily wooded mountains that were too steep for crops or gardens. Three-quarters of Vietnam consists of mountains and hills. The Truong Son Mountains, which form the central highlands, run from the north, where they are covered with snow for most of the year, almost the length of the entire country, as well as sending out spurs that continue eastwards to the coast. Vietnam is also a land of much water. Apart from the two great river systems, the Red River in the north and the Mekong in the south, many rivers originate in the mountains and flow across the country and into the South China Sea. We crossed several of these rivers that had picturesque villages clinging to their sides.

  I noticed that the people on this side of the border generally seemed more handsome than the Chinese. Many of the women were beautiful. Both men and women wore dark trousers and loose fitting tops and most people wore wide, conical-shaped, woven straw hats. One of the first things I had noticed when I had come over the border from China was the different head gear worn by the Vietnamese. Apart from straw hats, many men sported small green pith helmets that were left-overs from the days of the Viet Cong.

  Later the road followed the coast for some time and as sunset approached I realised that I must be at Halong Bay. There was a photo of it in my guidebook and it was unmistakable. Thousands of tiny, pointed islands thrust straight up out of the sea, the way that the mountains of Guilin stick up out of the land. They are the same karst construction, and resemble a Chinese ink painting, but the sea surrounding them gave them an added beauty. Ha Long means ‘dragon descending’ and the legend that explains this unique aquatic terrain is that a great dragon spat out pearls as it plunged into the sea from its home in the mountains.

  In the main street of Halong Bay’s principal village, called Bai Chay, I fell out of the bus to be welcomed by a reception party of motorbikes. By this time I was about to collapse from exhaustion, not to mention the state of my bladder, so I let one rider take me where he chose. The small hotel he picked was conveniently situated one street back from the water’s edge. It was ominously called Dung Phong, but it looked like a tall narrow wedding cake. The hotel foyer that doubled as the owners’ living room was only four metres wide, but it encompassed the entire façade of the establishment. From the centre of the foyer a narrow, spiral stone staircase wound up through the minute hotel to the eight guest rooms, two of which occupied each floor.

  I was gasping for the drink the hotel’s owners gave me as we bargained amicably until a suitable price was reached. It had come as a shock to be cordially welcomed by people who seemed happy to see me. I creaked upstairs –many stairs, shades of China – to my room which was on the fourth floor. Desperate to get to the bathroom, I had to practically throw the man who had accompanied me out, but eventually he got the message.

  I received another shock, a disagreeable one this time, when I looked in the mirror. An escapee from the black and white minstrel show stared back at me. Except for white circles where my sun-glasses had been, I was covered in dirt, and from the white circles my eyes peered out of an almost black visage. My hair, now pale brown, stood on end thick with dust. When I wiped my face the towel came away black. My once-pink shirt was now brown with black streaks. I marvelled at the politeness of the people downstairs, who had contrived not to burst out laughing at the sight of me.

  My small hotel room, with its narrow casement windows and patterned glass and draw-string curtains, had a rather French air. Everything in the room worked and was squeaky clean. The toilet flushed successfully, none of the plumbing needed repairing and, wonder of wonders, the fitting on the wall that held the shower was intact. And I was trusted with a whole roll of toilet paper all to myself. There was even a small, coloured television set, a test drive of which produced a hilarious old silent French film. But the electric hot water service required a degree in engineering to work and through the open, unscreened window mozzies as big as Pegasus roared in. To combat them a mosquito net had been provided, but it took me a while to detect it. The net had been artfully secreted in an oblong perspex box on the wall above the bed-head and initially I had thought this was a light and spent some time trying unsuccessfully to turn it on.

  Looking down from the windows of my eyrie, I saw, directly beneath me, a vivid, miniature street that was full of life. But I got vertigo looking groundwards. The windowsill was below my knees and under my feet there was an unscreened drop of four floors which seemed very dangerous. Only a few feet away, opposite my window, I was confronted by one of the towering, pointy mountains that had escaped the sea to erupt on the land. A row of whimsical, high but narrow houses had been built against the mountain’s sides and my room was level with the balconies of their upper storeys. Downstairs, I intimated that I needed feeding. The hotel owner took me next door to a diminutive café and handed me over to a friend. The café’s name was Dung Dung Fuk and its proprietor told me proudly that he had named his little girl after it. Poor kid. The Vietnamese language has some unfortunate English connotations. I discovered that I was now in a country whose currency was called dong and whose national dish is po. The café owner’s elderly father greeted me enthusiastically in French. Many older Vietnamese still speak French and they think that any educated foreigner does too. Stumbling along with the few thoroughly flawed words of school-girl French that I still retain and drawing pictures, I managed to communicate with him.

  The café’s fittings were basic: rough wooden benches and long communal wooden tables. The cooking was done on a coal burner on the street front. I dined well on crunchy, deep fried prawns, small cold fish in a delicious spicy sauce and vegetables. I sampled the local beer. It was good and cheap.

  Then mine host produced someone who spoke English to
entertain me: (or find out about me) a young man who was the manager of the government-owned hotel across the street. He was the only one on duty, so he kept his eye on his hotel foyer from where we sat. Toi said that his hotel had ten rooms which cost ten dollars each, but that their main business was import and export. Strange business for a hotel.

  From the time that I had arrived in Bai Chay I had been forced to listen to the propaganda broadcast that boomed from a loud speaker in the nearby public square. I asked Toi what it was. ‘It’s government news,’ he said. Whether you want it or not, I thought. The Vietnamese were apparently as much into this form of entertainment/torture as the Chinese.

  A little later I fell into bed and was fast asleep at once. But I was woken shortly afterwards. I had thought I’d found a nice quiet place, but Vietnamese on holiday proved to be just as noisy as the Chinese. They shouted, yahooed and slammed doors in the middle of the night and the disturbance reverberated up the stone staircase as though it was an echo chamber. Then someone threw on the landing light as well as the light in the room opposite mine and left them on all night. My room had a glass door. I got up to hang a blanket over it. At half past five in the morning the propaganda merchant started screaming and yelling over the loud speaker again and after that I got no more sleep. I was not amused.

  In the café Dung Dung Fuk I enjoyed a traditional Vietnamese breakfast, while trying not to watch the dishes being washed in the gutter at the front of the establishment. Most small places had no water and the only running water available to them was in the gutters. Breakfast consisted of a big bowl of thick noodles mixed with whatever had been left over from last night’s dinner and topped with a tasty sauce, a squeeze of juice from a tiny green lime and a dash of chopped chilli. It was one of the best breakfasts I’d had while travelling and it only cost a few cents. I was still feeling sleepy, but some great, strong heart-starting Vietnamese coffee soon fixed that. Then the itinerant butcher called at the café. He carried his wares in an old, cane basket which he put on the ground and everyone came and handled the meat. I went for a walk.

  Having heard that jewellery shops were the places to change money quietly, I patronised one in the main street where a genial woman gave me a good rate of exchange. Next I went in search of the wharf from where the boat sailed down the coast to Haiphong. Vietnam is a long and narrow country that lies between the Tropic of Cancer and the Equator, and, although it is only fifty kilometres wide in places, it stretches for over 1700 kilometres along the Indochinese Peninsula and has borders with Cambodia, Laos and China as well as 3260 kilometres of coastline.

  At the crossroads of Bai Chay’s two main streets, I noticed a big round communal well surrounded by cement where women washed themselves, their clothes, their dishes and their babies. Wandering on I went into many places that I probably should not have, was offered a ride on a sampan around the harbour and found the ferry that went over to the island across the bay, but I didn’t find the wharf.

  Although almost no one spoke English, everyone I met was sociable. The hotel owner’s mother tried very hard to talk to me. She really wanted to get to know me. On my second morning, deeply concerned about my health, she took my hand, looked intently into my face, and asked me if I had slept better. When I said that I had, she seemed genuinely pleased. I now wished I’d spent my entire time travelling in Vietnam.

  But Vietnam also had its drawbacks. Rubbish abounded in the streets of Bai Chay and mean-looking dogs scavenged through piles of it in the gutters. And once more I was appalled at the mindless cruelty I saw inflicted on animals. One day I watched two poor live birds, with an awful hopeless look in their eyes, being dragged along the street as a toy on a string by a child.

  I had slept better the second night, but there was no way of getting away from the morning’s harangue. It battered its way through ear plugs and shut windows and seeped into your subconscious. Sounding like a loud barrage of exhortations and demands, it continued non-stop, hammering the senses in a violent assault. The locals seemed oblivious to it. Maybe you got used to it like you did the call to prayer in Muslim countries. Downstairs, in the room open to the street at the front of the hotel where the owners sat in the evening, it almost drowned out the television. The harangue worked in one way though; it had me up by seven o’clock every morning. Even at this early hour the street below me was alive with activity.

  At last I located the wharf. It was a rusting metal pier that was punctuated by holes big enough to give vistas of the water below. The boats tied to it were not much better. They looked precariously dilapidated and a particularly decrepit wreck of wood and iron turned out to be the one on which I was to sail. Myriads of small boats plied the water between the mainland and the islands around the bay, and there was a constant coming and going of sampans and bigger wooden boats shaped like Chinese junks, complete with children, dogs and pot plants – one even sported a small tree.

  After three days in Bai Chay, I said my farewells at the hotel and climbed onto a motorbike. I had discovered that this was the only means of transport here, apart from the use of your feet. 1000 dong, or ten cents, got you a big thank you, as well as the price of a ride anywhere around town. I was getting good at managing motorbike transport, which I once heard referred to as ‘transpiration’. Did that mean inspirational transport? The riders here went very slowly and sedately when I was on the pillion. I hoped this was because they had learned that tourists who were unused to Asian road rules had more delicate nervous systems and not in deference to my great age.

  In the old stone building that served as the waiting room and ticket office on the wharf, I paid the fare to Haiphong – much to the amusement of the female officer who wrote my name and nationality in the tattered school exercise book that housed the official foreigners’ dossier. I wondered why she found it so funny that I was travelling by ship and why tabs were kept on foreigners. Was it in case one went missing, possibly drowned? The ticket to Haiphong cost 50,000 dong, which sounds like a fortune, but was only five dollars. I rattled down the pier, passed the two ticket collectors who tried on my hat with much hilarity, and clattered onto the boat.

  Our ancient craft set sail and lumbered along hugging the coast. In the three and a half hours it took to reach Haiphong we never left sight of the shore, which, in view of the vessel’s age and condition, seemed a very wise precaution. I sat on a hard, shiny wooden bench. The sides of the boat were lined by windows which contained no such refinement as glass. A pretty Vietnamese student seated herself opposite me and began to practise her English. She told me she was too young to marry yet, but that she would do so when she was twenty-five and then she would have three children. I asked her if the number of children allowed was government controlled and she said no, but that the ideal was two. I read that despite long years of war, famine and mass emigration, Vietnam is one of the most populous countries in the world and that, in a land a little smaller than Italy, there are over sixty-four million people, half of whom are under twenty years of age. When I discovered that the student sitting with me was also studying Chinese, I gave her my Chinese phrase book. I had no intention of using it again.

  Despite the decrepitude of our antiquated boat, it still ran to first and second classes, which were divided by a narrow walkway through its centre. In this passage-way a young woman set up a low wooden table and several microscopic stools, produced a kerosene-powered stove, laid out an array of jars, bowls and bottles containing various edibles and cooked and fed passengers who came and sat down with her two or three at a time. It looked a very sociable and agreeable manner of dining. All over Vietnam I was to see women arrive with two baskets on a shoulder pole and set up these instant portable restaurants on the street.

  The boat trip beat travelling by over-crowded bus on the terrible roads and the scenery was wonderful. For the first hour we passed slowly among the thousands of mountain islets, each surrounded by a flotilla of boats, which rise like the Loch Ness monster out of the sea over an a
rea of 1500 square kilometres. Their fantastic shapes and the wondrous grottos they contain have given them their unusual names such as ‘the unicorn’ and ‘fighting cocks’.

  Haiphong had been given bad press in my travel guide, but I found it extremely acceptable. The moral of this is that you shouldn’t believe everything you read in travel books. Haiphong is charming. About 100 kilometres east of Hanoi, it was just a sleepy market town until the French arrived. Now it is the major port of the north. Haiphong has witnessed the coming and going of many conquerors, the last being the Japanese, and it was heavily bombed by the Americans in their war with Vietnam. Full of interesting, old French colonial-era buildings, it has no traffic to speak of except that which is propelled by pedal power.