Travel Diaries #39 - Hanoi to Saigon
Part 1: Around the middle of my time in Vietnam, I left Hanoi to drive to Ho Chi Minh City by motorbike. I was unsure of what I was looking for, only I knew a part of me didn't want to go back.
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0.
I arrive home from Thailand and Bali and get stuck in Hanoi for a week. I’ve a fairly debilitating shoulder injury I woke up with one morning in Chiang Mai. I visit the physio who performs pleasurably sadomasochistic deep tissue massages and Chinese cupping on my shoulder. It miraculously recovers within days. I stay on a friend’s couch and make further excuses that I’m waiting on a delivery of a tent for my trip from a Vietnamese online retailer with a dubious track record. I wait another couple of days to meet friends from home who are travelling through, and am glad I did. I make further excuses and go to an all-night rave before finally, a week after I was supposed to, I begrdugingly accept that I must embark on this trip of a lifetime. The tent never arrives.
I was getting a bit too comfortable on the couch.
Maybe I was scared of the unknown.
1.
I leave Hanoi by motorbike on a pissy wet day in August looking like a sea fisherman wearing a bright yellow plastic poncho. I’ve made a rough itinerary of places I want to stop at, though the country only really goes in one direction. I have about three weeks to reach Saigon, which probably isn’t enough, and, after a year and a half spent living in Hanoi, I also a determination to drive off into the wilderness and leave everything behind.
The drive to Ninh Binh is straight, busy, standard. Rampaging truck drivers honk by like they’re driving magic carpets. Topless men play backgammon at roadside cafes. The rock formations of Ninh Binh are commanding as they rise out of the horizon like they’re formed from the dust that cakes the highways. They’re trying to make them into a world-famous tourist attraction. Somewhere past Phu Ly there’s a ten-lane highway laid out towards the rocks, the would-be tourist attractions, a Mad Max-looking construction site the size of Galway city centre at the base. You can hear the blasts from six miles away, they’ve already blown up half a mountain and are quarrying it away in dozens of trucks to build the rest of the country.
I make it to Tam Coc and into the safety of nature, lakes ensconced by the towering karsts. A quiet mud road leads to a tranquil fantasy world in the mists. A wooden bridge leads to an impoverished fairy-tale home. On the bridge a toddler with Downs Syndrome is whittling a piece of wood with a dagger in an eerie silence. There appears to be no-one else around. I expect barbarians from a foreign kingdom to attack at any minute.
The homestay is beautiful, refined, open to tourists. I swim in the warm muddy lake where men fish mussels from a boat. I sit away from the tourists after dinner, writing, though eventually I accept their invite to join them.
2.
I reach Ho’s Citadel around lunchtime, the ruins of a large fortress manned by two security guards in blue uniforms, one of whom is sleeping in a hammock while his partner smokes a thuoc lao and watches a kid fishing in a stream. Left and right and left again then right again along concrete roads that run by rice paddies. There is no-one around. The towns are all barely holding it together with franchise phone shops and obscene branded supermarkets are little else. Everyone stares. A man approaching with a hat and motorbike goggles and no shirt, lazily steering his custom bike with his hips. His head cocks back and his mouth hang open, revealing he also has no teeth. He flashes the peace sign and lets out a slack-jawed “HELL-AWW” which is standard enough for people here who don’t know what else to say to a foreigner. He appears to be drunk.
A man sees me putting on suncream and comes over and takes the bottle to see what it is. I point at the sky and explain by pointing at the colour of my arm, and the sun, and then the colour of his. He makes a gesture which could be an offer for: “a drink?” “karaoke?” “A blow job?” though it’s unclear what he’s suggesting. He points towards his house but I thank him and tell him I’ve to be on my way.
I stop for a pitcher of beer during a monsoon. The man is playing with his baby and is happy to let me use the toilet. He ushers me along the side of his house past his beautiful wood carving workshop, points to the chicken wire fence separating a pack of snarling dogs and hungry malnourished turkeys from his home, and graciously tells me to piss on the pile of sawdust under the fence.
I let myself rest, determined to finish my 15,000VND (60 cents) pitcher of beer. The road begins to rise after the rain but there are blueberry clouds on the horizon. I have an arbitrary destination but no bookings, and start to choose roads based on what the weather looks like over them. I arrive to Tan Ky just as it’s getting dark. My poncho is surprisingly useful. I’m glad to be able to categorically say I’m the only non-national in the village, which appears to be the Ballindine of Vietnam.
My neck and shoulders are aching.
3.
I see a German guy at the side of the road just past where some guys are cutting up a cow. The whole community is out and are queuing up to get pieces of the cow. The guy is whipping out entrails like he’s unblocking a drain. The German guy hasn’t broken down, and invites himself to join me riding to Phong Nha, which is about 250km away and should take the entire day. I can’t really say no, and begin to resent him instantly.
He tells me how great a bike driver he is because he had a rented scooter in Chiang Mai for a month. I try to warn him that the rules of the road do not apply – or at least, are very different – here, and to exercise caution. He laughs it off, repeatedly telling me how good he is at driving his bike, and pointing out how his bike is better than my bike. He keeps suggesting stopping or taking impossible detours to tourist attractions, and doesn’t even listen when I tell him I understand the lady’s directions in Vietnamese, the absolute bastard.
At some point he disappears from my rear-view mirror. After a while I stop and wait for him for about ten minutes. I turn back to look for him and travel far past where I’d last seen him. If he’s broken down he’ll already be wheeled into a mechanic’s garage by now. It’s a fairly populated stretch of road and so he wouldn’t be missing as such, whether he’s alive or dead.
I drive alongside a train and stop for bun bo hue at a restaurant. As I finish the German guy comes rolling up the drive. He looks worse for wear. Scuffed trousers, torn shirt, bruised back, bits of his bike broken off. He says he’s okay though. And the lady he crashed into. He keeps saying that he knows how to drive but she doesn’t. I tell him he doesn’t know how to drive in Vietnam. Not the ideal way to talk to someone who’s been in a traffic accident, but he’s not really listening, the arrogant fucker.
He spends the rest of the day talking to himself, and me, by circumstance, out loud about all the things people ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ do while driving. “This keeps happening!” he cries out in bewilderment as he curses these Vietnamese drivers that just keep bumping into him because “they don’t know how to drive!” I keep telling him he should leave his German rules of the road behind and look where he’s driving, or he’ll be dead by sundown. We stop for repairs in Tan Ap before we get into the mountains, the ignorant little prick.
It’s 100km to Phong Nha.
The stretch of mountains to Phong Nha is out of this world, a place where pteradactyls fly when you’re not looking. I stop regularly for photos, which annoys the German guy. The whole drive is sublime. We reach the flat valley at Phong Nha at sunset. Kids play football on open grass fields. I drive over a ball and the petrol cap comes flying off the tank between my legs, though I find it again. I get to the hostel with a flat tyre just as it’s getting dark. The German guy is still alive. He’s still talking about the right side of the road to drive on, looking both ways before crossing, and the proper way to make three-point turns.
I think he’s starting to piss me off.
4.
I’m staying in a backpacker’s hostel in Phong Nha, home by some measures of the world’s biggest cave in Phong Nha-Ke Bang national park. For some reason I’d been under the impression that this was the only accommodation in the village, though I was completely wrong, and accepted that maybe after spending one entire day driving off the beaten path, and night alone with my thoughts in a spidery hotel in a one horse town, I sub-consciously wished to return to the familiar smothering embrace of the home comforts of the Asian backpacking circuit, which included a burger menu and western beer drinkers, preferably female.
I join a bus tour to visit some famous caves, joining a queue of people to stand and walk along a lit-up boardwalk and peer into the artificially illuminated corners of a large dark hole. It is in some senses impressive, though my main enjoyment was standing in the dripping shade out of the insanity of the dry summer sun outside, and I couldn’t ignore the fact that I’d paid what amounted to my daily budget for my trip to stand in a queue full of Chinese tourists taking photos of the dark.
After the ‘Nice Cave’, or whatever it’s called, is the ‘Mud Cave’, which we zipline into before crawling through mud wearing helmets and headlamps. It’s quite fun, much better than the Nice Cave, though having failed to do any research about this area I’m wondering when they’re going to take us to the Biggest Cave in the World. I later find out it that trips into Son Doong cave are organised for three days at a time and cost €3,000, much of which goes towards paying the team of sherpas and scientists who accompany you.
On the bus I make friends with small groups and pairs of English backpackers. They’re on trips of a lifetime and trade stories about getting to experience all the wonders of travel, which includes naming all the places they’ve been and haven’t been, and bonding over ‘facing their demons’ by sleeping in a hostel full of bed bugs somewhere in Thailand. There’s a list of places that floats around the collective consciousness of backpacker hostels of South East Asia, or whatever route you’re on, and all the places you ‘can go’ or ‘do’ are on it, and when you meet other backpackers you name all the places and whether you’ve ‘done’ this one or ‘not done’ that one. “Yeah we went to Kampot but we didn’t make it to Koh Rong”; and “No we did Bali, Kuala Lumpur, Koh Samui, Bangkok, but didn’t have time to do Chiang Mai, Ho Chi Minh, Laos, or any of Cambodia”; or even “Yeah I’ve heard of Malaysia but I haven’t heard of Indonesia, be good to do it yeah”; and so on, and so forth.
I tell them I actually, like, live in Hanoi and they don’t really give a shit.
5.
I stay on another day in Phong Nha and explore the mountains by bike. It’s far more enjoyable than sitting on a bus talking to people, and it bears repeating that the landscape is out of this world. Close your eyes and think of South East Asia and this is whether you’ve ever been there or not, that is what this looks like.
I decide to wait on and take a further break from my bike as my neck and shoulders. I’ve decided long in advance of the trip, based purely off the reputation of Phong Nha as one of the highlights of travelling around Vietnam, that I would spend a few days here in favour of other places, which I also haven’t seen yet. This is the problem with planning travel.
I meet the German guy checking out. Our relationship improves when we each learn that he’s leaving today and I’m not, and so we will never see each other again. He boasts that he’s made about eight friends and they’re all going riding together in a big group. I ask how is back is – still sore, but okay.
“Be careful on that bike!”
“Oh well, I have nothing to learn!” he announces.
He was right all along. He is a great driver and the Vietnamese, to a middle-aged woman, are all terrible at it. I try to remind him to just stay alert and keep his eyes on the road.
“I’ll be fine. What am I going to do – drive 30kph the whole way?! I’d never make it on time. I wouldn’t change a thing!”
I’m reminded that when he showed up to lunch that time he also indignantly put forth the point to support his about the locals’ lack of intelligence that “This keeps happening!”
“I even got an exhaust burn!”
A couple of lads from Dublin have checked in and are chilling out in the pool. One of them is running out of cash. He’s heard he can make $25 an hour teaching English in Hanoi and does some quick calculations of how many hours he’d have to teach to cover the rest of his trip – about 10. I tell him it’s technically possible for him to arrive in Hanoi with no qualifications or experience, but with a CV-enhancing sunburn, and blag cash-in-hand teaching work in a matter of days and to make that money in a week, and I’d seen it done many times already. He checks his online gambling account to see if any of his bets have come in, and makes a quick call to his sister to spot him some money til he gets to Hanoi.
Later I try to stream the Mayo football match from home. They hammer Roscommon in the replay. I need to hit the road.
I’m getting far too comfortable here.
6.
I watch Game of Thrones on the hostel wi-fi and it takes me two hours to get petrol and an ATM before leaving out the road I didn’t want to go on. I double back across the village for a fifth time and go out to a crossroads by a river I came across yesterday. The main north-to-south highway runs along the coast, with its traffic and bikes and dust and murderous trucks. I want to go into the mountains, following the isolated Western Ho Chi Minh Road which runs close to the Laos border, and I never want to stay in a backpacker hostel again.
It is very, very hot. I drive up towards the sun through leafy hills on concrete roads which could only have been built by slaves as the pyramids were. The road winds and winds and winds, back and forth and up and forth again, always smothered by a dense covering of foliage on either side of the hairpin gorges, or opening out into an expanse of green mountains which stretches across to Laos in the middle distance. You can vaguely judge distances by the hue of green on the mountains before you, and it’s difficult to tell whether the darkest shades on the horizon are mountains or ferocious dark clouds laden with thunder and rain.
They could be the same thing.
I drive three and a half hours like this, at times not passing even a hint of a human being, only the odd ranger station, for ten or twenty kilometres. I realise I have not taken much time before the trip to road-test my bike, and like most mechanical items in this country, it could fail at any minute.
It's a small 100cc Lisohaka motorbike – a Taiwanese brand – with a maroon leather seat. I bought it off an Italian ex-pat for $300, with the petrol tank painted red with a yellow star, the Vietnamese flag, though I got it sprayed a niftier shiny black. It’s slow up hills and tops out at about 70kph, and is far, far too small for me to be driving 2,000km on it over the course of a few weeks. But it has a nice burst of acceleration, handles like a dream and whips through hazardous city traffic with the slightest flick of the hips. I love it. I’ve no idea how reliable it is yet. If it fails, I’m done. Every so often I calculate how long it would take me to put on my runners and walk to the nearest ranger station in the event I do break down.
I reach the top of a hill and I can see the sea, which is the exact same colour as the sky. In the distance, what must be the large town of Dong Hoi looks like San Francisco. I feel like how old migrants to the Wild West must have felt when they crossed the California mountains and into the promised land.
I’m not going there. I’m aiming to stay on this road. I’m aiming for a motel, the only one for the next 250km. I’ve brought extra petrol in an old 1.5 litre bottle as there are no petrol stations either. I’ve been told there’s nothing else near the motel, and that’s where I want to go.
I’ve made it somewhere though, I’ve reached the crest of the hill. The road continues to undulate up and down and turn on hairpins over and back and over again, though metaphorically speaking, it’s all downhill from here, or rather, the only way is up. I know my bike won’t fail me now. The sense of isolation changes from something worrying to something liberating.
I reach a fork in the road.
To the left is the sea, and the town of Dong Hoi. No doubt there’s somewhere comfortable to stay, maybe even a backpackers hostel with beautiful young tourists who speak English, who could spend all night naming all the places they’ve been and not been for all I care at this stage, just to hear the sweet loving embrace of the familiar.
To the right is the motel in the middle of nowhere. Two roads diverge in a green jungle. I wonder if I’ve spent enough time in isolation driving for the last four hours, barely even passing a single other soul, English speaking or Vietnamese. It’s not even been half a day but it feels like a week since I left Phong Nha. Maybe I’ve had enough. The thoughts of sitting on a beach this evening drinking a cocktail is strong.
I go right.
***
The Duc Tuan motel is in the middle of small village around the crest of a gorgeous shire. There’s no-one home, so I go across the street and go to sit away from the horde of twenty men with their shirts pulled up around their nipples downing beers at a large outdoor table, but they make me sit down amongst them. It’s blistering hot and they’re roaring drunk. The girl waiting on them is well fit for their lewd remarks and the odd grope from mafia-tattooed arms. They give me pieces of fruit and hot peanuts and interrogate me amidst raucous laughter, everything about me is ridiculous. Eventually they pile into several flash cars and large SUVs with Vinahouse music banging out the windows, roaring off back down into the valley. The girl looks exhausted and cleans up with her family, she gives me the bill even though I don’t ask for it. It’s about 4:30pm.
The hotel lady scurries down the road apologising for being late. I take a nap and go for a delicious meal of beef, rice and vegetables at the only open house in the village. I go to bed early and listen to the old couple engage in arguments and a fight that sounds like an armed robbery for much of the night, though to my impartial ears it is the comforting sound of getting away from it all.
It feels like a week since I left Phong Nha.
I’m starting to lose track of the days.
Read about the rest of the trip here:
Part 5 coming soon
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Your stories really make me wish I was back in Vietnam! Doesn't matter how much time I spend there, there's always more to see and more to eat. :)