Travel Diaries #41 - Hanoi to Saigon [part 3]
I cross the halfway point of the trip and begin to relax into it, though I'm still living in two minds - everything I know and love, or everything I don't know and desire
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Part 3 of my trip from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City by motorbike
10.
Huế is famous for its citadel, former seat of the old emperors of Vietnam, an ancient walled village and castle of sorts, and exactly the sort of thing I love to visit, to pore over every corners of in maps and aerial photos and drawings and paintings, and a place I’ve wanted to see for myself since I came to Vietnam.
I’m hungover. I’d arrived into town at sunset looking for someone to show me around so I met a Vietnamese girl on Tinder and went for a drink. She told me she worked as a tour guide and asked if I like the ‘typical Vietnamese foods’ like phở, Bún chả, bún bò Nam Bộ, like an eight-year-old sitting an oral exam to get into a large English language centre, then recites the names of famous tourist attractions like Ha Long Bay, Hội An, Ho Chi Minh City and ‘our capital city Hanoi’ in a similar fashion. She was plain looking and bored me to tears. When I asked if I could smoke she said ‘no’, though I tried to light a cigarette anyway, but my lighter didn’t work. I asked if she wanted to go home to which she said ‘yes’ so I dropped her off at her house.
I leave her waving at me from her doorstep to go meet some English friends from Hanoi at a backpackers hostel. I’d seen they were in town on social media.
I was beginning to notice another familiar pattern on this trip; just when I was about to take off with the transcendent thrill of driving off into yet another mystical sunset on the edge of civilisation, I couldn’t help but turn around and peak over my shoulder at where I’d come from. It had taken me all of about two hours to come down from the jungle and find myself reimmersed in everything I believed I wanted to leave behind.
We met up in the bar at Huế Backpackers Hostel where a James Corden-esque Lad was hosting a pub quiz. His voice gone, he bellowed hoarse questions about sexual positions into a loudspeaker while we drank 2 for 1 mojitos for a dollar. I’d been sucked back into the city and its ways, and its offerings of renowned tourist attractions that everyone and their books say you ‘must see’, after a blissful and timeless few days travelling mostly alone through the mountains, away from everything I knew in Hanoi and (mostly) from foreign tourists like myself, and having sworn I’d never go near another backpacker’s hostel after the formulaic sterilisation of the travel experience in Phong Nha.
I couldn’t help but enjoy myself.
I wake in the morning after eight-for-four dollar mojitos with a red face and a stomach like a bold child who’s eaten too many sweets.
On the way to Hội An I realise I’ve forgotten to go to the citadel I really wanted to visit, though I’ve also developed a sense of satisfaction on my travels in letting the trip go how it goes; the story of forgetting to go to the thing being as rewarding as seeing the thing itself would have been. I stop off at the Elephant Springs I visited once before, though the water’s all dried up and it’s full of summer crowds. The drive to Hội An is relatively short compared to what I’ve done in recent days but my body is in bits. My shoulders ache from the lack of space on my already tiny bike, and my neck feels like something could pop if I turn it too quickly, which is always wont to happen with the abundance of fast-appearing stimuli on the roads here.
The Hai Van Pass stretches from near Huế to Đà Nẵng on the other side of a low mountain. It’s a scenic coastal road made famous by the cast of Top Gear who filmed an episode here. If one more person asks me “Have you seen that episode of Top Gear?” I’ll throttle them. The pass is renowned as the pinnacle of driving in Vietnam, by people who haven’t driven anywhere else, and after the last few days I’ve had, it’s surprisingly tame. There’s no heavy traffic as there’s a tunnel for trucks beneath the same hill. The mountain is not even comparable to the mountains of Vietnam’s north, and, I’ve just discovered, its central spine. Though there is a lot to be said for the stunning views of the coastline it follows, a coastline I’ve seen tragically little of since I’ve been here; and the view down to Đà Nẵng is stunning. The Pass is a popular route for tourists who’ve never been on a bike (though many with zero experience still instantly brave the whole north-to-south route, or far more treacherous driving elsewhere the country, and to be fair, that’s how I started when I got here) though now it’s obvious that it’s because it’s driving in Vietnam on easy mode, though don’t let that stop anyone.
I get into Hội An around sunset and locate the post office, where I’ve to run an errand. I’ve been in contact with a lady there called Van who told me my package has arrived, and when I get there the lady tells me that she is Van, and that she’s expecting me, but that she also doesn’t know what I’m talking about. She makes some calls and apparently it went to the other post office, and tells me that it’ll be brought over after making me accept it’s my fault.
While I wait I steal a cigarette from the Buddha shrine in the post office foyer, and later come to believe, amongst other hypotheses, that this is what cursed me with such poor fortune for the subsequent few months of my life once I’d gotten back to Hanoi from my trip.
After some time, a one-armed man delivers my package by bicycle.
I drive out to my homestay at An Bang beach and notice that Hội An has grown dramatically, in infrastructure and tourist population, since I was here about 9 months ago, just as much as it had in the 9 months before that when I’d first been there. The last time I drove this road there was nothing on it. Now there are large multi-story restaurants and hotels and traffic is heaving, Vietnam is booming. Throughout the length of the country there is explosive development relative to the standing of the particular local community; in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, skyscrapers and luxury apartment complexes and international franchises and highways replacing entire neighbourhoods; in the enclosed valleys near Phong Nha the bizarre sight of the gaudy neon signs of the Vietnamese version of Carphone Warehouse spring up in villages of small houses isolated from the world; in places like Long Son the rest of the village might come around to help some guy build a small brick extension onto his house; while here on An Bang beach a proliferation of smoothie bars and fancy restaurants and yoga studios are early adopters to the transformation into what in a few years will no doubt resemble Bali’s Canggu, the boojie Aussie exclave rice-paddie suburb of Denpasar.
The owner of the homestay on the beach is Linh. He is obliging to a fault with a wicked straight-faced sense of humour. His partner’s name is Vi, his daughter’s are named Xu-My and Dao, which means ‘Strawberry’. His home is a beautiful, modern three-story house across the road from the beach. He makes a point of introducing all the backpackers staying in the single dorm room to each other so that we don’t end up doing the usual thing of grunting politely at each other as we come and go about our solitary business.
Linh is a wonderful host. He calls me a “hero” with a straight-face, and when I ask why, he says “because you drove here a long way all the way from Huế”.
To Linh, everyone is a “hero”, everything is “easy”.
“Don’t worry” he says, the muffled buzz of his Central Vietnamese accent contrasting from the staccato yelp of the Northern ones I’m used to.
“Stay here with me – easy”.
11.
I need to stay another day in Hội An, or on the beach at least. I’ve no desire to go back into the town where everyone else wants to go, I’ve already been there twice before. Linh drops me off on his bike to get a massage. I am physically exhausted but mentally relaxed. Each day has settled into a familiar pattern: wake up, eat breakfast, arse about for a bit, pack up my things and secure them to my bike, hesitate for a bit before leaving, settle into the driving and reach a point where I start to feel confident in reaching my destination – the metaphorical crest of the hill – and then enjoy a blissful few hours of driving before arriving where I’m going – no matter where and no matter how far I’ve travelled – around sunset.
Every day an expectation of seeing this or that, and inevitably coming across sights, people and places that I never knew existed, and never knew could exist.
Every day expecting that I’ve already seen the best of what the country, and the trip, could possibly offer, and every day outdoing it in some way.
Every day getting a little bit easier, more confident on the bike (and in the bike), more confident in choosing the road less travelled and going with the unknown.
And every day being tempted a little bit to delve back into the familiar – the tourist attractions, the busy towns and cities, the English speakers, the comforts of Western food, the backpackers all here just to have a good time – the lure of the known. Always two steps towards the unknown, one step back.
Always disappointed with yourself for going back.
But for now though, I need comfort, and at least the full body massage is a very Vietnamese tradition (and no they don’t offer happy endings).
Linh picks fruit from the trees in his courtyard and gives them to us regularly throughout the day. He explains Vietnam’s traditional gender roles and how he makes the money but he has no money – spending money is the woman’s job. He also offers us free tea and coffee, though he leaves the making of it to the woman as well.
I spend the day doing nothing. After many days of work I am on holiday again. I enjoy a long lunch on the beach with my new backpacker friends, whose company I enjoy thoroughly and resent not in the slightest. I eat a chicken panini and drink a smoothie at a place called the Juice House. Vi makes us jasmine tea plucked from the trees in the yard.
The beach is 50 metres away down a narrow alley shielded from the sun between houses. Restaurants with excellent versions of local speciality My Quang face onto the quiet road, the homes out the back facing the beach. Little kids play unattended in the alleyways, big square frameless windows in the bare red brick give glimpses into the sparsely decorated houses as you walk by at touching distance. Parents dose in hammocks out in the back yard as a child fills an ashtray with sand with a spoon and brings it back home to them.
At night Linh brings us to the beach where we swim in the water under a meteor shower. 20km across the bay over Đà Nẵng is a lightning storm, though Linh assures us it’s safe to be in the water, where we’re surrounded by flickers of bioluminescent plankton. Trawlers patrol the sea in the distance fishing by floodlight. Cham Island on the horizon illuminated by the combination of lightning, sea life, stars both shooting and stationary, and the moon.
In both space and time I’m halfway through the trip, and I’m starting to relax.
12.
They say it’s different down south, in Vietnam. The Northerners will tell you that as much as the ones from down below. The people are friendlier, more open. It’s more ‘Westernised’. I always wondered what that means. The south has better weather, and spicier food – both of which are predictors of friendliness and openness on many continents.
I leave Hội An with slightly relaxed shoulders in late afternoon and take a pleasant three hour spin down on the busy Highway 1 to a non-descript town called Quảng Ngãi.
The first thing that hits me is that people are friendlier here.
It’s my first time in what was for a brief two-decade period South Vietnam, outside of the major tourist and urban areas of Huế, Đà Nẵng, Hội An and Ho Chi Minh City (the city formerly known, I should mention at some stage for those of you not familiar, as Sài Gòn). Beyond the noticeably cheerier stares and waves and moans of ‘Hellawwww’ as you drive by, something dawns on me, the thing I could never put my finger on in Hanoi, though here it instantly and calmly coalesces into mind: perhaps a fundamental underpinning of what people mean when they vaguely refer to foreign cultures being ‘more Westernised’.
It's the body language. How people carry themselves. It’s like the way you can stress and strain to memorise words and grammatical structures, and fret over why even with your perfectly rehearsed and practiced pronunciation no-one understands a damn thing you’re saying, until you see for the first time the slightly unsettling sight of a guy from London speaking fluent Vietnamese and you see that, bar his pale skin and blonde hair, he looks Vietnamese, the spirit of the language possessing him and contorting his face, his body, his shoulders and even – yes – his eyes so that he looks like his whole being was born and raised here and not on the other side of the world, where people look different, and you realise that fluency in a foreign language goes far, far deeper than words alone – it’s an expression of your soul.
And then you see it in reverse. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what, but if you were to look away from their faces and the tones of their skin, these young people around me in the café staring at youtube videos on phones, they don’t crouch like the young people in Hanoi, they slouch like lads from Dublin, or Manchester, or Idaho. They push and cajole and laugh and do all the things that people do everywhere, including up norf’ in Hanoi, and yet there’s something altogether more familiar about how they carry themselves in the world, and I understand a little better what people mean by ‘more Westernised’.
I dunno if they got it from the telly or the war, though it’s something I wasn’t expecting and I amuse myself by further spotting it around town. There’s something a bit different about the layout of the town too, reminiscent of Dong Hoi in that it’s not the same grim, grey, sort of vacuum of architecture and aesthetics as so many godawful northern towns, which seem to have been planned from above to within an inch of their souls, and have, to my innocent eyes, not much of natural evolution to their centres and their hearts.
People stroll about here and seem more relaxed, less shy, less hurried to what I’m used to.
Or maybe I’ve just been reading and listening to other people too much, about what it’s like ‘down south’.
The hotelier flirts with me and tells me I’m handsome and makes all sorts of suggestive comments as he checks me in. I leave in a hurry and drive around town looking for a quick bite to eat so I can get back to watch Game of Thrones in my hotel room; I find a large Bia hơi restaurant still open. Before I cross the threshold or have a chance to sit down an old man insists that I sit with him and his friends. It feels like he’s causing a scene and the staff seem embarrassed, though I oblige him. I can’t understand a word so his younger friend translates and says the old guy insists on paying for my food and drink.
They bring out prawns and vegetables and spicy barbequed beef and all manner of dipping sauces I’ve never had like green chili yoghurt. It is delicious. They feed me snails as the man watches. He mimes me dying when I hesitate for a split second. We all laugh.
The old guy sizes me up and laughs and calls for more beer and we all cheer. They keep plopping chunks of newly arrived dishes into my bowl and show me how to eat them, then laugh when I get it inexplicably wrong.
The youngest guy is Hoa, the owner of the restaurant. He translates the ramblings of the old guy and asks me about myself and where I’m from. At this stage a large part of my fluency in the language comes as much from knowing the standard questions and what order they rapidly come in from curious locals – they’re always the same.
“What’s your name?”
“Where are you from?”
“How old are you?”
“Are you married yet?”
It’s always worded ‘yet’
“Chưa”, I always reply –
“Not yet”
Hoa asks if I’ve a wife. He asks if I like women. He asks if I’m gay. He asks why I’m travelling alone. He asks if I want to meet a ‘pretty Vietnamese lady.’
I presume he’s on about hitting up a local nightclub later until he asks me the name of my hotel and the room number, and shows me a number on his phone. I realise he’s on about ordering a prostitute, and he tells me that the old guy, who’s since left, had insisted on paying for not just my food and drink, but a local hooker, because I’d told him I was unmarried and travelling alone, which he found hilarious.
It's more acceptable in these parts, they say (of course ‘they’ do), and I’ve heard anecdotes of it being acceptable to the point of country high school students doing a whip around to buy a hooker for their teacher on his birthday and waving him off on his motorbike to fulfil the promise, though I politely decline.
Our night continues. I spend the next three hours talking to Hoa and his wife, accepting that I won’t be making it back to the hotel to watch Game of Thrones. Hoa’s English is about as good as my Vietnamese (i.e. not very) though we manage to converse for several hours. He wants to learn English but he’s never met a native speaker before. The local kids must have got it from the telly. He wants his four-year-old daughter to learn English so she can leave Vietnam forever. He’s reduced to tears when I tell him, perhaps naively, that Ireland was once a poor country and is now doing well for itself, and I believe Vietnam will one day too. I finally make out, with the help of his phone, the words he’s trying to give as explanation for why it can’t:
“Marx-Leninism”.
Hoa and his wife want to visit Ireland some day, though I think it’s because I’m from there. They won’t accept any money at the end of the night, the old guy has paid for it, which I’m embarrassed at, though at least he’s up the price of a prostitute. He follows me back to my hotel on his bike, half cut – says he’s friends with the guy who owns it – to make sure I get home okay.
I get back to the hotel later than expected though content after yet another unexpected and touching evening. Once again, only a few hours down from lounging at juice bars eating paninis with backpackers I’m reimmersed in the Real World, the one I came to explore, the one that’s proving itself time and again to be utterly unknown and unknowable. The gay hotelier winks at me and as I turn out the lights in the room I can hear him bumping against my door; I check the keyhole and see him leaning against it with his ear.
I wonder if I should have ordered the prostitute.
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Some lines I surely can use in my blogs. “fluency in a foreign language goes far, far deeper than words alone – it’s an expression of your soul”, and others. Very observant and from interesting angles. Enjoyed!
Gavin, I never fail to enjoy your writing, thank you for it. So many beautifully described moments and scenes, visual phrasings and observations including "I couldn’t help but turn around and peak over my shoulder at where I’d come from", the disappointments with "going back" to the known, so much more.