Travel Diaries #42 - Hanoi to Saigon [part 4]
I suppose part of any trip is getting to know yourself as much as where you're travelling through, and by now I know what I want: I want to go to the mountains
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Read the story so far here:
13.
I had a rough idea that I would spend the first half of the trip exploring the mountains that run along Vietnam’s central spine from north of Phong Nha to near Da Nang and Hoi An; and for the second half I would travel along the coast and visit the country’s many renowned beaches, at places like Quy Nhon, Nha Trang and Mui Ne. A country of two halves; mountains in the north, sea in the south. It seemed a logical enough way to plan a travel itinerary, the prepared traveller portioning their time exactly equally between two things and environments they expect to enjoy equally.
The problem I found with the plan was that it in Hoi An it was too hot to go to the beach. It was so hot I could only go to the beach by night. I’ve realised by now that if I continue along the coast towards Nha Trang I’ll be spending every moment there trying to find ways to escape the sun that I’ve gone there to bathe under. The beach towns are also renowned for being heavily tourist oriented – grimly so, even coming from other tourism-oriented tourists – with resorts and tourist traps and Russian gangsters trying to mug you, not to mention forcing me to drive for much of the next week and more along Highway 1, the busy road that runs the whole length of the country, the sort of thing you find on holidays that’s so busy that it negates the point of what it is you’re trying to see (in this case, the country of Vietnam) by using it.
And by now I’m well enough conscious of the familiar patterns of the trip to know what I need to do: I need to go back to the mountains.
I find exactly what I was looking for: there’s a road which runs west from Quảng Ngãi and then south along the mountainous, coffee-producing Central Highlands and will take me to the mountain town of Da Lat, known by many as the most pleasant place in Vietnam, and another place I’ve wanted to visit for a long time, another destination I’m trying to tick off the list on this trip through the heart of the country. It will take me about five days to get there, and my online guide has described the mountain road as spanning “hills, lakes, rivers, farmland and jungle” – excellent – as well as being “super remote, even dangerous”, and “prone to mudslides and still under construction.”
Perfect.
The road pulls gently upwards from Quang Ngai, on poorly conditioned but sun-kissed tarmac, which unlike so many others remains permanently open to the skies and world around it, not covered or encroached by jungle, rock or mountain. I plan to reach an arbitrary town some 200km south of here on the map. It’s quite a stretch but I’ve already done some similar days, and I bring a spare bottle of petrol and some food just in case. I stop for food in a village called Sơn Tây and the construction workers in small villages confirm my prejudices that the people of the south are friendlier, though they try to hide their curiosity.
I decide to continue on with no real idea what’s ahead of me – though by my studying of the clock and the map, as well as leaning on my experience so far on the trip, I take a wild guess that I should be at my destination by about 6pm i.e. sunset. The road out of Son Tay is gorgeous, a never-ending foliated canyon stretches into the distance, the road hugging it criss-crossing by bridge intermittently. The low concrete barriers on the cliffside edge of the road seem like they’d do nothing other than flip you over the handlebars and into the abyss were you to run into them, and some of them are missing belying evidence of mudslides and monsoon rains, though the road is wide and well-paved, and for now, dry.
Rain clouds appeared as I left Sơn Tây and I’m now quite conscious that not only am I driving towards them, but that it’s already started raining a few kilometres in the distance. A bridge spans a huge river gorge, a secondary school perched on the rocky cliff edge like a Tibetan monastery. Every time I peer over the side there are people going to impossible places to collect bamboo or fetch animals, or men prowling riverbeds with fishing poles and nets, or kids adventuring, though it seems like here is a world where the adventure doesn’t stop when one comes of a certain age.
The rain comes and it’s heavy. I park in the covered yard of a building with red paint daubed on the wall that reads “FOOD. FREE-WI-Fi” and a simple arrangement of tables and chairs, though when I make myself comfortable it appears to be just someone’s home. A little kid of about 10 welcomes me in and mucks about and goes back to playing his computer games. After some time his mother passes by with laundry, I point to the rain and she smiles and takes no heed of me, in no hurry to ask me to leave. After a while I try to explain where I’m going and she thinks I’m mad, though I’m not entirely sure the language she’s speaking is Vietnamese. She hasn’t heard of K’Bang, where I’ve just pointed at the map and decided I’m staying tonight because it’s halfway between Quảng Ngãi and the next arbitrary destination on the route.
I’ve been there for an hour and the rain is still pummelling down, and I’ve still no idea what lies ahead on the road. Eventually the mother hints that I should probably be leaving. It’s 4.30pm and I figure there’s no way I can continue – I’m going to have to go back to Sơn Tây, an hour back the road. As I pack to leave the boy takes a cigarette from the pack on the table and lights it up. I look at him as if to say “Are you for real?!” and he shrugs and laughs. His mother tuts and grins at him.
The road back is treacherous and there are frequent mudslides and rocks rolling onto the path, trees felled, trickles of streams have turned into raging brown torrents that gush across the road like dams have been opened. It’s just as well I didn’t continue. As the rain eases somewhat its effects are still manifesting, though people are already back out, working or playing in the puddles.
I check into a motel in Sơn Tây. I ask if they’ve food and am invited to join three generations of the family for dinner in the courtyard after a cold shower. Lots of rice, pork, morning glory. It’s not the finest of cuisine but I’m grateful for it. My hosts are direct and unemotive but not unfriendly, the patriarch of the family talking to me indirectly through (presumably) his children, softening to me as I reply to his questions in basic Vietnamese and explain where I’m from and what I’m doing in Vietnam. Lots of “Em yeu Vietnam” (“I love Vietnam”), which usually goes down well with the locals, though I get the impression that to these guys I probably sound like a twat.
They’re incredibly generous with their food, and after dinner I’m invited to enjoy tea with the patriarch in a separate tea room. He insists I take one of his cigarettes and also that I drink my tea in the proper corner of the room, as well as eating the dessert he offers and smoking the cigarette in the other side of the table reserved for it. I tell him I’m from “Ai Len” and he responds with the classic “Ah – Roy Keane”, as well as the lesser-heard and more impressive “Niall Quinn!”.
The son, around my age, who’d come furiously banging on my door earlier looking for my “Pa Po” (‘passport’) makes his adorable young daughter dance by pretending to hit her with chopsticks, as ‘punishment’ for her throwing her bottle around; she giggles and settles down. It’s a fun and affectionate little routine for disciplining her without her knowing it.
I start to see more nuance to the ‘friendliness’ generalisation between north and south; perhaps rural and urban is a factor, and perhaps polite western manners are not the be all and end all of friendliness; the hospitality here reminds me of the northern personality, what seemed ‘cold’ at first belies a compassion and decency as deep as any I’ve encountered so far.
I retire to my room after several obligatory shots of rượu, at the ‘drinking table’, and catch up with the latest episode of Game of Thrones on my phone.
14.
It’s a good job I didn’t go any further on what’s been described as the ‘Vietnamese Death Road’. Even the hardiest of mountain dwellers don’t dwell much further on past the point where I turned back yesterday, from the lady with the smoking kid’s house. Slabs of concrete and mudslides roll down banks into bottomless valleys below. The views are top class. I come to what appears to be the top of the pass and a section of road that is still under construction, though no-one’s working today. The road flattens out and after a while I’m in a different type of landscape, a long stretch of deserted forest followed by more rolling hills and farmlands and tea and coffee plantations, as well as, almost unexpectedly – after the last couple of hours and days of creeping further and further away from civilisation, not unwelcome either – some small towns, villages and highways.
The Central Highlands is known for being the largest coffee producing region in the country (Vietnam being the second largest coffee exporter in the world, in case you didn’t know). I take advantage with frequent stops for the cheapest, and best, cà phê sữa đá I’ve ever had. The landscape changes dramatically, and I cover such great distance over the day, that by the time I get into my arbitrarily chosen stop of the mysteriously named Ayun Pa (at around sunset, I never would have made it yesterday), my brain is frazzled, and more than most days, I can’t distinguish between things that happened today, yesterday or the day before that.
Everyone in Ayun Pa hates me. I check into the hotel and the owners bitch and moan and charge me more than the advertised price. The lady wails like a calf when I query it, and they force me to give them my room key when I leave to get food. They seem to hate each other as much as me. They have tissue stuffed in the porthole, presumably so I can’t see when they’re loitering outside. The man points to a curfew of 10:30 when I leave.
Everywhere I go around town I’m told they’ve no food and no beer, despite clearly having them for everyone else. I’m shouted away from everywhere I go. A guy begrudging lets me sit when I say I want to watch the football, and drives off to get two beers for me which he slams on the table. Young people drive by on their bikes and ask “Where you from” before sarcastically saying they don’t understand and mocking me. A man on the street points and laughs at me when I tell him I’m travelling alone (after he asks). In the morning the breakfast lady gives me something different to what I ordered and goes ape when I ask for the thing I ordered, then goes ape at her children for not overcharging me for the thing I did get. Everywhere I go I’m treated like I’ve asked for the local brothel.
Forget about the north vs. south debate on the nature and quality of what ‘friendliness’ means, on the whole there isn’t a place I’ve gone in this country where I haven’t been welcomed and made feel safe, whether politely or not. Ayun Pa is the only place I’ve been in Vietnam where I feel like I might get beaten up, the standard stares and often belligerent curiosity you get all over the countryside and cities never has this sinister quality to it.
I’m glad of the curfew, reclaim my room key from the bastards running the place, and get an early night with the plethora of green flies who inhabit my room, who in contrast to the rest of the population of the town, love me deeply.
15.
I would say that the best thing about Ayun Pa is the road out of it, though the road out of it is absolutely diabolical. It’s more pothole than road, and I fear that my bike is going to suffer from mechanical failure or catastrophic tyre damage, leaving me stranded here. There was one redeeming experience in my whole time in the town: a gentleman of about 60 in a café, fisherman’s hat, hippy vibes, dirty hands and long Vietnamese fingernails, and a kind face shook my hand and began asking me the usual questions in a hurry, to which I found myself replying without even thinking, and as I spoke I realised I didn’t even know what I was saying, my mouth wasn’t waiting around for my brain to translate what was coming in or even what was going out, the most fluent and intuitive conversation I’ve ever had in this language, or perhaps in any foreign language, including Irish. And then it was over.
He shook my hand and said the local equivalent of “Fair play” before leaving. Everyone else stared.
Thankfully the road out gets filled in, and by my map it appears to be right on the border between Gia Lai province, where Ayun Pa is located and where I spent half of yesterday driving, and Đắk Lắk, home of the regional city of Buôn Ma Thuột (the provincial capital, one of the larger cities in the country, and a place nicknamed “the Capital of Coffee”, which I’m all about). Not only are the road’s different in Đắk Lắk, but as soon as I stop in the middle of a village a young teenage girl runs out of her family’s shop to ask me to pose for a photo with her as her mother watches on smiling. I’m getting deeper into the nuances of the contrasting personalities of not just historical nations but provinces and even towns.
On the far side of town I pass several men on the large sheltered concrete veranda of a house-cum-café. About half a mile down the road it starts to lash rain, and as I poncho up I decide to retreat to the shelter for a coffee. It’s only another 2 hours to Buôn Ma Thuột, and it’s just after midday. After the hectic last couple of days I’m in no rush.
The men cheer and welcome me in as I pull up in the rain. They invite me to complete their table and one explains that as soon as the rain started they were expecting me back.
The rain keeps coming so I get stuck there playing pool with the lads. After an hour they decide they’re not going back to work and one of them, who happens to be the café owner, invites us all into his kitchen inside “to drink beer”. He spreads out bamboo mats and snacks and we all sit cross-legged on the floor as he cooks up some seafood. He throws a box of Saigon beers on the ground. We’re settling in for the day.
It’s about half past 1.
The guys speak no English but we get along just fine. They ask the usual questions: where I’m from, how old I am, what I work as in Vietnam, and so on. Another common and sometimes inevitable question on the Standard List For Foreigners is “Một tháng bao nhiêu” – “One month how much?” – the local way of asking one’s salary. Although I’ve learned at this stage to drastically lowball the answer to such a question when I do answer – Vietnamese people are obsessed with talking about money, and foreign English teachers are paid obscenely inflated wages, which could be anything from five to ten times the local average monthly salary – I’m mortified when the figure I give as half the typical month’s wages is still five times what one of my new friends makes, working as “a musician in a local bar”.
The guys are incredibly friendly and good fun, ensuring to include me as much of the conversation as they can. The whole situation is bizarre. We demolish the crate of beer along with generous helpings of crisps, dip and the dried squid and greens and chili pork which one of the guys has fried up for us in the kitchen, which we are sitting in. The guys talk about independence and football and there are frequent compulsory cheers. The man’s daughter hauls in a huge block of ice for our drinks, which is also met with cheers. The guy called Duc keeps filling up my glass and cheering. They ask how many beers I could drink – “8?” – and I tell them I could probably drink all of them, which they love. The rain gets heavier on the roof. I’m not going anywhere for a while.
Suc is the owner of the café and the house and he has a collection of birdcages placed around his kitchen. He shows me a trick where he curls his finger in front of the cuckoo and the bird mimics him – I let out a reactive yelp of “That’s class!” The rest of the guys keenly observe my choice of words, and despite not even having full sentences of English, intuit what it means, everything that is good getting described as “class!” with a hearty chuckle from then on.
Duc is completely steamed and after asking if I do yoga he takes to doing a Jackie Chan kung fu routine and pointing at me as if to say “This is you!” He tells me he does Muay Thai and after demonstrating some swift elbows he declares elbow strikes to be “Number 1”. Throughout the evening he insists on me coming to his house to stay the night. I don’t really want to, and I start to feel a bit apprehensive when he keeps alternating his offer of a bed for the night with clarifying “You make 10 million, one month?!” At this stage he’s also begging me to stay at his place, though it’s taken on somewhat of an ominous air, as the other guys dissuade Duc from pressing me any further. The rain has stopped so I take my chance to hit the road. He’s roaring that Muay Thai is “better than bawxing!” They try to tell me I’ve had too much to drink but I just tell them I haven’t, because I think if I stay any longer Duc is going to ask to fight me, and I really want to get out of here now. I give Suc money for the box of beer but Duc makes a point of paying behind teary eyes, and mimes blowing into a breathaliser as I drive away.
It's an easy drive to for the remainder of the day, and I take the time to stop for a cup of the luxurious local coffee in the pleasantly bustling town of Buôn Hồ. The conclusion of the afternoon took little away from the overall effect of The Lads restoring my faith in humanity after last night’s dubious collective hospitality, in fact the whole bizarre course of events only added to it.
I get to Buôn Ma Thuột just after sunset and the first thing I do is pull into a KFC.
I'm loving these stories, can't wait for the next instalment! I really feel like I'm riding pillion with you. Back to Vietnam for a couple of weeks in late Feb, can't wait. :)
Again, these have been great, all the way down to the details.