Travel Diaries #43 - Hanoi to Saigon [part 5]
I reach the end of my journey, before I reach my destination
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Part 5 of my trip from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City by motorbike.
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16.
Buôn Ma Thuột is a large and pleasant enough city with a slightly controversial reputation, from what I’ve gathered. Not exactly yet a major tourist destination for non-nationals, the Central Highlands region has historically been hard fought over by various colonising and war-mongering forces, and the natives themselves, who for most of history were members of several of Vietnam’s distinct indigenous tribes. The mountainous region has long been the home of a wealth of ethnic diversity – the so-called ‘Montagnards’ or ‘Mountain People’ (Người Thượng in Vietnamese: ‘Highlanders’) – who at various points in history seem to have been harassed by the French, recruited to fight in the war by the Americans, and then cleared wholesale from their land and declared as traitors and spies by the victorious Communist government, being replaced by plantations of settlers as part of the standard ‘land reforms’ and nationalisation of agriculture that goes with Communist takeovers.
But at least now they have Kentucky Fried Chicken.
I decide to take another day’s breather in Buôn Ma Thuột, figuring I’d rather do it in this more hum-drum and out-of-the-way city than in the known tourist destination of Da Lat, even if the latter were to be far more pleasant.
I’ve been driving for three straight days from Hoi An, and once again I need to take a rest day. It is laughable now to think that it never occurred to me once in advance of my travels that my bike might be a bit too small to be doing such a gruelling marathon of a trip on. Not only is it not built for high speeds (it tops out at about 70kph) but it’s miniature size is far too small for my six-foot-plus frame, and puts incredible strain on my shoulders, neck and hips, requiring frequent stops throughout the day to stretch (which I enjoy – any excuse for a roadside coffee and a bit of soaking in the surroundings), and at this stage, necessitating taking a break from driving every two or three days as my body just can’t cope with riding any longer. No harm to slow down, I suppose, though I also am battling time, and probably should have given myself more than three weeks to complete the trip.
I wander around the city enjoying cheap and delicious coffees. I get a massage from a blind guy who is an expert with his hands, for a quarter of the price of the timid old lady in Hoi An who was afraid to really go to town on me. The food down south is reliably fantastic – deliciously spiced beef or pork, with savoury rice and vegetables and pickles. I think I’m finally falling for Vietnamese food, though I know I’m destined to live out the rest of my days on the comparatively bland northern cuisine.
I decide to take a short trip to a local waterfall though I wonder if it’s going to rain.
“Không mưa!” says the kind man running the hotel with a wave of his hand. He’s given me the warmest of welcomes, slowing down his busy schedule to stop and chat whenever I pass through the small lobby, and me enjoying the favouritism I’ve now become used to in busy places due to my longer-term residence in the country.
“No rain!”
The waterfalls are amusing enough, and I go for a swim in the river with some local youths having a picnic. They offer me some nuts before we even speak. It’s standard practice in Vietnam, like offering someone your hand to shake, people just go around indiscriminately giving you bags of fruit or nuts or other small gifts, an in-built social generosity and almost innocence which is absolutely adorable.
It starts to rain.
It’s still raining as I walk back from the river in my togs. I decide to leave instead of waiting it out and change back into my clothes. As I’m getting on my bike a young girl gives me some advice:
“Đi chậm”
“Go slowly”
I drive off quickly as I want to get out of the rain.
The rain gets worse.
And worse.
Within a few minutes there are large brown puddles gushing across the road. It continues to pour down. The driving is brutal. The puddles turn into streams which turn into rivers rushing down the road. The water is coming up to my feet by now as I keep my head down and steadily plough on.
I’m getting soaked through my poncho. The rain keeps hammering down. There’s rivers of brown water flooding every section of road now, which I hope is from the rich reddish-brown soil that’s abundant in the region. By the time I get close to Buon Ma Thuot again the water is up past my feet.
The presence of traffic is not trivial, the issue amplified due to the weather. It’s the law of the jungle on the roads as always, and they never give a damn about the smaller guy. In fact, in rains like this, it often feels like they enjoy lording it over the peasants who must travel outside. A truck overtakes and drenches a line of bikes with a head-height wave you could surf on. I grind (or float) to a halt and call him all sorts of things in frustration.
The road into town is a straight steady uphill climb for several kilometres. I see a sign for ‘Road Works’ and further up I see the roadworks floating down the new-born river, great big chunks of gravel and red bricks floating downstream spinning in circles like obstacles in Mario Kart. I fall in behind a truck with some other bikers, which shields us from the worst of the debris and the weather, though carries the risk that if he brakes too hard we’ll probably be killed. A middle-aged lady zips by on an automatic scooter under a large protective cover, her high heels tucked into the central platform, still clean and dry as a bone. Biblical red seas of water from the local mud flush down from side streets as people wade through, undeterred from their daily chores, the slow motion of their movement must be paradoxical to the urgency that warrants the trip being made.
I make it back alive, and once I confirm that my backpack full of all my earthly conveniences – phone, charger, headphones, notebooks – is miraculously safe and dry, my resentment of the truck drivers eases entirely.
I casually flip-flop around in the rain for the evening eating pork chops under canopies and reading and writing in the cool humid air. There are noticeable population of beggars in the city. In Hanoi they’re noticeable by their absence, the practice being frowned upon by the government, allegedly keeping them ‘out of sight’ according to locals, most people in the samedesperate position tending to try to sell you something of little value at the least.
The effects of (presumably) Agent Orange are visible in several of them. A tragically deformed man with his chin stuck to his chest, his shirt buttoned down to reveal intense scarring, his skin pinkish-white and discoloured blue like a Caucasian baby who’s died from hypothermia. He can’t lift his head to look around at his environment, his gaze permanently glued to the ground as he shuffles about looking for handouts.
I grab a bottle of Da Lat wine and relax in my hotel writing out my notes from the last couple of days, the poor creature’s existence committed to posterity at least, no more than his days which are presumably spent in an eternal loop of walking through a form of simple hell.
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17.
I pull around the corner approaching Lake Lắk and nearly crash into an elephant.
I thought it was a statue of an elephant first, until it started moving, and took its place in a column of other elephants. There are saddles on their backs and riders with pairs of tourists sitting on top of them. The slowly parade along the boulevard running between rows of traditional tribal houses, which look like they might also have been placed here for tourists.
Lake Lắk is planned to be an up and coming tourism mega-centre in the Central Highlands, and they’re preparing for it with the development of resorts and hotels. The road in the town is freshly tarmac’d and lined – it’s probably the best quality road I’ve seen in the entire country. The town looks like it’s prepped and waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for buses of Chinese tourists to come and wallow in luxury and ride elephants and sit and enjoy traditional people in their traditional houses and traditional clothes making (and selling) traditional crafts and playing traditional music.
Any day now. Just not yet.
The place is fairly dead for now.
I do a lap of the lake area once I overtake the misplaced elephant. In the middle of the lake water buffalo bob submerged up to their noses, their horns and the tips of their backs showing, a lady in a canoe herding them slowly back to dry land.
Back in a café in town a girl starts chatting to me and offers to find me local accommodation for the ‘same price’ as the ethnic homestays out on the lake, which she doesn’t rate. I’m happy enough to go with the comfort of a hotel rather than go through what can be a contrived rigmarole of sleeping on a wooden floor in a drafty hut for the sake of ‘authenticity’, which I have already observed to be a manufactured tourist trap in this particular case.
At least there’s no foreigners from what I can see. Or western foreigners, at least.
The girl gives me a note that I believe to be securing me a discount at the large multi-story hotel across the street. After a nap I cruise around looking for somewhere to get something to eat and where I might while away the night with my notebooks and pens. Unlike the north, I’ve found they tend not to serve beers in late night cafes, and I wonder how anyone sleeps drinking Vietnamese coffee at 10 o’clock at night. The level of manual labour in constant practice might have something to do with it.
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18.
I stayed in Lake Lắk because it was only an hour and a half down the road from Buôn Ma Thuột, and Đà Lạt was too far to drive in one day. The road winds and snakes and is surprisingly fun to drive, though why I continue to hold expectations about anything on this trip, especially what the given road ahead of me might possibly look like, is beyond me.
I’m getting tired.
Families live on floating huts on the lakeside, and I wonder how in this vast land they couldn’t even lay claim to the smallest patch of it.
A few metres from a roadside mountain stop my bike fails me for the first and only time on the trip. When I get off I see the chain has come off. I push my bike into the house, the occupant of which tells me he’s not a mechanic, but his next door neighbour is. They are the only two houses for miles. Typical Vietnam. The guy comes out to the yells of his neighbour, who I presume is informing him of my predicament. He gets to work immediately, unfussed about the level of oil and grease my bike covers him with, and fixes the chain, taking minimal payment for his troubles. This minor incident just reminds me that I have been absolutely blessed with the reliability of my bike, which although is far too small for my journey, has been more reliable than I could have ever dreamed of, this being the land where – just in case I haven’t laboured the point yet – everything breaks, everything stops working, even shiny brand new things, and even when there’s no real physical reason for them breaking; it is simply a metaphysical property of this beautiful and bizarre country that things cease to function correctly, or as expected here.
Though this infuriating quality also allows for its beautiful corollary: it is also the land where someone, anyone and everyone, can and will fix anything for you when it does inevitably stop working.
My bike pulls off in perfect working order again.
At this stage it’s just my body that’s failing me, and the only thing that can fix it is me. My bike, while reliable both mechanically and in its inch-perfect manoeuvrability (which has probably also saved my life in several instances of dodging trucks, buses and other bikes), is and has always been far too small for my stature. My neck is so stiff that it feels like something is about to pop in it, and I have to stop every 30 minutes or so to stretch. Even the frequent rest days haven’t helped much, my body permanently crouched forward to make room for my large backpack which has been sturdily – and I’m pleased to report, always faithfully – secured to the carrier on the back of my bike. It’s made that bit larger by the last item I packed, and the first one I remove when I check in anywhere: an enormous tome called Wandering Through Vietnamese Culture, by writer Hữu Ngọc. It’s a 1,200 page collection of ten years of newspaper columns on all sorts of intricacies of Vietnamese culture, across a full spectrum of topics from food to history, national political events to regional and local peculiarities. It’s a wonderful and insightful book from the few pieces I’ve skimmed through before the trip, and a great educational asset about Vietnamese culture, though bringing it on this trip was one of the worst ideas I’ve had in a long time. Not only is it taking up room in my backpack, but the sheer size of it has had the effect of minimising my available riding space on the bike, which has had a direct impact on my health and is now compromising my ability to continue on the trip.
The worst thing is that, predictably, I haven’t read the book once.
As I chunder in the rain up the straight long hill that pulls onwards up to Đà Lạt like the slow climax of a rollercoaster, the bodily and mental exhaustion by now feels interminable. I have to be back to Hanoi in a few days as the school year is starting again and I’m due back in work. After Đà Lạt I calculate I could get to Saigon in two long days of driving, stopping for the night in an arbitrary halfway town ‘in the middle of nowhere’, which I’m sure is a lovely place.
I take great pride as I watch the odometer slowly click over to signal that I’ve completed exactly 2,000km thus far since I’ve left Hanoi.
The rain comes again, as they say it is always liable to do in Đà Lạt. It’s at an altitude of 1,500m and was chosen by the French as a summer getaway from the oppressive heat of the lower lying regions of south Vietnam, and experiences the so-called four seasons in a day. My approach coincides with the middle of winter it seems, and the last few kilometres uphill past honking traffic is completed in the rain that I’ve become used to over the last few days.
I am done.
As I make my way up the highway with saturated feet I remember that some friends have informed me it’s possible to transport your bike by train, and that they did the same on a similar trip when the driving had gotten too much for them (in defence of any accusations of softness they’d just spent three weeks driving through the remote Laotian countryside and two weeks further in Vietnam itself).
I feel like perhaps I’ve nothing more to see, and know the measure of my trip by now. Like the German guy in Phong Nha, perhaps I believed that I’d nothing more to learn, about myself or the country I was travelling through, and that getting to my destination was now merely a formality, its value not dependent on what mode of transport I get there by.
The roads the last few days have been brutal. The rain as ceaselessly hard-working as the people. I’m fed up of the once satisfying routine of strapping up my backpack to the bike in the morning, and I’m definitely fed up of this stupid fisherman’s yellow poncho.
The wave of relief and surge of energy I feel when I decide to surrender to the journey and resolve to forego the final two days of driving, and to send my bike to Saigon by train and take an overnight bus, allowing me more time to spend in both Da Lat and Ho Chi Minh City, as well as allowing my body the recovery it has earned by now, tells me that it’s the right decision.
I have nothing left to prove.
***
Đà Lạt is lovely, it’s hilly topography immediately distinguishing it from the average Vietnamese town which is often flat, dull and centrally planned. It reminds me of Cork, actually, though maybe it’s just the local accent. It looks a bit European in its comfortable layout, and in its architecture. The cafes all have French or English names.
I find my homestay across a footbridge over a raging brown canal in the centre of town, despite my phone being dead. The owner Hung invites me through a sliding patio door into what is very much the living room and kitchen of the house he shares with his wife. After a shower and a nap I’m about to leave for dinner but Hung invites me to stay and eat with him and his wife, which I cautiously accept.
The simple looking fare turns out to be the finest meal I’ve had on the whole trip – fried rice and morning glory, fatty pork slices and beef, pumpkin soup and balsamic salad – both for the flavour of the food and the company, and I don’t leave the house for the rest of the night.
19.
Hung is a gentleman in every sense. I’m reminded of Linh at An Bang beach near Hoi An, and over the course of the two nights I stay there he proves himself time and again to be generous and welcoming beyond what anyone could ever expect from a host. He tells endless interesting stories from his life and his twenty-five years spent working as a motorbike tour guide (he goes by the nickname ‘Scimitar’).
I don’t leave the house until 1pm the day after I first arrived. Hung takes me to the train station to drop off my bike for shipping to Saigon. He’s endlessly obliging and helpful, any time I remind him of this he gives me some sort of variation of “Well, what else would I be doing?”, the signature of the truly generous of spirit that time spent helping others and offering hospitality is the time best spent.
I check out some local sights, a building known as the ‘Crazy House’ which is a Gaudi-esque architectural wonder-slash-monstrosity with melting dimensions and incongruous walkways, and that’s – appropriately enough – still under construction. There’s also a maze bar which is similar in spirit but it’s dark and enclosed and you can get a drink at the end.
Hung invites me to stay for dinner even though my bus leaves at 11pm and I’m not spending the night with them again. He provides plentiful cups of home-grown artichoke tea, along with coffee, biscuits and fruit, all with a story behind them. I stay chatting for hours until my bus comes. He tells stories about his Easy Rider trips that he’s been doing since 1991, every trip from a different time, a different place, with a different group of people, each one segueing into some tangential insight about Vietnamese history, society and culture, which he tells with a mixture of pride, enthusiasm, amusement, bemusement, optimism and love.
Hung’s wife’s name is Hong. She doesn’t speak any English though she mimes her own version of sign language to tell us nice things in that endearing Vietnamese way of pointing you through the steps of tasks and obligations like taking off your shoes when you enter the house or the correct way to prepare and eat food on the table.
Hung walks me to the bus station and shakes my hand goodbye. After a short pause he asks me, almost timidly for once:
“So…. Is my house good??”
I’m embarrassed he felt he had to ask, and offer him my thanks for the thousandth time, for his generosity, warmth, his humour, and promise him I’ll leave him a good review. I’d hesitated for a moment when booking as I’d thought the 9.9 rating for his accommodation was too good to be true; now I wonder who the liar was who docked him a mark somewhere along the line.
It feels like he’s asking on behalf of the whole country.
The answer is simple:
Yes, Hung.
Your house is good.
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