Bound for Vietnam (21 page)

Although Vietnamese and Chinese people were moving to and fro rapidly across the border outside, I received a special scrutiny and the first stage of my crossing took an hour. As few foreigners came through here, I was of great interest, as well as being a captive subject with whom the staff could practise their English. It was only after everyone in the building had played with my passport, wondered over it, handed it back and forth and I’d had a long social chat all round, that the first official said, ‘Now we will move onto customs.’ Expecting a gruelling inspection, I heaved my bags up onto the counter and opened them. But the customs’ officer did not look at anything. He was only interested in my books. When I showed him my travel guide, his interest evaporated. No dirty pictures as he had hoped.

Finally, farewelled and sent on my way with good wishes, I stepped out into a gorgeous morning and walked easily towards Vietnam. A wide river separates Vietnam and China at this point and a long, paved bridge is the no man’s land between the guard posts on each side. Crossing the bridge was an enjoyable doddle after what I had imagined awaited me – a horrible border shanty manned by thoroughly anti-social people.

Reaching the Vietnamese side, I came to a line of low adobe buildings and trundled my bags past the first guard, who did not seem the least bit interested in me. But soon someone came up behind me and said, ‘In here. You wait in this room.’ Long and narrow and containing only a big table surrounded by chairs, it looked like an old school room. I waited half an hour. I ate some fruit from my bag, did some knitting, read my guidebook and looked at the map on the wall. I had the feeling I was being watched to see whether I got nervous and betrayed any sinister motives.

Eventually a good-looking young gent wearing an army uniform and with a great-coat thrown over his shoulders in the manner of Hitler’s SS sauntered in, sat down and had a chat with me. I wasn’t sure if he was the immigration official or a visitor. He looked like a captain, so I addressed him as such and he did not argue. Finally he reached for my passport and copied my details into a very old, battered exercise book. No computers here. As I filled out the innumerable forms that he kept pushing towards me across the table, the captain continued to question me.

Then he asked me if I had anything to declare. I asked what sort of things he had in mind. ‘Like jewellery,’ he said and I replied, ‘No.’

‘Camera?’

‘Yes.’

‘Video?’

‘No.’ Then he said, ‘Do you have anything prohibited, like hair oil?’ I looked at him dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe my ears. I asked him to repeat it and he said, more clearly, ‘Her oin.’

‘No.’ I said, and burst out laughing.

‘Cocaine?’ he said, and I laughed again. I think that my giggles may have convinced him that I was merely an innocent tourist, but it really was ridiculous. Immigration officials don’t usually ask if you have heroin in your luggage, or even hair oil. But there was a funny, cold hard look in his eyes and I thought, God help me if I did.

After this the Captain said that I was finished and asked me if there was anything I would like to ask
him
or if I wanted anything written down to help me on my way. How kind, I thought, and said that I would appreciate directions to where I could get a bus to Haiphong. I knew a train ran from there to Hanoi. The captain recommended that I stop at Halong Bay on my way south, saying that it was a very beautiful place and I should not miss it. It was here that I discovered that I was almost on the coast.

I said, ‘Do I go to customs now?’ But he replied, ‘No, you may go.’ Apparently he was the lot rolled into one. So much for the traumatic searches I had dreaded, I was through! It had taken over two hours but had been no trouble at all.

Outside, I was on Vietnamese soil. Good-bye to China!

Hoping to find some transport to the village of Mong Cai, a kilometre or so further on, where the Captain had said that I would find a bus, I started walking down the dirt road. The only vehicles I came upon were several old army trucks that now seemed to be in the general carrier business and gave off a powerful pong of pig. I showed the paper with my directions written on it to a man sitting beside one of the trucks. He signaled to someone. Up roared a motorbike and, before I knew it, the rider had grabbed me and hustled me onto the pillion. Heaving my big bag up in front of him on the petrol tank, he shoved the smaller bag between us and thundered off, with me clutching my handbag, the bag in front of me and the rider, and shrieking, ‘Slowly! Slowly!’

Later I laughed to think that I had left China by bicycle and entered Vietnam on a motorbike.

We travelled a couple of kilometres in this precarious manner and then I was deposited by the roadside. A minivan screeched to a halt at my feet. The tiny vehicle was already squashed full, but I was forcibly crammed into the back seat. They not only bundled me in, but added several more people afterwards. Then a few metres further on a man hailed the bus and wanted the driver to take a bicycle aboard – a spanking new bike with big wire carrier baskets front and back. I thought, You’ve got to be joking. But they weren’t. They got it in! The driver produced a wrench, took off the bike’s front wheel and put the dismantled parts between the first two seats. The passengers in the second seat rode for more than six hours with a bike on their laps. It seemed to me that the bus was now way past full, but a short distance beyond this point we picked up one more woman. She was squeezed in beside me so that we only had half a buttock each on the seat. Now the van which had been designed to carry eight passengers bulged with fifteen people, baggage, freight and a bike. The last woman to get on, who was about thirty years old, took one look at me as the bus moved off and burst into tears. I thought, Oh, come on, I’m not that bad. But she sobbed on and on, utterly breaking her heart and only stopping occasionally to wipe her nose on her sleeve. I figured that she didn’t have a hanky, so I groped in my bag, got out my wad of precious toilet paper, passed it to her and she continued to snivel in that.

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.