Bound for Vietnam (25 page)
Riding the Thong Nhat, The Vietnamese Unification Express, on a one-track, narrow gauge line is a bone rattling adventure. There are unscheduled stops and a good chance of derailment owing to flooding or typhoons, in the fifty-six hours it takes to reach Ho Chi Minh City. But it is one of the most spectacular train journeys in Asia. The train passes through a dramatic landscape of jagged granite mountains and rocky coastlines that is interrupted by long, coal black tunnels. Begun in 1899, the train-line was repeatedly sabotaged and bombed in the second world war, the Indochinese War and the American war and it was only re-opened in 1976.
Vietnamese trains are old, but they have been well cared for. I thought The Unification Express was wonderful. It was not as plush as the showcase Shanghai–Beijing train, but it was clean, including the loo, which even ran to the luxury of toilet paper. And the trains came with service with a smile. When I boarded at seven in the evening a conductor carried my bags on for me.
My two person compartment had an upper and lower berth and a wooden wash-stand in one corner, the lid of which lifted to disclose a small blue porcelain sink with a tap. Attached to the wall beside the wash-stand was a little fold-down table, beneath which nestled two tiny stools and a waste bin. It was a long time since I had seen one of those articles on a train. There were also bed lights, a fan and, apart from the outside windows, a window covered by an ornate, wrought-iron grill and a curtain that opened into the corridor.
The other half of the two-person cabin arrived; an interesting Englishman who was a steam railway buff. Nigel had some great train stories. We sat on the lower bunk talking for hours and soon became mates. After a while we were brought a plastic bag of long, stringy green tea and later still our minute table was ceremoniously laid with pepper, salt and toothpicks. But although we waited a very long time, nothing in the food line eventuated and regrettably we had nothing to pick out of our teeth. I think we had been expected to buy our dinner from a trolley that we unsuspectingly allowed to get past us. Breakfast, however, was delivered to us in bed – banana, noodles and meat, along with propaganda over the loudspeaker which started at half past five in the morning.
Nigel got off the train at nine o’clock in Hue. From there the line ran down the sea coast to Danang, three and a half hours away. The countryside was as lovely as I have seen anywhere. Buffalo stood among lush green trees and ducks puddled in wet rice paddies alongside thatched atap and bamboo, or occasionally a stone, house. Women stooped to work in the large expanses of fields in which bananas, sugar cane and vegetables grew in verdant profusion. In each rice paddy the tombs of its previous owners stood guard; the ancestor still looking over his rice. (Or had he been used as fertiliser?) The red, blue and yellow of the painted head stones had been faded by the weather, which gave them added charm. The occasional paddy accommodated a veritable cemetery of tombs, some of which were quite large and contained a stone sarcophagus. Reminders of the American War, bomb craters were visible alongside bridges and riverbanks. We crossed several big rivers on which narrow boats bobbed, while on the banks men fished and women washed their clothes. At a little town made up of a motley collection of low buildings that were mostly stone, I noticed that spirit houses decorated with offerings stood on posts in front of all the dwellings. The red Vietnamese flag flew above the railway station. Its doors had once been painted bright blue, but were now attractively weathered to a more subtle colour. As we crossed more rivers, I began to realise just how much water there is in this country.
The railway line began to follow a line of blue mountain peaks on one side, while on the other, waves beat on the white sand of the shore. Then we were among mountains so skyscraping that smoke-like cloud wreathed their tops. We had reached the majestically beautiful Hai Van, The Pass of The Clouds, where the mountains plummet dramatically straight into the sea. We went through several long tunnels that had been cut through the mountains and a guard with a red flag and a whistle stopped the train in a village high on a mountain. From my window I looked down into a deep crevice that was completely overgrown with luxuriant vegetation that cascaded all the way to where the sea swept around the coast in dramatic curves. From this height it was a spectacular sight. The train emerged from the final tunnel to run along the outer edge of a towering, jungle covered cliff. Far below, the sea crashed in waves over black rocks, smashing itself into swirling, foaming white water while the rushing water of small streams tumbled down the mountains over smooth stones and boulders to join it.
At Danang the conductor helped me off the train. Smiling, he happily carried my bags as though it was his duty and not as though he was doing me a favour. As I left the station, I was accosted by several touts, who, though not aggressive, insisted that I should take a taxi to Hoian. I said, ‘No, cyclo to bus station.’ A cyclo was produced, but one bloke, who was still determined to taxi me to Hoian, rode alongside it on his motorbike. When he couldn’t
convince me to take a taxi, he said that he would take me on the motorbike. I said, ‘No no,’ and pointed to my luggage. ‘No problem,’ he insisted. Maybe not for him, but I wasn’t bumping thirty kilometres over bad roads on the back of a motorbike clutching my luggage. Still trying to persuade me, he said, ‘Vietnamese bus very old.’ I said I didn’t mind,
‘Vietnamese bus very crowded.’
Ditto.
‘Vietnamese bus no good.’
Ditto.
‘There will be Vietnamese people on this bus.’
‘I love Vietnamese people.’ I laughed.
‘There will be
many
Vietnamese people.’
‘The more the merrier!’ I chortled.
I won. He gave up.
‘Ever onwards!’ I enthused, pointing, I hoped, in the direction of the bus station with my trusty umbrella. But when the cyclo and my entourage deposited me at the station, I began to see their point. At the bus station I found, not real buses, but a yard full of senile four-wheel-drive wrecks that appeared to have been hashed up out of scrap metal. Built high off the ground, they resembled a mistake between a small truck and a van that had been badly converted into a passenger vehicle by shoving bench seats in the back. I was allotted pride of place in the front seat – possibly because I had paid twenty times the local price, even after bargaining the fare down to half the starting point. My bags and I were pushed into the vehicle to rest on a rock-hard bench that was so high I had to duck my head to see out of the windscreen. Not having a death wish, I always try to steer away from the front seat of anything drivable in Asia, but somehow I usually manage to end up there anyway. I am not tired of living just yet and if the vehicle I am in is about to have a horror smash, I really don’t want to see it coming at me head on. But in this instance I need not have worried. The broken-down conveyance wobbled along, crashing through its gears, sounding like a sick food processor. It could not have gone fast enough to have had a decent smash.
The driver climbed in. Instead of one of the young macho boys, who look about ten years old, smoke full time and drive like loonies, that are usually found in charge of public transport in South East Asia, in creaked a tiny, wizened-up geriatric, who looked as though he should have been licensed to drive a wheel chair, at the very most. He gave me a huge, almost toothless grin, and was obviously delighted to see me. I sat hunched almost double on the bench. My big bag was crushed between the Wizened One and me, the smaller one was under my feet and my handbag was stuck up in front of me on the dashboard like an object of worship. As we took off, I looked down at the door by my side and saw a hand creep around to secure the latch on the inside of the door. The kind gentleman in the seat behind me obviously did not want to see me bite the dust. Then I discovered that this door failed to meet the frame by about an inch and that the bolt which had been banged on as an after thought was extremely insecure. Expecting to fall out at any second, I rode clinging to the seat and the dash board with my fingernails.
We doddled along very slowly over an appalling dirt road that I thought was crook until we turned off it and I discovered that it had been the main road. Now we were on a track of rocks, pot holes, ditches and mud – it had been raining here. We crashed over this monstrosity at about one kilometre an hour for what seemed a very long time. It took an hour and a half to go thirty kilometres. Touting for extra passengers, we stopped every now and then and more people, lots of live chooks, ducks and a pig or two, joined our group.
Advancing through rice paddies and vegetable gardens, we came to the sea shore, which we followed. We passed the turn off to China Beach, and finally came to the outskirts of Hoian. An ancient town on the banks of the River Thu Bon, which winds down to the China Sea, Hoian was once one of the biggest ports in Asia. It is a rich fusion of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and European influences, the latter dating back to the sixteenth century. In its earliest days, around the year 2 AD, the town was a port of the Champa kingdom and its annual spring fair grew to be an exotic showcase of the world’s goods – silks, brocades, ivory, fragrant oils and fine porcelain. The now drowsy river was once thronged with majestic vessels that came with the trade winds from the great merchant nations of the world. But the river started to silt up in the late eighteenth century and Hoian’s fortunes began to decline.
From its fringes, Hoian looked like a simple village, and I wondered if I had come to the wrong place. This was on the cards. But I knew all was well when I asked a cyclo driver to take me to the Hoian Hotel and he good-naturedly agreed. According to the guidebook, the Hoian Hotel was the only place that was permitted to take foreigners. But the book was outdated. All the small guest houses were now allowed to house foreigners and the place was jumping with them. I reflected sadly that Vietnam would soon become another Bali. Many of the foreigners were ghastly package tour monstrosities. One bunch of Italian men careered around in a screech of loud, lairy check-patterned shorts and plastic sandals and behaved like complete yobbos. Suffering from herd mentality, they went everywhere
en masse
in crocodile file. Obviously believing that they needed the safety of numbers, they trooped out in line to shop, tramping into one place after another, and making complete exhibitions of themselves in each.
The cyclo pedalled me along the wide drive that swept up to the main entrance of the Hoian Hotel – the only place in town that looked as though it was accustomed to its guests arriving in cars. You didn’t see many cars in Hoian, but this was where they were to be found. I imagined that respectable tourists did not land here in cyclos. The Hoian complex was very extensive and I discovered that I had got out at the restaurant by mistake. A girl took me in tow and walked me through the vast grounds.
At the reception desk I was told that the Hoian had several grades of accommodation, and I negotiated for one of the cheaper rooms. Two people travelling together can afford better rooms, but when you have to pay the lot yourself it is not practical. Another young woman walked me across more of the grounds to show me the room. I had become cautious when she had said that it had an outside bathroom. I had been caught in this trap before.
The Hoian had been the original old pub in French colonial days, but it was now run by the government. I was billeted in the oldest part, which was now the poor quarters.
It consisted of several antiquated, but charming bungalows that fronted the street and were some distance from the main hotel building. Each bungalow had four very large rooms and was surrounded by a wide tiled verandah supported by stone columns. Colourful decorated pots containing plants, trees and palms flanked the steps up to the verandahs.
The first room I viewed did have an outside bathroom. You had to walk across the verandah, step off it, go along the side of the building and enter an old wooden door. My accomplice and I looked at this arrangement with a jaundiced eye. She said, ‘No, you have other room.’ This one’s bathroom was more convenient. A door at the end of the room opened into a corridor right next to one, albeit with only cold water.
The main Hoian Hotel was a white-washed building with a tiled roof and wide verandahs. It reminded me of the old Dutch hotels in Indonesia. During the American War it had accommodated the US marines. The grounds were surrounded by a stone wall broached by a gate at the street front. A guard was stationed here who watched all entries and exits from a small hut under a pink hibiscus tree.
My room was comfortable and I circumvented the lack of hot water by using the thermoses provided. The room attendants were quite happy to replenish them often, and they also asked if I wanted anything else. The weather was not as cold as it had been in Hanoi, and nothing like the freezing conditions I had survived in China, and I had already learned to wash my hair in a thermos of water and perform my ablutions with a little less.