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'Nam
From Laos, land of a thousand elephants, to Vietnam, land of a thousand propaganda posters.
Luang Prabang, Laos
A day before I left beautiful Luang Prabang for the capital Vientiane, I felt I owed it to the Unesco-approved town to at least climb its famous hill and see what all the fuss was about. Despite the name, Pusi Hill is a steep climb. I wish I could say it had been worth it, but the truth is that the combination of an entrance fee* to the very top and the oppressive heat made me climb down again before the supposedly impressive sunset. Maybe next time.
*Us Cloggies have a well-deserved reputation for being cheapskates.
It ain’t much if it ain’t Dutch
Laos is similar to Thailand in a lot of ways. The food is almost identical, the languages are similar, etc. But one striking difference is that things in hard-up Laos happen at a slower pace than in its more developed neighbour. Even in the ‘bustling’ capital of Vientiane (population: 300,000; open 7am-11pm), traffic moseys along at a crawl. Even people’s brains are slower, I think: the guy at an internet café I went to needed a calculator to
work out 20,000 minus 13,000 kip (27.50 baht; 2.3 peasants).
Vientiane
Vientiane (which my guidebook, mysteriously, tells me is supposed to be pronounced ‘Wieng Chung’, leaving locals strangely mystified) is deserted after 11pm or so, apart from the dodgy tuktuk drivers on every street corner offering weed, prostitutes or a ride to some nightclub that’s open till 2am (!). Two black cats crossed my path that night. All cats are basically evil, but black ones are especially good at symbolism that way.
But don’t get me wrong, Vientiane isn’t a seedy sort of town, and its location on the scenic Mekong lends it a certain charm. But its major saving grace has to be the food, which is very good here, especially the French and Belgian fare. At absurdly reasonable prices, I indulged to my little
coeur’s content.
Mind your language
I’m kinda doing the whistle stop tour of Southeast Asia, in an if-it’s-Thursday-this-must-be-Laos kind of way, so it doesn’t really pay to learn the lingo, as I’d find myself learning another one two weeks later.
Another good reason not to bother is that most of the languages in this part
of the world are tone languages. This means that if you don’t get the subtle yet crucial distinction between the various tones just right (six of the bastards in Vietnamese!), you end up saying something completely different.
Example one: Me:
Sà bâidèe truong. Charlie: You want to divorce an armpit?
Me: No, wait.
Sá băidée truơng.
Charlie: My elephant sweats a mountain?
Me: No, hold on. Erm…
Să bàidêe truợng.
Charlie: Aah, OK. Fine, thank you. And you?
Example two: Me: Hi, is this the way to Hanoi?
Charlie: Hanoi? Hmm. No… No, I’m sorry, never heard of it. You know what he’s on about?
Friend: Search me.
Me: OK, no, wait…
Hà Nợi.
Charlie:
Hà Nợi? Hmm. Nope, sorry.
Me: OK, hold on…
Hặ Nó.
Charlie: Hmm. No, never heard of that either.
Friend: What a peculiar name for a town.
Charlie: ‘Discomfort Trustworthy’? Yeah, that is kind of an odd name.
Me:
Hà Nội?
Charlie: Aaahh! Why yes, of course, it’s straight down here, then left at the POW camp.
I Knead your Body Right Now
Had an hour to kill before boarding the sleeper bus to Hanoi, so I went for one of those Thai massages (common in Laos as well). It was quite nice, barring one or two painful knee digs (that woman could stand to lose a few pounds, or at least file down her knees). She rubbed something that smelt and felt like Vicks VapoRub all over me (or nearly all over; it wasn’t that kind of massage); and basically kneaded, poked, pulled and generally manhandled my body, but in a nice way.
She was even walking on my inner thighs and over my back at one point. The whole effect was instantly ruined soon after by 12 hours in a cramped sleeper bus seat built for Charlie’s hobbitesque stature.
I might have pulled a bit of a cultural boner by putting my feet up over the seat in front of me (showing your foot soles or pointing your feet at someone is a big no-no here), but after an hour on this bus I was just about half-past give a shit. The nearly horizontal sleeper seats were comfortable enough —even
Laos
About a hundred lizards crawling up a wall at dusk. For reasons best known to themselves.for a six-foot gaijin like me, surprisingly—, except for the foot end, which doesn’t give you enough space for your feet to stick up, so they’re permanently twisted to the side. And that gets old quick, believe me.
So most of the passengers were avoiding the foot end altogether, sitting with their knees up, including the lady who had brought three little dogs along (Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner). I don’t usually like small yapping dogs, but even I had to admit these three were cute.
Charlie’s always helpfully pointing out to me that I’m sweating. Thanks, Chuck. I hadn’t noticed.
Vietnam
The traffic here in Hanoi has to be seen to be believed.
I was stuck here for a week waiting for a visa for China. I hate visas. They’re such a barrier to travelling, and completely unnecessary. Any kind of checking up on people I suspect you can do just as easily with a passport.
Vietnomnomnomnom
Being a card-carrying cheapskate Cloggie, I eat at cheap-as-chips roadside stalls most days. It takes a little practice to get it right, though. Charlie takes great delight in every clumsy, awkward little faux pas made by visiting foreigners, laughing their heads off at every goof. Occasionally, along comes some spoilsport
like me who's not only good with chopsticks (I’m getting pretty handy with them by now) , but also used to very spicy food, and I was comfortable with the local fiery fare.
Did this dampen their glee? Did it fuck. They simply didn't believe me, preferring to assume I was simply good at hiding my discomfort. You've got to admire their glass-half-full way of thinking.
Northern Vietnamese food is OK but a bit bland.* They don’t use much in the way of spices, seasoning, soy sauce and the like. I’m told it’s better down south, so I’m a bit bummed that that part of the country’s not on the itinerary. Maybe some other day.
The mystery meat in the soup here sometimes contains bits of US POWs. They're in their 50s and 60s now so it's a bit chewy, but not bad.
*A notable exception are the delicious spring rolls, which are nothing like the Vietnamese spring rolls you get back home.
Hawkers
The hawkers on the streets of Hanoi take persistence to a new level. As a foreigner, you can’t venture two feet outside your hostel without being accosted by some grubby
hustler. “Hello my friend, you want a book,” they’ll go. It’s a statement, not a question. On display are a range of Lonely Planet guidebooks, dog-eared decades-old bestsellers and some cheaply photocopied more recent bestsellers.
Hanoi, day three
I was feeling a bit depressed today, so I thought I’d commit almost certain suicide by hiring a moped and venturing out into the Hanoi traffic. It had a wee basket at the front. This may have been my talisman actually, because I somehow emerged unharmed through all the insane traffic (despite some dickhead’s front wheel grazing my leg trying in an attempt to try and squeeze through).
I got this wound in 'Nam, but I don’t hold my country responsible.
The lingo
One of the nice things about Vietnam is that street signage is pretty good, so it’s easy to find your way around. Another plus is the fact that they use the Roman alphabet, just like English, so you can actually read the writing everywhere.
Speaking of writing, it’s remarkable, too, how consistent they are with the diacritics: you almost never see Vietnamese written without the various dots, accent marks and squiggles. This makes a refreshing change from Spain, where half the time they don’t
bother with them (that's if they even know where to put them in the first place). So when I was living there, I kept putting the stress on the wrong syllable.
Another interesting thing about the Vietnamese language is that they spell all their place names as separate syllables: Viet Nam, Ha Noi, Sa Pa, etc. I think it’s in order to avoid long convoluted words like in Thailand. In this hot tropical climate, syllables breed like rabbits if you don’t separate them.
Halong Bay
Some of the most colourful characters you meet while travelling are often other travellers. On board one of the junks that dot gorgeous Halong Bay (on the coast, about three hours from Hanoi), I met an Australian with an accent so humongously Strine, he made Steve Irwin sound posh. I had trouble understanding Barry at first, and needed a few minutes for my ears to adjust. We had the usual sort of conversation that you do when you’re travelling: Where you off to nixt? God yer visa for China yid? That sort of thing.
Barry was a nice bloke, don’t get me wrong, but I think it’s fair to say
People's Glorious Revolutionary People's Museum
By law, national flags in Laos have to be flown alongside the communist party flag. he had a few issues. There was the usual mix-up with the room bookings on board. It’s uncanny how Charlie ever managed to beat both the French and the Americans, because the words ‘piss-up’ and ‘brewery’ spring to mind on a regular basis in this country.
Barry pointed out that he’d paid extra for a private cabin, so he wanted either that or a refund. Reasonable enough to point out, I think, but Bazza felt it necessary to do so fifteen times (I counted). He seemed terrified at the thought of having to share a cabin.
I think it all got sorted out in the end though (hard to tell through the tour guide’s thick Vietnamese accent*). Me, I hadn’t been offered the choice of a private cabin or otherwise, so as far as I knew I was sharing, which was fine by me.
When I was handed the keys, the cabin was empty, so I thought, Bonza, cobba! A cabin to myself. Halfway through the night, however, the tour guide came in and passed out on the other bed. Which he’d maybe tried to make clear to me earlier, or maybe decided on the spot; I'm
not sure. Whatever.
*Charlie, for the most part, learns English at school from local Vietnamese teachers, which means their pronunciation is so abysmal that it makes your brain bleed trying to work out what they’re saying.
Being relatively rich and very far away from anywhere else, Australians have had a travelling/backpacking/gap-year tradition since way back in the 1970s, much earlier than other Western countries. And in contrast to the rest of the West, where it’s almost exclusively a middle-class thing, Australia’s travelling bug has had time to trickle down from their middle-class bellwethers to the working class. So these days, it’s not unusual to meet Australians on the Gringo trail who work in a mine or an oil rig or similar, with accents to match.
Watch this space: ten years down the line, the same will be happening in Europe and America, I’m guessing.
Caves
Halong Bay is also home to an impressive cave complex. Our tour guide pointed out some of the more interesting rock formations, but seemed to be able to see a dragon in every other limestone stalactite/stalagmite structure, leaving me scratching my head. Some of his ‘cloud shapes’ I could
follow, like one shaped a bit like the top half of a man, which he enthusiastically described as a praying monk (fine, whatever), a vaguely heart-shaped hole in the rock wall, a kissing couple, etc., all of which I could just about see, but I drew the line at a piece of rock that didn’t look remotely like a lion.
I asked the other white devils on the tour if they could see a lion in it, and their reaction was mainly along the lines of: Whatever, no, just go with it.
As if on cue, a drop of water splashed on my head from the cavern roof, as if to calm me down. Or maybe to erode me into a stalagmite.
Rude boys
Vietnamesers can be a gruff lot sometimes. The let’s-be-generous-and-call-her-a lady attending the toilets at Hanoi’s central train station* flapped her hand in my direction as I approached, greeting me with “Money money!”
The guy who ‘showed’ me the right platform (which I already knew) subtly suggested a tip by yelling “Money!” at me. When I gave him 2000 Vietnamese dong (4 peasants), he demanded more, and left in a huff,
muttering something when I refused. Cheeky bastard.
I like talking about money in Vietnam because I get to say ‘dong’ a lot. (I’m easily pleased.) ‘Nam is a bit more expensive than Laos or Thailand, but on the upside, the girls are prettier. Plus you get to say ‘dong’.
*The Vietnamese for ‘station’ is
ga, from the French word
gare. In the same way, ‘beer’ is
bia. I like that.
Day seven
Up at the crack of noon today. Got an absolutely awful haircut. The lady hardly took anything off; I don’t think she even had a pair of clippers, so she just scissor cut randomly into my hair. Bit of a waste of 70,000 dong. Dong.* I’ve heard similar stories from other gaijins: Charlie’s scared to take too much off for some reason.
*The repetition of the word ‘dong’ is not a typo or anything; I just like saying ‘dong’.
Sapa
The hawkers here in Sapa, a beautiful town near the Chinese border, come in the guise of women in traditional ethnic dress (Hmong I think) giving you the by now familiar, famous informal Asian interrogation. ‘Where you
from? What you name? How long you stay Sapa?’, etc. etc.
I played the game the first three or four times, then got bored with it. After that, whenever they went ‘Where you from?’ at me, I’d just answer ,‘Uranus’. It deters them not a jot. ‘What your name? Where you go? You buy something!’
Some of them get straight to the point and whine ‘Something!’ at you as you walk past, short for ‘You buy something’.
Their valiant efforts triple when you’re schlepping a backpack, because they all get a commission from local guesthouses and hotels for trapping gaijins.
Dong.
The Vietnamese currency, the dong, has way too many zeroes. You could pay upwards of 400,000 dong for a good-quality dong here.
The slow bus to China
From Sapa, it’s just a short minibus ride to the Chinese border. More on the Celestial Empire in the next blog, my little spring rolls.
Dong.
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