Modern Packman

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The airport hasn’t gotten any better. Five years ago in Saigon, you met next to nothing but a corrugated zinc hut, lime-green (like most things were) and Vietnamese greeters, as welcoming as any overcoated Serbian, at a door in Mayfair, in February. I miss that shed. ‘The customs shed’ was the epitome of arrival. The customs shed is now in another place: up the Fly River; on the docks in Davão; Ciudade del Este maybe. Not here. Here is a contemporary structure of which any municipality could be proud: an edifice with smoked glass, chromium tubes and wires and a hyperbolic flyover. This architectural monstrosity is easily better than analogous airports in Nottingham, Omaha and Perm. Once we would mass in the car-park: we thieves, we whores, we taxi-drivers, we language school principals. In that shadeless, lawless, beerless car-park, relatives wept openly and founded cargo-cultures to the horizontal endeavour of daughters, nieces and some ex-nephews, in expectation of the émigrés ample return from Bangkok, Manila or some other El Dorado. But no more. Now there are almost as many opportunities at home. Now, it is all burnished steel tubes and merrily coloured plastic buckets under drips. Welcome to Vietnam.

You will be assailed by furies, enthronged by cab or bus drivers, touts, guides, money changers, three different kinds of police officers. Every one of these people, including those with some degree of bona fides, is lying to you, misinforming you. Everyone of them just wants your money. Many offer some grossly expensive goods or service in exchange, most of them would rather just have the money. There are rip-offs, short cons, long cons, probably medium cons and honest to goodness larceny. Get used to it. Ignore everyone. Turn left. Continue left. At the domestic terminal is a cheap bus into town.

Escape from any airport or train station is much easier if you don't look like a pack mule. In Vietnam, you need a couple of T-shirts, shorts, and some sandals, regardless of your sex. You can’t arrive naked, so you had better wear some of that. There is nothing to photograph except you and your drunk mates. Don't bring a girlfriend, or a motorbike, or a computer. You won’t need to carry sunglasses or nail-clippers.

So what the hell is the huge pack for? You look like a fool, a stupid lumbering dinosaur of a fool. And you know it, don’t you? You look like a fool, you act like a fool, you are festooned like a fool, so what conclusion can anyone reach? Travel light, buy stuff. Oh yeah, your ski-sweater and matching gimp mask? And your dress shoes and sleeping bag? Your day-glo dildo? You won’t need that stuff here… Well, most of it. The modern backpacker resembles nothing so much as a packman from the nineteenth century. But these men carried literally their whole stock and trade on their back. You are only carrying… Hell, don’t know! Yoga mats? Campaign chests? A mobile army surgical hospital?

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