Gooood Morning Vietnam!

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Perhaps it was the 5 consecutive days of pre-dawn starts that put me in a cranky frame of mind when we entered Vietnam. Or perhaps it was the fact that we had just spent 6 hours on a chicken bus travelling from Muang Kha in Laos, across the Phongsali border crossing and down into Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam. When I say chicken bus I mean an exhaust spewing minivan full of locals, about 100 tonnes of fake Red Bull, a thousand 50kg bags of sticky rice and us crammed at the back with zero legroom whilst cages of live chickens were secured to the roof.

Then again, perhaps it was the fact that my first experience in Vietnam was accidently stumbling across a man” busting one out” in the biblical sense! In Laos, I had the embarrassing moment of blundering across bathing time at Monk School – I’m not sure who blushed more. Me or the monks-in-training and they still had their orange Y-fronts on still. Here in a grotty, filthy street café in Dien Bien Phu whilst Sandy and I were waiting for the onward bus to Muong Kay, I ventured into the dim recesses of the eating establishment in search of the toilet. Having stood patiently outside the door for some time, I decided to check there was indeed someone inside and peered through the cracks in the wood. To my immense surprise there crouched a butt-naked man soaping himself and quite clearly “shaking hands with the unemployed”. Ooops. Goood Morning Vietnam!

Returning to Sandy with the amusing tale we apprehensively tackled the only food on offer–a bowl of noodle soup to share with unidentifiable crustacean body parts floating in it (and we are FAR from the sea !) followed by 2 plates of cold soggy spring rolls with what could have been dog stuffed inside. The gap toothed lady (quite possibly the afore mentioned man’s wife) then deigned to insist we pay some 120,000 dong (c$8) for the privilege of eating this. With the bus driver standing over us shouting that the bus was about to depart (Vietnamese don’t seem to have evolved to be able to speak softly, it’s all ‘in yer face’ yelling), my conversational Vietnamese language skills were not up to negotiating the price (something we should have done before we ordered – doh!). So we disdainfully gave her the cash (no wonder her husband was jerking off in the bathroom – if you had a wife that ugly and miserable you’d just want to” slap the bishop” all day) and hauled our rucksacks onto another minivan hoping that things would improve.

They didn’t.

With plans to head north to the French hill station town of Sapa, it seems we chose a rather unique route – rarely used by “falang” (most head straight to Hanoi and then up on the ‘tourist train’). It was therefore a rather challenging 2 days, with not a word of English spoken by anyone. Driving North through a wasteland of paddy fields with rubbish strewn everywhere and scenes in towns reminiscent of Beirut after the Lebanese civil war, we spent a further 4 hours bouncing in time to the potholes on the unsurfaced roads.

Needing to break the journey we got off in the hell-hole that is Muong Lay. Apparently the place has suffered periodic flooding in the past few decades and so it is like a permanent construction site with skeletal frames of buildings lying alongside what looked like a overfilled lake which itself will flood again when the dam just above the Song Da reservoir is built. Burying Muang Lay under 100 foot of water would probably be no bad thing… it was a place where the only hotel in town (yes – still a construction site) wanted to charge us 600,000 dong for a room and every local we tried to speak with to ask about alternative guesthouses (ok, my Vietnamese is bad….really bad) took it upon themselves to phlegm on the floor. Perhaps it’s a cultural thing this coughing up of one’s sputum but I find it really quite revolting be it in the UK or Vietnam. Pigs were being slaughtered in the mud and having run out of the nominal dong I had obtained in Luang Prabang and no ATM we bought some packets of instant noodles to eat dry, plus some tasteless and soggy marshmellow biscuits and scuttled back to our room.

Where did we sleep that night you may wonder? Well, Sandy and I were in agreement that $30 to sleep in the building site hotel wasn’t acceptable and all negotiation (all in Vietnamese) had failed, so we ended up in the bus driver’s quarters IN the bus station. ;-) We slipped the attendant 180,000 dong, put a padlock on the door and slept in our clothes…. The beds were less than clean and the previous incumbent’s toothbrush was lying face down in a puddle of grey water.

I don’t want to generalise too soon but Vietnam seems a really dirty place! The disposal of rubbish is just hideous…plastic littering villages and roadsides. As for their sanitation systems….oh good god, stop reading now if you don’t want to know about how at one place we stopped for a toilet break, was no more than a communal defecation area out the back of the shop. There wasn’t even a hole in the ground - just people squatting on the floor. On another occasion, the toilet was one where everyone craps in a line and it all flows past you as you hover adjacent to the next person. Fun times eh?!

So ok, the sanitation and rubbish disposal systems aren’t quite 1st world yet but then neither is the food preparation. In the villages you see hulking carcasses of beef with heads and hooves still attached or chopped up sections of pigs and chickens, or skinned ducks strung from their necks just lying out in the open air with flies crawling everywhere. Africa was more civilised than here. Now maybe I was still cranky from the lack of sleep, or the fact I was in dire need of an osteopath but it was really disgusting. Even architecturally (and this is important to me – Ian B/Arran, you taught me well!), the places we drove through up to Sapa failed to grab me in anyway. The buildings are all right angles and angular. In Laos and Thailand, there are gentle curves and organic flowing lines in some of the structures especially the wats… here it’s all dead straight and clinical – like some sort of municipal communist atrocity.

Am I giving the impression that Vietnam has not grabbed me yet? Hmmmm! Travelling for 8 hrs on Day 2 of this journey up to Sapa we crossed through some of the remotest parts of the country and traversed the stunning Hoang Lien Mountains – through Tram Tom Pass at 1900metres under the shadow of the towering Fansipan at 3143m, Vietnam’s highest peak. However, we couldn’t actually see anything as the weather was dire. Mist and cloud swirled around shielding the views and a light drizzle descended on Sapa when we eventually disembarked the bus. Just as an aside, the bus driver kindly dropped us some 1.5kms away from where he should have done whilst pointing to my map, smiling and nodding his head. Very funny eh?! Bombarded immediately by people offering guestrooms, moto-taxis and trinket shopping, we walked into the centre of town lugging our rucksacks, a procession of H’mong tribeswomen tailing us and took refuge in our $7/night room. What a journey and what an introduction to Vietnam. Ouch.

But you know what…I still love it. This is another side to travelling. It challenges you. It demands of you. Its exhausting. It’s not all positive and that’s what makes it so special. After all, life is about creating memories and these two days were unforgettable. I wouldn’t want to travel like this for an extended period of time or feel this out of my depth for long but a little is good for the soul. It makes you appreciate the fun times and also makes you realise you are capable of so much.

Han x

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