Têt and the Funny Funnel Country: Kunming to Saigon

---

---

It's Têt and my last night in Saigon. I'm sitting on a blue plastic stool at a busy junction waiting for my food to arrive, all around me are clustered little tables and sizzling stalls. From one of these stalls I've ordered something by just saying "One, please!" and when it comes I still don't know what it is. Small lumps of glutinous matter are heaped on a plate, on top something vegetable and an undeniable fried egg. I drizzle over something like chili sauce.

Over the road stands a man selling huge red balloons and lucky New Year trinkets and the roads are already swollen with motorbikes: it's New Year's Eve and nobody's missing out.

Picking at my actually quite delicious meal, I sit and think about my journey; it feels like the first time I've paused since leaving Kunming over a week ago.


Before I had got on the bus I'd already been scammed. Or almost.

A man in a baseball cap approached me with a smile and English far too good for a worker at 'the company' (he indicated his irrelevant badge).

"Hello friend, there is a 50 yuan petrol fee."

"No there isn't, I've never heard of that," I said.

"Before it's different, petrol is expensive now. Ask if you don't believe me."

So I did. Having to barge past him, I climbed onto the bus and asked if anyone else had had to pay this absurd fee. Blank faces and silence. Then something clicked with the bus driver:

"He speaks Mandarin! Which country? England? Manchester!! Come in, give me your bag, I'll make sure it's locked up."

And the baseball cap sloped off in a sulk.


The bus's hip-hop music was played so loudly from a speaker directly above my top bunk that I was reluctant to lie back on my reclining 'bed' fearing for my eardrums. When it finally stopped the woman next to me started playing more from her phone's loudspeaker to help her get to sleep. It's the same song. But this time in a love ballad version and I could catch some of the lyrics:

"In a strange city...the black of night...I hear someone quietly weeping."


The next day, a million Vietnamese dong in my pocket, I crossed the border and boarded the train for Hanoi. Unlike balmy Kunming 12 hours north, here it is overcast and cold. I'm wearing all my clothes.


The train was an education in the difference between the Chinese and the Vietnamese. Instead of smirks and taunts I was greeted with open smiles and everything was eerily quiet. Although hawkers streamed through the carriages selling everything from horoscopes to whole chickens, the haggling was all done in a whisper.

Walking from my 'soft seater' through to the restaurant car, as I passed through 'hard seat' and 'harder seat' carriages, the acoustic changed accordingly: the noise levels rose and in 'harder seat' the windows were metal shutters which amplified everything.

The restaurant car would be better named the 'street stall car'. It was lined with cobbled-together wooden benches and at one end a women slopped murky noodle soup from a barrel.

At various points during the 11 hour journey I had my falling-apart trainers superglued back together, bought a fake Swiss Army knife with a compass on it and started up a conversation with 'Ali', a young nurse from Hanoi.

I say conversation, really I mean scant patchwork of English, Chinese, hand gestures and a Vietnamese phrasebook. She tried to teach me Vietnamese pronunciation. She failed. It's not naturally possible.

Along the way she offered me various foodstuffs including qua tao, a sour little apple dipped in chili salt: a combination to make your eyes implode and your tongue fizz off, but anything in the name of culture, right?

In the morning, Hanoi was raining. I set about a wander with Steve and Adi, an Italian and Israeli I had met on the way. Disappointingly I didn't manage to add Ho Chi Minh to my budding list of embalmed communist dictators as his mausoleum was closed, but we did get to the One Pillar Pagoda (a pagoda on a pillar), the Temple of Literature (which was very atmospheric in the rain) and more than a couple of local coffee shops.

Lunch was the first of many bowls of pho, Vietnamese noodles in soup. They taste somewhere between Chinese and Thai, with lime and whatever that noticeable herb in Thai food is.


On the second day I got up for an early morning stroll around the lake and the busy colonial streets of the Old Quarter. In the 'Old House', a shop dressed like a museum, I had to tell them they'd hung their Chinese calligraphy wall hanging backwards. The Vietnamese ditched Chinese characters for an adapted roman alphabet in 1910, but you still see them all over the place. It makes me feel slightly more settled to think I can understand some things that even the Vietnamese can't!

Later I went to the Water Puppets. It was a fantastic show considering all they have to work with are wooden puppets on long sticks and a stagnant-looking pool of water. The puppets are operated in a very lifelike way from behind a bamboo screen, which presumably acts like a gauze so they can see what they're doing, and the sticks are underwater. Most of the plot (narrated in Vietnamese; I wasn't picking up the finer points) was set in water such as the flooded paddy fields of the genre's origin.


Preparing for the New Year, yellow flowers were springing up everywhere and, most notably, every other motorbike carried a cumquat tree in a decorative pot.


After two days in freezing Hanoi I was heading south in search of warmth and sunlight. Next stop was Hoi An.

Hoi An is a small town on the Thu Bon river famous for its tailors, temples and tourists; the old streets are lined with traveller cafes and cloth shops. The market was crammed with people, mostly women in their cai non (conical hat) and mostly a good 18 inches below my level of vision.

Over the river the town became a village, rickety buildings spread out along the dirt road. An old man on a bicycle called out "Hello! How are you?" and shook my hand as he passed. I had lunch over there in a quiet restaurant by the river, far from the seething market, fishing boats and ferries of the other side.


After a day walking the streets and disinclined to enter any of the temples or Chinese Congregation Halls, I got straight back on the bus, this time all the way to Saigon: my third 24 hour journey in six days.


Everyone I spoke to said I was mad... isn't this such a nice place? wouldn't it be a great spot to chill out for a few days?

Well, frankly, no. Part of this whole travelling alone thing has been about learning to divine my own opinions and, with Cambodia, Laos and not a lot of time ahead of me, heading on was the only option. Vietnam is a funny funnel country which, after a little floating about at the top, flushed me right down. I don't regret it a bit. Actually, part of the 72 hours on buses made me realise that I enjoy them and that it really is as much about the getting there. And I'm not bloody going to chill out!


SAIGON! Where the streets are paved with motorbikes. Ho Chi Minh City (but 'Saigon' to most of the locals) was hot and sticky when I arrived the following night. The roads were seething with motorbikes and a park near the bus station was overflowing with yellow flower sellers to make Hanoi blush with its inadequacy.

I was up at six the next morning. Roaming the tourist-free streets, I came across an old lady selling something orange on the streets, so I bought some. It was a little sticky fruit and tasted just like bubblegum. I think she said it was called moht.

The War Remnants Museum (formerly called something like 'The Museum of Wartime Atrocities Committed by the Americans and Chinese' but amended for reasons of PC) was extremely eye-opening, if a little traumatic. It charts all the horrors of the American War from torture and execution of prisoners to the effects of defoliants on later generations and a charming little exhibition on 'Jane Fonda: a warm-hearted American'.

In the afternoon I took a bus to Cholon, an outskirt of the city, where evident poverty and a huge open sewer contrast with streets of colonial architecture. Families were living in single rooms with chickens, goats and collonades.


Finished with the fried matter, I walk along from the busy junction towards the centre. The Têt preparations alone were drawing crowds this afternoon and by now the roads are starting to coagulate. The huge roundabout in front of Ben Thanh market is already full to bursting, the roads leading in to it lined with thick layers of revellers waiting for midnight and the traffic in the middle moving steadily at slower than walking pace. I find a spot in the park and listen: the sound is extraordinary. Ten thousand engines grinding along in the seething, viscous lava of motorbike traffic. When midnight finally comes along there must be a hundred thousand people in this area alone. Along one street we can just see the start of the street decorations leading into the main action.

When the fireworks finally come the spectators go wild. Fireworks are banned in Vietnam, Têt is the only time they're allowed and then only to be let off by the government.

Their excitement is understandable.

---