Bound for Vietnam Read online

  All three mouths of the young women behind the counter dropped open simultaneously. They stared at me in shocked horror. They obviously didn’t get many foreigners here. I said, ‘Neehow’ and proved myself to be not only harmless, but friendly, and they all unfroze, became sociable and agreed to let me have a room. Until then, I had thought that I might be in a restricted area and could be refused entry to the village, or admission to a hotel. I’d had horrible visions of sitting by the side of the road on my bags for a couple of days, so I was greatly relieved.

  I filled out the usual foreigner registration form and paid twenty dollars for the best room in town; they would not hear of my taking anything less. One of the receptionists – a haughty breed in most other places in China – insisted on escorting me personally to my room. Not only this, but she turned on the tap in the bathroom and stood for ages waiting for the hot water to appear. Then she demonstrated all the fittings, proving what other travellers had told me to be right – that the further south you went and the smaller the places you visited, the nicer the people were.

  I surveyed the best room in town. It was fine; a big bright place with everything in reasonable condition. I went to move one of the beds, but it wouldn’t budge. I thought it must be nailed to the tiled floor. Then I discovered that it was made of great planks of wood, like a stockyard fence. All the sturdy wooden furniture was painted white and had an endearingly home-made look – the kind of thing I would have turned out at my carpentry classes years ago. Mosquito nets hung draped over the beds and the bed linen was all hand embroidered. A great deal of effort had been made to make the room look first class, but whoever had done the decor had no idea. Bright, shiny mauve frilled bedspreads with the hotel’s logo embroidered on them in purple were in appalling taste and clashed violently with the other gaudy fittings. The bathroom had the usual strange plumbing and a hand shower without a holder. I pondered again why no fixture found on a wall in China was ever intact. What did they do? Swing on them? The toilet was a squat hole in the floor, but it was cleaner than most. There was no wardrobe, but the bathroom had rails on the walls with wooden clothes hangers on them which I took to indicate that this was where I was meant to hang my clothes. They would get a bit wet!

  I found a pamphlet in the room that told me I was in the Dhongxing Hotel. It was only then that I was sure that I had finally made it.

  The first thing I noticed about Dhongxing was the quiet. It was wonderful after some of the noisy places I had been. Looking down into the street at eleven o’clock at night I saw only the portable street stalls lit by kerosene lamps outside the bus station and a few people on foot. At two in the morning, however, I was rudely awakened by a dozen men banging on all the doors and shouting loudly. I shot up in bed thinking that the police had discovered I should not be here, had come to raid the place and were hauling everyone out looking for me. (That’s what a guilty conscience does to you.) Eventually I realised that it was only a bunch of drunks returning to their rooms from the nightclub below and behaving in the usual inconsiderate manner. The deafening din continued until four in the morning. They yelled, banged on doors and shouted up and down the corridors of every floor. One of them may have been locked out of his room; at one stage I heard the sound, somewhere below, of a door being broken and demolished.

  In the morning, I opened the curtains and found that they covered a big wide window through which the sun shone brightly, but which was closely barred to prevent anything else getting in. This was the first time I had seen the sun for days and it was lovely to be warm again. I had been very cold by the time I had arrived last night. There was not much pollution here, but later in the day the sky clouded over and it looked as though the rain was following me down from Nanning. I still didn’t know if I was on the coast, or in the mountains, but Dhongxing was definitely a border town – I saw signs written in both Chinese and Vietnamese.

  From the window I couldn’t see much apart from the street and the bus station. There was little traffic; the odd bus, a few cars, some bike and other pedal power and some put-putting tractors. I liked this. The things I found hardest to contend with in China were the crowds and the traffic.

  Investigating the village I found everyone charming, glad to see me and helpful. Could this still be China? Maybe I did cross over in the night! I discovered that I was only a kilometre from the Vietnamese border, but there was no such thing as a taxi in Dhongxing. I asked the girls at the hotel’s reception desk to direct me to a bank. They had never heard of such a thing. I went into a place of business that looked as though it could have been a bank. It wasn’t, but a young woman took me into the street, put me into a pedicab and told the rider where to take me. When I arrived at the bank, the same thing happened there. I was given explicit details of how to get somewhere to change money and I started off, but a young man from the establishment, obviously deciding that I would not find it alone, followed me out and got into the pedicab with me. He took me to a back street money changer where I got a better rate than the bank, stayed to help me with the transaction and saw that I got a good deal. When I tried to pay for the pedicab, he wouldn’t take my money. I said I wanted to go on to the post office, so he took me there too, escorting me to the desk and showing me around before he left.

  I wanted to mail a postcard home in time for a family member’s birthday, but it appeared that I could not do it there. The assistant came from behind his counter and took me – despite the fact that the post office was a big, shiny new building, it was empty – into the building next door. But when I tried to post the card the woman presiding over this counter, who had obviously never seen a postcard before, just gazed at it in wonder. I don’t think the post office did much business; I was the sole customer in here too. Fortunately, a young man came in just then who told me he had majored in English and asked if he could practise speaking it. Word was out about me. He had tracked me down from the bank. We chatted for a while and he told me that he worked for the Agricultural Bank and that the postmistress wanted me to put my card in the envelope she was offering me. I said it was not needed. She thought I did not want to pay for the stamps on the envelope. My friend assured me, ‘No problem. She says she will send it for nothing.’ I said that wasn’t the way it worked. I wanted to buy the stamps and put them on the postcard. I did so and passed it back to her. She franked it and then said it still had to go in an envelope. Without my friend I would never have convinced her to put it in the mail bag. It took some doing, but finally and reluctantly she did. I know she did not believe that this was the way you sent postcards, and I don’t really think the young man did either. They just humoured another mad foreigner. But the postcard for my sister’s birthday arrived!

  Finding my way around the village was easy. It was fortunate that the hotel was opposite the bus station and that I could say ‘bus station’ in Chinese; it is the same as in English. I checked out the upmarket restaurant attached to the front of the hotel. It was empty, and six young lady attendants stood around doing nothing. After much talking and giggling we ordered something. It turned out to be a great amount of chicken skin, fat and splintered bones chopped into inedible clumps. It wasn’t cheap either. I followed it with a fish dish which was only passable. But I ate its delicious sauce with some rice and went up the street in search of more food. On the footpath at the bottom of the steps in front of the hotel’s restaurant were numerous wire cages in which the food was stored – fresh and on the hoof. There were chooks, fish and crabs in tanks, birds like fluffy pheasants and tortoises – how could they eat tortoises! Huge mounds of them with their stumpy legs waving pathetically in the air were stacked in the market.

  Though at first I was put off Dhongxing by my experience of the food, I came to like it because everyone was so pleasant to me. This was a strange feeling. A congenial place with a good vibrant feeling to it, I decided Dhongxing was the best place I had been in, with the exception of Yanshu, and I spent an enjoyable couple of days there. And later I foun
d a wonderful night market close to the hotel that was a great place to eat.

  Dhongxing’s streets go up hill and down dale and there are only two large ones. The rest are mostly small cobbled lanes that are sprinkled with interesting street stalls and markets. I was only one of a few foreigners seen in this village and people let me stray around unmolested. Either they were too afraid to hassle me or they were too kind. The only way to get around was by pedicab, a bicycle rickshaw, which was cheap, one yuan anywhere in town. With my weight on a flat surface, I do not find riding in this form of transport guilt inducing, but when the poor peddler started going up the hills of some of these streets, I began to worry.

  The television in my room delivered the Chinese news. Although I understood little of it, I grasped one bit perfectly well. A film of a sleeper bus, charred and smoking and an ordinary bus – ditto – pranged into a couple of cars. Hospital workers were carrying heaps of bodies away. The cynics say the carnage on the road is one way of keeping the population down.

  Walking past the outskirts of the village, I was immediately in the dark green of the jungle and in country very different from the China I had seen so far. At the end of a wandery, deeply rutted road I discovered a long flight of steps that went up to an ancient crumbling monument. At the top of the steps was what had once been a charming park but was now very run down. In it a couple of quaint willow pattern bridges spanned a stream near a pagoda. There was a strange feeling in this place, like being in a lost world, and I would have liked to stay for a while, but it was now dusk and I decided that it was probably no time to be rambling around in a park.

  9 Heroin to Hair Oil

  I was nervous about entering North Vietnam overland. Vietnam remains a police state and I was afraid that, particularly in the north, I would be viewed with animosity and suspicion. After ousting the French in 1954, the communist government isolated itself from the west. Travellers have only been gradually allowed to enter the country since 1991 and very few had come over land borders. The word ‘Vietnam’ was to me, as it still is to many westerners, synonymous with a dreadful and bitter war. No one ever mentioned that the country was beautiful and the people gracious, hospitable and kind. Once I realised this, the war seemed all the more terrible.

  And the guidebook gave the operation of crossing a land border very bad reviews. North Vietnamese Communist officials are notoriously xenophobic and frontier guards were said to be hostile. They had been known to refuse travellers entry for no valid reason, as well as give them a hard time about the contents of their luggage. I had even risked my tape recordings in the Chinese mail rather than chance them being confiscated, as I had read could happen. Finding transport to the border was not easy. The Dhongxing Hotel staff fielded my enquiry to a man, who directed me to a car parked at the end of the street. Its driver proved unwilling, but a spectator came to my aid and dragged me further up the road to an office that seemed to be in the bus business. Here my passport was examined at length, especially that wretched visa extension which was argued about loud and long. Finally I was told, ‘No. But sit and wait.’ After a while I was taken outside by a middle-aged woman, complete with her bulky knitting, who had apparently adopted my cause. With much gesticulating, my new accomplice conveyed to me that we should hire a pedicab. We did so and, returning to the hotel, collected my bags and set off. The rider pedalled us along tiny, crowded lanes that wound uphill for about a kilometre, before stopping in front of a flight of stone steps that led up to a gateway set high above the street. I’d never have guessed that this was the border. Loudly heralded by my friend, who followed behind still knitting, I climbed to the top. The Chinese Guardian of the Gate examined my passport. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘I want to go to Vietnam.’

  ‘Enter!’

  Passing through the arched stone entrance, I walked up a steep, paved incline that was overhung by big trees and flanked by garden plots bursting with flowers. My friend still tagged along. At the end of the path I came to a building that was entirely covered in dazzling, shiny blue glass, the interior of which proved to be a great echoing, almost empty hall. A charming young Chinese official greeted me and we started formalities. After questioning me at length, the official produced a form and escorted me to a desk to fill it out. Then came a bombshell. ‘Can I see your vaccination certificate?’ I had accidentally left that behind in Hong Kong months ago and until now had not given it another thought. No one had asked to see it when I had entered China and I wondered why they were interested in it now that I was about to leave the country. I tried to explain how I had lost it. It sounded pretty limp, but the young man said that in lieu of presenting my certificate I could make a statement about the condition of my health. He gave me a form to fill out. It wanted to know if I was suffering from AIDS, Hepatitis B or any other undesirable disease. I thought that I’d hardly be likely to say so if I was. I vowed that I was as pure as the driven snow. This satisfied the young man and he, the trusting soul, kindly waived the requirement to produce a vaccination certificate.

  Although Vietnamese and Chinese people were moving to and fro rapidly across the border outside, I received a special scrutiny and the first stage of my crossing took an hour. As few foreigners came through here, I was of great interest, as well as being a captive subject with whom the staff could practise their English. It was only after everyone in the building had played with my passport, wondered over it, handed it back and forth and I’d had a long social chat all round, that the first official said, ‘Now we will move onto customs.’ Expecting a gruelling inspection, I heaved my bags up onto the counter and opened them. But the customs’ officer did not look at anything. He was only interested in my books. When I showed him my travel guide, his interest evaporated. No dirty pictures as he had hoped.

  Finally, farewelled and sent on my way with good wishes, I stepped out into a gorgeous morning and walked easily towards Vietnam. A wide river separates Vietnam and China at this point and a long, paved bridge is the no man’s land between the guard posts on each side. Crossing the bridge was an enjoyable doddle after what I had imagined awaited me – a horrible border shanty manned by thoroughly anti-social people.

  Reaching the Vietnamese side, I came to a line of low adobe buildings and trundled my bags past the first guard, who did not seem the least bit interested in me. But soon someone came up behind me and said, ‘In here. You wait in this room.’ Long and narrow and containing only a big table surrounded by chairs, it looked like an old school room. I waited half an hour. I ate some fruit from my bag, did some knitting, read my guidebook and looked at the map on the wall. I had the feeling I was being watched to see whether I got nervous and betrayed any sinister motives.

  Eventually a good-looking young gent wearing an army uniform and with a great-coat thrown over his shoulders in the manner of Hitler’s SS sauntered in, sat down and had a chat with me. I wasn’t sure if he was the immigration official or a visitor. He looked like a captain, so I addressed him as such and he did not argue. Finally he reached for my passport and copied my details into a very old, battered exercise book. No computers here. As I filled out the innumerable forms that he kept pushing towards me across the table, the captain continued to question me.

  Then he asked me if I had anything to declare. I asked what sort of things he had in mind. ‘Like jewellery,’ he said and I replied, ‘No.’

  ‘Camera?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Video?’

  ‘No.’ Then he said, ‘Do you have anything prohibited, like hair oil?’ I looked at him dumbfounded. I couldn’t believe my ears. I asked him to repeat it and he said, more clearly, ‘Her oin.’

  ‘No.’ I said, and burst out laughing.

  ‘Cocaine?’ he said, and I laughed again. I think that my giggles may have convinced him that I was merely an innocent tourist, but it really was ridiculous. Immigration officials don’t usually ask if you have heroin in your luggage, or even hair oil. But there was a funny, c
old hard look in his eyes and I thought, God help me if I did.

  After this the Captain said that I was finished and asked me if there was anything I would like to ask him or if I wanted anything written down to help me on my way. How kind, I thought, and said that I would appreciate directions to where I could get a bus to Haiphong. I knew a train ran from there to Hanoi. The captain recommended that I stop at Halong Bay on my way south, saying that it was a very beautiful place and I should not miss it. It was here that I discovered that I was almost on the coast.

  I said, ‘Do I go to customs now?’ But he replied, ‘No, you may go.’ Apparently he was the lot rolled into one. So much for the traumatic searches I had dreaded, I was through! It had taken over two hours but had been no trouble at all.

  Outside, I was on Vietnamese soil. Good-bye to China!

  Hoping to find some transport to the village of Mong Cai, a kilometre or so further on, where the Captain had said that I would find a bus, I started walking down the dirt road. The only vehicles I came upon were several old army trucks that now seemed to be in the general carrier business and gave off a powerful pong of pig. I showed the paper with my directions written on it to a man sitting beside one of the trucks. He signaled to someone. Up roared a motorbike and, before I knew it, the rider had grabbed me and hustled me onto the pillion. Heaving my big bag up in front of him on the petrol tank, he shoved the smaller bag between us and thundered off, with me clutching my handbag, the bag in front of me and the rider, and shrieking, ‘Slowly! Slowly!’

  Later I laughed to think that I had left China by bicycle and entered Vietnam on a motorbike.

  We travelled a couple of kilometres in this precarious manner and then I was deposited by the roadside. A minivan screeched to a halt at my feet. The tiny vehicle was already squashed full, but I was forcibly crammed into the back seat. They not only bundled me in, but added several more people afterwards. Then a few metres further on a man hailed the bus and wanted the driver to take a bicycle aboard – a spanking new bike with big wire carrier baskets front and back. I thought, You’ve got to be joking. But they weren’t. They got it in! The driver produced a wrench, took off the bike’s front wheel and put the dismantled parts between the first two seats. The passengers in the second seat rode for more than six hours with a bike on their laps. It seemed to me that the bus was now way past full, but a short distance beyond this point we picked up one more woman. She was squeezed in beside me so that we only had half a buttock each on the seat. Now the van which had been designed to carry eight passengers bulged with fifteen people, baggage, freight and a bike. The last woman to get on, who was about thirty years old, took one look at me as the bus moved off and burst into tears. I thought, Oh, come on, I’m not that bad. But she sobbed on and on, utterly breaking her heart and only stopping occasionally to wipe her nose on her sleeve. I figured that she didn’t have a hanky, so I groped in my bag, got out my wad of precious toilet paper, passed it to her and she continued to snivel in that.