Bound for Vietnam Read online

  The post office staff were friendly and accommodating. By now I was becoming blase about this again. Two tiny girls about six years old helped me post my card and then stood, one at either of my shoulders, when I sat down to look at the pack of local postcards that I had just bought. The little ones gave each other a delighted commentary, exclaiming excitedly as they recognised each place. A third small girl sat quietly in the chair opposite me, saucer eyed, absorbing me. She seemed particularly fascinated with my feet. Finally she leaned forward and ever so gently passed one of her little fingers back and forth across my ankle. I realised then that she had never seen panty-hose before. She smiled up at me and when I did not bite her, greatly daring, she picked up a piece of the material between her finger and thumb and rubbed it. A look of sheer rapture came over her face. Her little friends joined her in this occupation. Wow! she seemed to say to them. Look at this! They peeped at each other and tittered, then excitedly discussed this phenomenon.

  In one of the main streets of the town, I found the 200-year-old former home of a Chinese merchant that had been faithfully preserved as a shrine for ancestor worship. Tan Ky house, in which the merchant’s family still lived, lay behind a massive old stone wall that enclosed a typically oriental garden. The house was wonderful. Approached through a gateway covered by a stone arch, it was a combination of Javanese, Chinese and Vietnamese styles and material that the merchant had acquired in his travels. It was constructed entirely of wood, most of which was heavily carved. Huge columns made from whole Javanese trees supported the roof and rafters and beams crossed the wooden ceilings and overhanging verandah. There were no interior walls, only carved wooden screens that were fenestrated on the top half to allow the breeze through. A large ornate altar held pride of place in the main room. It was decorated with hefty, 200-year-old blue and white Chinese jars and delicate bowls that held the daily offerings of fruit, rice and flowers. Flickering candles and burning joss sticks had been placed before photos of some of the ancestors. Before photos were available, wooden boxes inscribed outside with the ancestor’s name and containing his CV and some personal memento, such as his seal, were placed on the altar.

  The present owner of the house was the original merchant’s great-great-grandson. A gracious man, he offered me a chair and served me home-made lotus flower tea and delicious dried coconut snacks while he told me the history of his house. Explaining ancestor worship, Tan Jai said that the Vietnamese worship their ancestors inside their houses, but are Buddhists outside. The outside god does not come inside the house, he said.

  There were many attractive pieces of antique porcelain in the house, and in a back room, I was shown the porcelain collection I had heard about. Some of it was for sale, but most of it had been recovered from a sunken ship and was water damaged; some pieces even had sea shells stuck to them. Unfortunately, only a few of the bigger bowls were worth buying, and they were too heavy to be a practical consideration. They were also expensive, but Tan Jai told me that up until two years ago they would have sold for a mere couple of dollars. The story of my life. Now it was too late. I visited the Fuk I En temple. Outside it old ladies sat selling incense and candles. I had been surprised to find how active religion was in Vietnam and how many private homes and shops contained altars, or had spirit houses in front of them. When I asked what people had done during the hard-line communist rule, I was told that religion had remained alive but had become clandestine. Near the temple is an extremely archaic-looking, Japanese covered bridge which was known to exist in the sixteenth century. It is said to have been built by the Japanese community in order to link them to the Chinese across the creek.

  Three mornings later it was still raining. Winter had now arrived. Everything was damp and my clothes wouldn’t dry. Down the street strode a loud, but very bad, drum band of young boys in uniform. They were followed by lines of marching high school kids. Behind them there was a van that bore a huge sign warning against the dangers of AIDS, and a megaphone on its roof blared out a harangue. I sat on my balcony and wrote postcards to send for Christmas until it stopped raining. Then I went out without my umbrella. Murphy waited until I was well away and then arranged for it to pour, and I was forced to buy a purple mushroom rain-cape like everyone in South Indo-China seemed to have. I felt like a well-wrapped parcel in it, but at least I was dry.

  That evening when I came out of my room in search of my dinner, I found that the rain had stopped, but all the lights in town had gone out. The only dim flickerings around the streets came from little kerosene lamps. I had noticed many of them for sale in the market and I had soon learned why. The power failed in Hoian with monotonous regularity. It had gone off every day since I had arrived, sometimes for hours, even in the Hoian hotel which had its own generator.

  I stumbled along the rutted roads and footpaths in absolute darkness. Unlit bicycles whizzed past me. They hardly ever had lights. I was eating at a café when a real tropical rain began pelting down in earnest and my table under the verandah on the footpath became so wet I had to move inside. I loved the rain, but I had to wade and paddle home through running water in the dark; the power still had not come back on.

  In the cafés I frequented I met two people I had encountered previously in Hanoi, as well as my erstwhile train companion, Nigel. And a new friend, who had hired a car and driver to come to Hoian for two days and with whom I arranged to share a ride back to Danang. It was extraordinary how you caught up with the same people when travelling. John, the Englishman I had travelled with from Yanshu to Guangzhou, had turned up in the Trung guest house in Hanoi on the same night that I had. Yet when we had parted in Guangzhou, he had been going down to Thailand via Hong Kong and I was supposedly going home.

  The next day it was still raining and it looked like continuing to do so for some time. I sat in the middle of the river – in what was called a floating restaurant, but was really a café on a ramshackle pontoon – watching the rain that hadn’t let up for three days. But my father had taught me that I should never complain about rain, only the lack of it. The restaurant, a wooden edifice that resembled a pagoda, was reached on a wooden bridge from the riverbank. It was surrounded by verandahs, awnings, wooden balconies and railings that had plants in pots secured to their outside edges and made me feel rather as though I was on a wet floating garden.

  The next day, when I drove to Danang with the young Frenchman I had met in Lilly’s café, it was still pouring with rain.

  12 Tin Pan Alley

  At Danang railway station I bought a ticket for the nine-hour ride to Natrang, a seaside town halfway down the coast to the capital, Ho Chi Minh City. I was the only foreigner in the train’s first-class carriage. The seats were old-fashioned recliners and from the back of the one in front a small tray could be pulled down. This augured well for food, I thought. Sure enough, soon a trolley was pulled through the carriage and I was offered drinks and nibbles. Luggage was stored in large lockers of white laminex that hung overhead and the latest addition to this 1950s train was a video screen that had been suspended in a similar box in the middle of the carriage. It was, of course, showing blood-thirsty horrors. The original sound-track was in English, but instead of being dubbed the film had an ‘explainer’, who told the story over the actors’ voices. This proved frustrating as I could still almost, but not quite, hear them. The sound track of the second film was simply drowned by a Vietnamese song that was played loudly over and over. At first I thought that the lovely tune was the theme song of the film, but then I twigged that what was obviously a sweet and charming love song was incompatible with the murder and carnage that was taking place on the screen. The actors were wrecking mayhem on each other; chopping off heads with swords, kicking each other to death and generally being thoroughly unpleasant.

  I turned my attention to the green and silver land outside the train. Mile after mile of it followed; rice paddies overlaid with water, fields of bamboo, sugar cane and bananas and countless rivers, all viewed through a shimm
ering veil of slanting rain. When we came to villages, some of which were made up of thatched hovels, others of small stone buildings, the train guard put a yellow or red flag out of the window and a guard at the station we were passing through would respond with the same.

  They fed us dinner with the chooks. The conductors brought around meals on a trolley at half past four. The food was set out in a compartmented plastic tray; a big space for rice, a slot for meat, another for vegetables and a special little groove shaped exactly to fit one fresh chilli. There was also a bowl of cabbage soup which I used to moisten the dry rice. The pepper and roughly ground sea salt came already mixed in a tiny plastic tub and two tooth picks were supplied. They had ends as blunt as fence posts that you had to chew to get a point. I was also given a free can of soft drink. As I had paid one hundred per cent extra for my ticket, I suppose this was fair enough.

  Dark came early. By half past five dusk was gathering on the calmness over the rice paddies. Their waters changed from silver to gun-metal and then they were no more. Now all I saw were a few small yellow glows that suggested a village among the trees. The rain continued and I decided not to get off at Natrang, but to go on to Ho Chi Minh City. It would have been a bit of a fizz to visit a beautiful beach resort in a pouring deluge. The train only stopped once before Natrang. More passengers got on and I discovered that I was in someone else’s seat. But there were spare seats so we sorted it out amicably.

  As this stop had been the last place that passengers would be boarding the train, I decided to try my luck at getting a sleeper. I waved my ticket at the conductor and he seemed to understand. He went away and returned shortly with an English speaking railway worker, who sat beside me and talked for a while, telling me about his daughter who lived in Sydney. After a time he also went away, but came back later saying, ‘You come with me. I will show you what you can have.’ He led me to a four berth compartment full of men who were smoking up a storm. I said, ‘Heavens! I don’t want that. I’d rather sit up all night than be locked in there with all that smoke.’

  The conductor explained hastily that the men were only train employees, who were taking advantage of the empty compartment for a little relaxation and that they would be turfed out if I took up residence. We agreed upon a price. I was sure that some of it went into the conductor’s pocket, but I like to support private enterprise. In Hoian another traveller had told me that he had tried to change from a seat to a sleeper on this train but had been told that it could not be done. Fortunately I never believe the first thing I am told. I have found that although sometimes you cannot do the things that are said to be possible, depending on your approach, you can often do things that have been declared impossible.

  Safely installed in the incredibly freezing airconditioning of the compartment, I settled down for the night, glad that I had kept a few woollies when I left Hoian for the anticipated warmth of the south.

  The compartment door had no lock, so I tied it shut with one of my socks, which turned out to be a good idea as about fifteen people tried to get in with me during the night.

  Maybe they were checking to see if I was all right, or if I was behaving myself. I did not care. The sock kept them out.

  When we stopped at Natrang at half past ten, it was still raining and I was glad that I had decided to continue on south. We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City at seven the next morning. I took a cyclo to a small hotel that was not in the guidebook, but which a New Zealand couple I had met in Hanoi had recommended and marked on my map. I was greeted enthusiastically by an agreeable man who made me feel very much at home. He brought me coffee and a terrific breakfast of eggs and bread accompanied by what he regarded as suitable eating equipment for a foreigner – a knife and fork. The fork was one of those diabolical instruments they produce in Asia which have prongs that are cut off square and have no points, and the knife was a bread knife – a huge, bone-handled affair. I would have been better off with chopsticks.

  While I wrestled with my breakfast, my new friend told me that he had been a captain in the army – unfortunately for him, on the side that lost the war, and he had subsequently spent four years in prison after it ended.

  The hotel owner drifted downstairs to inspect me. Looking like a Lady of the Night in a pair of short black frilly silk pyjamas, she swanned about in the foyer which was completely open to the street. In the full light of day this looked a bit strange. It also seemed odd that at night, although the hotel was full and there was no need to attract more guests, a small counter was set up on the steps outside the front door. Here, right on the street, Madame, with her once beautiful face, sat jangling her dozens of wide gold bangles.

  My room was a passageway that had been partitioned into a makeshift, windowless cubicle by a simple piece of gash engineering. The wall, which had previously finished at head height, had been extended to the ceiling by the addition of a piece of lattice that had had opaque plastic stapled over it in a most haphazard manner. The furniture comprised a bed and an intriguing, waist-high cupboard that had been constructed from the same kind of white enamel that panikins and mugs are made of. There was an extremely wobbly wall fan and a table lamp on the cupboard provided the only illumination. The electricity supply for these two items came in over the flimsy door on a dubious-looking extension cord and power-board. Every time I walked past the light, it went out!

  The ‘en suite’ bathroom was almost outside. It was another piece of corridor that had been partitioned off next to my room. I entered it by a door screened with a curtain which continuously fell down. The hand basin had been inadequately waterproofed with a layer of thick, uneven grout and it piddled profusely on my feet whenever I used it. But the staff, who consisted of Madame, the Officer and Gentleman and a Boy, were extremely kind and solicitous of my safety. Every time I went out they worried for me, telling me that I would get ‘stolen’. Was there much of a market for second-hand ladies who were ever so slightly over the hill, I wondered? And each time when, to their surprise, I returned safely to the hotel, they greeted me like the prodigal child returning.

  Saigon, (the locals still call the town Saigon, as this remains the name of the main downtown district) 1700 kilometres due south of Hanoi, has a population of four million and is situated on the Saigon River, forty kilometres above the fertile Mekong Delta. Originally a sleepy Cambodian Khymer fishing backwater and trading post in the sixth century, it was the seaport of the Kingdom of Angkor Cambodia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The town fell into Vietnamese hands in the seventeenth century, and was re-built as a colonial city in 1859 by the French, who named it Saigon, ‘Wood of the Kapok Tree’, and made it the pearl of the Orient.

  The first night I spent in Saigon there was the grandmother of all thunderstorms. It was wonderful. I love a real tropical commotion. There was thunder, lightning and torrents of rain that bucketed down in great sheets. It was more satisfying to watch than to go out in, however, especially at night. But it was dinnertime and I was hungry, so I braved the deluge and the dark. Putting on my purple plastic cape and raising my pink brolly, I sloshed down the street and around the corner to Kym’s café, a well known travellers’ hangout.

  Feeling like some western food I ordered ‘mashed pottatos and meat souse’ and wondered what on earth would appear. To my delight, I was presented with a marvellous big pile of proper mashed potatoes that were covered with a good, thick bolognaise sauce.

  At Kym’s I met an Australian called Angela who was on her way to Europe to visit her relatives. She was working her way through the cocktail menu and, having made the halfway mark, was in good form. Cocktails cost 5000 dong, fifty cents, and were delicious mixes of lovely, tasty freshly squeezed fruit juices and the tasty, but unlovely fresh squeezed local jungle juice or fire water. The drinks were listed as pina colada, screwdriver, etc. but the alcohol content was always the same – potent. The Australian miss was getting very sloshed. Not that daring, I had a bottle of the local beer.

  In the morning
I set off on foot in search of a bank. I got lost and never found the one I had been directed to by the hotel staff. I think I went in the opposite direction. Banks were one of my favourite places for a rest. They were cool, comfy and elegant and apart from couches and armchairs they provided high-backed bar stools at the counter. In one bank I watched a workman cleaning the iron grills and railing on the outside ledge of the mezzanine floor high above. He had a thick rope tied around his middle as security against a fall. I am no judge of distance, but it was obvious to me that the rope was longer than the drop to the floor.

  All the reports I’d had about Saigon were that it was incredibly hot. But I found that the weather was sticky but not unbearable. As I walked about I could not help noticing that many homeless people were living in the streets. Many looked desperate, and some accosted me for money. The streets were also a place of business for many itinerant vendors. There were toy cars, bikes, aeroplanes and trains made from used Coke cans and hats that had been fashioned from packing foam and old cardboard boxes. Vietnam is one of the poorest countries in the world, but its economy, which was lately in chaos, is slowly reviving.

  I returned to the hotel by cyclo, clutching a coconut that I had bought from a street vendor. The top of the coconut had been struck off on the spot with a murderous looking machete and I had been given a straw with which to drink the milk. It was palatable and refreshing and, despite the heat of the day, was as cold as if it had been refrigerated. At the hotel the staff and I sat in the foyer and demolished the coconut flesh.