1. 08:25 - 04/10/2005
“Whath that? Nuclear physicth, ith it?” a young voice says a little too loudly from above my left shoulder.
Four hours before arriving in Hong Kong, most of the plane is in darkness, its passengers restlessly trying to grab some economy class sleep. I gave up long ago as I have a Korean Jabba The Hutt character sprawled and gurgling next to me. My only blessing is an aisle seat.
I’m reading an entertaining, untaxing novel requiring minimal attention. At the beginning of each chapter there’s a small italicised question and answer blurb which forms the central theme of the novel. All of these are heavily ironic, poking fun at an immature narrator. The one on this page has something about physics.
Bold opening gambit, nuclear physics, I think of the lisper above my shoulder. And one dismissed as not possibly being serious. How could someone begin a conversation in a quiet, darkened aircraft at an indistinct but deep night time, about nuclear physics? I decide to banter.
“Well, no, it’s quantum physics actually: my speciality,” I say in a low, quieter tone, hoping his pitch will follow mine, although the effect is also that I sound less jovial than I’d intended. He’s a year or two younger than me in his earlier twenties. It’s possible mild drunkenness exaggerates his lisp.
“Really?” he says, still uncomfortably loudly. It’s like he can’t control the sound level as it blurts from the back of his throat. Some people nearby shuffle in their seats. He’s fascinated, apparently believing that nuclear physics really is my speciality.
I’m forced to concede my jest when he points at the small section at the top of the page of my book. After I explain, he stays to chat, somewhat awkwardly, still too loudly, nursing his thimble of spirit.
He’s going to Hong Kong for the first time to meet his Japanese girlfriend, who he sees every six months in various places around the world. It’s a cobbled notion of mine that any western man, particularly British or Americans - can easily land eastern girlfriends. It’s not difficult. To do with the difference / novelty factor which leads to many a holiday romance. You often saw gawky looking guys at university with eastern girls, because they’re less aware of their gawkiness. I tell him I’m just passing through Hong Kong on my way to Saigon. He asks if that’s in China. Vietnam, I correct him. Still he prolongs the scene with his travel tales and profound observations that I’m largely unresponsive to, smiling politely until he’s finished, then he plods back up the aisle.
Will I have to meet and be pleasant to many similar types of over confident, over loud, well-travelled, yet slightly empty seeming? I could dream up a sneering name for them like my Dad would - an oh-so-clever acronym. He and I had parted with the regular rushed clasping tangle at Terminal 3’s pick up/drop-off bay several hours ago.
Now Hong Kong is beneath me, looking impressive and strangely accidental. As if somebody has haphazardly scattered numerous well developed skyscraper families across a beautiful landscape intended for cute wooden huts and not many people. I’d like to go back and see more than the airport one day. The city’s formation over a series of jagged coastlines and islands, often too large to be connected by bridges, is spectacular. When we landed into the airport, I couldn’t stop looking out of the panoramic windows at the landscape. I’d heard that landing in the old Hong Kong city airport was a spectacular experience and had been disappointed to learn it had relocated to a small island a short distance away, but this was impressive too. I’m flying out now, away from Hong Kong, its surroundings and this breathtaking expanse underneath me. Hong Kong will frame my time away as I’m due to stop through it again on the way back, but I’ll know practically nothing apart from the almost arrogant charm it commands from arm’s length. “What, just because you came all this way, you expected us to live in wooden cabins? We live better than you, you mugs,” it yells from the ground.
At the gate to this flight onto Saigon there was a lady reading a book I’d recently finished. I wanted to say something, speak to her about it, having enjoyed it despite myself, despite thinking it all implausible and rather silly. I wanted to speak to someone, and speak to someone about that book because I hadn’t spoken to anyone about the book. And, apart from the chap on the plane, I hadn’t spoken to anyone about anything for a while. She got up and went to another gate for another plane.
I remain worryingly ignorant of what awaits me in the southern Vietnamese capital of Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City: its official title. It won’t be as developed and westernised as Hong Kong, I’m sure, but how much less? Will there be pavements? Boarding this aircraft, I began to feel more conscious of being western. A handful of other tourists, but we were in the minority. The natives looked bored to be going to Ho Chi Minh. It’s not something to get excited about, judging by the look of them.
2. 18:16 04/10/05
During the descent through Vietnam, everything grows brown: bare, charred fields with strips of scorched yellow offsetting the dominant brown rivers. Then the city: exposed blocks of vulnerable greyness, growing nervously. Unlike two hours previous, no sparkling skyscrapers, no stylishly shimmering sea; a sluggish fat brown river and a clutch of average sized tower buildings mark what must be the centre.
Excited and scared to be exiting the last aircraft of my long journey, to be staying somewhere so incredibly alien, I trailed my fellow passengers into the disorganised immigration area. Straggled queues led.. presumably.. to somewhere, outside? I wasn’t sure. It was impossible to tell exactly where or even if you were in the right one. Britishly, I joined one and hoped. Other western people were in it, but they were in ones to the sides of me too. A pretty young eastern girl in the queue next to me selected Robbie Williams from her silver mini iPod. A toddler bumped into the back of a short, sweaty young man with a large forehead who looked vaguely eastern European. He looked surprised by the bump, and travel frazzled. I exchanged a weak smile with him then selected Ian Brown’s F.E.A.R on my own ageing iPod, whose battery I was oddly proud to see was still hanging in there. The American couple in front of me were gently reprimanded by the immigration official when they went up to his desk together. He ordered her back. She said something to me I didn’t hear because of my music, but I smiled anyway and half shook my head at the maddening beaurocracy of it all. The immigration official had a frighteningly long hair sprouting from a facial mole. He didn’t smile.
I was eventually passed through, collected my luggage and went to join another queue, which I wasn’t alone in being frustrated to see appear ahead of me. What now? One final baggage scan. Half a dozen young men wearing identical T-shirts and baseball caps jumped the queue, unabashed. Disgruntled murmuring amongst us patiently waiting folk, an effeminate western boy rebuked them in fluent Vietnamese. They looked mildly apologetic, but not much, before still going on ahead of most people. Bags scanned and passport checked a final time. There was daylight ahead.
At a currency exchange counter I swapped forty quid I’d taken out at Heathrow. Musty, mainly pink currency in return. Then the searing blast of heat and a heaving swarm of people outside the main Arrivals door. There must have been hundreds of people staring at anyone who walked out.
“Hey, taxi?!” a uniformed man emerged from the dense pack and shouted at me. I looked up from studiously examining the floor, avoiding hundreds of pairs of eyes. Yes, he had been shouting at me. What other choice did I have? I didn’t know anything.
“Mm, ok,” I muttered, offering the first example of my bristling Vietnamese language. I’d half-heartedly tried learning token phrases for each country I would visit and now relied on a pocket phrasebook, knowing it was unlikely I’d develop the confidence to say anything more than hello, goodbye and thank-you. I was already uncertain of the approaching character as he weaved through the crowd towards me, knowing he’d be out to fleece this stupid dumb westerner who clearly knew nothing, who would need two hours and a large calculator to do any currency conversion. He appeared to be an agent of some sort and led me away from the doors, across the forecourt, away from the incomprehensible throng of people, to a taxi which already had a driver in. He quoted a price I knew to be way over the odds. I’d heard that the centre was only about twenty minutes away. He said thirty-five. Perhaps he was expecting a haggle but I conceded anyway; the taxi company had no competition. I forked out one of my largest notes to him, still ignorant of exactly how much I was being fleeced for. Better not to think about it.
He unceremoniously threw my backpack into the boot, then shut the rear passenger door behind me. My driver was a young man with few English skills. We spoke anyway, without understanding much each other said, both nodding and smiling frantically, picking up and dropping our own tangents between long periods of silence. The view from the window of my taxi was mesmerising. My first wholesome, mindbendingly rich flavour of Vietnam. I didn’t want to miss anything. I wanted to suddenly attain photographic memory powers, to remember each detail.
When you go somewhere new, anywhere you haven’t been before, however close to home, you’re naturally sensitive to differences. Here, somewhere so far away, so different, it was more natural trying to look for things that were the same. Sameness in such an alien, distant place was novel and kooky - Coke signs, aha! A few dominant global, capitalist names, but difference was king.
Traffic apparently isn’t in need of order or rules, anarchy reigns, everybody has the innate ability to thread their bike or vehicle through the eye of a needle. Even where squeezing through a gap doesn’t seem possible, where a fatality seems so inevitable you daren’t look. These drivers need only a millimetre of space around them. Any more than that is a luxury. The drivers look accordingly concentrated and serious, yet never stressed or hurried. Cars are few, with motorbikes and scooters ruling the road, packed tightly together, riders never with a helmet - a smog mask the most protection they have, chatting across the road with each other as they go, smoking, occasionally on mobile phones - despite the constant intrusive engine drones they’re immune to or have learned to speak over. Most have motorbikes: scooters and Vespas, and laughably tatty machines which appear barely capable of making a sound or staying intact if you were to sit on them. Less so of actual movement. Not a Harley Davidson in sight. Pedal bikes come a close second to their motorised siblings although few look what we would call modern.
The more people on a motorbike the better. Young and old, friends, lovers, whole families nonchalantly cram on, babies looking out glazed over the handlebars of speeding, precariously weaving cycles.
Beeping isn’t an aggressive act. Hello, I’m here, is all it means. Road rage appears extraordinarily non-existent. Buildings vary wildly from the ramshackle corrugated iron hut, just about upright, to the recognisably regular, sturdy modern bulk. Little glitz, no neon, but an intensity of frantic bustling dusty life that, in my experience, had no comparison. I sat in the back of the taxi staring out, petrified, hypnotised. Sometimes a passing biker would see the pasty-looking westerner in the taxi window - did locals ever use taxis? - and take a second look. I sensed our nearing centrality by the rosing height of buildings and an increase of western looking people. Still not many: the occasional couple, or a single young person. Then I passed a war museum, outside which an obvious clutch of them waited, adorned by cameras, sunhats and shades. The taxi swung into the forecourt of my hotel after a ride of about twenty minutes.
*
Now I’m irrationally seething following a protracted tour of Ho Chi Minh City, getting fleeced for the second time in a number of hours.
My journey finally at an end, I reached my hotel room in the plush hotel I’d been advised to book by my travel agent, at around midday local time. In the context of Vietnam it was an expensive room, with an en-suite, mini bar and television. Determined not to even consider napping, I freshened with a shower, a shave and fresh clothes, before braving the manic streets.
For the first few minutes I could only summon enough courage to walk around the blocks, only crossing the fearsome, permanently jammed roads when strictly necessary. I swore I’d be killed if I tried to be too clever, tried to cross too many roads. The odds were surely stacked against me with the swarming volume of traffic as it was. It brought to mind a childhood computer game where you had to cross a river packed with crocodiles, stepping on safe logs to reach the other side.
Climbing into the seat of a large pedal cycle, I wondered if I had been wise in succombing to the fourth offer of a tour. “3 dollar for hour,” he had reasonably quoted, before pummelling me with measured, luring questions as he pedalled alongside me, pitching his sale. “Oh, ok then,” I finally submitted, willing to defer the responsibility of my direction and lower the chance of getting run over.
The hour elapsed, but he continued showing me authentic Vietnamese pagoda after pagoda, temple after temple. Some more impressive than others, many a fair distance apart. The smell of incense in most of the square buildings lulled my senses, relaxed my already jetlagged mind. This combined with my unerring sense of over-polite Britishness and I delayed telling him: Enough, I’m tired, take me home now - even when the second hour passed. A tall, self conscious and over flamboyant temple with little artistic substance, claiming to be the tallest; then another, smaller, flatter, red block with a wondrous amount of detail, locals on their knees, praying to Buddhas. My guide sat in his cycle, relaxed, smoking, pointing me in the direction of other buildings of interest, although I’d lost enthusiasm long ago and wanted to go back.
I brainlessly agreed anyway and went plodding dopily off to the next temple. Beginning to lose track of the number of temples I’d seen, I grew weary of getting rinsed of money again. He pedalled, standing behind me as I sat fretting, between short, sporadically vicious thunder storms. He had cycled around more blocks than was necessary to get back to my hotel, I was sure.
It had been around two and three-quarter hours. I’d been stupid for letting it go on so long and was as much annoyed at myself for that as I was at him for overcharging me. Amidst another torrential storm soaking us to the bone, we had a confrontation outside the hotel. I was reluctant to give him as much as he asked, claiming he should have told me at the beginning how long the tour would be. A local lady manning a nearby streetside drinks stall saw our stand-off, came over and mediated, successfully knocking his price down better than me. Reluctantly, I handed over a still inflated fee, and stomped dripping wet into the plush hotel, attracting confused looks from the staff.
(I later guessed that this was because they would have expected to collect my room key from them, but I had accidentally contravened rules by taking it out with me).
I’m irrationally angry now because it was a decent, occasionally fascinating tour, taking in many different corners of the city - possibly ones less chartered by tourists. And the traffic remained consistently captivating, terrifying, tipping back and forth like an hour glass, each vehicle a grain of sand, on each junction a hundred miracles, never even a scrape. Several near-miss swerves when collisions appeared a certainty. Heart regularly in mouth as I sat in my little priveliged shell, I’m amazed not to have witnessed a single accident.
My energy levels, momentarily boosted by the adrenaline of conflict, are now dipping again. Ridiculously so for six o clock. But I’m jet-lagged so it’s excusable. My writing is dipping in and out of focus. I should stop.
