Travel
To Vietnam
Looking
Out For SARS ~ by Sheila D'Souza
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| It’s
9AM, and we have just left Nha Trang after stopping at every bus stop/tourist
cafe that exists in town. In between stops, we have also re-fuelled,
broken down and crossed a bridge that was still under construction.
After over an hour of circling and zigzagging, I had became fearful that
I would never reach Saigon by 7PM. But fortunately, it seems that
we are now well under way. My attention is currently focused on the
fact that the bus driver is seated across from me; he started taking the
air-conditioning unit apart while we were re-fuelling, and another man
nonchalantly replaced him. However, the former bus driver appears
to have given up on the A/C unit, leaving a gaping hole in the ceiling
and the passengers sweltering as well as a little unsettled. With
distractions like these (including the three goats that the new bus driver
has just narrowly missed adding to the daily road-kill count), I can’t
believe that when I started this trip I was just worried about SARS. |
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I had arrived
in Saigon four days earlier, having by the time I boarded the aircraft
finally quashed the majority of my misgivings about the trip. My
uncertainty arose from the fact that SARS was ‘raging’ through Asia at
the time. And yet joining me on the flight from SARS-free Tokyo to Ho Chi
Minh City were about 40 travel-hardened Japanese. In an attempt to
appease both fate and the gods by traveling at this time, we had all brought
the soft white masks popularised by SARS. But we had also all placed
them next to us on the seat. It was as though we were aware that while
the masks were largely useless unless we refused to drink or eat throughout
the flight, it was somehow better to have one than not. Indeed not
one of us buckled under the pressure, although heads did turn sharply every
time someone wheezed or hacked. In the end, our pride (stubbornness?)
carried us through, and upon our arrival we found ourselves surrounded
by similarly unmasked people. Signs of SARS were nowhere to be seen or
heard, and it was disturbingly easy to forget about the disease that had
shut down Hong Kong and Taiwan. (In fact the only people in Viet
Nam wearing masks were women sitting astride scooters, protecting themselves
from pollution and sunburn).
HCMC’s downtown
core has been blatantly sanitized, in that all touts and beggars have been
moved to outlying areas and cyclos - basically bicycles with a bucket seat
in the front - are not permitted to enter tourist zones such as Dong Khoi.
The horrors of the ‘American War’ can still be seen on the streets in the
bodies of people disfigured by Agent Orange and at museums such as the
War Remnants Museum. But despite these things, I can’t help but like
Saigon. It is vibrant and beautiful and quirky. And everywhere
are reminders of the different cultures that have influenced Viet Nam.
Perhaps the most striking in Saigon is the pervasiveness of French culture.
Lush tropical flowers surround the Hotel de Ville, house numbers are painted
on the same blue tiles as in France, and if you should desire the freshest,
creamiest creme brulee outside of Paris, Saigon is your city. And
it is courtesy of those banned cyclo drivers and an attempted exploration
of another of Viet Nam’s cultures - the Chinese - that I see a little of
the ‘real’ Viet Nam.
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My friend
and I had decided at the last minute to check out Cholon, Saigon’s Chinatown.
We were staying in the posh district of Dong Khoi, in the Grand Hotel,
a French colonial-era beauty with 4 meter high ceilings, polished hardwood
floors and a fabulous breakfast buffet. (And all this for about USD$60
- but make sure you get a room in the old wing.) Anyway, after a
hard day spent getting measured at various tailors, lounging at the pool,
and enduring a somewhat sadistic massage, we decided to head for Cholon.
Just as dusk was setting, we jumped in one of the many taxis neatly lined
up outside the hotel and arrived only slightly shaken from the Vietnamese
traffic experience. My first impression of Cholon is that it is not
for the hygenically fainthearted. Humans and animals coexist affably
in various stages of life and death here, and it is only the outsider that
remarks the cats chasing the rats that are trying to get at the dead chickens.
Other than that, it is a fairly average market; the Ben Thanh market is
probably more conducive for souvenir shopping. And if you are interested
in buying some of the famous Vietnamese coffee, the Ben Thanh market has
the infamous weasel coffee. (The delicious flavour stems from the
fact that raw coffee beans are fed to weasels. After the weasels
have digested and eliminated the beans, the beans are then collected and
roasted.)
As it was already
dark, things were starting to wind down in Cholon, so we decided to head
back to Dong Khoi. Of course, there were no taxis neatly lined up
anywhere (as there is no real curb for them to do so at), so we started
walking. It was the aimless, bumbling walk that I like to think of
as the classic tourist strut: mouths slightly agape, heads swiveling and
our bodies moving in such a way as to block all pedestrians behind us.
There were now two cyclos following us, and against all the paranoid good
sense that has been drummed into me about making friendly overtures to
people following you, my friend turned around, hailed the cyclos and negotiated
a deal back to Dong Khoi. I settled into the seat and girded myself for
the inevitable collision I would have with another cyclo, bicycle or car.
In the other cyclo, my friend began a thorough probe into Vietnamese family
and culture, food and drink. And I found myself listening to the
driver’s story as traffic turned out to be far less terrifying when observed
from a cyclo than from a car. Traffic in Viet Nam more swirls and
flows than stops and goes. It’s the cars that disrupt the rhythm
of the bikes and pedestrians, not the other way round. The ride was
in fact quite pleasant. But just as I was getting comfortable, we
came to a stop. My driver assured us that the cafe we had stopped
in front of had excellent local beer (bia hoi).
Moonshine would
perhaps have been a more accurate description. I am still not sure
if it was the beer itself, or the glasses which the waiter brought out
filled with ice, that brought on the strange feeling. My friend gasped
at the thought of beer on the rocks. I gasped at the thought of ICE in
my glass. The waiter dumped the ice out at our request, but at no
time during that trip was SARS further from my mind than when faced with
unfiltered water. SARS seemed too commercialized and almost glamorous
compared to the banal reality of hepatitis. And yet, for whatever
incomprehensible reason, I drank the beer. The ride back was groovy - the
whole world slowed down and things came into sharp focus. Our bemused
drivers dropped us off in the vicinity of Dong Khoi and I awoke the next
morning with a headache and an aversion to bia hoi.
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A week is
a luxury. Remember this when you encounter harried Japanese and Korean
tourist groups abroad. Their panic arises from trying to squeeze
a year or two worth of experiences into 5 days. In a way, it seems
as though they are trying to justify their absence from routine.
So, since I’d been living in Japan for 5 years, just hanging out in HCMC
would have felt like a waste of time. I needed to go somewhere else.
We finally settled on Nha Trang, a resort about 440 km north of HCMC.
Nha Trang is a popular destination, both for tourists and locals alike,
so at such short notice I could only get a one-way plane ticket, as the
next few days were national holidays and all return flights were sold out.
I would have to find another way back to HCMC. Alone. My friend,
operating on Canadian time, decided to stay on longer to see more of the
country.
So it is after
two short nights in Nha Trang that I reluctantly board the ‘express’ bus
bound for Pham Ngu Lao (the bus depot in HCMC). As I settle into
my seat, I have happy memories of the most succulent, subtly flavoured
tuna steak ever to pass these lips, some cool bars, and an amazing white
sand beach. It is as I am taking out my journal to write about these things
that the bus driver whips out his screwdriver. By the time we have the
near-miss with the goats I give up trying to write; the manic swerving
of the bus is just making my writing more illegible than usual. Instead,
I lean back and contemplate the scenery. And it is fascinating; we pass
by luminescent green rice paddies, plodding water buffalo, and little hamlets
where peasants are sitting in the shade of trees literally nit-picking.
After cruising along the spectacular coastline, we stop for lunch at a
small cafe nestled between huge, luxurious resorts called such things as
‘Palmira’ and ‘Swiss Village’. After a feast of pineapple beef, rice
and iced jasmine tea, I board the bus only to be greeted with the sight
of the elderly female cook from the cafe squatting behind one of Palmira’s
palm trees. I watch her as she waters the lush lawn in an unhurried
manner, and decide that despite the good time I’ve had as a tourist, if
I were Vietnamese I would probably pee on the front lawn of Palmira too.
At 6:35 p.m.
we pull into the bedlam of Pham Ngu Lao and I unsteadily descend from the
bus. My feet and ankles are so swollen that I could use them as pin
cushions and yet remain blissfully unaware of the pain. I watch for
a moment as the pipe-smoking 60-something year-old French-Canadian man
from my bus disappears into the crowd with his 18 year-old Vietnamese girlfriend.
Following him are the backpackers that joined us en route (hailing from
the more downscale resorts), their hair spiky or matted, universally unwashed,
grubby feet carrying them into the descending darkness. The Vietnamese
who were on the bus (and who in their quiet way thoroughly enjoyed the
people-watching that the bus had on offer) have already left with their
families or friends, handing over packages and presents from the countryside.
I have no more time, and scamper for an available taxi to take me to the
airport and back to SARS-free Japan.
To contact Sheila Click
Here
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