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Vietnam: A Little Discomfort
In Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) the motorbike taxis make exhilarating rides. In the swarm of motorbikes flowing through the streets like a flash-flood (there are 3 million motorbikes in the city's streets), you are flushed forwards at terrifying speed. If you want to overtake, you have to break ranks and slip into the opposing lane, weaving through the opposite onrush of bikes with daredevil nimbleness. In crossroads - engines revving, horns bleating - the motorbikes become something like trapped and choppy and angry water. Driving, which is conducted with a certain playfulness, is like being on the controls of a video game where you have to dodge the onrushing barrage of obstacles: you hold tight, surge ahead, and brace yourself for the impact.
It was the motorbike taxis that gave me a sweet taste of recklessness, and made me crave the freedom tinged with danger that can be had from independent travel - forging one's own path, an experience that becomes personal and meaningful because of the small discoveries one stumbles upon along the way, making a journey inimitable, even if in small ways. Besides, after some weeks on the tourist trail, I realised that although I had travelled halfway across the country I still hadn't seen the inside of a local bus, and the only natives I had met were the ones who worked in the tourist industry. I had been numbed by the passiveness of organised tours, and of being bundled with other tourists in a group that attracted attention; I wanted to be an anonymous, down-at-heels traveller. I didn't want to be taken to restaurants and hotels and souvenir shops; the satisfaction of travel was in finding my accommodation and my restaurants. I didn't want to ride in air-conditioned buses with other civilly-minded Westerners; I wanted to travel in run-down native buses. In the trip I was planning to the Mekong Delta, did I want to be taken there in style in a fast ferry and taken round the canals in a big touring boat? Or find an old fisherman with missing teeth and a dubious canoe and pay him generously to paddle me through the canals?
Furthermore, package tourism is more likely to be intrusive and elitist and artificial, and socially and environmentally invasive and detrimental. Most of the money goes into the pocket of a few businesspeople, and package tourism necessitates the development of tourist enclaves - hotels and restaurants and supporting infrastructure - that are imposed on communities that don't benefit directly from tourism, gobbling up land and resources that belong to that community. It's much better if tourism benefits the locals directly; I wanted to eat in local eateries and stay in family guesthouses, and hire a fishermen or local boy for a guide.
It was these political beliefs that wheedled me to get on a motorbike taxi to the bus station, and wait five hours for the bus to Cantho - a destination I chose because I wanted to see the floating market. The bus was dusty and stuffy, the aisle cluttered with sacks and boxes of vegetable produce, and the twenty-something boy next to me, whose feet stank of sweat, slept on my shoulder for five hours of the eight-hour journey. It was an uncomfortable journey in an overcrowded bus choking with cigarette smoke. But this was where I wanted to be. Few Westerners travelled like this, and the natives in the bus regarded me as an eccentric and accessible Westerner, dressed, like them, in a T-shirt full of holes and sandals that had been stitched together by a street cobbler, and carrying my belongings in a dirty cloth bag. I was shown curiosity and kindness, and offered fruits and nuts and sweets and cigarettes. No one could speak English, and I didn't have an idea where I had to get off the bus. A breakdown had delayed us, and now it was dark outside, and I was trying to ignore the tentacles of panic: how would I find accommodation in a strange town in the dark?
A young woman chatted me up on the ferry, as we crossed the river. After some small talk, she said: "This bus will go to the bus station which is on the outskirts of town. If you come with me, I can take you to the cheapest guesthouse in town. It's owned by my English teacher - nice family, clean house."
"Take me?"
She smiled and pointed to the Honda moped parked next to the bus. "Come!"
I hesitated: her eagerness made me suspicious. What did she want from me? Was she a prostitute? Would she drive me somewhere to a pre-planned ambush? I thought about a story I had heard of a Westerner who was seduced by a Vietnamese woman, and the next day she told him he had to pay her US$20 for every night they slept together, or else her family would beat them up.
I got on the back of the moped on a sudden impulse, and she drove me to the guesthouse she had described. So grateful was I for this act of kindness that I invited her to dinner, where I found out more about her. Nga, 29, came from a poor family who lived in thatched hut in the scruffy settlement that had spilled across the river, and she came to town in the evenings to see her uncle, to get online, to go to the Karoake. She had a degree in business studies. She was well-dressed and confident, and her large innocent curious eyes, as well as the unflinching interest she showed me, made me think she liked me. It was a thought that made me careless, and hours later, when I was tipsy and giddy, Nga asked me if I wanted to take a boat tour with her cousin. I would see the floating market, the backwater canals, an orchard, a paddy field - a six-hour tour, at US$3 per hour. No orchard and paddy field for me; I wanted to do three hours. She said three hours wouldn't be enough to do the whole loop; I needed at least five. She took a form book and wrote something, then she pointed where I had to sign. I had to pay her an advance of US$5.
Earlier she had said she was on holidays, and I asked her again about a job. She said, "This is my job." So this was why she had helped. Everything she had done had led to this point. A slick, professional operator: she got a free meal, free drinks, and booked me on a tour. the US$5 was her cut.
The next morning, feeling groggy and hung-over, I stepped into the creaking canoe with trepidation. The constant wobble of the canoe and the dizzying reek of the cranky engine's exhaust compounded my nausea. Everything slid past in a misty blur: the sea gypsies in their houseboats trading vegetables and seafood, the women and girls washing cooking pots and clothes in the side canals, the fishermen preparing their bamboo-framed nets. Nga's cousin wanted me to stop at the orchard and the rice field. I had seen a thousand paddy fields and orchards in Asia: why would I pay money to see more? But I had already agreed to this itinerary, Nga's cousin said. We had been moving at a numbingly slow pace; even pinching myself didn't stop me from drowsing. I realised we could have done this tour in three hours at a leisurely pace; five hours was being inventive. There were other anomalies. How could my skipper, a withering old man, be Nga's cousin? Afterwards I hurried to my guesthouse and asked the owner whether he was an English teacher - but he didn't understand my question, and his wife intervened to inform me that he didn't speak English.
I had fallen for Nga. The thought that here was a sexy woman falling at my feet had made me foolhardy and trustful. Now I could feel Nga thinking about how foolish and gullible to a woman's attention Western men were: that knowledge was her strength. I had been planning to spend three days in Cantho, but now, in anger and humiliation, I packed my bags and paid four times the cost of the bus ticket to take an air-conditioned share minibus back to Ho Chi Minh City. I had met the natives I had wanted to meet - the fishermen with missing teeth and dubious canoe, the young woman with the beaming smile and show of grateful innocence, the family guesthouse - but it had all been a charade of trickery that had led me to spend in one day what I had budgeted for three days. I had sought genuine interaction, but I had forgotten that in tourist-ridden places the relationship between visitors and natives is disfigured by economic expediencies. But I shouldn't be angry: the joy of independent lone travel is the unpredictable encounters, and my recklessness and drunkenness - even the trickery - was what had shaped my little inimitable adventure, which was anything but numbing.
© Victor Paul Borg
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