By Any Means: His Brand New Adventure From Wicklow to Wollongong (30 page)

Hanoi blew me away with the high-pitched whine of strokers, the constant honking . . . the energy and buzz were intoxicating. The motorbike was clearly the main mode of transportation here; I reckon they outnumbered any other vehicle by about 70-1. Taking a slip road towards the heart of the city, all we could see as we approached the junction were motorbikes flashing past in front of us. The humidity was even worse than in the mountains - the walls of the buildings were stained and even the trees seemed to drip with sweat.

We’d phoned ahead from China and found a dentist who could fix my tooth (hopefully once and for all), so I had that to look forward to. Meanwhile Anne had jabs she had to get through; the poor soul had so little notice in London she’d flown out here without being fully inoculated. Tomorrow we could compare needle marks.

At the hotel I took a shower and dried off, though I don’t know why I bothered because by the time I made it down to reception I was soaking again. We were going to eat dinner in a place Digby had recommended: the Delicious Restaurant. Not a bad name for a restaurant. The food was apparently a combination of the best flavours from all over the country.

It was dark outside now. I watched a woman ride by on a bicycle loaded up with empty plastic bottles; hundreds of them tied in two enormous bundles one on top of the other. I don’t know how she managed to get them tied on, never mind ride the thing - the load was at least a dozen feet off the ground. She waited at the lights: when they’re red they count down 10, 9, 8 . . . which is kind of cool. When they went green she tottered off looking slightly less stable than the guy we’d seen with the hessian sacks.

What an amazing place. Welcome to Vietnam, Charley. Or should I say, Welcome to Bike Country.

19

Dead in the Water

The following morning I went to the dentist on the back of a
Xeom
or motorbike taxi - last night over dinner at the Delicious Restaurant, a piece of what was left of my tooth had broken off. Not so delicious.

The driver gave me a black plastic helmet to wear. With its short peak, it offered about as much protection as a baseball cap. At first glance the driver seemed to be wearing a steel helmet rather like the GIs used in the Vietnam War, but when I looked closer I saw it was also plastic - like a toy helmet. Up until a year ago there had been no helmet law in Vietnam, but so many kids had died from head injuries the government introduced legislation. Apparently since then there had been an explosion of shops selling these useless plastic crash hats.

The ride across town was slow: one of a million bikes, we criss-crossed the main roads into smaller side streets where the buildings kept the heat so compressed the tarmac was sweating.

When I got to the clinic the dentist said all she could do was stuff the hole with a block of composite. I’d need the tooth crowned when I got back to London. Fine, I didn’t care, really, just as long as she could do something that would last that long.

That afternoon we would be taking the bus to Halong and then tomorrow we would be crossing to Cat Ba Island on a junk. But before we left Hanoi we were due to meet up with a Vietnam Vet, an ex-soldier who’d fought against the Americans. Chi explained that he had been disabled in the war and made his living on a tricycle taxi provided by the government.

I was looking forward to meeting him - this expedition was all about taking local transport and it would be interesting to speak to a man who’d fought on the Vietnamese side. Jumping on to a couple of motorbike taxis Russ and I were ferried across the city. It was wonderfully chaotic, with a similar feel to India, though perhaps with a little more western influence. We left the streets for a labyrinth of alleys, and a different world altogether. We were among the poorer houses here, where dogs were yapping, kids were playing and washing hung from windows. Now and again the lines were strung across the alleys themselves. The warren opened into a large square surrounded by buildings with a lake in the middle. Sticking out of the slack, green water was the mashed-up wing of an American bomber.

At 23:05 on 27 December 1972 a B52 was shot down and part of the wreckage crashed into Huu Tiep Lake. There was a plaque on the wall commemorating the event in both Vietnamese and English: it stated that the downing of this plane galvanised the people and helped bring about eventual victory against the American forces. Standing there, gazing at the wing, I had a very strange sensation - an incredibly strong feeling of déjà vu. I swear it felt as if I’d been there before and yet this was my first time in Vietnam.

The guy we wanted to speak to was waiting for us on his motorised trike on the far side of the lake. The trike had a motorbike’s front end, though the gear changing was done by hand and the seat came from a car. Behind it there was a luggage/passenger compartment with two benches. The whole thing was covered with a canvas canopy. The driver only had one leg and I assumed he must have lost the other during the war. It was thirty-odd years since the Americans withdrew, though, and this guy looked no more than forty. He had a calm, thoughtful face and wore a green pith helmet. I asked him how he’d lost a leg.

‘In a traffic accident,’ he said.

I looked quizzically at Chi, but she didn’t comment.

‘Right,’ I said, nodding. ‘And the government provided you with the trike, is that right?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I bought it.’

Clearly there had been a communication breakdown somewhere. Never mind - he was a lovely bloke. Hopping in the back we asked him if he could take us to the hotel so we could pick up our luggage, then on to the bus station. He explained there wouldn’t be enough room for us and the gear, so one of his friends, another disabled driver, followed us with a second trike.

I was sorry not to have seen more of Hanoi - my trip to the ‘Veteran’ had taken up most of the morning. However we’d seen enough to know that in two years the city would celebrate its one thousandth birthday. In that time it had been ruled by the Chinese and the French, from 1940-1945 it was occupied by the Japanese, and from 1946 to 1954 it was the battleground between the French and the Viet Minh. We could have spent a month here and barely scratched the surface.

The trikes dropped us at the station where we boarded an old coach. It was small and crowded but we’d been on a few buses now and this wasn’t too bad. The humidity was killing me, though, my face felt as if it was glowing and there wasn’t a single part of my body that wasn’t soaked in sweat. We knew the heat was going to be the major challenge here - and almost certainly in Laos and Cambodia too. Just sitting on a bus was arduous enough, never mind driving in the jungle and riding a couple of dirt bikes later on.

It took for ever to get out of the city: at least a four-hour journey and the driver went all around the houses trying to fill the bus. Fill it he did, though, and with so many people on board the atmosphere was even more oppressive. We headed south on open road with flat, green fields on either side. Matt had a window open and his arm dangling which, unbeknown to us, was illegal. Halfway to Halong the police stopped the bus and boarded it, then spent half an hour reading us the riot act about windows and arms and the laws of the road in Vietnam.

The next morning - 7 June - we were at the harbour by seven-fifty to pick up the junk that would take us to Cat Ba. Vietnam was the eighteenth country we’d crossed through since we left Dad’s house. Even this early it was baking, the air still, the sun hidden in dense clouds. It was sticky and breathless and felt as though the monsoon rains would unleash any moment. The harbour was heaving; a real bun fight with hundreds of junks tied up and people clamouring to get on board.

The junk we were taking had two storeys. It was beautifully built with a polished wooden deck and carved rail, and a staircase leading to the upper deck. Inside there were four or five really nice cabins. I decided I could quite happily live on it; the main deck was decorated with potted plants and little shrubs like someone’s courtyard garden.

There was no order, each vessel just cast off and steamed out hoping for the best. We did likewise, picking a path between other junks and flat little skiffs. It was as chaotic as the streets of Mumbai; there were boats shunting each other, people shouting, horns blaring. I looked around for a harbour master, or pilot maybe, to take charge, but couldn’t see anyone. It was only when we were steaming away that I glimpsed a uniformed guy arriving finally in a speedboat.

‘Too late, mate,’ I muttered, ‘they’ve all gone already.’

Finally we were away, and having escaped without damage we headed across an emerald green sea in the direction of islands that rose steep and sharp in the distance. It was very close now - one of the stickiest days I can remember - the water flat as a mill pond and what little wind there was was so incredibly hot and clammy that you could barely even stand in it.

It was stunningly beautiful, though, an island paradise that reminded me of the mountains around Yangshuo, the way the land climbed almost vertically out of the sea. It was a little touristy, I suppose, though most of the boats were heading in the opposite direction from us. The skipper, Hang, told us they were going to a group of islands where they’d moor up with a police guard in case they were attacked by pirates who rode small, fast boats that came down from China. I could imagine pirates in these waters. Apparently the area was notorious, and they preyed particularly on tourists.

There are more than three thousand islands off the coast at Halong, which means ‘Where the dragon descends into the sea’. Legend has it the islands were formed by a huge dragon that spewed out precious stones and thrashed its tail, raking up the seabed as it swam out to defend the area. Even today fishermen claim to have seen a giant sea creature they call Tarasque. I don’t know about sea monsters but as far as the precious stones go, we’d been told there was a fishing village among the limestone cliffs where the people cultivated pearls. Hang had never been there before but he knew roughly where it was and said he’d try to show us before heading to Cat Ba.

Leaving the other boats behind, we motored between enormous hunks of rock. With their short beaches and towering cliffs it wasn’t hard to see how the dragon legend came about. They all seemed to look much the same though, and I imagine navigating this area would not be easy. We toured bay after bay and rounding one island we’d come across another ten just like it and ten more beyond that. Finally we crossed a wider stretch of water and on the far side I glimpsed a patch of blue. It was the roof of a hut: I could see a line of them built at the base of the cliffs. Strung across the water in front were hundreds of floating buoys, markers for oyster nets.

The huts - spread across the beaches of a number of neighbouring islands - had concrete walls and tin roofs and most had a yard area covered by a canvas canopy. Pushing off from the shore, one of the boats came out to meet us.

It was rowed by a teenage girl wearing a straw coolie hat, her young brother sitting next to her. Russ and I climbed down and they took us to the home of an oyster fisherman who cultivated pearls by seeding the host oyster with a tiny slice of another. The ‘fertilised’ shell was then soaked in the sea for two years while the pearl grew. The oysterman was a young guy with smiley eyes and a shock of black hair. He said he had a million shells that generated twenty kilos of pearls.

Sitting there looking at an open shell I suddenly felt incredibly lucky. Here I was in a rowing boat off the coast of Vietnam with an oysterman. I was swept away not just by where I was, but the enormous distance we’d covered. I bought some pearls for Olly and my children and a few for the girls back in the office.

There was a whole community here; an unnamed village with its own way of life, a school that the kids rowed to every day, their parents making a living from pearls sold to wholesalers or people like us who just showed up. The oysterman separated the pearls we’d bought into various different bags and, shaking hands, we headed back to the boat.

In late afternoon we docked at a concrete quay. We tied up and, having collected our luggage, said goodbye to Hang and the junk.

Cat Ba is the largest island in the Halong archipelago and a fairly popular tourist destination: there are lots of fishing villages dotted along the beaches and one main town with a bunch of hotels. We took a van from the harbour, driving inland through roadside farming villages that backed on to rice paddies.

At the hotel we took a moment to check the map, tracing the line we’d taken from Yangshuo to here and all the way back to Ireland. As Russ put it, we’d come two hand-spans and had another hand-span to go before we reached Sydney. Amazing. But first we had a night in Cat Ba before we took a boat to the mainland and a train south. After dinner we wandered through town and came across a competition where people were making mummies out of toilet paper.

Maybe I should have taken that as an omen. The next morning we arrived at the quay, and as soon as I clapped eyes on our boat I knew it was too small.

‘That’s not very big,’ I said, staring unconvinced at the tiny vessel flopping about in the water. I looked out to where some of the smaller islands formed a natural barrier that kept the water here pretty calm. It wouldn’t be so calm on the other side and the same ominous-looking clouds that had dogged us since we arrived were still threatening to unleash the rain.

They say you should always go with your first instincts and over the years I’ve learned to trust mine. Only not today, apparently. I knew this was wrong but I kept my mouth shut and like stupid sheep we all clambered aboard. There were quite a few of us on this part of the trip as well as myself and Russ - Anne and Matt were filming, Robin was with us again taking still photos, and then there was our translator, Chi, the government attaché and Seb and Brighade, two of Chi’s friends who were hitching a ride. On top of that there was the luggage. By the time we’d piled in we were sitting on bags with three people hunched precariously in the bows. The pilot was young and looked inexperienced: I should’ve known better, I really should. But he got the boat going and we pulled away from the harbour and turned into the swell.