It was 5:30AM and Mandy and I were seated on the porch of the Phong Nha Farmstay in central Vietnam. We were waiting for our transportation to arrive to take us back to Danang City.
The night before, we had been told that the bus we planned to take home was not a bus at all; it was, in fact, a van. The news came as a surprise but we had just finished a full day of caving and hiking in the rain. Exhaustion had prevented us from processing the true implications of this mode of travel in rural Vietnam. If we had been more alert, we would have remembered that vans are for soccer moms and facilitating the abduction and murder of hitchhikers on isolated stretches of highway…
..and chickens. I have seen enough National Geographic photo spreads, taken in impoverished countries, to know that this is the preferred mode of transportation for chickens the world over.
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| Hard evidence that chickens love vans. |
Vans are NOT recommended for long-distance, public transport in third world countries if you happen to be a 5’10”, lengthy-limbed lass, such as myself.
The night before our journey home, Mandy and I had fallen asleep around midnight. I had been so bushed that I used a Wet Ones antibacterial wipe to “wash” my face and kill 99.99 % of the germs who had made a land-grab on it. I also, uncharacteristically, skipped brushing my teeth rather than make the short journey downstairs to the communal bathroom.
At 4:45 AM the next day, the alarm pulled back our sheets, snapped us on our asses with a wet towel and yelled, “Rise and shine, maggots!” (a little known alarm feature on the iPhone 4).
The rest of the farmstay was still asleep as we fumbled around our dorm room, making sure we had collected all of our belongings. We quietly tucked the grasshoppers and mosquitoes back into our beds, lightly kissed them on their foreheads, whispered, “Sleep well, sweet angels,” and slipped out the front door.
I stumbled out to the front porch and slumped into a chair to wait for the van. A young, Swiss guy, whom we had failed to get the name of the night before, joined us. He clearly shared our early morning, bleary-eyed misery.
The only creatures interested in small talk at that time were a yapping dog and a few crowing roosters. Every few minutes, one of us tossed obscenities at the loudmouthed dog for him to run and fetch.
Two days earlier, Mandy and I had traveled from Danang to the small city of Dong Hoi, via a train. At Dong Hoi, we were picked up by a car service that the farmstay had arranged for us, and driven an hour north to their locale. Our last day at the farmstay, we had been informed that the public bus, nay, van would be an excellent alternative to the train, due to its convenience and low price.
As the van pulled up the dirt drive, my father’s words of wisdom, “You get what you pay for,” suddenly rang in my ears, as did the stream of obscenities that had recently been directed towards the dog.
*******************************************************
“Wait…this is it?”
“Wait…this is it?”
The three of us sat, slack-jawed, gazing out at the 3-door circus that was noisily rolling up. We had been told it would arrive nearly empty. Our informer had not taken into account that it was the end of a holiday weekend. The van came fully loaded, with some passengers already standing, hunched over to avoid hitting their heads on the roof.
A young man strode over to us, snatched my straw hat off the table, put it on his head, and hoisted our bags onto his shoulders. With the skill of a brick mason, he added them to the wall of luggage that was already tightly piled high at the back of the van.
As we squeezed into the steel can, a chorus of salty sardines yelled into their cell phones from within. It sounded like a Vietnamese stock exchange trading floor. Judging by the commotion, the price of rice had just plummeted.
Still disoriented and slow to process, our heads were in more of a fog than the neighboring rice paddies. Mandy and I took our places in the rear row of the packed van. It was built to accommodate three to four people per row, but currently had five packed into all but the last.
We were able to claim one window seat. That window seat became more precious to us than any moment, artist, Sam Butcher, could ever capture in a porcelain figurine.
“I’ll switch with you later,” Mandy promised as I took my place between her and a lovely Vietnamese woman. Our Swiss comrade in farms(stay) was relegated to a fold-out seat in front of Mandy. It had roughly five vertebrae worth of back support.
As I settled in, I noticed that the vent above my head was broken. The cover that once aimed the air away, or blocked it from coming out completely, was MIA. Judging by the age of the van, it had probably defected to Thailand back in the 70’s to escape the war. A large, round blast of cold air shot directly out the blowhole at the top of my head.
Unfortunately, my hat was still in the possession of the van bellboy’s head. His head was currently out of reach in the front passenger seat. The only attention-getting phrase I know in Vietnamese is “Em ơi!” which is used to alert a waiter that you need service. I didn’t think that would be appropriate in this situation because, as far as I knew, there would be no in-transit meals served on the journey. Even if I had possessed the language knowledge, I doubted I could make myself heard over the myriad of day traders nattering away into their phones.
Demonstrating the power of our strong friendship connection, Mandy almost instantly sensed my discomfort. (There’s a small chance it wasn’t our recently formed bond that alerted her to my irritation, but the fact that every ten seconds or so I repeated the phrase, “I’m uncomfortable.”) She grabbed her own straw fedora and set it on top of my head to block the worst blow out I had ever received.
Mandy has an adorable, child size head. Mine is a Scandinavian dome, bred throughout the centuries to support large, horned helmets. I looked like an organ grinder monkey on vacation.
The next 6-8 hours flashed before our eyes and it wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t even “average” with the potential to be bumped up to “decent” after receiving a dose of plastic surgery so large, not even Demi Moore could claim it never happened. We craved sleep like the nicotine Mandy had given up only the week before.
Trying to make the best of the situation, I attempted to get comfortable. Unfortunately, I’m a stomach sleeper. I can’t fall asleep on my back, which makes passing out on airplanes and in cars tough. On planes, I usually put the tray table down and rest my head on my folded arms. In cars, I sleep against the window or lean over and sleep in my neighbor’s lap, if our social association is close enough to allow for that. I thought Mandy and my relationship was.
I politely asked her if I could use her lap as a pillow. She gave me a look that said, “Not for all the road head in the world.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. We’ve known each other for almost two months now. I didn’t know you’d get all weird about me requesting to put my head face-down in your vagina. I thought gym buddies to crotch nuzzling was a natural progression.”
Her rebuff made me realize that sleep would be impossible. I had never wanted off of a moving vehicle more. Which says something considering my bus in middle school was shared with a mob of teenage deviants. They once put open catsup packets in my backpack…on my birthday…and didn’t even have the heart to include a few french fries and hotdogs to sop up the mess with.
My eyes, growing wide and fearful, met Mandy’s. Without exchanging a word, we both knew we wanted to get off that ride as badly as the other…and that we needed to let it be know quickly before the van pulled away from the farmstay.
There was a slight problem. My limited vocabulary of “Hello, goodbye, one, two, three, cheers, rice, ice cream, chicken, shrimp, beef, coffee and coffee with cream,” was not going to help me properly express, “Open the f*cking door or I will tear it off the hinges like a stampeding water buffalo.”
I made eye contact with the guy manning our point of exit. I motioned to Mandy, myself and then out the open door to freedom, fresh air and an area larger than 14’x5’ that wasn’t currently occupied by 21 people.
He smiled and gave us two thumbs up.
I gave him two thumbs down.
“Nooooooo! Off! Me, her, off! We want to get OFF, please!”
The man smiled at us and said something in Vietnamese that I imagined was, “Shhh, let it happen. Just let it happen,” as he slid the door shut and sealed us, along with our fates, inside.
“No, no, we want OFF! Stop van!” Mandy pleaded.
More smiles and universal hand signals for happiness and good times.
“I’d rather shoot myself in the face than ride in this van for eight hours!” Mandy animatedly exclaimed as the engine let out a low death rattle.
“Well, now you’re being just, plain dramatic. I mean, I would certainly shoot off a toe or two to get out of here, but the face? Don’t you think that’s a little extreme? There’s no coming back from a shot to the moneymaker.”
“Did I mention that I get carsick?” Mandy mentioned for the first time, ever.
Overhearing our distressed attempts at communication, a man who spoke a small bit of English turned around in the front row.
“We want to get off at Dong Hoi!” I shouted to him.
“Not going Dong Hoi,” he yelled back over the noise.
“We want to take train from Dong Hoi to Danang! Will we go NEAR Dong Hoi?”
“No. No Dong Hoi. Dong Hoi impossible.”
This seemed strange. Vietnam didn’t have THAT many well-developed highways running the length of it. As far as I knew, Dong Hoi was located along Highway 1; the road we were currently jostling and jerking our way towards. I couldn’t imagine there was another main thoroughfare running parallel to HWY1, aside from the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
“’Ga’ means ‘train,’” our Swiss companion offered.
“Gà’ means chicken,” I shot back. I may not know how to say “excuse me,” or “bathroom,” or “where is,” but this girl knows her meats.
“Well then, it means ‘train’ too,” he retorted.
“I don’t know you, but if they drop us off at a poultry market in the middle of nowhere, I’m going to slice you up like Swiss cheese and enjoying finding out if you taste like gà.”
Not being able to properly communicate with the other passengers was, quite obviously, our fault. Vietnamese language classes in Danang don’t come cheap. We had made a conscious decision to spend that money on travel instead of on learning a language we would rarely have a legitimate need for once we moved back to the states.
Just when we thought our rutted ride couldn’t get any more uncomfortable, a middle-aged man, standing and facing us from the second row, began staring at Mandy. Noticing this strange behavior, she jokingly clicked her tongue and winked at him. He did not pick up on the healthy dose of sarcasm that came along with that act and stared even harder and longer. I think it was meant as a gesture to show how long and hard he would like to do other things to her.
“Are you crazy? What was that? He thinks you’re serious!”
“Shit. If I have to spend the next eight hours with this guy staring directly at me…“ Mandy turned and said to me while laughing.
“You’re smiling. Why are you still smiling?! He probably thinks you’ve just turned to tell me how ruggedly handsome he is.”
She laughed again before glancing nervously at him, and then quickly back at me.
“And you KNOW he just interpreted that as a coquettish giggle, followed by the ‘I’m looking at you. Now I’m looking away. Now I’m looking at you again,’ maneuver, right? Flirting 101! What do they teach you in your mountaintop, Colorado finishing schools?”
Mandy laughed again. She couldn’t help herself. Years of weed smoking had rendered her incapable of not letting out a slow, easy-going, stoner laugh at any and all situations. They don’t tell you about that long-term effect of ganja use in the PSAs.
As the van led us further and further away from the farmstead, I slumped (read, ‘wedged myself’) back in my seat, ready to admit defeat.
Normally, I would put up more of a fight but I was ridiculously tired and suddenly remembered that we had a slight money issue; mainly that we had none.
We had exactly 13,500 Vietnamese Dong to our names. 13,500 VND may sound like we were rolling around in a huge, steaming pile of Dong, but in reality, that’s the equivalent of about 75 cents, US.
The reason we were so skint was a long story involving multiple attempts to pick up my new Vietcombank ATM card, and a country where people like to close up shop and nap…A LOT.
Mandy had told me that she would spot me for the trip but had miscalculated how much we would both need. Surprisingly, there were no corner-rice-paddy ATMS for her to use in the National Park. We had been informed at the farmstay that the van could stop at a bank for us when we arrived in Danang so that we could pay for our journey.
Just then I had a light bulb moment. It was as dim as the early morning light filtering through the dingy windows, but it was an idea, nonetheless.
“I have an idea,” I proudly declared. “We may have to do some things we’re going to regret. By ‘we’ I mean ‘you,’ and by ‘we’re,’ I mean, ‘you’re.’ I won’t regret any of it.”
“Does this involve that guy who’s still staring at me?”
“Yes, it does. Him and whoever else happens to be at the first rest stop we break at. Before you say, ‘no,’ hear me out. We need money and since we didn’t find you a caveman in Phong Nha, you’ve still got an itch that needs to be scratched. This is really a win-win situation. I’m thinking we can use the picture I took of you, pretending to lick that phallic stalagmite in the caves, as your advertisement. I can distribute it along Highway 1 like a Las Vegas Strip pimp.”
Mandy firmly declined.
“Fine, but when the Vietnamese love songs start a-blasting, you’ll reconsider.”
No road trip in SE Asia is complete without native music blaring, day and night. It doesn’t matter if it’s 2AM and everyone but the driver is trying to sleep.
At that moment, forlorn Vietnamese ballads would have been the piece of undigested corn on top of my shit sunday. Just the thought of it made me whimper pathetically, “Dong Hooooooi,” to nobody in particular. The woman next to me smiled and nodded at this.
“Dong Hoi?” I asked, louder and suddenly more alert. She gave me another gentle, motherly nod.
“Get the driver to drop us in Dong Hoi and I’ll give you my firstborn child,” I excitedly told her. “…if it has some sort of mental or physical defect.”
This time she looked back at me with a face that queried, “What you talkin’ ‘bout, Jive Turkey?”
“Write it for her!” Mandy suggested.
The van rolled down a pockmarked road, jumping in and out of puddles like a child with a new pair of galoshes it aimed to sully. This caused my pen to do spastic, Chuck Norris style jump kicks in the air. I wrote “Dong Hai” in the neatest, clearest letters I could manage while trying not to give the woman a roundhouse kick to the face with my pen.
She took the slip of paper and showed it to her male traveling companion. Mandy pointed at the driver and then to the slip of paper, communicating, “Tell him to stop here!”
The woman pointed to herself, then the driver, then the paper and nodded in agreement.
Success!
Just to be sure that she understood, I drew a train. It was not a Vietnamese breed. It was a European bullet train; because that’s what I wanted. Mandy desired to shoot herself in the face with a bullet. I wanted to shoot myself to Danang in one. I made a little arrow that pointed to the word “Danang.”
She laughed at my child-like sketch and bobbed her head again.
“Shit! You wrote Dong Hai, not Dong Hoi,” Mandy pointed out.
I scratched out the letter ‘A’ and wrote an ‘O’ beneath it. I didn’t know if there was such a place as Dong Hai, but I didn’t want to find out today. The woman smiled and gave a look of understanding.
“Whew, that could have been bad,” I exclaimed. I picked up Mandy’s tiny, monkey hat to let the overhead cooling system power blast the sweat from my brow.
This wasn’t the first time I had made a slip-up of this sort. On the way to Dong Hoi, the ticket counter lady had given us a ticket to Dong Ha; a mistake I had failed to catch. Dong Ha was a mere 96 kilometer, 1 ½ hour difference. We couldn’t understand why the train workers tried to kick us off nearly two hours before our scheduled arrival time. We had to buy them off in order to complete our journey.
“Crap. Even if she gets him to stop in Dong Hoi, we still only have 13,500 Dong between us,” I remembered. “We can’t pay for our van ride. We either have to communicate to them that we’re in need of an ATM and a train station or we suck it up and stick it out.”
We opted for neither and instead rochambo-ed to determine who would ask the Swiss guy to borrow the money needed. Mandy and I reasoned that we could exchange phone numbers with him and meet up in Danang to pay him back. The full journey was roughly $5.00 each. 1/7 of that shouldn’t have been much.
As a matter of habit, I lost the game.
“I don’t want to do this. I really don’t want to do this,” I fretted as I worked up the courage to beg. It’s one thing to have a friend spot you money. It’s quite another to request it from a total stranger who had already grown weary of your kvetching antics.
“At least you two have real seats!” he had barked at us at one point, from the discomfort of his foldout chair.
Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. “Stop complaining, you high-maintenance, spoiled, American asses. You should be raising your un-calloused hands to the heavens and thanking your lucky constellations that an uncomfortable journey is your biggest tribulation of the day. There are people who were standing in that van and thankful for the chance to do so.”
I agree with you 100%. If the worst thing to happen to me is getting stuck in an uncomfortable van, in a heartbreakingly beautiful foreign country, then I can count myself as damn fortunate.
But believe me when I say, I’m not generally a high-maintenance gal. I can rough it with the best of them. (That’s coming from a non- “Jenny From The Block,” “I’m Real,” “Wait…I said I wanted the room kept at 80F, not 81F!” place.) I realize that feeling the need to proclaim that I’m laid-back probably lost me any “cool and casual” credibility I may have had; much in the same way that a girl who insists she’s “Just one of the guys” is often a nag and a buzzkill and a person who constantly asserts that they hate drama is a walking Korean soap opera.
So, I will submit as evidence of my mid-to-low-maintenance ways, the time I’ve put in sleeping in ferry stairwells and on train station floors. I have backpacked across Myanmar; a country with relatively no infrastructure and roads so bad they could shake the head lice off a hobo. I have thoroughly enjoyed that form of “adventure travel.” But I have to say, at 28, my mind and body are beginning to get a bit old for it.
I’ve since experienced the joys of 3-ply toilet paper, bath salts and complementary slippers. And dammit, I’m not ashamed to admit that I liked it.
I’ll certainly still ride overnight, on a wooden bench, in an open-air truck bed, when that’s my only option. But not when a soft sleeper is waiting to welcome me between its semi-clean sheets in a quiet, nearby train compartment.
That was the main issue with this scenario. It was hard to resign myself to sitting upright in a blaringly loud, Vietnamese call center on wheels, for an extended period of time when the train was, theoretically, a rock, paper and scissor’s throw away.
“We could either spend the next eight hours playing “Things I’d rather do than be stuck in this van,” or you beg like your pimp just bought a new set of brass knuckles,” Mandy threatened.
I considered my two options while I mentally compiled a list of things I’d rather do than remain in the van…
1) Admit to my mother that my 5-year plan is written in the form of a teenage girl’s fortune telling game. Then continue to let the divine hand of M.A.S.H. lead me into a new tomorrow. (Can’t wait to live in a mansion with Ryan Reynolds but not thrilled that our only vehicle is a shopping cart.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASH_(game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MASH_(game)
2) Let a plastic surgeon near me with one of their “flaw pens”…while on stage…buck naked…at my 10-year high school reunion.
3) Start using the phrase “totes ma goats,” as a legitimate substitution for the word “definitely.”
4) Take my temperature every few hours to see when I’m ovulating, just for funnsies.
5) Watch root canal fetish films.
6) Binge on airplane food.
7) See if toothpaste, besides acting as an effective zit cream, also doubles as a good eye makeup remover.
8) Have my Thanksgiving meal selection taken from a cookbook entitled, “La Dolce Vegan.”
9) Wear flannel footy pajamas to a Bikram yoga class.
10) Walk back to Danang.
“Yep, I’m gonna go ahead and ask him for the money,” I finally decided.
Joe, as we learned his name was, kindly obliged. He also declared that he would be joining us in our escape.
The girl seated in front of him had pulled her hair back into a ponytail; condensing it into one, smooth, billowing tube of hair. It was just long enough to graze and tickle Joe’s face as the wind from her wide-open window blew it back in his direction. Everyone has their breaking point; apparently, a one-sided tickle fight with someone else’s hair was Joe’s.
True to her nod, my seatmate told the driver to drop us off at the Dong Hoi bus station. It was not quite the “train station,” but close enough. (Although I must say, while my drawing of a train could have been mistaken for the New York Citigroup building lying on its side, it certainly did not look like a bus. I took her misinterpretation as a personal attack on my skills as an artist.)
After sharing a taxi to an ATM and then to the train station, the three of us ordered a round of Banh My sandwiches from a street cart and boarded the next train. I don’t know if it really was the best Banh My I’d ever had or if everything just tastes better when it’s seasoned with freedom, comes with a side of personal space and isn’t full of somebody else’s hair. The three of us slept soundly all the way back to Danang and not even the tropical humidity could dampen our high spirits.
