It took a fall on my head to knock some sense into me. Literally.
Unlike past journeys to Vietnam, flying into maelstroms of people and bureacratic chaos at airports in Saigon and Hanoi, the flight into the country’s third largest city, Da Nang, was a laugher. To begin, there were only seven of us on the flight from Bangkok. The shuttle bus that met the plane travelled all of 50 metres before depositing us at the tiniest, most decrepit international terminal I’ve ever seen. And inside, well, it looked as though they had to wake Phuoc and Nguyen to process us through immigration. Customs? Baggage x-ray? You’ve could’ve dragged in a missile launcher. And whereas in the two larger cities you step outside the airport to armies of attacking taxi driver/body snatchers, here a handful of cabbies looked up from their card game, back at their hands, sighed, stood up and half-heartedly began haggling for my business.
The chosen driver spoke English as though from under water. Every now and then I understood a word.
I’d heard that a spanking new highway had recently been finished connecting Da Nang with Hoi An, but if so this chap hadn’t yet got word. Hand on horn, he trawled through mainly bicycle and motorbike traffic – not a single one budging so much as a mm out of our path – on a road barely fit for vehicular consumption.
“You have hotel?” he asked as we approached Hoi An. I shook my head. “I take you to very good place.”
Which he did. The three storey hotel was new and clean, a full complement of staff attentive and efficient. The young man behind the desk said $20 for a room. I replied I intended to stay a few weeks, how about a discount. “Okay, only for you, $15.” Which, he added, included free breakfast, internet use, bicycle and swimming pool.
The room had everything: air-con, cable TV, stocked fridge, instant hot water, new linen and curtains. I thought: what a classy bargainer I am. Later I learned nobody paid more than $15, even if they stayed a night or two.
Breakfast was still being served. I stared in awe at the buffet spread. It was massive. Eggs to order, any style, pancakes, all kinds of bread and cakes, different fruits, juice, coffee. All you can eat. And did I ever. Three, four trips to the food display, loading my plate each time, toting it back to where white people sat shoveling grub into silent, no-eye-contact, sour faces. Euros on holiday.
Laden with food, my digestive enzymes fleeing for their lives, I somehow made it to the room, had a nap, got up, watched an ancient James Bond on the Star Movie channel, went down and checked my email, ate lunch (sparingly: I had to pay for it), back to the room, another Bond flick, nap, more internet. Thrill a minute, this travel business.
The following day was more of the same. Huge breakfast my digestive tract was loathe to process, nap, TV, internet. I did take one bike ride to the old town. It was so hot, and I was feeling so lousy, I returned in half an hour, drenched. Back to the air-con room, shower, nap, movie, internet. Through it all I was feeling worse and worse.
Upon my first visit ten years before I had fallen in love with Hoi An and a number of its natives. Vietnamese are a truly remarkable people, and none more remarkable than reside in this small, picturesque river city. The old town is World Heritage protected, a good thing too because the business-minded Vietnamese are developing the hell out of all the surrounding area. My hotel was part of this.
The third day started out pretty much the same as the two previous. Normally, the first day in a new place I take it easy. By day two I’m back to my usual strength. But not only wasn’t I feeling up to standard travelling snuff, I was experiencing now a rare malaise, combined with faint symptoms of roadie run-down – bit of nausea, woolley-headed, low energy. So when Dong knocked at my door around 7 that evening and invited me out to dinner, good sense told me to beg off. But Dong was a dear friend I hadn’t seen in ten years. His wife and six year old son, neither of whom had I met, were down in the lobby waiting.
“It’s so good to see you again!” he cried, over and over. “Come. Meet my family and let’s go to dinner.”
The family four-wheels were two older motorbikes: wife and son on one, me behind Dong on the other. The restaurant was on a dark road just out of town. It was a local hangout, not a tourist in sight, a bit rundown and seedy. The food, though, was excellent. My taste buds danced, while my stomach said, Careful here, bud, and my head said, Really, I’d rather be back in my air-con room, lying on the bed watching another bad old movie. Twice I reckoned I’d had enough, but Dong kept piling more delicious things into my bowl. Finally, feeling like death in a centrifuge, I declared: “Dong, please take me back to my hotel. Now.” By his expression, he could sense I was in trouble.
As we walked back to his motorbike across the darkened street, I fought back the increasing urge to retch. It just wouldn’t be good form. Deep breath one, deep breath two… My next thought was this: why am I lying on the ground with all these people staring down at me? And then the pain hit. The back of my head was on fire.
I don’t know how long I’d been out, but when An and two other men lifted me off the ground and carried me to a waiting taxi, I thought, Hang on. Taxi? There hadn’t been a taxi anywhere around during my most previous moment of awareness.
I was dizzy; blood was slowly dripping from both knees and my right elbow, and oozing profusely from the rear of my head. I was also aware that Dong’s face was whiter than Uncle Ho’s beard.
They wanted to take me to the hospital, but roadie paranoia said, Hospital? In Asia? With surprising vehemence I directed them to deliver me to the hotel.
In the room, Dong settled me onto the bed, towels under my head collecting blood from the wound. He made a phone call, and within minutes a man arrived with medical case. He was shortly followed by a very pretty young nurse, who turned out to be the man’s daughter. It was she who cleaned me up, stitched the head slash that felt just slightly narrower than the Mekong, gave me a tetanus shot (no worries, it was a brand new syringe and needle). Half a dozen pills later I was legging the time-warp tango in ooga-booga land.
I awoke in the morning feeling not at all badly. Even a peek in the mirror didn’t put a crimper on that feeling. For peering back at me was a poster entitled The Last Man Standing In A War Zone.
The headband had come off during the night, so I gingerly peeled back the adhesive to the large bandage covering my sewn-up scalp. I was amazed there wasn’t a flotilla of Chinese junks in my recently-formed canal. Only four stitches, in fact. Daughter-nurse had done a fine job.
I left the room and walked down to the dining area. Full of free available foodstuffs, full of dead-eyed gringos. I turned right around and walked out again. Past the bank of computers. I smiled at the staff, all of whom urged me to please return to bed, sir, and secured a bicycle from the hotel’s private stash.
Without plan, not a thought, I cycled through the city to the old town, and then to the river. And encountered there the most wonderful scene in Asia. The morning market.
All Asian morning markets are grand, but Hoi An’s, being right on a river, where most all commerce in the country takes place, is exceptional.
Locking the bike, I stepped through the mass of people, mostly women, all wearing the cylindrical straw hat known as non, pushing, shoving, jostling, bargaining, toting the unbelievably laden quan ganh, or yoked shoulder baskets full of fish and produce, crying out en masse like a thousand jungle birds in morning song. I stepped daintily in amongst those already set up with their wares on blankets, where they would sit on tiny low stools or simply squat for the next 14 hours, beckoning for business. Bicycles and motorbikes piled high and wide with product threaded their way slowly, precisely, through the narrow, cluttered covered pathways. Many were wearing the khan bit mat, face masks covering all but the eyes against the fumes and grit which filled the air. Once past the market area, I came to the dock. Ancient wooden boats full of fish, full of fruit and vegetables, plus ferries packed with kids in uniform, their bicycles squashed together. When the school boats docked, the kids grabbed their bikes and took off, the high school girls perched high on elevated seats like princesses, wearing the appealing white pants-dresses called ao dai.
I sat on a bench by the river. Just across the way, the small islet, An Hoi, had since my last visit been developed from a collection of simple wooden homes into a standard Western suburb with just a tinge of Asian flavor. Yeah, all right. Happens everywhere. Might even be nice to sit at a café there at night, look back over at the beautiful ancient architecture of Hoi An proper.
Later that day I would encounter my Vietnam “family”, dear, dear people I had met a decade before. They ran a small vegetarian eatery in an alley off the old town’s primary artery. A dozen years back, the woman of the family had been fired from her job as school principal because the old farts running the show in Hanoi disapproved her following a certain Buddhist guru. She couldn’t even score a job as a teacher. No other means available to bring in money, she opened her home as a vegetarian restaurant. Vietnamese Buddhists go meatless four days each lunar month, two around the full moon, another two at new moon. It was my friend Dong who first had taken me to this place. The food was exquisite, and even though the woman spoke no more than a dozen words of English, and I – still -- can’t pronounce Vietnamese to save my soul, we experienced one of those unexplained but joyful moments of the road where you know a lifelong relationship has been established.
She and her husband have four kids, the youngest of whom was then eleven. In Vietnam, schooling is provided free for children up to that age; beyond, payment is necessary. Because so many people here are dirt-poor, kids often are forced onto the streets to sell postcards or cadge coins-from-your-country-sir? to support their families. So I undertook the role of sending the lad through his next ten years of schooling. Big deal, right? Would you believe it costs me more to feed my cat each month than a year’s education of a young person in Vietnam.
But before this could happen, meeting up with these wonderful folks, sitting there by the river I had me an understanding and made me a decision. The understanding was this: what the hell was I doing at my cushy, all-comforts-provided hotel way out of town? And the decision was – you got it.
Back at the hotel, the staff obviously thought the knock on my head of the previous evening had stuffed up my thinking. Nonetheless, I simply smiled my way through packing, toting my bag down to the lobby, paying the bill. Then out the door and into the late morning heat. I walked slowly, contentedly, back to the morning market area, where I would take a room in an older hostel right on the river. No TV, no stocked fridge, no internet, no free bicycle, no pool. It had air-con, yes, and mostly it worked, as did most everything else, most of the time. But don’t bet on it.
Didn’t matter.
I was moving into Vietnam.