The Buck starts here…

The day never really began because yesterday never really ended. 12 hour overnight bus rides can really mess with your perceptions of time & space. I have vague recollections of waking up in uncomfortable positions & stopping at random truckers’s cafe in the Vietnamese countryside for surreal pseudo-conversations…

And then at about 6.30am, our destination, Hoi An, within frisbee throwing distance, the rain began. We didn’t view this as either unusual or a significant problem. After all, it is the rainy season. The bus pulled over. The road ahead was flooded. How would we cross? Would we all drown in the attempt? Was the baggage compartment waterproof?

Two “no”s and a “slowly”.

So out jumped the driver, down came the window, and in went the bags, displacing the smug git who thought he had the back seat for the entire trip. The bus inched forward. Just to give you some idea of the water depth, people were crossing the street in boats. We passed two trucks parked back to back in waist-high aqua. Bricks were being passed from one to the other. Slow work. We exited the water with our sanity and baggage intact, entered Hoi An, found a hotel & fell asleep.

A few hours passed. A day dominated by water was doused by a new mini-episode. The shower was cold. No worries. Into the beautiful old town we wandered. We drank some water with our lunch. Our lunch was great. The water was wet. We saw some of the beautiful sights that this UNESCO (The cultural wing of the United Nations) protected town has to offer. This inclued a traditional chinese merchants house which floods every day. All the crafts on show have to be rushed upstairs, helped no end by the pulley system/hole in the ceiling.

After getting measured for a pair of jeans & a shirt (Hoi An is the tailoring hotspot of Vietnam) I decided to leave Jane in a world of fabrics, cuts and other fashion stuff on which I am clueless, and meander back to the hotel. I stopped for a mars bar. It was frozen. As a general rule – frozen biscuits & chocolate bars are great. As a specific rule -frozen mars bars are not. As I ripped open the familiar black wrapper (which inspirationally informed me that eating the contents would help me “work rest & play” – all worthy pursuits I might add.) the heavens opened. Someone upstairs had been on the ice tea’s.

I ducked into a bookshop to wait it out. Bookshops in Asia have an endearing habit of wrapping every book in plastic – thus preventing potential customers from reading any part of the book other than blurb & the sickeningly sycophantic 2 line reviews on the cover. (E.G: “This book was absolutely sensational! You absolutely, positively must, must read it! Yay!”) Having circumnavigated the shop twice it felt like time to move on. And still it rained.

I began to consider how soggy a person would have to be before they qualified as a clump of wet spinach. I reasoned somewhere between 37 & Bolivia. And then my saviour appeared. Cycling along – hands waving objects for sale. Those objects were umbrella’s and raincapes. Really, really, funky raincapes in a a variety of colours. I plumped for purple. A purple plastic bag with holes cut in convenient places for hands and neck. Damn did I look hot. I marched on, feeling impenetrable. The road had become a river. Ankle-deep, but a river all the same. The only safe haven was the pavement. I stepped up. Some Vietnamese people laughed at my outfit. I laughed. We all laughed. A truck drove by and drenched us. The truck driver laughed. We all laughed some more. The river kept flowing. The rain kept falling….

Yesterday we decided to see some of the “must-see” sites in Saigion. We booked our tickets with a local travel agency, and had the good fortune to be guided by “Slim Jim” – a former soldier in the South Vietnamese Army with an astonishing capacity for inserting seemingly random snippets of cockney rhyming slang into his speech. The tour was a double-headed day trip from Saigon, the massive Vietnamese metropolis (8 million people, 4 million motorbikes, a shedload of coffee shops, and a small monkey called Trevor) where we are currently based.

Bright & early we were woken by the incessant, synthesized Israeli tune which, try as I might – and despite the fact that it is played by someone, somewhere in the street below me every 3 to 4 minutes 24/7 – I cannot remember the name of. Hoop-da-doop down to the travel agency from where our tour bus will depart. 5 minutes to spare eh? Think I’ll be having me some breakfast. Ahh look: a lady across the street is selling small baguettes (baguette-ettes???). Yes, I’d love one with unrefrigerated soft cheese and potentially unwashed cucumber please.

The bus departs. Our day is to be composed of 2 sections, placed together for geographical rather than thematic reasons. First stop is the headquarters pf the “Cao Dai” religion – an indigenous ideaology which combines Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism & Christianity with a whole lot of brightly coloured buildings & people. It has about 2 million followers in Vietnam. Below is a picture of their symbol: the all-seeing eye, and of some of the officials walking into their temple at the start of the daily ceremony.

By the time the ceremony actually began (about noon) I was starting to feel quite unwell. Maybe it was the cheese baguette, maybe the sun, maybe a mosquito with an as yet undiscovered disease had bitten me on the tuchus. Either way, my temperature was high, my energy was low, my head felt like Maradona had just punched it past Shilton, and my bones ached like a shake. So it was boiled rice for Bucky’s lunch. And then back on the bus for part 2…

The area of Cu Chi saw heavy fighting during the American war. It marked the southern end of the Ho Chi Minh trail – the route through which the North Vietnamese Army moved men & supplies into the American-supported south. My pain had subsided to a sufficient extent that I felt sleeping on the bus would be to do both myself & this place a grave injustice. So in we trooped to watch the obligatory propoganda film. The Americans in the audience squirmed slightly at the somewhat biased take on events, but it was an interesting documentary nonetheless.

Then in we sauntered to the forest. We saw how small the tunnels where the North Vietnamese guerillas (Vietcong) used to shelter & live in were. Some of the group even crawled into one of the holes, as you can see in this picture below.

One of the tunnels had been specially widened for Western tourists (who tend to be somewhat wider than the Vietnamese). So we crawled through it. It was horrible. Hot, dark, suffocating. And this is a tunnel twice the size of the ones that were actually used during the war. We also saw some of the nice friendly surprises that awaited American soldiers walking through the area such as this one below:

And then finally…just as my headache is starting to inch closer to recovery, they take us to a firing range and give people the chance to fire the same guns that were used in the Vietnam War!! What an opportunity!! And one which I politely declined. Every shot was like a sledghammer to my cranial nerves. At least I could just get back on a bus & sleep it off though. For the poor bastards who fought wretchedly over this land that wasn’t an option.

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