The Livitrans train, true to what I’d been told by a fellow traveller, did not look anything at all like the photos in the brochure in the Livitrans booking office, which depicted a four star hotel room on wheels. In fact, it isn’t a train at all, but just a single coach attached to a regular train when they’ve sold enough tickets to warrant it. It has a savvy coach attendant who speaks some English and brings tea, a cup of instant noodles and complimentary bottled water when you board, and offers to sell you beer and wine, but the coach is identical to the one on the regular train except that the walls have been covered in plastic fake wood paneling. So what you get when you pay more is fellow Western tourists as neighbours and a coach attendant who understands you when you tell him there is no toilet paper left in the toilet but does nothing about it (no soap in the sinks and no towels, either) and that several mice have scampered down the hall and invaded your compartment. He used his iPhone flashlight to peer under the beds, stamped his feet in the hallway a few times, and pronounced them “Gone!”
The coach attendant didn’t miss a beat when we came aboard. There were many empty compartments. Pricing the use of this car, like the overnight boats on Ha Long Bay, is not based on the market, or even on additional equipment costs to the railroad, because there aren’t any; but on what they think they can get the tourists to pay. He immediately suggested that we could have the cabin to ourselves if we paid him off. Deborah asked how much, but he delayed his answer, and then a French couple came aboard, with their French-speaking guide. Their later train had been cancelled, so they’d been assigned the two other bunks in our compartment. The coach attendant offered them the same deal, and the husband checked it out because he said his wife is a light sleeper. He came back and said he’d been proposed that he should pay double, in other words, he should pay for the four berths to ensure that the other two remained empty. He declined. There were still several empty compartments on the coach.
Eventually the coach attendant brought his price down, and for a $25 bribe, the French couple got a compartment that would have stayed empty anyway. I thought that the coach attendant should happily have given it to them for free, because no-one likes to sleep on the upper bunks, so he’d only have to change bedding on the lower ones, which is much easier to do. That’s assuming the linens get changed between customers; upon inspecting mine, I wasn’t completely convinced. I saw a few random hairs and a smudge on the pillow-case that I thought should have disappeared with the laundry soap. Fortunately we have silk sheet-bags that we actually ordered from Vietnam on Ebay a few years ago. The coach attendants make out like bandits with this system, given the average salary of Vietnamese government workers, (every public school English teacher wants to be fluent enough to leave his gov’t salary behind and become a tour guide) and they probably pay off higher officials up the line a portion of the customer pay-offs they can’t manage to hide completely.
There’s also no dining car with white table-cloths on this train, unlike the brochure photos; only the same disgusting dining car I’ve described on our previous train trip, which was worse, and dirtier, than the worst kitchen car I’ve ever seen when working on a railway track gang, or any kitchen trailer at a rig camp. The French couple had a bag lunch thoughtfully provided by their tour company, who wouldn’t dream of sending their customers to use the dining car on a Vietnamese train. Deb and I had been smart enough this time to purchase our own bowls of instant noodles, mandarin oranges, bananas, roasted salt peanuts, and cookies, and Kim had given us a special farewell gift of a kind of soft Halvah fudge inside a golden Buddha in a lotus.
We went peacefully to sleep hoping that the coach attendant could not sneak someone else into our compartment, because we knew those bunks had been officially assigned to the French couple. He was slick as goose-shit, however, when it came to offering us coffee in the morning. Tea and water had been included in our train ticket, which was about fifty percent higher than the cost of a sleeper compartment in a regular coach, although, as I’ve said, identical except for the cheap faux paneling. Deb asked him if the coffee was “included”, and he said “Yes, included”, but when he delivered two tiny powdered coffees with milk and a hefty dose of sugar already stirred into it, he demanded a 50K note. She said, “I thought you said it was included?” and he very cleverly pretended he hadn’t understood her question. He’d answered that the tea was included when he brought it around the evening before; he knows most other words that apply to his work duties, and I’m sure he’s heard the question posed by dozens of previous tourists, even those whose first language isn't English. I can hear the Germans and Russians in my ear right now, asking "Is included?"
We went to sleep early and slept well enough, me with my earplugs in because there is a loose metal panel somewhere that banged loudly whenever the train hit a particular rhythm. I think it was behind the faux paneling, the old metal divider between compartments, perhaps. In the morning it was raining when we reached Hue, and the French couple disembarked, as did what looked like a school tour of young English adults with chaperones and an older British group leader. We appeared to be the only tourists left in the coach, as it continued another four hours to Da Nang, where we would meet a young CS’er, Hieu, who has volunteered to host us for a couple of nights.
I was always mildly suspicious in Vietnam when someone volunteered to host, because it isn’t usual, and since one can’t charge for hosting, there might easily be some sort "of strings attached", or hidden expectations. Most Vietnamese hosts will never travel overseas themselves, so the normal “pay-it-forward” reciprocity doesn’t really apply. Even Kim and Vu would have liked to find some way to have guests cover the extra costs of electricity, water and foregone rent on the floor of their home that they made available to Couchsurfers – and they felt that way especially when they had guests who abuse the hospitality of their hosts,. like the young Russians mentioned in a previous entry. But our host in Da Nang had good previous references and the only expectation she indicated was that her guests should be willing to spend an hour a day speaking with them in English, which we were certainly keen to do.
The scenery between Hue and Da Nang was quite pretty. We ran through the Truong Son spur of mountains that run down to the sea off the main spine down the western edge of Vietnam, dividing it from Laos and Cambodia. There were few farms and hardly a dwelling in sight as we crawled upward through the switchbacks. The coach attendants in their spiffy uniforms congregated again, and would probably party in an empty compartment in our coach, yelling their conversation at the top of their lungs to each other even though they are sitting right next to each other, which is an odd but common cultural behaviour. We knew that we might have to close our compartment door, but we were watching for the high mountain pass north of Da Nang. We'd missed it on the way north because it was dark when we went through, and we were on a sleeper bus which cut off over six kilometres of the best view by going through a tunnel, which apparently reduces the journey by an hour.
The pass is described as a worthwhile sightseeing experience by the Lonely Planet guide. It is called the Hai Van (Sea Cloud) pass. Apparently the spectacular views can be seen on the BBC-TV Top Gear Vietnam special. We had the rain and cloud to contend with, so here are only a few worthwhile photos, but we saw and enjoyed what we could with our eyes. Deborah had been looking forward to this section of our trip. The railway track also goes through many shorter tunnels, but goes around the peninsula, following a beautiful and deserted shoreline, rather than up over the top of the pass, where the old highway goes. Motorcycles and bicycles aren’t allowed to use the highway tunnel that cars and buses go through, so they actually get the best views on a clear day.
From the Lonely Planet:
“In the 15th Century this pass formed the boundary between Vietnam and the kingdom of Champa. Until the American War it was heavily forested.” (Then it was defoliated with Agent Orange.) At the summit is a bullet-scarred French fort, later used as a bunker by the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies.
“If you cross in winter, the pass serves as something of a visible dividing line between the climates of north and south, defending Da Nang from the fierce ‘Chinese winds’ that sweep in from the northeast. From about November to March the exposed Lang Co side of the pass can be wet and chilly” (as it appeared to be today), “while just to the south it’s often warm and sunny.”
We pulled over at a siding on the Lang Co side to allow a north-bound train to pass. A collection of buildings was filled with family and friends taking shelter from the rain under corrugated metal patio awnings and tarpaulins, drinking hot tea. The men were smoking like chimneys, which is a common habit in Vietnam. In a concrete building that looks like it was built to be a passengers’ lounge but which might rarely get used by passengers, they pass the day watching Chinese operas and kung fu movies on the television. Wood for stoves, for cooking and heating, is stacked against shacks. Suddenly four ladies leapt up and opened their umbrellas. Carrying bags under their arms with plastic wrapped items, they crossed the tracks to the train, fortunately heading toward the cars behind ours. Perhaps that’s another thing you buy with the extra cost of your Livitrans ticket: protection from the vendors. I was surprised to see a significant number of well-built concrete buildings without windows and sometimes missing all or part of their roofs.
Under way again, on the ocean inlets we saw fishing villages, square drop nets, and fishermen sculling their canoes, trawling for fish in the sheltered inlets. We passed the highway, which is elevated for a long distance at this point, and then we looked out over rocky drops from our window right onto crashing surf directly below, with the mountain almost vertical up and down on both sides. We enjoyed a series of beaches, mostly deserted but a few with small fishing villages and a few boats at anchor. There were some larger fishing vessels at work, farther out. One could imagine living a solitary life on one of those beaches, living on fish and bananas and other local fruit and vegetables, and rice for every meal. You'd sleep in a hammock. If it were me, I think I’d seek out a beach south of Da Nang where it would be warmer and drier most of the year, including January.
Arriving in Da Nang about an hour earlier than anticipated, we took the taxi quite a long distance to Hieu’s house, where they installed us in a spare room nicely made up for guests, with the traditional bed on the floor that we’d become accustomed to. Hieu lived in a group home of disabled adults; she has cerebral palsy. She taught English, and spoke German fluently as well. We had lunch with her and with Hoang and a caregiver, Nham, who works for the group home, which I believe was supported by an Australian group. Her brother Tuan managed the home, although wheelchair bound, and he missed lunch with us because he went out with a German lady who is staying for a week, to show her around the neighbourhood – she pushed his wheelchair. He’s usually the one who responds to couchsurfing requests, and in fact he’d invited us at the beginning of January but we by-passed Da Nang on our way to Hoi An. We got a second unexpected invitation from Hieu a couple of days ago, who lives with him in his group home. She had spotted our itinerary now that we were headed back south to Nha Trang. We decided to stay two nights, so Deb would try to book our next train ticket for Monday; Sunday would be Hieu's day off, so we agreed to be responsible for creating a “Canadian” meal for lunch, and to give a talk and chat with her group about where we come from. Nham would take us to the market on Sunday morning to choose the ingredients we would need. Nham also wanted to introduce us to a friend of hers from Canada who was teaching her English.
Jan 19th: Deb and I provided lunch. There were seven of us at lunch, including Annette from Germany, who was also Couchsurfing there for a week and helping Hieu brush up on her German. Tuan had to be away for Sunday lunch with his family. After the traditional noodle breakfast (Mi Quang, for most of us) we went to the market with Nham and bought ingredients for banana pancakes. We made them with eggs, milk and baking soda, which wasn't something they'd used in their cooking before, and we got smoked bacon at a nearby supermarket. I looked for icing sugar but didn't find it until after we'd already bought some "extra fine" small granule sugar, instead. We couldn't get cinnamon powder, but got some good strawberry jam. They had honey which we didn't use, but Hieu got to try out her gift of maple syrup from Deborah, and shared it with her friends.
We did most of our shopping in the "local market", and some of it at the nearby Metro, which was a revelation. It is a modern western supermarket - overstaffed and paranoid about pilfering, but completely like those in Australia and Canada in all other respects. There are many foreign products on the shelves, and the prices were as high and often higher than in Toronto, yet 99% of the customers are Vietnamese. So in spite of what we'd heard about Vietnamese salaries, there is clearly a thriving middle and upper class here who drive to the western supermarket in cars, which I'm told are extremely expensive in Vietnam, and who can afford shopping carts filled with expensive food brands. They weren't the teachers, the civil service, the nurses and doctors in public hospitals, or the average gov't workers...so who were they? Higher level bureaucracy who can command higher salaries or who are at the top of the corruption ladder? Cops? Successful businessmen? Train executives and coach attendants...? I wondered how long it will take for this conspicuous wealth to trickle down to those who we think of as the middle class in our nations.
This was an interesting group we stayed with. Tuan managed the house and some of the affairs of the others, advocating for their needs. Until recently he'd had a job working for a gov't department in charge of the disabled, but he quit; he says they really did nothing useful for disabled people. Hieu worked for an American aid group whose director was from the U.S. and made $10,000 a month, she claimed, without ever leaving the office and without knowing much at all about Vietnamese people, let alone Vietnamese disabled people. They distribute wheelchairs, but she said they are a dangerous design that she was embarrassed to distribute, and she wouldn't supply one to Tuan, who used a much better Japanese model.
Tuan was passionate about the dearth of human rights and care for the disabled in Vietnam. There was simply zero thought given to making things wheelchair accessible, providing transport services for disabled people, and other advantages that disabled people have in the west. I believe he was from a fairly wealthy family. He had a personal care attendant named Nham, and he seemed to be very bright and good at management skills. He became wheelchair bound after a motorcycle accident when he got clipped from behind by a car. He was paralyzed from the solar plexus down, and had some facial damage, poor sight in one eye and no sense of taste or smell.
Tuan liked gathering wheelchair bound people in his house for "peer counselling" and discussions to share ideas about how to meet challenges and improve their lot. In order to meet they had to take taxis, which was a very expensive proposition for most of them, since they couldn't ride bicycles or motorbikes. He managed to pull it off once the previous September by paying the taxi fare for anyone who couldn't pay for their own. About a dozen people came. He called his group "Free Wheeling Life" and had T-shirts made up with that logo.
Hieu dreamt of running a café for disabled people that would accessible to people in wheelchairs; Tuan dreamt of a "Wheeltrans" vehicle that can transport several wheelchair bound passengers at once, and perhaps take them on field trips, to libraries, to university courses and vocational training, and to Hieu's café. Nham was getting her driver's licence, and might one day drive such a vehicle. She worked for five years with Daily Bread charity and learned sign language; she had come to work for Tuan three months ago.
Hoang had one withered leg, perhaps from polio. He balanced well on the good leg, and he hobbled and bounced around very quickly, as if he was on speed, sometimes. He was an excellent cook and a gifted natural musician with excellent pitch who could whistle and sing many western melodies; he wished he had a guitar. They're a lot cheaper in Vietnam than in western nations, but still out of his reach. He whistled a lot; I reflected that he might get a lot of pleasure from a harmonica.
Hieu had cerebral palsy and had trouble walking. She had a gift for languages and laughter, and a winning way with people.
They all spoke English, at least at beginner-intermediate level.
In the evening we had dinner with them, and did our presentation. Deb brought a map of the world and a Canadian scenes calendar from her backpack. I included some terms that arose from our lunch today in my Canadian English presentation after dinner: pancake, flapjack, crepe, banana fritter. I talked about the origins of those words, and the fact that so many words in English have come from other languages. We talked about Canadian geography and culture, and then responded to open questions.
Annette was here too. She was an interesting lady: close to our age, tall, blonde, German, a solo traveler and free spirit with two grown sons at home. She had been a supply teacher in Germany and also spent eight weeks volunteering at a school for street kids in India. Deb told me she also worked at a restaurant in India for five years. She was sensitive, warm-hearted, with a big smile and hearty laugh, and connected with everyone. She would stay with this group for a week before heading for Ha Long Bay. We showed her photos of our experience there, and she shared with us some excellent photos of the Dragon Bridge in Da Nang, to include in my photo album. She would do her presentation on Germany the next night, but we'd be gone by then. I suspected she'd do much of it in German, for Hieu's benefit.
Annette had an interesting tale that might parallel mine about the market vendor who attacked me for upsetting her friend. Recently arrived in Saigon, she was wandering Ben Thanh market early in the morning. It’s sort of a central market for small vendors, where tourist prices prevail; I was asked to pay six times what a Vietnamese would buy for a shirt that I finally purchased for about double the price of a local, and more than I would pay in Toronto for the same shirt with the tag "Made in Vietnam" on it. She took a photo of one of the stalls. The vendor went ballistic at her, shouting and threatening to do serious harm to her. Her Vietnamese friend (every western tourist needs one!) explained that the first sale of the day establishes the “luck” for the whole day, and when she came to his stall, bought nothing but “sucked away all his luck for the day in her camera” by only taking a photo, he became furious with her. Superstitions run strong here in Vietnam.
We didn't see much of Da Nang itself. What we read about it suggested that there wasn't much to see, although there's a museum that I forgot about (and Deb didn't remind me...how odd). We really only intended to break up our trip by meeting this group of disabled Couchsurfing hosts who are reaching out to the world beyond the borders of Vietnam. Da Nang is a familiar name to American vets, being the place where the marines landed in '65 in secrecy and full battle gear only to be greeted by Vietnamese girls wearing ao dai's and bearing flowers, and lots of well-wishing sightseers, including four American soldiers who'd created a large welcome banner. General Westmoreland was horrified. It was a major staging area during the war and also the location of China Beach, which is well-known now because of a recent TV drama. China Beach is about four kilometres from the home we're in. The city itself is the 5th largest in Vietnam, and is a bustling, growing, commercially important centre, but there isn't much here to recommend it to tourists, and the traffic noise where we are is beyond a level that I'd call disconcerting, day and night.
Jan 20th: Our presentation went well. After a delicious dinner that they prepared and treated us to, we used Deborah's map and calendar and filled an hour of presentation time. They had brought notebooks and were excellent students, asking all sorts of questions about Canadian sports, festivals and holidays, our social security system (which they are envious of), whether we have homeless people, and whether we have programs for homeless people, and similar questions. Sadly, Tuan remained with his family for the evening, and couldn't join us.
The scenery between Hue and Da Nang was quite pretty. We ran through the Truong Son spur of mountains that run down to the sea off the main spine down the western edge of Vietnam, dividing it from Laos and Cambodia. There were few farms and hardly a dwelling in sight as we crawled upward through the switchbacks. The coach attendants in their spiffy uniforms congregated again, and would probably party in an empty compartment in our coach, yelling their conversation at the top of their lungs to each other even though they are sitting right next to each other, which is an odd but common cultural behaviour. We knew that we might have to close our compartment door, but we were watching for the high mountain pass north of Da Nang. We'd missed it on the way north because it was dark when we went through, and we were on a sleeper bus which cut off over six kilometres of the best view by going through a tunnel, which apparently reduces the journey by an hour.
The pass is described as a worthwhile sightseeing experience by the Lonely Planet guide. It is called the Hai Van (Sea Cloud) pass. Apparently the spectacular views can be seen on the BBC-TV Top Gear Vietnam special. We had the rain and cloud to contend with, so here are only a few worthwhile photos, but we saw and enjoyed what we could with our eyes. Deborah had been looking forward to this section of our trip. The railway track also goes through many shorter tunnels, but goes around the peninsula, following a beautiful and deserted shoreline, rather than up over the top of the pass, where the old highway goes. Motorcycles and bicycles aren’t allowed to use the highway tunnel that cars and buses go through, so they actually get the best views on a clear day.
From the Lonely Planet:
“In the 15th Century this pass formed the boundary between Vietnam and the kingdom of Champa. Until the American War it was heavily forested.” (Then it was defoliated with Agent Orange.) At the summit is a bullet-scarred French fort, later used as a bunker by the U.S. and South Vietnamese armies.
“If you cross in winter, the pass serves as something of a visible dividing line between the climates of north and south, defending Da Nang from the fierce ‘Chinese winds’ that sweep in from the northeast. From about November to March the exposed Lang Co side of the pass can be wet and chilly” (as it appeared to be today), “while just to the south it’s often warm and sunny.”
We pulled over at a siding on the Lang Co side to allow a north-bound train to pass. A collection of buildings was filled with family and friends taking shelter from the rain under corrugated metal patio awnings and tarpaulins, drinking hot tea. The men were smoking like chimneys, which is a common habit in Vietnam. In a concrete building that looks like it was built to be a passengers’ lounge but which might rarely get used by passengers, they pass the day watching Chinese operas and kung fu movies on the television. Wood for stoves, for cooking and heating, is stacked against shacks. Suddenly four ladies leapt up and opened their umbrellas. Carrying bags under their arms with plastic wrapped items, they crossed the tracks to the train, fortunately heading toward the cars behind ours. Perhaps that’s another thing you buy with the extra cost of your Livitrans ticket: protection from the vendors. I was surprised to see a significant number of well-built concrete buildings without windows and sometimes missing all or part of their roofs.
Under way again, on the ocean inlets we saw fishing villages, square drop nets, and fishermen sculling their canoes, trawling for fish in the sheltered inlets. We passed the highway, which is elevated for a long distance at this point, and then we looked out over rocky drops from our window right onto crashing surf directly below, with the mountain almost vertical up and down on both sides. We enjoyed a series of beaches, mostly deserted but a few with small fishing villages and a few boats at anchor. There were some larger fishing vessels at work, farther out. One could imagine living a solitary life on one of those beaches, living on fish and bananas and other local fruit and vegetables, and rice for every meal. You'd sleep in a hammock. If it were me, I think I’d seek out a beach south of Da Nang where it would be warmer and drier most of the year, including January.
Arriving in Da Nang about an hour earlier than anticipated, we took the taxi quite a long distance to Hieu’s house, where they installed us in a spare room nicely made up for guests, with the traditional bed on the floor that we’d become accustomed to. Hieu lived in a group home of disabled adults; she has cerebral palsy. She taught English, and spoke German fluently as well. We had lunch with her and with Hoang and a caregiver, Nham, who works for the group home, which I believe was supported by an Australian group. Her brother Tuan managed the home, although wheelchair bound, and he missed lunch with us because he went out with a German lady who is staying for a week, to show her around the neighbourhood – she pushed his wheelchair. He’s usually the one who responds to couchsurfing requests, and in fact he’d invited us at the beginning of January but we by-passed Da Nang on our way to Hoi An. We got a second unexpected invitation from Hieu a couple of days ago, who lives with him in his group home. She had spotted our itinerary now that we were headed back south to Nha Trang. We decided to stay two nights, so Deb would try to book our next train ticket for Monday; Sunday would be Hieu's day off, so we agreed to be responsible for creating a “Canadian” meal for lunch, and to give a talk and chat with her group about where we come from. Nham would take us to the market on Sunday morning to choose the ingredients we would need. Nham also wanted to introduce us to a friend of hers from Canada who was teaching her English.
Jan 19th: Deb and I provided lunch. There were seven of us at lunch, including Annette from Germany, who was also Couchsurfing there for a week and helping Hieu brush up on her German. Tuan had to be away for Sunday lunch with his family. After the traditional noodle breakfast (Mi Quang, for most of us) we went to the market with Nham and bought ingredients for banana pancakes. We made them with eggs, milk and baking soda, which wasn't something they'd used in their cooking before, and we got smoked bacon at a nearby supermarket. I looked for icing sugar but didn't find it until after we'd already bought some "extra fine" small granule sugar, instead. We couldn't get cinnamon powder, but got some good strawberry jam. They had honey which we didn't use, but Hieu got to try out her gift of maple syrup from Deborah, and shared it with her friends.
We did most of our shopping in the "local market", and some of it at the nearby Metro, which was a revelation. It is a modern western supermarket - overstaffed and paranoid about pilfering, but completely like those in Australia and Canada in all other respects. There are many foreign products on the shelves, and the prices were as high and often higher than in Toronto, yet 99% of the customers are Vietnamese. So in spite of what we'd heard about Vietnamese salaries, there is clearly a thriving middle and upper class here who drive to the western supermarket in cars, which I'm told are extremely expensive in Vietnam, and who can afford shopping carts filled with expensive food brands. They weren't the teachers, the civil service, the nurses and doctors in public hospitals, or the average gov't workers...so who were they? Higher level bureaucracy who can command higher salaries or who are at the top of the corruption ladder? Cops? Successful businessmen? Train executives and coach attendants...? I wondered how long it will take for this conspicuous wealth to trickle down to those who we think of as the middle class in our nations.
This was an interesting group we stayed with. Tuan managed the house and some of the affairs of the others, advocating for their needs. Until recently he'd had a job working for a gov't department in charge of the disabled, but he quit; he says they really did nothing useful for disabled people. Hieu worked for an American aid group whose director was from the U.S. and made $10,000 a month, she claimed, without ever leaving the office and without knowing much at all about Vietnamese people, let alone Vietnamese disabled people. They distribute wheelchairs, but she said they are a dangerous design that she was embarrassed to distribute, and she wouldn't supply one to Tuan, who used a much better Japanese model.
Tuan was passionate about the dearth of human rights and care for the disabled in Vietnam. There was simply zero thought given to making things wheelchair accessible, providing transport services for disabled people, and other advantages that disabled people have in the west. I believe he was from a fairly wealthy family. He had a personal care attendant named Nham, and he seemed to be very bright and good at management skills. He became wheelchair bound after a motorcycle accident when he got clipped from behind by a car. He was paralyzed from the solar plexus down, and had some facial damage, poor sight in one eye and no sense of taste or smell.
Tuan liked gathering wheelchair bound people in his house for "peer counselling" and discussions to share ideas about how to meet challenges and improve their lot. In order to meet they had to take taxis, which was a very expensive proposition for most of them, since they couldn't ride bicycles or motorbikes. He managed to pull it off once the previous September by paying the taxi fare for anyone who couldn't pay for their own. About a dozen people came. He called his group "Free Wheeling Life" and had T-shirts made up with that logo.
Hieu dreamt of running a café for disabled people that would accessible to people in wheelchairs; Tuan dreamt of a "Wheeltrans" vehicle that can transport several wheelchair bound passengers at once, and perhaps take them on field trips, to libraries, to university courses and vocational training, and to Hieu's café. Nham was getting her driver's licence, and might one day drive such a vehicle. She worked for five years with Daily Bread charity and learned sign language; she had come to work for Tuan three months ago.
Hoang had one withered leg, perhaps from polio. He balanced well on the good leg, and he hobbled and bounced around very quickly, as if he was on speed, sometimes. He was an excellent cook and a gifted natural musician with excellent pitch who could whistle and sing many western melodies; he wished he had a guitar. They're a lot cheaper in Vietnam than in western nations, but still out of his reach. He whistled a lot; I reflected that he might get a lot of pleasure from a harmonica.
Hieu had cerebral palsy and had trouble walking. She had a gift for languages and laughter, and a winning way with people.
They all spoke English, at least at beginner-intermediate level.
In the evening we had dinner with them, and did our presentation. Deb brought a map of the world and a Canadian scenes calendar from her backpack. I included some terms that arose from our lunch today in my Canadian English presentation after dinner: pancake, flapjack, crepe, banana fritter. I talked about the origins of those words, and the fact that so many words in English have come from other languages. We talked about Canadian geography and culture, and then responded to open questions.
Annette was here too. She was an interesting lady: close to our age, tall, blonde, German, a solo traveler and free spirit with two grown sons at home. She had been a supply teacher in Germany and also spent eight weeks volunteering at a school for street kids in India. Deb told me she also worked at a restaurant in India for five years. She was sensitive, warm-hearted, with a big smile and hearty laugh, and connected with everyone. She would stay with this group for a week before heading for Ha Long Bay. We showed her photos of our experience there, and she shared with us some excellent photos of the Dragon Bridge in Da Nang, to include in my photo album. She would do her presentation on Germany the next night, but we'd be gone by then. I suspected she'd do much of it in German, for Hieu's benefit.
Annette had an interesting tale that might parallel mine about the market vendor who attacked me for upsetting her friend. Recently arrived in Saigon, she was wandering Ben Thanh market early in the morning. It’s sort of a central market for small vendors, where tourist prices prevail; I was asked to pay six times what a Vietnamese would buy for a shirt that I finally purchased for about double the price of a local, and more than I would pay in Toronto for the same shirt with the tag "Made in Vietnam" on it. She took a photo of one of the stalls. The vendor went ballistic at her, shouting and threatening to do serious harm to her. Her Vietnamese friend (every western tourist needs one!) explained that the first sale of the day establishes the “luck” for the whole day, and when she came to his stall, bought nothing but “sucked away all his luck for the day in her camera” by only taking a photo, he became furious with her. Superstitions run strong here in Vietnam.
We didn't see much of Da Nang itself. What we read about it suggested that there wasn't much to see, although there's a museum that I forgot about (and Deb didn't remind me...how odd). We really only intended to break up our trip by meeting this group of disabled Couchsurfing hosts who are reaching out to the world beyond the borders of Vietnam. Da Nang is a familiar name to American vets, being the place where the marines landed in '65 in secrecy and full battle gear only to be greeted by Vietnamese girls wearing ao dai's and bearing flowers, and lots of well-wishing sightseers, including four American soldiers who'd created a large welcome banner. General Westmoreland was horrified. It was a major staging area during the war and also the location of China Beach, which is well-known now because of a recent TV drama. China Beach is about four kilometres from the home we're in. The city itself is the 5th largest in Vietnam, and is a bustling, growing, commercially important centre, but there isn't much here to recommend it to tourists, and the traffic noise where we are is beyond a level that I'd call disconcerting, day and night.
Jan 20th: Our presentation went well. After a delicious dinner that they prepared and treated us to, we used Deborah's map and calendar and filled an hour of presentation time. They had brought notebooks and were excellent students, asking all sorts of questions about Canadian sports, festivals and holidays, our social security system (which they are envious of), whether we have homeless people, and whether we have programs for homeless people, and similar questions. Sadly, Tuan remained with his family for the evening, and couldn't join us.
Thau, a friend of Hieu’s and sister of her former social worker, made our dinner on our last night with Hoang’s help – he prepared the veggies – and sat in on our presentation, and then stayed the night. She managed rooms in a large business hotel in Da Nang. We were also joined by another friend of the group who was very quiet, and barely said a word in either language the whole evening. He had even more serious CP than Hieu and is also extremely gaunt, leading me to suspect some additional malady. He also stayed the night, sleeping with Hoang. Friendships are relaxed and easy among young Vietnamese. Sophie, a Couchsurfing Chinese girl from Shanghai, an English teacher there and already an inveterate traveller who had visited several countries and had spent two months at the University of Toronto doing extra training last fall, arrived in the middle of our presentation. We made plans to reconnect with her in Nha Trang.
In the morning we planned breakfast and coffee early so that Hieu could join us before she went to work, but it was raining, so before the appointed hour, Nham had already run out to buy a dozen fresh baguettes, and we had them with a fried egg, instant coffee, butter and the tasty strawberry jam that we bought yesterday and are leaving in the house.. We bought some banh mi sandwiches for the train, said our goodbyes, grabbed our backpacks and hailed a Mai Linh, the only trustworthy taxi company that operates in every city in Vietnam. They have exclusive access to the train station here, and one of the older drivers, a leader in the taxi rank, proudly proclaimed his company "Most famous in all Vietnam!"
In the morning we planned breakfast and coffee early so that Hieu could join us before she went to work, but it was raining, so before the appointed hour, Nham had already run out to buy a dozen fresh baguettes, and we had them with a fried egg, instant coffee, butter and the tasty strawberry jam that we bought yesterday and are leaving in the house.. We bought some banh mi sandwiches for the train, said our goodbyes, grabbed our backpacks and hailed a Mai Linh, the only trustworthy taxi company that operates in every city in Vietnam. They have exclusive access to the train station here, and one of the older drivers, a leader in the taxi rank, proudly proclaimed his company "Most famous in all Vietnam!"
Our train was over an hour late arriving and leaving the station this time. Scheduled for a 10:36 departure, we finally got away by noon. The windows were marginally cleaner, if only because it had rained that morning. It had slightly nicer cushions and paneling, but we inherited a messy pile of used bedding that the coach attendant had made no effort to change during our entire journey – not even to simply throw in fresh ones that we could use. We swapped them for the unused, still folded and theoretically cleaner bedding on the upper bunks that hadn’t been used. The attendant checked our tickets and made a note of the two empty upper bunks. We’d paid extra for the two lower ones; Deb says they prefer to sell an upper and a lower to a couple, who will sit together on the lower one when not sleeping, with their luggage on the upper one, making it easier to sell the opposite set of bunks to another couple or even another single.
We assumed the attendant would go through the sitting coaches and try to sell the upper bunks for cash in his pocket, as before, but we put backpacks on our seats (Deb’s won’t fit under the lower bunks anyway) and the soiled bedding on the upper bunks, hoping that might discourage any takers. Foreigners sometimes pay for all four bunks just to have a compartment to themselves, but they still have to fiercely defend their half-empty compartments against encroachment by the coach attendant who thinks he can re-sell the empty bunks even though they show their tickets to prove they’ve purchased all four of them. In our limited experience so far, as long as you purchased the bottom two and you didn’t let yourself get shaken down to pay more to secure the whole compartment, you would probably be left alone anyway, unless the bunks do actually get purchased by other travelers at the agent’s wicket. People don’t generally prefer to ride all the way in an upper bunk.
This time we were well prepared with a ten-pack of noodles-in-a-cup (the choice was a ten-pack or a three-pack), two apples, roasted salt peanuts, soft-as-butter “Vache qui rit” cheese triangles, and chocolate chip cookies, all from the high end Metro supermarket. Deb and I split all our food equally; it’s amazing that her metabolism keeps her relatively svelt while I am an object of some amazement to the comparatively skinny Vietnamese. I was melting slowly through our journey however. My girth was reduced by two belt notches in two months...unless the leather was just stretching.
The coaches all have hot water tanks so that passengers and crew can make tea and instant noodle soup; but no cold water unless you buy it by the plastic bottle. They have a tremendous recycling program in Vietnam. We’ve watched the recyclers collect cardboard by calling out to store owners as they pass along the street, carrying them in huge stacks on their bicycles;. They'd sort plastic bottles and other items out of the rest of the trash at storefront recycling businesses. I was not sure exactly what it gets recycled into, but it disappears from the streets. The coach compartments are air conditioned, but there are no separate controls for each cabin, so some German ladies in a nearby compartment have complained that they have been assigned the “Arctic Cabin”, while ours took quite a while to become even vaguely below perspiration level.
There’s a sink near the hot water that I could fill and shave with, in a good mirror, if I got too bored; someday perhaps these compartments would have wifi, or flat screen tv’s, (or even decent reading lamps and a way to sit up straight that doesn't wear on your back muscles and tailbone), but not today – not even the Livitrans, in spite of the sales come-on. Just like all the bus companies – none of the ones we’ve travelled on have had wifi, although all advertise that they do, painted right on the sides of the buses. The station had a “free wifi point” sign in Hanoi, and a strong password protected signal, but no-one would tell us the password, not even the Livitrans agent whose entire job, it appears, was to keep non-Livitrans customers out of the exclusive Livitrans lounge, which still bore an old sign: “Waiting Room for International Passengers”.
There was a western toilet at each end of our coach, one of which actually had soap in the soap dish, maybe left behind by a kind fellow passenger. The soap dish in the other lavatory had three moth balls instead of soap...I presume they functioned as a deodorizer. Each toilet was perpetually covered in water drops, because there’s a sprayer beside each toilet that might be used if you make a mess of the bowl, or for cleaning oneself for those who have no toilet paper (there’s none provided, we have to carry our own), but also there were no paper towels, so if that’s what the sprayer is for I guess you walk back to the compartment and sit in wet underwear and trousers. I think some passengers sprayed the seat because they couldn't face sitting on plastic that someone else's cheeks have touched.
We ate when we came aboard, read a bit, then napped, then ate again at five. When Deborah gets bored, she says things like “Shall we eat now? Is it time to eat?”, whether she is actually hungry again or not. She enjoys the diversion of going for a walk to the end of the car to get the hot water for the noodles, and eating them. One compartment of her brain dwells constantly on food, like a person starving in the wilderness. She laughed when I rolled my eyes at her question, and admitted, “I’m already thinking about breakfast tomorrow. Shall we go we go to that breakfast buffet in the hotel near ours? It’s not too expensive…” Yeesh - no wonder I’m large. “I’m going to make dinner,” says Deborah. “It’s five-o’clock.” Thus, we eat according to the clock, not when we’re hungry or when our bodies actually tell us they need the food. She would counter that I don’t seem to get hungry when she’s already “starving”; that could be because my body knows it’s already been fed quite enough food for one lifetime, or that it would be quite pleased to shed a few pounds.
Still, Deborah was happy with the privacy and extra space of our own compartment – by 5 p.m. it is already dusk, and so far, no-one has been foisted on us from the sitting cars and we haven’t been shaken down for extra cash by the coach attendant – and we are cheerfully on our way to hot showers, clean sheets and no all-night traffic noise. Our private room with the group had a private toilet but no hot water, no sink and no mirror for shaving; our mini-hotel in Nha Trang has all of that and is up a cul-de-sac away from the traffic on the main street.
We wondered if we might have to do some comparison shopping, since the clerk quoted us a price 20% higher than she made us pay last time; not that it was a lot of money, but we couldn’t use our credit card in the smaller “family” hotels and we couldn’t access our money in more than $100 withdrawals with high service fees, not to mention the inconvenience of having to get to a street-side ATM every two days, and the worry about being watched by opportunistic muggers or guys that break into hotel rooms looking for tourist cash. Those do exist; the Happy House Hotel in Nha Trang is infamous for it on TripAdvisor. It has probably lost more business than it has gained by the thefts as a result of the poor reviews, but there are too many naive travellers who don’t read those reviews, so the practice continues, and most incidents don’t even get reported. The police are ineffectual, and don’t respond even when tourists demand that they be called.
As it is, we paid $17 per $500 withdrawal in Hanoi and Saigon and had a $500/day limit - and we could only get that by visiting the ANZ Australian bank for Aussie tourists in the main tourist area each day - so we hadn’t gotten quite as much money to spend over a seven week period in Nha Trang as I wished we had – it’s the main reason why we stress a little over prices outside of Saigon and Hanoi, and carefully count our dong – not because we don’t have the money, or wouldn’t spend it, but the gov’t here doesn’t make it easy for tourists to access their funds, and therefore actually inhibits tourist spending in every city but the two largest.
Vietnamese souvenir vendors, restauranteurs, hotel owners and tour agents wonder why long term travelers like ourselves are so cheap when we can afford the plane ticket to fly here and obviously belong to the same race of people who fly in for two week package tours from Australia, buying souvenirs and expensive dinners. They don’t realize that we need to stretch our travel dollars and calculate how much we can afford to spend before we get back to a city where we can actually withdraw cash in useful amounts. At a $100 withdrawal limit less $5 in fees at both ends and perhaps as much as $10 in taxi fare to the ATM and back, the whole exercise becomes a bit of a joke, especially when our daily expenditure has been about $65 a day, including hotels, meals, site entry tickets, train and bus tickets, taxis, bicycle rental, the odd tour, and so on. If we spent more on hotels and meals, or bought souvenirs, we could easily be running to the ATM on a daily basis, but it is a pain and an anxiety wearing all your cash all the time, and we learned in Bali that leaving it in a hotel safe or trusting the front desk staff is not the answer. That’s one of the drawbacks of third and second world travel – even for the locals.
Four hours into our trip the sun had come out (the forecast for Nha Trang, still six hours away, is sunny and warm) and we were rollicking through flat fields between hills, small farm plots, some flooded for rice, all growing some kind of crops, and all extremely green and pretty, looking as they have, presumably, for thousands of years, hundreds of generations. It’s a wonder the soil never gets exhausted. Doris Lessing talks about the very poor class 4 soil that has been turned into productive gardens in Zimbabwe with the help of dams and boreholes for irrigation. There was no shortage of water here, and on these flat fields it can’t go anywhere until the farmer decides that it should and opens a drainage gate; and of course there is wonderful sun most days. Water buffalo are marched through fields before planting to till the soil with their hooves, and they provide some of the compost for fertilizer as well.
Jan 21st: We checked into our hotel around ten, the same one as before. We had a little discussion with the evening desk clerk about the 20% price increase, which she agreed to lower back to the price we’d paid before, and speak to her manager about it. The she took us to our room and we discovered that we’d been assigned a more expensive front room with a balcony. Awkward...I often avoid these rooms because of the traffic noise, but we’re in a cul-de-sac so that would not be an issue.
We had a great night’s sleep and went to the Asia Paradise hotel a block away for a western buffet breakfast and a comfortable chair to blog in – our hotel room lacks a desk and chairs, and in mini-hotels the chairs are often solid wood. I didn’t see any chair in our hotel, not even in the lobby.
At breakfast we wondered if we could design a language lesson around asking the students to look for flaws in English signage in Vietnam. On the train we saw that you could flush the toilet in merely a half-second...truly, it said “To flush, please pull the handle for 2 ÷ 4 seconds”. At the buffet table this morning a Russian fellow was wearing a t-shirt that read “I would love to art”. Since “art” is not a verb, one’s mind immediately leaps to the nearest verb that could apply…we figured it was missing an F.
We ate when we came aboard, read a bit, then napped, then ate again at five. When Deborah gets bored, she says things like “Shall we eat now? Is it time to eat?”, whether she is actually hungry again or not. She enjoys the diversion of going for a walk to the end of the car to get the hot water for the noodles, and eating them. One compartment of her brain dwells constantly on food, like a person starving in the wilderness. She laughed when I rolled my eyes at her question, and admitted, “I’m already thinking about breakfast tomorrow. Shall we go we go to that breakfast buffet in the hotel near ours? It’s not too expensive…” Yeesh - no wonder I’m large. “I’m going to make dinner,” says Deborah. “It’s five-o’clock.” Thus, we eat according to the clock, not when we’re hungry or when our bodies actually tell us they need the food. She would counter that I don’t seem to get hungry when she’s already “starving”; that could be because my body knows it’s already been fed quite enough food for one lifetime, or that it would be quite pleased to shed a few pounds.
Still, Deborah was happy with the privacy and extra space of our own compartment – by 5 p.m. it is already dusk, and so far, no-one has been foisted on us from the sitting cars and we haven’t been shaken down for extra cash by the coach attendant – and we are cheerfully on our way to hot showers, clean sheets and no all-night traffic noise. Our private room with the group had a private toilet but no hot water, no sink and no mirror for shaving; our mini-hotel in Nha Trang has all of that and is up a cul-de-sac away from the traffic on the main street.
We wondered if we might have to do some comparison shopping, since the clerk quoted us a price 20% higher than she made us pay last time; not that it was a lot of money, but we couldn’t use our credit card in the smaller “family” hotels and we couldn’t access our money in more than $100 withdrawals with high service fees, not to mention the inconvenience of having to get to a street-side ATM every two days, and the worry about being watched by opportunistic muggers or guys that break into hotel rooms looking for tourist cash. Those do exist; the Happy House Hotel in Nha Trang is infamous for it on TripAdvisor. It has probably lost more business than it has gained by the thefts as a result of the poor reviews, but there are too many naive travellers who don’t read those reviews, so the practice continues, and most incidents don’t even get reported. The police are ineffectual, and don’t respond even when tourists demand that they be called.
As it is, we paid $17 per $500 withdrawal in Hanoi and Saigon and had a $500/day limit - and we could only get that by visiting the ANZ Australian bank for Aussie tourists in the main tourist area each day - so we hadn’t gotten quite as much money to spend over a seven week period in Nha Trang as I wished we had – it’s the main reason why we stress a little over prices outside of Saigon and Hanoi, and carefully count our dong – not because we don’t have the money, or wouldn’t spend it, but the gov’t here doesn’t make it easy for tourists to access their funds, and therefore actually inhibits tourist spending in every city but the two largest.
Vietnamese souvenir vendors, restauranteurs, hotel owners and tour agents wonder why long term travelers like ourselves are so cheap when we can afford the plane ticket to fly here and obviously belong to the same race of people who fly in for two week package tours from Australia, buying souvenirs and expensive dinners. They don’t realize that we need to stretch our travel dollars and calculate how much we can afford to spend before we get back to a city where we can actually withdraw cash in useful amounts. At a $100 withdrawal limit less $5 in fees at both ends and perhaps as much as $10 in taxi fare to the ATM and back, the whole exercise becomes a bit of a joke, especially when our daily expenditure has been about $65 a day, including hotels, meals, site entry tickets, train and bus tickets, taxis, bicycle rental, the odd tour, and so on. If we spent more on hotels and meals, or bought souvenirs, we could easily be running to the ATM on a daily basis, but it is a pain and an anxiety wearing all your cash all the time, and we learned in Bali that leaving it in a hotel safe or trusting the front desk staff is not the answer. That’s one of the drawbacks of third and second world travel – even for the locals.
Four hours into our trip the sun had come out (the forecast for Nha Trang, still six hours away, is sunny and warm) and we were rollicking through flat fields between hills, small farm plots, some flooded for rice, all growing some kind of crops, and all extremely green and pretty, looking as they have, presumably, for thousands of years, hundreds of generations. It’s a wonder the soil never gets exhausted. Doris Lessing talks about the very poor class 4 soil that has been turned into productive gardens in Zimbabwe with the help of dams and boreholes for irrigation. There was no shortage of water here, and on these flat fields it can’t go anywhere until the farmer decides that it should and opens a drainage gate; and of course there is wonderful sun most days. Water buffalo are marched through fields before planting to till the soil with their hooves, and they provide some of the compost for fertilizer as well.
Jan 21st: We checked into our hotel around ten, the same one as before. We had a little discussion with the evening desk clerk about the 20% price increase, which she agreed to lower back to the price we’d paid before, and speak to her manager about it. The she took us to our room and we discovered that we’d been assigned a more expensive front room with a balcony. Awkward...I often avoid these rooms because of the traffic noise, but we’re in a cul-de-sac so that would not be an issue.
We had a great night’s sleep and went to the Asia Paradise hotel a block away for a western buffet breakfast and a comfortable chair to blog in – our hotel room lacks a desk and chairs, and in mini-hotels the chairs are often solid wood. I didn’t see any chair in our hotel, not even in the lobby.
At breakfast we wondered if we could design a language lesson around asking the students to look for flaws in English signage in Vietnam. On the train we saw that you could flush the toilet in merely a half-second...truly, it said “To flush, please pull the handle for 2 ÷ 4 seconds”. At the buffet table this morning a Russian fellow was wearing a t-shirt that read “I would love to art”. Since “art” is not a verb, one’s mind immediately leaps to the nearest verb that could apply…we figured it was missing an F.
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