“Soft” sleeper cars on the train are four bunks to a compartment. There are also compartments with six bunks, and there are “hard” berths, and there are also “sitting” cars. Although it is mostly western tourists who occupy the fours, there is no signage in any language but Vietnamese in the stations or the trains, and announcements are all delivered in Vietnamese. Deborah thought it was “Cool”, but I found our compartment depressing – dingy and institutional, looking more, to me, like a prison cell than the best mode of comfort that Vietnam trains could provide. It was a let-down after our Zimbabwe sleeper compartment of rich dark wood and brass fittings. I was hoping this might be an old French coach. We rocked and rolled our way to Hanoi, with me feeling like freight the whole way. Deb said she felt like a baby being rocked.
Whoever decided to combine Asian squat toilets with Western trains needs to have his head examined. The men would be best off to pee in the sink (there’s another sink for washing hands outside the toilet stalls), rather than trying to stand and aim on a moving train. Deb located a western toilet, but it hadn’t fared much better, since many Vietnamese will simply squat on the toilet seat – you’ll see their shoe prints there to discourage you from sitting on the seat yourself. On many toilets in Vietnam the seats have simply been removed, or never replaced when they are broken by being stepped on. The dust and grime on windows and surfaces was at least weeks old – in the toilet it was so thick that when wet, it became mud in all the corners.
Mercifully, we had our compartment to ourselves and slept from 7 until 10. Then the coach attendants, who appear to have nothing to do but look spiffy in their uniforms and check tickets at each station to make sure no-one sneaks aboard without a ticket or a bribe, and to prevent passengers from using the toilets while the train is stopped at a station, congregated in the compartment next door for a rowdy yak-fest. At one point they were wrestling or kicking the wall, I wasn't sure which – I banged it back to make them stop, which they did.
At 10:30 our coach attendant came sneaking around to see which bunks were free, unlocking our door several times – and each time we had to get up to close and re- lock it; finding two empties in ours, and a quiet older couple, he put someone else in with us, an unsmiling older man with a briefcase who was probably enough of a big shot to weasel a free upgrade from his seat to a berth, no doubt for a cash incentive to the pocket of the coach attendant. There doesn’t appear to be an inspector on the trains to keep the coach attendants honest; or perhaps there is one but the way the system works is that he keeps his nose out of their business in return for his own piece of the action, rather like the ticket agents and guards at the Citadel and Royal Tombs in Hue.
The "big shot with a briefcase" stood in the hallway for some time before deciding to enter our compartment, watching to see if someone might simply have gone to the dining car and would return before he could settle in. At one point he took his briefcase away, considering another berth, which was a dead give-away, since the bunks are assigned on your tickets when you buy them. When he finally decided on our compartment, I showed him my ticket and asked him if he had one, because Deb had read that this often happens on the train, but he appeared not to understand me, and wouldn’t produce one. He climbed into the upper bunk and proceeded to play a video game on his phone through the small hours of the night, coughing and beeping instead of sleeping. It sounded like a heart monitor in the emergency ward, but not as peacefully steady. He took occasional calls on the phone, talking aloud while we tried to sleep.
The "big shot with a briefcase" stood in the hallway for some time before deciding to enter our compartment, watching to see if someone might simply have gone to the dining car and would return before he could settle in. At one point he took his briefcase away, considering another berth, which was a dead give-away, since the bunks are assigned on your tickets when you buy them. When he finally decided on our compartment, I showed him my ticket and asked him if he had one, because Deb had read that this often happens on the train, but he appeared not to understand me, and wouldn’t produce one. He climbed into the upper bunk and proceeded to play a video game on his phone through the small hours of the night, coughing and beeping instead of sleeping. It sounded like a heart monitor in the emergency ward, but not as peacefully steady. He took occasional calls on the phone, talking aloud while we tried to sleep.
Except for the phone and the unfriendly attitude, he was relatively quiet and polite. He didn’t seem to keep Deb awake, but I found him an aggravation, maybe because whenever I fall asleep too early in the evening and wake up a few hours later, it takes me ages to get back to sleep. By 7, it had been already quite dark and there wasn’t anything else to do, and I’d missed my afternoon nap. Finally he fell asleep, and then I did too.
Early in the morning, as we approached a larger station, "big shot" roused himself, and before we pulled in, he left the compartment and “made himself scarce”. I went for a stroll, and in the neighbouring car I finally saw an inspector asking to see tickets, so I guess "big shot" knows the routine and timetable of the inspector. However, the inspector never made it as far as our compartment.
Dawn opened quite swiftly onto pancake-flat land and rice paddies, with hills of the sort you see in the Halong Bay photos. They have been plopped down here and there like giant mounds of cookie dough or spikes of meringue, and sometimes have tall skinny hoodoo spires on top.
I saw long yards full of weathered limestone karst boulders beside the train, quarried from the hills. The boulders were beautiful – they each have unique colouring and many nooks and crannies that give them character to serve as the base of a miniature world, a foundation for bonsai in pots and little statues of deer and meditating Buddhas. They are a popular feature of Vietnamese tiled front yards, and especially in hotels and government buildings.
We saw several square miles of new, unfinished apartments, just brick walls and roofs, but with exactly one finished house in each block - perhaps the model show home in each, and perhaps a caretaker or real estate agent lives there. There were hardly any stretches of countryside that didn’t have buildings and small villages. The highway runs along the tracks, so there is unimpeded access, and wherever it is too dry for rice, there will be small farm plots of one to five acres, each with a home on it, between towns of tall skinny homes and buildings. It puzzles me, this uniform narrowness of buildings three and four stories tall, often standing quite alone on a plot of land, and with only the front painted, while the unpainted and windowless sides are ready for someone, someday, to build a similarly narrow home butting right up against the first. There is also a smattering of homes which are, while still as tall, more square in floor plan, therefore more of a “double-wide”.
I walked to the dining car through the “sitting” cars. The seats recline, but they’re old, stained, dirty and smelly. So is the dining car, for that matter. It’s a ruin, filled with cardboard boxes of curious contents, and due for restoration. It needs soap and elbow grease, paint, new surfaces, upholstery (there isn’t any), and a cook and server who don’t do all their wobbly work with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and over the pots. It was a good thing we'd brought along a sandwich for breakfast.
I met a cheerful lady who sells rice and pork from a cart, and she eagerly tried to sell me a Styrofoam container of it for breakfast, but when I asked her in Vietnamese “How much?”, she answered me in Vietnamese (she must have been sleepy, it was early in the morning) “Twenty”, but then quickly corrected herself and stated in English, “Thirty”. Which is par for the course: when we go out with our Vietnamese friends we pay roughly half of what we get charged on our own, for almost everything. Sometimes they make a point of paying the bill just to ensure that the four of us don’t get overcharged – for example, a typical Vietnamese sandwich, a small baguette with pate and veggies and maybe a bit of pork or ham, cost 8,000 VND each when Thu bought our lunch (Deborah actually paid) on the morning that they took us to the Royal Tomb. When Deb goes to the same vendor herself, she’ll be charged 15,000 apiece. When we bought two last night and they tried to charge 20,000 each (over a dollar Canadian), I got tough and threatened to walk away if we didn’t get two for 20,000. The vendor grumbled, but she was making better money than she could from a Vietnamese customer, so I had no sympathy left; and let’s face it, even in Canada the ingredients to make those little buns won’t cost more than that.
I’m more than half-way through Catfish and Mandala now. It is fascinating to read Andrew Pham`s observations and impressions of Vietnam in the mid-nineties, twenty years after he’d left, comparing it to his childhood memories from the seventies; and then layer on my own impressions and observations now, another twenty years later. On the one hand we meet so many Vietnamese, especially the younger ones, who are sweet, honest, hopeful and trusting; on the other, we encounter a culture that appears to see every foreign face and every Viet-kieu (foreign Vietnamese who escaped to the U.S. and elsewhere) as a financial windfall, an opportunity to gouge and overcharge. And we hear and read so many stories of double-cross on bus bookings by desk clerks - and it happened to us, of course.
Should it bother us? Perhaps not, except for those foreigners, and there are some, who live here and survive on Vietnamese salaries; but it does feel a little insulting and unwelcoming, and it also tends to raise the overall market prices for average Vietnamese people – the more tourists there are per square mile, the harder it is for them to pay the higher prices that result. We would be disturbed to learn that foreign tourists visiting Canada were forced to pay double in our shops, and that’s got something to do with it – an issue of fairness. Not that we would spend any less if we paid Vietnamese prices, either, because like all travellers we have a daily travel budget; but we’d afford more of the tourist and other services they’re trying to develop, which would be a benefit to development and entrepreneurship. I`m only taking one side of this debate, of course; there are countervailing arguments.
These thoughts bubble up as we approach Hanoi, and consider the warnings of the Lonely Planet guide about the especially high prevalence of hustlers and scammers in the city, including some situations involving significant aggression and even pistol muggings. I've read about hotels that will turf you out on the street if you don't purchase your tours from them, two large herds of taxis at the bus station and the train station, respectively, with extremely fast meters, young tourists constantly complaining that the motorbike taxis quote one price when they start out and demand triple when they arrive ("15,000 dong? No, I said 50,000!"), and other shenanigans.
I saw long yards full of weathered limestone karst boulders beside the train, quarried from the hills. The boulders were beautiful – they each have unique colouring and many nooks and crannies that give them character to serve as the base of a miniature world, a foundation for bonsai in pots and little statues of deer and meditating Buddhas. They are a popular feature of Vietnamese tiled front yards, and especially in hotels and government buildings.
We saw several square miles of new, unfinished apartments, just brick walls and roofs, but with exactly one finished house in each block - perhaps the model show home in each, and perhaps a caretaker or real estate agent lives there. There were hardly any stretches of countryside that didn’t have buildings and small villages. The highway runs along the tracks, so there is unimpeded access, and wherever it is too dry for rice, there will be small farm plots of one to five acres, each with a home on it, between towns of tall skinny homes and buildings. It puzzles me, this uniform narrowness of buildings three and four stories tall, often standing quite alone on a plot of land, and with only the front painted, while the unpainted and windowless sides are ready for someone, someday, to build a similarly narrow home butting right up against the first. There is also a smattering of homes which are, while still as tall, more square in floor plan, therefore more of a “double-wide”.
I walked to the dining car through the “sitting” cars. The seats recline, but they’re old, stained, dirty and smelly. So is the dining car, for that matter. It’s a ruin, filled with cardboard boxes of curious contents, and due for restoration. It needs soap and elbow grease, paint, new surfaces, upholstery (there isn’t any), and a cook and server who don’t do all their wobbly work with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and over the pots. It was a good thing we'd brought along a sandwich for breakfast.
I met a cheerful lady who sells rice and pork from a cart, and she eagerly tried to sell me a Styrofoam container of it for breakfast, but when I asked her in Vietnamese “How much?”, she answered me in Vietnamese (she must have been sleepy, it was early in the morning) “Twenty”, but then quickly corrected herself and stated in English, “Thirty”. Which is par for the course: when we go out with our Vietnamese friends we pay roughly half of what we get charged on our own, for almost everything. Sometimes they make a point of paying the bill just to ensure that the four of us don’t get overcharged – for example, a typical Vietnamese sandwich, a small baguette with pate and veggies and maybe a bit of pork or ham, cost 8,000 VND each when Thu bought our lunch (Deborah actually paid) on the morning that they took us to the Royal Tomb. When Deb goes to the same vendor herself, she’ll be charged 15,000 apiece. When we bought two last night and they tried to charge 20,000 each (over a dollar Canadian), I got tough and threatened to walk away if we didn’t get two for 20,000. The vendor grumbled, but she was making better money than she could from a Vietnamese customer, so I had no sympathy left; and let’s face it, even in Canada the ingredients to make those little buns won’t cost more than that.
I’m more than half-way through Catfish and Mandala now. It is fascinating to read Andrew Pham`s observations and impressions of Vietnam in the mid-nineties, twenty years after he’d left, comparing it to his childhood memories from the seventies; and then layer on my own impressions and observations now, another twenty years later. On the one hand we meet so many Vietnamese, especially the younger ones, who are sweet, honest, hopeful and trusting; on the other, we encounter a culture that appears to see every foreign face and every Viet-kieu (foreign Vietnamese who escaped to the U.S. and elsewhere) as a financial windfall, an opportunity to gouge and overcharge. And we hear and read so many stories of double-cross on bus bookings by desk clerks - and it happened to us, of course.
Should it bother us? Perhaps not, except for those foreigners, and there are some, who live here and survive on Vietnamese salaries; but it does feel a little insulting and unwelcoming, and it also tends to raise the overall market prices for average Vietnamese people – the more tourists there are per square mile, the harder it is for them to pay the higher prices that result. We would be disturbed to learn that foreign tourists visiting Canada were forced to pay double in our shops, and that’s got something to do with it – an issue of fairness. Not that we would spend any less if we paid Vietnamese prices, either, because like all travellers we have a daily travel budget; but we’d afford more of the tourist and other services they’re trying to develop, which would be a benefit to development and entrepreneurship. I`m only taking one side of this debate, of course; there are countervailing arguments.
These thoughts bubble up as we approach Hanoi, and consider the warnings of the Lonely Planet guide about the especially high prevalence of hustlers and scammers in the city, including some situations involving significant aggression and even pistol muggings. I've read about hotels that will turf you out on the street if you don't purchase your tours from them, two large herds of taxis at the bus station and the train station, respectively, with extremely fast meters, young tourists constantly complaining that the motorbike taxis quote one price when they start out and demand triple when they arrive ("15,000 dong? No, I said 50,000!"), and other shenanigans.
We're unlikely targets, since we go only with the reputable taxi companies, we don't trust overly friendly strangers, and we don't stay out late and walk in dark places, but it is interesting to wonder how people who would do those things to foreign visitors perceive us. It probably matters to our Couchsurfing host in Hanoi that we have come a long way to experience her country and increase our cross-cultural awareness, reciprocally whenever we can, but does the average Vietnamese feel that way about us? Or are we merely walking marks and dollar signs to most of them?
Next entry: Hanoi
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