Bound for Vietnam

by Lydia Laube

  Wakefield Press

  Bound for Vietnam

  Believing that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive – and she sometimes almost doesn’t – Lydia Laube is one of Australia’s favourite travel writers. Lydia can never resist a challenge, and her books, Behind the Veil: An Australian Nurse in Saudi Arabia, The Long Way Home, Slow Boat to Mongolia, Llama for Lunch, Temples and Tuk Tuks, and Is This the Way to Madagascar?, tell of her alarming adventures in far-flung places of the globe.

  When she is not travelling, Lydia Laube chases the sun between Adelaide and Darwin.

  Bound for Vietnam

  LYDIA LAUBE

  Wakefield Press

  1 The Parade West

  Kent Town

  South Australia 5067

  Australia

  www.wakefieldpress.com.au

  First published 1999

  Reprinted 2007

  This edition published 2010

  Copyright © Lydia Laube, 1999

  All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

  Edited by Jane Arms

  Cover designed by Nick Stewart, design BITE, Adelaide

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-publication entry

  Laube, Lydia, 1948– .

  Bound for Vietnam.

  ISBN 9781862549012

  1. Laube, Lydia, 1948– – Journeys. 2. Vietnam – Description and travel. 3. China – Description and travel. I. Title.

  915.9704

  Contents

  1 A Ship for Shanghai

  2 VIP Voyage

  3 River Dragons

  4 Three Dog Night

  5 Snakes Alive!

  6 Cops and Robbers

  7 The Bike Police

  8 Big Nose in Nanning

  9 Heroin to Hair Oil

  10 Hanoi

  11 Chariots of Dire

  12 Tin Pan Alley

  13 Snake Livers and Jungle Juice

  By the same author

  Behind the Veil

  Is This the Way to Madagascar?

  Llama for Lunch

  Slow Boat to Mongolia

  Temples and Tuk Tuks

  The Long Way Home

  1 A Ship for Shanghai

  It’s funny how life turns out when you are travelling. I had set off from Timor planning to reach China by sea, cross that country by train to Mongolia and then come home. But a chance encounter with a Welshman on the Trans-Siberian Express en route to Ulaan Bator had made me decide once again to take the long way home. I had ended up in Tianjin, a great port washed by the Bohai Sea on China’s north-east coast. It sits on the banks of the Hai River, 120 kilometres from Beijing. I now planned to sail down the coast of China to Shanghai, ride riverboats as far south as I could on the Yangtze, go to Guangzhou where I had heard it was possible to get a visa for an overland crossing into Vietnam, make my way over the mountains to the border and, with luck, be allowed to enter Vietnam’s far north.

  The train journey from Beijing had taken me only two hours. I got off at the station with a minimum of fuss and a fellow-traveller, a Chinese man, helped me with my bags.

  My guide book labelled Tianjin ‘the most expensive town in China’. It was said to be a hopeless place to find a reasonably priced hotel room that was not off-limits to foreigners. Near the railway station exit I came across a table run by an official-looking woman whom I deduced, from the pictures she displayed, was selling hotel rooms. I reckoned that in these circumstances some bargaining might be in order. I asked how much. The woman wrote a figure on a piece of paper. I said, ‘Too much. I only want a single room.’ I wrote 200. She used a nearby public phone – there was no office, only the table – and returning said, ‘Okay,’ and indicated that I should go with a man she now had in tow. He turned out to be the driver of one of the little yellow vans that served as taxis. By now it was ten o’clock at night and I went willingly.

  He took me to a smart hotel, where three giggling girls presided over the reception desk. They intimated that I could have a room and wrote a price: 488 yuan. I recoiled in mock horror. ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I can’t afford that,’ and began to bargain with them. We finally settled on 188 yuan.

  That accomplished, it seemed to take all three young ladies forever to fill out the myriad forms that were necessary to get me admitted. And then they could not scrape up enough money to give me twelve yuan change. ‘Come back tomorrow’, was all they said. It’s no good travelling in China without cash. You need lots of the gorgeous stuff – no one will trust you inside their establishment unless you pay up front, preferably in small denominations.

  The accommodation I was finally let loose in was far above the standard to which I had become accustomed in China. And everything worked – airconditioner, lights, hot water! The toilet flushed. But there were the usual faults. The hand-basin was loose, and the shower was impossible to use; the water wouldn’t mix and was either burning hot or stone cold. The young female room attendant showed me how to work everything in my room and a bell boy, the first I’d encountered on my travels, delivered and stowed my bags.

  The hotel dining-room was crowded at breakfast, perhaps because the meal was included in the price of the room. The food was not riveting, but I had got up at the crack of dawn to indulge in it, so I was determined to persevere. Rice and pea gruel, which tasted like warm water that had had rice washed in it, was followed by a cold hard-boiled egg, some of the pickled cabbage I had come to like, and dumplings. Tianjin is famous for its steamed dumplings – they are even exported to Japan – and these were delicious. There were also some strange-looking fried patties that were definitely an acquired taste –meat spread with peanut butter, sprinkled with sesame seeds and dipped in batter.

  Outside the hotel, the bell boy, who was most concerned about where and how I was going, helped me get a taxi to CITS, supposedly the place to go if you need to buy tickets, or get help with your travel arrangements. CITS was located in a marvellous great building with China International Travel Service blazoned across its front. The foyer of the building was desolate except for the usual guard who sat behind a glass screen like a museum exhibit. In China I found that everyone who was exposed to the public was, wherever possible, behind barricades. Through the peephole in his glass case the guard indicated that I should state my business.

  I said, ‘CITS.’

  He pointed upstairs, but when I took a step in that direction he said, ‘No no!’ He dialled a number and then handed me the phone through the aperture.

  A woman asked, ‘Who do you want to see?’

  ‘No one in particular,’ I said, ‘I just want some help.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want a ticket on a boat to Qingdoa.’

  No boat went anywhere from Tianjin, she said, except for the international ferries that sailed to Korea and Japan. After this outrageous lie, Madam CITS was utterly unhelpful. She refused to admit me to the office, saying that she was not seeing anybody that day. Thinking, Funny behaviour for a firm that was in the business of helping and advising foreign visitors, I left. But the guard waved me next door to China Airlines where a beautiful young woman listened to my story and wrote down the address of the coastal boat ticket office for me.

  At the shipping office the ticket-seller and I, with the aid of the phrasebook and a lot of effort, worked out where I wanted to go and how much it would cost. I went off to change some money and arrived back just before midday to discover that all the ticket windows were covered with wooden shutters. I banged on one b
ehind which I could hear voices and was told that the office did not re-open until half past one. I sat down on the hard wooden bench to wait. An old man shuffled up and, smiling broadly at me, practised his only two words of English – both ‘H’ words, ‘Hello and Whore’.

  At a quarter to one I was joined by the first English-speaking traveller I had encountered in a long time, a Chinese named Liang. He was a friendly young man who was on holiday from his job as an electronics engineer with a French nuclear firm in Guangzhou. He decided to wait with me, and I asked him if he would help me buy my ticket. Liang was going to Dalian, and he convinced me that I should too, saying that it would be easier to get a ship to Shanghai from there than from Qingdoa.

  Having eventually acquired the boat ticket, I got into a taxi intending to go to the antique market, but the driver told me that I would be wasting my money because the market closed after lunch. All the taxi drivers I encountered in this town were honest. This one took me on a much shorter trip to a local tourist attraction, the Ancient Culture Street, an area where old buildings have been restored or reproduced to recreate a traditional old town. It is centred around the Temple of the Queen of Heaven, the goddess of the sea, which dates back to 1326 AD. The buildings were impressive but the shops all sold similar souvenirs and copies of antiques that I found tedious after a while. The few genuine old pieces were either very expensive or not very good. I did buy a silk kite however, another product for which Tianjin is famous.

  At the end of the Ancient Culture Street, I came to the River Hai and started walking along its bank in the direction of the city centre. It was an agreeable ramble. The river wound through the town and passed under many bridges, one of which was shaped and curved to follow the large decorative dragons that ran along each of its sides. The path by the riverside meandered under shady spreading trees and every now and then I passed small cafés that served coffee and drinks at tables and chairs in the open air.

  The feeling that I was walking along the River Seine in Paris was reinforced by the ornate wrought-iron railings that edged the riverbank and which I read had been brought from France. People fished from the railings using hand lines or rods and itinerant bicycle repair, accessories and spare parts salesmen set up business beside the path. You could lean on the balustrade and watch the river while your bike was mended. Or you could perch on a tiny, three-legged stool and get your hair cut by the nomadic barber who wandered along looking for trade. Other vendors produced an instant shop by stringing a rope between two trees and hanging some goods, such as scarves, on it. One woman pedalled by on a bike that had an emporium of plastic wares and clothing dangling from its sides. At one spot I came upon a large piece of plastic sheeting that had been strung between two trees. A crowd of men behind it seemed to be gambling. It looked like a floating crap game.

  The riverside railings were also used to suspend big circular fishing nets. They were attached to poles that extended outwards from a central post like the arms of an umbrella, and were hauled up and down by a winch. I watched many nets brought up but didn’t see any fish in them. This caused me no grief. The river was marred by flotsam, and the town’s sewerage emptied into it. I would not have wanted to eat anything that came out of it.

  Strolling along under the lovely trees watching local life going by was great, but every now and then I came to a bridge, and I had to negotiate the terrifying traffic on the road that crossed it. There were lots of cars, a few carts drawn by horses or donkeys and millions of bicycles. I had learned by now that I would never get across a street if I did not just step out bravely into the bicycle brigade. I had watched how the Chinese navigated their way. The locals simply walked among the bicycles like a bunch of chooks. So, taking a deep breath I would march into the melee and rely on them to miss. They were pretty good at it too. Bikes peeled off me all around.

  In Tianjin’s city centre, I marvelled at a veritable architectural museum of turn-of-the-century buildings – remnants of the Europeans who had occupied segments of the town in its trading heyday. Tianjin was developed as a port and grain storage point in the fourteenth-century Yuan Dynasty following the establishment of Beijing as the Mongol capital. In 1858, the British and French invaded Tianjin, established trading posts and opened it to other countries, and the Japanese, Germans, Austro-Hungarians, Belgians and Italians also moved in. Now Tianjin has a population of five-and-a-half million people and, with two universities and numerous institutes and colleges, it is an important education centre.

  The next morning I arrived at the shipping office intending to board the bus to Tanggu, fifty kilometres away, which is Tianjin’s port. My friend Liang was waiting for me at the office. He persuaded me to share a taxi, saying that the bus would be overcrowded, which it was. The taxi was much more comfortable. Liang sat in the front seat with the female driver, while I reclined in the back of the van, lounging on a chintz-covered seat with my feet up like Cleopatra swanning down the Nile.

  The road we travelled to Tanggu was a tangle of bikes. They were everywhere and I was constantly surprised at how the taxi managed to miss them. We drove over many of the canals and waterways that crisscross Tianjin and on their landscaped edges, as well as in the frequent leafy parks, I saw people doing tai chi and grandparents minding children; one elderly man was teaching a small boy to ride a tricycle along a canal path.

  Once outside the city, however, we were in a dreary industrial landscape that was only relieved by an occasional, unintentionally humorous sign. I saw one that proclaimed a building to be ‘The Long Smooth Perfect Article Factory’. I am still wondering what exactly they made. They certainly weren’t giving away any such information before you got in the door, but any time I want a long smooth perfect article, I shall know where to go.

  The only other interesting sight on the highway was a mule train; a team of ten heavily loaded mules plodded along amid the zooming traffic.

  Tanggu seemed to consist mainly of low sailors’ dives. There were whole streets of them, presumably catering to the droves of Chinese tourists who land here by ship from Macau and Hong Kong. I remembered my friends, the seamen of the Good Ship Pandora, with whom I had once hitched a ride across the Indian Ocean and who had promised to show me a low sailors’ dive in Bombay. This had never eventuated, and I am still waiting for this elevating experience to enrich my life.

  Liang and I lunched in a wharf-side café that had poor food at inflated prices. Our ship, the Tiansin, carried 500 passengers, but it was not overcrowded. The toilets, however, were the communal trough and trench variety, but without running water, and so they came complete with piles of other people’s doings.

  As the Tiansin pulled out of port, I made for the bow of the ship where I could see a sole occupant. On closer inspection I heard loud retchings and heavings, which explained his solitude. I left him to it.

  I had only been able to buy a second-class ticket on the Tiansin, and I found myself in a four-bunk cabin with three young men for company. What a good conversation opener that would make. ‘I spent the night between Tianjin and Dalian with three young men!’ The cabin was large and functional, but it had no privacy. The door even contained an eye-level, uncurtained window through which anyone who had a mind to could peer in at you from the passageway. It reminded me of the windows in the doors of prison cells that are used for checking on the inmates.

  That evening Liang and I ate together in the ship’s huge cafeteria. We had a cheap meal of chicken that was a minefield of small bones which my dinner companion spat directly onto the tablecloth. A big brown bottle of beer cost me three yuan – twenty-four cents – but came without anything in the line of a drinking vessel. At intervals during dinner I clutched this huge bottle by the neck and swigged out of it, imagining how such niceties would go down in polite society.

  Later I wandered around the deck. The sea was like dark-green glass and the ship made hardly any movement as it slid over it. In the cabin I lay on my upper bunk and watched the ocean through the por
t-hole. My room-mates had all fallen on their beds the minute they had come aboard ship and slept until dinner time, after which they had prepared for bed and slept again, snoring, until morning. Except for two of them, who had woken at about ten in the evening and begun smoking and talking. Then one had started to sing softly. It must have been a lullaby, because I went to sleep.

  At eleven the next morning, the Tiansin slid slowly past a long breakwater and tied up at the wharf of Dalian. We had been a good while coming into this massive and busy harbour. Crowded with ships, its docks lined by imposing warehouses, it reminded me of Bombay. Overshadowing the warehouses were huge cranes that worked away, picking things up and putting them down frantically like giant, stick-insect robots gone mad. And over everything hung a heavy grey pall of pollution.

  I went ashore, disappointed that I had not seen Liang this morning. I feared his desertion might have been brought on by my questions. I had noticed that he did not ask me anything personal. Was this because he was too polite? Perhaps he had thought I was a spy. Perhaps he was the spy! He had told me that his job as an electronics engineer at the French company’s nuclear station in South China involved the disposal of toxic waste materials. I had been shocked at his reply to my question, ‘What do you do with it?’ In a matter of fact manner, he simply said, ‘We put it in the sea.’

  I had also asked him how he felt about the new path that China was taking. He said that he did not like to see the old culture destroyed, but he liked some things. ‘Like discos?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he answered, smiling. ‘You mean you want to keep some of the old ways, but the freedom is good.’ I said, and he agreed. Maybe it had been the word ‘freedom’ that had scared him off. It is a new concept in China. Or it could have been that he was deterred by the thought of a re-encounter with the clunky luggage that he had had to help me carry on board.

  A hike along the wharf brought me to the place where buses waited to ferry passengers to the terminal exit. I stood back, confounded, while two buses were stampeded until they were full and left. Eventually the sheer number of Chinese behind me propelled me onto a bus. I rode standing in a solid press of bodies and hanging on to the back of a seat for grim death.