by Rob Binkley
Even after a few drinks, something still felt off about Vietnam to Brian. He kept wondering aloud, “Is all this kindness a ruse?” We kept drinking until we forgot the question.
By mid-afternoon, if any bartender in the country spoke English we would’ve been arrested for public indecency, but no one noticed we were spouting obscenities. I looked at Brian. “It took us twenty-four hours to revert back to our original offensive nature. Luckily, no one cares!”
Brian just laughed, “Is this growth?”
“No!” I shouted and finished my beer. “C’mon, let’s go see the dead guy.”
We walked down to the ceremony, unsure if we were unwelcome intruders. If Jack the patriot were still alive, he would have frowned on our participation in this event, but our excuse was it was old news.
“This is crazy, this is crazy,” Brian said.
“Don’t sweat it. That was our fathers’ war, not ours,” I said.
They rolled out Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body and proffered it to about ten thousand Vietnamese. Suddenly all the boozy joy we felt disappeared. We witnessed how much these people admired their leader, who had won the war for them. We tried downplaying our Americanness and acted serious standing in the line that slowly snaked past the body. Brian did lean in to kiss his glass tomb but I pulled him back before the guards swept him away.
Other than that, the entire event was eerily quiet and serene. What was odd was we truly felt a part of it. I didn’t feel any connection with Ho, just with the emotions of the people. I realized I was worried for nothing. No one cared that we were Americans. No one even noticed. For the first time on the trip, it wasn’t about us … Maybe we were starting to learn something after all.
Our first trip out of Hanoi was to the Perfume Pagoda, a sprawling complex of Buddhist temples and shrines nestled into the limestone of the Huong Tich Mountains. The Perfume Pagoda is a sacred place to many Buddhists because legend has it that Guanyin, the Bodhisattva deity of mercy and compassion, once stayed at the Huong Tich Pagoda (one of the Perfume Pagodas) in order to help save human souls.
Brian was excited about checking out the temple. “Our souls need saving.” We hired two brawny oarswomen to row us up the Day River to the spot. When we got there, a crew of kids materialized to “volunteer” to carry small coolers of water and Cokes up the mountainside to the Trong Pagoda, which was hidden in one of the large caves at the top.
Little did we know, the kids had an angle. Tourism was new to North Vietnam at the time, so the people didn’t quite know how to react to travelers, but they were learning fast. These kids with the coolers were gouging us like real capitalists—charging us three times the rate for a Coke in Vietnam—smart little businessmen. We paid up but I knew their game. They even kept us on the right track. Sometimes Brian and I like to get lost and see what occurs but not today; these little troopers were keeping us on the straight up and up.
It took a lot of hiking through the beautiful, verdant mountainside, plush green vegetation, and rice paddies to get to the Pagoda, but it was well worth it. When we entered the Trong Pagoda grotto, we ventured into a huge, hidden cave, which was damp and billowed white fog from the burning incense. Inside the cave was a temple that was surrounded by imposing stalactites that hung from above.
We paid homage to Guanyin, then the kids met us outside with a fresh Coca-Cola and led us down another hundred steps to the base of the cave and another candlelit temple. While we traversed the path, I noticed the absolute splendor of the scene before us. The rice fields were lush and green and neverending.
I looked at Brian. “Are we in former communist Utopia?”
“My idea of heaven has no ethos,” Brian said.
After our tour, the nearby Lonely Planet café offered us a beer “and a pleasant meal to finish off our afternoon”—at least that’s what the sign on the wall read. “Guess their new vacation industry is trying to rip off any English tourist verbiage they can,” I said, pointing to the sign.
“Wouldn’t you?” Brian replied.
The next day, we booked a trip to Ha Long Bay in the north. Our tour started with a five-hour cramped minibus ride on terrible dirt roads. We bounced up and down like two kangaroos on springs. Brian looked at me while we were getting battered: “Thiiiis issss a commmmical amounnnnt of bummmmmmps, duuuuddddddde.” What do you expect for a two-day all-inclusive trip with transportation, food/drinks, and boat for twenty-two dollars?
During the bus ride, we stopped to watch the locals harvesting rice in the green rice paddies. It was moving to watch people working the same agrarian job their entire lives, doing something that had been going on for a millennium. It gave us a moment to reflect on our own modern existence while drinking overpriced Cokes, which were everywhere.
“What a tranquil sight … really connects you with the past,” I said.
Brian was less moved. All he said was, “Coke is clearly the first American company to conquer Vietnam.”
Our tour bus was also a transport company so the rest of the ride was spent stopping for relatives of the passengers and drivers. When we finally arrived, we took in the view of Ha Long Bay, a beautiful area off the Vietnamese coast. We marveled at the limestone rock islands jutting out in the bay; they looked totally uninhabitable unless you were a barnacle or seagull.
We bought a ticket to tour the islands and headed out on a fifty-foot boat with some other tourists. Our guide was a smallish Vietnamese man who was clearly gay; we liked him. We traveled out to the solo monuments; the guide told us there were sixteen hundred rocks with many caves to explore. The boat stopped so we could take a dip and explore the caves around the canyon of monuments. We swam into a cave with large stalactites that was totally amazing, then we explored a few more caves and swam into a big one that had a large circular tide pool with facades rising to the heavens. We were surrounded by large walls of limestone jetting out of the water. It felt like we’d found a secret lagoon.
“Where the mermaids at?” Brian asked, treading water.
Our guide swam up behind us and replied in a slightly creepy watery whisper, “Only mermen here, mistah.”
During our swim, I started talking to the guide whose name turned out to be Ty. He told me his thoughts on Americans: We were "dangerous” because he’d read about Hell’s Gate, whatever that was. He also said, “London was crazy because they had werewolves there.” After a few minutes, I realized he based all his feelings from a lifetime of reading Vietnamese newspapers and watching American movies. When we were finished, we swam back to the boat against the current and headed back to land.
The next day we took the five-hour bumpy bus from hell back to Hanoi, getting out to “water the rice paddies” every hour or so. We met a few gals from England, who we chatted up the rest of the ride. I took a liking to Emily, who was tall and stood out from the others.
When we arrived back in Hanoi, we went out to dinner with the English ladies, then walked around Hoan Kiem Lake in the center of Old Town, attempting to flirt with them—to no avail. Brian and I went home alone that night.
The next morning, Brian “Templed-Out” Rakow got up early and decided to incorporate exercise into our neverending temple tour. He said he was going to “get his tourism in by going for a temple jog,” and it worked. He came back invigorated like he had seen the face of God—and maybe he had. “Dude! The people here are amazing. Their smiles are all different! Some are large, some are small, some sideways, some upside down, some toothless but they’re everywhere like they come from different parts of the soul. I had another moment of Zen!”
“That’s great! You had an epiphany, man! Guess what? I’ve got a date with a bodyguard tonight!”
Brian just looked at me.
“A female bodyguard.”
“Right.”
Brian stayed in that night to read about Buddhism (he was getting into Alan Watts, the Buddhist philosopher) while I went out with Emily from London, who was a professional bodyguard back home. She was
tall and good-looking. When you’ve been on the road for five months, she was an absolute ten, regardless of whether she shaved her armpits or legs.
After dinner, we went back to our hotel slightly tipsy, and started playing cards in her room. These were no ordinary cards; they were Vivid cards we brought from California that had graphic sexual images on them. Brian and I had been whipping them out in party scenarios with girls. They were definitely an icebreaker … but not with Emily. I never saw her again after that night.
The next day, Brian and I hopped the train for Hue, a town in the middle of Vietnam. Since it was a fifteen-hour journey, I decided to buy a hard berth and stretch out. Scott, our ubiquitous traveling companion from London, bought one as well since he was a giant. So we went in on a little room that had six tiny berths.
Turned out, our sleeping companions were three adults and six young children who shared the four berths below us while Scott and I managed to jam into the two top berths. Brian, the poor slob, was stuck sleeping in a seat. He suddenly couldn’t afford a sleeping birth. He said he was running low on money. (I suspect he blew too much dough on his lady friend.) Of course I felt bad for him but didn’t have the money to start paying his way, so he got a crick in his neck and cursed my name the entire trip. Making matters worse for him was everything in Vietnam seemed to be made for smaller people. Every chair was the size of American baby seats—literally ten inches off the ground.
I awoke in the early morning needing to pee; the train was still chugging toward our destination. I tried not to wake the entire household getting down from my top bunk. I didn’t want to step on the kids sleeping below so I ended up grinding my butt into the ceiling fan, which woke everyone up. The kids laughed hysterically.
When I found the bathroom, it was just a closet with a hole in the floor so I peed on the train tracks speeding by wondering what the scene would be if I had eaten a heavy dinner last night. There was no toilet paper to be found.
After the long journey to Hue, we finally got off the train and checked into the Thai Binh hotel, which was nice for five dollars a night. Scott and I walked around town to The Citadel, an old dynasty fort with moats, then ventured down to the local market where we scared the crap out of a baby who had never seen white people before.
Brian was already bored by Vietnam, so he started spending more nights in bed reading while I started spending more time with Scott, who I quickly found out had odd historical fascinations, one of them being the Vietnam War and the other being coins.
After finding a random bar to drink warm beer in, we were starving so we stumbled into a restaurant where a midget named “Mr. Coin” tried to sell us some old coins. Scott, the coin freak, perked up.
I ended up buying one dong coin for two thousand dong and left scratching my head.
On our way to our hotel, a deaf mute tried selling us some tours, which we declined. We followed the train tracks back to our hostel, but since I remembered the bathroom on the train was just a hole in the floor we made sure not to walk on the tracks like we did as kids did back home.
In the morning, I dove into the unspoken unpleasantness of the unspeakable War.
Scott and I toured the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), where we saw the damage we inflicted here from the Vietnam War. It was highly educational but not pleasant. I was the only American on the tour except for this scruffy old US vet who spent the entire time yelling at everyone. His only act of grace was he bought some old spoons from a local who said they were relics from the War. Then he pissed in a water bottle in front of a couple of ladies and walked around with the yellow bottle the rest of the tour. I can’t imagine how a trip to the DMZ would be for someone who actually served in “the shit,” as they used to call it.
We visited the shell of a blown-up church appropriately dubbed “Skeleton Church,” then the bridge where North and South Vietnam were divided. Next we went into the Vinh Moc war tunnels, where we crawled underground for miles. There were three layers of tunnels: the first was for the soldiers, the second for families, and the third for ammunition—that was thirty meters deep. During the US carpet bombing, the people were safe here. We were told there were ten babies born in the tunnels during the war.
Afterward, we went to some famous battlefields where the land was forever barren because of all of the napalm that was dropped by our warplanes. There were craters as far as the eye can see. It was a humbling experience.
I wish Brian had joined us, but he couldn’t take the reality of the situation. When I left him at the hotel in his underwear, he said, “My karma can’t handle the DMZ. I’m staying above all those past atrocities, man, keeping my head in the clouds and soul in the garden of the Buddha.” He was really getting Zen with this trip.
After our day tour, we all had dinner as part of the package, I had frog and goat. I liked the goat. I tried to order “bird wrapped in a blanket,” but they were out of it “for the year.”
I got home late from the military tour—I could hear the Doors’s song “The End” on full blast as I approached our room. When I entered, I found Brian drunk, reenacting the Martin Sheen karate scene from Apocalypse Now in front of our mirror, still in his underwear. I just let him do his thing. He appeared to be covered in some kind of guava fruit and totally out of his gourd. Had he reached enlightenment? I’m not one to judge.
We took off early the next morning to Hoi An. On our way, we drove past China Beach, a famous playground for US servicemen during the war. We checked in to the Vinh Hing hotel where the service was great, again for five dollars per night.
There was a beautiful restaurant next door where you can sit outside and have a great meal while watching the action. A gang of little boys swarmed us, trying to sell us postcards. When “junior capitalists in training” attack, the best thing to do is buy a postcard from the first one, then prominently display it on your table so when the others come up you just point to your postcard. This seems to be a time-saving trick with touts anywhere in the world.
It took one hour for my shrimp pizza to finally arrive. It turned out to be fried bread with carrots—no shrimp. In the middle of the meal, Brian said to the boy who was demanding some of our pizza, “Where is the shrimp?” The boy said, “No have shrimp, just carrot.” At this point we’d learned to take what we can get and like it. We used to give servers hell back in the States but now we ate whatever they served us with gratitude.
The next day we continued our journey south on Highway 1 that ran the length of Vietnam. It was an arduous fifteen-hour ride to Nha Trang. When we finally arrived, we were happy to find that it was a nice little beach town with lots of other travelers.
I immediately hired a cyclo driver to go find me coffee. He had a family with three children and drove his bicycle all day so I promised I’d give him a dollar tip, which was unusually large over here. We started talking about the war and he started crying when he told me how his dad died in it. I felt bad being an American here for the first time. I gave him a hug. Maybe I wouldn’t have been as sympathetic to his tears if I were hearing his story twenty years ago, but time heals all wounds, I guess, and watching him cry in my arms, I could see both sides of the war. The fighting was done by young men who were just following orders. There was no real hate between the participants. I said goodbye to my friend and left him with a two-dollar tip.
That night we bought some pot and a packet of Vietnamese cigarettes and hired a guy to meticulously take out all the tobacco and put in marijuana. We were now able to hang out anywhere and smoke “cigarettes,” even though the smell was obvious. The locals didn’t seem to care. We partied on strong beer and our cigarettes and passed out at six o’clock in the evening. When we woke up at midnight with our first Vietnamese hangovers, we realized if we were going to smoke the rest of our cigarettes we needed to pace ourselves.
The next day we found out why all the backpackers were hanging around Nha Trang. The most popular thing to do in Vietnam that isn’t temple- or war-related is to go on Ma
ma Hahn’s boat trip, which is famous around Asia and written up in the Book. The first time we heard of Mama Hahn was in Australia, where some travelers were raving about her booze cruise.
Somehow we had forgotten about her until now. But now that we knew, we couldn’t go on without her. For seven dollars, Mama takes thirty travelers on a day tour around some of the islands, with a boatload of terrible wine and crappy pot. We were in. We had stayed sober long enough.
We bought our tickets and boarded her boat to drink while heading out to the islands. We met some European backpackers, which was a welcome sight. When we got out to the islands, we all took a well-lubricated dip—including Mama Hahn, who was sampling plenty of her own product. We bobbed in the water and Mama kept passing out drinks, smokes, and fruit from her floatie.
There we were, thirty travelers floating in the ocean with smiles on our faces talking to each other in languages no one else understood. After a while another boat pulled up to watch all us weirdos Brian, now fully tanked, jumped from Mama’s boat onto the stranger’s boat while it was moving, then cannonballed off the stranger’s boat right in Mama Hahn’s face, wilting her smoke. Mama was naturally pissed, so we had to play nice the rest of the tour or she said we’d have to swim back to shore.
When we finally staggered home, we somehow found the liquid energy to pop into a bamboo beach bar called The Sailing Club with Mama Hahn’s gang of traveling miscreants. We took over the bar, smoking dope and shooting pool. I had so much fun I raced home at five in the morning on a cyclo to get some rest so I could do Mama Hahn’s again the next day—a feat she said had never been done before. She said if I did this, she would let me go for free, saving seven dollars. The gauntlet had been thrown.