The hills are alive

These hill tribe women fascinate me. They’re ever-present here in Sa Pa, forever traipsing up and down the main streets as they attempt to sell trinkets, postcards and embroidered bags to tourists. They’re very friendly, often funny and usually good for a bit of banter. And because they’re women, and ethnic minority women at that, I don’t have the heart to tell them to piss off when they corner me and try out their hard-sell tactics.

This happened recently when I was drifting around town, waiting for the weather to improve. It was the day of my previous blog entry and the morning rain and mist had cleared for a couple of hours, only to return for half an hour and then vanish again within minutes.

I’d had the same conversation about half a dozen times already that day.

“Hello! You want to buy my things?”

“No thank you.”

“Where you from?”

“England.”

“Ah, England… What’s your name?”

“David.”

“How old are you?”

“Forty-one.”

“You married?”

“No.”

“When you see me later David you buy my things, yes?”

“Er, no. Sorry.”

While some are content just to follow me down the street for a couple of minutes, the more quick-witted ones manage to strike up a lively rapport with a mixture of jokes, flattery and sometimes mild flirtation. I have some footage of me surrounded by four of them - each one wearing the traditional female headgear for their particular tribe - having a good laugh as I say to my camcorder: “Ooh, I’m popular with the ladies today.”

Once they’d dispersed I turned into a sidestreet to look around the market, only to find that one had followed me and was trying to force brocaded bags and moneybelts into my hands. “Buy something from me and I can go home,” she said. “Do you have a baby? I have two, they’re ten and eight. You can come to my house and see.” (She looked about 55 to me; I guess she‘d had a hard life.)

The fact remained, though, that I didn’t want any of it and the emotional blackmail was making me feel queasy. So I stood there saying: “No. I’m sorry, no,” for about five minutes.

Oh, the questions this raises. What did they do before Vietnam started letting in tourists about a decade ago? Do they make a good living from it or are they fighting for scraps, as it were? It’s got to be more profitable than working in the fields with the menfolk, otherwise they wouldn’t do it, right?

Every morning they’re gathered outside my hotel, waiting for the day’s tour parties to emerge. Presumably they come here on some kind of motorised transport but what I didn’t realise until I did my trek was that they walk with the tourists all the way back to the Muong Hoa valley, about 12km away. It takes about four hours and when you stop for lunch, they pounce.

The day I went trekking it had rained all night, leaving some of the dirt trails slippery, and I was grateful for the women who looked out for me and occasionally held my hand to guide me. One in particular latched on to me and as we approached the restaurants overlooking the village of Lao Chai she started to drop heavy hints. “I help you, now you help me, yes?”

In the end, with a little haggling, I bought a bag off her. I wish I hadn’t been so churlish about it now, as it’s compact, light, was relatively inexpensive and will make a unique gift for someone back home. I suppose I’m always offended when someone acts friendly with me in a transparent ploy to sell me something. But then I have to remind myself that I’m much richer then her through an accident of birth and geography and that she’s just trying to provide for her family.

A little way past the restaurants we stopped at a school, where a group of girls came out and danced for us next to a wooden box with a label on it asking for donations. One of the tunes they performed to was a cheesy ditty - I’d call it Europop but it was probably Asiapop - with a chorus that went: “Kiss me, kiss me, make me happy.” This all reminded me of Minipops, a profoundly ill-judged Channel 4 show from the 1980s that featured children performing the hits of the day, suggestive lyrics and all.

In the neighbouring village, Ta Van, I had to wave goodbye to the rest of my tour group as I’d booked a place in a homestay for the night. It was owned by the brother of the woman I’d booked the tour with in Hanoi and he phoned shortly after I’d arrived to say he was a couple of hours away and I’d be eating with him and his family that night.

All of a sudden I felt socially phobic and wished I’d stayed in Sa Pa. What was I going to say? I know I used to feign charm with all sorts of people when I was a newspaper reporter, but that was years ago! Still, I needn’t have worried. To my great relief, the guy didn’t make it home and his family didn’t speak conversational English.

That afternoon and the following morning, I went walking on my own in the sunshine, breathing in lungfuls of pure clean air and marvelling at the exquisite landscape of soaring hills and rice paddies. I could have stayed longer but I was missing my laptop, stored in a safe deposit box at my hotel, and was fretting about the mosquito bites I’d received while I’d been asleep in my very spartan, basic room (under a mosquito net).

A view from a hill

This is what I can see from my hotel balcony this morning.

Hills shrouded in mist, accompanied by torrential rain. If this was a video, there’d be the occasional thunderclap as well. All in all, not the best weather for trekking.

Welcome to the market town of Sa Pa in the far northwest of Vietnam, close to the Chinese border. The area is home to various protected ethnic minority hill tribes and I imagine it's probably a charming place when the sun is shining.

Having come most of the way from Hanoi on an overnight train, I devoted yesterday morning to having a little lie down in the Summit Hotel, which I‘m staying in as part of an organised tour. The mist was like something out of a Sherlock Holmes film when I arrived - a veritable pea-souper - and, venturing downhill into town in the afternoon, I could see straight away that taking photos was pointless.

Normally when I’m approached by hawkers I make it clear straight away that whatever they‘re selling, I ain‘t buying. As long as they’re not overtly hassling me, most of the time I do this as politely as I can. However, when I ran into a couple of hill tribe women in ethnic dress trying to sell me bracelets and trinkets, it put me on my best behaviour. Perhaps sensing that they had the upper hand, they followed me all around the town centre like I was the Pied Piper. I didn’t buy anything but at least we parted on good terms.

(This is what they look like, by the way. I pinched the picture from the interwebs.)

Anyhow, I’ve told the tour organisers that I’m staying indoors today. Sure, it means writing off the money I’ve paid towards a hill trek, but that’s OK. It’s hardly going to break the bank.

With more than two weeks to go before I fly to Malaysia, and practically all of Vietnam’s major tourist destinations crossed off my list, I’m in no hurry to leave. I’ll just sit it out here till the weather improves and pay for a couple of day trips as and when.

UPDATE: It's the afternoon and there's been a change in the weather.

Baywatching

Billy Connolly once observed that children don’t really appreciate scenery. You have to learn to admire nature’s beauty and that process takes years. If I was a kid, I’d probably tell you that Ha Long Bay, in the far northeast of Vietnam, is just rocks sticking out of the sea. I might also add for good measure that the Mona Lisa is just a painting of a moody-looking woman.

As it is, I think that the bay is one of the most magnificent landscapes ever crafted by nature’s hand (and I mean that in the metaphorical, not religious, sense). That's why I’ve happily spent great chunks of the past three days puttering around in a tourist boat admiring hundreds of limestone outcrops. And I didn’t even mind about having to share a room.

I knew this was going to happen, of course, having pondered the question in Hanoi of whether I should shell out the extra cash to ensure my own room on the organised tour. I harboured the hope that I’d be the only single person there anyway but as it turned out, there were three others: a youngish guy called Todd who prosecutes murder cases in Washington DC and had taken the rare step for an American of having a month off work; a 67-year-old Berliner called Joachim, or Jo (‘Yo’) for short; and a young North American whose name and nationality I didn’t catch and who I never really got to know.

It took four hours by minibus to get to the harbour in Ha Long City and we finally boarded a boat at around 12.30pm. For once I’d eschewed the cheapo option and taken a mid-range excursion, figuring that £40 for three days was still very inexpensive. The food they served us on the boat was plentiful and high quality, although the soft drinks and beers, which weren’t included in the package, were at least twice their normal price. The cabins they assigned us were pleasant too and the main guide spoke good English.

During the day we stopped once, to explore a cave full of stalagmites and stalactites softly lit in various colours. The rest of the time we just gawped at the bay and chatted. This was something of a departure for me, as I’ve hardly had a conversation with anyone since January. All I do is walk around, look at things, check into hotels, order food and turn away unwanted hawkers. This time, though, I struck up quite a rapport with Todd and my roommate Jo. Both were fascinating, well-informed blokes.

Next morning we stopped at Cat Ba Island and boarded a bus for the short journey to its national park, where we‘d be doing a two-hour hike. So far, so good. However, I’d brought all my heavy luggage, including a rucksack full of valuables like my laptop, because when I booked the trip at the hotel in Hanoi no-one thought to tell me that I could leave some of it in storage. Now I was told that it wasn’t safe to leave valuables on the bus. So I insisted on climbing a 225-metre hill with the rucksack on.

Were it not for the view, I might as well have exercised on a step machine for an hour with a pile of bricks strapped to my back. Eventually I made it to the top but by the time I’d staggered back to the entrance I was fucked, frankly. Utterly wiped out. To quote Robin Williams: “I was sweating. I was like Marlon Brando eating Thai food.”

Fortunately we had the afternoon to ourselves in Ha Long City and had transferred to a hotel en masse. Not being interested in beaches, I confined myself to my room for a few hours and downloaded photos from my camera.

Over dinner, Todd and I agreed that travelling was a great way to lose weight. “You use up a lot of energy just sweating,” he said, which in my case explains a lot. Here’s how I looked in Bangkok on 15 January

and yet a mere six weeks later, at Angkor Wat on 1 March, I’d gone from Hardy to Laurel.

I think my weight has more or less stabilised since then.

Jo, by contrast, told us he gained weight when travelling and that the Vietnamese were fascinated by his belly and tits, frequently asking if they could poke him in the stomach. The two of us went out for a drink that evening and I listened intently as he talked about his impoverished post-war childhood, his travels in Asia in the 1960s, how he’d taught German to the Japanese and his involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Unlike me, with my email, blogging and Skype, when he left for Asia and Australia as a young man he had to pretty much wave goodbye to European society for months and years. Sometimes I forget how lucky I am.

I’ve decided I’d like to get a year’s teaching experience in China and that, for now, I’ll simply carry on travelling until it’s time to fly to London from Bangkok in July. With that in mind I’ve booked a budget flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at the end of this month and will head north from there to sample southern Thailand’s beach resorts and islands. Phuket, why not?

The dead hand of the state

Now here’s something you don’t see very often, at least not since the Berlin Wall came down: a statue of Lenin staring proudly out across a city square.

And here’s another perennial favourite of communist governments: a big mausoleum with an embalmed body inside. In this case it's that of Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese president who died in 1969.

I filed past him the other day after leaving my bag in storage and standing in line for a good 20 minutes. Every morning that the mausoleum opens, which is most days of the week, thousands of people do likewise. As a tourist, I was in a minority of about 10 or 15 per cent, I’d say. Such is Uncle Ho’s standing that ordinary Vietnamese bring their kids to look at his corpse.

Instead of the glass coffin I’d been expecting, Ho was in an open casket with a canopy, creating the impression, at least in my mind, that he was in a four-poster bed. His benign-looking face was a powdery white, which I’m sorry to say put me in mind of an actor from a Restoration comedy. (Oh hell, I might as well tell the truth. Without meaning to be disrespectful, what I instantly thought of was that episode of Blackadder the Third where Edmund keeps saying "Macbeth" to wind up the two superstitious thespians.)

To be fair to him, though, Ho never wanted all this fuss. He insisted on being cremated because he didn’t want his compatriots spending their dosh on coming to see him. But the party thought otherwise and had a crack team of Soviet embalmers standing by while he was dying. Even now, he’s whisked off to Russia for two months of the year while they work their preserving magic on him. It doesn’t sound much like resting in peace to me.

Last night, on the 35th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, I took a walk down by Hoan Kiem Lake to watch a fireworks display marking the Liberation Day public holiday. Before it kicked off, I caught part of an open-air concert that included an operatic lady singing about Hanoi and men and women in military uniforms performing what I gathered were patriotic songs. In spite of all this, I'm going to resist the temptation to make glib remarks about communist propaganda. With a few minor tweaks, I can just imagine how this kind of rabble-rousing wouldn’t look that out of place in the US, the UK or any other country you care to mention.

The fireworks were bog-standard to say the least. I mean, I wasn’t expecting Sydney Harbour Bridge on New Year’s Eve, but I was hoping for something more spectacular than a British municipal Guy Fawkes Night. Within a couple of minutes of it starting, I turned on my heel to head back to my hotel in disappointment. Maybe I’m just jaded. The crowd oohed and gasped and applauded throughout, so yeah, I probably am.

This afternoon I visited the Military History Museum (with its French flag tower from 1812, its captured American weaponry and its crashed US plane) and the B52 memorial (not a tribute to the band who sang Rock Lobster, sadly, but a small park with fragments of aircraft shot down during bombing raids on Hanoi in 1972).

I can‘t say I was all that thrilled with those either, and now all I‘ve got left to see is the theatre of water puppetry, if I bother seeing it at all. Time to move on, I think. Time to move on.

For some reason I've got the theme to The Littlest Hobo in my head...

Stalled

It’s only my fourth day in Hanoi and already I feel quite at home. I’m staying in a small, dingy room with a bed, a fridge, a telly and an ensuite bathroom (so not much different from London, then). I’m spending the day watching DVDs of films I would have seen on the big screen in England if I‘d had the chance. And it rained heavily yesterday afternoon, forcing me to dig an anorak out of the bottom of my bag (it’s like a second skin to me).

I’m staying in the capital’s Old Quarter, a distinctive maze of shopping streets dating back to the 15th century. Because of inheritance issues and taxes on frontages, most of the shops are narrow and stretch a long way back, hence the name tube-houses. You also find that retailers specialising in particular items are clustered together so that if, for example, you want to buy a pushchair, then you can shop around without wandering very far.

Yesterday I stumbled upon the shops that sell CDs and DVDs and learnt that movies cost 15,000 dong each. That’s about 75 cents or, in proper money, 50p. They’re about as legit as my Lacoste T-shirt and yet there are shops in Hanoi that stock thousands of them.

Of the four discs I bought, two actually work.

You can also buy box sets with numerous episodes of your favourite TV series crammed on to each disc. These are slightly more expensive at 25,000 dong/$1.25/80p a disc. I was sceptical about how the manufacturers managed this so I tentatively bought season one of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse on two discs. Here’s the good news: there must be a good eight hours’ viewing on each one. The bad? They’re off-air recordings from America's Fox network.

I guess that means I won’t be buying the Doctor Who series 1-4 set, “starring:David Thennant & Freema Agyeman”. Not even for a lark.

I haven’t done that much of note in Hanoi, not least because my first day was spent recovering from a 14-hour overnight bus journey. After that I had a morning of getting contentedly lost in the Old Quarter, with all of the candid photo-ops that implies, and an afternoon walking round the edges of nearby Hoan Kiem Lake, which my guidebook informs me is the soul of the city.

Yesterday was for mooching around some more, buying DVDs, sheltering from the rain and taking photos of the lake at night.

Today, as I say, I’m spending some time indoors. Visiting Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum, where he lies in a glass coffin, can wait till Monday as I was reading that at weekends it’s open only in the mornings and attracts huge crowds of Vietnamese.

And then? Well, apart from a couple of tours of the far north I plan to do, I really haven‘t a clue. Nearly every teaching job I see advertised here requires at least one year’s experience. The job applications I have made have produced practically no response. I worry that as a 41-year-old newbie, I’m at a distinct disadvantage in an industry that tends to favour twentysomethings. I’ve also read that the immigration authorities are cracking down heavily and from July will deport long-term expats who haven’t got a work permit.

My three-month tourist visa has nearly two months left to run. On arrival in Hanoi, I asked about extending it for another three months and was told it would cost an outrageous $260 (about £175). In truth I can’t blame Vietnam for not wanting to become another Thailand, with the scum of the earth living here like kings for years on end. But if it succeeds in driving away EFL teachers, I don’t think it’ll be doing its people many favours.

The upshot of all this is that I will stay a bit longer and try to find a job with a respectable employer that can get me a work permit. I don’t hold out much hope, but there you go. If that doesn’t happen I’ll fly to Kuala Lumpur or Bangkok and take things from there. If I’m to use my return flight ticket, I’ll have to be in Bangkok in early July anyway (when with any luck it won’t be like “the last days of Saigon” - although, since this is a Daily Mail story we‘re talking about, I‘m willing to bet there‘s some exaggeration involved).

It’s occurred to me that if I could fill July and August with subbing shifts in London then I could save enough to pay for this six-month trip I’m doing. Then I could maybe get a year’s teaching experience in China, where they’re still desperate for English teachers and don’t give a stuff about your age. I’m not short of savings, so I have plenty of leeway.

Until now the main thing putting me off was internet censorship - the ‘Great Firewall of China’ - but from what I’ve been reading, most Chinese people under 30 are expert in getting around it with a virtual private network (VPN). That’s immensely reassuring to me. There are many things I can live without but YouTube isn’t one of them.

Then again, there’s always Korea…


ADDENDUM: Up in the Air froze after five minutes. That just left The Hurt Locker, which to my mind was two tedious hours of: "The bastard towelheads keep planting bombs and shooting at us."

Talkin' about a revolution

I’m still in Hue. Mainly for the internet, if I’m honest. The hotel I’m staying in doesn’t have wifi but does have a mildly antiquated computer in each room, enabling me to plug a broadband connection directly into my laptop. Oh, it’s glorious. I’m also enjoying the weather, which since I arrived has been refreshingly dreary and sometimes even cold and drizzly.

What I don’t like about this city are the strangely selective power cuts, which happen most days and tend to last a specified number of hours. They don’t affect my room’s main light and overhead fan but they do shut down less essential stuff like the bathroom light and the sockets. So from breakfast time till 2pm today I couldn’t use my laptop (the horror!) or watch TV (which I hardly ever do anyway, except occasionally for the news). Goddamn it, I had to sit down and read a book about teaching!

That aside, I've been on two separate day trips since my wonderfully flattering encounter with the college girls in central Hue last week. The first took me down the Perfume River on a dragon boat

to see various temples and emperor’s mausoleums, a couple of which are accessible only by water. (Not this one, I should add.)

Quite early on I suspected I’d picked the cheap and nasty tour with the young, half-intelligible guide and the spurious visits to places of no interest where people try to sell you stuff. But it was diverting enough, and I did enjoy meeting a friendly contingent from the Vietnamese Army at one of the mausoleums. Despite their lack of English, one woman beckoned me over and invited me to take a photo of her with an older lady, presumably her mother. I thought of offering to email it to her but didn’t know if that was wise.

Speaking of armed forces, the other day I took a 12-hour tour, starting at 6am, to the former demilitarised zone or DMZ - a strip of land 5km either side of the North-South border, designated as such in 1954. I call it the DM-Zee as I’ve only ever heard it mentioned in American films. (I now understand what Robin Williams means when he bellows in Good Morning Vietnam: “Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.”) On the other hand our guide referred to the DM-Zed, which sounds all wrong to me, no matter how much I approve of British English.

Naturally enough, some of the most interesting events of the Vietnam War happened just outside of the DMZ. At Vinh Moc for instance, 8km north of the border, the communists set up a series of underground tunnels where villagers could shelter from US bombers in small burrowed-out alcoves for up to five days at a time.

Unlike the tunnels at Cu Chi in the south, which were built by Vietcong guerillas, these ones were constructed by the authorities and were therefore much larger. To my relief, I could walk through them fairly easily just by stooping.

Apart from Vinh Moc, though, there wasn’t much to look at. We tourists mostly sat on the bus, having things pointed out to us. We stretched our legs at a bridge that used to be part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail (the route used to ship supplies from the north to the Vietcong). We briefly took photos of a statue on the site of the Doc Mieu Firebase, which, like all US bases in the mid-1970s, was plundered for scrap and torn down by the war-weary Vietnamese.

We also visited the US base at Khe Sanh, overrun by the North Vietnamese Army in 1968 after a nine-week battle. It’s a museum now, with a couple of old helicopters and a gutted tank standing outside. I looked in the visitors’ book. A guy from the US had been there a day or two earlier to pay his respects to his best friend from university who had died in the fighting.

Now, much as I love Vietnam - and I really have fallen in love with the country - I have to say that the ubiquitous symbols of communism do take a bit of getting used to. Each to his own and all that, but it seems like every street corner in Hue has a big poster featuring a smattering of the late Ho Chi Minh’s words of wisdom. Here’s a small one I saw last week near Hoi An.

I could go out and photograph some big red ones if I wanted to, but they’d remind me of the British general election and I don’t care to think about that too much. The same goes for the volcanic ash, which hopefully will have dispersed by the time I want to fly back.

Basically, I rule

I’ve splashed out on a fake Lacoste T-shirt, available from most shops and market stalls in Hoi An for about £2, with haggling. I’ll probably dump the plain white T-shirt I brought from England; the dirt’s so ground in, I don’t think I’ll ever get it clean.

I’ve also come to the historic city of Hue (‘Hwey’), which the Vietnamese emperor made his capital in 1802. The walled citadel containing his Imperial City must have been a stunner in its day but was largely destroyed in the Vietnam War and the 1940s conflict with France. Of its original 148 towers, only 20 remain.

When I turned up there this morning, so had a party of students. Their tutor told us they were doing a four-year course in tourism.

Once their group shot was done, four or five of the young ladies made a beeline for me and insisted I have my photo taken with each one. Why? Because I was “handsome handsome”.

What an ego-booster! Yes, I know they're young enough to be my daughters. Doesn't mean I can't enjoy the compliment, or spend the whole day struggling to wipe the grin off my face.

Oh, and the Imperial City was good as well.