Exit Wounds. Episode 16: The road more-or-less travelled and The Not-nearly-lonely-enough-Planet

Exit Wounds. Episode 16: The road more-or-less travelled and The Not-nearly-lonely-enough-Planet

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29/06/05 00:13 A Special Kind of Hell : Vung Tau - HCMC – Nha Trang.
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A jerk, a jolt and the uniquely sharp squeal of heavy metal drags us onwards. The baby below me cries out but it is quickly muffled by the soft flesh of its mother’s breast. It’s the 5th hour on this journey and the train is once again pulling away from another silent dark and unmentioned station.

The train is now completing its acceleration and is hurtling over the tracks creating a regular rhythm, a mechanical mantra for some.

I sit doubled over on my haunches, the top of my head pressed against the bed above me sending a burning pain down over my back. I shift on my knees to relocate the pressure, and re-allocate blood flow to my aching limbs. My toes twinge, forewarning of cramp, I shift my foot but that catalyses the cramp. I cast my eyes over to the shelf across from me. On it lays Natasha, ear plugs in and eye mask slightly askew, miraculously she sleeps despite having her knees raised towards the ceiling at forty-five degrees because her already too short shelf is also occupied by her backpack.

Across and down from me lies Sammy, his six-foot something stature too long to fit in his birth, he us forced to dangle one leg off the side of his bed and arch his spine. They call these ‘Hard Sleeper’ berths, and in no way do they fall short of their title. A solid metal bench covered in a reed mat, no thicker than a piece of denim fabric. It does nothing to soften the bench beneath, merely sliding around and crumbling up with every bodily movement. There are three bunks on each side with around a foot and a half clearance from the one above it, making it impossible to sit up in. They should call these ‘Hardly sleepers’. Of course all the V!etn@mese in our compartment are deep in slumber, motionless, mouths agape, and eyelids relaxed despite the sharp fluorescent light that radiates from the ceiling and hallway. G0ddamit! These people are amazing, they can sleep anywhere!

Under his eye mask, Sammy imitates sleep, but his frequent jostling and posture adjustments betray this façade.

I sip on my warm, syrupy, ‘Asian-Strength’ Red Bull soaking in the familiarity of insomnia. These hours are always mine. My personal time, where the people around me sleep and I can sit as silent voyeur over the innocence or guilt of a world at rest.

So this is how we are to reach our destination, in a special kind of hell, mechanised, compartmentalised, and paid for. There’s another five hours to go before we reach the beaches of Nha Trang, but I’m not thinking of the sand and sun, I’m grinning madly, broken by sleep deprivation, and anesthetised by the relentless discomfort and inescapability of the situation.
In hell freedom from choice, is preferable to freedom of choice, because in such hopelessness one can find acceptance.

C0|\/||\/|unism is obviously taking its toll on me.
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02/07/05 06:30 A Turd at the End of the Rainbow - Nha Trang Train Station
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There are many colours that strike me as we pull slowly away from the Nha Trang train station on our way to Quy Nhon. There’s the yellow-brown of the piles of human faeces baking in the middle of the train line next to ours. It’s a vile image at this hour of the morning but its recognition is essential so as to avoid stepping in it. There’s also the grubby-hot-pink of the plastic jug that a young naked boy uses to drink from. He squats by the edge of the track like a featherless brown pigeon. There’s the ruby-red teeth of the gnarled old lady opposite me. She’s grinning wildly and mauling her beetle-nut vigorously. The juice bleeds into the wrinkled crevices around her mouth, giving the impression that she’s been drinking the freshest of blood. She cackles at some unseen hilarity and looks through me, but not at me. I wanna be drunk on beetle-nut too!
There’s the blinding gold of sunlight reflecting off an estuary as we pass by. The brilliance of the early morning sun muted slightly by a soft blue haze of smoke settling over the water, leading up to the blue-angular mountains behind. The smoke condenses to tall wispy pillars above several tiny wooden shacks on stilts in the water. A home of sorts for someone.

This is the goodbye portrait of Nha Trang, an entirely different picture compared to our arrival. It too was bathed in the light of early morning, but the brilliance was counteracted by our bleary, bloodshot, sleep-deprived eyes. The final tally on that terrible reintroduction to travel was 11 hours no sleep, our aching bones wrapped in tired flesh and clammy skin, all of it operated by broken brains screaming for freedom and sleep.

We settled for the second guest house we found, and quickly crawled into our beds, not rising for another 10 hours. I fared better than my companions; both Natasha and Sammy had boiling bellies, an effect of an immune system unfamiliar with the local flora and fauna that calls the street food home. This severely impeded our intentions of intoxications in the beautiful bars. Instead we lay prostrate on sun chairs, me befriending big bottles of BGI beer and the other two burping and caressing their bloated bellies.

This by and large summarises our time in Nha Trang, a pleasant but by no means astounding few days. It was the first time in Vietnam where all my interactions were conducted in English, and the first place I’ve been to where the tourists outnumber the locals. In short, it felt like Thailand.

So now we’re on the train again, but this time in soft seats, on our way to the non-descript town of Quy Nhon, our launching pad off the beaten track, up into the highlands near the C@mb0dian border around Pleiku, where the H0 Ch! M!nh trail still winds its way through the mountains. A place avoided by locals and tourists alike, where the native ethnic minorities cling onto survival despite gubberment repression, environmental devastation and the coffee corporations.

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03/07/05 12:00 Quy Nhon – Giving a Hi-3’s to Lepers.
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Quy Nhon; a large town hugging a bay being hugged by mountains. After the positively pleasant train trip from Nha Trang we strolled onto the often ignored streets of Quy Nhon. Sammy’s six foot stature strained the necks of all the locals and their dropped jaws reminded me of those clowns at the Melbourne show that you throw plastic balls into. We made our way to the only backpacking place in town, run by an old Kiwi aid-worker, Barbara. From the balcony we were enticed by the palms and golden sand so after a few beers made our way to the water’s edge. As with so much you find in Nam, things are good from far, but far from good. The beach was nothing short of filthy, peppered with plastic bags and polystyrene. It’s a cruel irony and a miserable reality that Vietnam gets cleaner where tourists congregate. So here’s a travel hint for all those seeking the pristine and clean spot in Nam, don’t go to places where the local go. So sad, so true.

Ultimately however, it’s our fault, we shake the carrot of consumer driven development in front of these nations, giving them the knowledge of half a century of synthetic polymer technology and then tell them nothing of the damage it has done to our environment. We give them the ability to produce and consume 1 million plastic bags every day (As Nam already does! That’s not an arbitrary figure either that’s a sound estimate…1 million bags every day!) But not the technology to recycle! Yet before you can recycle you need to collect your rubbish, and how can you do that effectively without rubbish bins? If you want an exercise in futility, try to find a rubbish bin in Nam, I’ll save you the footsteps now by telling you there’s probably less than 100, and they’re usually in airports and western holiday resorts.

So after being completely revolted by the sea, we made our way across town to a Vegetarian eatery, where we ate spectacularly tangy food for a total cost of 24,000d ($2.40) for three of us, including drinks. For desserts we searched out an ice-creamery and couldn’t resist ordering the ‘Cream of Funny-Man’. I hoped for a midget clown that would do a little half-man slapstick act and promptly jump into a blender which would then be set to ‘crushed ice’ by one of the friendly staff. Alas, no midget-blood was spilt; instead we received a tasty sphere of ice-cream and a few raisins on top. I guess it was funny, just honey ‘weird’ not funny ‘ha ha’. Afterwards we took a digestive late night stroll along the beach amongst the kite-flying kids and mesmerised stares of the locals.

This morning we rose early and made our way to a secluded beach behind mountains and a leper colony. Yes you read correctly – “Leper colony”. Here the beach was beautiful (How can you drop rubbish without hands?) and quaint vibe of Quy Nhon combined with the natural beauty of the area made me want to give something back to this pleasant little place. The Leper colony seemed the natural place to lend a hand, but it seemed one wouldn’t suffice, they needed a few dozen… It also seemed unfair that these poor people should shoulder the responsibility of treatment that costs an arm and a leg, when indeed they often lack all three of these peripheries. So we made a small monetary donation so as not to leave them empty-handed or at least empty-stumped and went on our way, a little more complete on the inside and gratefully complete externally.

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04/07/05 22:00 Bin there, done that. – Kontum
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Troi Oi!

I am stunned. It’s as if the powers that be have conspired to portray me as a liar. No sooner do I say V!etn@m is ‘bin-less’ and we stumble upon the township of Kontum, a far from affluent township atop a mountain chain, some 70km from the Cambodian border. Here where people have less, and bicycles outnumber motorbikes, there is a single road lined with several dozen day-glo orange rubbish bins. So astounded was I by this phenomenon that I stopped in the middle of the rubbish-free road and took a photo. This puzzled the locals and prompted suspicious stares.

Kontum, a town in the middle of an area bordering Lao and Cambodia and pounded by some of the fiercest fighting in the Vietnam war, is generally avoided by travellers. It is understandable then that locals are cautious of whities with cameras, as there are signs all over town stating ‘NO PICTURES’ with a cross over a camera.

We sniffed out a gorgeous little café on the outskirts of down, hidden within a dense garden. It was dark and serene, a perfect place for strategising how we could go hiking without paying mountains of money to the gubberment officials. Fate stepped in at that point and deemed us worthy of yet another lucky break as the oasis’ owner came to chat with us (he even spoke English!). He put us in contact with his friend, a local guide, and by the end of the afternoon we’d negotiated a trek into the hills. As our moods rose the rains fell and we sought shelter under a shopfront around a small plastic table with even smaller plastic chairs, and half a dozen properly proportioned bottles of beer, much to the delight of the owner and her adorable daughter in oversized sandals.

Bright and early we woke, madly ferreting around the bustling morning market securing food for breakfast and lunch. Our man with the plan was Thanh, he drove one motorbike and I the other, both Sammy and Natasha rode shotgun. He introduced us to the B@hnar minority village outside of town, with their houses on stilts, dark, dusty kids and livestock ruling the roost.
If you want answers, you must first have questions. I had questions to ask, but the answers were already known.
How do you feel about the decimation of you culture and environment? Terrible.
How do you see your future? Dismal.
What could be done to rectify the loss of your livelihood? Give us our land and freedom back.

Yet despite the ominous cloud that hangs over their future, the B@hnar people seemed to be calm and content in their world of forest and stream. Now I’m not glossing over the fact that their days include many hours of strenuous physical work, or saying they were marching around like ec$t@sy-eating Chr!stmas-elves, but they did have a positive presence, something that stands out against the austere nature of the V!etn@mese. Thanh knew enough of their language to chit-chat and provided us with a small breakdown of their lifestyle. To begin with it’s a matriarchal society where women hold power and sway over all matters. It is the women that choose whom to wed and all wealth and assets are passed on from mothers to daughters. All unmarried men must sleep every night in a community house, a tremendous structure some twenty metres high, and ten long, shaped like a giant wedge pointed towards the sky. It is constructed entirely from finely woven bamboo threads. The workmanship was flawless and its sheer size was amazing, but calculating the man/woman hours involved fried my neural network. Maybe there were ec$tasy-eating Chr!stmas-elves after all. Maybe I could score!

We decided to find out, walking out of the village and into the hills and valleys beyond. Below us was thick red earth, above us infinite blue sky and all around us vibrant green vegetation is shades of brilliant, breathtaking and blinding. From time to time we would pass a small hut or some villagers diligently tending to their crops of cassava, peanut or corn, but for the most part our only company were butterflies and crisp mountain air.

By midday we had reached our destination, a sandy beach beside a cool pristine river. We swam, ate, and soaked in the serenity of the scene. Thanh went off in search of bamboo shoots leaving us to our isolation. We were quite possibly the only whities for a hundred miles and we savoured the experience. We were visited by some old tribal women at one point, who muttered greetings from their solid wood dugout. Sammy responded by imitating a pigeon cooing, and then screeching like a dinosaur, they stared in confusion, smiled nervously, and disembarked on the other side of the river in a somewhat hurried manner. Thanh returned after an hour or so, and with the help of two tribesmen we took to the water in our boats, one a wooden dugout, and the other an inflatable raft. We followed the lazy flow of the river as the perfect postcard scenes unfolded before us, a lone fisherman laying his nets, a mother tending her vegetable crop with her babe braced to her back with a finely detailed hand-loomed cloth.

Once back in Kontum our appetite awoke. We walked a considerable way backtracking our motorbike route to find a Bia Hoi I had spied. At first it looked abandoned, I asked the giggling kids out front and they pointed towards the rear of the house, there we found tables, chairs and a girl too nervous to serve us. Luckily her co-worker was more courageous and she provided us with a menu. My knowledge of Vietnamese is okay, but the regional differences in diet meant I was clueless as to what most items were beyond the animal they came from. I asked for a recommendation and we received a mouth-watering slab of ultra-tender pork in a spicy broth with freshly toasted baguettes. This combined with the locally brewed, Czech style beer had us all beaming with greasy grins. I asked for another recommendation and after a substantial wait we were presented with three small wild birds roasted whole. The sight of their little baked skulls and clenched talons dampened our appetite somewhat, but we ate their gamey flesh none-the-less. It wasn’t long before Sammy and myself were re-animating the creatures, using their mauled carcasses as puppets, much to Natasha’s horror. The locals however, put us to shame in the courageous carnivore competition with the table next to us scoffing down a plate of giant fried beetles, and the table behind us hungrily scooping the blubbery flesh and entrails out of a turtle roasted whole in its shell.

I need a salad.

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05/07/05 19:00 K0ntum – Hoi An
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Another dawn breaking rise was required to make it to the bus station on time. Once there we were greeted with surprise and greedy eyes. K0ntum, you see, lies in a legal limbo for foreigners. Foreigners cannot purchase bus tickets in this area, an act of deterrence to keep the minorities’ plight insulated from international attention. Further irony exists in the fact that in this no-horse, three-tourist town there is a permanently staffed TOURIST OFFICE through which all expeditions out of town must be organised, and must involve a ‘guide’( read ‘guard’) and an extraordinary fee of fifty dollars US to enter any minority villages. Our attempt to side step this law was only partially successful as Thanh said it would be impossible to enter unnoticed or unpaid.
The bus however, was a little easier, the driver simply made us sit at the back of the bus and included the bribery fee into the ticket price (150,000d = $10US)
Soon after we departed, but not before sparing some change for a blind man, who by my guess picked up a landmine instead of a rice plant while farming. Ooww. Our bus rumbled out of town and into the thickly green mountains, as our elevation climbed the scenery became more spectacular, with juicy montane forests standing over densely packed ferns and mosses. As we climbed even higher the broadleaves gave way to conifer-needles and the canopy took on a bluish tinge. The only signs of habitation were small huts scattered sparingly throughout the climb. At one point however, the bus stopped on the side of the road and several wooden doors were loaded onto the already heavy roof.
Why here? Why doors? Why ask?

Finally after three or so hours we passed over the spine of the mountain chain and began our brake pad burning descent into the valleys below. Natasha then judged by time and map that we were in close proximity to the C@mb0dian/La0 borders and the OPM smuggling routes, the air did smell sweet. At precisely that moment our bus stopped beside a large log cabin housing army guards. They scrutinized our bus, inside and out, quickly finding us three round-eyes, however, no drama ensued and we continued on our way, obviously our extra fee had proved adequate. The scenery on our descent was no less spectacular, deep green valleys, etched erratically with rice terraces and the endless folds of mountain ranges stretching out to the horizon in shades of ever-increasing blue. Somewhere out there lay my-laid-back-love, La0.

But why weren’t we hugging those ridges? Our path ran alongside the La0 border. Why were we entering the low lands? Something was wrong. Townships were rare here and they corresponded with large blank areas in the Lonely Planet map. I couldn’t face the embarrassment of asking any of my fellow V!etn@mese passengers where our bus was going, four hours into the trip in the middle of nowhere. Instead we waited impatiently for a large town to pass by, and when it did I was filled with a rare mix of relief, disappointment and anger. The bad news was, we were not on our intended trailblazing path, the good news was that our bus would still pass near bye our destination of Hoi An. My disappointment stemmed from the fact that our original path was along the H0 Ch! M!nh trail and until only a month or two ago was traversable only by four wheel drive. This combined with its remoteness and xenophobic reputation meant we would have been of only a select few foreigners that had taken this path, and probably the first to do it by bus. My anger was directed at both the driver for lying to me and to myself, for breaking the cardinal sin in Nam: Don’t ask Yes/No questions! The answer in always ‘Yes’. Instead of saying: Does this bus take route 14? I should have asked “Which route does this bus take?

All the elation of the previous half of the drive was drained from me over the next four hours, as we rattled down a busy highway through dusty, dry, towns, all the while subjected to an agonising V!etn@mese Karaoke DVD at ear-bleeding volumes played no less than three times from beginning to end. I could see Sam had tasted his first hate for Nam with his jittery eyes and slightly-psychotic, clenched- teeth-grimace, pleading for reason and mercy. Why? Why? Why? His eyes screamed.
Why play such horrendously abrasive music?!
Why play it at such a deafening volume?!!
Why play it three times in a row?!!!
And why, oh-G0d why isn’t anyone on this bus not the slightest bit affected by this?!!!!

…. But there was no reason, and there was no mercy, Sam just had to learn to savour the pain.

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09/07/05 Hoi An – Hell An & the Not-nearly-lonely-enough-Planet.
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After the beautiful yet brain-jarring bus ride from K0ntum, we arrived in the ancient merchant town of Hoi-An. Rumour had it that the abundance of quality hotels had pushed prices down to the point of absurdity. The rumours were true, for US$8 a night we secured a large bathroom inside a larger bedroom, decked out in delightful décor with impeccable attention to detail. The fine touches included mood lighting and fresh flower petals arranged on our bed everyday. Such quality was refreshing as we had been paying as much or more to stay in squalid grimy rooms since leaving the tourist path. We relaxed on our generous and forgiving beds sinking our heads into their plump pillows and drifting off into bliss.

After resting and waiting for the cool of the night, we strolled out onto the streets amongst the countless tailor shops and eateries. I quite frankly can’t give a f**k about clothes anymore as V!etn@mese fashion seems stuck in a time and a place somewhere around Las Vegas, circa 1983. (Think zebra prints, mesh shirts, and turquoise leather… Yes, it’s that bad.) Yet these designs were sophisticated and tasteful, suits you’d see on Italian boulevards and dresses you’d find clinging to French honeys. But I was comfortable in my one buck shirt, instead it was my appetite that needed a fitting. At last I could escape the carnivore caravan and get back to eating vegetarian fare. It was delicious no doubt, but once my eye spied the bill I was dumbfounded. 70,000d ($7) for a measly four course meal!
‘Surely this cannot be! You must take me for a fool! I’ll give you 20,000d and for that I’m being generous! No-one in there right mind can charge such an absurd price for what was a tasty but, let’s face it, an unremarkable meal!’
But the menu backed him up, and I had to bite my lip and empty my pockets. So we promptly left and soaked in the ambience of this old merchant town. Hoi An has a unique history (where doesn’t?); originally the centre of the mighty Cham Empire it then became an important sea port to merchants from J@pan, Ch!na, Tha!land, Ph!l!pp!ans , plus the Dutch and French traders later on. The result is a gorgeous town, with hauntingly ancient architecture from all over As!a and Eur0pe, all of it dissected by narrow pathways framed in mustard yellow walls and dimly lit by ornate lanterns.
Alcohol is history’s friend, so we quickly found the ‘two-for-one’ spirits place and settled in for saucing.


30km from Hoi An, lay My S0n, the ruins of the ancient Cham empire, tour groups make me cringe, so we hired motorbikes and at 5:20am made our way there, to beat the buses.
Already they are arriving!
Then while I try to carve through a small pack of travellers on my bike, a thick Aussie accent boomed out “I know that face, M@!_%0”
I often fear that my THC saturated brain will draw blanks in the event of seeing an old face from the past, but my fear was unfounded, for while my short term might mimic a juggling amputee, my long term is sound, and my response was instant. “Cu!_!_3n !! You old kaaaarrrnntt! What the f**k are you doing here?!”
And so ensued a compressed catch-up of our lives since leaving our drunken little red-neck town.
I wanted to stay and chat more, but his tour guide began talking, and I found myself wretching, watching the unsure young man stumble his way through the area’s history with bland, confused English and vague facts, even forgetting the name of the first King.
I think I saw him later fact-checking with a Lonely Planet.
Never the less the plump white group nodded at appropriate points, with fingers on chins and brows furrowed. The scene was thick with bull$hit, and I swiftly stepped outside dragging Natasha and Sammy with me. We raced ahead of the crowds, finding the ancient red ruins unpopulated by people. There we searched the structures for images of past glory and the beauty of earthly decay. It was quite and still as I had hoped, but we couldn’t let history saturate our thoughts for our time was short. The chase was on, our privacy prey for the tourists groups.

In the beginning Hoi An seemed to be a great place to stay, but it soon became apparent with the incessant pestering swarms of young kids hounding people to purchase bracelets and store owners hollering to you every time you come into view, the offensively expensive food, and the greedy insincere vendors, that this was not the case. By our third day I had come to despise this town, gone was the helpfulness and honesty of the highland people, here we were just business.
Here we weren’t travellers, we were tourists, walking ATM’s for sly deal makers. This wasn’t V!etn@m. It was an Ind0ch!na-Disneyland for Anglotrash.

Let me out! Let me out!
I don’t like this ride, I wanna get off.

We sought our escape as quickly as possible, walking in the opposite direction of the buses marked TOURIST, and off down the dusty road to the local bus depot. I firmly told the driver in V!etn@mese that I was neither stupid nor a tourist and he accepted my price with a look of disappointment and a wry smile of respect. Finally we felt alone, ironically on a bus full of people, earning stares of astonishment from the locals. A man struck up a conversation in V!etn@mese with me, not as a butter-up for a sale, but out of genuine interest, his name was Thuy and through his chipped brown teeth he spoke of his life on fishing boats, seeking work where he could, sailing from Ch!na to the Philippi@ns and my home town of V$%@ !@$, the sea was his home eleven months of the year and now he was off to the docks of Danang to find a boat captain that would hire him. When we reached Danang we shook hands and went our different ways, already we were back in the real Nam, where friendship is a currency too.
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10/07/05 00:00 D@nang and the Un-marbelous Mountain.
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After 50 minutes on a dusty rattling bus and listening to the fisherman’s life-story, we stood out into the searing heat of Danang’s streets. We headed for shade and stumbled across a large tree-lined lake. There in the cool, calm, quiet we relaxed and read our books, uttering small sighs of relief as passing street vendors modestly offered their snacks to V!etn@mese couples and avoided us completely. “Thankg0d! The V!etn@mese version of V!etn@m. We had no real purpose in Danang other than to drop in on my friend K@rl the Big Dane and his stunning and sweet V!etn@mese wife, Ly%h.

He provided us with free beds to sleep in, cold beer to drink, and Ly%h cooked us a delicious meal that I hadn’t seen in a year and a half; steak with boiled potatoes in Hollandaise sauce and Danish Black Bread and No rice! No rice! Hallelujah! NO F@#KIN’ RICE!
Such dense, complex and creamy flowers, mixed with such subtlety, and the tender textures of plump morsels of meat, no fat, no sinew, no bones, no livers, no gut-lining, no entrails, no eyes, Hurrah!!
I still have the sloppy grin of a drooling St.Bernard as I crawl into bed, dreaming of hearty home cooked meals.

The morning began in cloak and dagger, with K@rl telling us to lock the door and lie low. Gubberment officials were inspecting the house. The problems with this were twofold. Firstly, K@rl and Ly%h were only paying rent on the bottom storey of the two storey house, but using both. Secondly he was harbouring unregistered foreigners. A big no-no! For us the penalty for not staying in official tourist accommodation and not supplying the authorities with our passports was tantamount to burning our VISA’s however that was never really a sincere risk, rather it would have required copious bribe money… both undesirable outcomes. So the tax-man sniffed around, suspiciously, Natasha and I lay silent and still on our bed, listening to the footsteps approaching. The door handle rattles to life, twisting backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards, but to no avail the lock held true and after a brief but intense bout of V!etn@mese language by our door, they left with the words “ Hen gap lai” = See you again

After our brief brush with the authorities we escaped from the industrial city on a pair of motorbikes, heading to the Marble Mountains.
The tourist buses had beaten us this time, and the vendors were eager to offload their grotesque and tacky produce.
C0mmun!$m’s attempt to 3thnic@lly cleanse artists from society has resulted in an unimaginative mindset, and nowhere else is this exemplified so clearly as here. Dozens of marble carving workshops, all producing the same item, large marble lions. All of them hand carved into exact clones of each other. Hundreds of them piling up infront of these shops. Nobody buys them, but they continue to chip away oblivious to the evidence, wondering why they’re still poor. I recall the words of the songs sung in schools:

“C0mrades solidarity is our strength.
It strikes fear in our enemy
Individuality is our enemy’s weakness
It is like an autumn leaf.”

Yes well, without individuality you have no niche and thus no competitive advantage and if you want to play the globalisation game (as VN most certainly does) then they’re going to have to start thinking outside the square.

Education is a dangerous thing.

We fled from the desperate merchants by riding to the sea, and relaxed on the 60km long China beach in some sling seat under the shade, with delicious double-hopped local beer.

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12/07/05 16:00 Danang – Hue Back to the Bitch.
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Back to the bitch, the train that is, this bitter-sweet beast. She tortures us at first, then rewards us with spectacular pleasure. She’s a trip-tease. Turquoise and aquamarine seas rolling against uninhabited cliffs, beaches and forests, the train never travelling over 60km/h. Infact it took us two hours to conquer the first 35km of the 100km trip. All for AU$ 1.50. Ah Vietnam, where time isn’t money, instead time is nothing and money is everything.

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15/07/05 11:00 Hue - The Past and Future Split.
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This ancient city is proof that at one time V!etn@m was capable of making something that lasted for more than a century. It’s the exception to what otherwise feels like one giant two-dollar shop. ‘Yeah, I know it’s cheap… I don’t wanna buy it because it sh*t’

We had three days left before we all parted company. We explored the old city but oppressive heat amongst the sprawling walls and courtyards of this, the ancient capital of V!etn@m, defeated us. Once again I felt as though I was removed from history. The guides tell of names and dates, but they’re just statistics. It’s impersonal and I can’t relate to it. I could however appreciate the aesthetics of this fortressed city. Gnarled and pitted by wind and war for five centuries. I went off on my own and imagined manga-warrior battles, even Voltron was there! History is exciting it just has to be told well.

So this tour ended there more me. For Natasha and Sammy it’s a different story, Sammy taking the Northern route into L@o, and Natasha taking a seven hour bus ride into the L@o border pass, Savannakhet.

By 8 in the morning I’m on a motorbike to the airport, then on the plane, also containing the travelling Black Arts Drama Group of Philadelphia, all black and beautiful with their mad braided hair, massive dreadlocks, and audacious tribal outfits. Such vibrancy, such flair, an explosion of self-expression! The exact polar of the attitude here, where modesty is the aim, and self expression vain, all must be held within. They draw stares of sheer wonder from V!etn@mese. Such alien cultures to each other, yet not a word is uttered, just stares. Staring is not rude here, so stare they do, looking over everything the group is wearing, oblivious to the concept of personal space.

I leave them mobbed at the airport and catch a Xe Ohm ride through HCMC’s alleys with a madman five-foot nothing driver lacking teeth. I then hire a new motorbike, this will bring the trip full circle. I turn for home, crossing two rivers in the Mekong delta on car ferries, blurring through the cashew plantations, past the dusty small towns, through the rice fields dotted with kids riding buffaloes, and then to the snaking coastal road that will take me to my home.
But none of this can happen until I complete my mission: ‘Buy more Rizla’s’
After all, this was just supposed to be a rollie-paper run.


Things can get out of hand.



Get a handful.
MALpractice.