Ho Chi Minh City to Da Lat – The Fall of Saigon

On the road again. I wanted to take Alicia but she objected to being bungee-strapped to the mudguard.

By the end of my second term teaching I had saved a little money and Saigon was starting to get on my tits. I’d seen Vietnam’s biggest concrete jungle I wanted to see its, um, jungle jungle. The idea was a four week motorbike trip vaguely following the Ho Chi Minh trail to the Laos border and over the mountains down to Vientiane, Laos’ sleepy capital.

In eight months I had left downtown Saigon only three times. The first had been an attempted ride to the beach on a 38 degree day. Three hours sweating through holiday traffic and one motorbike accident later Alicia and I decided to swear at each other for a bit, turn around, buy a considerable amount of cheap beer, set our hotel room’s A/C to Turkish prison and watch Discovery Channel for a couple of days.

My second outing had been a weekend in Bangkok playing in the Asia Championship Australian Rules Football competition for the mighty Vietnam Swans. It was an epic weekend which left me with a near-terminal combination of leg cramp and alcohol poisoning.

C'arn the Swannies!

A few months ago I had visited Cu Chi with some friends from home. I crawled through the damp tunnels where the VC had fought, slept and lived for months at a time and saw the terrifying booby traps they had left for allied troops. At the café next door backpackers drank beer and fired M16s or AK-47s at hay bales covered in paper tigers and cutouts of Saddam Hussein.

            I didn’t think I had seen what a guidebook might twatishly call the authentic Vietnam.

My last week in town was spent buying waterproof clothing and sorting out the new steed. As tempting as it was to do the trip on my mighty Cub 50, I had caved in to common sense and bought a more practical beast. I choose a 110cc Honda Win which, judging from the stickers adorning various parts, had been built in Indonesia, Thailand and China. As the more geographically engaged among you will know, none of those places is Japan. If I had been in the market for, say, a dish of green curry dumplings with fried rice or perhaps an Islamic lady-boy who was handy on the industrial textile loom, then the combination of these three nations would have been ideal. But a motorbike? Hmm… At 5 million dong ($230) at least the price was right.

Note the Vietnamese safety boots.

The Win is basically a road bike that’s designed like a small dirt bike and once I’d got over the loss of the Cub – well, not over exactly, it still stings – I had a great time buzzing through traffic enjoying novelties like brakes and the ability to drive up inclines. In fact it seemed that I had gone from the smallest, slowest bike on the road to the biggest and fastest. It would even pop a wheelie, kind of. I accumulated a tool kit and gave the old girl a bit of loving. After a few hours of TLC we were ready to go. It was the only bike I’d ever owned in Asia on which everything worked. All that was left was to teach my last week of classes.

I say teach but actually I spent the kids classes watching animated films and the adults classes chatting and finding excuses not to let them take me out to karaoke. The thought of sitting sober – sober! – while a 19-year-old girl emotes Vietnamese screech-pop at me just didn't appeal.

The happy absence of Japanese sing-torture left my evenings free to say goodbye to friends, favourite haunts and the contents of my wallet as I caroused around old Saigon town. In between hangovers, I located a photocopied Vietnamese road atlas and an old Lonely Planet guidebook and planned a route – up Vietnam and left at Laos. Easy. My only detour would be to the beach town of Hoi An to get some clothes made.

What could possibly go wrong?

There are a lot of fine things in the world – the first day of spring, a new favourite song, being drunk, an amusing hat, boobs – but for me nothing beats roaring onto a new road with an old bike and a backpack. I felt the early morning drizzle wash away months of stress and concrete dust. My shoulders straightened as the traffic thinned out and the first rice paddies appeared. An hour north of Saigon I turned off Highway One and into the hills.

Highway One is famously dangerous and unpleasant and I was glad to be off it. It is the main north-south arterial and overloaded trucks compete with long-distance buses, speeding BMWs, scooters, tractors and ox carts. In a country of mental roads, this one is Hannibal Lector. At one point I became caught between two eighteen wheelers as they bounced and swayed a foot from each handle bar. I gunned the engine and passed between them in a cloud of water-spray like a big wave surfer shooting out of a collapsing barrel. Goodbye Clarice…

Vehicles like this tend to have right of way.

Soon after I turned off the highway I made the mistake of filling up with petrol. I didn’t know it was a mistake at the time but ten minutes down the road the bike was coughing and carrying on and we were down to 50kph. A new spark plug, a fuel change and cleaning the water trap helped but the old girl was still dying pretty often, usually as I was overtaking, leaving me staring at the grinning bumper of a six-wheel-drive dump truck. My bike was trying to kill me. I could hardly blame her, we had been riding steadily uphill through heavy rain all day. By the time we reached Da Lat, I had been on the road for ten hours and covered 300km and I was spluttering and shivering as badly as the bike.

I found a $10 hotel, a beer and a hot shower and soon I was wet on the inside and dry on the outside which I decided was far better than the other way around.

Happily the rain had eased to a mere torrent so I borrowed an umbrella and went for a tour and some food. The first thing I noticed about Da Lat was that there was something wrong with the ground. Some parts were higher than others and the bits in between were kind of sloping. In the distance other bits of ground were sticking way up in the air, obscuring parts of the sky. This was most odd. I felt like a Dutch explorer. But wait, it was coming back to me. There was a name for these things – hills.

Saigon is on the dead flat Mekong delta and the sight of hills – as well as the forest covering them –  was a nice change, even though the rain didn’t let up. I found a restaurant overlooking the lake, ate something hot and pleasant and wandered through the pretty, old houses the French had built when they used Da Lat as a summer escape from the delta heat.

At the hotel I wheeled the bike into the foyer –  usual practice in Vietnam where theft is a problem – and turned in.

Soggy Da Lat.

Saigon III – Four Days in the Life

I'd never been overtaken by a kitchen before I came to Vietnam.

 Alicia and I had planned to spend three or four months in Saigon teaching and earning as much cash as we could. We stayed nearly nine months. After a week, I couldn’t decide whether I liked it or not. I still feel the same.

An Idiot confused

I’m sitting in traffic, tropical rain finding holes in my poncho, my leather shoes drenched in inky canal water which flows up the sewers and over the roads every time it rains. In the Wet season it rains a lot. Young guys on modified two-stroke scooters fly past and spray the putrid water over everyone. I’m trying to turn left but in this weather no one lets you in. Buses charge through intersections, horns blaring. I get to school and rinse my shoes and socks in the bathroom sink. Barefoot I teach three bored teenagers. I’m struggling, exhausted from teaching morning and night classes six days a week. The wage is about fifteen bucks an hour. Prep time is unpaid and I have to buy my books. The DVD player that I’d planned to use is broken. I’ll have to wing it. What am I doing here?

A flooded lane on my way to work.

 The next day the rain has stopped and it’s not too hot. My morning class loves the new game I’ve come up with. One of the students gives me a traditional moon-cake to celebrate the weekend’s festival. The shy girl in the back finally joins in an activity. After class I zip through light traffic to my favourite café for spring rolls and spicy noodles. One of my fellow teachers is there and we decide to have a couple of cheeky between-class beers. As I cruise through the sunshine to my afternoon class, Alicia calls to say we’re invited to a birthday BBQ. Goat and beef fried at a table-for-twenty on a charcoal fire and eaten with rice, lettuce and fresh herbs, all washed down with 70-cent iced beers. After dinner, we ride back through now-empty streets in a convoy of 10 scooters all riding two-up and swerving slightly to Thi’s Cafe to drink beer and watch a couple of Filipino guys play acoustic covers.
At home, the maid has cleaned our skinny two-story house and done the laundry. On the rooftop I lean against the stainless steel water tank and watch Saigon twinkle, thinking how lucky I am to be living in such an exotic, chaotic city surrounded by friends.

A little cross-cultural vodka bonding.

            At 6am I jerk awake from some strange dream feeling that something is not right. The door from the bedroom to the balcony is open and my school bag is near the door, papers scattered everywhere. My head is unaccountably foggy –  I didn’t drink that much, did I? Lurching out of bed I reach down for my pants but they’re halfway to the door. When I can’t find the computer, it dawns on me. Shit. Robbed.

            “Alicia. Where’s your iPod?”

            “Hmm?”

            “Your iPod. I think we’ve been robbed.”

That wakes her up.

            Grand total – one computer, two iPods, 30 or 40 bucks cash. No insurance.

Two days before I’d gotten my first full month’s pay. A huge wad of 30 million dong. Luckily that was in a locked draw with the passports and credit cards. 30 million dong is about $1500. After rent, living expenses and replacing the nicked gear, I wouldn’t quite break even this month. A month of hard work and stress down the toilet – so much for saving money. I go to school and have the worst class of my life. I’m grumpy, tired and I can’t think properly. I stutter like crazy. I feel like an idiot.

            Alicia gets a motorbike taxi to the police station to make a report. They say that we had probably been followed home from the pub. They had either drugged us at the bar or piped gas into our room. My wallet and iPod had been in my pants about a foot from my head as I slept. Alicia’s had been on her bedside table. She feels sick.

            That night the landlords arrive. A wealthy couple in their 60s, they own several houses. He stores his Harley Davidson and Yamaha cruising bikes on our bottom floor. He has a deep, slow voice and not much English. He’s covered in faded tats and by Vietnamese standards he’s a giant. He fought in the war on the losing side. He smiles a lot. She is quiet and friendly. When she hears what happened she pats Alicia on the arm and asks the maid to make some ice soda and lime. She gives us a heavy duty padlock for the balcony door and waives the electricity bill.

            When they leave a friend comes over and we sit in the courtyard drinking 333 beer. I call in sick for my evening class.

Saigon traffic

 A month later and I’ve been paid again, a little more because of a few extra classes. It’s independence day so, for the first time in months, I have two consecutive days off. Over the last few weeks the rains have eased off and it feels like the Wet is winding down. The sun is pale and the spectacular thunder storms have stopped. In the morning I lie in bed listening to the rattle and cry of rubbish collectors and fruit sellers in the street below. I wander to the end of our road for breakfast. Fresh baguette with omelette, salad, herbs, soy and chili sauce. All washed down with ca phe sua da – strong coffee strained over ice with sweet condensed milk. Most days I have two. The lady at the stall recognises me and has stopped laughing at my painfully bad Vietnamese.

            Because of the holiday, the traffic is light and I decide to walk into central park. Usually the scooters choking both the road and the footpath make walking in this part of town dangerous and unpleasant. My house is on an alley off Dien Bien Phu, the main road north out of town that becomes highway one and snakes 1000 miles to Ha Noi. Hunched old ladies sell lottery tickets to drivers stopped at traffic lights and groups of men drinking beer at plastic tables. In a country with no pension or healthcare it’s their only income. I walk past a group of men drinking in the shade of a lone tree growing out of the broken footpath. I smile and they beckon me over in the Vietnamese way, fingers pointing down. I tell them I’m an English teacher from Australia. They laugh, drunk at 10am. One man hands me a Saigon beer, a glass full of ice and a grape, addressing me as thay, a pronoun meaning teacher. He puts the grape in the glass and fills it with warm beer. I raise the glass.

            “Mot, Hai, Ba, Yo!” We chant the Vietnamese for 1, 2, 3, cheers and I down the beer, and the grape, eliciting cheers. I thank them and leave.

On hot days the stink is unreal

            After half an hour skipping over broken concrete and dodging scooters racing up the wrong side of the road I cross a bridge over a black canal to district one. In a city of stinking, sewage-choked waterways this one is the worst. I try to hold my breath as I hurry across. Barges loaded with dredged sediment sit low in the water. Workmen building a retaining wall stand waist deep in filth pouring concrete. Inexplicably a couple of guys are fishing, silently jiggling their rods and flicking cigarettes off the bridge.

Josh singing up a storm in central park.

I walk past a strip of shops selling  plastic motorbike helmets with pictures of butterflies, racing stripes or – occasionally – Nazi swastikas. Then more tables of drinking, chatting men until I reach the cathedral and central park. The cathedral is beautiful amongst the shopping malls and glass office blocks but I prefer the park opposite. Today it is packed. Red flags are everywhere, hung from trees and lamp posts.

            My teacher friend Josh is playing guitar in the park. He speaks fluent Vietnamese and has learned a few local pop songs. A crowd of balloon sellers, motorbike-taxi drivers and teenage girls are gathered around. They are all obviously amazed to hear this young American singing their songs. People walking past do classic double-takes and stop to listen, smiling. I play a few tunes. We start a game to see who can get the most people to stop and listen, the winner gets a free coffee. Josh wins and we grab some lunch. It’s good.

Playing Daddy at an orphanage for kids with HIV.

Saigon II – The Most Beautiful Thing I’ve Ever Owned

Off to work

Here’s a trivia question for you. What is the highest selling motor vehicle of all time? The VW Beetle? Toyota Corolla? Nup. It’s the Honda Super Cub. A tiny ‘step-thru’ scooter manufactured from 1958 to, well, now. To date there have been around 65 million built in 15 countries. In Australia we know them as the little red things the postman rides up the footpath. It is estimated – wrongly, by me –  that 56% of people currently own one.

Out of all them, I owned the prettiest. 50cc of pure sweetness and light. But like anything worth having, it took some finding.

Six weeks into my stay in Saigon I was hitting dead-ends in my job hunt. Day after day of pointless interviews and knocking on doors in the million-degree heat. Is there anything more depressing than being rejected? It got to me. Soon I settled into a dreary routine of mornings spent job-hunting and afternoons drinking enormous beers and eating chicken sandwiches. I was so bored that I started writing a silly blog.

One tipsy Tuesday afternoon, a superb baby-blue vintage Cub purred past the cafe and parked across the road – a piece of quiet blue-and-chrome perfection in the stained concrete madness that is downtown Saigon. I was entranced. Chicken fat and french fry crumbs fell onto the table as I stared. I was having a Wayne’s World moment. It would be mine. Oh yes, it would be mine.

Phwoooaarrrr...

At the time I was riding a plasticy Chinese-made, Honda-knock-off scooter which was so much like everyone else’s that when I parked it, I had to try my key in every bike in the lot just to find it again. It was reliable, it was easy to ride – I hated it. I’m a mechanic, I grew up driving cars, fixing cars and reading magazine’s with names like Street Machine and Just V8s. Later I became interested in bikes. 8 years working 40 hours a week for nothing more than an old man’s back, scarred black hands and a comically small paycheck somewhat dampened my enthusiasm, but there’s still some love left. To me a car or bike (or a bicycle, or a boat) is more like a friend than an appliance. It’s not just something you use, something that does a job for you. It’s something you have a relationship with. A vehicle should either make you smile or make you want to kick the hell out of it. It should never be just a thing.

My Cub was never just a thing.

            After I saw that first Cub on the street, I was besotted. I tried to buy it off the girl but she refused. I spent a week looking. I made phone calls. I searched the internet. One guy tried to sell me his 1960s Vespa until I explained to him that Vespas were invented when an Italian bolted skate board wheels and a chainsaw engine to a toilet as a practical joke. I’d sooner turn my face inside out than own one.

Late at night I could be seen walking down the street screaming and weeping like a child. I needed this bike. Eventually I got a break. A guy knew a guy who’s sister had one. This was how I met my personal Saigon motorbike dealer, Mr Duong. His sister’s Cub was a 1973 C50 that had been painted ‘hooker’s lipstick purple’ and had no brakes. I fell in love immediately. After a short test ride and some negotiation, we had a deal. For $250 I would get the bike with a new baby-blue paint job, recovered seat, new tyres, working brakes and a service. For $250. That’s value. Vietnamese people equate new with good – It’s only some very  westernized people, often university students, that have any interest in ‘retro’ or ‘vintage’  – so no one wants this old stuff. Combine that with the fact that the average mechanic works on the footpath under a tarpaulin for a few bucks a day, and you’ve got some cheap old restored bikes getting around.

The bike being spray-painted on a busy footpath in the centre of Saigon. If any of my panel-beater mates could read or use computers they'd be horrified to see this.

            Now I don’t mean to say that the mighty Cub was without it’s flaws. 50cc with a three speed gearbox does not add up to a sporty ride. Especially when you’re riding two-up. Also, and I’m being honest now, it didn’t always start easily. Or at all. It had a pathological fear of water and when faced with the weekly Saigon floods it had to be pushed and sworn at fairly often. Because of the leaking fuel cap and the tiny tank, I could only put 1.5lt of fuel in at a time, otherwise it would slop onto the seat and stain the paintwork. Or explode. The front brakes never worked, neither did the speedo. I had to carry a screwdriver to adjust the carburetor on humid days. The headlight only worked if you thumped it and revved the engine. It had an endearing habit of stalling in front of buses mid-intersection. Soon after I bought it the left hand rear indicator fell off. As did the mirror. When some tool crashed into me and shattered the front mudguard, the replacement was both a different shape and a different colour. But it was as pretty as Julia Roberts’ smile and sounded as sweet as a George Harrison guitar solo. It was so light I could lift the whole bike and park it anywhere. I’ve rarely been happier than when clicking into top gear at thirty kph on the sweeping right-hander alongside Pham Ngu Lao park in the sunshine, threading between tourist buses and taxis.

It was a rainy night when I sold it to a workmate’s brother. I hope he loved it.

I hope he didn’t get squashed by one of those bloody buses.

For conclusive proof that the Cub is the greatest thing ever conceived by the human brain, check out the Hondels performing Little Honda.

Saigon I – Teaching Terrors

Such a fraud.

Two weeks into my time in Vietnam and I’m shaking and sweating, shitting myself basically, at the prospect of meeting a 16 year old Vietnamese boy. This is what it must have been like in’69. Only this kid wouldn’t be crouching behind a tree cradling a Russian-made assault rifle. At least I hoped not – this was a high school in the middle of Saigon.

If you ever find yourself speaking to a Vietnamese person with a stutter and an Aussie accent, here’s why. I come from a family of teachers – mother, father, brother, grandfather, auntie, cousins, the lot – and I’ve spent the last 12 years doing everything but teaching. I’ve been a mechanic, a delivery driver, a bookseller and a busker, but in my thirtieth year the family firm caught up with me – I was a teacher. Or at least I would be if I didn’t die of a fear-induced stroke in the next few minutes.

In late February, Alicia and I arrived in Saigon (that’s Ho Chi Minh City for those of you playing at home) where we had enrolled in a course to make us teach English good. The month-long TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) is one of a couple of internationally recognised qualifications required by most schools to land an English teaching gig. There were five of us doing the course together - American Meg, Vietnamese-American Viet, Aussie Brad, Alicia and me. In only our second week of the course our heavily-pregnant instructor Diem told us that we now knew enough about teaching methodology. It was time to start teaching. Tomorrow.

“What’s a methodology?” I whimpered to Alicia as we cobbled together a written plan for a 60 minute one-on-one lesson at a local high school.

With no resources available, I had to channel my inner child to prep for kids classes. Note the retarded cat.

The next morning we all piled into a taxi and pushed through the heat and chaos of Saigon traffic. Ten minutes into my lesson and I’m still sans student. My fellow TESOLians are seated and teaching with varying degrees of competence. Alicia’s student speaks English like a BBC newsreader and they chat happily about life in Australia and some recent revision to Swedish taxation law or something.

Finally Dung is pushed into the room. He’s so nervous he knocks his chair over.

“Hello, how are you?” I say.

The kid just sweats and shifts in his seat.

“How are you?” More slowly this time.

Nothing.

“He doesn’t understand.” Says our instructor helpfully.

Let me just point out at this stage that after a week in the country I don’t speak a syllable of Vietnamese. Our style of teaching is called target language teaching and the idea is to use pictures, context, mime and repetition to get the message across. The problem I faced now is that we had been told we were teaching kids with intermediate level English, enough to hold a pretty basic conversation. Poor Dung was pre-beginner. My lesson was based on ‘the family’ and ‘likes and dislikes’. Stuff like, ‘how old is your brother? Does he like reading books? What does he dislike?’

Mr Dung was as likely to know the word dislike as he was hypoanaeshthesiologist, and I just made that word up. I was screwed. Eventually we stumbled through ‘what is your name,’ and ‘how old are you?’ Then we just drew silly stickmen playing soccer and spoke the international language of 16 year old boys.

“Manchester United”

“Yes”

“Angelina Jolie”

“Yes!”

I drew some boobs and hair on one of the stickmen playing soccer.

“Angelina Jolie and Manchester United.”

Limited educational value but at least we were laughing.

Notice all the boys paying such close attention. Alicia is a very effective teacher.

The next couple of weeks were spent doing lesson plans in the morning and teaching in the afternoons at various schools around town. In the last week I had my biggest lesson to date – an observed 90 minute lesson in front of 35 teenagers in, of all places, a government run technical college. The school was straight from the 1950s - wooden floors, big old blackboard, bare walls and teachers' cane resting in the corner (Vietnamese teachers still belt their students pretty regularly). Each classroom could sit 80 to 100 students on wooden desks that still had holes for inkwells. The only decoration on the damp-stained walls was a framed photo of Ho Chi Minh staring sternly onto the class from above the raised teachers desk. A single fan with no guard creaked from high on the wall and scattered any paper not weighted down. With no carpet, the room echoed like a drum as the kids in starched shirts filed in. And here’s the weird thing, I wasn’t really nervous. It was the same during my whole teaching ‘career’. The bigger the class the more comfortable I felt. Even after 6 months, one-on-one classes terrify me. A class of 40 rowdy 12 year olds? Bring it on.

As you can probably deduce for the décor, Vietnamese government schools don’t do fun. So teaching in them is easy, just play a couple of games and get them running around or staging a silly play and you’ve made 35 new friends. That’s what I did and a couple of days later we all graduated with our ‘license to teach’. 

Graduation day.

 All I had to do now was find a job.

             Saigon has nearly 47 million English Language Centres and another 84 billion High schools that employ foreign teachers. Ok so I clearly made that up, but you get the idea – there are heaps. It shouldn’t be hard to find a job. The only problem was that I needed two things to get a job in Saigon, a TESOL certificate (check) and a University Degree. Since I was not smart enough to do a Bachelor of Science and not silly enough to do a Bachelor of Arts, I never went to ‘College’ as it’s known in Vietnam (the Vietnamese love an Americanism). After a frustrating, depressing month of teaching the odd evening class and sweating around Saigon in long pants and leather shoes going to interviews and handing out reams of CVs, I hit upon a solution that was brilliant in it’s simplicity. I lied.

              With her good-looks, charm and legitimate qualifications, Alicia had been offered a job about 35 seconds after our course finished at one of Saigon’s better language centres, so I borrowed one of her two – I know, greedy – bachelors degrees and forged a pretty good photocopy of a Deakin University Bachelor of Arts (Photography). Incidentally this would backfire months later when the principal of my school asked me to take a few publicity photos for the school brochure.

“Um, why me?”

“Didn’t you study photography in college?”

“I did?.. Oh, yeah I did. Sure I’ll do it.”

Although at that time I thought aperture was a form of alternative medicine and F-stop was a style of hip hop dance, I talked a bit of nonsense about lighting and framing and now there’s a 5x life-size billboard of me ‘teaching’ two good-looking 'students' outside my old school. Ha.

I left the school the same week this went up.

Anyway, armed with my dodgy facsimile, I was offered a job that week at CEFALT school in District 3. Who said that crime doesn’t pay? The gig was teaching 90 minute general and conversational English classes to a mixture of university students, housewives, retirees and businessmen. The classes ranged from starter level (‘How are you? My name is…’) to advanced (good English but some suspect pronunciation). When the new term started a few weeks later I was teaching at two schools, 6 or 7 days a week both mornings and evenings. After three months in Saigon I was finally saving money.

Now we were both earning money we could afford exotic luxury items like vegemite.