Cuo Lac to Ky Son – The Wild Wild West

They call it rainy season for a reason.

The first two trucks I had seen in days were side by side coming around a corner towards me, spitting a hard mist of water and gravel. Thank God for that, I thought as the bike squirmed through soft grass between the overtaking truck and a concrete retaining wall, I’m back on the Ho Chi Minh Highway. Narrowly avoiding being smeared into an abstract painting felt familiar and comforting after yesterday’s ride through empty jungle – at least it would be a quick end. Better than spending two weeks drinking my own wee before being raped to death by monkeys, or whatever happens in the jungle. At least now I was making good time in my race for the Laos border.

            I spent the next three days muttering as I rode through patchy jungle, flooded rice paddies and constant rain. Occasionally steep mountains would loom out of the mist, giving me a glimpse of what was probably a very pretty part of the country. I stayed in no-name towns and passed the evenings looking for food and attempting to dry my belongings. As I veered left and away from uncle Ho’s highway I began climbing, following a swollen river. Washouts and mudslides became more frequent and often I would have to wait for an oncoming truck as it bounced and skated on the edge of an eroded cliff. By the time I arrived in Ky Son the river had narrowed and the road clung to the side of a steep hillside that angled into thick cloud.

Another truck edges passed a recent mud slide.

            Ky Son is the last town before Laos and a steady trickle of trucks rattled down the main road. At the end of town where the highway turned sharply away from the river and into the mountains, I checked into a sprawling wooden hotel which half hung over the muddy river. It was a nice change form the narrow concrete-box hotels which scar most Vietnamese towns. I changed into less wet clothes and walked the length of town. Squeezed between the river and a mountain Ky Son stretches maybe a mile along the highway but is never more than a hundred metres wide. It felt like a border town, the locals were less curious – obviously used to strangers – and many people looked more Laotian than Vietnamese. Floods had ripped through the area a couple of months before and the river banks on both sides were freshly eroded. Jury-rigged stilts held corrugated iron houses above the torrent. On the other side of the highway a mudslide had partially engulfed a small house. I bought some unidentified fried food and a beer from the market and sat on the hotel’s deck watching workers reinforce the riverbank with sandbags and gravel in an attempt to save a teetering house. I wondered how they would fare in this latest flood.

Ky Son's riverside houses hang precariously.

            That night I broke a personal rule and accepted an invitation to karaoke. In normal circumstances, like all  people with properly functioning ears, I would sooner tear off my own eyelids than let someone sing karaoke at me but the novelty of talking to a fluent English speaker proved too much to resist. Huy was an engineer from Ha Noi who worked for a Chinese company contracted to built a hydro-electricity plant nearby. With a touch of characteristic Ha Noi snobbery he made it clear that he was only here for the money and hated living in this backward nowheresville. It was Saturday night – I hadn’t realized – and as we chatted in the backroom of the karaoke joint he drank Johnny Walker while a group of younger guys shyly filtered in. With Huy translating we made introductions and shared bowls of sunflower seeds, spitting the shells on the floor and watching the joint fill. Loud young men with stupid haircuts drank quickly while pretty girls in heels sat in quiet groups, drinking nothing.

            Groups began moving into the private karaoke rooms and soon conflicting pop beats boomed around the building. As I returned from the bathroom – a room built above the river with a hole in the floor – two giggling teenagers pulled me through a door. The windowless room was the size of a small bedroom. On the wall a large TV sat on a stack of speakers. A guy belted out a local pop tune into a cordless mic and twenty people danced and jumped. The music was deafening and the scene lit in strobe snapshots. A familiar funk of testerone, cigarette smoke and blind energy filled the hot room – it was exactly like a Saturday night at the small-town pubs where I did my formative drinking. Young people cramming a week’s worth of dangerous, desperate energy into this one night a week where they were free to drink, scream, fuck and fight before returning to real life in a dead town. It could have been Benny’s Tavern in Leongatha circa 2001.

Like that teenaged haunt, the room had a strong undercurrent of violence – an exaggerated, fragile crust of camaraderie that could break in an instant. As I was pushed and pulled through the crowd, grinning youths shouted questions at me in Vietnamese and gave me plastic cups full of sugary vodka mixers. One of them pulled me into the middle of the room where half a dozen guys were half dancing, half fighting, laughing as they shoulder charged each other and spilled drinks. My new friend began talking to me, his face a couple of inches from mine. He was skinny and shorter than me – at 5’10” I was the tallest guy in the room – but all muscle, like one of the workers you see shirtless and barefoot on Vietnamese construction sights. Even if I spoke Vietnamese I wouldn’t have been able to hear him over the music and screaming so I just shrugged and smiled. He still had a tight grip on my arm. Maybe he’s gay, I thought. I’d been propositioned a couple of times in Saigon, once during a class I was teaching. Before things got too awkward Huy found me and, with some difficulty, dragged me outside.

            “Man, you shouldn’t go in there.” He said once we were back in the bar. “That guy you were talking to is a gangster. He’s crazy.”

            “A gangster? Bullshit.” He had been about nineteen.

            “No bullshit, he’s crazy.” Huy repeated.

            We said our goodbyes and I made it safely to my hotel and lay in bed. After a couple of minutes I decided to dead lock the door. It had been a strange and strangely fitting last day in Vietnam after an amazing nine months.

Tomorrow night I would be in Laos.

Soggy little Ky Son.