Hai Van Pass to Cuo Lac – Welcome to the Jungle

The steep mountain road north of Khe Sanh.

Somewhere north of Hue in central Vietnam, I stopped for a snack of Vietnam cold turkey, checked the map and turned my motorbike from the ocean to silver city, pausing only to sell my soul with my cigarettes to the black market man – I was going to Khe Sanh.

Those of you who have the gross misfortune of not being Australian have probably decided that I’ve descended into incomprehensibility. In fact you’ve probably stopped reading. How rude. If you did grow up riding the sheep’s back through a sunburnt country though you will know I’ve been paraphrasing lyrics from one of the most iconic Aussie song of all time, Cold Chisel’s ‘Khe Sanh’ – a tale of a Vietnam veteran’s struggle to adjust to civilian life.

The battle of Khe Sanh was a 1968 Viet Cong offensive against an American military base. By the time the VC took the base six months later, around 1,000 Allied troops and 5,000 North Vietnamese had died fighting over a lonely hill of questionable strategic importance in the middle of the jungle.

As I rode north west from Hue through what had been the demilitarized zone between north and south Vietnam, the roads deteriorated. There are, I thought to myself as I dodged potholes and dozy buffalo, probably better reasons for visiting somewhere than a familiar song title. But the name that had been scratched into my subconscious needed a face.

            A day’s ride that began amongst the English breakfasts of Hoi An topped the bitumen splendour of the Hai Van pass and left the highway near Hue before ending in the mountains and mist of the country’s west. It was like an advert for motorcycling in Vietnam.

Outta the way dopey.

            Although Khe Sanh is now called Hu’o’ng Hoa, I recognized it by a huge monument to the battle in the middle town. I spent $6 on a damp room with a TV remote chained to the bed and a fan that didn’t work and began my nightly routine of hanging up drenched clothes. From a balcony strewn with drying bedding, I watched clouds scud over the treetops and listened to the afternoon chorus of birdsong.

Hu'o'ng Hoa's subtle, restrained monument to the battle of Khe Sanh.

Hu’o’ng Hoa is little more than a couple of streets straddling a mountain ridge with the usual assortment of mobile phone accessories shops, mechanic’s workshops, banks and a market. I wandered around for an hour before the sun set and found a little hill-top cemetery next to a muddy sports field full of shirtless kids playing soccer and buffalo grazing on the pitch. More than anywhere else in Vietnam I felt like a novelty as I smiled, waved and snapped photos. Mothers smiled at me and encouraged their kids tosay hello. Older kids giggled and hid. After an hour the rain started again and I decided that the town would be better enjoyed from somewhere with a roof. Since I left Hoi An and crossed the old north-south border, my few words of southern-accented Vietnamese had been useless so I found a street-side stall, took a tiny plastic stool and pointed at beer and noodle soup.

Mum cooks while her teenaged daughter serves steaming noodle soup in Hu'o'ng Hoa.

The bike’s old fuel problem had reared its spluttering head again yesterday and facing a long ride through what looked like empty jungle on my map, I decided to do something about it. Reasoning that my hotel room couldn’t possibly smell any worse, I drained some fuel into a beer can which I had fortuitously emptied earlier, pulled off the bike’s carburetor and sidled past reception. After having previous bikes butchered in interesting and unusual ways by untrained local mechanics, I was reluctant to let anyone near this one.

Using the bathroom sink as a parts washer and the writing desk as a work bench, I stripped the carby and found the problem – contaminated fuel had clogged the main jet with what we in trade call black shit. After a quick clean out and a late night test flog up Khe Sanh’s main drag, I was ready to go.

Early the next day I loaded the bike, fueled up and headed north. A few miles out of town I saw a sign for an American airstrip and turned into an empty, muddy parking lot. Beyond a low fence was a junkyard of military hardware patrolled by two barking dogs. A man in khakis yelled at the dogs and invited me in. Lining a concrete path were rusting skeletons of tanks, fighter planes and helicopters overgrown with weeds. Beyond them was a long red airstrip sloping down to a wide valley – all that was left of Khe Sanh military base. The wreckage of a small fighter sat next to a huge B52 bomber that looked like it could fly tomorrow. The airstrip too looked like it could still be used. Everything else was slowly returning to the jungle. Foot-long shells lay beside the path and the garden beds were made of more military scrap. According to the register in a small museum next to air strip, the last visitor had been two weeks ago. The book was full of entries from Australians – the most moving were from veterans. Besides racks of guns, the museum mostly contained photos of grinning young men and ripped-apart bodies, their captions full of dodgy English and propaganda.

A downed US plane displayed proudly at Khe Sanh airbase.

Back on the bike I was soon on a skinny concrete road bordered by jungle. I left the scattered houses behind and sped past a sign that loomed out of the mist. I was in Phong Nha national park with at least 150km before the next village. At the end of a cutting a muddy path led into the jungle. I hid the bike in the undergrowth and pushed into the damp jungle. The path became mud-choked and patterned with footprints. When I stopped the silence was complete and although I was climbing steeply I never got a view, never knew where I was. I tried to imagine what it must have been like during the war, straining your ears for a cracking stick or a clattering leaf that might mean ambush, studying the trail ahead for signs of a trip wire or a covered pit full of sharpened bamboo stakes. It made my skin crawl. I slid back to the road and was happy to hear the bike start first try.

The air got cooler and the corners tighter as the empty road wound through the trees. The mist lifted and I got my first view of unbroken, uninhabited jungle. With no rising smoke or logging scars it was a perfect panorama of green bush and blue-tinged peaks. Although only a few miles from the Laos border I could see the port of Dong Ha and the sea beyond – all the way across Vietnam’s skinny waist. Farther on the rain started again and I was once more in the clouds. The road became narrower and more overgrown and I hadn’t seen another vehicle for hours. I came to a landslide that had covered the road as it wound around a steep hillside. A bamboo fence blocked the road. Several motorbike tracks led around the barrier. Without enough fuel to get back to Khe Sanh I had no choice but to crawl through the rain and over the steeply cambered mud. On my right the road dropped away into the mist. I feathered the clutch and looked straight ahead.

Beyond the mudslip the road improved and I saw my first house. I have never been happier to be chased by a dog. Late in the afternoon, wet, tired and low on fuel, I limped into the town of Cuo Lac. I’d had enough adventure for one day.

The view across Vietnam, from the Laos border to the South China Sea.

Kon Tum to Hai Van Pass – V-wet-nam

The weather closing in again near Hue.

Like many great things in life, motorcycling is never just ok. It’s either magnificent of awful. It’s a freedom machine effortlessly bonding rider and road, or it’s an angry badger gnawing at your scrotum. You’re either steering a cloud through a bed of flowers or piloting a rotting pig up the devil’s arsehole.

            Sorry about that last one.

            The ride from Kon Tum to Hoi An fell into the latter category. In 12 hours I did 250km, got lost three times and swore at a duck. It was rain as heavy as I’ve seen and it didn’t stop for a second. At one stage I found myself riding the wrong way up Highway One alternately singing Sheryl Crowe songs and screaming obscenities to stop my frozen face peeling off.

In fact, I don’t want to talk about it thank you very much.

            All I’ll say is that by the time I got to Hoi An’s old town, everything I owned up to and including my spleen was wet and, oddly, I could only speak German. I found ein zimmer in a small hotel and jumped fully-clothed into the shower. After thawing, I hung everything up to dry, turned on the air-con, crawled into bed and started a relationship with a man named Jeremy.

Jeremy Wade is a middle-aged Englishman with questionable oral hygiene and – at the risk of sounding like Mrs Slocombe from are you being served – a big rod. That’s because he hosts a fishing show called river monsters which Discovery Channel were playing ad nauseam. As the only English program on the hotel TV and with the rain still rattling the windows, it was my only choice. Also, it’s really good.

With Jeremy’s dulcet cries of "fish on, fish on" ringing in my ears, I slept.

Yet another ye olde tailor shop in Hoi An.

            I woke late the next morning to find a weak sun steaming the cobblestones dry outside my window. In a country of concrete-box housing and broken footpaths, Hoi An’s historic architecture and partially pedestrianized old town is a welcome change. Tiled roofs cover cracked yellow render and there’s hardly a straight line in sight. Moss tinges the roofs and fills cracks in eighteenth-century houses that lean drunkenly on each other. Before several decades in which one war blended into the next, many of Vietnam’s towns looked like this. By virtue of being an obscure, unimportant fishing town, Hoi An had been spared the bombing and bullet holes. Some streets look the same as they would have 200 years ago. Except that nearly every building is now given over to one of the town’s tourist draw cards – cheap tailored clothes. Virtually everyone that visits gets something made and the locals are cashing in. Even my hotel doubled as a tailor’s shop.

I ordered an American breakfast from an English menu and watched the round-eyes bump telephoto lenses as they ambled through by far the most touristy place I had seen in Vietnam.

            If you can’t beat ‘em and all that so after breakfast I went straight to Number One Design and got measured up, noting how much the price had risen in the two years since I’d last been. But $35 for two shirts is still cheap, and the one I’d bought there last time was still going strong so I knew the quality was ok. Mostly to stop them hassling me, I then commissioned a rather snazzy pair of pinstriped shorts from my hotel’s tailor.

A morning of being touched in unusual places left me in need of a beer so I hit one of the riverside cafes and filled up on 40 cent draught beer and noodles. I spent the afternoon chatting to backpackers, glad of some conversation that didn’t involve miming or the word kangaroo.

The following day I gave the Win some overdue loving, changing the oil and adjusting the chain. As I drained the oil, trying not to spill too much on the World Heritage listed footpath, a local pulled up on an old scooter. He said something in Vietnamese and I soon realized he was asking me how old the oil was. I told him 1500km and he grabbed the greasy bottle, miming that he wanted to use it in his bike. I admired his dedication to recycling.

Behind Hoi An's market.

The day was warm and with nothing to do but wait for my clothes, I decided on a test ride to the nearby beach. When I arrived I saw the upside to all the crap rainy season weather – good surf. The rain had been caused by a typhoon which had recently buggered parts of the Philippines and stirred up the South China Sea. Not generally considered a surfing Mecca, as the phrase goes, Vietnam’s line-ups are spared the hordes of he-men that make being a rubbish surfer like me so embarrassing in Australia. After a quick review of my surfer’s dictionary I got stoked, hired a gun and charged the next set. Two hours of being sucked under the lip and dragged over the falls had given me a gnarly board rash and a sick fin tattoo so I paddled in. It was time to get away from the beach and back to speaking the Queen’s tongue. I returned to town and picked up my clothes, which had been made in a day and fit perfectly

The next morning I turned onto the coast road past palm trees and shiny new resorts that obscured both the view of and the access to the stunning beach that I remembered from my last visit. This area has become one of Vietnam’s most popular coastal getaways for international tourists and a growing number of wealthy locals. On a drizzly day in low season it was hard to see how demand could keep up with the speed of development. I soon left the empty resorts and arrived in Da Nang, where I joined the rush hour traffic.

Da Nang is one of the biggest cities in the country and with its beach-side location and interesting history it probably deserved more than a cursory glance. But I was in a hurry. I wanted to get to the Hai Van Pass, allegedly the best stretch of road in Vietnam.

The mighty Hai Van pass.

Glued to the side of cliffs with views of rocky coves hundreds of feet below, the pass is 20 km of biking heaven. The Hai Van tunnel channels trucks and buses deep below the twisting tarmac so apart from the occasional private car, motorbikes have free reign. This is how it should be, I thought as a leaned into corners and clicked through gears, a world of bikes. A two-wheeled utopia with no belching trucks and fat old men in their polar bear-killing, four-doored smog boxes. Then the fog rolled in and the rain started.

What I wouldn’t give for a four-doored smog box.

Soon the road descended from the fog and joined Highway One. After an hour I got to the city of Hue, pleasantly surprised that I hadn’t been smeared up the road like meaty lip balm by the homicidal truck drivers. I steered at random through city streets and over the perfume river and found myself in the centre of the old city. I pulled over to consult the map and noticed that I was parked in front of one of the only western bars in town. I took this as a sign from the hamburger gods and ordered one with the lot. I topped up my dangerously low cholesterol levels and steered towards Laos. I was going back to the jungle.

Enjoying a rare break in the weather at Hue.

Da Lat to Kon Tum – Uncle Ho’s Highway

Dodging showers somewhere near Da Lat.

During what the Vietnamese refer to as the American war, the Ho Chi Minh trail was the name given to a network of paths and roads that supplied the VC with fresh troops and supplies from the north. It ran along Vietnam’s western border, snaking in and out of Laos and Cambodia. Some of the heaviest bombing and nastiest jungle fighting of the war took place along this route. In the ‘60s and ‘70s troops sometimes took months to trek through the jungle. Now, thanks to the Ho Chi Minh Highway, I was cruising comfortably at 80kph, leaning around rolling bends past tractors and water buffalo. From jungle hell to Vietnam’s best road in 35 years – not a bad effort.

Come to Vietnam. Get a bike. Do it now.

We’ve all seen the movies so we know how to describe this part of Vietnam - hot, muddy and mountainous with dense, stifling, tangled jungles, right? Well, maybe, but it’s also really… pretty. Jungle-clad hills flank fields and rice paddies, waterfalls burst from sheer cliffs high above the valley floor. Everything is green, wet and fertile. Villages with newly-thatched houses and yards full of pigs, water-buffalo and kids hug the highway. Every market is stacked with fresh fruit and vegetables, live chickens and Chinese electrical goods. In every field someone walks knee-deep in mud behind a buffalo or sits on a motorized rotary hoe which looks like an evil mix of paddle steamer, bicycle and lawn mower. People wave at me. Where is the desperate poverty and hostile locals I had been warned about in Saigon? Where are the dead dogs, flyblown kids and bomb craters? I’m not saying these people are wealthy – they're not – and maybe it's just the time of year that made the country side look so fertile, but I couldn’t help thinking that there are worse places to live – like Belgium.

Harvesting rice. Probably.

            For four days I cruised north from Da Lat through the bustling regional centres of Boun Ma Thout, Pleiku and Kun Tom, staying in $10 hotel rooms and eating fresh baguettes for breakfast and spring rolls with noodles for dinner. I especially liked Boun Ma Thout which sounds like a Scottish swear word but is a lively market town surrounded by low hills. In the towns along the highway I stopped for sweet coffee and endless refills of hot tea, pleased and surprised at my ability to communicate these desires. Despite months in the country my Vietnamese was still horrific.

Fishing near Boun Ma Thout.

            As the highway took me north and slightly west towards Laos, the hills turned into mountains and the farms into jungle. I began passing fewer ox carts and more logging trucks. There are still thousands of square miles of jungle in this part of the country and it is being felled at an alarming although predictable rate. Muddy scars appeared where loggers had torn huge holes in the jungle. Some logs were so big that one trucks could only carry three. The villages disappeared but occasionally I would see locals walking on the road. The men carried machetes and the women wore traditional long skirts and carried woven baskets on their backs. They were leaner and had browner faces than most Vietnamese. One man turned off the road and onto one of the muddy paths that I had presumed were animal tracks. In five steps he vanished into the jungle. At a tiny market cut into the trees, a woman sold vegetables and machetes. Dangling from a vine rope tied to her thatched shelter were three live animals that I didn’t recognize. The size of a big rat with squat, powerful bodies and short, grey fur, they had strangely human feet and a long nose like an anteater. I guess they were someone’s dinner.

A cloudburst over denuded hills near the Laos border.

            Hunting and deforestation has caused massive damage to an area still feeling the effects of American defoliant used during the war. At about the time I came through the area, a study announced that there were now almost certainly no wild tigers in Vietnam. In my time in the country the only wild animals I saw were a couple of beautiful white-furred animals that looked like big ferrets and one huge green snake. All of them were deep in national parks and I’m afraid to say that I accidentally ran over the snake. Oops.

I was told that the white, dead trees are a result of American defoliant. Birth defects here are very common.

            Despite having been bombed and shot at rather a lot by people who looked like me, the locals were almost pathologically friendly. For three days I didn’t see a fellow white devil or meet anyone who could speak more than a few words of English but I never felt lonely. In fact I felt like a rock star. There wasn’t a village in which the kids didn’t run after the bike screaming ‘hello’ at me as I waved, or a gaggle of girls that didn’t giggle as I walked past. Even the old men playing checkers with bottle caps gave me a nod. It was all very good for the ego.

            When I finally did see some westerners, they were on bicycles, which, as we all know, are for people who can’t operate an internal combustion engine. I was clearly the superior human being.

            Twenty miles down the road, I was forced to question that last piece of offensive nonsense when I ran out of petrol. As I pushed my bike through the jungle listening to the prattle of unseen birds, I prayed the bikists wouldn’t pass me. If they did I would obviously have to kill them to prevent word reaching home. Fortunately, before they pedaled to a grisly end I found a house at the end of a muddy path. A table of guys drinking morning beers and listening to booming Viet-pop fell silent as I wheeled the bike up the path. Someone turned the music off. They couldn’t have been more shocked if a giant octopus had landed in their garden. Soon they were all talking at once. I explained that I needed gas and someone staggered to his bike and began siphoning fuel into a coke bottle. I told them I had ridden from Saigon. One guy pointed to my bike.

“What, on that piece of shit?”
At least I’m guessing that was what it translated as judging from his mates’ laughter.

They offered me a beer and the thought of staying in the middle of the jungle getting loaded with these boys was tempting. Then I remembered the pedal-fanciers behind me. It wouldn’t do to let them catch me.

            I limped into the nearest town and filled up on petrol and baguettes.

            When I left Saigon, I had been worried about the fact that it was still rainy season. So far it had rained everyday but usually only for an hour of two, which was ok - I had learned long ago that God’s revenge for continually referring to him as a ‘beardy twat’ was to make it rain every time I even looked at a motorcycle. It’s just a fact of life - if I’m on a bike, it’ll rain. I had waterproofs, I had a helmet visor. I figured I could handle it. The ride to Hoi An would prove me wrong.

            Beardy twat.

The rainy season in full pique provides a perfect backdrop to this photo shoot. Not so great to ride through.

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.