noodles | travel blog

In my guest house in Vientiane (as in most of the guest houses I've stayed in so far) the bathroom was so small that it had become a habit to move the toilet roll to the next room before taking a shower.

I had done this, but just as I turned on the water, I realised that my bar of soap was still in the toilet bag on the bed. I popped outside, quickly shutting the door behind me so as not to get the bedroom wet. It was when I popped back in, soap in hand, that things went wrong. It was all over in a matter of seconds, but I'll slow it down, hopefully for your amusement.

As I entered the room from the south, I seemed to have completely forgotten that the 150cmx150cm glazed-tile bathroom floor and ditto walls were now splashing wet from the running shower. As my feet made contact with the floor, the left foot did what it's supposed to do. The right foot, however, shot across the wet tiles, only stopping when it reached the side of the (luckily Western-style) toilet, which occupied the north-eastern quarter of the room.

This caused the rest of my body to twirl around until I was facing west. I caught a brief glimpse of my own surprised face in the mirror above the sink, before I started falling backwards towards my original destination, the shower, in the south-eastern quarter of the room.

In an effort to regain my balance, I dropped the soap and grabbed the wash basin with both hands. This change of momentum caused my left foot, which until now had been supporting my weight, to slide the short distance to the south-west corner of the room. All my hopes of defeating gravity were now pinned on the wash basin.

As it turned out, the bloody thing was only resting on a couple of metal hooks on the wall, so it came off in my hands. I was now falling backwards carrying a 7kg ceramic sink.

Less than two seconds after entering the bathroom I was sitting next to the soap on the floor under the running shower with the sink in my lap. Long sprays of water shot out from several fresh leaks in the over-stretched tube that still (barely) connected the sink to the water mains, spraying most of the bedroom and its contents through the open door (though miraculously missing the toilet roll).

In the end, I was saved by the fact that it was a tiny bathroom. Before I had gained any serious speed, my back had hit the wall, and I had slid gently down to a seated position under the weight of the sink. This saved me from cracking my head on the floor or on the ceramic sink or on both.

Half an hour later the receptionist and I had replaced the leaking pipe with a new one and reattached the sink to the wall. I then proceeded to take my shower.

* * *

The next morning, as I came downstairs to check out of the guest house, there was a different receptionist.

"Room number?" he said.

"833," I said.

"833," he said, looking at his books. "Aha. Plumber Man."

On my second night in Vientiane I was fortunate to get talking to a local guy. He took me on a massive pub crawl that ended at around 2 am in the only late pub in town, which was apparently only allowed to stay open late because the owner worked for the police. By this time I had consumed a large quantity of Beerlao, and as the place also had open mic night, I ended up performing Langfredag i Aarhus to a crowd of bemused locals.

The next morning my friend took me sightseeing, and in the early afternoon he brought me along to a party for a friend who was "making monk". He explained that it's customary for Buddhist men in Laos to spend a week as a monk as part of their spiritual education. This can take place any time after the age of 20. We were going to the first day of a two-day party that families throw for their monks at the beginning of the week.

The food was on the table when we arrived. There were three guys making monk, all related to each other. Two of them were in their thirties and married with children, and the third one was just over 20. All three were dressed in white shirts and white sarongs, self-conciously stroking their shaved heads and eyebrows as my friend examined the generous rolls of cash gifts that they carried around in their breast pockets. Canadian dollars from an emigrated relative, and Thai bath from everyone else. We added our own gifts in local currency and helped ourselves to the food.

After a delicious meal we got ready to walk down the road to the temple. The three soon-to-be monks lined up, holding candles, flowers and incence in one hand, and a walking cane in the other. Their mothers, who led the procession, held the other end of the canes. Three mates held umbrellas to shield the new monks' shaved scalps from the sun, the rest of the family held on to the monks' or each other's coat tails, and off we went. There were flowers, fans, candles and camcorders, and someone was banging on a large gong.

As we entered the grounds to the temple I was encouraged to go to the front to take photos. As the proccession circled the temple three times, one woman showered the crowd with sweets and another kept shouting, "Oooooooh?", to which everyone replied, "Eeeeeeeeeh!"

The family then disappeared into the temple, and my friend and I sat down outside in the shade and had a Pepsi. A couple of guys were opening soft drink bottles which they kept carrying in to the people inside. My friend told me apologetically that there is no alcohol during these celebrations, but that this is duly compensated for the day after monk week. I wasn't complaining, given my excesses of the previous night.

According to my friend, this particular temple, Wat Sy Muong, is very popular among people from all over Vientiane, who come there to pray for their wishes to come true. Next to us a hawker was selling little wooden cages containing captured sparrows. The idea is that you buy a bird and release it for good luck. I didn't buy one, as I felt pretty lucky as things were.

At 7 am on Sunday morning I was chatting with a Red Dao (pronounced zao) woman outside my guest house in Sapa as I tried to learn how the gears worked on the motorbike I had rented for the day. Having got out of bed slightly earlier than myself, the woman had just arrived on foot from her village 18 kilometres away, to sell souvenirs to the tourists.

The far north is home to a population of about 5 million members of various ethnic minorities, most of them descendants of people who migrated over the mountains from China thousands of years ago (apparently before the arrival of the Viet themselves). I had decided to drive the 3 hours to Hac Ba village to people-watch as the minorities (mainly a group called Flower Hmong) and other locals did their weekend shopping at its Sunday market.

When I told the Red Dao woman I was going to Hac Ba, she asked if she could come with me. I said it probably wasn't a good idea as I wasn't a very experienced driver and didn't know the road. She agreed reluctantly. We wished each other luck and I set off into the fog.

I started my descent from Sapa feeling a childish sense of adventure. There was little traffic, as it was still early on a Sunday morning. Soon the rain started pelting down, but I was wearing a plastic poncho which I'd bought the day before, so I was laughing. It was a bit like a computer game, with a new obstacle revealed around every hairpin bend. Rocks that had loosened in the rain and tumbled onto the road, a crossing herd of water buffalo, and swarms of large moth-like insects hovering eye-high over the tarmac. Bonus points for waving back when kids along the road shouted hello.

An hour after leaving the guest house, I arrived in Lao Cai, 1000m closer to sea level than I was when I started. I pulled up on a pavement to ask directions. Although the poncho had kept the rain out, my gloves and trainers were soaking wet. I was invited into an office where a few electricians sat around a table in orange boiler suits, drinking tea. Once we had established how old everyone was, who was married and who wasn't, I was served lots of strong green tea and given directions to Hac Ba. (A possible future marriage between me and the only female electrician of their number was also hinted at.) Only two hours to go.

Just outside Lao Cai, the road crossed a river and entered a narrow valley. Massive construction work was being carried out on the road, and the whole valley seemed to have been dug out for this purpose. For three or four kilometres I drove through thick red mud in the lashing rain, my trainers caked with dirt. I had a couple of near misses, and as I passed a local sitting on his backside in the mud next to his fallen motorbike, I thought maybe I should give the market a miss. Just as I was looking for a place to stop safely, two big lorries from the construction site came onto the road, one in front of me and one behind. There was no room to overtake, and I didn't dare drive over to the side, where the mud was even deeper. For what seemed like ages, I was blinking the raindrops away, dragging my feet through the mud, focusing all my energy on keeping my balance. The childish sense of adventure was now gone.

After a few more kilometres the valley opened up and the lorries vanished. It was still raining, but the road here was sealed, and driving was a lot easier. I passed through rice paddies and little villages. As I started climbing up to Hac Ba, the rain was joined again by thick fog. The only scenery I was able to make out were the milestones that marked the last 30 kilometres into Hac Ba. Like a lunatic I shouted loud greetings to every single one through the rain. As I reached the high valley that lead to the village, I passed groups of hilltribes people walking along the road on their way to the market. And then about a dozen tourist minibuses from Sapa honked their horns and zipped past me. So much for being original.

Just as I arrived in town, the sun broke through the clouds, as it tends to do when no longer needed. I felt like one of the characters from Dumb & Dumber, riding into Aspen on a moped, with trails of frozen snot running from their nostrils to their ears.

The market was an exciting mix of food, farming implements, livestock, vegetables, tobacco, clothes and the obligatory assortment of tourist trinkets. But most of all, the atmosphere was created by the women from the various hilltribes, especially the Flower Hmong, who were everywhere in their spectacularly coloured clothes. I only stayed a few hours, as I wanted to give myself enough time to get home before dark.

Back on the road, the surface was almost dry and I was able to relax and enjoy glimpses of scenery through the low clouds. When I reached the construction site after about an hour, most of the water had drained away, and controlling the bike was much easier. That is, until I had a flat tire.

I parked the motorbike by the side of the road and walked over to some workers nearby. I explained my predicament, and one of them took me over to a tiny village, which also seemed to be under construction. I later learned that the people living there had been displaced by the expansion of the road, so the government had built them a circle of about twenty small cement houses. In one one of the houses there was both a phone and a mechanic. We called my guest house, my friend there negotiated a price, and the mechanic took the wheel off my motorbike and drove away with it. I sat on the front steps with the rest of the family and, after a short while, most of the kids in the neighbourhood. One of the boys ran home and fetched his English exercise book, which was used, together with the glossary in my guidebook, to pass the time.

About an hour later, I was back on the bike. The sun set just after I entered the fog during the final 30-kilometre climb towards Sapa, but at least it wasn't raining. Still, I was now quite cold, hungry, wet and tired. Visibility was very low, so I latched on to a slow-moving convoy of motorbikes and fell in to a daze, registering little more than the road and the traffic around me. Every so often, through the noise of the engine and the wind in my helmet, I was almost certain I could hear a pig squealing. At the market that morning, I had watched a piglet being dragged through the crowd by a rope tied around its neck, its tiny rigid feet ploughing through the mud, all the time letting out the most intense, piercing squeals. It wasn't a sound I'll forget anytime soon, but I didn't expect it to be actually staying inside my head.

There was, of course, a natural explanation. When the convoy reached Sapa, the motorbike in front of me pulled over to the side. As I passed I noticed that the wicker cage strapped across the back of his vehicle contained a live pig, which I'm sure would have been a fair bit larger than the basket itself, had he not been inside it.

On the second day of the Halong bay tour, in Cat Ba town, we were unexpectedly given the afternoon off. Although it was overcast and slightly chilly, I took my camera and went for a walk. I was in a slightly better mood after having spent the previous day cruising around the bay among limestone islands, caves and fish farms. Dubious receptionists and not-so-chocolate buns were but a distant memory.

Although Cat Ba town is tiny, it's the main population centre on the island of the same name. Apparently ten years ago it was only a fishing village. Today it has dozens of tall and narrow pastel-coloured hotels, with several more under construction. Our tour guide had told me that the town was struggling with problems of unemployment, prostitution and drug addiction. I hardly saw any tourists. As I walked through the streets, shop owners and motorbike drivers, and even the ushers in the mostly empty Western-style restaurants, only showed a faint interest as I passed by.

I wandered down to the quays, where a large team of workers were sealing a section of a new, wide seafront road. When completed, this road would run along the entire width of the town. Some workers were carrying baskets of gravel onto the road, others were levelling the gravel with rakes. A few were on their hands and knees on the compacted surface behind the steamroller, picking up loose stones one by one with their hands.

I went over and warmed my hands by some metal drums that had been placed on the edge of the road. As far as I understood the drums contained tar, and a wood fire had been lit underneath them to melt the solid contents. I took a couple of photos and two of the workers came over to have a chat. They pointed at one of their mates who was dozing horizontally on a wooden beam nearby. I took a photo of him and showed it to them on the display. They giggled, went over and woke the guy up, and we showed him too.

Then the three of them started singling out other workmates. They pointed and I took photos. The guy on the steamroller drove by, waving and smiling. I took a photo and waved back. The one who was minding the fire splashed liquid tar from the drum straight onto the firewood, creating huge flames and thick black smoke, before leaning on his spade, straightening his cap and looking casually in my direction. Everyone I photographed came over to look at themselves on the display and have a laugh.

At one point a worker came over and picked up a half-metre length of steel pipe that had been lying on the ground next to us. This turned out to be the communal tobacco pipe. The guy squatted, stuffed a tiny ball of tobacco into a hole in the pipe near the end, and placed the other end over his mouth (like you would a digeridoo). He lit the tobacco and inhaled the smoke in one deep breath. Then he exhaled and went back to work. I took some photos as more workers came over to use the pipe, and then, inevitably, I was invited to try it myself. As I blew out the smoke, one of the guys literally rolled around on the gravel laughing. (I know what you're thinking but it wasn't.)

And then, across the new road, I saw the driver of the digger jump out of his cabin and head towards us at a brisk pace. He didn't look pleased. He was wearing tweed trousers, and a white shirt under his sweater. I thought he might be the foreman. I tried smiling disarmingly as he approached, but got no reaction. As he reached our little group, I expected him to tell me off for keeping people from their work. Instead he uttered a simple, succinct sentence in sign language: He pointed at me, he pointed at the camera, he pointed at himself, he pointed at the digger. I nodded. Then he jogged back, jumped in the cabin and waved and grinned as I took the photo.

Finally the workers bummed all my cigarettes and went back to work. My good mood completely restored, I made my way back to the hotel to join the other tourists.

Early the next morning I was on a bus heading for Halong bay. I had been in Hanoi a mere 15 hours, but I was glad to leave.

It wasn't just the episode with the guest house. A string of other little pokes and jabs had conspired to put me in a dark mood. The weather was grey and cold. In the evening I couldn't get my email to work to communicate with my employers. The TV in the reception was blasting away until midnight.

And then, at 6 am the next morning, I woke up to the sound of a loud, metallic voice. I assumed that the TV in the reception had been switched on again. It was a woman's voice, and she sounded utterly bored. She would talk for a few minutes, then there would be a few minutes of silence, and then more talking. It sounded like live television commentary for a state funeral.

After about 45 minutes of this unbearable droning I cursed, got dressed and marched out to the reception. The receptionist raised his hands in apology before I even said anything, but I realised that the TV was switched off and that the voice was actually coming from the street. I walked over to the door and looked outside.

The locals had obviously been up for hours already, and the alley was bustling with buying, selling, talking, cooking, eating, barking. On a lamp-post across the street I saw a large loudspeaker - the source of the disembodied voice. I asked the receptionist what the woman was saying.

"It's Saturday. She's saying that everybody must clean the streets."

"She says this every Saturday?"

"Every Saturday."

"But she's been talking for almost an hour. What other things has she said?"

"Just clean the streets."

"Over and over?"

"Yes."

I looked around. "Nobody is cleaning the streets."

"No."

So an hour later I was sitting on the bus, sleepy and grumpy. In my lap was a bag containing two large, comparatively expensive buns with chocolate filling. I had bought the buns from a woman in a group of street vendors whose communal sales pitch (and answer to any questions about price) was to say "banana inside" and "chocolate inside" as they pointed at the heaps of bakery in their baskets.

I had planned to wait for the announced coffee stop before having the buns, but in my present mood I decided to comfort eat them on the bus instead. I opened the bag and sank my teeth into the first bun. Of course, there was no chocolate inside. There was also no chocolate inside the other bun. And no banana, for that matter. There was just more bun.

To be continued...

On arrival in Hanoi, the driver of the airport bus kindly offered to drop all passengers off at the hotels of their choice. I gave him the address of a guest house where I had made a phone reservation, and an hour later the driver stopped and signalled for us to get off. (I had joined up with a fellow tourist I met on the plane.)

On the street we were greeted by a cheerful receptionist in a white shirt who smiled and said "You made a reservation! Follow me!" and grabbed my bag. (So that's who the driver was calling on his mobile on the way into town.) The name on the hotel sign was similar, though not identical, to the name in my guidebook. This place also seemed to be in a higher price range than I had been given to understand over the phone. I was doubtful. In the reception I showed the man the entry in my guidebook and said I wasn't sure this was the right hotel.

"Same-same hotel," he said. "Different spelling. Confusing for you! I will show you the room."

"What's the address of this hotel?"

"Share room or single room?"

"Do you perhaps have a business card that shows your address?"

"I'll take you to the room."

"Are you the person I spoke to on the phone?"

"Yes, you spoke to me on the phone."

"But I spoke to a woman."

"Yes. Change shifts."

"This woman said her daughter would be doing the next shift. Maybe we can speak to the daughter?"

(Pause)

"Same owner."

"But not same hotel."

"No."

"Then maybe we should go to the hotel where we made the reservation."

"Yes. And first you'll see the room. OK?"

Back on the street we were immediately surrounded by several kids waving business cards for various establishments. We discovered later that the motivation for all this activity isn't merely the prospect of filling up the hotels with guests. Most of the guest houses double up as travel agents, and they go to great lengths to convince their guests to buy organised tours to Halong bay, Sapa and other destinations in the north. I later met other tourists in Hanoi who had been chased from their rooms at 9 pm on the first night, when the owner realised that they weren't going to buy a tour from him.

Anyway, half of the business card wavers claimed that our guest house was full and the other half claimed to represent it. In the confusion I called the guest house again on my mobile. A girl (presumably the daughter) answered, and said for us to come right over. The card wavers lost interest, and we arrived at the correct guest house a few minutes later.

"I'm sorry, we're full."

"Excuse me?"

"All our rooms are full."

"But I made a reservation."

"Are you Darren?"

"No, I'm Steffen."

"Sorry."

"But I spoke to your mother on the phone. I reserved a room."

"When?"

"Around 2 o'clock."

"We don't have any rooms now."

"But I spoke to you on the phone."

"When?"

"Five MINUTES ago." (Losing it slightly, brandishing mobile phone.) "You said you had a room."

"I didn't say I had a room, I said I could find a room. Are you going to Halong bay?"

"We're considering it."

"This man will take you to another guest house. It's only two minutes' walk."

"That's very kind. Thank you."

"Afterwards you come back here and book your tour."

"Somehow I don't think so."

To be continued...

I was amused to discover, as I visited the local pharmacy today, that the cosmetics giant behind the massive advertising campaign promoting spray-on tans to rain-drenched Irish lasses at bus stops in Dublin last winter, is also busy selling whitening lotion to girls in Vietnam.

One afternoon last week, I finished reading The Quiet American. As I was about to make the 600 km journey from to Hoi An by bus, I left my unpacked bags in search of another good read. Nha Trang is full of booksellers, but I was searching for one in particular, who I had met several times during the past few days. He would pop up out of nowhere, grab hold of my book and say, "Exchange?" Every time I told him that I would buy a new book when I had finished the one I was reading, and every time he made me promise that I would buy it from him.

So I was walking through the streets in a bit of a rush, determined to make good on my promise.

My bookseller was easily recognisable with his thick, round, black-rimmed glasses. I found him sitting on his motorbike outside a restaurant, waving at some French tourists. When he saw me carrying my book, he promptly spread his merchandise out on the pavement. The shop was open.

I'm really bad at bargaining. It makes me uncomfortable. The extent of my skills is to pretend to be uninterested in the item I'm about to buy. Obviously this can only go on for so long, and nine times out of ten I give up and just buy the bloody thing at the quoted price. In the present situation two other facts worked to my disadvantage: Firstly, I had problems concealing the fact that I was in a hurry for the bus (I almost ran towards the bookseller). In bargaining situations, time is, literally, money. Secondly, the novel I was hoping to trade in, The Quiet American, is not only laughably thin, but every serious bookseller in Vietnam carries about a dozen copies of it. (The recent Hollywood film even passed cencorship here due to the favourable representation of the Vietnamese struggle against the French.) Not exactly hard currency.

I scanned through the selection of books, moving quickly over the ones I was interested in and dwelling on the more ridiculous sounding ones. (This little trick seemed clever at the time, I only realised later that it makes absolutely no sense.)

The bookseller was making his own preparations for the ensuing transaction. Safe in the knowledge that most Western tourists feel uncomfortable about bargaining, he went for the traditional approach: Making Friends With The Customer. He opened with the universal pre-bargaining question:

"Where are you from?" (Finding Common Ground)

I told him, and he proceeded to reel off the names of the three living generations of the Norwegian royal family; spouses, children, the works. I was secretly impressed by this knowledge, but I wasn't going to take the bait.

"Yes," I said (still browsing), "we're all very fond of them".

It was a lie and he could smell it. He moved swiftly on to the next phase.

"Norway, you say?" He pulled out a thick copy book and started leafing through it furiously.

"Look here!" he said with a victorious grin, showing me some loose handwritten pages. "Letters from my Norway FRIENDS!" (Building Trust)

At this point I had already found the novel I had decided to buy (True History Of The Kelly Gang). I read the blurb while at the same time trying to betray no interest in the book whatsoever. I glanced briefly at the letters he was holding up, shrugged, and continued reading the blurb.

His eyes widened in disbelief. "But the letters are in NORWEGIAN!" he said. "Yes. Not ENGLISH! I gave them a GOOD PRICE!" He seemed genuinely hurt. (Inducing Guilt)

Things were getting awkward. I was forced to look at the letters again. I read a section (in Norwegian):

And he is one hundred percent trustworthy! You won't find a more honest bookseller in Nha Trang! This man is just super!

And so on. Now, some of these letters were rather long. I found myself thinking, who buys a paperback from a person on the street and then writes them a two-page letter of recommendation? Was this someone whose advice I should value? Whose street wisdom I should be emulating?

I snapped out of my thoughts and returned to the blurb, but it was too late. He had won. It wasn't only that I was in a desperate hurry and that I really wanted this novel. Despite the theatrics, by the end of it all I really felt that he was a decent bloke. He had my best interest at heart. He was my friend. (He knows Maud Angelica!) When he quoted me the price I knew that it was the right price. The fair price. It would be a devastating blow to our new friendship if I were to question his integrity by suggesting anything less. I paid up and we shook hands (We shook hands! I'll try that in Eason's.)

With my new book in hand, I popped around the corner and bought some food and water for my trip. The vendor gave me the groceries in a transparent plastic bag, and I slipped the book into it. I walked briskly back towards my hotel, trying to work out how much time I had left for packing. Suddenly, I felt something tugging at my bag. I stopped and looked down. There was my new friend, still on his knees on the pavement, surrounded by his books. His hand was clutching True History Of The Kelly Gang through my plastic bag.

"Exchange?" he said. I was speechless. He lifted the bag up to his black-rimmed glasses and slowly spelled out the title through the plastic.

"Oh," he said. "It's you."