noodles | travel blog

This happened a good while ago, I forgot to post it at the time. Reading it again, it may well be one of those situations where you had to be there.

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I was sitting with a Danish couple in a sleeper cabin on the night train to Hanoi, waiting for the train to leave Lao Cai station, when some very loud and drunk Vietnamese kids entered the train, piled into the cabin next to us and started partying. A few seconds later a flustered French girl turned up at our door and asked if we had a spare bed. She had suddenly found herself sharing her cabin with a drinks party.

As the train hadn't started moving yet, we didn't know whether our fourth bed was taken, but we invited her in anyway.

The four of us sat there chatting while next door havoc was wrought. In addition to the drunken laughing, shouting and slamming of doors, there were some outlandishly high-pitched shrieks from the lads, like when someone turns off the lights at a kiddies' birthday party and then lets loose a bucket of snakes.

And then our door slid open with a bang. In the doorway stood a tall, broad-shouldered Vietnamese-European guy in a dusty motorcycle suit. A horizontal scar ran across his right cheek just below his eye. He was carrying a transparent plastic bag, bursting at the seams from the weight of a dozen cans of Tiger. He didn't look pleased.

He leaned on the door frame, looked at the four of us and said, not without a touch of menace, "Folks, I've been on the road for a week. My bed's in this cabin".

The Danish girl pointed at the French girl and almost stuttered, "She's just here because her bed....." The guy looked at the Danish girl and her voice trailed away. For a few moments there were only the shrieks and thumps through the thin wall.

The guy then turned to the French girl and said, "Vietnamese guys next door?"

She nodded.

"I'll take it."

A few hundred feet off the beach in Salang, at a depth of about 17m, lies the wreck of a fishing vessel. In February 1983, as the boat was on its way back to the mainland, it was caught in a sudden, fierce monsoon storm off the northern tip off Tioman island. The crew fought to keep clear of the coast, but the wind forced it onto the coral reef near the Salang jetty, and its wooden hull was torn wide open. The boat sank in seconds, and only one of the crew survived. He was rescued by locals who had helplessly witnessed the drama from the beach. Swearing never to set foot in a boat again, the fisherman never left Tioman island. Today, 22 years later, he still runs a little stall near the beach where he serves roti chanai and tea to locals and tourists.

Actually, I just made that up. The vessel was sunk a few years ago by local dive instructors who needed a comfortably shallow site for teaching the PADI Wreck Diving Speciality. But how boring is that?

"I wish there was an interesting story about the wreck," said our Malay divemaster for the day, "but there isn't."

"Does it at least have a name?" said one of the other divers, grasping at straws of adventure.

"A name?" said the divemaster.

"Yes, what do you call it?"

"We just call it wreck."

However mundane its origins, there was something magical about seeing a wreck for the first time. You're swimming through semi-darkness with no point of reference apart from the seabed's gentle sloping towards the beach. Then you see darker water ahead, which transforms into a looming shadow, sprouting detail as you approach.

My God, it's HUGE!

No, wait. It's just really close.

The wreck was about 60 foot long, almost completely intact, and rested keel-down on the sand. It was a busy place. A wide variety of fish were nibbling at the growth on the planks, swimming in and out of the windows of the steering house and circling slowly in the tank below the deck (laughing at death). It was brilliant to behold.

After circling the wreck for a while we headed in the direction of the Salang jetty, a few hundred metres away. Our divemaster was picking up sea cucumbers and using them to make obscene gestures, for the benefit of the lads, who swam in front. For a while there wasn't much to see apart from sand and the odd fish, and I soon fell into a daze.

I then noticed a scattering of recently dead fish on the sand, gleaming like coins in a wishing-well. We passed an anchor and a buoy line, whose other end was attached to a fishing vessel high above us. Then I noticed that our divemaster was making the sign for sea turtle. I looked all around, only to realise that the turtle was right in front of me. A couple of metres ahead it was effortlessly hovering just clear of the sand, grazing on the dead fish from the fishing boat. As we all gathered around, the turtle picked up one more fish - for the road - and floated off into the darkness.

As the pillars of the Salang jetty materialised ahead, the strangest sight was still to come. At the end of the jetty lived a house-sized school of yellow-striped fusilier fish. We took turns swimming into the mass of fish, and rather than swim away, the fusiliers would just circle slowly around you, just out of reach, but so close to each other that at times you saw only glimpses of the other divers, and of the sky above.