Bound for Vietnam (30 page)

One day my lovely inn keeper handed me a written invitation to her daughter Leung’s thirteenth birthday party. I was stunned, Vien only looked twenty herself. I asked Emile, one of the Frenchman who lived upstairs, taught French at the university and spoke Vietnamese, to interpret for me so that I could ask her where I might have an
ou dai
made to wear to the party. She whizzed me to the market on her motorbike to buy the material. The Ben Thanh market, with its distinguishing central clock tower and pill boxes on each corner, has been Saigon’s largest market for eighty years. Standing in the centre of a square where eight streets converge, it is a phenomenal place with a great variety of merchandise; bunches of frogs with their legs tied together, live squawking hens, baskets crammed with pig’s snouts and ears, clothes, jewellery, dress material, kitchenware. It took hours to get all the way around the goods.

Outside the market a line of monks stood with their begging bowls in front of them. A tiny, ancient monk, who was obviously the elder, was in the fore. I said, ‘Good morning, grandfather,’ as I contributed to his bowl. To my surprise he said, ‘Good morning, madame.’

The next day Vien took me around the corner of the alley to a dressmaker, and I got myself equipped with a pale blue outfit much to the delight of the populace, who took it as a tremendous complement that I liked their national dress enough to wear it. The
ou dai
usually does nothing for frumpy westerners who squash themselves into it, because it is intended only for slim and graceful Vietnamese women. I, at least, am slim.

Downstairs all day on Sunday a dozen women worked frantically cooking and preparing food. At the party only the men and the foreigners sat at the big round table to eat.

The women served. The food and beer flowed freely. I was photographed with everyone possible, but especially the birthday girl, who was done up like a sore thumb with makeup and curls, and wore clumpy Doc Martins.

13 Snake Livers and
Jungle Juice

The weather seemed to me to be getting more humid daily as the northeast monsoon, and Christmas, approached. Hoping to find a ship that was sailing in the direction of home, I canvassed the maritime shipping companies which fronted the Saigon River. Everyone I spoke to was unfailingly polite to me, but I could see that they all thought I was deranged; tourists travelled by aeroplane, not cargo or coastal boats. The manager of one company did say that a cruise ship was coming into port soon and he gave me the address of the firm that handled it. I shot around there only to find that the ship was going the other way – to Hong Kong and China.

There were flotillas of boats on the busy river that runs through Saigon’s city centre – small boats that sailed the local waters and big cargo ships that went everywhere – but none carried passengers except the ferry to Cambodia. I wanted to go to Cambodia very much. There was, however, a slight draw-back to this venture. The area in the south where the ship would drop me was infested with Khmer Rouge guerillas, and travellers had been kidnapped and murdered there recently. And getting from the coast to Phnom Phen also entailed passing through dangerous country that was held by the Khmer Rouge. I considered risking it, but long-term foreign residents of Vietnam who had been to Cambodia via the northern route strongly advised me not to go to the south, so I reluctantly decided against it. Giving up on ships, I considered the other possibilities. Qantas flew to Australia. That settled it.

I stopped to rest by the riverside, a pleasant place that is well supplied with chairs, benches, umbrellas and shade trees, and watched children swimming and playing in the river as I drank the milk from a coconut. They seemed oblivious to the grotty appearance of the water and the fact that it was littered with rubbish. A little way down-stream a hideous floating hotel had been sited on the bank. Up and down the water plied legions of sampans that were always manned by women, some of whom accosted tourists and offered to take them for a ride. One of these women sat down beside me. I eventually convinced her that I did not want an excursion on the water and tried to tell her what I did need. She could not understand toilet, or WC, so I drew a picture of a what I imagined looked like a loo. Apparently it didn’t. Finally she got the message and taking me by the hand, led me off. Hauling me along the riverbank, she stopped here and there to chat and proudly exhibit me to her friends. They must have asked her where she was taking this strange woman and she made a gesture of pulling her pants down that I deduced must be sign language for what I wanted. We walked miles to that toilet and when we got there it was closed for renovations!

I found few public toilets in Vietnam and they all had a guardian who demanded an entry fee. The only decent one I came across was the one next to the post office in Saigon and it was, at 500 dong, also the cheapest. If you couldn’t afford that, you went in the street. There was, however, blatant sexual discrimination in this practice. Although men urinated everywhere, women did not.

A wide street on which hotels and other imposing buildings were located ran along one side of downtown Saigon’s riverbank. On the opposite bank a green park flourished until it petered out, at the edge of the inner city area, into the most deplorable cardboard and packing case shanties that tottered, decrepit and shonky, on stilts over the river.

One day I took a cyclo to the Ben Thanh market. I wandered along, stopping now and then to look at my map. Every time I did this, someone came and looked over my shoulder. While I was walking through a park opposite the market, a couple of wild-looking women who resembled gypsies came close to me and, pressing against me, pretended to help me read my map. Suddenly I felt threatened. My instincts told me to get away from these women and I started moving off. They said, ‘Yes, yes, down here,’ and attempted to lead me. I was trying to lose them when they were joined by a young man. By then I was on one of the broad main streets, the women were on one side of me and the young man on the other, at the gutter’s edge.

I was holding my handbag firmly under my arm, but my purse was in my hand. I usually did this deliberately to deflect interest from my bag. Then, as one woman distracted my attention for a second, the other suddenly snatched the purse out of my hand and they both ran off. But I hadn’t been looking where they had wanted me to and I saw that the purse had been thrown to the man, who shot off in the opposite direction. The ploy was for me to follow the women, but I reacted instantly without thinking and leaped after the man. They didn’t call me the Greyhound at school for nothing. In a few yards I caught him and grabbing him by the shirt-front, shrieked, ‘Give me back my purse, you bastard!’ He threw it at me and broke away. Now I was really angry. Thinking, He’s not bloody-well going to get away with that, I sprinted after him, seized him again and started hitting him over the head with my umbrella. He cried, ‘Ow and oh’, and put his arms over his head trying to protect himself, while I made a terrible fuss, yelling at him and calling him frightful names. Although there were a few people around, no one came to my aid. I suppose they could see that I wasn’t being hurt. But no police appeared. The locals just stared at us open-mouthed.

I rushed into a nearby hotel thinking that they would call the cops. I said, ‘Help, police, quick.’ After fifteen minutes the combined efforts of the three desk staff managed to locate the number in the phone book, but the police wouldn’t come. They said I had to go down to the station. The manager told me it wasn’t far, ‘About twenty minutes walk, no problem.’ I said, ‘What’s the point.’ I’d had time to cool down and consider the consequences. I had heard that the police either end up fining
you
or make a lot of trouble for you. I decided not to risk it. Anyway, the thief had only managed to take a handful of dong from my purse before I caught him. But I learned another lesson from this trauma. I had believed that being in a main street at half past eleven in the morning when there were people around made me safe.

I kept on walking until I found the Viet Cong Bank where I could change some more money. I needed it now. I didn’t carry much local currency, everything was so cheap and I often used American dollars – safely hidden in a wallet that hung on a string around my neck under my clothes.

I was not having the most brilliant of days, so I was greatly relieved when my friend Nye, the cyclo rider, pedalled up, rescued me and took me home to my family to be comforted with tea and sympathy.

Everyone I met who had been in Saigon for some time had a tale of robbery to tell. Rene, one of the inmates of my guest house, told me how he had had his pocket picked by two enchanting female children who did not come up to his kneecaps. They were, however, just the right height to get at the pocket on the leg of his trousers and adroit enough to overcome the difficulty of its secure zip fastening. Brian had been done by the Dodgy Brothers Money Changers. He received a large stack of dong and waded through it, counting carefully. It was correct. Then someone, obviously an accomplice, went past and accidentally knocked his shoulder. He was twenty dollars short when he counted his money at home.

Later that week I went on a five-day tour of the Mekong delta. Once part of the Khmer Kingdom of Cambodia, this is the flat, lusciously green and beautiful southernmost part of Vietnam which the sediment from the mighty Mekong River system has made rich and fertile. One of the great rivers of the world and Asia’s third longest after the Yangtze and the Yellow Rivers, Song Cuu Long, the River of The Nine Dragons, rises high in the Tibetan plateau to flow 4,500 kilometres through China, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to the South China Sea. At Vinh Long, the Mekong splits into several branches which are criss-crossed by countless canals and channels, some man-made and 1,500 years old. Half of the land mass of the delta is densely populated and under cultivation. There are 3,723,189 hectares of pineapples, bananas, coconut, sugar cane, other fruit and rice and large amounts of fish are caught here as well. The mangrove swamps and jungle further south are sparsely inhabited and it was from here that the Viet Minh resistance fighters fought the French, and the Viet Cong fought the United States in the American War.

On the morning of departure, taking my life in my hands once more, I let Vien deliver me by motorbike, bag and all, to the bus terminal. It had gone without me! After all the times I’d waited hours for transport that departed late, I had arrived dead on time to find that the bus had left. Everyone else had arrived, so they simply took off. No one at the office was concerned. I was squeezed into another bus, a tiny mini affair that was already packed to the brim. A few kilometres out of town we stopped at a hat factory where a tour had been arranged. But I was saved from this dubious pleasure. The guide said, ‘No, no, not you. You go on other bus.’ Reprieved, I was shunted onto the bus that was my rightful conveyance and which had just finished the awesome hat factory tour. Later I discovered that the people on this bus thought that I had hitched a ride. Greatly curious, they came up to me in ones and twos asking, ‘How
did
you get onto our bus?’

It was a good thing I abandoned the other bus. Later that day we came upon it broken down on the side of the road. And although our driver spent a certain amount of time lying under it – an obligatory procedure that often seemed to work – in this instance it didn’t and we left it and its unhappy occupants there.

The travellers on the still-functioning bus were a jolly bunch. There were eight rather gorgeous Israeli of mixed gender, two nice Australians, a Swedish couple and an American girl. I thought I would hate her when I first got on the bus – she did not stop talking for two hours straight – but in the end I quite liked her.

The roads we had begun making our way south on were not too good at the beginning of the trip, but once we hit the country roads they deteriorated badly. No lines were marked on these much repaired, bumpy paths and traffic drove all over the place. But the scenery was beautiful. Soon we began traversing rice paddies that were dotted with ancestral graves, crossed some immense rivers and drove alongside a great deal of water. It was everywhere. All the houses were surrounded by canals, and the villages were separated from the road by water that was spanned by all kinds of rough connections – a fallen log, a couple of planks, or a tiny, hand-built bridge. Now and then a lovely white ibis winged overhead or stood, mirrored in a water-logged field, posing gracefully.

After lunch we were frog-marched to a landing and onto a boat for a river tour. The boat was small and narrow with hard wooden plank seats on which we were crammed two abreast. We cruised along many water-ways at great length and the seats became harder and harder as time went by. But the territory we were in was like nowhere I had ever been before. It was a place of mysterious green shade where not much direct sunshine penetrated. I had the feeling that living here would be like existing in the depths of a rain forest. I could see little huts, some of them only shanties, on the edge of the water and I wondered what the people did. Nothing in the food line seemed to be growing here and it did not seem possible that there could be. There was so much water. Eventually we came to an area where the rain forest scenery ended and almost impenetrable jungle began. This was where the Viet Cong had hidden during the war. They had chosen this region because it had been uninhabited then and it was still pretty much deserted. Our guide said that nothing grew here as the soil was poor. He made us get out and walk. I could not see a foot in front of me through the jungle. Without the guide I would never have found my way out, or seen the booby traps and the hiding places he showed us: metal trapdoors covered with earth which you lifted with a piece of string or wire. There were also bunkers built under low mounds of vegetation where the Viet Cong had hidden during the day. At night they used to go into the villages.