Vietnam Day 10 – The town of heritage

Day 10 – 18th June 2007

As you may have gathered from the previous entry, the horrendous 12-hour bus ride left us in an almost sleepless state in the town of Hoi An (supposedly a World Natural Heritage site, incredibly famous for its tailoring, where supposedly that it could produce imitations as good as the original), and naturally (as it was natural to me), everyone was feeling rather irritable and tired, complete with an aching rear end. At 5am, the bus’ telly started playing what looked like a reality show where the audience’s irritating laugh really got to me. Completely unwarranted for, when people were trying to sleep.

After breakfast near our hotel (banana pancakes!), we walked around in search of TM Brother’s, our open bus company, henceforth known as TM Fucking Brother’s for reasons best left unsaid. The directions we acquired from a Canadian and a British lady, whom we met at breakfast, weren’t exactly correct, and we ended up walking about aimlessly in a street, all the while enquiring about motorcycle rentals.

The hustle and bustle of the morning street behind our hotel, the old women going about with their morning produces.

After a while walking and negotiating prices of renting a motorbike, a guy on a motorcycle came along, negotiated, and finally agreed to the price of 40,000 dong each (to the demands of both Gopi and Kazz, frankly I wouldn’t mind paying 50,000 dong per bike from our hotel since I wasa too lazy to walk so far). It ended up with Gopi and Kazz on a shiny red bike, while Siew Kiat and I were brought to a secluded area of the town, all the while the Vietnamese dude, SK, and I were sitting on a single bike wtf. And the way the bugger dodged the traffic was even more adrenaline-pumping.

Instead of a similar shiny red bike that Gopi and Kazz had, the bike we got was really old – an ancient Honda complete with a BASKET wtf (but apparently the red bike constantly made weird noises lol). The Vietnamese dude then brought us to TM Brother’s where both Kazz and Gopi were not in sight. Eventually we went to the petrol station to fill our tanks, and the Vietnamese dude wanted us to pay for his petrol too wtf. NAHHH our middle fingers almost shot up the moment he requested it, but at this point, the two of us who had barely slept in the last 14 hours were even more indignant – probably the most ludicrous thing you’ve ever heard.

Siew Kiat insisted “Why should we pay for your petrol?”, and then the motorcycle-renting dude’s face turned darkly black and demanded 50,000 dong for our petrol. Like fuck off lah think we so stupid is it, even though we can’t even read a single Vietnamese on the signs nearby, but where price is concerned, we could clear see it was about 11,000 dong per litre.

In the end we paid the petrol station attendant 40,000 dong.

At this stage, the Vietnamese dude was noticeably pissed at being unable to con us, and sped off, leaving us at the staton. Both Siew Kiat and I were stumped – like how the fuck were we supposed to find our way back to the hotel when:

1) We couldn’t remember the hotel’s name
2) We didn’t even know what street it was in

Like diuuu were we royally screwed. To make matters worse, the streets of Hoi An are composed of TONS of crossroads, so began our incredibly journey of wandering around literally aimlessly on a motorcycle in the dustiest town we’ve ever been yet.

After circling the town for a bit, we finally spotted a bank and our brilliant heads suggested that we head in and ask for directions to a hotel whose name we didn’t remember. =.=” However!, *lightbulb*, I seemed to recall vaguely the name of our hotel, explained the counter ladies our predicament, and mentioned the name “My Soa” to her, in hopes that she’d know what the eff I was talking about.

In the end, with a map we took from a travel agent we passed by, she drew the directions and said that the Hotel Hoa My should be on said street she pointed out, so off we went with very little hope.

Minutes after I took the photo of this map, since it was bloody hot and a little tiring to strain my neck 60 degrees upwards to stare at an erected town map, Siew Kiat, who left me with this town map because he thought he knew where our hotel was, suddenly came back and proclaimed victory.

Sweet, blessed victory. Imagine yourself in the shoes of one of the two guys on a motorcycle in a relatively unknown town, whose rather confusing crossroads didn’t help our predicament. Imagine riding along the streets while semi-admiring the various town landmarks because being in a dictionary-defined lost state, we weren’t exactly in a state to admire things. We were hopelessly lost, even more worse than when I once got lost on 2006’s New Year’s Eve, as we were in a foreign country where 60% of its residents probably do not speak English.

Anyway we went up to our hotel eagerly, only to find out that Gopi and Kazz just left minutes ago. -___- Great luck eh. Gopi’s rather cryptic message that he left with the receptionist didn’t help our confusion further, so we sat there for a good time staring at the arranged books and computers and the ceiling and the occasional passing car blankly.

When Kazz and Gopi finally arrived at the hotel, we started our journey to My Son (pronounced ‘may song’) – before we left, a granny from the shop next door pointed to Siew Kiat and my bike, the black Honda with the basket, and said that “this bike is so out”. Haha wtf even an old granny knows that the bike is ancient, but the dude who rented it out to us proclaimed otherwise.

It’s about 40-50km away to My Son (bukan anak aku lah), which translates to a fantastic 2 hour journey under the scorching sun – we occasionally stop by at various shops to ask for locations by gesturing and gesticulating to the non-English speaking townsfolk. My Son was supposedly a World Cultural Heritage Site, but we were all quite disappointed in what we saw – the Angkor Wat complex was a far better collection of temples. If Angkor Wat is 10 on the grand scale of 10, My Son would probably fall under 4.

Ta-dah – ancient brick temples destroyed by time.

We didn’t exactly have a group picture in a long time.

Another on a stone bridge by the river.

We fooled around at the crumbled ruins – try and spot Siew Kiat in this picture.

We didn’t spend that long of a time there at My Son, the 60,000 dong to enter wasn’t that worth it. When we finally emerged from the ruins, we rested for a bit at the wooden-makeshift restaurant there and waited for the shuttle van – it’s about 1-2km away from the main entrance wtf definitely not gonna walk, our water supply just ran out.

Frankly I thought the journey to My Son was far more interesting than the ancient ruins themselves. I love exploring an unknown terrain (not when we were lost without a direction like earlier), and a few of the locals were very nice – the men insisted that we feast on what seemed to be rice wine, which they were all drinking earlier. We had a sip each, thanked them, and went our merry way.

Along the way we crossed vastly beautiful fields of paddy, the cows grazing… all made an enchanting sight.

On the way back to Hoi An, we got lost a little and started asking the locals, some who couldn’t speak any English at all. We even ended up at a busy market, complete with live ducks with their poor feet tied together. As I probably have mentioned earlier, Vietnamese roads are rather treacherous if you don’t know about their unwritten conduct on the roads – honks of varying pitches from the deep bass to the cheesy ‘pit-pit-pit’ could be heard from any vehicle at all every few seconds, be it a motorcycle or a monster truck.

At about 4 or 5pm, we finally decided on a restaurant next to a long stretch of paddy fields, finally dining on our incredibly late lunch/early dinner. Our fried rice were fairly tasteless, but the scenery and the constant breeze were so pleasant. We were sweating, and probably a shade darker from the hours of motorbiking under the merciless sun, but once we sat there, we took our minds off our fatigue and enjoyed the peaceful, serenading moment – another one of the few places that I’d put under my ‘List of I-Could-Stay-Here-Forever places’.

The gentle, unruffled atmosphere was broken by one of the local women singing rather sweetly – we don’t know the song, of course, but it was quite melodious and set us in the mood for celebrating, as the 10 or so locals gathering about a table seemed to be. It’s the perfect place to be to unwind – sitting by the greenest paddy fields, breeze gently caressing your skin, with a sweet singing local on top of that.

We reached Hoi An finally, rode around and got to the Japanese Bridge which wasn’t entirely fascinating.

The entrance to the Japanese Bridge is on the left.

At this point might I remind you that we have yet to shower for almost 48 hours, since our Nha Trang motorbiking day, considering that we already checked out at that same day and couldn’t use any facilities to cleanse ourselves. Even as we reach Hoi An, we couldn’t check in yet as the rooms weren’t ready, so we went out anyway.. and that left us with so much FILTH that wiping any part of our skin will result in black inky thingies to materialise. Seriously, just wiping our faces or hands with towel will ensure instant black marks on said white towel – I’ve never felt so literally dirty in my entire life, after all the incessant sweating without bathing for 2 full days.

After a nice, long shower, we had our dinner at Cafe 43 at the street behind our hotel, which isn’t an exaggerating fact if I proclaim it to host the best and cheapest food ever of the entire stretch of Vietnam. Tongue-teasing fruit shakes at only 5000 dong (~USD$0.30)? Glorious grilled pork chop with fucking tasty oily rice for only 10,000 dong (~USD$0.60)? Now that’s a real bargain!

Halfway through munching on my 7th-heaven-inducing food, a fight between two men broke out – for convenience’s sake since we don’t know their names anyway, let’s call them A and B. B was chasing A around with a rod, and when B was finally restrained, A reappeared from the shop directly opposite Cafe 43 with a machete.

“Woo, a little drama here,” we thought. A chased B directly inside Cafe 43 where we sat, and in that instant, Gopi immediately stood up and was all ready to throw his chair. A swung his machete at B, and he nearly missed Siew Kiat’s arm by 2 centimetres had Siew Kiat not dodged it in a quick reflex. And the oddest thing we realised later that during this partly life-and-death situation, I continued to eat calmly while looking at the unfolding commotion, while Kazz, who was sitting next to Siew Kiat, was staring blankly ahead, semi-drunk and high from beer.

Police arrived instantly a few minutes later, the cafe man looked furious and gestured wildly at our direction, probably saying that the man had almost harmed his patrons.

The police and crowd gathering outside, I didn’t dare to boldly snap a picture in a communist country. >_>

Siew Kiat slept rather early that night, the 3 of us ended up walking around deadly quiet town (everything was already closed at 10pm), and logged on to the Net for a while to check for e-mails (the cybercafe was already closed, but the man kindly let us use it for a while for free). Gopi replied to Francis’ mails – we were supposed to meet up in this town and stay together, but we didn’t have the opportunity to check our e-mails, pretty hard to communicate without a cellphone and to rely purely on the Internet.

We bought a small bottle of cheap vodka shit to share between the 3 of us, and walked all the 10 minutes worth of journey back to our hotel. At that point I felt bad that we had somehow ditched Francis without saying a proper goodbye, but Kazz in his occasional philosophical wisdom said that when travelling, once you meet a person, you probably won’t come across the person again in your lifetime. He related a tale about a few friends of his that he really trust whom he can truly considered his best friends – couldn’t see how it makes sense now and related to the topic on hand, but at that moment any words of comfort seemed doubly mature and logical.

It was always hard for me to let go, of anything at all – but again, am trying to change that.

We went back to our hotel, played 31 by betting, and Kazz lost in the end and bought a can of Coke for Gopi, on the pretext that Gopi’s birthday was 2 days ago while we were in Nha Trang. Even Gopi himself completely forgot about it until he checked his e-mails, where an influx of birthday greetings reminded him.

Suddenly I dreaded heading back to Malaysia again, leaving behind my entirely carefree life – not a single worry about any problems save for that stupid server problem my blog was having – and my travelling companions.