Vietnam Day 11 – 12: Of ancient tombs

Just got back from dinner with Ryui Bynn, Shawn, and Andy (close to 12am at the time of writing), celebrating RB’s birthday at Yuen Fatt Steamboat, though it’s more of a ploy from Shawn to get RB to treat us rofl. After filling my stomach to its limits, when I reached home I dumped myself at the loo, let my thoughts flow by themselves, and there’s this certain inexplicable reason that my senses seem to just sharpen, seemingly able to perceive more, understand more, awakened.

I’m probably mentioning something that most of you probably wouldn’t know what I’m experiencing, but have you ever felt your senses being dulled, as if a part of your soul was in an entirely different world, leaving half of a walking shell in this current place we call ‘here’? I went through by my daily holidaying routine of staying (mostly) at home, and all of a sudden just minutes earlier, after considering events that have taken place 24 hours ago, like a hidden switch being flicked on, I felt more of a.. me.

I’d be indignant if you say that I’m being cryptic or helluva confusing, but this is exactly what I’m feeling. Maybe it’s an unfinished, failed transition from being in Vietnam to Malaysia, as if a part of my soul was still lingering about the smooth tendrils of the greenest paddy fields, or masking about among the mists of Dalat.

It’s as if I’m trying to learn how to be me for the first time.

---
Day 11 – 19th June 2007
Our last day in Hoi An – we were supposed to leave in the morning, but Gopi decided on the afternoon bus as after the horrendous 12-hour bus journey, we were somewhat traumatised. There’d be far less people taking the afternoon bus as compared to the morning one.

We lazed around in bed till 10am plus, showered, and finally checked out at 11.30am. We ate lunch at the highly superior Cafe 43 again, and because we were quite taken by the friendliness of the staffs and the utterly tasty food, we wrote them a recommendation on a piece of large paper (size A3 or A2 maybe?) provided by the male boss, and wrote a nice lengthy one in both Japanese and English.

We walked a long 10 minutes walk to Camel Travels (where TM Brothers seemed to have allied with) – when you’re lugging around a backpack, it could be considerably long. Our bus left at 1.30pm plus, and after contemplating the usual lushly greens and vastly beautiful scenery that accompanied a long-distance bus ride, we finally reached Hué (pronounced as huu-eh) at 5pm plus.

This little view of the boats traversing the river was near our first and only rest stop.

When we stopped at Hué, the hues in the sky (no pun intended) were preparing their migration to darker shades of red and blue. After the longest decision ever made to stay in a hotel (took us like, maybe 30 minutes or 45) due to conflicting opinions by Gopi and Kazz who constantly argued with one another, we finally stayed at this particular hotel with a large room with 2 queen-sized beds, 1 single, and a barely working air-con and a table fan. Fairly decent – think we got it for only USD$10 or $12 for the 4 of us.

We walked around at night in town, exploring and breathing the living lives in Hué – as every town has its own eccentricities, and unspoken cultural rules. For dinner, we ate in this completely secluded alley just a stone’s throw away from our hotel. It was really a house-cum-diner – which really meant that its inhabitants (mostly women) spoke not a word of English. We ate their delicious ‘rice pancake with shrimp’ (written on the only English menu on the wall, which only has 4 items in total), but obviously it wasn’t really filling.

Kazz kept pointing at the food they were preparing – beef, vegetables, etc – but as we could barely understand one another, finally a girl in her 20s from next door who spoke a little English explained to us that all the food above was preparation for a wedding. But after the kindly, motherly lady boss thought about it over, she said we could have the food, all together for only 50,000 dong wtf (~$USD3, divided between 4 people wtf so cheap).

It’s a bloody hearty 3-course meal – there were beef, various vegetables, potato chips, soup, and kangkung! They tasted just like home. We were ravaging over the plates and wiped them clean, and for some reason I felt particularly happy over this simple meal – we were tasting their cultural norms, as there were a few things that differ from eating in Malaysia, such as putting a large bowl of rice in the middle of other dishes, and we’d just scoop whatever amount we wanted from there.

After our dinner, we walked for a further 20-30 minutes until we finally found Francis’ hotel (as usual, we communicated via e-mail, and had to use cybercafes for this particular purpose) – there were TWO Thai Binh hotels, and we inadvertently ended up in the wrong one until the receptionist told us otherwise. He was out at Thu’s Bar nearby Thai Binh 2, a popular haunt among backpackers selling cheap beer and offering apparently excellent touring services, and I was relieved we managed to find him.

We had a beer each, then went back to the camera shop I went earlier to burn my pictures off my memory card to a DVD as there weren’t any space left (hence the lack of pictures in the previous entry), and was charged about 50,000 or 60,000 dong for it (the cheapest we found in Hué so far), where else Kazz only got his DVD done for only 40,000 dong back in Nha Trang.

We headed back to our hotel with a small bottle of cheap whisky, and the 5 of us played 31 as usual and drank both the whisky and the vodka. Both were really awful-tasting shits.

Kazz also bought what he thought was marijuana from a shady guy, and when we went back to our hotel, he discovered it was fake after trying to smoke it – it seemed to be just tea leaves mixed with tobacco heh. Kazz wanted to test it out before buying it, but the man gave excuses such as “the police is coming!” etc.

In our semi-drunken stupor, we went out again in search of something to eat (I was somewhat sober since I didn’t lose much), then Francis went back to his hotel. I bought fish crackers off a shop that was actually open (again, might I remind you that it closes rather early everywhere in Vietnam), and Heineken at another. We finally went back to our hotel to sleep.

Day 12 – 20th June 2007
It couldn’t be anymore worse to start a day by getting lost in the morning. We were at Camel Travels trying to book our tickets to leave today but couldn’t, so we had to leave the next day instead, and after making a detour to an alley that Kazz said would lead us to our hotel, we discovered that we weren’t any nearer to our destination. And as usual, we had neither the name of our hotel nor its address, so in the end, after relying on pure memory and very bad instincts, we wasted about 20 minutes and a probable amount of sweat to finally discover Siew Kiat and Francis sitting on stools, waiting for us at the hotel’s entrance.

We had earlier enlisted the services of a motorbiking tour guide for the day, and our arrangements were as follows: Me behind Francis, Siew Kiat behind Kazz, and Gopi behind Mr Tour Guide as we weren’t that good of a motorcyclist to balance such weight behind us :p (speaking from whatever little experience we had)

To be honest, what followed next didn’t really stir our interest much – they were ancient tombs, temples, pagodas, all of which would be tremendously fascinating were we historians or archaeologists in the making.

Our first stop was to a temple amongst the trees.

The procession that was going on, a daily ritual before eating.

Another look at the surroundings.

This was one of the more interesting bits of the temple.

Our little group photo.

We were travelling a lot between the temples and tombs by motorcycle, although they weren’t exactly very far away from one another.

At the Tomb of Tu Doc – even though we didn’t feel like visiting it as the entrance fee was like 60,000 dong or so, our tour guide insisted that it was worth the price, so why not.

The large complex of this tomb hosts a wooden enclosure atop a peaceful lake.

Another look of the Tomb of Tu Doc.

We were also taken to a hill with bunkers where a war/fight was said to have taken place – we couldn’t understand our tour guide’s horrible English accent. Apparently just across the river over the mountains would be Laos.

Also headed to this tomb, whose name escaped me. I rode the motorbike for a while across two places, carrying Francis behind me, and there was one time when I had to cross a wooden bridge, and stopped in my tracks when I discovered there was a hole in it with only a plank to guide the wheels of the motorcycle across. Evidently I was very nervous.

We examined the carvings and snapped some photos.

One of them statues.

Me mimicking the statue.

Kazz hauled himself up the horse.

It took us quite some time to climb up the elephant, as it was rather high and doesn’t have any grip for mischievous imps like us.

It was some effort to climb atop this, with some help from the rest to push me up.

Gopi couldn’t climb the elephant, so he contented himself with the horse instead.

We visited a particular tomb/palace which we didn’t enter as the tour guide told us there wasn’t much to see, and the price wasn’t worth it. We left this place and we were about to go to another when Gopi realised he left his pouch at said place with elephant/horse statues above.

Very hair-raising and heart-stopping for him I’m sure, as there was a considerable sum in his pouch (but luckily the passport was with our hotel guy), so the tour guide blasted through the roads as far as his motorcycle could go, and we had a hard time trying to keep up. Luckily enough, the temple was as empty as we visited earlier, so his pouch that was lying near the elephant statue (Gopi took it off when he was attempting to scale the elephant) was still there. Phew.

We were brought to this circular arena where supposedly ASEAN cultural dances, where countries ranging from Malaysia to Vietnam, participated. We were supposed to spend only 5 minutes there since there wasn’t anything to look at, but we sat down and chit-chatted for about 20 minutes.

Grand look of the short road we had to walk before reaching the arena.

I personally love this pic, even though it wasn’t exactly composed very well. Our conversations suddenly centered on Kazz’s experience of licking arseholes, which I shall leave at that.

Yet another pagoda..suffice to say we didn’t spend that much time here.

Their very tall flag, as opposed to our Malaysian’s Dataran Merdeka’s flag.

The imperial palace or sommat. We were contemplating whether to enter it or not – “It’s once in a lifetime, and you probably won’t visit Vietnam again,” said Francis – and just as we were about to enter, we decided against it, we were just too tired.

After finished with our visits to the various ancient tombs and pagodas, we ate at our favourite haunt, Phuong Nam, whose food is 2nd best and cheapest to Hoi An’s Cafe 43 (thanks to our tour guide who brought us here).

Lovely. <3

Frankly, the ride around Hué on motorbike was actually more fun than the places we visit, and Gopi, Kazz, and Francis were insulting one another all the time, calling each other ‘stupid’, ‘fucker’, ‘bitch’, ‘stupid Malaysian’, ‘stupid Japanese’, ‘stupid Canadian’ – we had all the makings of one happy, eccentric, dysfunctional family.

We went back to our hotel at 4pm plus, Francis showered at our place and bade us goodbye, as we were going to Hanoi on different days, and we probably won’t be seeing him again.

At night, when Kazz, Siew Kiat, and I tried to go to Phuong Nam again, we got lost yet again trying to find it close to 2 hours. We enlisted Gopi’s help when we finally reached our hotel (where the big guy was still sleeping), and halfway through Kazz’s scooter ran out of gas. After consulting a map and roughly guessed its exact position (that’s what you get for not paying attention while motorbiking around), as usual we eventually discovered the place and settled for a nice meal.

Later on, Siew Kiat and I tried to find an Internet cafe, but most are closed, so we tried guesthouses instead. We finally found one that offers the service for 3000 dong per hour (powered by table fans as usual), and we were through it for about 30 minutes before the hotel dude told us we had to leave as they wanted to sleep wtf. It was only about 11.30pm, but the entire town was entirely deserted and dead from 10pm onwards.

Walking back to our hotel, we had offers for ‘bun-bun’s (aka sex) and drugs which we both kindly declined.

Travelling this long filled me with disdain at the idea of going back to Malaysia – I wanted to go on travelling forever. As corny as this would sound, everyday was an entirely different life of its own, with different surprises, different pleasant discoveries, different experiences with the different people that you meet, that I’ve finally broken free from the dulling chains of routine back home. It’s as if the most natural thing to do – travelling – a pilgrimage to rid oneself of material things and learn life experiences.

For very few times, I had very vivid dreams of performing my usual daily habits in Malaysia, and when I woke up, my eyes still half-closed, still attached to the previous dream, I felt somewhat relieved when I saw an unfamiliar room with semi-familiar people still sleeping around me. It was as if I was leading two different lives at the same time – one in Malaysia and one in Vietnam – the vividness of it all was surreal, yet it led me to believe that this journey would make me more complete.