Vietnam Day 4 – 5: Kazz, our Japanese bitch

Day 4 – 12th June 2007

Our staple diet of morning comedy consists of a runthrough of The Ellen Degeneres Show on Star World at 8am (Cambodian time of course). Strange I didn’t discover her when I’m in Malaysia as she’s really hilarious, but then again I’m not much of a TV person – I get all my TV series through the miracle that is the .torrent file :D

At 7.30am I woke up with a start instantly – the strange hours when the sun is up (5am) and when it sets (6pm-ish) could have that effect on you. The three of us slept early and woke up incredibly early – I was finally embarking on a healthier life for once, after the madness that is DotAing till past midnight almost every single day. Come to think of it, I didn’t even miss playing it once – the physical and mental sensation of being in a foreign world beats an addictive LAN game anytime.

From left to right, Thai (or Tai), Siew Keat, Panna, Gopi, me.

We ate breakfast at Mama’s again with Thai (or Tai), our tuk-tuk driver – we treated him the breakfast for his good services and keeping us company all this while, although more towards Siew Keat and Gopi as they had been in Phnom Penh longer than I did.

Our bus to Ho Chi Minh City (henceforth known as Saigon, as it’s popularly known – HCMC is the official name though) finally departed at 12pm from this city. It’s a standard air-conditioned bus, apparently much better than the bus SK and Gopi took from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh.

An edited excerpt from the journal I wrote while in the bus (how do you think I managed to remember every single detail of every single day without my trusty makeshift journal which is originally a Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan USJ 8 brown exercise book that once belonged to Andy Goh Zhen Hao in Tingkatan 3B for the subject Tatabahasa/Rumusan/Ringkasan whose teacher was Pn Tuan Zainab?):

Here I am sitting in the bus writing amidst the noisy, unsteady cackling of the engine (fulamak sempat men-describe dengan teliti even though the bumpy bus ride kept messing up my writing), sitting in a rather poorly air-conditioned seat next to Siew Kiat that manages to make me sweat (the air-conditioner, not Siew Kiat). This bus ride isn’t exactly ordinary, unlike in Malaysia where you can take a midnight bus and pray your bus driver isn’t sleepy. With unlit streets and roads in even more out-of-place towns in Cambodia, with highly dusty roads that once kicked up a mini sandstorm that enveloped the windscreen, it’d be next to impossible to reach our destination should we travel at night without a few lives lost, seriously.

So far, we crossed the river in the bus by this sturdy carrier/ship thing of some sort, along with other heavy vehicles. Looking out of the window on my right, you can see endless fields of paddy, shrubs and bushes that stretch on right towards the horizon. It’s quite unlike Malaysia in a way (or I probably haven’t noticed before), but everything about Cambodia, including its fields scattered about quite unsystematically, lends itself a little bit of charm. Occasionally we’ll pass by villages and towns, almost similar to Malaysia’s pekan and kampung, or see dozens of cows grazing at the fields (no goats so far).

At the Cambodia-Vietnam border – all of us were requested to get out from the bus while our bus attendant who collected our passports earlier gave it to the border officer.

Another border checkpoint – this is actually the customs. It was also raining quite heavily, making the short stride from the comfort of the border’s shades to the bus a wet ride.

The checkpoint was where Gopi and a Japanese guy talked together, from what I observed from far. Both Siew Kiat and I had long got past the customs, but Gopi’s passport was still withheld by the border guys. When we got on the bus, the Japanese dude who introduced himself as Kazz (short for Kazuhito) sat next to Gopi, while I sat next to Siew Kiat.

We quickly became fast friends (or acquaintances really), and he tagged along – adding an additional traveller to our dysfunctional group. We stayed at the Yellow House Hostel which we booked online the day before, while Kazz stayed with us at the same hostel, although his was a dorm.

Kazz, Gopi, and Siew Kiat having a nice chat over dinner at the restaurant where a waitress earlier helped us out to find our hostel.

We wandered around the streets of Saigon together at night, drank the cheap USD$5 vodka by playing Blackjack – events were actually blur since I got really drunk on the 40% contained alcohol drink (worse than what I suffered in Port Dickson), the taste was at once burning sharp and one of the worst ones I’ve ever tasted. Considering that it’s so dirt cheap, Gopi concluded that we were merely drinking ethanol.

One of the videos of our drinking session, Siew Kiat was videoing, and Gopi was noticeably noisier than usual. My only vivid memory throughout the drinking night was me wandering down the streets with Gopi and Kazz after we finished the vodka, stumbling into a convenience store and slur around blindly, then minutes later vomited a healthy amount on the streets. Gopi told us a day later that he had trouble trying to pull two drunk guys back to the hotel, apparently we wanted to go to the nightclub. (Both Kazz and Gopi left in search of the nightclub after dumping me at the hotel, only to find that the nightclub has already closed wtf.) Also finished reading Norwegian Wood in the bus from Phnom Penh to Saigon.

Day 5 – 13th June 2007
We searched for another room the next morning to accommodate the 4 of us together, our search brought us to a tiny almost nameless guesthouse, but its room was very large at a very cheap price (can’t remember the exact price now, but it should be about USD$3 per person per night) – 3 queen-sized bed and a single bed, fancy that.

We also searched for an open bus tour company that can provide us the cheapest price. Open bus works the following way: you book from one destination to your final one (for us it would be from Saigon to Hanoi), and when you stop at different towns in between, you can choose whichever day you fancy to hitch a bus from the same company to the next stop. Quite a cost-effective way to travel the entire stretch of Vietnam.

After lunch at one of the excellent pho bo stalls (that’s rice noodles with beef, with basil leaves dipped inside to enhance the MSG-laden taste), we hitched a taxi to the War Remnants Museum (as you can see, tuk-tuks are practically non-existent in Vietnam).

Outside of the museum, there are actual tanks, aircrafts, and various artillery used in the Vietnam War. Quite an impressive display.

Various historical notes about the Vietnam War, with a myriad of pictures of victims of various chemical warfares such as Agent Orange.

This particular note is soo bloody ironic, after reading other notes about how the American soldiers treated the Vietnamese as a lower lifeform.

The museum is somewhat depressing – after going through 20-30 pictures of suffering citizens, all I wanted to say was ‘fuck it’. My sentiments for war remains the same – no one should suffer, especially innocent civilians.

After spending a long time at the museum, we walked around a lot and it was awfully tiring. We went to the Reunification Palace but it was already closed at 5pm.

This was the first time in my entire life that I saw an entire congregation of motorcycles converging on a single street – though they’re not your standard mat rempit variety.

At the nearby park near the Reunification Palace – it was the only place you can find solace amidst the hustle and bustle of the city.

HCMC now is definitely like Kuala Lumpur – its busy streets and alleys (the Yellow House Hostel which we stayed the night before, its street is also known as Backpackers’ Street), with hundreds of motorcycles zipping in and out. HCMC even has Louis Vuitton and Dolce & Gabbana, and the Diamond Department Store is similar to our Bangsar Shopping Centre – filled with branded shops although we didn’t enter it for that very reason.

The Notre Dame Cathedral which we couldn’t enter at that time as there was an ongoing mass.

When night settled (night came early at about after 6pm if you remember), we went to the night market which completely resembled Petaling Street, save for a few differences – lanes weren’t that narrow, and motorcycles do pass by these lanes.

We also had a long, nice chat with Kazz throughout the day, especially at night. He’s an interesting character to say the least, with loads of stories to tell and enchant us, despite struggling sometimes with the right words to use. One (un)popular fact about him is that he was a marijuana seller in Japan, stole cars, and embarked on what he termed as ‘steal travel’. Despite all his misdeeds that managed to land him in jail once (a complete nightmare, he mused), he’s really a very nice guy.

He said that he understood how these teenagers who commit suicide feel, because in Tokyo, you’re basically leading a very pressured life. He was feeling out of direction – not wanting to study nor work – until his friend asked him to go to Australia which he did. His first day there saw him being brought to a white Australian man’s house to smoke marijuana, and he said that that was the first time he felt happiness, albeit achieved illegally. Which was when he picked up his weed-smoking habit.

At this point he related a few facts (I’m not too sure if they’re the truth or not) about drugs in general, stating that plant-based drugs like marijuana are “good for you and do not damage your body”, compared to other chemical-based poisons like ecstasy. Not that I’m condoning nor forbidding weed, you understand. >_>

He’s 24 going on 25 this year, and a very cool guy. Not that I think committing all sorts of illegal things are cool, but how often do you meet and travel with a Japanese ex-convict? In an ironic twist, he has this strong philosophical individuality though – when Gopi was being all derogatory with the ladyboys who approached Kazz for services (very persistent on motorcycles wtf), he told me that he respects them just as he respects other living things, which means he doesn’t kill insects, just like a monk swt.

When he actually goes back to Japan (he has been travelling for 4 months now), he’ll definitely stop his previous misdeeds, though he doesn’t rule out growing weed for personal use lmao (“it doesn’t hurt anybody else”). Even odd enough, he dislikes drinking, but maybe because his dad is an alcoholic. He has developed some sort of trauma of eating fishes, and loves vegetables to death – to the point of being very vegetarian-like. He’s also somewhat picky with his food (took ages to order anything in restaurants), and loves fruit shakes, proclaiming that Malaysia has one of the best fruit shakes in the world wtf (I’ve never drank our own fruit shakes haha).

He did say a few profound words that will continue to affect me, but that’s for another entry. Sometimes it isn’t the destination that’s enlightening, it’s the journey and the people you meet itself.