After lunch at some crossroad somewhere, Chau hands me a scrap of paper with my night’s hotel (To Chau) in another city (Rach Gia) written on it. (Is the language confusing? In the past twenty-four hours, the word Chau with changing accent marks on the vowels is my guide’s name, the town we came from, and the hotel I’m going to.) He walks me to the large bus across the road and tells the woman in charge to take me to Rach Gia. Unfortunately, this bus doesn’t go to Rach Gia, but stops  in Rach Soi, about 10 km from Rach Gia. He assures me they’ll drop me in Rach Soi and get me a motorbike to Rach Gia. I don’t understand a word of what anyone is saying. I’ve learned a few words and phrases, but they’re speaking at the speed of sound. I say Chuc Mung Nam Moi (Happy New Year) and at least get a smile, probably because I mispronounced it and just said confidently, “The spleen of my sister’s cheese waits in the toilet of the mosquito.”

My backpack disappears on the roof and I enter the bus, already overstuffed with 60 locals with bags, boxes, ducks, whatever. No tourists, no English, no subtitles. A heated argument ensues with the older woman in charge and a younger woman who wants to be in charge. After a couple minutes of yelling and pointing, I understand they’re displacing an old man with a deformed hand to give me a seat up front. The man, and I assume, his daughter, are not pleased but have no choice. I have neither the vocabulary nor the will to resist. I say thank you and guiltily take my seat, above the engine, next to the driver, a wiry man of thirty to sixty, made completely from skin, bone, sinew and a few teeth. It’s not a seat; it’s a platform. No back rest, no place to put my legs down, just a board with black vinyl padding, melted by the sun, crushed by the years, soft but not thick enough to matter, sticky.

After several sellers of water, food and pamphlets give their spiels through a megaphone and collect their dong, the 60 km ride to Rach Wherever begins: a steamy two hours on a one-and-a-half lane road filled with buses, trucks, cars, push carts, people, cyclos, bicycles and endless swarms of scooters. There’s one paved road and everyone’s on it. There’s no line down the middle, no speed limit, no traffic cops. The only real rule: if you hear a horn louder than yours, its vehicle is bigger than yours, get the hell out of the way. Beside the driver, I have the best view of this traffic madness, probably my last view, since I’ll probably still be a casualty on this tour of Vietnam…a bug smashed on the windshield…from the inside.

My right foot is pressed on the dash near the plastic shrines and incense burners, my left foot perched between the cassette deck and the ignition key. If we hit a pothole, I pray I turn off the deck, not the bus. Someone rides on the roof of the bus, screaming at pedestrians and motorbikes as we bear down on them. The Assistant Horn. If only one passenger is waiting at a bus stop, the driver never quite stops. Two passengers, maybe. Hand the bags up, get your legs up, stand up, no seats left.

After a half hour of bouncing, stopping, jostling and starting, I realize I now have a backrest, constructed organically from parts of other passenger’s backs, including the old man I displaced. Humanity gets comfortable with itself, leans on its shoulders for support. I take out two, small, foil-wrapped Ghirardelli chocolates I brought from San Francisco, tap the old man from behind and hand them to him. “Chocolate,” I say, trying to sound Vietnamese or at least a little French. He’s confused, but his daughter repeats what I’ve said and perhaps explains what they are. She smiles at me and gestures, probably asking for more, but “So where are my chocolates, Mr. Big White Guy?” isn’t in my Vietnamese phrase book. The chocolates are passed around and scrutinized by everyone in our general area. It’s ninety degrees outside the bus, higher inside. They are not chocolate squares anymore; they’re tiny bags of hot chocolate.

The driver offers me a cigarette, as if he’s in charge of the foreign trade for the nation: two American chocolates for one Vietnamese cigarette. Since I’m already engulfed by a cloud of the dangerous and frightening second-hand smoke, I’m might as well get some first-hand. In this situation, I can’t refuse to help build this personal bridge coming across the cultures. Soon the driver turns the tape deck down from Blasting to Semi-Blaring because the woman in charge has to make an announcement, as she does regularly. This time the driver forgets to turn the volume up again. Once we’re moving and the woman’s silent, I reach down and turn up the music. The driver gives me a smile. I work for the bus now. I’m supported by hot humanity on all sides. I live here.

Suddenly we’re in Rach Soi, the woman is pulling me out by the arm, my backpack appears from the roof, a motorbike is waiting. It’s never hard to find a motorbike driver. They’re like air. If you need air, they’re there. I haven’t been on a bike for seven months, when I was smashed head-on by a drunken hit-and-run driver. My bike safety course had relentlessly preached the merits of safe clothing: helmets, face guards, gloves, boots, padding, long, strong pants. I’m in shorts, sandals, with a formidable backpack, a stuffed daypack, a kite and a belt pack. That was then, this is now. It’s time to get back on the horse.

I pass the Backpacks Get Heavier And Hotter With Every Kilometer Test with a death grip on the driver’s waist, probably leaving my fingerprints on his skin. I pass the Fear Of Gravel And Cement Ripping Off Your Flesh Without Protective Clothing Exam. He passes everything on the road with a clearance of a quarter of an inch. We arrive at the hotel and I pay him 20,000 dong = $1.30, not a bad price for being alive. My room is nondescript, but I have my own bathroom, hot water, air-conditioning, stocked fridge and a TV for 10 bucks a night. From my balcony I watch a large rat scurry under a car. I’m glad I’m not on the ground floor, as if that matters to a rat.

Inspect fridge. Pass on the Red Dragon Energy Drink, made mainly from caffeine, sugar and vegetable cocktail. Pass on the White Fungus Bird’s Nest Drink, made mainly from, um, white fungus and bird’s nests. Turn on the TV...maybe I can find out if we’re at war yet. No CNN, but a Mekong raft of channels: one very clear Vietnamese channel with Chinese subtitles, one fuzzy Vietnamese kids show like watching TV outside in the Midwest during a blizzard, one washed-out French movie with French subtitles so I can feel doubly stupid, one English channel with, of course, sports, sports highlights, instant replays and more sports. And MTV! A video of an artist I don’t know singing a song I don’t know: Escapology. Perfect. The MTV songs are in English, the commercials are in French, the host’s commentary is in English with Malaysian subtitles. Perfect escape.

The room service menu is standard--rice or noodles with chicken, beef or pork this or that--until they step out with the “Special Dishes”: shrimp, sea crab, swimming crab, cuttlefish, clam, turtle, snake, eel, buffalo meat, frog, bird meat, fresh water fish, and “many kinds sea fish.” It’s the “Forest Specialties” that truly sets my hotel in a class of its own: deer, wild boar and weasel. Yes, weasel. Delivered right to your room! No preparation descriptions. It could be weasel sushi! Was that a weasel I saw in the parking lot? I order two snakes and a weasel to go, planning to savor an eel and buffalo omelet in the morning.

Two more tasks before bed: get dong and get down to the ocean. The bank’s closed but you learn things along the way: don’t brush with tap water, don’t lick the stamps, beware of ice cubes in your drinks and if the moneychangers have gone home, try the jewelry store. I want to hit the island as a millionaire. 

Rach Gia is not a Travel Channel beach town. It’s a 60-Minutes, stinking, seedy, fishy, smuggling city, lurking along the shore. The darker it gets, the better it looks. But it’s on a west coast and the sun’s got to sink into the sea somewhere. Pavement devolves into dirt on the road to the water. The dead heat of the day gives way to the living heat of the evening. Bad karaoke from bustling bars wrestles for attention in the air. The sun sets silently as fisherman unload today’s catch and load tomorrow’s ice blocks. As a brooding storm stalks the horizon, I head back to the hotel with a few million in my pocket and a few more million moments to fill in the morning. ( Previous page )

ã2003 by Scott Jones, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 28.02.03

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