I think I’m in Asia, but there’s no way to tell for sure. There was no grand ceremony marking the epic milestone that this beast of steel and iron officially crossed the boundary dividing Europe with its gigantic distant relative to the East. No voice calling out over the intercom (not that I would have entirely understood it anyhow) that the known, more or less civilized world had been abandoned in our wake and we were now, like it or not, subjects to the exotically barren expanse of the Siberian tundra, in all its romantic, intimidating mystery.
Asia could use a welcoming sign. Nebraska has a welcoming sign. They even include a fun fact about the state’s character on the sign greeting drivers eastbound from Colorado: “Welcome to Nebraska: the Arbor Day State.” Its a genius of a sign, actually, because there are, everyone knows, no trees in Nebraska and thus, one would presume, no apparent reason for the entire state being named after a day that exonerates the deciduous. It may screw with your mind but it’ll at least give you something perplexing to think about; the alternative being suicide by sudoko, which some road-weary passengers have been driven to in maddening attempts to ease the boredom of the tortuous drive across Interstate 80.
No ceremony, no announcement, no sign. But I’m over it.
Asia. I’ve gotta be in Asia by now.
If I hold onto the luggage rack and twist my neck down and to the side, I can make out vague shadows blurring and bouncing and—damnit that was my f*#@ing[1] head hitting the window—darting in and out of view, depending on the angle of light sprayed out ahead and behind and above us from a platform lamppost or half moon reflecting. Snoring, footsteps and soft chatter are drowned out by the constant opening and closing of the door to the bathroom, which is conveniently positioned directly at the foot of my bed/rock-hard sleeping platform. The background noise behind it all is the ceaselessly erratic grinding of steel on steel occurring somewhere between twelve and fifteen feet below me, mixed with an occasional but far too regular jolting smash of a misaligned rail, alarmingly yet vainly calling into question the workmanship of the tracks themselves (were we actually airborne just there?), of which the worrying about is merely another mildly curious attempt to pass the time.
The foothills of the Urals and a brief pitstop at the train station in Yekaterinburg have been the highlights of the past hour. At a kiosk on the station’s main platform, I bought a beer (Baltica 3) and a carton of the Russian equivalent of Ramen noodles[2]. I ate the noodles and drank the beer on the bench in the semi-enclosed compartment I was sharing with five Russians. The bench has now been converted into a bed for Yana, a 26-year old lawyer by degree who is now scribbling notes in a Czech dictionary so she can better understand her Slovakian fiancé who she met at a New Year’s party nearly six months earlier while on vacation in Prague. Across from her sits Aleona, a 20-year old tourism student at a university in Petersburg (I couldn’t catch which one), just finishing up her 3rd year away from her family and just now heading home to the Siberian city of Irkutsk for the first time. My previous companion on the upper bunk across from me, Jhoura, who had just graduated in politics from Moscow State University, left us a few hours ago in Perm, replaced now with a short, mustached man in a light blue, oily button-up shirt who looks like a car mechanic and hasn’t said a word since hoisting himself up into the bunk upon arrival. Across the walkway, a middle-aged woman is tucking her four-year-old daughter into her sheets on the top bunk. I have not spoken to either mother or daughter yet, and I’m slightly terrified in engaging the four-year-old in conversation, lest my guise as a semi-fluent Russian speaker be uncovered by a toddler’s question about the color of rabbits.
“Hi.”
“Hello, little girl. How are you?”
“Good. What color are rabbits?”
“Ahh, yes.”
“---“
“Hmm?”
“Rabbits? I’m coloring rabbits.”
“Ohhh-kay...”
“What color are they?”
“Umm, flowers? You like flowers?”
(Giggling) “No, color. Of rabbits!” (Laughing hysterically)
“Ohh, color! Ha. Yes, yes. Color… my favorite color is green! What’s yours?”
(Rolling on the ground, uncontrollably laughing) “Rabbits, silly! HAHAHAHA!”
“Hmm. Haha. Yes. I have no idea what you are saying.”
At this point the whole car will join in rip-roaring laughter and frolicking through the hallways at the silly American who doesn’t know what rabbits are. It will be terrifying. I will have to jump from the train in the middle of Siberia. How far does one need to walk to find a town out in the middle of Siberia? If I was still in Eastern Europe, there’d be a chance. There’s trains and towns and taxis and haggard old grandmothers with hearts of gold that would take me in and cook warm pel’meni and greshka and adopt me as a second son to their only child who has been away as a sailor in the Russian Navy, stationed in St. Petersburg. At least I know a bit about Eastern Europe. But I’ve crossed. I’m in Asia. Surely, this is what Asia is like. I will be stranded in the wilderness and will need to fend off wolves and bears with a crossbow I will construct out of pine cones and tree sap. My beard will grow long and no one will know what has happened because no one is expecting to hear word from me until the end of this train ride, seven days from now. I will wander the endless expanses of secluded forests, hunting squirrels and gophers and—and rabbits! And then I will remember this twisted, demonic little four-year-old girl and I will be rejuvenated in spirit and will vow to track her down. I’ll find a caravan of gypsies and I’ll get them to bring me down through Kazahkstan, after several years in the process of becoming a gypsy myself, then they will smuggle me into a freight container full of wheat grains bound for Pakistan through the Indus River. There I’ll disguise myself as a fisherman and win a fishing vessel from a rug dealer in a high stakes poker game in the dark underground poker rings of Islamabad. I’ll bet my life as an indentured servant and he’ll bet the fishing vessel and I’ll win with just three queens. I’ll take the boat and hire a sidekick who calls himself Johnny after rescuing him from a footrace pursuit with the Pakistani police. Indebted to me for saving his life, together Johnny and I will sail undetected past Iranian pirates and U.S. submarines in the Red Sea up into the Mediterranean. We’ll sell the vessel to a merchant in Istanbul and hitchhike in the back of a Turkish immigrant-smuggling semi-truck all the way back to Moscow, where I will find this girl after hacking into the former KGB intelligence mainframe from the rooftop of the huge toy store across the street. I’ll find her at the cyber café at Moscow State University, chatting to friends and sipping a cappuccino with her black leather Gucci purse, four-inch leather print heals and hair pulled up tight in a twisted, stylized bun.
I’ll find her and I’ll say, “Tsaiytsii.”
Rabbits.
Ah, yes. That’s the word.
“And they are brown.”
[1] For my inaugural footnote, I’d like to direct attention to the restraint shown in the self-imposed censorship on profanity I have decreed for this work out of respect for the millions of children this book will inspire while it is read aloud to Kindergarten classes the world over. You can thank me later.
[2] Of particular note on the circuits of worldly travel is the universality of plain, just-add-hot-water blocks of noodles which are available for purchase in just about every grocery store, train station kiosk or street vendor from London to Singapore; the taste of which varies little yet each has a corresponding quality befitting its extreme thriftiness, making this style of noodle extremely popular among broke college students and backpackers alike. The sight of a broke college student on a backpacking trip must be a goldmine to noodle vendors.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Flirting in Czech
The narrow walkway runs down the length of the car, separating our enclave from the others. On the other side of this walkway is another bench/bed and above that is another bunk (in which the four-year-old is now thoroughly tucked in). So each “compartment” potentially accommodates six passengers and there are nine compartments making up this third-class car. Essentially, traveling in third class Russian trains is like one big slumber party with 54 of your friends minus the fort-making, chocolate chip cookie eating and the fact that they are actually all strangers—nice strangers, mostly, but still strangers and Russian strangers at that, meaning strangers who don’t shower (not that there are showers in third class to give them the option to shower anyway).
I twist and kick until I’m on my back again, staring up at the blank white underside of the luggage rack an arm’s reach away. My right leg is turned awkwardly at the knee to avoid the chain attaching the bunk to the wall at my feet. I’m still wearing the lightweight khaki hiking pants and 100% polyester T-shirt purchased by my mother at a specialty backpacking retail store that I’ve had on since I boarded last night and it’s still too hot to lie under the only covers I have: a single, hospital-ish, plain white sheet. I try not to move around too much so I stop sweating, but that’s been a lost cause since I stepped onboard. I also have to pee but there’s a line for the bathroom and I don’t feel like going through the ordeal of hoisting myself back up here just yet. Russians have an innate talent for bunk-hoisting. I have already been shown up by a pair of four-foot-tall, eighty-year-old Russian grandmothers whose gravity-defying leaps into upper bunks would qualify them for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not if one of the producers of that show ever decides to take the Trans-Siberian railroad and happens to witness the feat. Maybe when it’s all said and done, I’ll be able to hold my own but for now I’ll just hold it and remain staring at the luggage rack above my head.
This lasts for all of three seconds. “Are you asleep?” I say, peering down at Yana.
“Yes,” she whispers.
«What are you reading?»
«Czech. I'm learning how to say 'I'm asleep'.»
«How do you say it?»
«Well, I haven't learned it exactly yet.»
«Ok, try.»
(shurpelnighgya).
«That's not it. You made that up.»
«Oh, so you speak Czech now?»
«Of course.»
«Say something.»
«What?»
«Say something in Czech.»
«I can't hear you.»
«Say something you know in Czech.»
«I could, but you probably wouldn't understand it if you can't say 'I'm asleep'.»
(Laughing) «Ok, well I'll keep practising.»
«Good. There will be a test tomorrow.»
«So I can test you in Russian, too?»
«Hmm?»
«I test you in Russian tomorrow, also?»
«This isn't a test already? You should probably just learn English. It would be much easier.»
«For you!»
«Yeah, for me!» I smile, looking upside down at her sitting up in the bed below me. She has a personal light on over her right shoulder and the dictionary is propped up on her knees which are tucked under her sheet.
I am flirting with an engaged Siberian girl but I don't care. She's sweet and nice and is, not to mention, currently the only one I can understand clearly on this whole damn train.
On an unspoken, creepy telepathic mind wavelength, Yana understands me. It’s the wavelength between two people who have walked down the frustrated path of handicapped communicative abilities that I imagine would exist in a similar manner between people who have lost the ability to properly express their thoughts, say, after a freak attack by an escaped hippopotamus from the San Diego Zoo renders a paddleboating couple temporarily deaf and mute, or between a prison inmate and his brother who comes to see him during prison visiting hours but knows that the whole conversation is being recorded because they are secretly running an underground cartel for importing illegally-accurate news reports on the dependence of the United States’ economy on Canadian donut hole recipes.
I had the same relationship with my first pet goldfish, Speedy. On a fundamental level, we understood each other’s thoughts even if we didn’t have a common avenue for expressing them. For example, Speedy’s way of communicating that he wanted to be placed back into his bowl was to flop around on the floor several times in the upward direction of his glass home. Likewise, my way of showing him my appreciation for his loyal friendship was to chase him around the bowl with my open-cupped hand (until he jumped in) so I could show him off to my jealous friends.
So, it’s basically the same thing. Yana’s fiancé does not speak Russian and she does not speak Czech. Their entire relationship is an exercise in patient diligence to the endeavor of mutual understanding, regardless of having a common medium of a familiar language, which is, as I am learning, all-to-easily taken for granted among people who speak the same one.
How much do you really need sounds organized into what we call ‘words’ and ‘sentences’ to understand someone else? Maybe the whole deal is over-hyped to begin with. Maybe meaningful understanding comes more from what is unsaid than from what our mouths can blabber on and on about in ever more creatively crafted ways, concealing our true intentions and revealing them again, manipulating at times then cursing when our own are twisted unknowingly, dancing about the flickering flames of the primal fire of ultimate reality and examined truth, of which we were born and to which we will always seek to return.
I twist and kick until I’m on my back again, staring up at the blank white underside of the luggage rack an arm’s reach away. My right leg is turned awkwardly at the knee to avoid the chain attaching the bunk to the wall at my feet. I’m still wearing the lightweight khaki hiking pants and 100% polyester T-shirt purchased by my mother at a specialty backpacking retail store that I’ve had on since I boarded last night and it’s still too hot to lie under the only covers I have: a single, hospital-ish, plain white sheet. I try not to move around too much so I stop sweating, but that’s been a lost cause since I stepped onboard. I also have to pee but there’s a line for the bathroom and I don’t feel like going through the ordeal of hoisting myself back up here just yet. Russians have an innate talent for bunk-hoisting. I have already been shown up by a pair of four-foot-tall, eighty-year-old Russian grandmothers whose gravity-defying leaps into upper bunks would qualify them for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not if one of the producers of that show ever decides to take the Trans-Siberian railroad and happens to witness the feat. Maybe when it’s all said and done, I’ll be able to hold my own but for now I’ll just hold it and remain staring at the luggage rack above my head.
This lasts for all of three seconds. “Are you asleep?” I say, peering down at Yana.
“Yes,” she whispers.
«What are you reading?»
«Czech. I'm learning how to say 'I'm asleep'.»
«How do you say it?»
«Well, I haven't learned it exactly yet.»
«Ok, try.»
(shurpelnighgya).
«That's not it. You made that up.»
«Oh, so you speak Czech now?»
«Of course.»
«Say something.»
«What?»
«Say something in Czech.»
«I can't hear you.»
«Say something you know in Czech.»
«I could, but you probably wouldn't understand it if you can't say 'I'm asleep'.»
(Laughing) «Ok, well I'll keep practising.»
«Good. There will be a test tomorrow.»
«So I can test you in Russian, too?»
«Hmm?»
«I test you in Russian tomorrow, also?»
«This isn't a test already? You should probably just learn English. It would be much easier.»
«For you!»
«Yeah, for me!» I smile, looking upside down at her sitting up in the bed below me. She has a personal light on over her right shoulder and the dictionary is propped up on her knees which are tucked under her sheet.
I am flirting with an engaged Siberian girl but I don't care. She's sweet and nice and is, not to mention, currently the only one I can understand clearly on this whole damn train.
On an unspoken, creepy telepathic mind wavelength, Yana understands me. It’s the wavelength between two people who have walked down the frustrated path of handicapped communicative abilities that I imagine would exist in a similar manner between people who have lost the ability to properly express their thoughts, say, after a freak attack by an escaped hippopotamus from the San Diego Zoo renders a paddleboating couple temporarily deaf and mute, or between a prison inmate and his brother who comes to see him during prison visiting hours but knows that the whole conversation is being recorded because they are secretly running an underground cartel for importing illegally-accurate news reports on the dependence of the United States’ economy on Canadian donut hole recipes.
I had the same relationship with my first pet goldfish, Speedy. On a fundamental level, we understood each other’s thoughts even if we didn’t have a common avenue for expressing them. For example, Speedy’s way of communicating that he wanted to be placed back into his bowl was to flop around on the floor several times in the upward direction of his glass home. Likewise, my way of showing him my appreciation for his loyal friendship was to chase him around the bowl with my open-cupped hand (until he jumped in) so I could show him off to my jealous friends.
So, it’s basically the same thing. Yana’s fiancé does not speak Russian and she does not speak Czech. Their entire relationship is an exercise in patient diligence to the endeavor of mutual understanding, regardless of having a common medium of a familiar language, which is, as I am learning, all-to-easily taken for granted among people who speak the same one.
How much do you really need sounds organized into what we call ‘words’ and ‘sentences’ to understand someone else? Maybe the whole deal is over-hyped to begin with. Maybe meaningful understanding comes more from what is unsaid than from what our mouths can blabber on and on about in ever more creatively crafted ways, concealing our true intentions and revealing them again, manipulating at times then cursing when our own are twisted unknowingly, dancing about the flickering flames of the primal fire of ultimate reality and examined truth, of which we were born and to which we will always seek to return.
Sideways
A bell is ringing.
Shut up bell.
Ring ring ring.
Shut up, I mean it.
Ring ring ring.
Hey bell, stop it.
Ring ring ring.
Are you—
Ring ring ring.
—f---ing serious?!?
Ring ring ring.
My eyes open. There is a round sideways woman staring at me. Two seven-year-old boys sitting next to her, also sideways, also staring. She has two gold teeth. I know this because she is also smiling while she is staring. One of the gold teeth is the left front tooth. An incisor. The other is a pointy tooth, oddly pointed, not at all appearing in any type of organized formation with its fellow yellow-brownish brethren.
Ring ring ring.
The boys have empty eyes. They’re wearing the same faded yellow shirt. Not twins though. Their feet don’t hit the floor.
In an act of sheer courage, I’m sitting up. The sideways people are no longer sideways. My brain is a bit slow catching up with this move, swishing back and forth in my skull like a pair of jeans in a washing machine.
Ring ring ring.
Oh. China.
The ringing stops and a voice is jabbering in my ear. I think its coming from some speakers, somewhere. I’m on a plastic chair next to my backpack, surrounded by scattered paper napkins and a flower pot. I don’t even wonder what the flower pot is doing next to me. Six years of college have killed this curiosity in me entirely.
Why am I in a train station?
I look at my watch.
Ring ring ring.
SHUT THE HELL UP BELL.
My train out of China has left two hours ago. I consider myself a hero for standing up. The backpack is slung over my shoulder, the flower pot glanced at once more and a close-lipped smile/semi-nod combo is offered to the upright folks across from me as I make for the exit out onto the street.
There is another option for getting out of China. I need to find the bus station. Conveniently, this bus station is situated on the other side of the city and I will first need to find a bus that will take me there.
My guidebook says bus six will do the trick.
Actually, my guidebook did not say that at all. Guidebooks, loyal and compassionate as they may be, cannot speak.
On the street, I see a man in a suit with a briefcase in hand.
“Excuse me, sir, where is bus SIX?”
“---“
“Six? Bus? Bus number six?”
“---“
A woman walks by, pushing a stroller.
“Do you know bus six? Ma’am? Six?”
“(something in Chinese I don’t know)”
“Ah, sorry. Shye shye.”
Next, three more women, all potentially midgets, stride past at breakneck speed.
“Bus six? You know where bus six? Six? Six? …Bus six?” I’m almost running after them to keep up, these tiny power-walking midget women. This time, I hold up six fingers and then pump my fists up and down like my name is Big Stan at the helm of a nine-ton 18-wheeler hauling spark plugs.
“This… bus there,” the center woman points over her shoulder at the street corner across the big public square from us.
“There? Bus six? Ah, shye shye! Shye shye!”
I’m plowing through a pedestrian underpass, trying to find a way out of the country while vendors tout their counterfeit Rolexes and the white-collars are headed for another day at the office. My pocket contains just enough money to pay for the bus ticket. It is immediately obvious I’m the only white person on the bus .
Nanning is a tiny city by China’s standards, home to just over a million residents. It probably barely makes the cut to show up on maps in this land of sheer extremes. Outside the bus window, skyscrapers rise high and huge steel signs tout the names of American and Chinese banks. We drive past three McDonald’s and a steady stream of local shops, garish sentries lined up like dominoes.
I have an idea how big the city is. Yesterday I made two trips on a similar route on my way to picking up my Vietnamese visa at the consulate on the other side of the river. It takes over a half hour to get to the other side of this “tiny” city. My bus is stuck in gridlocked traffic at 9:30 am. There are no seats left and I’m forced to twist my back such that my pack is not thrust in the face of a teenage girl typing madly away on her cell phone.
After picking up my passport with newly acquired visa inside, I headed out to meet up with Vicky, who had already planned a night out with her friend from England who had moved here several years earlier to avoid credit card debt back home.
Tom is a tattooed, skin-tight black tank top wearing bartender who led us on a bar crawl of the city which stretched out into the unremembered territory of blurred images, bar games, the slamming of beer and (I think) a stop at a local diner with a whole contingent of Chinese characters who were amused, or possibly enthralled in a way that makes people watch the kid who could turn his eyelids inside out back in second grade, enough to follow us around as we went from bar to bar to club to bar to club to diner and on and on into a crazy night on the other side of the planet.
Shut up bell.
Ring ring ring.
Shut up, I mean it.
Ring ring ring.
Hey bell, stop it.
Ring ring ring.
Are you—
Ring ring ring.
—f---ing serious?!?
Ring ring ring.
My eyes open. There is a round sideways woman staring at me. Two seven-year-old boys sitting next to her, also sideways, also staring. She has two gold teeth. I know this because she is also smiling while she is staring. One of the gold teeth is the left front tooth. An incisor. The other is a pointy tooth, oddly pointed, not at all appearing in any type of organized formation with its fellow yellow-brownish brethren.
Ring ring ring.
The boys have empty eyes. They’re wearing the same faded yellow shirt. Not twins though. Their feet don’t hit the floor.
In an act of sheer courage, I’m sitting up. The sideways people are no longer sideways. My brain is a bit slow catching up with this move, swishing back and forth in my skull like a pair of jeans in a washing machine.
Ring ring ring.
Oh. China.
The ringing stops and a voice is jabbering in my ear. I think its coming from some speakers, somewhere. I’m on a plastic chair next to my backpack, surrounded by scattered paper napkins and a flower pot. I don’t even wonder what the flower pot is doing next to me. Six years of college have killed this curiosity in me entirely.
Why am I in a train station?
I look at my watch.
Ring ring ring.
SHUT THE HELL UP BELL.
My train out of China has left two hours ago. I consider myself a hero for standing up. The backpack is slung over my shoulder, the flower pot glanced at once more and a close-lipped smile/semi-nod combo is offered to the upright folks across from me as I make for the exit out onto the street.
There is another option for getting out of China. I need to find the bus station. Conveniently, this bus station is situated on the other side of the city and I will first need to find a bus that will take me there.
My guidebook says bus six will do the trick.
Actually, my guidebook did not say that at all. Guidebooks, loyal and compassionate as they may be, cannot speak.
On the street, I see a man in a suit with a briefcase in hand.
“Excuse me, sir, where is bus SIX?”
“---“
“Six? Bus? Bus number six?”
“---“
A woman walks by, pushing a stroller.
“Do you know bus six? Ma’am? Six?”
“(something in Chinese I don’t know)”
“Ah, sorry. Shye shye.”
Next, three more women, all potentially midgets, stride past at breakneck speed.
“Bus six? You know where bus six? Six? Six? …Bus six?” I’m almost running after them to keep up, these tiny power-walking midget women. This time, I hold up six fingers and then pump my fists up and down like my name is Big Stan at the helm of a nine-ton 18-wheeler hauling spark plugs.
“This… bus there,” the center woman points over her shoulder at the street corner across the big public square from us.
“There? Bus six? Ah, shye shye! Shye shye!”
I’m plowing through a pedestrian underpass, trying to find a way out of the country while vendors tout their counterfeit Rolexes and the white-collars are headed for another day at the office. My pocket contains just enough money to pay for the bus ticket. It is immediately obvious I’m the only white person on the bus .
Nanning is a tiny city by China’s standards, home to just over a million residents. It probably barely makes the cut to show up on maps in this land of sheer extremes. Outside the bus window, skyscrapers rise high and huge steel signs tout the names of American and Chinese banks. We drive past three McDonald’s and a steady stream of local shops, garish sentries lined up like dominoes.
I have an idea how big the city is. Yesterday I made two trips on a similar route on my way to picking up my Vietnamese visa at the consulate on the other side of the river. It takes over a half hour to get to the other side of this “tiny” city. My bus is stuck in gridlocked traffic at 9:30 am. There are no seats left and I’m forced to twist my back such that my pack is not thrust in the face of a teenage girl typing madly away on her cell phone.
After picking up my passport with newly acquired visa inside, I headed out to meet up with Vicky, who had already planned a night out with her friend from England who had moved here several years earlier to avoid credit card debt back home.
Tom is a tattooed, skin-tight black tank top wearing bartender who led us on a bar crawl of the city which stretched out into the unremembered territory of blurred images, bar games, the slamming of beer and (I think) a stop at a local diner with a whole contingent of Chinese characters who were amused, or possibly enthralled in a way that makes people watch the kid who could turn his eyelids inside out back in second grade, enough to follow us around as we went from bar to bar to club to bar to club to diner and on and on into a crazy night on the other side of the planet.
The Great Hanoi Hangover
When last I left you, I was headed out for a night in the Chinese town of Nanning after successfully picking up my passport from the Vietnamese consulate. An English friend I had met in Beijing had a bartender friend who had moved to Nanning to escape credit card debt in England. Tatooed and wearing a tight black tank top, Tom would be our guide for the evening. We headed out with his Chinese girlfriend, Chin, and another bartender with long wavy brown hair who told us to call him "vegetable head". Clubs in China are really different than anywhere else I've been to. They don't really have big dancefloors, as far as I could tell. Instead people stand or sit around tall tables and play games similar to "rock, paper, scissors" except they call it "pretty girl, bad guy, and policeman" and they turn it into a sort of dance.
I've never felt more like a celebrity in my life. Every club we went to, people smiled and said hello, calling us over to drink and play these games with them because we were Westerners. I went to the bar to order a drink and immediately the guy next to me poured me some of his. They just love drinking with Westerners. And I happen to just love drinking for free. It was a perfect match... and the main reason why I woke up in the Nanning train station at 10:30am, two hours after my train to the Vietnam border had already left.
I heaved my backpack over my shoulders and fastened my hip belt, smiling at the boys, still staring at me. So no train then. But there was another option to get out of China. I needed to take a city bus to the main bus station on the other side of town. After asking several people on the street how to do this, I eventually found someone who knew enough English to answer "where bus 6?" and headed for the station. 30 minutes later, I found that I couldn't buy the $1.25 bus ticket because I had spent all of my money trying to buy a round of expensive drinks at the club the night before. Nice move, Gar. No one knew where to exchange dollars and there were no ATMs. So I jumped in a cab and told him "bank China" using a phrasebook I had bought on the street a week before. At the bank, the ATM was out of money. They filled it up. Then it was broken. They took me to the main counter. After another 30 minutes of paperwork I had money for the bus. The bus was about 3 hours long. I mixed ramen noodle mix into a package of smashed noodles and ate it dry. My head was pounding. This was going to be a long day.
The bus ran to the border town of Pingxiang. Getting out I was attacked by taxi drivers telling me they'd take me to the border. Not even thinking of the exchange rates, I haggled the price down a bit then got in the back of a carriage led by a motorcycle called a tuk tuk. Then came the rain. 25 minute drive to the border. We stopped at a barracade and my driver told me this was as far as he could take me. I paid him and staggered toward the barracade, passing armed guards and a group of young men talking around the open hood of a Russian Lada. It was a 10 minute walk, then to customs, which was a joke. A little boy hid shyly behind a sign and giggled when I waved at him while filling out my departure card. Then it was through a gate where there was one customs agent and three rows of powered down metal detectors. He stamped my passport and I was in Vietnam.
Another taxi to the border town of Lang Son where I jumped into a minibus, again after a mindless price-haggling ordeal. I was the only passenger for few minutes before the driver took off for the first cruise around town, looking for more passengers. An hour and a half later I was banging my head against the glass of the back corner of the bus, as the 15 passenger limit was well overpassed and I sat with my feet on a package on the ground and my legs up almost all the way to my chest. Then we started out for Hanoi. A short, wiry Vietnamese man fell asleep an hour into the drive to Hanoi and slouched onto my shoulder. Two shrug-offs proved futile, so I closed my eyes and pictured my happy place. My happy place was everywhere except that minibus and in it there were no headaches, ramen came with hot water in a bowl and there was a beautiful supermodel asleep on my shoulder- but I probably could have accepted a decent-smelling st. bernard at that point.
Pulling into Hanoi, I immediately accepted a ride from a motorbike taxi driver, thinking death in a motorcycle accident wouldn't be too bad after the past 4 hour drive into the city. I soon discovered Vietnam's liberal following of what we may consider "road rules"... my driver darted in and out of traffic, signaling with his horn when he intended to plow sidelong into a moving wall of traffic- as if the horn could part the waters of mayhem at its very command. We squeezed across an intersection, overtook a tourist bus, dove across oncoming traffic to beat the rush on a hard left turn and I realized it might be the green lights that were the most dangerous as no one paid much attention to stopping at mere traffic signals.
Into the Old Quarter we rode, passing street vendors and sidewalk restaurants; entire families riding on motorbikes; monstrous tourist buses and bold pedestrians playing frogger across the narrow cross streets. Turning a corner, a ray of light shone down on my hotel from the Heavens, as a lighthouse to a storm-battered ship sailing for its home harbor, and I could have sworn I heard church bells welcoming my arrival.
Hanoi at last!
I'm glad I missed that train.
I've never felt more like a celebrity in my life. Every club we went to, people smiled and said hello, calling us over to drink and play these games with them because we were Westerners. I went to the bar to order a drink and immediately the guy next to me poured me some of his. They just love drinking with Westerners. And I happen to just love drinking for free. It was a perfect match... and the main reason why I woke up in the Nanning train station at 10:30am, two hours after my train to the Vietnam border had already left.
I heaved my backpack over my shoulders and fastened my hip belt, smiling at the boys, still staring at me. So no train then. But there was another option to get out of China. I needed to take a city bus to the main bus station on the other side of town. After asking several people on the street how to do this, I eventually found someone who knew enough English to answer "where bus 6?" and headed for the station. 30 minutes later, I found that I couldn't buy the $1.25 bus ticket because I had spent all of my money trying to buy a round of expensive drinks at the club the night before. Nice move, Gar. No one knew where to exchange dollars and there were no ATMs. So I jumped in a cab and told him "bank China" using a phrasebook I had bought on the street a week before. At the bank, the ATM was out of money. They filled it up. Then it was broken. They took me to the main counter. After another 30 minutes of paperwork I had money for the bus. The bus was about 3 hours long. I mixed ramen noodle mix into a package of smashed noodles and ate it dry. My head was pounding. This was going to be a long day.
The bus ran to the border town of Pingxiang. Getting out I was attacked by taxi drivers telling me they'd take me to the border. Not even thinking of the exchange rates, I haggled the price down a bit then got in the back of a carriage led by a motorcycle called a tuk tuk. Then came the rain. 25 minute drive to the border. We stopped at a barracade and my driver told me this was as far as he could take me. I paid him and staggered toward the barracade, passing armed guards and a group of young men talking around the open hood of a Russian Lada. It was a 10 minute walk, then to customs, which was a joke. A little boy hid shyly behind a sign and giggled when I waved at him while filling out my departure card. Then it was through a gate where there was one customs agent and three rows of powered down metal detectors. He stamped my passport and I was in Vietnam.
Another taxi to the border town of Lang Son where I jumped into a minibus, again after a mindless price-haggling ordeal. I was the only passenger for few minutes before the driver took off for the first cruise around town, looking for more passengers. An hour and a half later I was banging my head against the glass of the back corner of the bus, as the 15 passenger limit was well overpassed and I sat with my feet on a package on the ground and my legs up almost all the way to my chest. Then we started out for Hanoi. A short, wiry Vietnamese man fell asleep an hour into the drive to Hanoi and slouched onto my shoulder. Two shrug-offs proved futile, so I closed my eyes and pictured my happy place. My happy place was everywhere except that minibus and in it there were no headaches, ramen came with hot water in a bowl and there was a beautiful supermodel asleep on my shoulder- but I probably could have accepted a decent-smelling st. bernard at that point.
Pulling into Hanoi, I immediately accepted a ride from a motorbike taxi driver, thinking death in a motorcycle accident wouldn't be too bad after the past 4 hour drive into the city. I soon discovered Vietnam's liberal following of what we may consider "road rules"... my driver darted in and out of traffic, signaling with his horn when he intended to plow sidelong into a moving wall of traffic- as if the horn could part the waters of mayhem at its very command. We squeezed across an intersection, overtook a tourist bus, dove across oncoming traffic to beat the rush on a hard left turn and I realized it might be the green lights that were the most dangerous as no one paid much attention to stopping at mere traffic signals.
Into the Old Quarter we rode, passing street vendors and sidewalk restaurants; entire families riding on motorbikes; monstrous tourist buses and bold pedestrians playing frogger across the narrow cross streets. Turning a corner, a ray of light shone down on my hotel from the Heavens, as a lighthouse to a storm-battered ship sailing for its home harbor, and I could have sworn I heard church bells welcoming my arrival.
Hanoi at last!
I'm glad I missed that train.
Monday, December 10, 2007
The Road to Saigon
The next day I headed out on a 3-day package tour of Ha Long Bay from my hotel for a dirt cheap $45. Included were all meals, 3-hour bus ride to the coast and back, a night sleeping on a boat in the middle of the bay, a tour of a cave on an island in the bay, a hike up a mountain on Cat Ba Island, a 3-hour kayaking tour through a fishing village, and a night in a hotel on the island. Unbelievable. Giant limestone karst peaks like jagged teeth rose out of the bay and tourist boats shared the seas with fishing vessels of all shapes and sizes. I met a French couple and a French-Canadian couple on the boat. The French couple had just finished a two-week stint volunteering at an orphanage outside Hanoi. When asked about traveling, the kids there dreamed of one day visiting Hanoi, barely 50 miles away. Here I am, 8,000 miles from home with a backpack that costs more than they see in their entire lifetimes.
I give my highest recommendation for traveling to Vietnam. The country was phenomenal. I might not recommend taking a bus down the length of the country from Hanoi to Saigon, though. Pressed for time, I had to skip everything in between the two big cities, taking a 34-hour sleeper bus for the nearly 1,100 mile distance...
The trumpet horn sings out at the pavement ahead, announcing our presence and intentions to oncoming trucks and scores of shoulder-hugging motorbikes. Streets lined with storefronts, mini-markets and foodstands pass by; families and neighbors sit at plastic tables above dirt floor patios; straw cone hats bob among rice patties, bamboo shacks as sentries to pink flowered gardens; the road bends with the passing hills, lined with windmill-shaped ferns, palm trees and a background tree-lined mountain ridge; low-hanging white cottonball clouds floating, suspended at the mountain ridge mid-level; silk-masked women carrying baskets by motorbike; a lone child in a yellow t-shirt carrying a plastic bag full of groceries; rivers stretching and vibrant greens swimming; dark green army helmets strolling roadside, arm around a friend, neighbor, brother; snaking up ascending skyward mountain road, twists and leaning bodies bouncing, sun shining, reflecting, scorching; chimes blaring through bus speakers to a video of colorfully robed opera singers; water buffaloes grazing, basking, stone walls crumbling, railway workers sweating, laundry lines hanging, shirtless children wading; a periodic breath-stealing poison stench from the bus lavatory; a pothole smash and the darting swerve of an overtaking minibus; the swing of a hammock and the swirl of a distant rising smoke, higher up over and around twisting, white lines tracing, vast lake revealed: reddish sand outlined, at once disappeared and back returned; road falling down, hugging a water's edge; gazing at mountains looming; boats of rust and rot and bamboo poles emerging; scattered graves standing with rocks and sand under a canopy; colored triangular roofs above a narrow building; a tunnel approaching, yellow light consuming, the long darkness swallowing; out again and the sea welcomes- factories, warehouses, powerlines and rock piles; hillsides carved and brown grass growing; propaganda billboards like traffic signs while giant brown nets hang over water with four corners hoisted by long bamboo poles; rickshaws of long construction lumber and cafes with curbside motorbikes parked as horses to a trough; garages and bookstores, baseball caps and breathing masks, tire piles and fruit stands. The bus pulls into Da Nang town. Fuel, rest, heat. 16 hours and counting.
The trumpet horn sings and the road to Saigon rolls on.
I give my highest recommendation for traveling to Vietnam. The country was phenomenal. I might not recommend taking a bus down the length of the country from Hanoi to Saigon, though. Pressed for time, I had to skip everything in between the two big cities, taking a 34-hour sleeper bus for the nearly 1,100 mile distance...
The trumpet horn sings out at the pavement ahead, announcing our presence and intentions to oncoming trucks and scores of shoulder-hugging motorbikes. Streets lined with storefronts, mini-markets and foodstands pass by; families and neighbors sit at plastic tables above dirt floor patios; straw cone hats bob among rice patties, bamboo shacks as sentries to pink flowered gardens; the road bends with the passing hills, lined with windmill-shaped ferns, palm trees and a background tree-lined mountain ridge; low-hanging white cottonball clouds floating, suspended at the mountain ridge mid-level; silk-masked women carrying baskets by motorbike; a lone child in a yellow t-shirt carrying a plastic bag full of groceries; rivers stretching and vibrant greens swimming; dark green army helmets strolling roadside, arm around a friend, neighbor, brother; snaking up ascending skyward mountain road, twists and leaning bodies bouncing, sun shining, reflecting, scorching; chimes blaring through bus speakers to a video of colorfully robed opera singers; water buffaloes grazing, basking, stone walls crumbling, railway workers sweating, laundry lines hanging, shirtless children wading; a periodic breath-stealing poison stench from the bus lavatory; a pothole smash and the darting swerve of an overtaking minibus; the swing of a hammock and the swirl of a distant rising smoke, higher up over and around twisting, white lines tracing, vast lake revealed: reddish sand outlined, at once disappeared and back returned; road falling down, hugging a water's edge; gazing at mountains looming; boats of rust and rot and bamboo poles emerging; scattered graves standing with rocks and sand under a canopy; colored triangular roofs above a narrow building; a tunnel approaching, yellow light consuming, the long darkness swallowing; out again and the sea welcomes- factories, warehouses, powerlines and rock piles; hillsides carved and brown grass growing; propaganda billboards like traffic signs while giant brown nets hang over water with four corners hoisted by long bamboo poles; rickshaws of long construction lumber and cafes with curbside motorbikes parked as horses to a trough; garages and bookstores, baseball caps and breathing masks, tire piles and fruit stands. The bus pulls into Da Nang town. Fuel, rest, heat. 16 hours and counting.
The trumpet horn sings and the road to Saigon rolls on.
Against the Wind
You can either take a bus from Saigon to Phnom Penh, the capitol of Cambodia, or you can take a boat up the Mekong River from a town called Chau Doc, near the border. I had elected to go with the boat option, paying an additional 10 bucks to upgrade to an express hydrofoil. What cooler way to go to Cambodia, eh? As it turned out, I didn't make that connection either.
After walking around town all day, I was making my way back to my hostel when a guy on a motorbike asked me, "where you from?" I had been getting accustomed to politely avoiding people on the street who approached me because there were so many. But for some reason I turned around and answered "America." His name was Day. He told me he was a private tour guide and showed me a book of recommendations from numerous travelers who he had guided on custom trips around southern Vietnam. The first recommendation read: "So, you've stumbled across Day, tour guide extraordinaire, and you are thinking it is pretty shady to accept a tour offer from a random Vietnamese guy on the street. Believe me- GO WITH DAY! You won't regret it!"
So I cancelled my hydrofoil ticket.
Day agreed to take me on a 2-day tour of the Cu Chi Tunnels, which were used by the Viet Cong to harass American soldiers during the "American War". He said he would take me there and to his hometown of Tay Ninh for dinner with his family. The next morning, as I waited for him to pick me up on his motorbike in a torrential downpour just short of a full blown monsoon, I started having doubts. I only managed 3 hours sleep in an oven-like guest house room the night before, I was already soaked, and the idea of a comfortably dry tour bus ride into Cambodia was beaconing. Easy, dry, bus ride with a tour company and fellow travellers... or a rain-soaked 70 km ride on the back of a motorbike to the tunnels with a local Vietnamese man who's father had been killed in the tunnels by an American bomb dropped from a B52? What sort of trip was this anyway? Comfortable and easy or adventurous and limit-pushing?
I sighed. Then laughed. "Alright Day, I need to buy a raincoat first. Let's go." Jumping on the back of the bike, I felt that comfort zone explode one more time.
The ride was wet, to say the least. I swore I couldn't have felt wetter if I'd been in a swimming pool. Manuevering through the traffic of downtown Saigon, holding the seat in a white-knuckled terror as your hired tour guide passes slower moving traffic by swerving into oncoming traffic lanes is probably the last way you would want to understand what driving in Vietnam is like. I found closing my eyes helped until a bus flew through a puddle, spraying us in mud and water and nearly knocking us into a trishaw driver carrying a chain basket of live pigs. I thought of the bus to Cambodia and of my stubborn quest for adventure.
But the rain slowed and we got to the tunnels. I followed Day and another guide through the narrow passageways, trying to keep up with them and smacking my head several times on the dirt roofs in doing so. I almost felt like I was in Discovery Zone, trying to chase a friend's little brother through the plastic tunnels long after I had already grown too big to manage more than a slow, cursing crawl.
Mixed emotions, disturbing, confusing... They played a video honoring the achievements of the Viet Cong against the "evil American invaders", showing how they set traps with steel spikes and popped out of the pits to fire machine guns into a field of advancing soldiers before disappearing into the earth again. By the end of the video I was thoroughly pissed off. I had to take a few deep breaths. I was really in no position to be angry at anybody. Here I am as an American tourist being led by people who had grown up in the area with families who had been permanently affected by the war. Feel bad for them? Feel guilty? Feel angry? I didn't know.
I can't describe what it is like to stand in front of a war memorial statue of a woman holding her dying son in her lap in the middle of a cemetary where thousands of Vietnamese were killed by my countrymen. Nor the feeling of standing in a museum, staring at war photographs of mangled corpses and deformed limbs from American chemical weapons next to families of Vietnamese tourists. Then there was the video of how American soldiers were tortured, how the tunnels became a hell trap for boys who had been drafted to fight a war they didn't know anything about.
All of those images were mixing around as I sat down on the tiled floor of Day's tiny home with him and his three brothers-in-law, sitting under a mantle where a portrait of Day's father in military uniform stood watch. The whole experience was so surreal. But the most amazing thing about the entire crazy, convoluted scene? How unbelievably genuine my hosts were to me. They held absolutely zero negative feelings against Americans, much less me. We passed shots of a heavy rice wine and ate chicken and rice, with Day acting as a translator. I expressed my gratitude for how welcoming they were to me. Then one of Day's brothers-in-law shook his head and then shook my hand, looking me straight in the eye. He said something in Vietnamese and held my hand firm. Day translated. "Our governments may not agree, may not ever agree, but we are the same. We have the same heart."
I nearly cried.
The rice wine shots kept on coming and we sat and sang to a kareoke machine into the night. I sang "Against the Wind" and "A Hard Day's Night" which were the only songs I knew in the list of songs that started with A. Quang and Trang got into singing some Vietnamese songs and I got Day to sing one too.
The hydrofoil ride will have to wait for the next time I cross into Cambodia.
After walking around town all day, I was making my way back to my hostel when a guy on a motorbike asked me, "where you from?" I had been getting accustomed to politely avoiding people on the street who approached me because there were so many. But for some reason I turned around and answered "America." His name was Day. He told me he was a private tour guide and showed me a book of recommendations from numerous travelers who he had guided on custom trips around southern Vietnam. The first recommendation read: "So, you've stumbled across Day, tour guide extraordinaire, and you are thinking it is pretty shady to accept a tour offer from a random Vietnamese guy on the street. Believe me- GO WITH DAY! You won't regret it!"
So I cancelled my hydrofoil ticket.
Day agreed to take me on a 2-day tour of the Cu Chi Tunnels, which were used by the Viet Cong to harass American soldiers during the "American War". He said he would take me there and to his hometown of Tay Ninh for dinner with his family. The next morning, as I waited for him to pick me up on his motorbike in a torrential downpour just short of a full blown monsoon, I started having doubts. I only managed 3 hours sleep in an oven-like guest house room the night before, I was already soaked, and the idea of a comfortably dry tour bus ride into Cambodia was beaconing. Easy, dry, bus ride with a tour company and fellow travellers... or a rain-soaked 70 km ride on the back of a motorbike to the tunnels with a local Vietnamese man who's father had been killed in the tunnels by an American bomb dropped from a B52? What sort of trip was this anyway? Comfortable and easy or adventurous and limit-pushing?
I sighed. Then laughed. "Alright Day, I need to buy a raincoat first. Let's go." Jumping on the back of the bike, I felt that comfort zone explode one more time.
The ride was wet, to say the least. I swore I couldn't have felt wetter if I'd been in a swimming pool. Manuevering through the traffic of downtown Saigon, holding the seat in a white-knuckled terror as your hired tour guide passes slower moving traffic by swerving into oncoming traffic lanes is probably the last way you would want to understand what driving in Vietnam is like. I found closing my eyes helped until a bus flew through a puddle, spraying us in mud and water and nearly knocking us into a trishaw driver carrying a chain basket of live pigs. I thought of the bus to Cambodia and of my stubborn quest for adventure.
But the rain slowed and we got to the tunnels. I followed Day and another guide through the narrow passageways, trying to keep up with them and smacking my head several times on the dirt roofs in doing so. I almost felt like I was in Discovery Zone, trying to chase a friend's little brother through the plastic tunnels long after I had already grown too big to manage more than a slow, cursing crawl.
Mixed emotions, disturbing, confusing... They played a video honoring the achievements of the Viet Cong against the "evil American invaders", showing how they set traps with steel spikes and popped out of the pits to fire machine guns into a field of advancing soldiers before disappearing into the earth again. By the end of the video I was thoroughly pissed off. I had to take a few deep breaths. I was really in no position to be angry at anybody. Here I am as an American tourist being led by people who had grown up in the area with families who had been permanently affected by the war. Feel bad for them? Feel guilty? Feel angry? I didn't know.
I can't describe what it is like to stand in front of a war memorial statue of a woman holding her dying son in her lap in the middle of a cemetary where thousands of Vietnamese were killed by my countrymen. Nor the feeling of standing in a museum, staring at war photographs of mangled corpses and deformed limbs from American chemical weapons next to families of Vietnamese tourists. Then there was the video of how American soldiers were tortured, how the tunnels became a hell trap for boys who had been drafted to fight a war they didn't know anything about.
All of those images were mixing around as I sat down on the tiled floor of Day's tiny home with him and his three brothers-in-law, sitting under a mantle where a portrait of Day's father in military uniform stood watch. The whole experience was so surreal. But the most amazing thing about the entire crazy, convoluted scene? How unbelievably genuine my hosts were to me. They held absolutely zero negative feelings against Americans, much less me. We passed shots of a heavy rice wine and ate chicken and rice, with Day acting as a translator. I expressed my gratitude for how welcoming they were to me. Then one of Day's brothers-in-law shook his head and then shook my hand, looking me straight in the eye. He said something in Vietnamese and held my hand firm. Day translated. "Our governments may not agree, may not ever agree, but we are the same. We have the same heart."
I nearly cried.
The rice wine shots kept on coming and we sat and sang to a kareoke machine into the night. I sang "Against the Wind" and "A Hard Day's Night" which were the only songs I knew in the list of songs that started with A. Quang and Trang got into singing some Vietnamese songs and I got Day to sing one too.
The hydrofoil ride will have to wait for the next time I cross into Cambodia.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
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