The memories started coming back. Tom. The bartender. Shots of rice wine. Ohhh, shots of rice wine. Those were not good. Dear liver: I’m sorry for that. And all the rest, too. Don’t hate me. We’ve got a long way to go.
Vicky, Tom and I had headed out with Tom’s Chinese girlfriend, Chin, and another bartender with long wavy brown hair who told us to call him “vegetable head”. Clubs in China are different than anywhere else I’ve been to. They don’t really have big dancefloors. Instead people stand or sit around tall tables and play drinking games, turning them 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…
So. That explains something.
The cross-city bus arrived at the out-of-town bus station and I soon 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.
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 took 3 hours to get to the border town of Pingxiang. I’d have to walk from there over the border. I mixed ramen noodle mix into a package of smashed noodles and ate it dry. My head was pounding. I tried to sleep. Then tried to read about Vietnam. Then tried to listen to some music.
The rain came down, battering the bus in steady waves. Limestone karst peaks showed themselves periodically in between patches of low, sweeping storm clouds.
Vietnam. I can’t believe I’m heading into northern Vietnam… I can’t believe I’m heading into northern Vietnam like THIS. Somehow, I had imagined it a bit differently.
Ducking out of the bus into the slightly diminished rain in Pingxiang, I was instantly 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. The rain doubled its attacks. It was 25 minute drive to the border and I chatted with the driver’s teenage daughter in the back of the carriage. She told me she was learning English because her dad told her it was very important to make money and have a good life. I didn’t doubt that.
We stopped at a barracade and my driver told me this was as far as he could take me. I paid him, despite a feeling in my gut that told me I was getting ripped off. Not that my head was in any condition to figure out what the exchange rates added up to anyway.
So I thanked the man and his daughter and staggered toward the barracade, passing armed guards carrying machine guns and a group of young men talking around the open hood of a Russian Lada. In just two minutes the rain had shifted from downpour to light drizzle. 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 another 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.
Filed under: My Book
