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November 2005 – Vietnam
The driver put the bus in gear and pulled out from the kerb. This simple act sent every second seat, including mine, into the full reclining position. I retrieved my baseball cap and the back of my head from the lap of the person behind me and the bus resounded to the sound of laughing apologies and the clacking of seats being brought back to the seated position. The fun sort of went out of this however when we realised that the full recline would happen with every pot hole we hit or gear change the driver grunted out. We had been up at sparrows fart to catch the tour bus for our excursion out of town. Together with a German girl named Claire we followed our guide through a series of back alleys to where our bus was waiting. The narrow Hoi An streets prevented any vehicles bigger than a Matchbox car from getting near our hotel. As we killed time on the bus we compared notes with Claire on where we had been and where we were going. She was doing the north to south route and had just come from Hue, our next destination. Claire put a bit of a dampener on our expectations with stories of out of control touts and street vendors. We crossed our fingers and hoped that it was no worse than Saigon.
My Son is the ruins of an ancient town built by the same guys who also threw together the significantly larger Ankor Wat across the border in Cambodia. It sits in a jungle valley surrounded by misty mountains and would be incredibly eerie if it wasn’t for the camera clicks, small talk and the humming along to iPod tunes from the throng of tourists. It lies inside a national park and to get there you either walk the couple of kilometres along the windy road or hitch a ride on old army jeeps, MASH style.
 We poked in and around the ruins as our guide pointed out the stone penises and vaginas for the assembled crowd. “If you drink from here,” he said dipping his finger in the brackish water filling a rock cervix, “hundreds of years ago you get extra fertile. If you drink today you get extra sick.” We walked around the obligatory B52 bomb craters that seem a standard accoutrement to Vietnamese tourist attractions. Is there anything that wasn’t bombed? Aside from the occasional rude intrusions of the 20th and 21st century My Son is the sort of lost city in the jungle where you half expect to bump into Indiana Jones and Lara Croft snogging in some secret anti chamber.
Instead we ran into Sydney Rod, who we had last seen in Cu Chi. Rod had been to Ankor Wat the week before and was finding the Vietnamese version a tad ho hum. As the rain came and the crowds retreated to the ranger station and souvenir shops My Son became hauntingly silent in the misty rain.
The river current had picked up during the past few days following the storms and we discovered that our planned river cruise back to Hoi An had been cancelled as the boat couldn’t make it upstream. We were disappointed as it included lunch and visits to a few fishing villages along the way. After 40 minutes of slamming the back of my head into the guys lap behind me, a joke that was wearing thin, we found ourselves back in Hoi An and paying a cheery feller a couple of bucks for a river cruise.
Big sailing ships used to come right into Hoi An docks but now the river is too shallow. These days it is full of fishing boats of all sizes. Women slap the water with sticks to drive fish into nets their husband drags behind the boat. Groups of buffalo trot along the banks past barely sea worthy hulks flying the tattered gold star on red of the Vietnamese flag. Clothes washed by hand, huge nets and fish traps with bamboo sleeping platforms teetering above them. The river was the main drag of town and it was from here that the city sparked to life. The captain of the boat swung her around towards a fishing couple paddling home causing a wake to buffer the small canoe. They exchanged some shouted Vietnamese and the fisherman grabbed hold or the stern and we toed him back to town.
 Day 1 Part 1 - Saigon Part 2 - Cu Chi
Part 3 - The Reunification Express
Part 4 - Nha Trang
Part 5 - Hoi An
Part 6 - My Son
Part 7 - Hue
Part 8 - The Dee Em Zee
Part 9 - Hanoi
Part 10 - Ha Long Bay |
Road Monkey - Vietnam 
