I almost didn’t come on the Mekong Delta trip. The severe weather that hit Vietnam while I was on my way here resulted in higher than normal flooding of the delta which led to an outbreak of dengue fever. The government was worried about an epidemic. It was all over the English-language newspapers… be careful if you’re going to the Mekong Delta. Whatever you do, don’t let the mosquitoes bite you. Just my luck. I vaguely remembered reading about dengue fever as a side note in my guidebook. It was one of those diseases that doesn’t occur very often so they don’t bother vaccinating travelers against it. Andrew, an Australian I’d met over dinner in Hanoi, had warned me about dengue fever, “Be careful,” he said, “it’s really bad.” He looked so serious. I’d only known him for an hour and I could see how serious he was.
I really didn’t want to get dengue fever. But I did want to see the delta, and I did want to spend more time with the students I had met from Vong’s school, Khoi Viet. I figured I would just be extra careful about the mosquitoes and go enjoy myself. Somehow, though, the whole thing started off on a bad note.
Maybe the 5:30 a.m. start time should have been a red flag. One of the reasons I avoid organized tours is that they always want to get such an early start… but five-thirty? That seemed excessive, even for a tour. It meant waking up at 4:15 to get to the school on time.
Bleh!
But I did.
Maybe it was the bus part that should have clued me in. I’ve been on bus tours with groups of students. I know what students on bus tours are like. They’re loud. They move a lot. Why would Vietnamese students be any different from American ones? Why, at the age of forty-two, would I want to spend a week on a bus tour with sixty of them?
But I did.
Maybe it was the fact that, even as I pulled up to the school at 5:15, I still had only the vaguest idea what the agenda would be for the next few days. Now I don’t mind a little ambiguity. In fact, I like it… a healthy dose of ambiguity keeps a person on her toes. But too much just makes it hard to pack. I don’t mind not knowing where we’re going to stop to eat or whether we’ll be visiting Vietnamese or Khmerian pagodas that day, but if I’m throwing my backpack into the cargo hold of a bus at five-thirty in the morning I at least need to know if I’ll be getting it back again closer to nine, or noon, or lunch, or dinner… just more or less.
The straight-line distance we were to cover between Ho Chi Minh City and our first hotel was only about 120 kilometers. I don’t think it was unreasonable to believe we might just blast straight through, check in, and then start touring. I was so wrong.
There are two buses on the trip and I am lucky enough to get on the big one. After what seems like hours with forty rambunctious teenagers and a hyperactive air conditioning unit that seems to blow directly at me no matter where I point my spigot, we pull in to the Vietnamese equivalent of a truck stop for breakfast. The food is delicious and elegant.
Then it’s back on the bus to go to our hotel… or so I think since no one has mentioned that we will be stopping anywhere else along the way. After a while, though, the bus pulls in to the Temple of Somebody and we have a look around. Later, we get off again next to a fish sauce factory along one of the tributaries of the Delta. Making fish sauce is an art in Vietnam. Tiny fish, fresh from the day’s catch, are layered with salt in enormous clay pots and left to ferment in the sun… after six months the first draw is taken and the fish sauce equivalent of an “extra virgin” grade is bottled up and carted off to the market. You can imagine how this smells.
I think we are going to tour the fish sauce factory so I mentally prepared my nose for the experience. In spite of the smell, I have already come to appreciate fish sauce and even though I’m tired I am looking forward to seeing it under production. Instead we line up to get on a boat.
A boat ride… OK, I think. I’d probably enjoy it more if I weren’t so groggy, but a nice river breeze in my face might clear my head a bit.
“First big boat,” Vu says. Vu is the staff member who has more or less been assigned to keep an eye on me. “Then little boats.”
Hmm… multiple boats. Well, that might take a little longer than I thought, but I like little boats. OK.
The sun is already hot and the air humid. Maybe I should have put my sunscreen in my day bag. I won’t be able to borrow any because Vietnamese don’t wear sun screen. Even when it is ninety degrees outside, the majority of Vietnamese, especially the women, are clothed from head to toe. Being tanned is considered unattractive. People who are tanned look like they’ve been working outside, so they wear hats, masks, sunglasses, long sleeved jackets, arm length gloves and long pants with socks, all in an effort to avoid looking like an outdoor laborer, even if that’s what they actually are. “Why don’t you just wear sunscreen?” I ask one of the girls.
“Too expensive!” she says. “Only rich people can afford to do that.”
Oh well, I’m sure we’ll be going to the hotel after the boat ride – boat rides. I’ll just do like the Vietnamese and cover up until then. I grab my big scarf and get on the big boat.
The big boat stops at a coconut candy factory along the Delta. A famous experience. I’ve read about this place in my guide books… coconut candy fresh from the Mekong Delta. I should enjoy this and I do. We watch the workers take a coconut in the husk and turn it into long strips of chewy candy within minutes. We hang around a bit so we can all buy some, and then we get back on the big boat. While we sail to our next destination, the crew hacks open fresh coconuts for everyone and we sip the cool water out of them as we glide along muddy, sediment-rich rivers that criss cross through the jungle, passing thick glades of water palms, banana trees and all kinds of flying, swimming, buzzing and humming creatures.
That was a nice break from the bus, I think. Then we stop again. This time at an apiary where we watch local bees make local honey. One of the things I usually take home as a souvenir anywhere I travel is a small jar of local honey, but although I’ve found all kinds of local variations here, each with its distinctive taste, color and consistency, none of it is for sale. Not, at least, in the kind of sterilized, vacuum sealed container that would make it through customs. Vietnamese honey is typically sold in used plastic Aquafina bottles. Since I can’t take those home with me I am even more eager than usual to taste it, so I am disappointed when the proprietors bring out trays of fresh honey served over ice.
Ice. “Uh, no thanks,” I gesture.
The students at my table are surprised. “You don’t like honey?”
“I love honey, but you know, I can’t have the ice.” I really think about it for a minute, but no, I’ve been very good about resisting all kinds of dewy refreshing drinks so far, and so far, knock on wood, I haven’t had any trouble with my stomach. What are the chances that the tap water here in the middle of the Mekong jungle is uncontaminated, or that they use filtered water for their ice? Pretty slim.
Vietnamese men learn early how to be gentlemen. They let women go in front of them in line, they give up their seat on the bus for little old ladies, they walk on the dirty side of the sidewalk, and they’ll do their best to solve your foreign tourist problems, even when they don’t understand why you’re being so damn picky. One of the male students says something to the guy with the tray and a moment later a steamy hot pot of tea appears next to a small glass of honey. It is delicious!
OK, it was a nice stop here, but in spite of the sweet pick-me-up I’m feeling really tired and starting to get cranky. I’ve forgotten about the “little boats” and for some reason believe that any minute we might be getting back to our wonderfully frigid bus and heading for our hotel where I will be able to take a shower and finish sleeping.
“Now we take a short hike,” Vu says.
Hike! This is torture. A short hike, he’d said, but I still haven’t figured out what Vietnamese meant by short. I have flashbacks of similar promises made by Vinh.
Vu is true to his word, though. We walk down a lush green path to a little dirt road nearby where our next mode of transportation awaits us: cute little… uh... ponies. No little boats. I guess we’re going on a pony ride first, to take us to the little boats, which will take us back to the big boat, which will take us to our bus, which will take us to our hotel. OK. I like ponies.
At this point I wish that the students spoke English better or that they were less shy about it. They must have spent the last week’s worth of classes talking about everything we would be doing on this trip in detail because none of it seems to surprise them. If only I could get one of them to tell me what our itinerary is maybe I could wrap my sleep deprived brain around the rest of the day and figure out how much energy I need to muster to actually enjoy it all. "Please tell me what we are doing next," I say to Vu, and off he goes to chat with one of the teachers.
"After this we get on little boats. We have to be at the bus at two."
Two pm? It’s not even noon yet! Well, at least I know.
After the ponies, which fortunately for my white shorts are attached to small metal pony carts, we finally get on the little boats. Mercifully, they are not equipped with loudspeakers, which means that at least they are quiet. The Vietnamese affinity for noise has not been helping my headache. Everywhere we go, on the bus, on the big boat, in the restaurant, somebody has to be either talking or singing over a loudspeaker. Everyone in Vietnam is an emcee. Everyone is a karaoke star. Everyone is a ham. Silence is not an option. Aren't they tired? Do they always get up at 4:15 in the morning?
But the little boats are peaceful, low tech things and they take us to lunch, which is wonderful, on an island in the delta. All the river fish I've eaten during this trip had been superb – richly flavored and beautifully served – but this is one of the best… a whole river fish propped up between four wooden sticks, cooked head, fins and all with the scales golden brown and crispy, flaking off the sides of its body like a crunchy, salty seasoning that makes him glimmer in the sun like, actually, like a fish… swimming just beneath the surface of a clear, cool river.He tastes good, too.
We dig in with our chopsticks. My tablemates, three teachers, four bus operators and Vu, find it interesting that I can actually get food into my mouth using chopsticks, but aside from commenting on that we don’t talk much. I am not even sure who among them speaks English. I watch what they do – what goes with what and which gets eaten first – and try to do the same without leaving too thick a trail of spill marks on the tablecloth.
After lunch, we take another short walk to the grotto of the Coconut Monk. Everything in the Delta centers around coconuts. After visiting this strange compound, we get back on the boat… the big boat, at last! More karaoke, and me sitting right next to a speaker again, but we’re almost at the bus and at least then I will be able to sleep while we finish the drive to the hotel.
But not quite. First, we have to stop at another island for tea and fruit… and more singing. A trio of costumed women sings a folk song bidding us visitors farewell. The students pick someone from our group to reciprocate with a song saying good-bye to our hosts. Now we’re finally on our way back, for real this time, and at long last, just before two pm, just like Vu said, we’re back on the bus. I curl up in my seat and blow my stuffed up nose for a full ten minutes. My head is killing me and I’m late for my malaria pill, but it seems like we’re finally on our way to the hotel so no problem, it can wait.
“About one hour,” says Vu. OK, I can handle an hour.
And he is more or less right. The bus actually stops in less than an hour, but not at a hotel. The heat of the afternoon is oppressive. My head is throbbing from noise, chaos, fever, and lack of sleep. In addition to being seated near the speaker of the bus’s karaoke system, I also somehow end up right above the horn. Every time the driver honks at someone, which happens a lot, something underneath my seat blasts and screeches. It’s so loud I can feel it vibrate. I would happily pay $10 for an icy cold pint of Anchor Steam. Instead, I get off the bus yet again, lugging my heavy day bag full of things I don’t need and lacking most of the things that would have been useful like sun block, Tylenol and another layer of mosquito repellent.
But this can’t be too long of a stop, I figure. Vu had said something about a farm. How long could it take to walk around a farm?A farm, yes. I try to decipher the sign at the entrance. A snake farm.
Fine. I said I wanted to eat snake while I was here, I might as well have a look at one of the places that raises them. This one is complete with one of the country’s premier snake bite emergency clinics, which makes me wonder how competent the handlers might be. We spend the next hour exploring reptiles large and small, caged and loose. I am not really in the mood to drape one around my neck and pose for pictures, but everybody wants to see the foreigner hold a snake so I tell Vu I will pose with the snake if he poses with me. We put the snake on like a scaly scarf and smile for a round of photos.
OK, fine. Back to the bus. By now I really have to pee, but something about being on a snake farm makes me wary of using the outhouse. Vu had said it was only an hour and we’d already gone at least half that, so we must be close. I can hold it.
Right.
After about thirty minutes, just as I am wondering if I really can hold it, the teacher says something in Vietnamese to the students. Vu translates, “two hours.”
I’m sure my eyes get as big as serving platters. “Two hours til what?” I can’t bear to listen to the answer.
“Until the bus stop.”
Oh joy. I am not about to ask the driver to stop just because my foreign bladder didn’t take care of itself at the snake farm when it had the chance. Fortunately, as a flight instructor I’d gotten pretty good at this. Unless you’re really desperate, you can’t ask a student to make a pit stop mid-lesson in a small airplane just because you forgot to go before you left the airport. I am competent at holding it. I can wait another two hours. I’ll just cuddle up against the window and take a nap, and when I wake up we’ll be at our comfortable hotel where I’ll be able to pee and sleep and take my malaria pill and put on more mosquito repellent. I can do it. The bus is even oddly quiet for a few moments. I snuggle up against the cold pane. Yes, I can do this.
And then… techno.
No. Anything but techno. Loud, thumpy, ultra-bass, vibrating techno. I am going to die, I’m sure of it. If there’s one thing my head can’t stand, even when it’s feeling good to start with, it’s techno. Why didn’t I think to bring earplugs? Not that they would make such a difference; techno reverberates right down to the marrow of your deepest darkest bones, but they might help a little bit.
Not caring anymore about whom I might offend, I wad up bits of tissue, stick them in my ears like a complete geek and wonder how I am going to survive five days of this.
Mercifully, they only play three songs, which turns out to be the daily techno allowance from what I can tell. Maybe that’s all the teachers can take themselves.
Eventually, somewhere on a busy corner near the Mekong River, the bus stops and people start getting off.
“Are we here?” I ask.
Vu is evasive. “It’s hard for the bus to get through, so we walk,” he says. Fine by me… I am happy enough to walk the rest of the way to the hotel. It will help keep me from peeing in my shorts.
But no – and this is where I start to lose it – where we walk to is not a hotel. It is a ferry boarding dock. “We’re getting on a ferry?” I ask cautiously.
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“Then we cross the river.”
“And on the other side of the river what happens? We find our hotel?”
“Yes.”
“Do we walk?”
“Yes.”
“Do we get on a bus?”
“Yes.”
“Which one… walk or bus?”
“Both. We walk, and then we get on the bus.”
“And how long on the bus?”
“Not long.”
And if this is getting tedious to read, imagine how tedious it is to experience. Unfortunately, Vu himself doesn’t know all the answers. He has not been on this particular tour before and he doesn’t have a copy of the itinerary either. He is doing the best he can with what he has, but to the Vietnamese way of thinking, it doesn’t really matter anyway. We will get there when we got there. They probably think I am just being difficult, which I am. It probably would not matter so much to me, either, if I wasn’t sick and feverish and really, really tired.
I try, unfairly, to pin him down. “Five minutes on the bus? One hour?”
He thinks a moment. “Ten minutes to walk to the bus.”
“OK, and then how long on the bus?”
“Ten minutes.”
“OK, so in about twenty minutes I can get to my backpack?”
“Yes.”
Good. I really need to take some Tylenol.
“OK, thank you.” I pause to look around. A ferry dock anywhere wouldn’t have the cleanest bathrooms, and it probably isn’t the nicest place along the Mekong River either, but I really need to go. I ask Vu if there is time.
“Yes, I wait here.” Thank goodness for Vu. This might take some time, but he won’t let the boat leave without me. And if it does, he will wait with me for the next one, all the while trying to make it seem as though I am not inconveniencing anyone, even if I am.
I kick my way through a flock of chickens. For some reason, squat toilets always seem to be located near the ugly chickens, the ones that are too scraggly to run around out front where people can see them from the street. That’s probably why people in this part of the world are more susceptible to bird flu. I am not feeling too generous at this point. I scoop some water into a flush bucket, review my meager vocabulary lessons – nu means women, nam means men… I’m pretty sure – and go in to have a look.
You would think you wouldn’t want to linger too long at something called a squat toilet, what we would literally call a shit hole back home, but they’re actually much cleaner than the average port-a-potty you might find at an air show or a county fair. They’re much more sanitary than similar shit holes I’ve used in Italy and France. All the ones I’ve used here have been made out of porcelain and located in reasonably well ventilated huts. The problem isn’t with the smell, really, it’s the logistics. Men, please skip ahead if you’re squeamish.
In order to pee – and god help you if you have to do anything else – you walk up onto a small platform, face the door, and put your feet on a pair of textured footholds immediately left and right of a small porcelain hole. So far so good, but to squat down properly from this vantage point you need to roll your pants down far enough that they stay clear of the splatter zone. Moving the top of your pants down from the waist means that the bottoms of them sink down below your ankles and onto the floor. You really don’t want them to do that, especially if it’s been raining, which it does every day, and previous squatters have tracked in mud mixed with scraggly chicken droppings.
So before you pull your pants down you have to roll the bottoms of them up. Unless you’re a gymnast, doing that typically means bending over, and when you bend over, anything that might be hanging on your arm falls over onto the same floor you’re trying to avoid touching with your pants. So before you roll your pants up, you have to find something to hang your bag on. Sometimes there’s an obvious hook provided for this purpose, but often it takes some ingenuity to find an appropriate protuberance – strong enough to hold weight and high enough to keep your bag off the floor. Depending on the length of your hair, you may or may not need to put that up, too, in order to keep it out of harm’s way.
Now you’re ready to deal with the issue of toilet paper. More often than not, there simply isn’t any. Not that they’ve run out, it was never provided in the first place. If you’re sloppy enough to need toilet paper, you’re supposed to bring your own. I’d been forewarned about that by my friend Sylvia, so I always come prepared.
You can see how all this might take a little time. The first thing you have to do when you enter an unfamiliar squat toilet is survey the facilities in order to come up with a reasonable plan of action. But finally, hair tied up and day bag hanging precariously from a large splinter in the wall, you’re ready to roll up your pants, pull them down and go. The act itself is simple, though I can see how those with weak thighs might have trouble with the positioning. Once you’re done, a small bucket of water serves as a flush. Sometimes you get that from outside, but the better ones have narrow canals flowing through them for the purpose, which is much nicer.
I make it back in time for the ferry, and as we cross the Mekong an incredible blood red sun is setting, peaked by puffy white cumulus clouds building over the coastal hilltops. It is beautiful. Everything we did today was pretty cool, actually. I just wish I’d been in a better frame of mind to enjoy it. I would enjoy the sunset more if I didn’t have in the back of my mind that my twelve-hour mosquito repellent expired ages ago and here I am crossing the Mekong River at peak mosquito time in nothing but shorts and a tank top. I remember Andrew’s serious face. But what can I do? My deet is in the backpack, which is on the bus, which is on another ferry, a bus ferry.
Finally, it happens. We get back on the bus and go to a big, modern looking complex. “This is our hotel?” I am so tired I feel like I will cry if he says no.
“This is the restaurant.”
I can feel it coming… the lump in my throat, mild stinging sensation deep in my eyes. I stifle it. “Oh.”
“It is also hotel.”
I perk up.
“But Mr. Tinh says we are very late for dinner so we eat dinner first and then check in to hotel.”
Fine! Great! We’re here!
“But we take luggage now.” Things are looking better all the time.
Dinner is fast and excellent and I am cracking open the door to my room only forty-five minutes later, exhausted but happy to be… but wait…
What is that big black thing on the floor?
Oh god. Just the most enormous beetle I have ever seen. He doesn’t seem too bothered by me. He is much too big to step on and really such a presence that I wouldn’t feel right about it anyway. I slap a shoe against the floor thinking it will scare him off but he just looks at me calmly with his big beetle eyes (or so I imagine). He wants a stand-off. I put my things down and jump up and down on the floor with both feet right next to him; he finally gets the point and scampers underneath one of the beds. I’m going to forget about him, I think. I’ll use the other bed.
I cautiously examine the garbage can to find out why it seems to be spontaneously crackling and, finding nothing moving inside, I satisfy myself that I can probably sleep here. I may not be able to turn all the lights off, since my room mate might take that as an invitation to come back again, but I’m so tired I probably won’t even notice.
Meeting time tomorrow: 6:00 a.m. Maybe I’ll feel better. Maybe I’ll get used to waking up with the roosters. Maybe our communications will improve. Maybe I can survive four more days.
Maybe.
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