Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Sunday, June 11: Misadventures on the “Scenic Route”

Jim and I were due to arrive for our program on the night of June 10th, so Saturday was to be our last all-day travel day. After way too many days of all-day bus journeys, we decided to shake things up a bit and travel primarily by boat today on the scenic route across the Cambodia-Vietnam border through the Mekong Delta. However, we remained on a tight budget, so we chose neither the express bus service nor the speed boat companies. Instead, we opted for a budget company’s combination of bus, boat, and minibus that was supposed to take about nine hours to reach Ho Chi Minh City through the border town of Chou Doc. I guess we should have known by now that travel times are as optimistic as possible and that anytime you are required to change vehicles or vessels multiple times you are opening yourself up for problems, but in our excitement to see the river delta, we ignored these obvisous warnings. As a result, the nine hours became a sixteen hour epic odyssey that just kept getting stranger After all those rather depressing discussions of Cambodian poverty and politics, I hope this is a bit more entertaining!
The morning actually started off really well, albeit significantly too early for our tastes. We arose at 6, drenched in sweat as usual in our tin shacks. Having long since given up on the shower’s inconsistent trickle, we used the hostel’s cleverly named “bun-gun” (a hose that replaces toilet paper) to rinse a bit, and then hopped in the waiting van to take us to the bus to the boat. We arrived at the bus station, where there was both a bus and driver. For unclear reasons, though, the driver chose not to get in to the waiting bus for an extended period of time.
Finally, though, we loaded up, picked up enough passengers at stops around the city to bring us to capacity, and headed to the highway. The bus had clearly been around for decades, but in its own rickety, bedraggled way, it seemed spacious. The air-conditioning was even blowing. Again, we should have known that the always proudly advertised air-conditioning is merely a rouse. We had never had a journey where it blew the whole time—why should this be different? Indeed, just twenty minutes down the highway, the engine inexplicably stopped. After another fifteen minutes of driver head scratching, we were able to begin again. Apparently the problem had been the air-conditioning, but we turning it off fixed everything.
The next three hours offered our last free Cambodian roller-coaster ride. Again the road was labeled as a national highway, but it looked more like a dirt track to me. The track, though, was full of trucks that would exceed the weight limit on any paved American highway. The cargo in most of them was people, who were packed like sardines in the backs of trucks, on the roofs, clinging to the sides, or hanging off the back. I could barely hang on inside the bus—I’m not quite sure how they managed to avoid falling right under the wheels of the frequent oncoming traffic that would barrel ahead in the wrong lane or in both lanes or off the road.
Running only about an hour behind, we got to the boat that would take us to the border. “Boat” turned out to be a generous term. The vessel was more like a rust bucket with a steering wheel. It sat so low to the water that I thought it was sinking when I first saw it. Of course the enclosed cabin lacked air-conditioning or shades to prevent the sun from beating down on our little greenhouse for the next four hours. The promised scenery was absent here—just dirt. Occasionally we’d see a shack or two, but really there was very little.
Two hours later we pulled up at the border checkpoint. The gangplank would be considered a safety hazard anywhere in the world—it looked about to snap and we had to walk one at a time and hang on tight while threading our feet carefully between the holes. Here we checked out of Cambodia and officially entered no-man’s land. When we had lingered long enough for everyone to buy something from the children selling overpriced soda, we were herded back to our bucket to cross this nether region where we had no country.
The bucket’s end of the line was at the Vietnamese entry point—a little collection of shacks on the shore still a full 2.5 hours from the nearest Vietnamese town. The country displayed its finest right on the border, offering two scams for all entering tourists. First we had to pay a mysterious “quarantine fee” to get a ticket that assured us we did not have SARS. Since SARS was never in Vietnam, I hadn’t been particularly concerned, but it was nice to have a ticket that confirmed my self-diagnosis.
Then, we learned that it would take Customs somewhere between half an hour and an hour to process our passports and during the processing time we were required to wait in the coffee shop, offering the only food in miles (unclear where the profits went). Finally, we all redeemed our passports. Peter found that his had been stamped with a required exit date the day before we arrived, but fortunately he caught it early enough that it could be changed without him paying the fine (heavy and calculated by the day).
Another boat was to take us on the town of Chou Doc. I hadn’t thought it possible, but when this boat appeared, I suddenly wanted our first boat back. This sat even lower in the water, and instead of benches, some chairs had just been set on the deck, stability unknown. We left the port and spent the next several minutes switching bodies around so that the boat could stop tipping and move forward straight, but eventually the balance was achieved.
Here, finally, the scenery actually was beautiful. It really did make the trip worthwhile to see the floating villages here in what appeared to be a lifestyle unchanged in centuries (except for the television antennas that rose above the settlements set just off the water all along the way). It was hard to tell if the people here were any better off than those in Cambodia, but somehow since we were floating down the river, it was really easy to romanticize their lifestyle in a way we could never do with hovels alongside the highway. Nonetheless, the villages seemed so peaceful. Everyone smiled at us and waved as we passed, looking up from fishing or swimming or puttering from house to house back and forth across the rivers. The Mekong Delta is a large network of tributaries and channels, and our boat floated along these channels towards Chou Doc. the delta town of 100,000 people. Nick was so excited by the classic Vietnamese conical straw hats, but everyone really was wearing them. There were all sorts of means to catch fish, from something that looked like an oil derrick to nets, to polls. Under all of the houses set up on stilts are fish farms, six meters deep, where colonies are grown and harvested. We didn’t see any large floating markets, but people seemed to drift from boat to boat, talking and selling snacks. It seemed like such a peaceful way of life.
We were jarred out of our idyllic daze upon arrival at the chaotic port. We wanted to save the dollar commission from the boat company to put us on a mini-bus to Ho Chi Minh City, but unfortunately that meant that we had only the Rough Guide’s vague map. An old man cyclo driver met us as soon as we stepped off the boat and first tried to offer us a ride. I didn’t want to point out to the senior citizen that there was no way his little bike could carry me and my 60 pound backpack faster than I could walk, but he followed us forever, trying to convince us to take a certain minibus company. When he lowered the price enough, we finally relented and purchased our tickets. The company loaded us up in their plush Toyota Land Rover, and we thought we were set for a great trip to the Ho Chi Minh City. Well, what seems too good to be true usually is, and it was—the vehicle took us only to the minibus station a few miles away. We then learned that what was supposed to be a three hour ride would actually take between 5.5 and 6. I cursed and cursed the woman in Phnom Penh who sold me the tickets for this “scenic route,” but there wasn’t much we could do now.
The minibus seemed downright luxurious at first—we thought the Vietnamese really knew how to run their transportation—and it left immediately! Yet, the problem this time seemed to be that empty seats were unacceptable. The driver kept stopping and packing more people in until our backpacks were jammed under our feet. However, at least the four of us had two rows (meant for 5 or 6 Vietnamese people, who are quite a bit smaller). Even that couldn’t last. Soon the driver motioned me to climb to the back with Peter and Nick. Jim joked that he was lonely and wondered if he could come back to. Just a few minutes later, the driver obliged. (He did not speak any English, so this was all grunts.) He seemed to get great pleasure out of toying with us, offering the small children in front of us larger seats, and ensuring that we couldn’t move a bit.
I never thought six hours could last so long. No one spoke any English, the bus was so hot that sweat was pouring down all over me, and we had to leave our legs crossed in ways they were never meant to be crossed. At one point we stopped at some massive rest stop for a break, and when we got back in, the woman in front of us decided that Peter’s stretched out leg could become a table. Poor Peter had a small child resting on his foot until the pins and needles became unbearable. It now being over twelve hours after we departed, even our reserves of patience were gone. We just gritted our teeth and counted the seconds.
Despite the promises to be let off inside the city, we were deposited at a bus station right on the outskirts. We piled out of the vehicle like refugees seeing free soil for the first time, and stretching as never felt so good. Some shady looking taxis were waiting for us, and we were quickly herded into the first vehicle. We were sick of arguing, so when the driver said he didn’t want to use the meter but wanted to charge about four times the going rate, he seemed a bit taken aback by our refusal. Next, he decided that he needed to get gas, but somehow forgot to turn off the meter (fares are calculated by time and distance). I called him back, with Peter mumbling in the back seat about how we knew his tricks and he better not try to fleece us.
Our driver got the last laugh though. As we took off, the meter steamrolled forward at an unquestionably rigged rate. I groaned inwardly—we had been warned about rigged meters, and here we were, stuck. It could have been worse—we only paid about eight dollars—but this was twice what the price should have been. However, we were way, way beyond caring. Finally, just before midnight, sixteen full hours after we departed, the cab pulled into the guesthouse and we were done. Our ten day travel saga across Southeast Asia has concluded. Peter and Nick will take off for a quiet finish on the beach and Jim and I will start our real challenge, living in the city!

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