A Vietnam Sandwich

OZZIE WRAPAROUND (1)

In Australia time seems to move more slowly, creakily negotiating the vast spaces. People in minor bureaucratic positions are even more officious than in England, perhaps in an attempt to impose petty order on this unwieldy terrain. The urinals all have flush chains. After Asia it was a shock to see so many white people who all speak English (of sorts). Another shock was the price of everything. I had become accustomed to splendour, which is difficult to forget.


HOI AN FLUSH

Last night in Hoi An. It's been gorgeous, full of experience. Lots of stories, some that I can't even fathom. Seems crazy to have a story without a suicide bomber these days. I feel like an idiot - but these chances are so fleeting and must be grasped. From one ridiculous experience to a really rather beautiful one. From a great non-realised romance with the cutest Vietnamese girl [her accent and the way she laughed the words 'no' and 'maybe', and never said yes just the Vietnamese grunted 'ugh' (sp?), and threw her head back bashful to the audience when we said goodbye] to an abortive homo dalliance. And kisses in the street. Love runs parallel, never quite touching, always visibly staining the street with its syrupy ooze. I am DRIVEN by these things. Is this the time for self-indulgence?

I lost my camera in Hoi An, with 300 photos of Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. I have drawn minature sketches of all the ones I remember. I passed through Hue in an afternoon.


HIGH HANOI

I received a pen and a drink from a lovely London family atop the City View cafe in Hanoi against the lake stretched out darkly sparkling. The man had once been arrested with some friends for being Irish and loud on the tube. The woman was beautiful and had a theory that the world's terror atrocities were following their family around the Globe (there was some substantiation for this, which I won't go into right now). Their littlest daughter was very cute and clever and loved watermelon and riding camels, and the eldest was teetering on the brink of adolescent bashfulness. We drank beer and breathed in the crazy city, astoundingly alive far below us like the bottom of the cave in Raiders of the Lost Ark.


MONEY AND STREETS

Hanoi was running around ripped off. Sometimes I am gullible as a hungry puppy. An irritating hotel and an obscenely extravagant flight to Hong Kong brought about by my lack of forward planning. An overpriced day trip to Halong Bay was deafeningly misorganised. On the good side, fantastic beef noodles at a street cafe where no-one spoke English. I love sitting on those tiny plastic stools amidst sweat guzzled streets and Viets huddled round endlessly chatting and drinking beer with ice and smoking White Horse. I LOVE IT! The memory of the streets hits me like a wave, and the taste of the soup inhaled with voices and people and warmth. America has used chemical warfare. No other country has used nuclear weapons in war. In the concerted effort to prevent other countries from developing nuclear technology we are like the members of a very smug club. We have it but you can't. Or, we have it so you can't. The big question is, though the US has used and uses hideous means to conquer the world ideologically and financially, do I want their mission to be successful? It has been enormously refreshing to be in Vietnam, a country that seems to work without the gush of Americanised culture that's inescapable in the West. There is poverty and corruption, inefficiency. Healthcare is all but unaffordable to the average person. Nonetheless the culture is strikingly warm, friendly, community based. Families look after each other, which might be the result of poverty and the lack of a welfare state as much as indiginous cultural differences. Does our welfare state come after our individualism or does it inculcate it? Do they advance together? In a replica ethnic longhouse in the grounds of the Vietnam Ethnology Museum I drank tea and chatted with Dat. He was rather happy with the Government but wanted more cash and the ability to travel. It will come eventually, I'm fairly sure, along with living alone and plastic surgery.


TWO THOUSAND STUBBY ISLANDS ALONE IN THE SEA

En route to Halong Bay (with a bunch of people who had paid less than me) we stopped off at a tourist warehouse with 30 other buses. Whiteys swarmed, buying diet coke and smoking fags in the scorching heat. Disabled people sold bits of cloth. The free lunch was lousy. I ate it next to Vung, a Vietnamese girl with pointy shoes who I'd chatted with on the bus. She was about to go to Reading for a month, the poor thing. Several others at the table ate in surly silence. Hung out with two French bombes, Oriane and Valentine, for the day and they laughed at my French. Sitting aft of the boat in the sun silently roaming an inescapable canopy of bluest sky and everywhere around craggly knobbles sprouted out of the sea like mushrooms after a storm. Two thousand islands, some cut away underneath, some stretching out towards their siblings; some adrift, alone, pensive.

Into a grotto lit up with multicoloured lights like Disneyland. Too majestic to ruin, but they did their best by installing penguin-shaped bins in every crevice. Hundreds of tourists traipsed through and tour guides bellowed an assortment of languages. The walls were stone jellyfish, soaked with cold condensation.

I didn't pay to see another cave, even though it starred in a James Bond film and a French flick Indochine. People live in between the islands on house boats. Surreal in the midst of this natural beauty, little plastic prefabs topped with TV antennae. A school floats, funded by the UK government. I took credit for that. Someone had to!

I was sad to part with Valentine and Oriane. I put so much of myself into these transient relationships. As soon as people feel at ease with me I can't help working into them like the ocean into a fissure of rock. But all the while I am working them into me and I feel it so strongly.

Travelling solo is both wonderful and difficult - I always craved a weird poetic ideal of solitude yet I NEED companionship. And when I have it I want to escape. Some people are never happy. When I'm alone my deranged imagination starts to feed on itself, which is entertaining at first, but irritating after a while.


NEW CENTURY

The calculating crooks at my hotel were one step ahead of me again. All ready to confront them for overcharging me for the Halong Bay day trip, when I was greeted by the sight of someone playing my guitar in the lobby. But.. that was in my room! And is that my bag over there? Yes, it was. Some vague 'problem' with the 'room' had forced them to stuff all my things into various pockets of my bag. THE WRONG POCKETS! Don't these scurrying misfits know that there's an order to things? I was whisked away by bike to their 'other hotel' and put in a vast warehouse type room with cracked mock antique furniture and hammer horror light fittings. The shower was an abbattoir. I bumped into Jakob, my hirsute Canadian friend. We drank in an overpriced shithole called Funky Monkey and met two Ukranian girls who took us to a club that was new and closed. Then, in a superclub called New Century, drinks were astronomical and thousands of pineapple slices had been used as decoration. Bouncers wearing orange boiler suits (each with their own number) prevented me from taking a drink onto the dancefloor and from eating the pineapple. One of the Ukranians expected me to buy her drinks so I ran away upstairs and played pool on a balcony with some guys from Dorset while a bouncer told me I was handsome and offered advice on which shots to play. When the club closed, my bag had magically transported from one locker to another one. I asked the guard to saw a woman in half as his next trick, but this was misinterpreted and I decided to leave Vietnam forthwith.


MIXED BALLS

And what about Hong Kong? Have you ever seen such a craven crowd of skyscrapers? People slosh at the bottom like rainwater in a gutter. Flash storms combined with many short people holding umbrellas on crowded strips of street is bad for my head. Hotness and wetness, and an occasional unexplainable belt of cold air that passes through the city like an angel of mercy.

I had mixed ball soup in a Chinese cafe with condensation coating the front window. I was greeted with frank hostility by the waiters, which I rather liked (do you ever feel like you could use a beating?). Somehow a bit of chilli made it into my eye causing me to weep like a baby. I felt the eyes of everyone on me, like a monkey on drugs. I dabbed with a tissue and soldiered on with the mixed balls, some of which were brown, some white, and some inscrutable grey.

I walked three hours when I arrived in Hong Kong, disbelieving at the difference in room prices from Vietnam. Rooms were 15 pounds - 15 pounds! Can you imagine? I hadn't paid more than 50p for 3 months. Eventually I found the cheapest room in the city at HK$100 (about 8 pounds). It was approximately 2 x 1 metre, with a bathroom that you couldn't sit down in owing to a crisis of width. It was impossible to turn around in the 'shower area' between sink and toilet. There was no floor in the room, it was all taken up by a bed that sagged and groaned under aeons of filth. Wombfully I loved it.

'What gave money its true meaning was its dark-night namelessness, its breathtaking interchangeability.' (The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami)

I sat in the Peninsular Hotel blowing any difference in room prices I had scored on gin and tonic, listening to unobtrusive jazz and breaking the dress code. The next day at the peak of Hong Kong, overlooking the dizzying bay furred with fantastic protrusions, I met Ruth, a psychiatric nurse from Stoke. It's very difficult to meet people in Hong Kong - there is no backpacker guesthouse scene, and big cities impose anonymity. Ruth was feeling much the same so we descended on the ridiculous peak tram and drank bizarre chinese wine cocktails in a subterranean bar airconditioned to freeze the eyeballs.

AC's friend Alex, who lives in Hong Kong, let me stay at his stunning apartment with a panoramic view of the sci-fi city. Alex is relaxed and charming. Jane is down to earth classy. And my fellow (though more long-term) freeloader, Sophie, moved to Spain in order to learn flamenco and make clothes. It was warm and nice being welcomed into their place. Alex and I managed to have a conversation about Pol Pot and the Cultural Revolution as a violent expression of the Hippie revolution in America within about 10 minutes. Brilliant. We all left together, they to a dinner party. I met Ruth and ate won ton noodles in a thronging eatery. Lang Kui Fong is a street with an unusual gradient, packed with people drinking beer out of yard glasses on straps round their necks. We met Alex & co in an ex-pat bar called Feather Boa which is rather like the Bennets' parlour in Pride and Prejudice as seen through a twisted mirror. The size of the cocktails defied belief, and my capacity for reason. I discussed religion and marriage with Alex and a small posh man, young and married and awfully pleased about it all. Small pictures of dogs and things grinned from paisley walls. My vision blurred. Ex-pats bobbed and weaved. I eventually made it back and decided judiciously to have a one hour nap before leaving for the airport at 05:30 to catch my flight to Sydney.

I slept soundly and woke up 45 minutes after my plane had departed. I crashed in on sleeping Jane and Alex to announce my folly and then scarpered off to the airport berating myself intensely during the hour journey. 'Why am I so STUPID' was the mantra, accommpanied by slapping of own face and occasional punch to temple. I was convinced I'd be charged for a whole new ticket, and that the rest of my tickets would be cancelled. And I was supposed to be meeting Hannah in Sydney that night. And Brendon was supposed to be picking me up from the airport.

But the Qantas desk lady didn't even seem to hear my muttered story about severe stomach problems. Nor did she seem to smell the margarita crust that had formed around me. She simply changed me onto the night flight, no charge. I felt tears of relief welling up. I wanted to fall at her feet and offer her my eternal soul, but I didn't want to get locked in a customs bin for 24 hours. And partly I felt I should have been punished for my stupidity. I didn't deserve to be awarded the winning raffle ticket. So I resolved to spend the 12 hours until my flight in the airport, as a sort of purgatory. Hannah emailed saying she couldn't meet that night anyway and Bren offered to pick me up the next morning. Plus HK airport is a shimmering wonderland filled with nymphs and goodies. Am a lucky bitch or what?


12 HOURS IN HK AIRPORT

Ate bowl after bowl of noodle soup;
Bought item after item from Pacific Cafe for 15 min internet slot you get with each;
Read;
Played guitar and attracted large crowd of Chinese who gave me biscuits;
Napped;
Stared into middle distance with runway transit eyes


OZZIE WRAPAROUND (2)

And now Australia. Filled with campervans and friendly people (though there are many people who are painted-friendly shells filled with hate. I know that's true everywhere but their accent gives them a strained intensity that terrifies me).

What have I done in this enormous country over the last three weeks? Did I rescue Hannah from the pouch of evil Professor Wallaroo? Did we save the human race from eradication by a horrific biotoxin with only a can opener and a boomerang? To find out, tune in next week to rrrrrrope of sssssand!