I’d like to apologize to anyone who has been hoping I might post on this blog at a reasonable rate. Not only is my sense of duty undermined by an unwillingness to consistently set aside time to write this, internet problems have kept me from blogspot the last couple weeks (it is blocked in China, and my VPN has been having issues). In any case, here is a much overdue first chapter of the Fall Break (Mis)Adventure!
I’ve put off recounting the journey I hinted at in my last posting long enough. Now, perhaps, these stories will be less fresh than they were a few weeks ago, perhaps even tinged with the faintest scent of nostalgia as I long now for the motorbike swarms of Hanoi, the damp jungle heat of Siem Reap, the bustling anonymity of life in the Bangkok megalopolis. Or maybe I’ve just forgotten some things.
Our tale begins on Thursday, the 21 of October. The four actors of our drama, Sam, Taylor, Ryan, and myself, have rushed through our exams, alerted our teachers of our travel plans, bought lonely planets, made feverish internet investigations as to the culture, currency, and transportation reliability of each of the three nations on our agenda: Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand. We have bought tickets for a plane on Tuesday from Hanoi to Siem Reap, and one from Bangkok back to Kunming on the following Sunday.
We plan to take the night bus from Kunming to Hekou. An hour and a half later than planned, we board a taxi for the bus terminal. By the time we arrive at nine, the trail of the last bus is nearly an hour cold. Frustrated and ill-prepared, there is only one solution: to return defeated, go dancing, and leave in the morning.
The morning bus goes much more smoothly, and by ten o’clock we are sailing past Kunming’s outer edges, southbound. I should have said perhaps, that boarding the morning bus goes much more smoothly, as our ride was anything but that. I spent the first three hours intermittently reading and pondering how anyone could consider karaoke good driving entertainment. In true Chinese style were held up at a checkpoint for half an hour as the nonexistent traffic from the other direction was allowed to pass. About an hour before we were to stop for lunch, we were halted by a seven-car pileup on the road ahead. We wandered in the heat, frustrated and hungry.
As the lanes ahead cleared and our bus began to move, we heard a pitiful crying from the rearmost seat. Oh hell no. From the way the mother was gingerly tugging at the child’s pants, but mostly from the foul, familiar stench that began to drift forward toward our seats, it was pretty clear what had happened, and that with the bus just now moving, we were in for a rough ride, a roughness that had nothing to do with the quality of the roads.
At our 3:00 lunch break, the poor little girl had at last an opportunity to get…unsoiled, and we a chance to both eat and breathe deeply of untainted air. Well, briefly, that is. You see, these buses have no sort of bathroom facilities whatsoever, so when the opportunity arises, you grab that bull by both horns with your good hand and hold on for dear life. That last phrase began as cliché fusion, but turned out surprisingly accurate, as you’re about to discover.
Chinese bathrooms are something I have yet to become accustomed to, and in fact a level of general tolerance, let alone intimacy, it is not an outcome I consider in the realm of possibilities. Chinese bathrooms are vile places, and I will be doing you all I favor by stopping at that and letting the collective imagination (Jungian?) take its course. However, I’m way too excited to talk about this to stop now, so buckle into those bull horns, we’re riding this one out into the eye of the storm.
Culture shock would be an appropriate term to describe a Westerner’s first trip into the Chinese Weishengjian (literally, sanitation room), were it not totally dwarfed by general, well, shock. While you try to figure out how to mouthbreathe like you’ve never before, you wonder if they really try to clean it, or just have someone go in every now and then and try to clean the urine off the walls by, well, urinating on the walls (works, right? Right?). The fact that these are all squatters is a minor note, except for the fact that the floors are wet (guess why?) and if you hold your health, or sanity, or simply humanity in any regard you really don’t want to fall. I know a guy who slipped and fell forward out of the stall, ending up in front of the sinks with his pants around his ankles (and no, “I know a guy” is not just a way for me to share some of my worse moments under the umbrella of a convenient unshared acquaintance). If you’re unlucky it’s just the ol’ trough toilet, the porta-potty of yesteryear, with absolutely no stall doors, just a two-foot divider so you don’t have to actually make eye contact with your neighbor while in the act. As you squat awkwardly, cursing your soft Western thighs and recent neglect of wallsits, you will try to think ahead when your next shower could be. You will become further impressed with the ability of Chinese people to withstand hardships. You will become further impressed with your ability to withstand hardships. You will begin to wonder if there are, by any chance, animals in here. No, but really? I introduce you to this general, average Chinese public bathroom so that you may further appreciate this rest-stop ordeal.
From afar, it looked a bit dingier than other bathrooms on the road. Up a small stairway, it was crammed into a small cement structure, which was unnervingly wet. It looked like a cave. I entered, and as soon as my eyes adjusted enough to see clearly I stepped quickly past the old man squatting resolutely inside the doorway. Avoiding suspicious spots on the floor, I scuttled to an open stall in a half-crouch because the ceiling was only about five and a half feet up, and damp. There were spiders. I almost fell. I wondered if I could take a deep breath with my nose and maintain consciousness; thankfully I didn’t experiment.
I escaped (physically) unscathed, but Sam was not so lucky. Somewhere in the dark journey in and out, he had failed to notice one of those “suspicious spots”, and the deep treads of his shoes ensured that we would have the familiar smell of human waste to accompany us for the remaining hours to Hekou.
By evening we were in Hekou, but were too late to cross the border. We bunked down in a little $4 hotel and, after a brief stroll about the block trying to avoid the propositioning stares of the town’s numerous prostitutes, we locked our doors, crossed our fingers, and went to sleep.
The next morning, groggy but growing ever-peppy from our border-crossing nerves, we walked the three blocks to customs and waited outside for border to officially open. When the doors slid open, we marched happily in and lined up behind the familiar yellow line. I stepped forward and handed my passport to the guard, who flipped through it once, then began again, seeming not to have found what she was looking for. I pointed out my Chinese visa, assuming that was what she was looking for. “No,” she said in Chinese. “Where is your Vietnamese visa?” Vietnamese visa? Don’t you, y’know, get those in Vietnam, on the other side? I mean, we have our Chinese visas, isn’t that what you care about? Is there a problem, officer? Just as that final question is always preceded by the knowledge that yes, there is a problem, I was speeding and now I am going to regret doing so, a growing sense of unease was gnawing its way into the exhilarated travel-joy in my brain and building a malignant nest. The line was building up behind us, so we stepped back for the minute to regroup.
Now, we were under the impression that as Southeast Asia is, well, Southeast Asia - a tourist paradise and bureaucratic/anarchic morass, visas were readily available, especially with a few American bills to grease the wheels. And when I say we, I must be up front here and say that this conception was at the very least 50% my own, and this was a fact that was about to make things a little bit uncomfortable for yours truly. We pulled out the Lonely Planet, flipping to the visa section in the back. “At the time of this research, visas were not available at any of Vietnam’s border checkpoints.” Oops.
After tempers had flared, silences had been shared, and we had ceased bargaining with God, we grabbed another hotel room and took stock of the situation. It turned out that the worst that we feared – that we would have to return to Kunming to apply for visas – was not true; a travel agency across from the customs building told us they could take our passports and apply for visas in Lao Cai, the town across the river, all in one day. “Shady,” we thought, “but great! Can you do it today?” “No, today is Saturday. Monday, we can.”
Not ready to accept three days in a place that was most definitely still not Vietnam, we walked on, convinced a better solution could be found. Even if we made it into Vietnam Monday night, we said, could we make our Tuesday afternoon plane to Cambodia out of Hanoi? We began to talk of Laos, of the lax border there, and of the apparently beautiful countryside to be seen from the long, long bus to Bangkok. We sidestepped around the fact that such a bus ride would, given our experiences, involve untold hours of vile odors and cramped legs, let alone the fact that in all likelihood – at least somebody had heard – the Laotian buses had chickens.
It was about this time we were accosted by Li, the local hustler, and his “American” friend/scam associate. First asking us if we wanted to change Chinese RMB for Vietnamese Dong, they soon offered to get us visas by the end of the day. “But we thought you can’t until Monday,” we told them. “Hold on,” said Li, pulling out his cellphone, “I don’t get good reception right here.” As his bald, dirty, and possibly European friend introduced himself as a Floridian with a daughter at school in Michigan, who liked coming to Hekou because people knew who he was, didn’t just say hi just “because of the Bentley”, Li made infrequent appearances, seeming to get poor reception wherever we were. Were our phones blocking his signal? At the point when the ‘American’ explained that they would send someone on the bus to Kunming, apply for visas, and come back on the next bus, getting there that very night by six o’clock, a process that if executed perfectly could not take less than twenty hours, we got up to leave. As we walked away, Li made one last discovery, “Oh, my friend says actually not today. But Monday, I get you visas!” The office of the travel agency across from customs seemed relatively legitimate at this point, so we decided to wait it out for the weekend.
I can tell you honestly that we had a very nice time in Hekou, and feel quite fondly for the town, but this is in no small part due to cognitive dissonance – if we had not managed to convince ourselves that it was a nice little place, and not a veritable “hive of scum and villainy”. Or rather, an empty town not intended for long-term (more than 12 hours) residence, a town that would be a lot more interesting if it actually were a hive of scum and villainy.
We spent the majority of our time between the internet bar, our hotel rooms, and the river, where we would stand and stare longingly out at Vietnam, which we are still pretty sure was a more vivid shade of green. We would glare jealously at the Hekou and Lao Cai residents as they strolled leisurely across the bridge, going to “the other side” for an evening walk. We waited.
And, soon enough (I finished my book, and read a higher percentage of the New York Times than ever before in my life), Monday rolled around. Monday started like any other day, with an early trip to the market for breakfast, and a slow walk along the river. However, by 10 we had nervously handed our passports to the woman in the travel agency, and were left to pass one last day in the town we’d almost grown to love. After a morning spent in the internet bar, the four of us walked to the local elementary school, with the intention of whiling away the afternoon (we wouldn’t get our visas until 6) using our mastery of the English language to help out their (inevitably struggling, of course!) English program. We were surely the only foreigners to think of this, and without a doubt the most fluent English speakers in the town. We would be greeted like heroes.
Preparing ourselves for the welcome we would no doubt receive, we stepped triumphantly through the school gates, and marched up to the doorway. Once inside, however, we realized that the reason for our silent entry was that there were no adoring children to shout excitedly, no harried teachers to thank us profoundly, to weep in happiness at the dedication to their charges education we displayed. Everyone was out to lunch, and would be back by three.
Around half past two an adult wandered in. No doubt a little unsettled to find a handful of dirty white backpackers standing in the lobby, she nevertheless listened politely to our request, and led us up to her office to wait for a higher authority. We made awkward conversation, informing her that we were studying in Kunming, and confirming our hopes that yes, we were the first visitors to make such a request.
But pedagogical stint was not in the cards – the administrator, who arrived ten minutes later, hastily informed us that the students had a plan, and in the strict Chinese style, must follow it absolutely. She was unbending, and when we informed her that the students would nevertheless learn more from our experience and innate talent than from her lesson plan, it was time to leave, and hastily so. The children had returned, and as we passed them on the staircase they would perform exaggerated double-takes, the most excited of them shouting out “Hello!” when we turned to stare at them in turn. When we passed the last classroom in the building, a brief silence was followed by excited shrieking, and a mob of students rushed out into the hallway to greet us.
The administrators had failed to see our worth, but the students, ever more perceptive, clearly valued our presence as much as was due, and with this spiritual satisfaction we departed happily for the internet bar.
It was soon after that we had our strangest experience in Hekou. While Ryan and Taylor sat eating dinner at one of the two same restaurants we’d already over-patronized, who should walk in but the head of our program, Wang Laoshi. I know, we’re already all thinking it: Of all the cheap restaurants in all the world…
It turns out that the visa-at-the-border mistake is not one exclusive to foreigners, and Wang Laoshi and her mother had been in Hekou since Sunday, with the same problem as us. It’s actually more than somewhat odd it had taken as about a day to bump into each other.
In any case, we walked after dinner to our respective travel agencies, and from the doorway watched anxiously as six o’clock passed and no visas were in sight. At 6:15, however, the daily group of travel agents came trotting briskly back across the bridge. Our hearts pounding with excitement and more than a little fear that the visas would prove to be fakes, we walked once more into the border checkpoint, and crossed on through.
We were in Vietnam.
END OF PART ONE: HEKOU
