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may be mistaken is to transgress some inviolable etiquette. Through intermediaries, we finally learned that our train was late because the whole affair had been expropriated by the army. Sure enough, the station began filling with officers dripping with braid and carrying cheap plastic briefcases full of relevant paperwork. Once their documents were processed, their train, which I suspect had been loitering just out of sight on a siding, slunk into view, sheepishly, I thought. It quickly departed with a full load of mid-level personnel, for this was neither a VIP train nor a troop train, but something in between, bound where and for what purpose we couldn’t tell. Ours followed, even more shamefacedly, in about an hour and a half. It was a poor substitute.
For one thing, it was second class. The locomotive was identical to the one on our original Hanoi train, but the carriages were even more battered. They were more primitive-looking somehow, with metal grilles in the windows instead of glass. Even out on the platform, the smell from inside the carriages got into our nostrils. It was dark now, and the night promised to be a long one. Our assigned compartment was the nearest one to the squat toilet. We weren’t certain whether this was a plus or a minus. Because the spaces in the grilles were big enough to admit a small hand, we had to sleep with our feet facing the windows and stash all our gear up by our heads, using our spare clothes as pillows.
We were sharing a compartment with a young English couple. When the male half, who had drawn the lower bunk, sat down, he noticed insects that seemed to resent the intrusion. He got up and pulled back the thin mattress to find the wooden surface underneath alive with bug life. He went off, bracing himself against the bulkheads of the pitching car, to find someone to complain to, but returned only with a fresh set of bed linen, recently washed, but still greasy to the touch. He settled in for a while, but grumbled loudly. Then he hit on the idea of climbing up top, to pass the journey with his girlfriend (as though her bed wasn’t infested — he must have reasoned that the insects weren’t the climbing or flying varieties). As I lay there in the top berth across from them, feeling relatively secure (M and I had done as the guidebooks suggest and brought our own sheets in which to wrap ourselves), I couldn’t help seeing them facing each other in the lotus position, playing cards. I dozed off for a bit and when I woke, the friendly hand of cards had turned to foreplay. I tried to get back to sleep. For various reasons, this wasn’t easy.
In the slot-like aisle between the two tiers of beds was an all-purpose table. It was supposed to lie flat against the wall until needed, when a hook could be unlatched to let it swing out and a leg would descend to support it. The latch was broken and the damn thing banged against the wall at every curve in the track, however slight. I tried everything I could think of to fix it, including padding the underside with clothing to deaden the noise and stacking all the backpacks on the floor underneath to keep it in the fully extended position. Nothing worked. What’s more, people kept barging into the compartment unannounced: cops with red collar-tabs and high-peaked caps, conductors demanding to see our tickets once again, hawkers selling really dreadful food at exorbitant prices. M and I arrived somewhat bedraggled after yet another twelve-hour trip.
Days passed before we were willing to risk train travel again, and by then our luck, it seemed, had turned. We were ready to take the train from Nha Trang to Saigon. This time, the hours weren’t quite so gruelling. The train was intended to arrive at 0400 hours after departing at about dinner time. Here we learned a valuable lesson. There’s a point beyond which it doesn’t matter what category of ticket you buy. What matters is the age and condition of the train, which is purely a question of the luck of the draw. This time the cars were clean and the compartment had once been decorated and instead of Vietnamese pop tunes we got a documentary — not too long — about the history of Saigon. The colour scheme was a bluish mauve. There was glass in the window and curtains over the glass.
Only once did things look as though they might turn on us. M had the top bunk and I was in the other top one, across from her. Down below were two New Zealanders who didn’t come in until late, as they were off partying in another coach. Behind M’s head when she lay down was a luggage storage area with double doors. One of the doors kept working its way loose and gently banging her on the skull. Remembering the table from hell, I tried several times to tie the two door handles together, using, for example, one of my bootlaces; nothing would hold. She was about to sleep facing the other way, with feet instead of her head in the line of danger, when an idea struck me: a condom. I got out the only one I had and knotted it tightly around the handles. It gave a bit on sharp bends but was elastic enough to spring right back into place, silently. The fact that it was the lubricated kind made it easy to tie as emergency hardware, though, as I might have foreseen, this also meant that it gradually worked its way loose as we slept. When this happened and the doors flung themselves open, striking M on the cranium, the condom flew up in the air and landed, we thought, on or in the sleeping bag of the Kiwi woman down below. While I held the doors together manually, M had to inquire of the not-yet-quite-asleep fellow passenger. “Excuse me,” she said. “Our condom seems to have come loose. I think it might have gone into your bedding. Would you mind checking for us, please?
“Bugger!” said the New Zealander. “Now I’ve heard everything.”
I was mugged by the realization that we had just become the travel story she’d be telling people back home in Auckland. Fortunately, she didn’t know our names.
Noel Coward said that the melody and lyrics of “Mad Dogs and Englishmen” just “popped into my head” during a trip from Hanoi to Saigon. Of course, he was travelling by motorcar, not train.
— CRACKS IN THE EMPIRE —
Time passed. I had returned to Southeast Asia, alone once again. M’s fluency in French hadn’t got us terribly far. The search for Frenchness in Indochina, and Vietnam in particular, had become increasingly ridiculous: an endless cycle of half-baked inference. I had sought out the places where the concept of French Indochina originated. I had poked among the fragile ruins of French culture in the places where it once had flourished. The narrative I was seeking didn’t really seem to exist; there was nothing but its highly dramatic ending.
So I got in touch with Christopher Moore and asked if he wanted to travel with me to Dien Bien Phu where the French were driven out of Asia once and for all. I didn’t have to use much persuasion, as I knew that this was one of the few places in the region he hadn’t visited. What’s more, he had always wanted to talk with the so-called Black Thai, a distinct cultural group who have lived near the Lao border for uncounted generations, remote from the Thais of Thailand from whom they descend. They speak an odd variant of the standard Thai that Christopher was eager to see if he could understand. Emails flew between his base in Bangkok and mine in Vancouver as we ironed out the details. I would go to Hanoi and settle in there for a while, waiting for his arrival when he had an opening in his writing schedule.
Hanoi has serious traffic and pollution problems and some truly ugly suburbs — which megalopolis does not? — but at its centre, frequent wars notwithstanding, remains the stately and refined city it has so long proclaimed itself to be. To put the matter in Western terms, Hanoi is to Saigon as Montreal is to Toronto and Melbourne is to Sydney: less brash and materialistic and certainly more cultured — and sensitive about its loss of power. For heaven’s sake, it has a Temple of Literature.
Travelling light and solo, I went straight from the airport to the northern part of the city and holed up there with pleasure, shifting from one small hotel to another as the rates rose or fell according to the occupancy levels. I did a good deal of walking in the Thirty-Six Streets, an area I imagine probably reminds American visitors of Greenwich Village, though it’s both more charming and more alive. The old guild system that assigned silk merchants, salt sellers, and birdcage makers to particular streets is long gone, and the artisanal proportion of the population is always shrinking. Yet among the temples with swallow-tail roofs and all the clubs, bars, restaurants, and souvenir stands (the nearly instantaneous result of the doi moi, the economic liberalization that began in 1986), it’s still possible to pick up the tinware one might need in Hang Thiec Street and shop in Hang Ma for all manner of paper goods, including those used