February 25, 2000
Blaring propaganda woke me up at 6am. That’s the downside of sleeping near a border post.
I wandered down to the shared bathroom in my t-shirt and shorts, hoping to avoid the family. Shorts are offensive to Laotians – they just don’t wear them. The night watchman lifted his head up and watched me walk by.
We all met back at the restaurant next door for bread and Lao coffee – thick, black coffee with disgustingly sweet condensed milk pooled in the bottom of it. I was about halfway through a baguette when Wendy approached from the direction of the market. She had a plastic bag in her hand and there was a dark, familiar shape in the bag.
“Marie, I got you something,” said Wendy.
I was up and across the room like a shot, putting a quick six feet in between us. I knew perfectly well what was in the bag and the reality of it was not so easy to joke about as the concept of it.
Rat-on-a-stick. For breakfast.
I finally got enough nerve up to go closer. The rat wasn’t actually on a stick, Wendy apologized. Its tail was fried and stick-like, but the market hadn’t had any rats on sticks, just deep-fried rats.
I posed with it for some photos and then placed it back in its bag and washed my hands.
We left Lak Xao and the rat behind and drove to the border. The morning was misty and cold and as we got closer to the border, the mist turned to actual rain. We all pulled out our plastic raincoats and wore them over our fleeces. My pack felt incredibly light as all my bulky clothes were actually on me.
“Marie, how did you sleep through all that racket last night?” asked Wendy.
I had no idea what she meant. It turned out that there had been incredibly loud televisions on for hours. Wendy had complained several times and had even knocked on my door to see if I was sleeping – I was. I had no recollection of any of this. Just a fringe benefit of living on Avenue B, I suppose.
We crossed the border from Laos in the rain, lining up solemnly in front of Vietnamese officials who stamped everything in triplicate. We crossed by foot, deserting our minibus on the Laos side of No Man’s Land and boarding a waiting minibus on the Vietnam side.
The changes were immediately apparent. Laos, with its 4.7 million people, was a ghosttown compared to Vietnam with its 76.5 million. The tarmac became smoother but everything else became more complicated. The roads were suddenly full of cars, people, bicycles, motorbikes, cows, dogs and anything that felt like wandering by. Driving in Vietnam involves even more dependence on horn-honking and all drivers tailgate and drive on the wrong side of the two-lane highways when it suits them.
Our 66-year-old Swiss man, Hans, had a massive freakout over the roads. He had an absolute fit, yelling for Wendy.
“Vendy, this driver is not a safe driver, you need to make him drive more carefully.”
Wendy replied that the driver was better than most and that Hans could expect all of Vietnam to drive in the same style.
Hans continued to gasp, grumble, whine, and complain for the next few hours, while we continued on to the small town of Vinh.
Vinh was meant to be a stopover for us. We could either go to the beach or to the re-created birthplace of Ho Chi Minh. No one wanted to go to the birthplace and it was raining so the beach was out. We all had the exact same idea – get some food and rest in our hotel dayrooms until our overnight sleeper train left at 8pm for Hanoi.
We checked into four separate rooms. Wendy divided up the group so that she, I, and Lochie were in a room. Everyone else went into their respective rooms to shower. The three of us went to our room.
Wendy put the key into the lock and opened it but the door encountered resistance. It was chained from the inside.
“Hold on, what’s this?” said Wendy. She wrestled with the door for a minute.
Then the door opened from the inside and several hotel employees came wandering out, dazed and smiling. They’d been sleeping in the room.
“No, this will not do,” said Wendy. She disappeared down to reception while Lochie and I watched even more hotel employees come out.
She returned with the keys to the room next door and the hotel manager. We moved our bags in and then I noticed the wet paint around the bathroom doorframe.
“That won’t do either,” said Wendy irritably to the manager. “When we shower, the paint will run. We will get paint on our clothes.”
The manager tried to convince her that all was well but she’d have none of that. She got us into a room on the next floor and her face went pale when the manager told her that our train tickets had not arrived.
Wendy disappeared for a long time, leaving us instructions to get some food in the hotel restaurant.
There was a wedding in the lobby. A bride in white and a groom in a tux walked around and greeted their guests. When I peered in, all eyes went wide and everyone stared at me instead of the happy couple so I nodded my head and backed away quickly, retiring to the safety of the lunchroom.
Wendy showed up shortly. No one at the hotel knew what had happened with the train tickets. It was impossible to get tickets as they sold out a month in advance. We were going to have to continue on the minibus to Hanoi.
She did switch drivers though, to keep Hans quiet. And before we left Vinh, Wendy called ahead to Hanoi and ordered us pizzas from Al Fresco’s for 10:30 p.m. It was a seven-hour drive and nothing is open late in Hanoi.
We were all a bit tired and out of our heads by the time we got to Hanoi. We’d been on the road all day long and Lak Xao and the rat-on-a-stick seemed very, very far away.
Hans had another freakout when he saw that all we had for dinner was pizza. Everyone else had heard Wendy say about thirty times that we were having pizza for dinner so we weren’t real sure where he’d been…unfortunately this was normal. I often sat next to him in meetings to repeat everything Wendy said, but had forgotten to mention the pizza.
Wendy had attempted to get me an allergy-free pizza so it had no cheese and no tomatoes. Unfortunately, it tasted disgusting so I swiped a cheese slice when no one was looking and just dealt with the consequences.
The rooms at the Viet My Hotel were warm and clean, with antique furniture, television, and hot water. And tonight we had a special treat – soft mattresses!
