The Beach (7th to 10th July 2006)

This is something I prepared a while back... but didn't dare publish! Picture is the beach at 6am.

There’s something about the Vietnamese and travel, which I think extends beyond the difficulties of communication across two very different languages. I wonder how a nation where no one seems to read maps or have any idea how long travel takes beat the Americans back in 1975?

The reward for a successful event at my old placement was to be a long weekend at the beach. I was advised we would depart on the 9pm train on Friday, a slow train without air-conditioning for a 9 hour journey to Cau Lo beach. When I was issued with my ticket I saw the departure time was actually 11pm. This made me wonder if we would actually have aircon as the train to Hoi An the previous month had also departed at 11pm and had aircon, despite assurances that it would not.

I was travelling with Richard, a short term (4 weeks) volunteer working in the same organisation. We arrived at the station and passed through the ticket checks, found our carriage and boarded. There was no aircon, well actually there was no electricity at all. The place was like a furnace. We dropped our bags on our bunks and retreated back to the platform. Vietnamese colleagues remonstrated with the railway staff. The eleven o’clock departure time loomed closer and still the carriage sat in darkness. With only minutes left and the guard waving his flag things finally burst into life, lights came on and air-conditioning compressors began to whirr. Within a few minutes condensation was crashing down like a waterfall under the train and as we boarded it already felt reassuringly cool. Yes we had aircon!

The train departed dead on time and after my Vietnamese colleagues had finished a game of musical beds trying different combinations of adults and children until everyone was happy we settled down and put the lights out. A rude awakening by the conductor to return our original tickets and take away our on-train tickets (don’t ask) revealed the journey was actually four and a half hours, not nine. We arrived in Vinh at 4.20am.

We stood in the dark outside the station whilst our leader negotiated with various bus drivers for the half hour journey to the beach. Eventually a guy was engaged and ran off into the darkness returning about ten minutes later with a large bus. We piled on board, adults, children, crates of beer and baggage. As the morning light came up we drove into the beach resort. First impressions were just as in the guide books, a strip of monolithic government run hotels. The bus crawled along the dual carriageway between the hotels and the beach until our hotel was located. It swung into the yard and we unloaded. Leader went into the hotel to announce our arrival. It was 5am. The hotel was not impressed. We could have our rooms at 1pm, after today’s departures had left. Until then we were allocated a small suite to keep our bags in and entertain ourselves. Eight hours in one large room with two double beds, two bathrooms and one TV for a group of 23! No problem. Those who were tired laid out like sardines on the beds and went to sleep, some played cards on the floor, some watched TV and a few of us headed for the beach to walk and watch the sun come up.

The beach was not as bad as I expected. Both Rough Guide and Lonely Planet said this was somewhere you would not want to visit, trash everywhere, nothing to do and plenty of vendors to make life miserable. In fact the local authority is trying to clean the beach up, bins have appeared and a mechanised trash sifter combs the sand along part of the beach before the sun comes up. It’s not that bad. The vendors are not persistent, you say no and they go away – you just have to say no very very often. The beachside cafes are a continuous strip and charge for everything from sitting on double size deckchairs made with bamboo slats to storing your belongings whilst you swim – the latter definitely necessary. Richard left a pair of old flip flops on the sand whilst he took a dip, they disappeared in seconds.

As I walked along the beach and the sun came up I looked up and saw a black cloud swirling above, a closer look revealed it was a swarm of dragon flies. They were present for the whole four days – we were almost breathing them except in the water. Some invisible wall seemed to keep them over the land, never over the sea.

We got our rooms as promised and when Richard and I arrived at our door the maid was just finishing clearing up from the previous inhabitants, she was sweeping a mountain of peanut shells, empty crisp bags, cigarette ends, empty cans and bottles towards the door. It appears Vietnamese behave in hotel rooms as they do in restaurants and bars – any unwanted debris just gets dropped on the floor. The maid had an easy life for the duration of our stay.

As we had had an early start, lunch was planned for 10.30am - another new experience. It took me a while to understand I was also experiencing an extreme version of “bring your own”. We were directed to the restaurant on the beach where lunch would take place. We sat down and immediately food started to appear, my Vietnamese colleagues looked it over, nodded approvingly and we started to eat. I asked who had ordered. No one. Well, was this a set menu? No, its our menu. Please explain? It turned out whilst I had been walking the beach the women had gone down to the market and bought food which they then took to the restaurant and negotiated a price for cooking and service. This was the pattern for the whole weekend, not only was all the drink brought from Hanoi, the day’s food was bought by the team each morning and only cooking was subcontracted. Its cheaper that way and the quality was assured. The lightbulb came on – that was why vendors kept approaching me with raw prawns and squid, if I bought some the place where I was sitting would cook it for me.

Speaking of the vendors, there’s a whole supply chain going on here. Boats similar to large coracles go out throughout the day and night and catch squid and prawn. They bring their catch back to the beach where women wait to buy it. Some buy to eat, some to sell to restaurants or restaurant customers and some buy to sell on to other vendors who are not around when the coracles come in – you see small groups squatting round metal bowls on the pavement deeply engrossed in discussions about quality and price.

Prawns and squid featured in expanding my gastronomic comfort zone on this trip. The first evening I picked up a juicy, very large grilled prawn, pulled off the head, peeled the body and started to eat it. A colleague frowned at me from across the table. She pointed at the discarded head. “It’s good” she said and taking one herself spilt the head open and sucked out the inside. She looked at me, waiting. I took a deep breath and picked up my prawn head. Fortunately my sucking was not terribly proficient so I only got a small taste of prawn brains, not enough to tell if it actually tasted of anything, but enough to make her smile and return to eating her dinner.

Next the squid. I’ve eaten some really tasty and tender squid in Vietnam, but it had all come from large creatures with plenty of flesh. The squid here were small, maybe three inches long, and complete. To be eaten in two mouthfuls. One was dumped in my bowl by a smiling colleague. It looked up at me pitifully. I picked it up with the chopsticks and bit it in half. This was the point when I remembered squid have a sort of bone in the mantle which supports their water pumping muscles. They also have a beak in the middle of the tentacles. I felt the beak go down but managed to catch the bone and delicately deposit it on the side of the plate. These squid were ok, but not as great as those of Hoi An. I didn’t eat many but I did remember to remove the bones after the first.

It was definitely a seafood holiday, fish, crabs, squid, prawns and occasionally pork for every meal, not forgetting the rice and garlic stir fried morning glory of course – staples of virtually every meal in Vietnam.

My boss’s teenage daughter was on the trip. With a friend she asked if they could have an English conversation with me. We sat and talked. I asked a few simple closed questions which were despatched with ease and then more complex open questions which appeared to be easily understood and equally easily answered. Within five minutes we were discussing the difference between Finance and Accounting – she wants to run her own business. After about half an hour she turned to me and said “now I want to ask you a question – what is your life history?” I think the next generation of Vietnamese will be well placed to deal with the western world.

The only entertainment in Cau Lo appeared to be swimming in the sea, (something everyone did between 6am and 10am each morning and between 4pm and when it went dark each afternoon) or hiring a tandem. Yes, bicycles made for two in a country where its possible to see three people on a bicycle made for one. Tandems did not seem to be fully understood though. It was quite common to see Dad on the front, peddling with a small child who could not reach the peddles on the seat behind him whilst Mum sat side-saddle on the luggage rack. On one occasion I saw a mother sitting on the luggage rack peddling whilst her son also sat on the luggage rack in front of her with his feet on the cross bar. In the water you could hire an assortment of rubber rings, tractor inner tubes, inflatable sharks or even real boats. The water was policed by two speed boats which chased people swimming too far out (like me) and turned back those who were desperately trying to recover their hired inner tube as it disappeared towards Australia on the current.

There was of course the much talked of swimming competition. One of the guys starts each day with 100 press ups and he and a couple of the others were keen to show what they could do. For some reason Richard was to be excused this test, even though most of them are in their 20s and Richard is only a few years older than me. This event had been talked of for at least two weeks and now it had arrived.

One guy demonstrated his butterfly (which was good) and another his crawl (not so good) They all looked at me. I did my breast stroke and a few strokes of crawl. Nods of approval. Now for a race. Richard joined in and suggested swimming to a boat about 20 metres away. Much shaking of heads – too far(!). Then the penny dropped, just like the pool in Ha Noi, hardly anyone actually swims full lengths, they do a few strokes and take a rest. Even though three of them were way faster than me at breast stroke, I only had to set a challenge of doing 50 metres and I was bound to win – I’d be the only one to finish! As the weekend progressed I realised that over half the group could not swim at all and actually the best swimmer was one of the girls. She is universally modest, speaking good English without acknowledgment from her colleagues and swam faster and further than most of the boys, again without anyone commenting. Anyway UK honour was retained and Richard and I were acknowledged as number 1 and number 2 swimmers, but they were too polite to tell us in which order we had been ranked.

Each day I swam until I felt like a prune, or could no longer endure the small and invisible stinging creatures which made us all jump every few minutes, then it was back to the beach where hoards of photographers waited. It was very much the done thing to have your photo taken standing in the surf.

Maybe I looked like a soft touch, or maybe I looked like I needed help but everytime I got out of the water a mob of boys aged between 8 and 12 would descend on me and try to force me to part with money for a massage. I don’t know who trains them, and having seen a couple at work I had no intention of accepting their offers but I could NOT get away from them. After the second night I asked Richard what his secret was, how come they left him alone but pestered me relentlessly. Oh, he replied, its easy – everytime one of them approaches me I point to you and say “he needs a massage”.

Richard never stopped during the break. He was restless and relentless and would disappear regularly, usually just before we were required to attend lunch or dinner. His return was always accompanied by some new discovery, be it a new fruit or some sweet snack – which he has a weakness for – discovered on some small beachside stall. He lost his reading glasses and managed to purchase replacements from a guy wandering the beach with a board covered in sunglasses and he would disappoint the beach vendors regularly by picking through all their wares before indicating that he didn’t actually want anything. The only other non Vietnamese on the trip was the husband of one of the female staff. He’s a dry, slow speaking Swedish American who has worked here for many years. Nothing perturbs him. He told me a lot about life in Vietnam and south east asia. Whilst he returns to the US every year and is well into his 60s, he is not showing any signs of wanting to retire, nor return to the states on a permanent basis. I’m not sure I’ll ever get to that stage.

Americans and Europeans are rare here, I saw maybe three others in the four days. I suspect everyone is put off by the guide books, but it is not really that bad and the hotels are reasonable both in price and condition. What the place needs is a few more attractions. I headed off the strip and down into the town behind the beach. It was largely a ghost town. Large boulevards with unfinished houses and beautiful pavier sidewalks - with foot high weeds growing between the gaps. I wanted an internet café, I’d almost given up when suddenly – there were FOUR all side by side. I walked into the first and was directed to possibly the oldest computer in the world. All the letters had worn off the keys, the screen had the image of a dialogue box burned into the middle and I was surrounded by 8 year olds again – all playing on-line games. It was painfully slow, but I managed to read a few emails and then set about typing a few replies. At this point the café fell silent and I had an uneasy feeling that I was being watched. I looked round, I was surrounded by children who had a few minutes ago been engrossed in games. They all knew how to use a mouse and arrow keys, but it was a novelty for them to see (or rather, hear) someone type at speed on a keyboard.

I stuck it as long as I could then, since the audience was showing no sign of waning interest and I could feel the breath on the back of my neck, I paid my five pence fee and headed out to a street vendor squeezing sugar cane into a frothy but not too sweet iced drink. Ten pence bought me a glass and I sat and watched the world go by – very slowly.

They have plans for this place. The hotel front desk manager was proudly showing us. The strategy is to become the major centre for holidaymakers from Ha Noi. The hotel strip is going to more than double in size, roads are already built and new hotels have started to go up. He smiled “soon we will be able to take everyone from Ha Noi!” That’s a scary thought.

By the last day I had had my fill, beach holidays don’t do it for me at the best of times but a place where you can swim or swim is even more limiting. We were going back on the night train again. Unlike when we arrived the hotel allowed us to keep our rooms until we left on our day of departure. We had our final fish, squid and prawn lunch, though I did see a group of my colleagues eating yet more crabs in the late afternoon after the final swim. At 9pm we piled on the bus back to Vinh to sit outside the station for an hour and a half as the train was late. No messing this time, once on board everyone just hit their bunks and next thing I knew we were pulling into Ha Noi at 5.15am, well in time for me to get to my 8am meeting. I walked back through Lenin Park, not like a park would be in the UK at 5.30am. Here everyone gets out to do exercise before the day heats up, so it was a little like being on the London underground in rush hour. All sorts of activities from aerobics to Tai Chi by people of all ages. Home by 6am I showered, changed, breakfasted and headed off to find a Xe Om to get me to my meeting. Long weekend that.