Through the Mountains to Buon Ma Thuot:
Double Fares, Motorbikes and a Wedding
By KorskiAfter I’d spent a long morning in Da Lat taking lots of photos in the main market, I happened upon a tourist office and stopped to see if I could get a bus ticket over the mountains from Da Lat to Buon Ma Thuot, a trip that I guessed was taken by few tourists, for the reason that there is little to see or do in the city and you therefore find yourself rather literally in the middle of nowhere. You can either continue north toward Pleiku by bus, or even farther north by the same means; but then cannot get into Laos if that’s your aim without already possessing a Lao visa. In short, once in Buon Ma Thuot or Pleiku, the best alternative short of simply taking more long bus rides is to get a plane to Saigon, Hanoi, or Danang.
The woman at the travel agency was kind enough to call the bus company that takes locals to Buon Ma Thuot and arrange for a seat on the bus for me (not necessary, as I would discover). I would be picked up at my hotel, she said, and the cost for the trip would be 80,000 dong. The trip would take about six hours.
The following morning while waiting to be picked up at the hotel, I had a chat with the hotel owner. In his poor English, he groused at length about the lack of human rights in Vietnam, the blocking of certain Internet sites, the absence of CNN on TV (BBC is available in some places but not in others), the inability to speak out against the government at the risk of being arrested, and the fact that he like other hotel and restaurant owners in Da Lat always have to give money to the police when they come around, simply because they ask for it. Everyone is aware of the consequences of saying no—closure or fines for minor infractions, or both. In all, he gave me a good short list of what we have all come to expect from communist regimes.
I was picked up in a spanking new mini-van that had a couple of other well-dressed Vietnamese in it. This was not the vehicle we would be going in, but rather a no-charge pickup vehicle that was taking us to the other side of town and the bus that would take us to Buon Ma Thuot.
The bus was small without air conditioning, and with seats not meant for someone with my lean six-foot frame. Like all such buses for locals in these kinds of countries that are poor, they are packed with passengers well beyond what would be considered reasonable in the West. The object, of course, is to accommodate as many people as possible who appear along the road and are going in the same direction. Or put differently, to make as much money as possible, human comfort and safety being negligible considerations. After all, twenty or forty thousand dong for one more person means a lot, especially if the ticket taker who doesn’t give out tickets or receipts splits some of the fares with the driver before what’s left over gets to the owner of the bus.
I made a mistake and took a corner window at the rear, where not only did I have a young man who was on the verge of throwing up in the winding mountainous roads for much of the trip, but he slept through most of the journey, his head or a leg or both finding happy resting and twitching niches on my body. I also had a window that wouldn’t open, which was no big deal as far as the temperature was concerned—there was no air conditioning in the bus and it wasn’t that hot, but for the fact that a middle-aged man who had that mean look of a determined Viet Cong guerilla was on the other side of the sleeping kid at my right and had a fresh cigarette in his mouth about every fifteen minutes. It mattered not at all to him or others in the bus that there was a prominent sign that clearly indicated that smoking was not permitted. There was no sign that said drinking was not allowed, but I’m sure it would not have mattered to the half dozen or so young scruffy males in the rows in front of me who were passing around a quart of rice wine. It was potent enough to get a couple of them going to yellow plastic bags to vomit in, and then when finished heaving the bags out the window.
After the bus filled up with the first load of passengers and moved down the road a couple of kilometers, the young fare collector with a chunky face and a wild head of unruly greasy hair came to the back of the bus to begin getting money from everyone. By this time I was sure that the collective understanding of English on the bus amounting to about seven words, none of which had anything to do with money, numbers, destinations or food. He looked in my direction and I handed him a 100,000 dong note, expecting 20,000 in return. Instead, he gave me back 40,000, which led me to believe that the woman who had made the reservation was taking a cut of 20,000 dong. No ticket or receipt or anything else was forthcoming to me or anyone else after paying the bus fare. Which didn’t matter except for the fact that fifteen minutes later when we picked up another seven or eight passengers and were way beyond the bus’s capacity, the wild-haired kid collecting fares insistently hit me up for another 60,000 dong. I didn’t have a clue how to protest that my fare now exceeded what I’d paid for a luxurious bus ride from Saigon to Da Lat—air conditioned, roomy, free water, no one smoking, and a generous plate of fruit before leaving to boot. So he had now gotten 120,000 dong from me and I still had nothing resembling a receipt to show to someone later as proof that I’d paid.
Since the kid with a handful of dong bills would soon exit and a young woman in her mid twenties with short reddish hair and an earphone glued to her right ear would take his place for the rest of the journey, I figured that before I left Vietnam I’d count this double fare charge and what might follow as Scam No. 14 on a list that exceeded forty or fifty in number. It was possible, of course, that the kid had made an honest mistake, but this seemed rather unlikely since I was the only white person on the bus, and a quite obvious one with my light hair and three to five inches of leg on everyone.
But then when I got to Buon Ma Thuot in late afternoon and asked about rooms at the Cao Nyguen Hotel I was given a laminated price list with two columns of prices, one for Vietnamese and one for foreigners, and the bus fare “scam” began to make sense. At the hotel, the room fare for Vietnamese were listed in dong, that for foreigners in U.S. dollars. The cost of a room to a foreigner was more than double that for the identical room to a Vietnamese. So, I had to revise my thinking, now concluding that someone had probably clued the young wild haired kid in to the fact that I was subject to a double fare, which no doubt made him happy since it meant that there was an additional 60,000 dong to be split between him and the driver. (Well, okay, the driver would probably take 55,000 and give the kid 5,000, one of the prerogatives of age, more evident in Asia than in America.)
(One of the things I love about communist regimes—and here I’m thinking again of Cuba—is how they come to their rather unique sense of equality. It goes something like this: we are all equal, but some of us are far more equal than others [those who get to share in all the corruption monies obviously deserve what they take by force or intimidation], and the least equal of the lot are those dirty rotten capitalists who come to our country and deserve to pay double or more, the only way, surely, to get back a small share of all that they have taken from us through the centuries. Interestingly enough, as far as I can tell, this dual pricing system in Vietnam does not operate, or operate so blatantly, in areas swarming with tourists; though here, I suspect, the mechanism for maximizing profit is simply higher prices across the board. Of course, I could not be unmindful of the dual pricing system in Thailand, where the word communism is virtually unknown. What’s at work there, however, is simple discrimination against foreigners. After all, everyone knows that while Jews are the world’s Chosen People, the Thais believe that they are Southeast Asia’s Chosen People. Others, foreigners, widely known as farang, are simply inferior and should therefore pay for their inferior status, which is the kind of twisted logic one often finds in the Thai mind.)
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The winding journey over a pot-holed and narrow road through the mountains (Route 27, Du’c Trong to Buon Ma Thuot) was another reminder of how quickly the relative prosperity of the city (Da Lat) quickly changes to the forgotten and marginal makeshift periphery of the countryside. One where beyond the first couple of dozen kilometers of well tended fields of vegetable crops, the land turns to a landscape of coffee trees, small clumps of anemic looking banana plants, and long stretches of string settlements. House after house made of bamboo sticks and concrete blocks with corrugated iron roofs, and the rare rather tall and skinny home of some substance, invariably painted in a gaudy fruity green or overripe mauve, and with dark stained French doors and windows. All a reminder that even in the most distant and forgotten margins of a country there are always a few who do quite well at the expense of the many, and they are rarely bashful about showing just who they are and how much more wealth they possess.
I took this small trip in mid May, in the rainy season, and everywhere the time of the year was evident. No least on all of those messy and garbage strewn pieces of land in front of and around the jerrybuilt homes of concrete blocks and sticks and slabs of unpainted wood, now and again given life by a woman on a porch washing dishes or clothes. Yards—to use the term loosely—best described as mudscapes. Wet and gooey, puddles of water here and there, and of no concern whatsoever to the sleeping dogs or to barefoot children running about. But taken in account, it would seem, by those a bit older, who sensibly find it more comfortable, and cleaner, to sleep atop the long black leather seat of a Honda motorbike.
It’s hard to avoid the impression that there is some real if small money coming into a marginal area like the one I traveled through, and the best piece of evidence are all the piles of gray stones, red bricks, and mounds of sand and gravel. It’s progress that might not be counted as such in the affluent world of Southern California in which I live, but progress surely in the fourth-world outback of a third-world country where wealth is heavily concentrated at the top and few are paying attention to what’s hard to get to and is out of sight.
I did not see, except in a few of the open valley bottoms where cattle grazed on land not planted to rice, much evidence of animals. A few goats by the roadside, a dozen cattle being whipped by long saplings to move them along on an intersecting road, some penned chickens, a few slate gray and overweight pigs, some free-roaming roosters, and that was about it. What was out of sight, of course, I cannot know, and in one market along the way where we stopped and I had a chance to roam about, I did see half a dozen ducks for sale.
The most pervasive (perhaps even more so than the cell phone at this time) and arguably single most coveted item to own in Vietnam is one of the small Hondas—a Wave, a Dream, a half dozen other models—or a cheaper and increasingly evident Chinese and Korean bikes. The motorbikes are everywhere, and I’d bet they outnumber cars by a ratio of two or three hundred to one. Perhaps, too, no single possession will so clearly mark a development curve in Vietnam, both within the country and in comparison with other countries in Asia. As the ratio of motorbikes relative to cars decreases so one will be able to measure Vietnam’s economic development (well, only crudely since it is always the rich who will gain the most from development and regions always develop unevenly).
But I digress, briefly, and the point I wish to make is that even on this one long stretch of relatively impoverished land of broad cultivated valleys and burned and cutover mountains patched with ferns and upland rice, the little motorbike is everywhere, more prevalent it seems than the small moon-shaped TV satellite receivers. I can imagine that a mere decade ago the number of Vietnamese who had motorbikes was a small fraction of those who have them today. And that at some point between then and now a whirlwind positive feedback loop got launched; more and more Vietnamese got the bikes, more desired them, and more sacrificed to get them by giving short shrift to their home environments and perhaps even the welfare of their children.
About three hours into the trip, we made our first stop, at Dong Krola; and it was for lunch, one that I passed on even though I hadn’t had breakfast. It was not the look of the food that got me to wait until late afternoon for something to eat (an incredible seafood hotpot); but rather a chance to roam among the puddle and mud-clogged road lined with open-faced hardware and dry good and food stores, and vendors selling all manner of fresh vegetables and fruits. The up close look only reinforced the sense that this is the Vietnam few care about, and nothing in the near future will change this. It’s easy to conclude that there is no place for a real city or growth or major change in these mountains—only a lingering and slow-changing sameness, change worth nothing measured in decades. Cell phone are already here, and their numbers will increase dramatically; this is as certain as predictions people were undoubtedly making a decade ago about the go anywhere motorbikes that can at take mom and dad and one or even two kids to market at the same time and yet find enough room on the return trip for groceries for the next couple of days.
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Invariably, I find, there are unexpected payoffs from traveling off the beaten path, and alone—I always travel alone. Because I hadn’t eaten all day and wanted to eat early, I was the only one in a sprawling dining area. But this was quite okay, for I had three waitresses constantly hovering around me and the hotpot and my food bowl, turning down the temperature on the fire, putting greens and large shrimp and squid and tuna into my bowl, pouring more beer into my glass. Keeping their eyes on me for anything I might want.
And then the fun began. One of the waitresses--Huyen was her name, I would learn—asked me to explain a couple of words I had used. She barely knew more than a dozen words of English. I used my hands, and pointed to my mouth when I spoke to explain what I meant. I even wrote the words down, which was more than excuse enough for Huyen to take up a pen and write down the Vietnamese equivalent. Within ten minutes or so, there were four waitresses and two waiters hovering around me, laughing and shaking their heads and nodding as I gave them the words for eyes and mouth and arm and leg, and lips and nose. And then explained the meaning of big nose and small nose by pointing to mine, and to Huyen’s tiny nose. All this and much more, which went on for the better part of two hours, was just plain fun, and marvelous. And an awful reminder of how eager some people can be to learn, and how so many others, my American Vietnamese university students in particular, don’t give a damn about what I am trying to teach them, no matter how I present the material or how hard I try.
In the morning, after making some phone calls home, I hit the streets for a couple of hours, my usual M.O., in search of photos, maybe someone to talk to, perhaps get caught up in something unusual that comes out nowhere. On returning to the hotel just before noon, there were several cars coming into the entrance of the hotel, and it was right away fairly obvious that there was going to be a wedding. Earlier, I’d noted that the large reception area had a couple of dozen tables that had been set up for reasons then unknown.
I hung on the periphery of the unfolding wedding ceremony and celebration, and much as had happened a couple of years ago when I did the same thing in a small village in Indonesian Borneo and got invited into a traditional Muslim wedding and became a great object of curiosity, so it happened again. One of the middle-aged men saw me sitting on a small plastic stool with my camera in hand. He approached me and wanted to shake my hand and use a few words of English he knew. He offered me a beer; and then an invitation to join his table of family members for a large lunch in celebration of the couple being married.
The seven men and two women at the table wasted no time bringing me into their way of wishing the bride and groom all the best that life might offer. Which meant round after round of Saigon beer in glasses half filled with large ice cubes, and then the raising and clinking of glasses. I lost count of the number of people I was invited to toast with. And when this wasn’t going on I was being force fed with beef and chicken and shrimp and greens and a soup, all the while one of the waitresses from the night before never far away, eager to take out the dwindling ice cube in my glass and replace it with one that filled about two-thirds of the glass. And then see that the glass was foaming with more Saigon beer.
As in Borneo, I could not get away or hide from the bride and groom, who came to the table and insisted on clinking their glasses with mine, the bride at one point reluctantly having a beer forced into her hand so that she could be caught on camera with me. I was the curiosity piece, the one no doubt who would be a source of laughter when they talked about my clumsy ways with chop sticks, something I’ve always put aside at home in favor of that incredible little invention called a fork.
Not long after everyone had eaten—more than 200 people in attendance and most in fairly casual dress, even blue jeans and running shoes—the bride and groom headed toward he front door and people began to get up from their large round tables and, as if on cue, follow them. More photos were on order: the couple together, the bride alone, the of them with a dozen close family.
The waitresses, a couple of whom I now knew by name, were busily cleaning up, the floor an enormous mess of Saigon beer bottles and the black shells of sunflower seeds. The Vietnamese like them as much as do the Chinese before they get around to the main meal, and like the Chinese there is only one sane and reasonable place to throw the shells.
And so, these kinds of experiences—the eagerness to learn English by some poorly paid waitresses, the wedding of which I become a small part—are among the best experiences I get from travel. They are memorable, poignant, and worth days of long bus rides and mundane observations often repeated. But then there are other experiences that hit me differently. They too are memorable, and even in all that I don’t know or understand I become curious, speculative, and judgmental.
At one point when I was deep into my most elementary lesson on English with all the avid waiters, four uniformed policemen came into the hotel and went to the registration desk. They would soon ascend the wide stairs, where on the first landing on one of walls in three languages (Vietnamese, English and French) were a good dozen hotel rules. One of them, No. 5 as I recall, read: No prostitutes are allowed in the hotel. I think this is the first time in all my travels in Southeast Asia where I have seen this great concern among some so prominently displayed.
Surely we’re not talking about foreigners consorting with hookers in this hotel, I thought on reading it; there are too few that pass this way. So it must be aimed at the Vietnamese. But then, I thought, they can’t possible have an interest in whoring akin to all the bad guys from the West. Whoring like only Western men can do is, as everyone knows, the preoccupation of corrupt capitalist foreigners, debased men with broken or lost moral compasses.
But why, I also mused, does the state or the police give a flying fuck about what people agree to do in private, and whether or not for money? Is it that the police really care about “immoral” fornication, or is it simply another means to extracting money? From the woman. From the man. And, you can be sure, the hotel for not properly policing a rule that someone advised the police to visibly post so there could be no doubt about the “right” of the police to knock on doors, and check under beds and in closets, and then demand a payoff.
What the four policemen were doing there while I was busily engaged with my eager students, I don’t in fact know. They were, I was only informed, just “looking,” seeing if there was any trouble. Snooping, to put it lightly. I wished them well in going through my bags if they went into my room. I just hoped that no one got an inkling to plant something that would cost me a hell of a lot of money.
Stickman's thoughts:
The ups and downs on travelling in Vietnam. It sounds like if you can stick it out, and overlook some of the problems like the double pricing and the issues associated with such horrendous poverty that there are rewards to be had.
The author can be reached at korski1@cox.net.
The author of this website, NOT this article, can be contacted at: stickmanbangkok@gmail.com.
