2. 18:16  04/10/05

During the descent through Vietnam, everything grows brown: bare, charred fields with strips of sun hurt yellow, dominating brown rivers.  Then the city, blocks of vulnerable greyness growing nervously.  Unlike two hours previous, no sparkling skyscrapers, no stylishly shimmering sea; a sluggish, fat brown river and a clutch of averagely sized grey tower buildings mark what must be the centre.
          
Excited and scared to be exiting the last aircraft of my long journey, to be staying somewhere so incredibly alien.  I trailed my fellow passengers into the laughably disorganised immigration area.  Haphazard queues of a sort led presumably somewhere, out.  It was impossible to tell exactly where or if you were in the right one.  I Britishly joined one and hoped.  Other western people were in it, as they were at ones to the sides of me.  A pretty young eastern girl in the queue next to me selected Robbie Williams from her silver mini iPod.  A toddler bumped into the back of a short, sweaty young man who looked vaguely eastern European, and who I exchanged a weak smile with.  I selected Ian Brown’s F.E.A.R on my own ageing iPod, whose battery I was oddly proud to see was still hanging in there.  The American couple in front of me were gently reprimanded by the immigration official when they went up to his desk together.  He ordered her back.  She said something to me I didn’t hear because of my music, but I smiled anyway and half shook my head at the maddening beaurocracy of it all.  
The immigration official had a frighteningly long hair sprouting from a facial mole.  And he didn’t smile. 
            I collected my luggage, went to join another queue, which I wasn’t alone in being frustrated to see appear ahead of me.  What now?  One final baggage scan.   Half a dozen young men wearing identical T-shirts and baseball caps jumped the queue, unabashed.  Disgruntled murmuring amongst us patiently waiting folk, an effeminate western boy rebuked them in fluent Vietnamese.  They looked mildly apologetic, but not much, before still going on ahead of most people.  Bags scanned and passport checked a final time, there was daylight ahead.  
          
At a currency exchange counter I swapped forty quid I’d taken out at Heathrow.  Musty, mainly pink currency in return.  Then the searing heat and heaving swarm of arrivals outside the main door.  There must have been around five hundred people staring at anyone who walked out. 
          “Hey, taxi?!” a uniformed man emerged from the dense pack and shouted.  I looked up from studiously examining the floor, avoiding five-hundred pairs of eyes.  Yes, he had been shouting at me.  What other choice did I have?  I didn’t know anything.
       “Mm, ok,” I muttered, offering the first example of my bristling Vietnamese language.  I’d half-heartedly tried learning token phrases for each country I would visit and now relied on a pocket phrasebook, knowing it was unlikely I would to develop the confidence to say anything more than hello, goodbye and thank-you.  I was already uncertain of the approaching character as he weaved through the crowd towards me, knowing he’d be out to fleece the stupid westerner who knew nothing, who would need two hours and a large calculator to do any currency conversion.  He appeared to be an agent of some sort and led me across the forecourt, away from the incomprehensible throng of people, to a taxi which already had a driver in.  He quoted a price I knew to be way over the odds.  I’d heard that the centre was only about twenty minutes away.  He said thirty-five.  I conceded anyway, the taxi company had no competition.  There was no other option.  I forked out one of my largest notes to him, still ignorant of exactly how much I was being fleeced for.  Better not to think about it.
        He unceremoniously threw my backpack into the boot, then shut the rear passenger door behind me.  My driver was a young man with few English skills.  We spoke anyway, without understanding much each other said, both nodding and smiling frantically, picking up and dropping our own tangents between long periods of silence. 
       The view from the window of my taxi was mesmerising.  My first wholesome, mindbendingly rich flavour of Vietnam.  Eyes bulging ravenously, I didn’t want to miss anything.  I wanted to suddenly attain photographic memory powers, to remember each detail.

When you go somewhere new, anywhere you haven’t been before, you’re naturally sensitive to obvious differences.  Here, it was more natural trying to look for things that were the same.  Sameness in such an alien, distant place was novel and kooky - Coke signs, aha!  A few dominant global, capitalist names, but difference was king. 
      Traffic apparently isn’t in need of order or rules, anarchy reins, everybody has the innate ability to thread their bike or vehicle through the eye of a needle.  Even where squeezing through a gap doesn’t seem possible, where a fatality seems so inevitable you daren’t look.  These drivers need only a millimetre of space around them, any more is a luxury.  The drivers look accordingly concentrated and serious, never stressed or hurried.  Cars are few, motorbikes rule the road, packed tightly together, riders never with a helmet - a smog mask the most protection they have, chatting across the road with each other as they go, smoking, occasionally on mobile phones - despite the constant intrusive engine drones they’re immune to or have learned to speak over.  Most have motorbikes: scooters and Vespas, and laughably tatty machines which appear barely capable of making a sound or staying intact if you were to sit on them.  Less so of actual movement.  No Harleys here.  Pedal bikes come a close second to their motorised siblings although few look what we would call modern.  The more people on a motorbike the better.  Young and old, friends, lovers, whole families nonchalantly cram on, babies looking out glazed over the handlebars of speeding, precariously weaving cycles. 
      Beeping isn’t an aggressive act.  Hello, I’m here, is all it means.  Road rage is extraordinarily almost non existent.  Buildings vary wildly from the ramshackle corrugated iron hut, just about upright to the recogniseably regular, sturdy modern bulk.  Little glitz, no neon, but an intensity of frantic bustling life that in my experience had no comparison.  I sat in the back of the taxi staring out, petrified, hypnotised.  Sometimes a passing biker would see the pasty westerner in the taxi window - did locals ever use taxis? - and take a second look. 
       I sensed our nearing centrality by the increase of western looking people.  Still not many: the odd couple, or single young person.  Then I passed a war museum, outside which an obvious clutch of them waited, adorned by cameras, sunhats and shades.  The taxi swung into the forecourt of my hotel after a ride of about twenty minutes.
        
                                                             *
  
Now I’m irrationally seething following a protracted tour of Ho Chi Minh City, getting fleeced for the second time in a number of hours.
         My journey finally at an end, I reached my hotel room in the plush hotel I’d been advised to book by my travel agent, at around midday local time.  In the context of Vietnam it was an expensive room, with an en-suite mini bar and television.  Determined not to even consider napping, I freshened with a shower, shave and fresh clothes, before braving the manic streets. 
         For the first few minutes I could only summon enough courage to walk around the blocks, crossing the fearsome, permanently jammed roads only when strictly necessary.  I swore I’d be killed if I tried to be too clever, tried to cross too many roads.  The odds were surely stacked against me with the swarming volume of traffic as it was.  It brought to mind a childhood computer game where you had to cross a river packed with crocodiles, stepping on safe logs to reach the other side.       
         Climbing into the seat of a large pedal cycle, I wondered if I had been wise in succombing to the fourth offer of a tour.  “3 dollar for hour,” he had reasonably quoted, before pummelling me with measured, luring questions as he pedalled alongside the head-shaking westerner, pitching his sale.  “Oh, ok then,” I finally submitted, willing to defer the responsibility of my direction and lower the chance of getting run over.   
         The hour elapsed, but he continued showing me authentic Vietnamese pagoda after pagoda, temple after temple.  Some more impressive than others, many a fair distance apart.  The smell of incense in most of the square buildings lulled my senses, relaxed my already jetlagged mind.  Teamed with my unerring sense of over polite Britishness, I delayed telling him enough, I’m tired, take me home now - even when the second hour passed.  A tall, self conscious and over flamboyant temple with little artistic substance, claiming to be the tallest; then another,  smaller, flatter, red block with a wondrous amount of detail and locals on their knees, praying to Buddhas.  My guide sat in his cycle, relaxed, smoking, pointing me in the direction of other buildings of interest, although I’d lost enthusiasm long ago and wanted to go back. 
         I agreed anyway, went plodding dopily off to the next temple.  Beginning to lose track of the number of temples I’d seen, I grew weary of getting rinsed of money again.  He pedalled, standing behind me as I sat fretting, between short, sporadically vicious thunder storms.  He had cycled around more blocks than was necessary to get back to my hotel, I was sure. 
        It had been around two and three-quarter hours.  I’d been stupid for letting it go on so long and was as much annoyed at myself for that as I was at him for overcharging me.  Amidst another torrential storm soaking us to the bone, we had a confrontation outside the hotel.  I was reluctant to give him as much as he asked, claiming he should have told me at the beginning how long the tour would be.  A local lady manning a nearby streetside drinks stall saw our stand-off, came over and mediated, successfully knocking his price down better than me.  Reluctantly, I handed over a still inflated fee, and stomped, dripping wet, into the plush hotel, attracting confused looks from the staff.  (I later guessed that this was because they would have expected to collect my room key from them, but I had accidentally contravened rules by taking it out with me).
       Irrationally angry now because it was a decent, occasionally fascinating tour, taking in many different corners of the city - possibly ones less chartered by most tourists.  And the traffic remained consistently captivating, terrifying, tipping back and forth like an hour glass.  Each vehicle a grain of sand.  On each corner a hundred miracles, never even a scrape.  Several near-miss swerves when contact, crash, hurt appeared a certainty.  Heart regularly in mouth as I sat in my little priveliged shell, I’m amazed not to have witnessed a single accident. 
       My energy levels, boosted momentarily by the adrenaline of conflict, are now dipping again.  Ridiculously for six o clock.  I’m jet-lagged so it’s excusable.