The trains in Vietnam are not wholly convenient when Hoi An is a part of your itinerary. Though it’s a popular tourist destination, the nearest train station is in the city of Da Nang, which is an hour bus ride away from the city of tailors. But what a ride it is.
The bus driver barrels down the approximately two-laned, mostly-dirt road, fully aware of his status as the largest vehicle in the local mechanical food chain. This means that the bikes, tuk-tuks, sedans, and even SUVs have to make way for this behemoth. In his graciousness, The Bus Master has equipped his ride with a wide variety of horn variations to communicate his will to them.
“Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba…” goes the reverberating fade-out horn that is used as the general chorus to the cacophony. “I am Bus,” it says. “Hear me roar!”
Matt smiles from his back seat, realizing he’s never going to find a better place and time to use the word ‘cacophony’ than in describing the driver’s disjointed and frenzied honking.
“Breeee-ahhhh!” a sharper horn whinnies from the bus’ front grill. “Breeee-ahhhh!” This one seems to mean that whomever is just ahead needs to move or get their ass run over.
It has been less than ten minutes into the journey and there have already been some close calls. Luckily, the locals seem to understand the code and make way for the wheeled juggernaut.
“Do you have any chocolate?” the middle-aged Vietnamese woman sitting next to the American asks out of nowhere. She’s the manager of this trip, to whom everyone pays their twenty-thousand dong fare ($1).
Matt had paid her earlier, having hobbled up the bus’ steps and past the LED-enshrined Buddha statue on the dashboard, favoring his good foot. Even now, propped up as it is, his smashed toenail throbs gently, wrapped in a Neosporin-soaked band-aid (or ‘plaster’ as he’s come to learn Brits and the industry that caters to their tourism calls them). So he feels vindicated in sitting with the older passengers in the roomier section in the back of the bus, answering their questions on where he’s from and whether he has sweets for them.
“Chocolate? Why would I have chocolate?”
Manager Woman shrugs. Perhaps this is a leftover perception of American GIs from the Vietnam War?
It’s not a misplaced perception.
“Actually,” the young man admits and reaches for his pack amid the sick beats of DJ Diesel, “I’ve got a chocolate chip granola bar somewhere in here.” He digs out and proffers a Clif Bar.
Manager Woman tears open the package and breaks off a piece. She tastes and approves of the offering. Then she makes her way up the aisle, handing out chunks of the chocolate chip granola to the other passengers.
The other passengers–
“Bee-beep!” the driver interrupts with a quick blast of his horn, pointing and laughing at some women clustered at a street corner. They wave back while he slows down before returning to the regularly scheduled horn programming. “Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba…”
The other passengers, mostly women, have been hopping on and off the bus at erratic intervals. ‘Hopping’ is the proper word here, because the bus only slows down to a walking pace while a teenager by the side door hoists up those whom have flagged down the bus. It’s like a strange, Vietnamese alien abduction. And these women! These traveling women look like effeminate ninjas with their wide-brimmed hats and pollution masks. Instead of swords and throwing stars, however, they carry bundles of brooms and baskets of corn. There’s even a cage of clucking chickens. So that’s where that stereotype comes from.
Sanitation be damned, even the chicken woman is accepting pieces of Manager Woman’s chocolate offering.
“More?” she asks Matt a minute later, having returned with the now-empty wrapper crumpled in her pocket.
“More? What am I, a walking vending machine? Those are my travel rations!”
The woman shrugs again and settles back into her seat. They sit in silence. Almost.
“Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba…”
* * *
The train car is silent for a time. Just for a few minutes, nothing crazy, but it’s enough to kindle the small hope that Matt might have the berth all to himself. All the way to Ho Chi Minh City, about eighteen hours south of here.
But soon, too soon, the door slides open with a plastic-on-metal rattle and an older woman bustles in. And a middle-aged woman. And she’s holding a baby boy, so young as to still need diapers. So young that his eyes don’t even seem capable of opening.
Matt eyes the child warily.
But the procession isn’t done. Next bustles in a man, the patriarch of the family, carrying a heavy cardboard box, at least two feet to a side. He sets it down and immediately slides it under the lowest of the three rows of beds. He reaches out into the hall and ushers in a ponytailed little girl, no older than three or four. She has one hand firmly in her father’s, the other equally firmly shoved into her mouth.
Feeling crowded, Matt tosses his laptop up to the second row, where his bed is, and gingerly climbs up the metal hand- and footholds. He dangles his feet before leaning around and bending himself to–
“Sunuvabitch!” he mumbles, having just whacked his head into the Vietnametrically-designed clearance. Seriously, it’s like maybe a foot and a half of space between his bed and the one above it.
The family setting up shop in the bottom beds looks up from their hugs goodbye only briefly. The father, it seems, won’t be making the trip south for now. After he’s left, the little girl looks up and meets Matt’s eyes. Drool shines off her pudgy hand.
“Heya,” he says in the uptone reserved for children, animals, and condescending sarcasm.
She stares.
He smiles and waves.
She stares.
He wiggles his fingers and makes a goofy face.
The girl takes off like a shot, diving behind the older lady, the woman who has to be her grandmother.
“Okay…” he mumbles.
The grandmother comforts the whining girl for a bit before turning up to address him. “She scare,” she says in blessed English. She motions to her face and chin. “You face, you… hair. She scare.”
“She’s scared of my face? My beard?” Matt gets it and tugs on his now three-month old facial hair. This is the longest he’s grown it out; every day is a new personal record!
“Yes,” she nods, laughing.
The girl peeks out to see what the commotion is about. She makes eye contact with the frightening Westerner again and just like before, squeaks and buries herself in her grandmother’s skirts.
“Here,” he gestures, passing down his phone. “It’s a picture of me without a beard.” Pictures go a long way in bridging the language barrier and maybe it’d help assuage the girl’s fears.
With the grandmother’s hands full, the younger woman, the presumed mother, takes the phone and shows the girl the picture of a clean-shaven Matt. She explains the picture in Vietnamese. The girl looks up one last time before hiding completely behind her grandmother.
The grandmother laughs and the mother looks more closely at the picture. “No beard, more handsome,” she says, gesturing to her own face like the older woman had.
Few Vietnamese can truly appreciate his scruffiness.
* * *
Matt sits on the train and scratches his beard. It’s a week before his ride to Ho Chi Minh City and he’s alone in his train car, Yas, Jac, and Shawn having left an hour ago at the Hue station.
He gazes out at the waves breaking on the rocky coast far below the mountainside tracks he rides along on his way to Da Nang. The late morning sun shines through a cloudless sky over a scene that would decry black-and-white photography as blasphemous.
He sits back, nomming on some incredibly squashed yogurt-covered raisins he pilfered from the United Club at the airport back in Newark. He had gotten them weeks ago when he was just setting off for Southeast Asia. But they still taste fine and he’s hungry.
“I’m really getting a lot of mileage out of these raisins,” he jokes to himself.
A man walks past in the hallway, interrupting Matt’s musings. He looks into the berth to see the raisin-munching passenger sitting, staring off at the scenery. “Hello!” the man greets, smiling.
“Hello,” Matt returns.
The man looks at him for a second or two more. Then he leans over and buries his hands in the foreigner’s beard, tugging gently. “Boop,” he says with approval before stepping back.
He walks away.
Matt’s eyes are wide until he realizes he’s the only witness to the scene. He shrugs and resumes chewing.
* * *
He wishes he had more of those raisins now. It’s only been a few hours on the train, but the baby’s crying and too-frequent diaper changes are starting to get a little old (and for some strange reason doing nothing to dampen his appetite).
Matt wriggles in his bed-like cell, as much to ease the cramp in his neck from hunching over his computer as to alleviate the pins and needles in his leg from the odd angle forced by the bed above. He reconsiders his choice of bedding: the hard bed compartment. Hard bed, he has recently discovered, is a wood-plus-foam-strip.
Suddenly, a green plastic package is thrust into his lap. Wait, no, it’s not the hard shrink-wrap plastic that’s green, it’s its contents. They’re leaf-wrapped cubes about an inch to a side and the package contains ten of them.
Matt looks up from his lap to find a youngish man smiling up at him. He’s Vietnamese and gesturing for his new Western friend to unwrap the package.
“For me?” Matt asks him.
“Nnn,” he grunts affirmative.
“Thanks.” A pause. “To eat?” he hopes.
“Nnn.”
Matt’s hands–and then when it proves necessary, his teeth–tear the shrink-wrapping asunder. One of the cubes tumbles free and onto the standard-issue train blanket. On closer inspection it’s obvious that the leaf-cubes are tied up around something with a floss-like string.
The man gestures for Matt to keep going.
Sliding the string off, he’s able to unwrap one layer of leaves, then a second layer, to reveal an even smaller cube of squishy pink something in another thin plastic wrapping. So many layers, it’s like an inedible gobstopper. Inedible so far.
The man is still gesturing, so Matt gingerly unwraps this final barrier between him and the ‘food’ and sniffs it.
“This smells like… fermented fish or something,” the hungry American tells him.
The man doesn’t quite understand, but continues to urge him on nonethess. When his new friend balks, the local takes a cube of his own, unwraps the copious leaves and plastic and pops the morsel into his mouth. “Good!” he says.
“Alright…” Matt is less wary, and tries the snack. “It’s like,” he chews, “it’s like a fishy type of sausage thing.” He chews more, silently praying that this isn’t some kind of fish shit. “It’s like seasoned, like a… like a raw pork salami thing, maybe?”
The man smiles, clearly understanding nothing more than the fact that his new foreigner friend is cautiously reaching for another cube to unwrap.
“I like it, but it’s kind of strong on it’s own, you know? Like, it’d be great on a sandwich or something.”
Somehow the man not only understands this, but has been on the same page the entire time. He swings up to his bed on the top row and whirls back with… a package of tortillas?
“Banana,” he says with an emphasis that underscores the unfathomable depth of meaning he’s going for. He gestures some more at the floppy yellow tortilla things. “Banana.”
“Banana tortillas? Right on, I got you.” Matt tears open the wrapper and pulls out a thin, surprisingly leathery disc about a foot in diameter. The package has twenty or so such discs, far more than meat cubes, so he passes it back to the generous local. “I think it’s time for some banana-tortilla meat-cube tacos, ah?”
“Nnn,” the man agrees, nodding and pulling out his own tortilla.
The taco’s made by smushing and spreading a fish-salami-cube on one half of the banana-paste jerky-tortilla and folding it over.
Matt rips a bite out of the makeshift sandwich. “Oh hell yea, dude! This banana-fruit-leather thing totally works!”
“Nem,” the man says.
“You’re name is Nem?” Matt points to Possibly-Nem.
Possibly-Nem shakes his head. “Food nem,” he clarifies and points to the package of green cubes.
“Ohhhh, the food is called nem.” Matt points to himself. “I’m Matt.”
“Ma’,” Not-Nem pronounces haphazardly. “I Thắng.”
“Pleasure to meet you, Thắng.” They shake hands. “Thank you again for this nem stuff. It’s the best!”
“You welcome,” Thắng beams.
To return the favor, as they talk in stupendously broken English about Thắng’s e-publishing business and twin baby boys (just a bit older than the infant napping below them), the traveling folder makes a two-thousand dong terrier ($0.10). Thắng accepts it with a big grin and murmurings of “…master…” Matt waves him off, but generally accepts the praise. He’s really getting a lot of mileage out of that terrier.
Later, when the cubes are all finished and the rest of the passengers have retired to their beds, Matt WhatsApps Chelsea back home.
>I feel like a monster
>Scaring children
>Cramping beds
>Eating fish diarrhea
>Somebody just try to stop me
He shuts off his phone and settles in for the night. The messages won’t get sent until he gets to a WiFi hotspot in Ho Chi Minh City the next morning, but at least he can rest easy knowing that he’s captured this moment in time. Well, maybe not easy, he’s reminded as he folds himself into the narrow bunk, but at least well-fed.
Behold the majesty of the shared meal on the train (as well as the small, middle-row bed).