Ho Chi Minh City - Bao Loc

Religious Harmony
Today I acted on the idea to discover the 'real' Vietnam.

I'd booked a ticket from HCMC to Da Lat -- an old summer retreat in the highlands with a European air -- and had got on the coach fully intending to complete the journey. However, half-way along I had an impulse to just get off at the next town we stopped at.

The coach eased to rest in the middle of a long non-descript strip of a town, and I grabbed my backpack and left the air-conditioned coach to bemused looks from my fellow travellers slouching in their reclined seats. The coach roared away leaving me coughing in its dusty wake, and I took a minute peering up, and then down, the long straight road.

Right. Here we are, then. What happens now? No guidebooks to consult. Just me in a small town in Vietnam with my own wits. Fantastic!

I strolled up the road and went into the first, and possibly only, hotel. Some kind of celebratory lunch was going on in the main dining room. A hundred guests sat at a dozen round tables filled the air with a chaotic din of conversation and consumption. Everyone was dressed smartly: the men in shirts and ties, jackets draped over the back of their chairs; the women in elegant ensemble pieces.

Everyone except me, of course.

I stared at the feasting in my mud-caked boots and splattered fatigues with the straps of the backpack pressing sweat patches outwards, and waited for an invite to join.

It never came.

I trudged up to my room a little deflated, threw my stuff on the bed, and inspected the room top to bottom. Bed, sink, shower, table. Everything in order. I slipped out to the passage which ran under an awning and nosed about. The other rooms seemed vacant and nobody was about. Perhaps this was going to be really boring.

I went down to reception to hire a motorbike; I'd read about a waterfall twenty kilometres away and wanted to check it out. After some umming and ahhing a man in a leather jacket pulled up outside on a beat up moped. I asked for better directions to the waterfall and set-off. First I just rode up and down the town's main road, getting a feel of the place and the bike. I kept to the innermost lane and looked for memorable landmarks, but everything was indistinguishable to my eye. Eventually I took a guess at the right road to turn-off and headed into the sticks. How many roads could there be?

Lots. And unlike the laser-beam straight highway they looped and twisted and turned and joined and forked and climbed and dipped and ended. The few signs there were didn't mark the way to the waterfall, or if they did, I didn't know about it. I headed back to the hotel like a lost schoolboy returning home. The leather-jacketed man picked-up his moped and another man arrived with a proper motorbike. I hopped on the back and started out again, this time confident I'd get to the waterfall.

The conversation was stalled by the language barrier and the noise of the engine and the wind, so I just enjoyed the speed and the scenery instead.

The waterfall site was overflowing with local tourists and I felt like the proverbial sore thumb, ascending and descending stone steps on my own and watching with a sense of weird detachment gallons and gallons of water falling under the effect of universal gravitation.

Is it that special?

Water and gravity. Gravity and water. There are more interesting combinations in the world. Like light and droplets of water forming a rainbow, but I didn't see that. A sense of wonder of the world is enormously enriched when you have some idea of its mechanisms and history. I can see the waterfall as a symbol of nature's power, but with our 21st century understanding I find something seemingly banal like the ant even more spectacular.

In the evening I played a version of snooker with three balls and no pockets in a low-ceilinged hall across the road from the hotel. It was fun but again the conversation was limited to a few basic phrases like 'good shot' or 'bad luck'. I think I went to bed about nine, setting my alarm for 1am to catch an Arsenal game.

So much for the adventurous lone-traveller off the trail...

Spectacular...or not?