Son La to Haiphong, Endless Rain, 15 - 18 March 2011

My alarm bleeped annoyingly emphasising the lack of sleep I had during the night despite going to bed at 9pm. My bus to Son La was scheduled to leave at the ungodly hour of 5am! I got out of bed and made my way cautiously across the room making sure I didn't bump into anything as I went to flick the light switch on. Despite my index finger firmly relocating the switch into the on position, the light bulb remained lifeless. I checked the TV but that too was lifeless meaning that their was a power outage again. Dien Bien Phu has power outages everyday for the majority of the day for some reason. This was not great news when I wanted to make sure I hadn't left anything behind.

With my bag on my back, I made my way to the bus station and it was quite an interesting walk as the streets were pitch black but the locals were out in force selling meat, fruit and vegetables on the side of the street on their bicycles with dimly lit torches. I was astonished by the amount of people out and trading so early. As soon as I crossed the river the lights seemed to be on. I got to the bus station that always seemed to be buzzing with life and after asking and thrusting the ticket in his face, the man at the gate showed me which bus was mine. I got on board and dumped my bag on the back seat and found a seat for myself, which wasn't difficult as there was only one man on the bus at the time. Shortly after sitting, a Belgium couple got on and sat on the two seats opposite me. I spoke to them for a while as we were waiting for the bus to move but as the bus moved off, Karen and Paul drifted off to sleep. I tried to sleep but couldn't as the bus journey was more like a rollercoaster ride, hugging the corners of the mountains, sharp breaking whilst fog surrounded us and forcing blindness upon the driver who slowed a little bit and just avoided on coming vehicles who were blowing their horns or flashing their lights frantically. Vietnamese don't slow down to avoid collisions, they just hit their horns thinking that things will magically disappear from their way, a technique that may work with people or buffalos but definitely not brick walls.

The journey was somewhat spacious, we stopped to pick up a hand full of people along the way but we all had several seats to ourselves to stretch out on. We stopped randomly in the hills by two wooden houses and the driver and his aide got out and walked into one of the houses, next thing we see is a water buffalo being butchered, gutted, sliced diced and boxed up in front of us beside the bus. The two young boys, who were oddly smartly dressed for cutting up dead animals, picked up the box they had just put the chopped up buffalo in and made there way to the bus. Initially they were about to put the box inside with us but I think they gathered we weren't happy about that and placed it in the small luggage compartment at the back of the bus which was directly under the back seat. The smell of the dead buffalo filled the air of the bus instantaneously, we all opened our window which let in the damp, cold breeze from outside helping to subdue the stench. Thankfully we didn't hang around too long and the bus driver soon moved off. Buses in Vietnam are multi purpose, they carry passengers (sometimes too many) and courier goods from one town to the next for a small fee. People just give them a call on their mobiles and they go and collect all types of things along the way.

The bus stopped again shortly after picking up the buffalo, it was 7.30am and it was time for breakfast. I had already snacked on some bread I had bought in DBP and Karen and Paul generously gave me their last Dairylee segment to go with it so I was not hungry. Despite this, we quickly jumped off the bus as being stationary meant the smell of the buffalo crept into the bus again and became too much to bear. We headed into the road side restaurant which resembled a shack made from a mixture of bamboo, metal sheets and odd pieces of wood, and took a seat. We asked for a pot of tea which finally arrived after several translation attempts. There was a group of 3 men sitting beside us who had finished their breakfast of Pho and had begun on the rice wine. They saw us and immediately offered us a shot. It was only 7.30am and they had started drinking the hard stuff already and seeing as it is incredibly rude to turn down an offer, we were subjected to downing several shots of the incredibly potent liquid, it might have been because it was early but it had a slight taste of petrol to it, not that I know what petrol tastes like of course. With our bodies warmed by the tea and rice wine, we left out new friends and the restaurant owner who refused to take our money and headed back onto the death bus for a further few hours to Son La.

We arrived in Son La bus station a little after 9am and rain was pouring from the sky above. We quickly gathered our bags and headed inside the bus station where Karen and Paul bought their onward ticket to Ninh Binh for the following day. I had a look at my possible destinations and decided that I needed to think about where I wanted to go next a little further. As the bus passed a sign to the guesthouse I had looked at staying a few miles back, it meant I would have to look for another one, perhaps closer to the bus station. I ended up staying at the VIP Guesthouse very close to the station with Karen and Paul as my next door neighbours. The room was nice, cramped, with an en-suite and a TV. I quickly settled into my room and had a knock on the door. It was Karen and Paul saying that they were heading out and wondered if I would join them. A few moment later, we were walking down the road towards the centre of town. The rain was slowly yet steadily spitting from the clouds and I suddenly regretted not bring my water proof with me. We approached a taxi driver outside the bus station, asked him how much to the centre of town and of course he responded with a ridiculous price. We tried to haggle but he was not having any of it so we tried the next taxi driver but they were obviously working as a team because he said exactly the same price and refused to put it on the meter. They thought they had us trapped as it was raining and the centre of town was 5km away. Motorcycle, xe oms as they're called were pestering us but they were going to charge even more to get even wetter. We stubbornly said no and walked of towards the town centre. It only took a minute for one of the taxi drivers to come to their senses and pull up beside us. He lowered his price to a reasonable level and so we jumped in. The driver also had the meter running and once we got to our destination it read just a little lower than the price we agreed on. It was barely anything to quarrel over, so we paid up and got out.

The heavens opened up a little further which forced the three of us to take refuge in a restaurant until it stopped. The only problem was, it didn't really stop raining at all, so we sat in the restaurant talking, eating and drinking for a couple of hours and once the clock struck 12, we began on the beer. Only a couple but it was enough to take our minds of the abysmal weather outside for a while. The rain was too much and Son La had too little to offer in the way of sights to see so we headed back to the guesthouse. Karen and Paul are kind of professional walkers, they annually take part in a charity event that sees people walk 100km in a day, so the 5km walk back to our guesthouse wasn't an issue for them. I on the other hand was drenched as I didn't have any waterproof on. Just my jeans and a shirt. OUCH, a pain shot horizontally through the centre of my back and a thick liquid started dripping down my legs. Pavements in Vietnam are the most dangerous thing on the road, most of them are just for motorcycles to park on, some have holes that plummet into the sewer below and all of them are slippery in the rain. I had just stepped of the curb to avoid a parked motorcycle when I slipped and landed in a drainage hole. I was covered in mud and things I don't really want to know. I quickly got myself up and although laughing about it externally, I was fuming and cursing Vietnamese pavements inside my head.

Karen and Paul left the following morning and I was alone again, it was also raining again. Son La is the second time I became a little depressed on my journey as it was raining, there was little to do and I hadn't been essentially on my own for a couple of weeks since leaving Hanoi. Although I did meet Andy and Emma, and Karen and Paul, for some reason I strived for more companions. I think the problem with Vietnam is the lack of hostels and staying in guesthouses just doesn't give you the opportunity to meet anybody new. Perhaps it was just the rain and the fact I was shut up in my room because of it. I headed out to the town centre in the rain, perhaps to go to the prison which was supposedly worth seeing, I planned to walk there and get a taxi back with the fresh Dong I would withraw from the cash machine. Didn't work out like that. First of all I couldn't find the prison so I went for something to eat, then I couldn't find a cash machine that would take my card so had to walk home as I didn't have enough money for a taxi and to pay for my hotel room. Having said that, I didn't even have enough money to pay for my hotel room!

I made the long trek back to the guesthouse which seemed even further and endless on the way back in the dark. I got to the guesthouse and approached the manager and showed him all the money I had left. I think I had a deficit of 10,000, which is nothing but still not enough to pay the agreed price. The manager, who spoke little English, smiled and indicated that it was fine and shoved a handful of Doublemint chewing gum in my hand as a present. What a nice man. This was to be my last night as I was leaving early again the next morning on the bus to my next destination.

It had been raining for the past week almost non stop and the day I got the bus to Haiphong, on the coast below Ha Long City, was no different. It was freezing as the bus conductor had his window open constantly all the way across to the other side of the country. The journey became a little tighter as we went along as people were constantly being picked up and squeezed on with their bags of god knows what. When I arrived in Haiphong, it was still raining and I still had no money so I had to walk to the nearest cash machine before I could get a taxi to the hotel I wanted to stay in. I planned to stay in Haiphong for one night only as it is the gateway to Ha Long Bay and I was going to get the ferry across to Cat Ba Island the following morning. The hotel I wanted to stay in was unexpectedly too expensive so I ended up in another hotel which was slightly cheaper yet still expensive. It was one of the worst hotels I have stayed in, the noise was unbearable all night and I couldn't wait to get onto the Island.

The following day it was still overcast yet the constant rain had made way to intermittent downpours. I left the hotel after a horrible nights sleep and headed to the ticket booking office to get my ticket to Cat Ba Island. The lady in the tour office was extremely friendly and as I had an hour to wait until my bus picked me up, I sat there with her as she went through my phrasebook teaching me Vietnamese and took turn in asking each other questions. The bus finally arrived that took me to the boat and out of Haiphong.

Next time, Cat Ba Island and Ha Long Bay.

Dien Bien Phu, A Battle to the End! 12-14 March 2011

It was 7.30am and my minibus for Dien Bien Phu had pulled up outside the hotel, I said goodbye to the owner and his wife, the true boss, and approached the bus. The wife also acted as chef and had made me a chicken sandwich for me to take onto the bus for the journey. She had told us how she dreams that one day she would like to move to Europe as a chef. I passed my bag to the driver who crammed it in the back with all the others and I stepped up into the bus and found a seat on the back with two other people.

Beautiful, though...

My hopes for a semi comfortable journey were dashed when we stopped two minutes later to pick up more people. There were three seats free and we picked up five more people. A girl squeezed herself in next to me and her companions mirrored this in the other rows. I just hoped that there weren't going to be any more collections as there was not any more room on the bus and this was to be a eight hour journey through the hills to Dien Bien Phu.

I began talking with my very close (proximity) travel companions and learned that Andy and Emma, the couple to my left were British, had been working in Australia for a couple of years and were gradually making their way back home via South East Asia and India. The girl to my right didn't talk much, she was an American and that's pretty much all I remember about her.

...the mountainous view is better by naked eye...

The bus journey was long and bumpy but the scenery was absolutely amazing! At times the road was non-existent or under construction as many things tend to be around this part of the world. An couple of hours down the road the bus pulled over for what we thought would be a short stop, but no, we stopped for an hour whilst the Vietnamese passengers filled themselves up with Bun Cha. We thought this to be slightly ridiculous and stood outside eating a quick snack waiting for them to finish. We got back into the hot and uncomfortable bus and hit the road for a few more hours on death provoking roads, hanging off the edge on every bend and narrowly missing all oncoming vehicles. Still, if I died on this road, at least I died with an amazing view! The temperature difference between Sapa and where we were was so incredible I wish I had worn my shorts, not my jeans.

...not through moving bus window!

A few more hours passed by until we made our next stop at 1pm which we took to be a natural lunch break for anyone. We asked the driver how long we had and he motioned with his watch, twenty minutes, so we thought we would go off and find somewhere to eat. We walked 100 meters down the hot and dusty road to a small wooden shack market and Andy found somewhere to eat, I wasn't too hungry as I'd been snacking on some dried fruit which I had become addicted to. I walked back towards the bus station to find the toilet only to be confronted by the driver slapping his watch with his middle and index fingers and urging me to get onto the minibus. “It had only been five minutes,” I told him to which he didn't seem to care. “You said twenty minutes, it's been five.” I repeated myself trying to make myself clear but the driver had no wish to interact on the matter and the other Vietnamese passengers were shouting for me to get on board. This made me angry and agitated, we waited for them for an hour earlier for a pointless, stupidly timed lunch stop and now they can't seem to get away fast enough. I shouted to Emma who had just walked back up the road that Andy needed to get back as we seemed to be leaving with or without him. She ran back down to the market and grabbed him before he started to eat and the bus drove towards them and they barely got on before the bus driver slammed his foot on the throttle which kicked a lot of dust into the air behind us.

The War Memorial

We finally arrived in Dien Bien Phu around 4pm, it was hot and humid, the hottest temperature I had experienced so far on my trip. I had found a guesthouse in the Lonely Planet which I was drawn to as it was a micro brewery. I told Andy and Emma about this hostel and they were also keen to go and find it, so we grabbed our bags and began the walk towards the hostel following my hand drawn map of the town. However, after ten minutes of walking down the main road and still not only half way there, we decided to turn back and get a guesthouse closer to the bus station as Andy and Emma's bus was extremely early in the morning and they didn't fancy the walk, which I couldn't blame them. We found a guesthouse which was of the no-frills category close to the market. We dumped our bags in our rooms and had a quick freshen up before heading out to find some bia hoi.

After a well needed shower, we headed out to the streets of Dien Bien Phu and found an place selling Bia Hoi. We immediately ordered a pitcher of freshly brewed beer between us and it went down like a dream. The cool, refreshingly smooth tasty beer slipped down our throats making us forget the bus journey earlier that day. One pitcher turned into two, three, four and I'm not sure how many as the locals joined us and began filling our glasses up to toast with them. Darkness instantaneously surrounded us as all the electricity was cut off across the whole town unexpectedly following a brief hushed silence whilst the staff found the candle lamps and conversations continued as though it was a normal occurrence.

The centre of town... brilliant...

They began to take more interest in us and the teenage daughter of the owner came over to talk to us. We didn't have much verbal communication between us as she was either shy about speaking or more likely has just learnt English from a book as her written communication skills were almost faultless. We spent a while reading her questions and writing our responses until her father invited us over to a table where they had laid out a birthday cake with other sweets for one of their children. They offered us cake and we sang happy birthday to the little girl whilst she opened up her present. It was really nice to be involved in such a personal family affair and to see the happiness on the girls face when she got her gift. By this time, it was 10pm and the restaurant was needing to close, but the owner kindly invited us round to his house to watch a premiership match that was on that evening.

The grand entrance to the cemetery of fallen comrades

His house was just across the road and we were accompanied by his youngest son and eldest daughter who was still communicating to us through her pen and notepad. When we arrived at their home we were individually asked to follow him into the back where he wanted to show us something. A bit strange we thought and feared for our lives. However, Andy and Emma both took their times and came out with a laugh which had a slight nervousness to it. I was intrigued and followed the man to the back garden where I was confronted with a dozen porcupines, all in cages, being fed and watered by his wife. I did ask whether they were for food or pets and was relieved when he confirmed the latter. I returned to the front of the house which opened up to the road with a feeling of 'what the hell is that all about' on my face to which Andy and Emma nodded in agreement.

A huge bomb crater on Hill A1 from a B-52

I didn't really watch the football as planned as I began talking with the youngest son who was no older than 8 years old. He didn't speak English but he showed me his transformers with excitement and we ended up playing with them for the next 30 minutes whilst Andy watched the football with the boss and Emma was talking with the girl. The match finished and we politely said thank you to our extremely kind and generous hosts and left in search of well needed food as we hadn't eaten a decent meal since breakfast.

Our luck was in, there was a bakery open selling cakes, burgers and hot dogs. We settled for a couple of hot dogs each and a beer which I struggled to get down me. After sitting there for half an hour, we decided it was time for bed as Emma and Andy had to get up extremely early to get early morning bus to Laos in the morning. We walked back and I said goodbye to my new friends who I was so fortunate in meeting on the bus that day.

Destruction beyond belief

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, 1953-54

Dien Bien Phu is synonymous with the 1954 Battle of Dien Bien Phu which was an important turning point for Vietnam and the rest of Indochina. After the second world war was over, the first Indochina war began and the Viet Minh insurgency was growing in strength and had gained land from Hanoi as far as Luang Probang in Laos. The French were continually failing to quash the Viet Minh's victories over their armies and needed to stop their advances into Laos which was still under French control. France saw the only option was to launch an all out attack on Dien Bien Phu which would cut off the Viet Minh's supply line and force them to retreat. France were poorly prepared and didn't stand a chance against the Viet Minh who had secured all the highland in the area and severely outnumbered the French army. Nguyen Giap, commander of the Viet Minh's army described the battlefield as a rice bowl, they had all the high ground while the French were all deep inside. The French lost the battle miserably and decisively.

French Trench of Hill A1, their best hope...

On May 8 1954, Ho Chi Minh delivered the news to the Geneva Conference declaring Viet victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu. They had no choice but to divide Vietnam at the 17^th parallel until elections were held that would reunite the two halves, Communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam to the north and French supported State of Vietnam to the South. The last French troops withdrew from Indochina in 1956 which paved the way for the United States of America to get involved.  The United States had been funding the French for years in an effort to remotely squash the communist influence on the area.  They were always agitated by the French inability to do so they took the opportunity to go in and 'finish' the job.

An example of Viet Minh strength

Unmarked graves of the victims of war

The Victory Museum, of course with heavy Viet prejudice, documents the battle from start to their victorious finish with photos, artefacts and destroyed French and American artillery. Across from the museum is the cemetery which is a very moving complex with endless lines of graves for all those that lost their lives in the battle. Overlooking the cemetery is Hill A1 which is the highest point in town and was held by the French troops during the battle. It is littered with a rabbit run of trenches and was extremely hard fought for between the French and Viet Minh armies. After the walk up to the top of the hill, you get a fantastic view of the lines of unmarked graves below in the cemetery and the surrounding countryside to seal my trip to Dien Bien Phu before it started to rain.

Next Time: Son La and the obligatory rain... rain... rain... rain...