The plane touched down at the Ho Chi Minh City airport. The long taxi to the gate told me a lot about what I should expect over the next 24 months. Lining the road were broken down and derelict airplanes and helicopters in various stages of decomposition. Most looked like they had been parked and abandoned ten or more years prior to my arrival. Looking at them reminded me of how the houses on my street in Las Vegas looked during the economic disaster in 2008. There were also local people dotting the runway; families with small children mostly. They appeared to be relaxing on the side of the landing strip taking in the show of the planes coming and going. The runway itself was cracked and pocked with weeds and grass growing through. In this tropical climate, even the most robust concrete cannot escape the penetration of nature.
I exited the plane and headed for customs. I was relieved to find that there are
surprisingly few automatic weapons in Vietnam.
I always notice the airport security around the world toting M16s and
AK-47s and think to myself, “why do they need automatic weapons?” I can understand carrying a pistol or a Taser
for the occasional dust up at the coffee bar, but a machine gun just seems like
it’s more for show than anything else.
Interestingly, the only place I have seen an AK-47 in Vietnam is outside
the American embassy. Go USA. But I didn’t see any in the HCMC airport.
I made my way through
the customs line and followed the crowd to the baggage carousel. I managed to locate a cart for my luggage,
which was only slightly easier to handle than carrying the 100+ pounds of
luggage manually. All four wheels on the
cart turned, so it was nearly impossible to steer once loaded with anything weighing
more than ten pounds. They are also
clearly not designed for the thirty-five cubic foot lady bag I was bringing
into the country. I managed to balance
my bags like a game of Jenga onto the cart and keep it there to walk 20 feet
before being forced to remove it all and put it through yet another baggage
x-ray, the fourth of the trip.
After another minute of hernia inducing lifting and
balancing, I got the bags back on the baggage cart and exited the airport. Two things hit me the second I walked
out. First I was overpowered by the
heat. I lived in Las Vegas for four
years, rode my bike nearly every day, and spent most of my childhood in the
Deep South. I have never felt heat this
oppressive in my life. I was already
feeling nervous and apprehensive about the trip as a whole considering not a
single thing had gone according to plan so far.
With the introduction of 100+ degree heat and 98% humidity my whole body
turned into a faucet. I was finding new
and interesting places on my body to sweat.
Second were the throngs of people waiting for the passengers exiting the
airport.
There is a T-shaped aisle that
all passengers walk through when they leave the airport creating a gauntlet of
families, children, people with valet signs, security with whistles and
passengers with hundreds of pounds of luggage all making a disorienting,
ear-splitting and chaotic noise. This
was my real introduction to Vietnam. My
hermetically sealed flight into this place gave no indication of what I was to
expect in the first 30 seconds of my time in country. People in front of me were stopping and
reuniting with what I assumed were family members, which resulted in a line of
traffic not unlike driving through a construction zone. This was my first encounter with a sensation
I would become all too familiar with over the following weeks and months.
I had been told that the company driver would be meeting me
and picking me up. I had not been told
that the weekend I arrived was a holiday weekend. I scanned the crowd without stopping my
precarious load of luggage looking for my name on a sign. I saw nothing. I turned and made my way through the rest of
the arrival area without seeing anything bearing my name or the company
name. I got on my phone (which
thankfully still worked) and called my parents.
I told them I had arrived safely and was looking for my ride that hadn’t
shown up. It was a welcome relief to hear
a familiar voice for a few moments before I was thrust, yet again, into the
legions of people straining to find their loved ones.
I fought my way back and forth through the crowd for the
next twenty minutes looking for something, anything that looked familiar,
feeling more and more panicked with each passing minute. The only thing I had with me was the address
to the hotel. Each time I made my way to
one end of the crowd I was stopped by an older man claiming to be a taxi
driver. I rebuffed his repeated
advancements, but eventually noticed that he had what appeared to be a credential
around his neck. I reasoned that he
wouldn’t bother wearing it unless he was actually a taxi driver. I decided that I had no choice but to let him
drive me to the hotel. Relenting, I
asked him how much to take me to my hotel.
He said “$20 US.” I asked him how
long it would take and he said “45 minutes.”
I said “Let’s Go.” Thankful to be
going somewhere out of the heat and crowd.
[Later I learned that a taxi from the airport to that particular hotel costs
around US$8, so I got taken. In my own
defense, I was hot and panicking. Twenty dollars seemed totally reasonable
given my situation -and in the US, $20 to drive that distance isn't unreasonable.]
He took my cart from me and wheeled it across two streets to
what I guessed was the airport parking lot.
When we got to his car, a beat up silver compact 4-door Hyundai, I
thought, “My luggage is not going to fit in there.” I tried to ignore the fact that there was
nothing on the car to indicate that it was indeed a taxi. I moved around to help him lift my bags into
the car, but he waved me away saying “I do, I do!” I obliged and moved out of the way.
On his first attempt to heft my largest bag into the trunk
it would not fit. His efforts to lift
the bag brought on a fit of wheezing and coughing that made me think that he
hadn’t done a whole lot of heavy lifting.
Considering he was supposed to be a taxi driver, this didn’t fill me
with confidence. I think of taxi drivers
as men who were born to move luggage.
Loading and unloading it effortlessly because that is a significant
percentage of their job. He turned to me
and exclaimed, “Beaucoup kilos! Beaucoup kilos!” and waved me over to
help.
We managed to squeeze my largest bag, large enough to hold a
medium sized cadaver, into the back seat along with my camera equipment. The two backpacks were crammed into the
trunk. Once the luggage was loaded he ushered me around the car. I folded myself into the front seat, where my
knees touched the glove box as a result of scooting the seat so far up to
accommodate my now embarrassingly large amount of luggage. He plopped into the driver’s seat wheezing
like a man who smokes 12,000 cigarettes a day, laughed and said “BEAUCOUP
KILOS!” again. I noticed that he hadn’t
returned the luggage cart to its stowing area as one would in the US. Come to that, I hadn’t even noticed any place
to store luggage carts. They were just
drifting around the parking lot waiting to be picked up by a person in need
like shopping carts in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
The engine came to life and we rumbled out of the parking
lot and onto the streets of Ho Chi Minh City.
To say that the city is confusing would be an understatement. For the most part American cities are based
on a grid running on a north/south or east/west axis. HCMC is on an angle running northeast to
southwest with streets that cut diagonally across what would be a standard city
grid. The Saigon River meanders and
weaves its way through the city creating bridges and dead ends around many
corners. Despite being mostly a grid,
the detail that makes this city different in its grid is that there is not a
clear pattern between two-way and one way streets. This can, and often does, make circling the
block into a site-seeing adventure that can last an hour or more if you aren’t
careful.
About 20 seconds after leaving the airport I found myself
totally disoriented and overwhelmed by the traffic. People had told me there were a lot of
motorcycles in Vietnam. Nothing could
prepare me for the number of motorcycles.
I thought I knew what a lot of motorcycles looked like having gone to
the Laughlin River Run the previous spring, but no. There were thousands of them, buzzing like
locusts like some kind of alien symphony of honking horns and the Doppler
effect created by 100cc engines whizzing by.
My driver handled the car with one hand on the steering wheel and the
other moving between the gear shift and the horn. He honked the horn about every three to five
seconds, handing out “beep-beeps” to nearly every vehicle or pedestrian we
passed. Sometimes he would mix it up and
usher forth with a “beep-beeeeeep-beep-beep-beep” like he was speaking to the
other vehicles in some kind of horn code.
We swerved and cut people off and then would, in turn, be
cut off by others like some kind of insane square dance. It seemed that we were nearly in about 35
accidents. Accidents which included, but
were not limited to hitting pedestrians, hitting a bicycle, hitting a
motorbike, rear-ending a bus, being rear-ended by a bus, and others that I’m
certain have been blocked from my long-term memory. There are nights when I wake up sweating
after dreaming about exposed bus and eighteen wheeler tires coming at me,
sucking me underneath in a festival of flesh melting and bone crunching
agony. I could see my heart pounding
though my shirt. We made about 47 turns,
drove either on the wrong side of the road, or straddling the center line and
we may have even taken a momentary detour onto the sidewalk. It’s all a blur in my memory.
All I could think was “This is home. I’m home…”
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