Free Bound for Vietnam by Lydia Laube Page A

me was to see people standing patiently in queues. They were better behaved than their northern cousins – possibly because they had to stand between two lines of strong iron bars that they could not get over. But they could go past on one side. I saw one man walk along this side of the queue, shove his money in the window in front of the first person in line and buy a ticket. No grumbles were heard. No one complained. They just let him get away with it.
    I got my message across to the ticket seller, a helpful woman who indicated that a soft sleeper to Guangzhou was not available for tomorrow. I asked if there was one to Liuzhou, which is close. She replied that there was. Only later, when I asked the hotel desk staff to translate my ticket for me, did I discover to my utter disgust that the train left at five o’clock in the morning! I had to clutch the desk to sustain the shock when this horror was revealed to me. It meant I had to get up in the freezing cold at three a.m.
    Outside the station, a line of taxi vultures lurked. One grabbed me and pushed, patted and propelled me into his taxi. Then he demanded fifty yuan. I yelped, ‘Not on your Nelly!’ It had only cost nine to come there. I got out, slammed the door and walked off. He ran after me saying, ‘Forty, thirty, twenty!’ To which I genteely replied, ‘Frogs!’ Across the road I flagged a passing taxi with a working meter, who returned me for the price I had paid to get there.
    After Hiro left, I had no company in my room, well not human anyway. As I was drawing the curtains at the far end of the room, I saw a furry thing moving on the floor. On closer inspection it proved to be a large rat in the process of twitching its death throes. Death from over-eating, by the look of it. I summoned the room maid, who very casually and calmly swept the rat up with her feather duster and put it in the bin. It looked like she did it all the time. During the night one of the deceased’s brethren came looking for it. I was almost asleep when I felt a large animal jump on top of me and start walking down my hip. I gave a shriek and the rat went flying off. Next morning there was another very dead rat on the floor. I wondered if it was my nocturnal visitor who had died of a heart attack. I have been told that I have a scream like an air-raid siren.
    At dusk that evening I went strolling along the streets looking at the shops. It was a good time to be out; many people were shopping and temporary stalls, pedlars and night markets were active. Small boy shoe-shine merchants and a street ironer worked away on the footpath close to where an old woman in charge of a pair of bathroom scales invited custom. I saw a youth trying to sell the same armful of neck ties that I had seen him with in the morning and again at noon. He stood in front of a haberdashery shop that also sold ties. The tolerance of the shop keepers amazed me. They allowed hawkers to sell the same goods as they did, probably cheaper, right outside their doors.
    The shops did not diversify in the goods they stocked; one tiny shop was full of umbrellas and another of hats. Some things were so cheap that I wished I had the baggage space to bring them home, like several pretty hats that were only two or three dollars each.
    I wandered a long way up and down these fascinating narrow streets. When I decided to return, it was dark and I could not see anything familiar. Then I realised that I did not have the address of my hotel with me. I had no idea where I lived. I was lost, and I couldn’t speak a word of the language. I had used a monument at an intersection near my hotel as a landmark, but when I returned to it in the dark it looked different and I had gone off in the wrong direction. I walked for a very long time before I came to a big hotel and, in desperation, I decided to swallow my pride and ask for aid.
    It did not help that I could neither pronounce nor write my hotel’s name and, although it turned out to