Single White Female in Hanoi by Carolyn Shine

Author:Carolyn Shine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transit Lounge

Fellowship of the ring

Sapa is an old French hill station in the mountains above Lao Cai, on the Chinese border. Lao Cai is 294km north of Hanoi; the train trip takes nine hours.

Natassia and I jump on the train Friday night in high spirits. The Tulip carriage seems okay, nothing special. Each box has two bunk beds. We share ours with a friendly Vietnamese couple, putting the lie to the ‘just for foreigners’ pitch. But they’re asleep almost before the train has pulled out. I ask the Tulip representative why the aircon is not working.

‘Ah – sorry – we turn it off because the Vietnamese passenger don’t like it,’ he explains. He seems to be hiding a grin himself.

The rep’s name is Thinh. He’s a wiry guy with a hungry look, but very friendly. He takes a few swigs on our bottle of rice spirits then leaves it to us to drink ourselves into a happy sleep.

We’re woken by a surly female attendant at Lao Cai. The sky is powdery with the beginnings of sunrise as we’re bundled, hungover, onto a minibus and begin the two-kilometre climb up the mountain pass to Sapa. It’s a spectacular trip. The road is badly pot-holed, rocky and perilously close to the precipices below. But precipice-gazing is also very rewarding, showing dizzying valleys terraced wall-to-wall with electric green rice paddies.

At one point we pass through a small, dilapidated town and I start at the surreal sight of a massive shining shopping mall about 500 metres ahead of us.

‘What the hell’s that?’ I say to Natassia, who points out the neon signs above it are in Chinese. Thinh overhears us.

‘That, over there, is China!’ he says simply, as the bus make a sharp left turn in order to stay in Vietnam.

‘My god!’ I say with awe, squinting at the concrete monstrosity. ‘Now I can say I’ve seen China.’

I look back to where we’ve come from. Mountains, mist, dazzling rice fields. The terracing that divides the paddies is impossibly complex, like a head of African hair, styled into corn-rows by a pedantic madwoman. The scenery is breathtaking. I feel almost patriotically glad to be on the Vietnam side of this border.

In Sapa, Natassia and I find a brand new hotel on the side of a mountain, yet only metres from the town centre. Our previously unused room features a balcony with a cutaway view of a yawning white abyss. The hotel’s manager points emphatically into it and chants: ‘Fancy Pants, Fancy Pants’, which inspires me to peer ever harder into the swirling cloud. Mount Fansipan, or ‘Phan Si Pan’, is Vietnam’s highest peak.

As soon as we’ve unpacked and showered we walk the thirty metres to the main drag and I laugh in disbelief. Khai was perfectly right. Looking around, I feel I’ve been transported to a mammoth film set for some overblown sci-fantasy flick. The air is misty, rendering the street in muted shades. The shop-fronts and buildings that line it look exactly as I imagine

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