The long way from Hanoi to Bangkok

Learning to meditate is one of my travel goals. I imagined a Vipassana course, rightly or wrongly, to be an experience of purity, wholeness and painful joy. A place where I would strengthen my mind and spirit and become more connected, whole, and more at peace. From the moment I found a Vipassana course at Wat Suan Mokkh, sitting in a hotel overlooking the magnificent mountains of north western Vietnam, everything felt right. I had a surge of excitement that seemed to come out of my bones. It was euphoric. I changed my flights and I was off.

The train from Lau Cai to Hanoi was seemingly uneventful. I arrived in Hanoi in the wee hours and caught a xe om (motorcycle taxi) to my hotel. It felt good zooming through the streets of Hanoi while everyone was sleeping, there was a light rain and the air was warm. I knew he was going the wrong way from the outset, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe it’s a bad short cut, I thought. After ten minutes of tapping him on the shoulder repeating the name of my hotel I asked him to pull over. He agreed with me that it was a very long way, and repeated the price, $20. $20! I thought we had agreed on 20,000 Dong (just over one Australian dollar) he laughed, handed me my backpack and zoomed away good humouredly. I looked around. I was in the suburbs, off the map, and in the dark. With spirits still high, despite the misadventure I ambled on back the direction we had come. I congratulated myself on the good fortune of the street lights in the dark. Not a minute later they all switched off, even though it was still dark. It was like a scene from a movie. I felt like I must have stomped on a sacred flower in the mountains without knowing it. Still I continued, with no idea where I was going.

My backpacks grew heavy as my mood waned. I stopped at a street stall with a lamp and re-consulted the map, hoping that I had walked far enough to find an intersecting street. I hadn’t. Eventually I succumbed to yet another motorbike taxi that took me directly to the hotel for 20,000 Dong. We pulled up and I went into my bag to find my purse, only to discover it was gone. Gone, gone, gone. Along with my camera, mp3, credit cards, a number of pairs of spectacular hill tribe earrings, cell phone, and worst of all, the last bit of my good mood. I mimed to the driver that my money was gone, and when that didn’t work I asked the hotel staff to tell him. They said they would pay, and when she did he doubled the price.

At this point having my bag stolen was almost enough to make me come home. Had I not just spent an extortionate amount on a flight to Thailand post Tet maybe I would have. Lucky for me, I met a generous person who helped me out when Mastercard couldn’t. Why Mastercard couldn’t is an amazing story of bureaucracy that I won’t even bore you with it. Ten days later and I still don’t have a credit card! 24hr emergency card replacement my arse.

So back to Wat Suan Mokkh, everything felt great when I arranged it, and a simple bag theft wasn’t going to get in the way of me continuing to enjoy this journey. In my last couple of days in Vietnam I began to hear of trouble stirring in Thailand. I won’t give details in case the secret police are watching my blog (hehe). Reports from Australia and Thailand were suggesting not to enter Bangkok after the 26th February, the day the courts handed down a big decision, and coincidentally the day I arrived in Bangkok. My anxiety soared as I heard tales of a previous military coup in Thailand that saw the main airport in Bangkok shut for ten days. Maybe this Vipassana wasn’t meant to be? Surely not. I arrived in Bangkok with the remainder of my Dong, no credit cards, and no dollars. I hadn’t been able to find money changers during my last night in Hanoi, not even at the airport. This is when I learned that some currencies, for instance, Vietnamese Dong, aren’t very popular at money changers. Quite unpopular in fact, so unpopular that none of the airport money changers would change my cash.

I read once that money is nothing until you have none, and then it’s everything. It’s true. I decided that with no one around that I had built enough rapport with to ask for a loan of a bus fare, the only thing I could do was to get in a cab and ask to be taken to the centre of the city, hoping that along the way somewhere there would be a big bank that accepted crappy currencies (a side note – how rude that money changers don’t accept money from everywhere! Imagine if that was your local currency and no one wanted to change it) He took me the long way to the main train station. It wasn’t in the centre of town as I imagined, but lucky for me they had an exchange counter the size of an atm and they were more than happy to give me a horrifically bad exchange rate for my unpopular currency.

These few days were possibly my worst traveling days, and on reflection I don’t think that’s too bad at all. I survived them, not happily, but I did, and it’s also kind of cool that I had to work it out on my own, even though it would probably have been easier if it all happened when I was with a friend. If this story had to have a moral, I think it would be that no matter how fragile, powerless, alone, and frustrated you feel, everything eventually works itself out. The second moral would be that if you ask for help strangers can be amazingly generous and kind.