4corners7seas

Overland travel blog

Simon Norton

Sapporo to Kyoto by local train; a bizarre encounter in Tomakomai, the dog-eat-dog-politely world of busy Japanese trains, and a heroic last stand in Hiraizumi

History, Hokkaido, Japan, Overland travel, Tohoku, Trains, Travel tales

Rusutsu ski resort, Hokkiado
Rusutsu ski resort in Hokkaido

Part One: A Bizarre Encounter at Tomakomai Station

“Hey. Fuck you!”

…what the? I heard this woman before I ever saw her; she’d sneaked up behind me while I was on the phone and suddenly started screaming in my free ear…

“Fuck you! Hey, fuck you!”

It quickly became apparent that her entire English vocabulary consisted of these three words (although actually it was more like “fakkuyuu” with her heavy katakana pronunciation).

Tomakomai train station
Tomakomai station; a grim little station in a bleak little town

I was standing in the concourse area of a freezing cold Tomakomai train station at 11pm in early January, having just found out my return ferry from Hokkaido to Kyoto prefecture that night was cancelled due to rough seas; I’d just spent the New Year holiday snowboarding in Hokkaido, and now I was trying to work out what to do and was on the phone to my manager, letting her know the situation just in case I didn’t make it back in time for work two days later.

Of course, she was saying just stay the night and get a flight tomorrow, and that was indeed by far the most sensible option; however it was also going to be a pretty expensive option and I didn’t really have the budget for a last-minute flight and a room at the business hotel opposite the station (if they even had any rooms available). The last train back to Sapporo (the only big city near there, where I’d just come from) had already left, so that wasn’t an option. If I stayed the night to use my ferry ticket the following night I would get back in time for work, but that would be risky as there was no guarantee the ferry would run the next night either so it didn’t seem a good idea.

Another option was the night train leaving Tomakomai at midnight going through the undersea Seikan tunnel to Aomori at the northern tip of Japan‘s main Honshu island; I was considering taking that, and then either riding the bullet train back to Kyoto from there, or riding the local trains down through the Tohoku region to Sendai then a night bus (the following night) from Sendai to Kyoto. The cheapest option (other than the ferry) would actually have been the Seishun 18 Kippu, a kind of train pass available in the holidays in Japan which gives you unlimited train travel but only on the slow local trains… it would’ve got me back to Kyoto for only 10,000 yen (around 100 US dollars), but taking the best part of two days… but in any case, when I enquired about buying one it turned out they’d stopped sales two days earlier.

And the bullet train from Aomori to Kyoto was crazy expensive, more than a flight would’ve been, so that was out. It was looking like either stay the night and fly, or take the night train, then local trains to Sendai, then a night bus to Kyoto… the former would be expensive, the latter would be a complete bastard of a journey, and I wasn’t keen on either option.

So there I was talking to my manager and asking if she had any other ideas, when this woman suddenly screamed “fuck you” in my other ear.

I jumped out of my skin the first time, and turned to see a short, middle-aged Japanese lady, dressed perfectly normally for Hokkaido in winter, but with a wild mess of tangled hair up top and an even wilder look in the eye.

“Hey you! Fuck you! FUCK YOU!! Hey, fuck you!”

Okay, okay, I get the picture… I grabbed my bags and walked down the other end of the concourse to continue my phone conversation, but 30 seconds later it started again…

“Hey, fuck you! Fuck you!! FAKKUYUUU!”

She’d followed me along the concourse! I turned and went back the other way again, and now she followed hot on my heels, fuck youing the whole way.

I apologised to my manager and said I’d call her back, and started trying to speak in Japanese to this woman screaming at me, just to say hello, okay, there’s no problem – but that only led to her hurling an absolute torrent of abuse at me in Japanese, only half of which I caught and that’s probably a good thing.

Jesus, this woman’s actually quite scary, I thought, better get away from her, and I went to seek safety in the herd by going into the waiting room.

When I said it was cold that night, I mean like minus 10 (Celsius) outside and perhaps 0 degrees on the concourse; but the waiting room was heated and nice & toasty, so there were a dozen or so passengers waiting in there for the night train. So I went in to join them, and thankfully my new friend didn’t follow me but instead went over to the ticket window and started shouting at the Japan Rail staff. Watching though the window, I got the impression that perhaps this was a regular occurrence and they were used to this woman and her outbursts.

The ticket barriers at Tomakomai station
The ticket barriers at Tomakomai station; you can see the ticket window on the left, and the waiting room is just out of shot to the right

So I sat there for a few minutes mulling over my options and thinking that maybe I should go ask for a room at the hotel and sleep on it, and if no rooms were available then I’d jump on the night train. But before I’d picked up my bags, I became aware of a change of atmosphere in the waiting room; I looked around and there she was again, now standing silently but intently in the middle of the room, turning to glare at each of the waiting passengers one by one, until we were all watching her in suspense, wondering what was about to happen.

And then, slowly and deliberately, she opened one side of her coat, and slowly and deliberately reached in with her other hand as if to draw a weapon… and we all watched with grim fascination as she slowly and deliberately pulled out a huge pair of kitchen scissors. Kitchen scissors… what the fuck?!

We all started edging away from her, backs to the walls, sidling towards the door, avoiding making eye contact with her, and no-one saying anything; she stood there, as if waiting for her cue to strike… and then all of a sudden she reached up, grabbed a fistful of her own hair, chopped it off with the scissors, and threw it at one of the passengers… and then did the same thing again to someone else, then me, and someone else again, all without saying a word. In the shocked silence we got the door open and made a pretty orderly evacuation while she stood there silently hacking handfuls of hair off and throwing them at us. It was quite the most surreal scene I think I’ve ever seen, never mind been a part of. And once we were all out we closed the door, and stood watching through the window as she continued to randomly chop her own hair off, now just scattering it willy-nilly around the room.

(I don’t mean to ridicule this woman or try to get laughs at her expense. Clearly this was a very disturbed individual, in need of help she wasn’t getting, perhaps living homeless in this brutally cold town and hanging out in this train station every night; I’m just trying to paint the surreal scene and her alarming behaviour…)

By now the station staff had come over, four of them if I remember correctly, and they went into the waiting room to talk to her. The most senior, the station manager I guess, approached her, hand held out palm-upwards, asking her to hand over the scissors; she leapt back into a fighting posture, her left hand out in front of her, cocking her right hand with the scissors up by her ear as if ready to lunge and stab with them.

I’m pretty sure everyone was now thinking “Holy shit, this is happening” and getting ready to run away or run back into the waiting room to help; yet we all stood motionless for what seemed like ages but was probably just a few seconds, waiting to see what she would do… and then, just like that, she relaxed, turned the scissors over to him handle first, sat down, and focused her attention on the TV mounted on the wall.

A collective sigh of relief went round the crowd, and I now knew how I was going to decide what to do. A couple of scenarios had run through my head – what if I get on the train, and she ends up being in the same carriage or even in the seat next to me? Given the extremely aggressive interest she’d shown towards me and her unpredictable behaviour I definitely didn’t want to be trying to sleep with her anywhere close by… on the other hand though, what if I decide to stay the night but can’t get a room at the hotel and go looking for somewhere else, and she ends up following me again?! Or I try to pass the night in the convenience store, and so does she?

All situations I wanted to avoid, so I went to the ticket window and asked if they knew if she had a ticket for the night train. They told me she definitely didn’t, and that was my decision made – I bought a one-way ticket to Aomori, and a short time later went down to the platform to wait for the soon-to-arrive train.

This particular station has the entire concourse and ticketing area built up above street level, meaning you go up the stairs into the station, and after passing through the ticket barriers you go down the stairs to the platforms. I went through the barrier and down, and she was still sitting quietly watching the TV so I thought that was that…

After a few minutes stood on the platform, shoulders hunched against the icy wind, it was a relief to see the train rolling into the station, its front end plastered with a solid 6-inch shield of ice and snow. As the doors opened I felt the inviting warmth calling from inside the carriage, but just then there was a commotion and a string of shouts from upstairs – I turned to look and there she was again, charging down the stairs, cheeks puffing, fists pumping, a look of such utter determination on her face, sprinting for the train door. She’d jumped over the damn ticket barriers and was trying to board the train! The station staff were in hot pursuit and rugby tackled her a few feet from the train door, and now she was screaming and cursing and fighting like her life depended on getting on that train; it was plain awful to see and hear, and that was the last I saw of that poor woman, struggling and kicking out against the people trying to subdue her on that freezing platform, the flurries of snow picking up and swirling around them under the bright lights as the train pulled out of the station.

Part Two: Hokkaido to Kyoto Overland, mostly by Local Train; Two Brutal Days, Two Legendary Heroes

The green Hayabusa train used on the Hokkaido shinkansen
These sleek green trains (named Hayabusa or Hayate) cover the Aomori and Hokkaido stretches of the shinkansen system

Night train to Aomori, bullet train to Morioka

In 2015 the shinkansen was finally extended through the Seikan Tunnel from Aomori to Hakodate in southern Hokkaido, connecting Hokkaido directly to Tokyo by bullet train; as a result, these days there are no more night trains running through the tunnel.

However, at the time of my journey the bullet train didn’t yet reach Hokkaido and standard trains did the 6-hour run from Sapporo to Aomori several times a day each way, including the midnight train I was on. This was basically, in a nutshell, a total bitch; though it was a night train, it most certainly wasn’t a sleeper train. The seats barely reclined and the lights stayed fully on all night, and the train was more or less at capacity so I had an occupied seat next to me; the one slight saving grace was that at least I had the window seat, making it a little easier to sleep a bit. Only a bit though!

To say I arrived in Aomori bleary-eyed would be an understatement; I was probably looking full zombie as I lurched through the station on auto-pilot, searching for coffee. A short while later with caffeine taken care of I went to buy a local train ticket to Sendai, only to be told the line was blocked due to heavy snowfall overnight. The shinkansen was still running, so it was either a very long way round on a different local train, or a pricey bullet train ticket. As money was tight, I bought a shinkansen ticket only as far as Morioka, beyond which the local lines were operating as usual, and a local ticket from Morioka to Sendai. I have to say it was quite nice to be blasting along in that sleek green bullet train on that sunny winter morning after trundling along in the red-eye night train, and I didn’t want to get off; I realised later that I actually should’ve just got the shinkansen right to Sendai as switching to the local train in Morioka only saved me about 20 dollars… absolutely not worth it! But get off I did, and had an hour to kill in Morioka while waiting for the connection.

This gave me time to potter around the station, grab a sandwich, and top the caffeine level back up – this was a running theme over the course of the 2-day slog to Kyoto; occupying myself with where the next coffee was coming from was in its own stressful way a way of dealing with the stress of the journey. Morioka looked like a nice enough place, not that I saw much of it; one of the textbooks I was using in my English-teaching job in Kyoto had a couple of lessons about Iwate prefecture, of which Morioka is the capital. A town famous for its ironware, I recalled; cast-iron teapots in particular. But no time to check the place out; it was time to get on the local train, or rather, hell on wheels (if Hell is indeed other people).

JR pass banner

The dog-eat-dog-politely world of busy trains in Japan

As I mentioned above, at Tomakomai station the night before I’d asked about buying a Seishun 18 Kippu, a holiday-season ticket that gives you 5 days of unlimited local train travel throughout Japan; it’s a popular and affordable way to cover a lot of ground, if you don’t mind doing it slowly. I hadn’t been able to buy one as the sales date had passed already; however, the validity date had not yet passed and a whole shitload of people had those tickets and were riding long-distance on the local trains that day. It was the last day of the New Year holiday, and Japan was on the move, heading home en masse. I lugged my bags down to the platform (I had all my snowboard gear with me) to find everyone already on the train, waiting for it to depart. Absolute sardines it was, and I just about squeezed in with all my stuff.

Now the way these local trains work is they run along a given section of a line, perhaps two hours, before going back the other way. The station where they turn back is the start of the next section of the line, with another train doing that run, and so on; so although that line extends all the way from Aomori to Tokyo, any given local train on it just does a short section, back and forth, serving every station (as opposed to the express trains which go long-distance and cruise through the minor stations, while the shinkansen boosts along on its own dedicated elevated lines).

What this means for long-distance local train travel is you ride a train for two hours to its switchback station, and get off there to board the next train continuing in the same direction. After two hours on that train, you do the same thing again, and again, until you reach your destination; going this way from Morioka to Sendai is a 4-hour job with two changes of train.

This might not sound so bad, and indeed usually wouldn’t be outside the peak holiday travel periods; but imagine a 3-carriage train, completely stuffed to the gills, pulling in at a train station platform with a mostly empty train waiting on the far platform; and everyone on the packed train is getting on the waiting train, and everyone wants to get a seat on that waiting train, and there are several people for every seat. Competition is fierce, and the competitors ruthless. Encumbered as I was with all my gear, I had no chance…

As the train pulls into the station, everyone’s already on their feet, bags at the ready, jostling for position at the doors. Some of those who’ve been standing for two hours have been canny enough to do so at the doors – if they know the correct side, or anyway had a lucky guess – and are in pole position. Others have been too slow on the uptake and are now anxiously trying to ferret through towards the doors, others are on the wrong side of the train and know they’re in trouble; toes are stepped on, backs are elbowed; and no-one says a word. Japan is famous for its polite society, and not falsely so; but in certain situations, like the one at hand, you see that sometimes the politeness is merely a matter of etiquette being rigidly followed, and that beneath that veneer of politeness some people can still be cold, ruthless, inconsiderate, selfish assholes. The doors open, the starting gun is sounded; the crowd surges out of the train and runs along the platform, up the stairs and onto the footbridge over the tracks, down the stairs to the far platform and onto the waiting train. Those at the end of the train nearest the stairs are in the know, or in luck; those at the wrong end are desperate, and shit out of luck. Shins are kicked, people ‘accidentally’ knocked aside by swinging bags, the crowd huffing and puffing and shoving its way across; and still no-one says a word, no-one remonstrates or becomes angry, and the polite veneer is maintained. Those who get seats do not celebrate their victory; those who do not, accept it, casually returning to their smartphone screens as though they never wanted a seat anyway thank you very much, you’re welcome to it. The last available seat is a photo finish, two middle-aged men dashing for it and executing spinning lunging butt-dives into it at the same time; they collide, the bigger guy lands with more of his butt on more of the seat, the other momentarily in his lap; the loser quickly stands and walks away, pushes through the crowd to go stand at the far end of the car. At no point during or after their head-to-head do they ever make eye contact, or speak, or acknowledge the competition they just took part in. And this is how decorum is maintained; the pandemonium quickly settles down and everyone gets on with quietly occupying whatever seat or standing position they’ve ended up in and ignoring the world around them. Although it’s polite, in its way, it’s not very pleasant; but it works. Everyone’s on the train, no-one’s injured, no-one’s (visibly) angry; we’re all getting where we’re going. As for me, I already knew I’d be standing and watched the battle from the platform, taking the time to drink a can of coffee from the vending machine, and grab another for the road. At least being the last one on means you’re right in the door and can watch the scenery go by, which is some recompense (or so I told myself, as I looked out at Mt Iwate in the distance).

Mt Iwate, snow covered in winter
Mt Iwate

It was a tough little bit of travel, for sure; but there was a silver lining to be found – not the minor consolation of being able to see the scenery, but a genuine bonus – as I ended up visiting the UNESCO-listed town of Hiraizumi. Somewhere south of Morioka, the conductor announced the next station (as per usual), and I caught the name Hiraizumi… that rings a bell, where’ve I heard that before? Ah yes, of course – the same ESL textbook that told me about the ironware in Morioka. I remembered that Hiraizumi was some sort of historical area with a golden temple hall (the Konjiki-do, a beautiful building – photography is prohibited and pictures of it are hard to come by, but the temple’s homepage has one), and as it was around lunchtime I bailed out of that god-awful train at Hiraizumi station; local trains on that particular bit of line are roughly hourly, so I figured I’d eat something, do a quick whip around the temple district, and get back on the train an hour or two later. I didn’t know it yet, but Hiraizumi is one of the key locations in what came to be my favourite tale of Japanese history / folklore.

Hiraizumi and the last stand of Yoshitsune & Benkei

If you read around my Japan posts a bit, sooner or later you’ll find me talking about the legendary heroes Yoshitsune and Benkei; Yoshitsune is Japan’s most beloved tragic hero, Benkei his loyal retainer. Like a Japanese Robin Hood and Little John, the two first met in single combat; and just like Robin Hood and Little John, the smaller but faster and smarter Yoshitsune outwitted and defeated the man-mountain Benkei.

Painting of the duel between Yoshitsune and Benkei
Classical painting of the duel between Yoshitsune and Benkei on Gojo Bridge in Kyoto

They were inseparable ever-after, Yoshitsune becoming a great general in his half-brother’s army as they won the Genpei War and avenged their father’s death at the hands of the Taira clan. But unlike Robin Hood and Little John, these noble warriors then met a violent and early death; betrayed by his jealous half-brother, Yoshitsune fled to the north, Benkei with him all the way to the bitter end. They made their last stand in Hiraizumi, where, realising his defeat was inevitable, Yoshitsune committed the ritual suicide that allowed him to die with his honour; buying him the time to complete the act, Benkei went out on to the castle bridge and single-handedly held the entire enemy army at bay. Every soldier who approached was summarily dispatched, so they stood back and rained volleys of arrows down on him; but this man was such a beast, was so utterly determined, that he died standing right up on his feet, stuck full of arrows but never going down. By the time his opponents realised he was already dead and they could safely pass, Yoshitsune had completed his honourable death within the keep.

The grave of Benkei in Hiraizumi
Benkei’s final resting place in Hiraizumi

A cracking little story that, in my opinion; but I didn’t actually know it yet at the time I went to Hiraizumi! I’d just got off the train to eat some noodles and see the Konjiki-do, but wandering around the various other temples and historical sites, I also happened to visit the grave of Benkei (it’s next to the main road between the station and the main Chuson-ji temple area – alas, I missed the grave of Yoshitsune which is nearby but set a little away from the main road). Later, back in Kyoto, I learned the full story of Yoshitsune and Benkei – the two men had both had their formative years in the mountains around Kyoto, leading up to their fateful meeting and the duel on Gojo Bridge.

Painting of Yoshitsune training with the tengu in Kurama
Classical painting of Yoshitsune training with the tengu in Kurama

While the young exile Yoshitsune was learning his unsurpassed swordsmanship and military skills from the tengu forest spirits of Mt Kurama in order to one day avenge his father, the warrior monk Benkei (then of Enryaku-ji temple on Mt Hiei) went around Kyoto generally fucking shit up, stealing giant bells from rival temples and booting them around the mountains and making them cry, and beating up 999 swordsmen and keeping their swords – Yoshitsune was the thousandth to face him, and the first to ever defeat him, leading to the oath of loyalty.

Painting of Benkei dragging away the Miidera bell
Classical painting of Benkei stealing the bell from Miidera temple by Lake Biwa

Another historical figure closely associated with Hiraizumi is the great poet Matsuo Basho; Hiraizumi was the northernmost point he reached on his famous 1689 journey immortalised in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, where he contemplated the tragic ends of Yoshitsune and Benkei 500 years earlier and penned one of his most famous haiku:

夏草や
兵どもが
夢の跡

Natsugusa-ya
Tsuwamonodomo-ga
Yume-no-ato

Summer grass,
The only remains
of warriors’ dreams

So, after later learning the story of Yoshitsune and Benkei and getting into my Basho, I was retroactively stoked that I’d already accidentally ended up visiting Hiraizumi on that 2-day mission from Hokkaido to Kyoto. And that was the silver lining of an otherwise totally unpleasant journey, even though I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time.

Finally, a view of Mt Fuji

As for the rest of the journey, it sucked. Upon arriving in Sendai, I found the night buses to Kyoto were all full; the best I could do was a night bus to Tokyo, so that was another 6-hour leg of night transportation with only a few hours of sleep, and then another full day of long-distance local train travel from Tokyo to Kyoto. That’s actually a 9-hour job, with 6 changes of train; but thankfully, it was the first day back at work for most of the country, and the brutal crowds of the previous day were gone. I got a seat on every train, and even got a picture of the usually coy Mt Fuji (on my crappy old camera phone):

Mt Fuji

I’ve ridden the train past Mt Fuji a whole bunch of times, and that was the only time I ever actually saw it from the train – in fact that was the first time I’d ever clearly seen the whole mountain, despite the fact I’d actually climbed Fuji the previous summer! (we could hardly see it even while standing on it)

So I arrived back in Kyoto on the Monday evening having left Sapporo on the Saturday evening, having had perhaps 5 hours of sleep and an absurd amount of coffee; I ate and showered and collapsed onto my futon, and got up for work in the morning. That 2-day journey really wasn’t fun, not fun at all, and work the next day was pretty tough; but at least I finally got to see Mt Fuji properly, and I came to be glad I’d ended up visiting Hiraizumi. As for the lady in Tomakomai station, who knows what became of her; I hope she’s okay, and spending her nights somewhere better than Tomakomai station.

Photo Credits

Don’t really have many photos from this journey unfortunately. Credit for pics above as follows:

Three classical paintings: public domain

Shinkansen, Mt Fuji: Simon Norton, all rights reserved

Tomakomai station exterior: screenshot from Google Maps

Tomakomai station interior: Konstantin Leonov, Flickr

Mt Iwate: yisris, Flickr

Benkei’s grave: Yoshihide Urushihara, Flickr

The images from Flickr are used under Creative Commons Licence.

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JR pass banner

Phonsavan to Hanoi overland; 2 days, 2 landslides, a scam, a crash, and 2 stolen passports

Laos, Overland travel, Southeast Asia, Travel tales, Vietnam

As the three of us rattled along through the dark in back of the songthaew, a brief pinprick of light caught my eye out over the rice paddies. As I peered out into the night, another tiny light popped into existence and described a quick arc through the air before vanishing; and then there were dozens of them winking out there in the darkness like will-o’-wisps. Dave, sat across from me on the opposite bench, had noticed them too, out in the darkness behind me, and pointed them out to Mike next to him; and the three of us sat there, bouncing along this rural road in northern Laos towards the border with Vietnam with the wind in our hair, gazing out at the fireflies, lost in our weary thoughts after a long day of washed out roads and landslides and feeling like we’d almost reached our goal. Little did we know then that it was to be a case of out of the frying pan, into the fire…

The Plain of Jars, Phonsavan
The Plain of Jars, Phonsavan

Anyone who goes long-distance overland backpacking picks up an epic bus journey story or two; ten hours on a crazy mountain road while trussed-up livestock squawks and bleats under your seat, perhaps, all while a friendly local sits on your shoulder or leans over you to vomit out of the window. I’ve got my fair share – such as winding down the Trans-Sumatra highway from Bukkitinggi to Jakarta (a white-knuckle ride, missing logging truck after logging truck by inches as we overtook on blind corners round mountain bends, all with the same driver – the same one guy driving as though with a death wish for himself and all on board, taking only three one-hour breaks per day – the same driver day & night for almost 48 hours!); such as the mud-fest of Luang Nam Tha to Luang Prabang in rainy season (which I’ve been masochistic enough to do a second time even though I knew what it was like); such as the 10-hour marshrutka ride from Irkutsk to Ulan-Ude in a Siberian blizzard (we were packed into that marshrutka van like a matryoshka Russian doll!), to name a few. But this 2-day journey from Phonsavan, Laos, to the Vietnamese capital of Hanoi (and the ensuing crazy weekend in Hanoi) was the most incident-filled bit of overland travel I’ve ever done or likely ever will, and it left me with a decent travel story and two new friends for life (and, as it would eventually turn out, future business partners)

Phonsavan
Phonsavan’s busy high street

Phonsavan to Hanoi, Day 1: Phonsavan and a brace of landslides

I’d met Mike and Dave early that morning at the bus station in Phonsavan, waiting for the bus to fill up and get going as the rain drizzled down on the paddy fields. The scheduled departure time had long been and gone and the bus was showing no signs of movement, so we fell to chatting about this and that, including what we’d seen and done in Phonsavan – such as visiting the UXO museum, which explains the issues Laos still faces today due to unexploded ordnance left over from the Vietnam war, mostly due to cluster bombs; all the metal that was dropped on northern Laos has been put to good use by the resourceful locals – you see bullets serving as key-rings, spent shells serving as stools and door-stops, knives & forks fashioned from the melted-down metals – but often at great cost, as those who go out searching with metal detectors (because they need the income) often become victims of these weapons doing what they were designed to do, decades after they were dropped there to do it.

Scrap metal from the Vietnam war in Phonsavan
An entire scrap metal industry revolves around leftovers from the Vietnam war; unfortunately this has tragic consequences for many of the metal collectors, the main culprit being unexploded US cluster bombs

The previous day, Mike told me, they’d rented scooters to visit the Plain of Jars, which I’d also visited on a bus tour. It was a good little tour, taking in the mysterious jars – large prehistoric stone pots scattered across the plains around Phonsavan – as well as an abandoned tank and a visit to a village where they were producing lao-lao (a sort of rice moonshine). My tour-mates and I bought a few plastic bottles of the stuff, and it was like drinking paint stripper… not the best night cap I’ve ever had, but there I was, up early the following day to head on to Vietnam without too much of a sore head. The conversation moved on to various other travel stories, as it does, and finally, amid some talk of a landslide, it was announced that the bus was finally leaving.

The lao-lao distillery in Phonsavan
The lao-lao distillery

The road left town and snaked up into the jungle-clad mountains, their peaks wreathed in mist, and after an hour or two we arrived at the aforementioned landslide. These are a common problem in mountainous northern Laos during rainy season, especially with the sadly seemingly ever-increasing deforestation in the area, and roads are often blocked. A pile of earth and fallen undergrowth was blocking our way now, with a large tree making up the bulk of it. Still, it didn’t look impassable and in due course a JCB came trundling up the road behind us to do battle with this obstacle; it wasn’t easy, but the JCB strained and heaved and was eventually victorious and bulldozed a path through to re-open the road. And that was when one of the locals on the bus told us that this landslide was only the small one and that there was another, bigger one further up ahead.

The first landslide, our first obstacle from Phonsavan to Hanoi
The small landslide (and Mike looking pretty unimpressed)

A bulldozer arrives to clear the landslide

The bulldozer gets to work

The bulldozer clears a path through the landslide

And he wasn’t wrong – a short time later, we pulled up in front of the site of a massive landslide… the road here wasn’t simply buried under some mud and undergrowth; the road here was gone. The volume of mud, rocks, and trees that had come down in the night was enormous, flattening a swathe of forest down the hillside, huge boulders all stacked up in a crazy jumble, with the wet mud filling in the cracks between them.

“So… that bulldozer back there probably won’t be able to clear this, will it?”, I asked the same guy.
“No – now we wait for the army”, came the reply. “They use dynamite to open road!”.
“Great – when will they get here?”
“Maybe today, maybe tomorrow… who knows?”

This wasn’t looking good. While the local passengers started producing stashes of food, mostly consisting of wicker baskets of the main Lao staple of sticky rice, and settling in on blankets for the wait, the three of us along with a Dutchman and two American girls who were also on the bus discussed our almost complete lack of food and water. The stoicism and foresightedness of our fellow passengers was impressive; but we needed either to find a ride back to where we’d come from, or find a way to continue beyond this landslide. So a few of us picked our way carefully across the unstable pile of rocks and wet earth, which looked like it could very well have given way any moment and swept us down the hillside – pretty nerve-wracking and perhaps not the brightest idea, but we made it over and started sounding out the drivers of the long line of vehicles waiting on the other side, and eventually we found a songthaew willing to turn around and take the six of us back down to the next town towards Vietnam. He’d been on his way to make a delivery of empty Coca-Cola bottles for recycling – crates and crates of them – so it was going to be a tight fit. And while he didn’t seem too keen to do it at first, we negotiated a fair price with him and as he obviously wasn’t going to get where he’d planned to that day he agreed to do it. So we climbed back over the landslide, picked up the rest of the group, and then we all had to clamber over the landslide again but this time laden with our bags. Super sketchy, but it held; and so we lashed our bags to the roof of the songthaew and crammed ourselves in amongst the crates and onwards we continued to the clanking and jangling of hundreds of glass Cola bottles.

The second, much larger landslide
The big one
Crossing the landslide
Crossing the landslide

Some hours later, with the sun shining low and the shadows growing long we arrived at the village we’d agreed passage to. It turned out that this was our driver’s home village, and our Dutch and American companions arranged to stay there overnight (not sure where, exactly). However, the three of us who were Vietnam-bound had started the day intent on reaching the border town of Sam Neua, and we hadn’t given up yet. So we had another round of negotiations with the driver to take us a few hours further, writing the numbers on the ground with a stick to make sure there were no verbal misunderstandings, long strings of zeros etched in the dust (there are over ten thousand kip to one British pound) – this time he really didn’t want to make the trip, what with the late hour and him already being home, so we had to make it worth his while. I don’t recall how much we paid – not a lot in the grand scheme of things, but our man had a rather profitable day in the end. So, him being happy with the price and us being happy that we would reach our original goal (which would allow us to make the border crossing in good time the next day and so be able to make Hanoi by the next evening), and with the Coke bottles offloaded to be transported another day, we clambered back into the songthaew’s now-roomy back and drove on into the gathering dusk (stopping to pick up one of the driver’s mates – not sure if this was just for company or he actually needed a ride to Sam Neua too!)

And that’s how we came to be in the back of that songthaew while the fireflies danced over fields of rice paddies under fields of stars. You spend so many hours on the road when travelling, that eventually they can blur together somewhat. You remember these long journeys and the scenery along the way, aided by the photos you snapped through the window; but sometimes a scene etches itself vividly into your memory, and that songthaew ride with two new friends and the dancing fireflies is firmly etched into mine. I almost didn’t want to reach Sam Neua! But in due course we did, having taken the entire day to cover a mere 240km (150 miles), and so after checking into a cheap hotel enjoyed a well-earned bowl of pho before hitting the sack. We would be up early the next day for one last songthaew ride to the border and the madness waiting for us in Vietnam.

Phonsavan to Hanoi, Day 2: Sam Neua to Hanoi; a scam, a crash, and two stolen passports (welcome to Vietnam!)

And after a bright and early start we were crammed once again in the back of a songthaew which was driving us the last 100km (60 miles) to the border. This took us through the town of Vieng Xay, famous for the cave systems used by the Pathet Lao (Laotian communists) for shelter during the Vietnam war as the American air force subjected the area to the heaviest aerial bombardment in history. The caves look remarkable (in the pictures I’ve seen); a natural limestone cave formation which was expanded by the Pathet Lao into an underground fortress, complete with factories and even a concert chamber. They survived the war and went on to overthrow the Laotian monarchy, establishing the Lao People’s Democratic Republic government that holds power to this day. I do now think it would have been a good idea to stop over there and see these caves, as they are both spectacular and historically significant; the tall Dutchman our songthaew picked up in Vieng Xay had done just that and told us it was well worth it.

Anyway, a short time later (after having been on the receiving end of the most hostile glares I’ve ever received from a border guard), we were stamped into Vietnam and along with our new Dutch travel companion were attempting to arrange onward transport to Hanoi. This involved an awful lot of being messed around as we tried to negotiate a remotely reasonable price – there’s no public transportation from that border, so we had to deal with the private vehicle owners who knew very well that they had the upper hand. After all, we weren’t going to be walking to Hanoi. We tried to be as polite as possible, but our efforts to bargain were met with outright hostility; tempers became a little frayed, and suddenly our Dutch companion intentionally tripped one of the Vietnamese we were negotiating with. I couldn’t believe my eyes! He apologised and managed to pass it off as a mistake (and I reckon he could have got himself, perhaps all of us, a nasty beating if he hadn’t immediately apologised), but that moron scuppered whatever chance we had of bargaining the price down. I think we paid around 40 dollars each – extortionate by Vietnamese standards at the time, and a few weeks later a Dutch girl in my hostel in Ho Chi Minh City told me that she’d paid 25 dollars from the same border town to Hanoi. Which just goes to show that smiling and being polite & respectful tends to yield better results than kicking people!

In any case, finally we were on our way. We thought that bus was taking us all the way, but in fact it dropped us off by the highway where we were shunted on to another bus to Hanoi. But before that change of buses, we’d stopped for a toilet break in a small town; I managed to score a much-needed coffee, and as we stood there sipping and chatting in the rain, another bus that was parked up alongside ours started reversing out into the street. There was a squeal of tires from the road, and I watched the breaking scooter plough into the side of the bus with no chance of stopping on the wet surface. The helmet-less driver went over his handlebars, smashed his head through the bus window with a sickening crunch, and bounced back into the street. A crowd gathered; no-one helped; we wondered if we could help, and how (I’ve never wanted to be a Vietnamese-speaking medic, but I wished I was right then); but then someone simply picked him up and plonked him on the back of another scooter and held him there behind the driver, his head lolling around on his limp neck, and off they went. To hospital, I hope, but I don’t actually know. What I do know is that he’d probably suffered severe head and neck injuries, and that however bad they were to begin with they would have become worse by the time they got him there.

Talking about it later, Dave and I who’d been facing out towards the road and watched it happen reckoned he was maybe permanently injured, if not dead; whereas Mike, who’d had his back to the accident, judging the situation by how bad his actual injuries seemed afterwards rather than how bad the impact had looked, reckoned he might have come out of it okay. He was just about semi-conscious in the immediate aftermath, so I sincerely hope that Mike was right; but we’ll never know.

Hanoi
Hanoi’s hectic, atmospheric streets

So with that sickening crunch fresh in mind, along with the aggro at the border and another full day’s bus travel on top of the previous day’s songthaews and landslides, we finally arrived in Hanoi. The tall Dutchman told us he knew of a good hotel, so we left him to it and went to find our own. After seeing him trip the chap at the border we had little time for him and were glad to be shot of him; but the hotel we did end up in turned out to have been a rather bad choice (and on the way to it, the taxi driver passed a fake note off on us – when Dave tried to use it in a restaurant they showed us it was fake, and it ended up pinned on the wall behind the bar). We checked in late at night and were told 10 dollars a room per night (when they later charged me 15 a night upon checking out, the argument became a scrap and I have a scar on my arm to this day). The hotel staff took our passports to keep in reception (this is standard in Vietnam and they have to do it by law), and I said good night to the lads and crawled into bed. It had been a long, crazy, amazing, stressful couple of days, but it we’d made it and it was finally over… or so we thought…

I woke up the next day to find a note under my door… “Si mate, you’re never gonna believe this. The bastards have lost our fucking passports! Yours is okay, but mine & Dave’s are gone. We’re off to the police station, see you this evening – Mike” (my passport was in a leather holder I’d bought in Mongolia a few months earlier, so presumably whoever took theirs hadn’t noticed mine due to the holder). My time in Vietnam had started as it would continue…

Theft, robbery, scams; three intense weeks in Vietnam (Hanoi to Saigon overland)

Overland travel, Southeast Asia, Travel tales, Vietnam

People often ask each other about which countries were their favourites to travel to. It’s a hard question to answer, and not a question which I can answer with one single country; I’ll usually answer with a shortlist! However, sometimes the opposite question is asked – “which country was your worst?” – and that question I can sadly answer without a moment’s hesitation…

Hanoi
Welcome to Hanoi… we’ll be keeping your passports…

The day I arrived in Vietnam, we got ripped off and almost ended up in a fight as soon as we crossed the border (though to be fair the aggro was made worse by a random Dutch guy off the bus who we didn’t actually know), witnessed an accident involving a scooter and a bus, and my friends’ passports got stolen overnight from the hotel. What a way to start things off! And while it didn’t keep coming quite so thick and fast, there was plenty more to come. Picking up from where that crazy day ended, I woke up in my hotel room in Hanoi having had a solid sleep but still feeling the effects of the previous two days’ epic journey from Phonsavan, Laos, to Vietnam’s capital, involving a couple of landslides, enchanting views of fireflies over the rice paddies, the angry scenes at the border, and the scooter accident. But it felt good to have made it, and I was looking forward to checking out the bustling, chaotic, vibrant city I could hear honking and hustling about its day outside. Dragging myself out of bed with thoughts only of first sourcing some coffee, I noticed a piece of paper had been pushed under the door… a note from Mike:

“Si mate, you’re never gonna believe this. The bastards have lost our fucking passports! Yours is okay, but mine & Dave’s are gone. We’re off to the police station, see you this evening – Mike”

Unbelievable… I hastened downstairs to confirm that they did indeed still have my passport, and then went off to sort my caffeine fix. (Now, while I had a pretty constant string of annoyances and problems, and found myself in a couple of outright dangerous situations in Vietnam, it wasn’t all bad – the food was excellent (bowls of excellent pho noodles from street stands for dinner, and fantastic French baguettes with fillings like lemongrass and chillies for breakfast), and so was the coffee. You get a little glass with an individual filter shaped to fit over the top, stuffed with ground beans and with the hot water poured in just before it’s served. You sit and wait for the coffee to drip through, while the old chaps sit around playing xiangqi and putting the world to rights and the heaving life of the city pours past just outside the door, and then a few minutes later (if you’ve remembered to ask for it without milk – they use condensed milk which I find far too sweet) you have a deliciously bitter glass of coffee in front of you. Without much to do until the lads got back from the police staton and the embassy, I whiled away an afternoon of people watching, snacking, and way too much coffee.

A cafe in Vietnam
Hanging out in cafes – overdosing on delicious coffee and watching (but not partaking in) the madness outside – was pretty much my favourite thing to do in Vietnam

We never really knew who’d taken the two passports, but the fact that they’d failed to take mine – presumably because it was in the passport holder I’d bought in Mongolia a few months previously – did suggest the hotel’s claim it was someone from outside was true. If it had been their own staff, all three would likely have been taken, so it did lend credence to the idea that it was an opportunistic theft. Of course, that still didn’t exonerate the hotel from their failure to keep the passports safe from would-be opportunistic thieves in the first place (Vietnamese law requires you to leave your passport with reception at every place you stay, so you just have to trust them to keep it safe).

Mike & Dave were advised by the embassy to stay at that same hotel until the whole thing was sorted and they had their new passports and their insurance reports, but I had no intention of continuing to give my business to them – especially as they were being so unhelpful and unapologetic. They seemed to be more concerned with dodging the blame than they did with either apologising or trying to make up for it in any way. But with the next day being Sunday and with the embassy closed until Monday, there wasn’t much to do except go out for a good-old fashioned bender and relieve some of the tension! And boy, was it a bender… we drank all night, all over Hanoi, including at one point a night club on a boat moored up on the banks of the river, and eventually found ourselves joining the crowd of elderly folk doing tai chi in the park at dawn. I can honestly say that we weren’t taking the Mickey and made a genuine attempt to follow the moves; but we were rather drunk at this point, so our attempts were frankly pathetic.

Another cultural experience we had on that long and messy walk home as we wandered in circles (we couldn’t find the hotel) was crossing the street Vietnamese-style. This involves picking your spot, choosing your line, setting a steady pace along that line, and then sticking to it until you reach the other side. Sounds easy, but when there’s a constant stream of scooters, swarms of scooters, buzzing past you front and back, it’s a real test of nerve – but if you start trying to read where the bikes are going and changing your line, you’re gonna get hit. So you just have to keep your eyes forwards and walk straight and steady. Now, the locals have this down – they’ve been doing it all their lives – but it takes some getting used to at first… especially when you’ve just witnessed a scooter accident a couple of days before. And I didn’t really get the hang of it until we started doing it drunk – and then it was kind of fun!

Saigon
Crossing the road; hectic

Anyway, with the need for alcohol-derived stress-relief having been dealt with, and another day having been spent sleeping it off, on the Monday I checked out of the hotel to head to Halong Bay while the lads were back at the embassy once again. They were looking at a week or so stuck in Hanoi but I was aiming to be in Bangkok to meet someone a few weeks later, so we’d agreed to try and meet up again somewhere further down the Vietnamese coast. So, having been there for 3 nights in the end, and having been told it was 10 dollars a night at check-in, I had my 30 dollars ready and went to drop my keys off at the front desk – where I was told that I owed them 45 dollars at 15 a night. This obviously didn’t go down very well, especially as they’d lost my friends’ passports; I insisted that I’d been told 10 dollars a night, and they insisted that the staff member who’d told me that had made a mistake. I insisted that that wasn’t my problem, and given that they’d failed to keep the passports safe I didn’t really think they were in a position to demand more money from me. And so I placed my 30 dollars on the counter, bade them good day, and walked out of the door… I’d made it about half way to the taxi rank when I felt the first slap on the back of my head, and before I’d even turned to defend myself I had two cleaning-ladies dragging and pulling at my backpack, the straps caught on my elbows and pulling my arms down, while the old chap who was always sitting in reception slapped me round the head and pushed me in the chest, with my arms pinned to my sides, quickly reinforced by the manageress – whose pregnancy didn’t prevent her from getting stuck in! – who contributed the most stinging slaps of all. The four of them pushed and pulled me back into the hotel lobby, slammed the door shut and locked it. I was being held hostage!

There ensued a furious argument between myself and the manageress – “you, big fat liar!” she kept shouting at me, again and again, refusing to accept that I’d checked in on the understanding that the room was 10 bucks a night. I tried again to leave, but it was clear that this would lead to violence – there were by now half a dozen hotel staff surrounding me. So I told them I wanted to use the phone to call the British embassy. “Okay”, she said, “you can use it. Phone charge is 15 dollars!”. Haha… I remember admiring that even at the time. So then I said I wanted to call the police. “It’s okay”, she said; “we already call them. They come now, arrest you!”

And that’s exactly what happened. They took my passport, we all walked to the station, a cop holding each of my arms (thankfully the station happened to be just around the corner), and the English-speaking policeman in the group asked if I wanted my passport back. I said that of course I did, to which he replied that once I paid the hotel the 15 dollars, he’d return my passport. I still wasn’t having it, and asked to call my embassy, which the police allowed me to do from their phone.

Imagine my two friends, sat in the British embassy applying for new passports to replace their stolen ones, when the official dealing with them breaks off to take a phone call – and tells them it’s from their friend who’s in the police station! They told me they couldn’t believe their ears… “What now?”… The embassy official explained that if I really didn’t want to pay the 15 dollars, it would go to court and I may very well win… but also that it would take months and I wouldn’t be able to leave Hanoi during that time. So, of course, in the end I just had to suck it up and pay the extra. What did I learn from this? Mostly that, as a tourist, you aren’t always welcome; that to many people you’re just business; and that when you’re in another country you really don’t have a leg to stand on when dealing with the police, however much you feel you’re being wronged. They say you have to keep your cool in situations like that, and it helps to take a deep breath and calm down. I kept my cool reasonably well, I think, other than the shouting in the hotel lobby after they’d got me back in there. But it’s hard to keep your cool when the people you’re dealing with are not even remotely keeping theirs, and have been hostile and aggressive from the word go. I still have a scar on my right arm from where my bag strap cut into my skin as they were forcing me back into the hotel; they lost my friends’ passports, they overcharged me 50%, and I don’t think they had the slightest guilt about it or any consequences to deal with. In those days we couldn’t even write them a scathing review on Hostelworld and the like.

Halong Bay beach
The beach in Halong

Ah well. In any case, I did eventually make my way to Halong Bay that evening. The bus conductor ripped me off for a few dollars (dropping me off at some intersection and slamming the door and driving off as soon as I’d got my bag out of the luggage compartment, without giving me my change), adding to the simmering rage I was already feeling, but whatever, I got to Halong.

Halong Bay

And it really is a beautiful place – that’s the photo you always see of Vietnam with the limestone karsts towering up out of the sea, traditional junks sailing between them; a breathtaking view and well worthy of its World Heritage status.

Boat trip in Halong Bay
My boat-mates in Halong. They were the first people I managed to have a nice conversation with in Vietnam (after 5 days in the country), which was refreshing

However much hassle I had in Vietnam, it doesn’t take away the fact that it’s a gorgeous-looking country with amazing food. And on the boat cruise I did around Halong Bay, I finally got to interact with some locals without it feeling like a cutthroat transaction, and they were of course absolutely lovely.

The old fortress in Hue
Hue’s old citadel

Continuing on southwards, I visited the ancient fortress city of Hue on the way to the charming old town of Hoi An. This pretty little town really was by far my favourite place in Vietnam, and unwinding there for a few days I started to feel the hassles of Hanoi and Halong had just been a string of bad luck; I was perhaps even starting to quite like Vietnam. Hoi An is a World Heritage listed town, a living collection of traditional Vietnamese architecture including a fantastic roofed wooden bridge; and nearby are the ancient Hindu ruins of My Son, well worth a day-trip – not quite as spectacular as Angkor Wat or Borobudur, but definitely a place which appeals to the Indy Jones in you. I emailed Mike to see how he and Dave were getting on in Hanoi, telling them that Hoi An was great and that I’d be making my way to Ho Chi Minh City and stopping there for a while, so hopefully they’d catch me there.

The My Son ancient ruins, near Hoi An
The My Son ruins

The next port of call was Nha Trang. And this was where I realised that the hassles back in Hanoi hadn’t just been bad luck; that there really were a lot of people in the tourist areas of Vietnam who just wanted my money, were willing to straight-up take it from me, were likely to resort to violence to do so, and who absolutely didn’t give a fuck if I liked their country or not… and indeed, I suppose, on that last point why should they?

The beach in Nha Trang
Nha Trang… not as nice as it looks

Nha Trang is a famous beach town, and the beach itself is nice enough (though not nearly as nice as the one at Mu Ne, further south); but it’s also a notorious spot for sex-tourists – including, apparently, for some with very disturbing tendencies. Elderly white men in speedos sunbathe alone on that beach, a beach where kids are wandering up and down selling postcards and chewing gum and other bullshit to tourists. It’s disgusting and heartbreaking to think of the opportunities for predators; there’s a restaurant in town called Lanterns which works with local orphanages, and to anyone stopping in Nha Trang I’d highly recommend a visit to learn about the great work they do and support them with your business.

So, this coastal beach resort town has a very unpleasant side to it, and it’s barely even hidden – as you walk along the road, motorbikes slow down alongside you…

“Hey, you want taxi?”
“No thanks, I’m okay”
“Okay… you want marijuana?” (said with a little ‘spliff-smoking’ action)
“No thanks”
“How about boom boom? You want boom boom?” (said with a pelvic thrust action)
“No. Go away”

…was more or less how the conversation went each time. Two of the other guys on the boat tour I did said that on one occasion the day before, the standard exchange had been followed with one additional (hushed) question:

“You want little boy?”
“…what. the. fuck?!”

You get the picture… the motorbike taxis in Nha Trang are the local drug dealers and pimps. Not a nice bunch. We discussed this on the boat tour, but mostly we had fun and swam and drank and had a singalong with the boat’s resident band (i.e. the crew) who had a good stock of tunes – one classic tune for each of the nationalities on board, and members of said nationalities had to get up and sing. The song for the Brits on board was ‘Yellow Submarine’, to which I discovered I actually knew sod-all of the lyrics apart from the chorus (which we delivered con gusto).

I also got stung by a jellyfish that afternoon, and had a great big pink lightning bolt slashed across my torso for the rest of the day. It hurt a lot at first, but faded quickly – perhaps due to the excess of alcohol that the passengers on this cruise were encouraged to imbibe. Arriving back at shore, we all headed for showers & changes of clothes before meeting up for dinner, more drinks, and ultimately a club.

A temple in Nha Trang
This Nha Trang temple’s Buddha may look serene; my time in Nha Trang was anything but

It was when the last three of us remaining left that nightclub at 3am that things got sketchy. Names are long forgotten I’m afraid, but I was with a stocky New Yorker and a legless-drunk 18-year-old from Scotland; we left the bar, New Yorker and myself taking one arm each as we held Scotsman up between us, steering him out of the door. And then next thing I knew, I was pinned up against a wall – by five scantily-clad Vietnamese girls doing the full Full Metal Jacket routine, for real… “me love you long time”, “sucky fucky, let’s go, me love you”, while they giggled and tickled and distracted me as I protested and tried to politely brush them off, laughing “no thank you” while one of them crouched down and fondled my groin with one hand… and lifted my wallet from my pocket with the other.

I saw the wallet come out, and I must admit I completely lost my cool right then and there. I shoved all these girls off me and chased after the one with the wallet, catching her on the other side of the road and throwing her to the floor. I got my wallet back and stood over her, lecturing her – in fact, yelling at her – that it wasn’t okay to steal from me just because I’m a tourist, or words to that effect (though rather more colourful, I think…), before being turned about by a hand on my shoulder. One of the motorbike drivers – the pimp – was confronting me, but before he’d even told me to back off, I just facepalmed him and shoved him to the floor. It was a very stupid thing to do, but at that point I was well and truly seeing red – I’d say that’s probably the most out of control angry I’ve ever been. And I really do think that I could’ve been stabbed if a group of Irish and Australian guys hadn’t been passing at that exact time; my memories of how they got me out of there are pretty blurred, and in fact I was told many of the details by the Irish lads when I happened to see them again the next day – but I clearly remember one of these guys grabbing me by the shirt and looking me in the eye, and saying “Run!”

Which we did – our hotels were all in the same direction, and we ran from back street to back street before ducking into a street stall with tarps covering the sides. We ordered coffees and huddled in there, listening to the scooters driving up and down – some of them no doubt searching for us. Luckily – and it was very lucky indeed – they never did find us, and eventually we made it back to the street where our hotels were. Those lads really helped me out that night, at great risk to themselves, and if any of you boys happens to read this, thanks again!

As for the guys I’d left the bar with, I didn’t see what happened to them and I didn’t know which hotels they were staying in to go check on them; but by chance I bumped into the Scottish lad again in Saigon, who told me he’d woken up safe and sound in his hotel bed with nothing missing other than his memory of anything after midnight. Presumably New Yorker had managed to bundle him into a taxi and out of there while I was surrounded by hookers, and good thing too – Scotty would’ve been thoroughly done over with the state he was in!

View of the Nha Trang countryside
View from the temple in Nha Trang

Of course, following this narrow escape I sent warning emails to Mike and Dave, telling them to be very careful in Nha Trang, especially if they were to go out drinking, and then I continued on to the highland town of Dalat (nice enough place, but at the same time not so interesting) and the beach at Mu Ne (gorgeous beach, without any of the nonsense of Nha Trang!) before finally reaching Ho Chi Minh. And it was there in Ho Chi Minh City that I got a message from Mike – he and Dave had been attacked and robbed in Nha Trang, having come out of the exact same nightclub, by a gang of prostitutes and their bike-riding pimps. They had been similarly surrounded but had escaped, only to be chased and cornered in an ally, and threatened with knives (and were even threatened with being clubbed with motorbike helmets). They emptied their pockets out – they’d made sure they weren’t carrying much after what they’d heard from myself and others about Nha Trang – and handed the contents over, and thankfully walked away.

Boat trip, the Mekong delta
The Mekong delta (day trip from Saigon)

I never did manage to meet up with them again in Vietnam, but I next saw Dave two years later in Vancouver, Canada. After that spell in Asia, I’d headed to Canada to work in the ski resorts, and Dave and his girlfriend had travelled all the way up from southern Argentina to Canada overland (a trip I hope to emulate some day!). And over a few beers by English Bay, he filled me in on the details of that night – and also told me about the bloke they’d met in Nha Trang who’d actually been stabbed, having likewise been surrounded and threatened but trying to fight their way out. To anyone reading this and heading to Vietnam, I say be very careful in Nha Trang at night, don’t carry too much money or valuables, and if you do get robbed just hand it all over and be able to walk away. Don’t do what I did and lash out; in fact, not getting drunk late at night in that town in the first place is probably the best advice.

(I should point out that despite all the crap that happened to Mike & Dave in Vietnam, Mike eventually went back to live there for a while and ended up loving it – he now says it’s his favourite country in Southeast Asia, and that it’s changed a lot in the years since. I certainly don’t mean for this post to be a damning indictment of all Vietnamese and their country; I’m just telling the story of my (ridiculous) experiences there as a backpacker, not wanting to put anyone off going and checking it out for themselves, but to hopefully give people a heads up to keep their wits about them when they do)

So anyway, there you go; in just three weeks in Vietnam I experienced more threats, rip-offs, aggression, danger, and hassle, than I probably have in all the other years of travelling I’ve done combined. Well… there’s been a lot of minor hassle in a lot of countries… but in terms of aggression and really being in physical danger from other people, Vietnam was definitely the worst by far (except perhaps the one nutcase hillbilly encounter on a mountain road in the Rockies). And all simply because there are people there who see (western) tourists as a source of cash, but unlike, say, India, where people will cheekily try it on to get a little extra out of you but then will also be cool about it and sometimes even laugh it off if you don’t let them get away with it, in Vietnam when you try to stop people ripping you off it seems only to lead to aggression and possibly violence, as though they feel they have a right to do so and you’re being deeply offensive for trying to prevent it – I say this all in my own experience, of course. I do know people who travelled there without any problems at all – all of my Japanese and Korean friends who’ve been there, for example, had no trouble; same for my sister and her boyfriend. I think the people who have the most trouble are young, single, western, males (whether travelling as groups or individuals), so if that’s you bring all the patience and streetsmarts you can muster.

So, would I go back? Well, I almost did go back – almost – when I was in Kunming last year and aiming for Bangkok; I was looking at the overland route options from China to Thailand, and as I’d been through Chiang Rai & Chiang Mai before, and I’d been through Luang Nam Tha & Luang Prabang etc before, I was looking for somewhere new to check out on the way (Myanmar was out, due to the MTT permit situation at the China / Myanmar border). It occurred to me that I could swing through northern Vietnam to check out Sapa for a few days and then cross to Laos from Dien Bien Phu; I very nearly did it, but you know what? I imagined crossing the border at Lao Cai and trying to get myself to the Sapa bus without getting fleeced, and all the angry glares and shouting and aggro it would probably involve, and I just could not be fucking arsed with it; so I just took the bus from China to Thailand (now possible in one day, with a change of bus in Huay Xai, thanks to the new bridge over the Mekong), and I didn’t regret it at all. So would I go back? I’d never say never of course… so suffice it to say that if I ever do find myself back there, it will be to my great surprise.

But with that said, the food is great, the scenery spectacular, and the people (the ones who aren’t out to make an easy buck from you) friendly. So, do go to Vietnam and see for yourself what it’s like, but do be careful! (and one last thing to note again – the events I describe here happened in 2008, almost a decade ago, so hopefully you find a different (better) experience to mine)

Further reading: all I’ve given here is an account of my personal experiences in Vietnam, unfortunately largely negative. But I haven’t given any practical advice for actually dealing with it. So, as both a counterpoint to my post and for some good advice on dealing with Vietnam (or more specifically Hanoi), have a read of this great post by a long-term Hanoi expat on how to get your head right for dealing with the Vietnamese capital.

I also strongly recommend travelling by rail rather than road, and booking your tickets online. Baolau* is a Vietnamese online ticket booking agency (trains, buses, and domestic & regional flights), you can search & book using this widget:

Have you been to Vietnam? Got any similar stories to share? Would also love to hear from anyone who loves Vietnam, and why. Or maybe you just want to call me a moron? Leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you.

Also see my main Vietnam page here

(*affiliate link)

Visiting the Yuzawa ‘Snow Country’

Japan, Snow

The view of Yuzawa from Gala Yuzawa ski resort
Snow Country: the Yuzawa valley

国境の長いトンネルを抜けると、雪国であった
Kokkyō no nagai tonneru wo nukeru to, yukiguni de atta

“The train emerged from the long tunnel, into the snow country.”
– the opening line of Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country

Granted, Kawabata’s protagonist Shimamura wasn’t riding the Joetsu Shinkansen as I was on my frequent visits to Yuzawa’s Snow Country in Niigata (the Shinkansen didn’t exist when the novel was written in 1935, and in fact uses a different tunnel), and unlike Shimamura I wasn’t going there to continue a doomed love affair with a geisha but rather to continue my love affair with snowboarding; but all the same, when you travel from Tokyo to Niigata by train you do indeed emerge from a (sequence of) very long tunnel(s) into a gleaming white world, almost as though you’ve gone through the back of the wardrobe and come out in Narnia.

It was a much longer journey in 1935, but these days the bullet train whisks you in under 90 minutes from the grey concrete of the metropolis up to the Snow Country; it takes you through the semi-rural northern Kanto plain, plunges under the mountains, and then suddenly you’re emerging in this dreamscape wonderland where everything is buried under enormous quantities of fresh snow. It’s pretty amazing, and while the riding available in Niigata isn’t the best in Japan (see Hokkaido for that), a trip up to the Yuzawa snow country is worthwhile whether you’re riding or simply sightseeing.

(For snowboarders and skiers, here’s my review of the three Yuzawa ski areas I’m familiar with – there are many more I never visited)

The top of Gala Yuzawa ski resort
Gala Yuzawa ski resort

Things to do in Yuzawa for non-skiers

If you’re just going to Yuzawa to visit the mountains and see the snow, there’s plenty to do around town including a sake museum (located in Echigo Yuzawa station) and a ‘Snow Country’ museum dedicated to the famous novel and its author, and the ryokan where Kawabata stayed is still open and apparently still an excellent place to stay and soak in the hot springs (with Kawabata’s room preserved for viewing just as it was in 1935). For around 1,300 yen you can also go up the Gala Yuzawa ski area’s main gondola for some lunch and to see the views of the valley and surrounding mountains.

How to access Yuzawa from Tokyo by shinkansen

Yuzawa is easily reached by Joetsu Shinkansen from Tokyo station. Two services run on the line; the Toki trains make fewer stops and you need to disembark at Echigo Yuzawa station, while the Tanigawa trains take slightly longer (making more stops) and terminate at Echigo Yuzawa in summer or carry on to Gala Yuzawa station in winter (directly at the base of the Gala Yuzawa gondola). If you don’t have a JR Pass, you can buy a JR Tokyo Wide Pass which covers the whole Kanto area and extends as far as Yuzawa – this costs 10,000 yen for three consecutive days of unlimited travel on (most) JR trains in Kanto and is available to all foreign passport holders (even if resident in Japan, unlike the other JR passes).

Riding the original Snow Country train

Another option instead of zooming up to Niigata on the Shinkansen is to take the old Joetsu main line, which despite having been made rather obsolete still provides service to the local communities along its route between Gunma and Yuzawa. This was the line that Kawabata rode, and while the bullet train simply bypasses the mountains through a series of tunnels, the old Joetsu line mostly winds its way along valley floors, with a very long tunnel under Mt Tanigawa on the prefectural border, the Shimizu tunnel, Kawabata’s 国境の長いトンネル, or ‘long tunnel under the border’.

After a solo snowboarding trip to Yuzawa when my day was cut short after I bashed myself on a jump (and so I was heading home in daylight for once), I decided to ride this famous old train line just to see the scenery and the lay of the land. It’s an interesting way to see a side of Japan that you can easily miss – these tiny rural communities which have largely gone forgotten in recent decades, with shrinking and ageing populations and vanishing economies. It’s grimly fascinating to see the semi-deserted villages and fully-abandoned old ski areas along the railway line, disused chairlifts standing like sentinels in the snow, a stark foreshadowing of Japan’s looming demographic problems. But despite that rather gloomy aspect, it really is a pretty train ride with views of snow-blanketed valleys and mountains on the Niigata side, and running alongside a bamboo-lined river on the Gunma side. If you have a couple of hours to fill and feel like travelling at a slightly slower pace and taking in a bit of scenery, this is a good alternative to the bullet train when heading up to (or back from) the Yuzawa Snow Country.

There’s also the opportunity to get off at Doai station, Japan’s deepest and creepiest train station, and check out this unmanned station’s epic flight of stairs down into the bowels of the mountain – an opportunity I unfortunately missed, as at the time I didn’t know about it!

Suggested itinerary for a (non-skiing) day trip from Tokyo to Yuzawa

Using a JR Pass or Tokyo Wide Pass, catch a morning Tanigawa (or MAX Tanigawa) train from Tokyo station to Gala Yuzawa station. Exiting the train station brings you directly to the ski resort base station (in the same building), and you can buy a round trip ticket for the gondola (you can also rent a sled for 500 yen if you want to play in the snow, with rental snow boots and gloves also available).

At the top gondola station there’s a large restaurant building with great views of the Yuzawa valley where you can grab some lunch, and you can find a sledding area outside.

Once you’re done there, ride the gondola back down to the base station and head to Echigo Yuzawa station (you can either ride the train one stop with your pass or jump on a free shuttle bus, just check the schedules and take whichever is leaving first – the bus stop is in front of the building, take the elevator down to the lowest level or just ask the staff if you’re not sure where to go!)

At Echigo Yuzawa station visit the Ponshukan (sake museum) to sample the famous Niigata sake, and then ride the old original Joetsu line (not the Joetsu Shinkansen!) from Echigo Yuzawa to Takasaki (with a change at Minakami) to experience the original Snow Country railway. If you get off at Doai to check out the crazy underground stairs & platform, it’ll be at least one hour before the next train comes through – but the stairs alone apparently take ten minutes, so an hour seems about right to descend, check it out and snap some pics, and climb back out (the underground platform is for northbound trains i.e. trains heading to Yuzawa; the above-ground platform is for trains going south to Minakami). Note that if you’re using a JR Tokyo Wide Pass, the 40-minute ride from Yuzawa to Minakami isn’t covered so you’ll have to buy a one-way ticket (670 yen at time of writing); with a full JR Pass, it’s all completely covered. At Takasaki station you can then board any of the frequent bullet trains back to Tokyo (50 to 60 minutes).

(Hyperdia is a super-useful website you can use to check the train schedules; there’s a good guide to using Hyperdia here)

(This page contains affiliate links i.e. if you follow the links from this page to Japan Rail Pass or Amazon and make a purchase, 4corners7seas will receive a commission from them. This commission comes out of their profit margin at no extra cost to you; thank you in advance should you choose to do so!)

JR pass banner

The joys of Interrailing (and the benefits of having your passport stolen)

Europe, Overland travel, Travel tales

Interrailing around Europe is one of the classic overland trips, and it was my first taste of independent backpacker travel. Growing up in the UK, I’d already visited mainland Europe a whole bunch of times on family holidays and school trips. But it was during the summer holiday between my second and third years at university that I first packed a load of clothes, some guide books and novels, a first aid kit etc etc into a backpack and headed overseas with just a travel ticket booked and a list of places in my head that I wanted to see… although in fact, come to think of it, that isn’t quite true – on that first trip none of the four in our group had a guide book, a first aid kit, or anything much more than our clothes and travellers cheques! We didn’t even have a specific list of places we wanted to go, or any real sort of plan whatsoever other than a vague notion of Gibraltar being our ultimate goal as we had a friend there. My camera was a wind-up 35mm compact and for entertainment I had a Sony walkman – the type that played tape cassettes – and Danny had a discman (CDs… fancy!), and that was pretty much it; the real entertainment was the company of one another and of the awesome people we met along the way as we Interrailed our way around ten cities in eight countries in four weeks.

Hungarian parliament building in Budapest
Hungarian parliament building

As our passes weren’t valid in the UK, we’d taken a one-hour train from Leeds to Hull and there boarded an overnight ferry to Holland where we checked into a grotty Rotterdam hostel with a lively bar. And as grotty as that hostel was, I’m glad we chose it because it was there that we met three lovely Irish lasses who would be our travel companions for the next two weeks; initially, the four of us and the three of them just made plans to head to Amsterdam together the next day, but it quickly became the seven of us as we travelled across Germany to Köln and Berlin and then on to the Czech Republic. That was where we parted ways (though we all kept in touch and there have been various visits between Ireland and England in the years since), and once again we were four as we travelled on to Hungary, Austria, and Italy.

Map of my Interrail routes
The blue line is my first Interrail trip, and the purple line is my second Interrail trip following the 2003 ski season in Austria (the red line is the first leg of the Trans-Siberian trip I did a few years later)

The whole charm of this kind of travel was the reckless and happy-go-lucky way we went about it. Our rail passes allowed us to just rock up at a train station and board any train heading anywhere across Europe, and that was basically what we did – we took it a city at a time, and sometimes we literally went to the station in the morning and just got on whichever train was going to the most interesting place. We had no guidebooks, no reservations, no real plan, and not a care in the world.

Walking along the banks of the Danube in Budapest
Wandering along the banks of the Danube

We did have the one potential goal in mind to visit our friend in Gibraltar, so when we boarded the night train from Vienna to Rome we’d decided that after a couple of days in Italy we’d head to Barcelona and then down to Gibraltar. Unfortunately though, while the four of us did make it to Rome only two of our four passports made it with us, and as a result we never made it to Spain or Gibraltar. It’s hard to say exactly what happened to Danny and my passports, other than that they were stolen – the train was busy that night (as usual, I believe), and Danny & I were in one compartment while Ross & Ben slept in another. There was a nice Austrian lady sharing our compartment to start with, but she disembarked somewhere before the border and Danny and I could stretch out and enjoy the extra space.

Vienna

These compartments don’t have locks so the security isn’t great, but the only things we had worth stealing were our passports and we slept with those tucked away in inner pockets. But when the train was at the border (presumably), our door was flung open, a torch shined in, and a burly bloke shouted “passports” at us before stomping off down the carriage. We got our passports out, but from what I recall no-one came back to check them, and the next thing I knew was when we woke up somewhere near Rome without our passports… was that guy a real border guard? No idea. Had we been gassed? It sounds far-fetched, but the embassy staff informed us that it sometimes happens – it is possible and we did both feel very groggy that morning, but then that could easily also be explained as the simple result of a poor night’s sleep.

Grand Place, Brussels
Danny showing some appreciation for the fine architecture

In any case, we arrived in Rome sans passports (Ross and Ben had fared better in their compartment, although Ross thinks he did wake up during the night and see someone leaning over him through the door and looking over their stuff, after which he stayed awake and made sure the door stayed shut) and we would spend the next few hours traipsing around to the police to make a statement and then to the embassy to apply for new passports. As they would take four days to be issued, and due to the cost of applying for them, we gave up on Gibraltar… but hey, Rome was a pretty good place to get stuck for a few extra days! We had plenty of time to look around the sights, and we partied with a great bunch of people from our hostel – including Anna & Trevor, an American-Canadian couple who came and visited us in the UK a few weeks later on their way back to North America. Once we had our new passports in hand, we headed up to Brussels for a few days before finally returning to the UK on the ferry from Rotterdam.

A moment of contemplation high above a Vienna street
Ben taking a philosophical cigarette in Vienna

That was in 2000, and I also used an Interrail pass in 2003 when I returned to the UK overland following a ski season in Austria (travelling via Liechtenstein, Switzerland, France (where I visited my brother who was spending the ski season in Morzine, catching our visiting sister & parents at the same time), Luxembourg, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Holland).

Malmo Castle
Malmo Castle

Back then, the rail passes were very simple – your pass basically covered you for all trains in the countries it covered, bar a few night trains and high speed trains which required small supplements. These days, with the spread of high speed rail, there is a long list of trains which require seat bookings and supplements, and the amount charged varies from country to country. While this makes it harder to travel with the kind of complete spontaneity we did, Interrailing is still a great way to see lots of European countries in a short time.

Salzburg

(The pass that you buy depends on where you’re from; the Interrail and Eurail passes are basically the same thing, if you live in Europe you qualify for the Interrail pass and can go buy it at the ticket office where you live (or online). If you live outside Europe you qualify for the Eurail pass which you have to buy from a travel agent or online before you reach Europe. The Interrail pass for Europeans only covers you for 2 days (your first and last) of travel in your own country, meaning you can use it to leave and return but not to travel around domestically)

Koln cathedral
Koln cathedral

While it was certainly a shame that we never made it to Spain and Gibraltar on that first trip, I’m actually glad it happened – thanks to the passports being stolen, we befriended Anna and Trevor, and we also met a Canadian solo traveller called Ginny while playing pool at the hostel in Belgium. The following summer, Ross and I went on a road trip around the States with Anna and another of her friends, during which we visited Ginny in Canada; Danny and I stayed with Ginny again when we travelled round Asia and she was living in Thailand; I stayed with Anna again in LA when I flew from New Zealand to Central America a few years after that (following a ski season in Queenstown); and I even ended up being Ginny’s roommate in Vancouver when I lived there for a couple of ski seasons.

Waiting for the next train, Brussels Midi
Waiting for the next train: Ginny, Ben, and Ross, Brussels Midi

And that was really what was so great about Interrailing around Europe – not just the places we visited (as fantastic as they were), but the going with the flow, the spontaneous day-to-day decision-making, and the fantastic people we met as a result and the future travel possibilities those friendships led to.

Resources and Useful Links

Check out my Europe overland tips page here

Official website for the Interrail pass

Official website for the Eurail pass

Search for hotel deals on Hotels Combined

World Nomads offer flexible travel insurance you can buy even if already overseas (this can be a key point, as I once found out the hard way when I got pickpocketed). Also check out their winter sports cover if you’re hitting the slopes.

Lonely Planet: Europe on a Shoestring

These are affiliate links i.e. if you follow the links from this page and make a purchase, 4corners7seas will receive a commission. This comes out of their profit margin at no extra cost to you, and I only link to stuff I know, use, and trust. Thank you in advance should you choose to make a purchase via the above links!

Road trip USA! (and the psycho hillbilly)

Canada & USA, Overland travel, Travel tales

Stormy skies and the open road

America is a huge country, a place of remote and vast wildernesses where you can truly be in the middle of nowhere. And that remote mountain road that we took out of Yellowstone, heading east through the Rocky Mountains, really was in the middle of nowhere. There were no towns anywhere nearby and our road was a squiggly line across a big white space on the map.

You sometimes hear it said by visitors to the US that they feel like they’re in a movie… and growing up watching American movies and TV does mean everything has a familiar feel when you eventually go there and see it in the flesh. I guess that when people say that, they’re usually thinking of their favourite comedies, action blockbusters, Christmas movies and whatever… but as we drove along that winding mountain road in the dark with some lunatic chasing us in a Toyota pickup truck and making as if to knock us off into the void, it felt like being in a movie alright – but more like a slasher movie…

Storm over the Grand Canyon
The Grand Canyon

Ross and I had met Anna the previous year in Rome while Interrailing around Europe in a motley gang of four. Anna and her boyfriend were staying at our hostel and we all hung out together for a few days of cheap pasta, drinks in the Campo de’ Fiori, and drunken paddles in the fountains; a few weeks later we hosted Anna and Trevor in Leeds as they made their final European stop in the UK before flying back across the pond. The following summer, Anna and her friend Shannon were planning their graduation trip, and invited the four of us to join them on a grand tour of the States in Shannon’s parents’ camper van. We couldn’t all make it, but Ross and myself accepted; it was time for a road trip!

We flew to Chicago and were met by Anna & Shannon (who’d driven up from Ohio), and all crashed at their friend’s place for a few days of sightseeing and Jaegerbombs before setting off across the prairies.

Map of my overland routes in North America
The route in red

We’d camped out in the Rockies, watched the Independence Day fireworks in New Mexico, been put up in the middle of the Arizona desert by a random fishing guide with a (sting-induced) fear of scorpions, stood in awe on the Northern Rim of the Grand Canyon, hiked through the incredible natural wonders of Bryce Canyon and Zion National Park in Utah, drunk & eaten & gambled in Las Vegas, chilled in San Diego (crashing with Anna’s aunt & uncle) & popped over the border for margaritas in Tijuana, got stuck at the Mexico – US border (due to a minor problem with Ross’ visa waiver, which took longer than it should have to correct because the border guards took a little pizza break in front of the line of waiting people), checked out LA, crashed with Anna’s friends in Berkeley and checked out San Francisco, driven up Highway 101 and been dwarfed by the giant redwoods, crashed with Anna’s friends in Portland, driven around Oregon with Shannon’s parents and visited the hotel from The Shining and the house and beach from the Goonies and done Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions in front of the school from Kindergarten Cop (“I’m the party pooper“), drunk bottles of Jaeger in her aunt & uncle’s jacuzzi at their cabin in the woods outside Seattle, and had made it all the way up to Canada where we stayed with our friend Ginny in Victoria.

Bryce Canyon
Bryce Canyon

Ginny was another traveller we’d met the previous summer in Europe (while shooting pool in Brussels) and also kept in touch with (one of the greatest things about travel – every trip leads to new connections and future possibilities). She put us all up in her Chinatown apartment for a couple of days, and then it was time to hightail it back to Chicago in time for a Peaches gig Anna was determined to attend.

At the beach in Victoria, Canada
At the beach in Victoria

So we set off to cover the 2,000 miles from Victoria to Chicago in two days, with our lucky pot plant on the dashboard and a bag of Canadian oranges Ginny kindly gave us as we left… and we quickly ran into trouble at the US border; having forgotten about the oranges, and totally failing to consider our lucky plant, we declared on our customs forms that we didn’t have any weapons, explosives, drugs, contraband, etc etc… nor any fruit or plant materials. The customs guys said they were going to do a quick search, and picked out and held up the bag of oranges like they’d just busted a gang of drug smugglers. We then watched, mortified, as they gave our van a thorough ransacking, before being sent on our way with a 120-dollar fine and 3 hours behind schedule.

Road trip USA: crossing Loveland Pass, American Rockies
Crossing the continental divide in the Rockies

The delay meant we only made it to somewhere in the Rockies in northern Idaho by that night, where we threw up the tents in a campsite and grabbed a few hours sleep before packing up and driving on in the morning. There was some debate at this point about whether or not we had time to detour to Yellowstone as we’d planned, but Ross and I were adamant as we figured we might never be in the region again. We still had time to swing through Yellowstone and make it to Chicago in time, I argued, and besides I hadn’t come all the way to America just to miss Yellowstone for the sake of a Peaches gig! So we agreed that we’d head down to Yellowstone, do a quick drive around the main points of the northern area of the park without stopping too much, and then continue on east towards Chicago via Mt Rushmore and the Badlands.

But it was that insistence on going via Yellowstone that led to our encounter with the Toyota-pickup-truck-driving lunatic in the mountains. We left the highway and drove a couple of hours south towards the park, before being informed by a park ranger that some of the roads were closed due to a forest fire. So instead of swinging through the park and back out to the highway, we would have to go deeper into the park and exit by a different road, then drive a long way east before connecting with a different highway. As the sun was sinking we watched Old Faithful erupt, then jumped straight back in the van and carried on around Lake Yellowstone, finally leaving the park in the middle of the night along a narrow road that wound away through the mountains.

It would be a cracking drive by daylight, that road, winding along the flanks of a mountain range with a precipitous drop into the valley off one side, but at night the yawning darkness beyond the guard rail was a little nerve-wracking. Ross and Shannon were asleep in the back, Anna was at the wheel and I was riding shotgun. There were no city lights in the distance and no other cars on the road, until we rounded a bend and saw up ahead a red pickup truck crawling along at 20mph…

It seemed kinda weird and I looked across as we overtook, and saw what I can only describe as the classic hillbilly driving that truck – the long, dark, messy hair, the beard, the baseball cap, and the lumberjack shirt, and the generally dishevelled appearance, all matched my (Hollywood-derived) image of a crazy redneck. I only got a brief look at him – I would never be able to pick him out from a hillbilly line-up – but he looked pretty much exactly how I picture a Midwest survivalist gun-nut might look.

I think we commented about how strange it was that he was plodding along at such a slow speed, but we drove on at 60mph and didn’t expect to be seeing that red Toyota again… and indeed we didn’t see it, until it was mere inches from our rear bumper ten minutes later – because he’d sped right up behind us with his lights off. And then suddenly from darkness all the world was blinding light; he threw his lights on full beam as we were going round a mountain bend, and we almost crashed off the road right then and there – Anna did an awesome job not to panic and to keep us from plunging down the mountainside, shielding her eyes with one hand and steering with the other.

We didn’t know it was him at first, all we could see was the blinding light glaring from our mirrors… he backed off a little, and then accelerated again, taking a run at us. We braced for impact, and I pretty much thought shit I’m about to die. But he braked just in time, inches short, before backing off again and then taking another run in.

Ross took a look out the back window as he was backing off, to try and see what the vehicle was – he said it looked like a red pickup truck. The hillbilly. We had no idea what the guy was playing at or what his intentions were, but this was a sketchy mountain road that would require concentration from a driver at the best of times, never mind with a nutcase threatening to ram you off the road for god-knows-what purpose. He kept up this routine of backing off and speeding right back up on our tail, while Anna did an amazing job of keeping calm and keeping her eyes on the road… she suggested that maybe she could try to outrun him, but we figured that he was faster and maybe that was what he wanted us to do to help him get his kicks, and the chances and consequences of crashing would increase with the speed (and they were already bad enough).

So Anna stuck to the 60mph limit, and the rest of us tried in vain to dial 911 – no signal, of course. It was getting more and more like a slasher film all the time – Ross and Shannon moved around as much as they could in the back of the van, trying to make it look like there was a big group of us… perhaps, when we’d overtaken him, he’d looked over and thought it was just Anna and myself, and would be put off by the extra people in the back. But if he did end up forcing us to crash at 60mph in the mountains, it wouldn’t really matter how many of us there were in the van – we’d be at his mercy. So as he kept up this bizarre routine, scaring the crap out of us but still not actually ramming us, we had frantic conversations about what he was trying to do… maybe he’s just a drunk hick trying to scare a bunch of kids for a laugh… maybe he’s a murderer and rapist… maybe he has a gun… but at times like that, your natural flight or fight response kicks in – and flight didn’t seem like an option. So our thoughts turned to how we could defend ourselves.

Ross and Shannon reached back into the camping gear under the seats, giving us a hammer and a knife, and Anna had a can of anti-rape spray in her handbag. Shannon took the can, and Ross and I had a weapon each; we decided that in the event that he forced us off the road and approached we’d hit him with everything we had. We had no idea if he was armed, or what he was going to try and do… but we had basically decided that if he forced us off the road (without it causing us to crash horribly), then we’d have to try and incapacitate him by any means necessary, even if that meant killing the guy

Never in my life before had I actually been contemplating this sort of violent possibility (and nor have I since, thankfully). But the most immediate danger remained the possibility of plunging down into the river below; so then we thought about actually slowing down and stopping safely, if he allowed us, and seeing what he would do – and, if he got out and approached us, we’d jump him as planned. Would it still have been self-defence if he’d approached us like that and we’d jumped out and severely injured or killed him? Legally speaking, I have no idea. Morally speaking, would I have been able to live with it if that had happened and we’d killed him? Not sure – I think I, we, would have been haunted forever. But who expects to ever be forced to make a choice like that? The fact is that you don’t really wrestle with moral choices when you think it’s a life or death situation – and I was ready to try and kill this man if it came to it.

But it never did… he just kept on backing off, speeding up, backing off, speeding right back up again, probably for a quarter of an hour, with his lights on full beam the whole time. And Anna kept on driving as safely as she could without trying to outrun him or react to his charges, and I had a good look at the map.

The road we were on, which was our shortest route back to the national highway, looked like it was going to become even more winding and exposed as it went up and over a mountain pass, but the map showed that there was a right turning coming up a few miles ahead which went to the nearest town some 30 miles away, a place called Cody. This would be even more of a detour from our best route to Chicago, but our only concern right then was to get to safety, and the town of Cody seemed a better bet than continuing on this increasingly winding mountain road to try and reach the highway. So as we approached the turning, Anna slowed down and indicated, and executed a textbook right turn; and the red Toyota pickup truck slowed down behind us, waited for us to turn, and then drove on straight. And it was over, just like that.

But remembering that he’d already sneaked up and surprised once that night, though, we didn’t let our guard down. We kept the weapons to hand and Shannon took turns with Ross to watch the road behind us, and the tension remained high in the van as we drove the remaining distance to Cody. There we found a phone and called the police, explained what had happened, and gave the best description we could of the vehicle and its driver. And then we got some much needed refreshments from a gas station and debated staying at a hotel in Cody for a few hours. But there was a Peaches gig to be in Chicago for, and we decided to carry on driving through the night as originally planned.

Independence Day, Albuquerque
Ross and Monster the monster, drunk on Independence Day in Albuquerque, New Mexico

The rest of the road trip was uneventful (as almost anything would have seemed after that). We stopped for a photo at Mt Rushmore, just off the highway in South Dakota, and we made the short detour to Badlands NP (where much of ‘Dances With Wolves’ was filmed). And we did finally arrive in Chicago in time for Anna and Shannon to attend the Peaches concert (while Ross and I – who were a tad sick of Peaches after six weeks in the van listening to her a lot – went for a drink in a nearby Polish bar and talked about football with a bunch of old Polish-American patrons who were surprisingly knowledgable about Leeds United FC). And that was the end of our American road trip. We’d clocked 8,000 miles in 6 weeks, including the whole West Coast from Mexico to Canada.

America is a beautiful country, it really is – the cities are what it’s most famous for, but the natural beauty is staggering. I don’t think any other single country I’ve been to, except maybe China, has such an amazing range of different types of scenery – deserts, mountains, forests, coastlines, and much of it genuinely astounding in scale and beauty. The Rockies tower over you, the Grand Canyon humbles you, the Utah landscape bewitches you… and then you have an all-night bender in Vegas. And we enjoyed such warmth and hospitality from Anna & Shannon’s friends and relatives, and so many free drinks from strangers who were stoked to hear we were driving across the States (or perhaps just liked Ross’ and my British accents), that despite our encounter with a nutcase I must say that America and her people are wonderful. Not least Anna and Shannon – it would be remiss of me not to mention that of the 8,000 miles we covered, neither myself or Ross drove a single one of them! I wish I had had my licence back then – I would have loved to drive along those roads through that amazing scenery. Ross and I attempted to pull our weight in other ways like setting up and breaking camp, but the girls both provided the vehicle and drove the thing, which was amazing of them!

Anna & Shannon in Albuquerque
These two wonderful ladies drove us 8,000 miles!

Again, this is one of the best things about travelling – you can meet someone in a hostel bar one year, and if you stay in touch and keep that connection alive, who knows where you might find yourself somewhere down the line (Ginny, who’d put the lot of us up in Victoria, ended up putting up with me again for a whole year as housemates when I went back to Canada for a couple of ski seasons in Vancouver).

Even after being tailgated by a psycho in the Rockies, Anna still completed her night-time driving shift with me on shotgun duty while the other two slept; and I have this clear memory of us driving across the plains in South Dakota (I think) in the early dawn, listening to Madonna and feeling damn relieved that we hadn’t just either killed someone or been killed. The song ‘Borderline‘ has particularly stuck in my head, and whenever I hear it I remember that crazy drive and wonder just who the hell that guy was and what his intentions were. We’ll never know, and I’m glad we didn’t find out.