minutes and kept telling the driver to hurry up, step on it, go faster and several other expressions that meant about the same thing. The driver kept saying stuff back to the old man but, of course, it was in Japanese. I figured he was probably saying shut up, stupid.
I was getting one of my headaches. All very nice.
“Maybe we should just turn around and go back,” I said.
The old man looked at me like I was nuts. “No way,” he said. “No problem.”
I have to admit, the tower was actually pretty cool. The driver got us there in seventy-nine minutes, six minutes quicker than what we’d been told at the airport, so the old man finally started to chill. Twelve thousand yen for the cab fare — one way. That’s almost a hundred and fifty bucks American. He never said how much we had to pay to go up to the observatory, but I bet it was a bunch.
I was beginning to think the old man had some serious coin. Either that or he saved up big-time for this trip.
Once we got up in the observatory, my head started feeling better, and I kind of enjoyed the view. We walked around the whole platform so we saw the city in every direction. There was another tower, newer and taller — called the Tokyo Sky Tree — off in the distance. Impressive.
But the best part was Mount Fuji. I’ve seen mountains, some of them close up, but I’d have to say that was the most amazing, and biggest, mountain I’d ever seen.
“If it’s cloudy or there’s too much smog, you don’t see the mountain,” the old man told me three or four times, like the fact that it was a clear day was all his doing. Part of the “old man tour of Tokyo.”
The ride back to Narita Airport was a replay of the ride to the tower. Eighty-two minutes this time. We ran our asses off getting back through the airport, then through the security line and back to our departure gate about five minutes before they started boarding the plane.
Now the old man was grinning. “Not bad, eh? You see some of Tokyo, and we’re back here in time, just like I planned it. Nothing to it.”
Yeah, nothing to it.
Saigon
1
Okay, what I said before about being pretty good with geography? Forget that. I expected Saigon to be all huts and mud — little orphaned kids everywhere holding out their hands and begging in these little pathetic voices, American man you nice … give little money. I expected to be standing in line at weird little shops (more huts), so I could buy a bowl of wet rice that I’d have to go through with my chopsticks to filter out the bugs crawling around in the bowl. I expected a city that was not like any city I’d ever see. I expected … a dump.
And I was wrong. First of all, it’s not even called Saigon any more. It’s Ho Chi Minh City. Okay, that was partly the old man’s fault; how would I know that? He called it Saigon, so I called it Saigon. And in fairness to him, a lot of the locals still call it Saigon too. I found that out later. But officially, at the end of the war, when South Vietnam and the Americans lost and the North Vietnamese took over, the leader of North Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh, and he decided to re-name Saigon after himself. Nothing like a healthy dose of self-esteem.
No huts, at least not in any of the parts of the city I saw. Skyscrapers, neon lights, clubs, restaurants, palaces, and parks — some people begging, quite a few of them actually, but not many of them were kids. If it wasn’t for the totally different trees and flowers, the gazillion people on little motorbikes and another gazillion people on bicycles and the fact that most of those gazillions of people were Vietnamese, I could have been in Toronto.
And I was wrong about that too — the everybody-being-Vietnamese thing. The old man told me that a pretty big part of the population of Saigon is Chinese. Especially in the centre of town.
Since we’d arrived at eleven thirty at night, I was pretty tired by the time we got our stuff off the luggage carousel, and the old man had flagged down a taxi outside. We were staying at a place called the Rex Hotel — the old man told me that while we were watching luggage drift past us on the carousel. Watching and getting pushed out of the way by rude people, who seemed to think that if they didn’t get their suitcase right now, the world was going to come to an end.
I got pushed out of the way three different times. By the third time, I was getting seriously annoyed, and I was about to educate the little Asian guy who did the pushing on some of the more creative ways to use English swear words when I noticed that he was a she. A tough little she, but a she just the same. I stepped back beside the old man, who was grinning and shaking his head. I might have thought it was a little funnier if I hadn’t been so damn tired.
Before we left the airport, the old man rented two cellphones at a little kiosk, one for each of us. “Our phones don’t work over here. so we’ll need these. Don’t lose it, or it’ll cost us, well actually cost you, a bunch.”
One of the top five prettiest women I’d ever seen in my life explained how the phone worked and what our numbers were. I wanted to ask a bunch of questions just so we could keep talking to her, but exhaustion from the plane ride had ground my male hormones into powder, so I settled for nodding a lot.
She spoke excellent English, but a couple of times she couldn’t find the word she wanted and fell back into Vietnamese. The old man seemed to understand, and even spoke a few words himself. I don’t know why, but I thought that was pretty impressive. I didn’t bother to tell him that though.
The taxi ride was another adventure. I expected the first words out of the old man’s mouth to be Rex Hotel, but instead he said some stuff in Vietnamese. Then we discovered the driver spoke English, so the old man said, “Just drive around for a while.”
I looked at him in the dark of the back seat. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Just for a few minutes. Go to sleep if you want.” Then he turned to the window on his side and stared out like a kid watching for Santa Claus. It was like I wasn’t there.
It was close to midnight, yet there was an awful lot of light. Neon lights and street lights and the lights from cars and motorbikes. It felt like four o’clock in the afternoon.
And there were a lot of people on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City. That surprised me, since it was pretty late. Most were still in shirt sleeves because it felt like a summer afternoon feels back home. Lots of movement. There didn’t seem to be anybody just standing around. Quite a few eating places and most of them seemed pretty busy for that time of night. Except for the people eating in those places, everyone seemed to be in a hurry. A blur of moving bodies and vehicles of all types.
Noise too, lots of it. The driver had his window down, and there was this din — car horns honking, music coming from several different places, the rattle-hum of motorbike engines … and voices, loud voices that seemed to be speaking in syllables instead of sentences.
The other thing I noticed was the smells. A big mix of smells. From the streets we drove down, there was the smell of food, kind of like when you go into a Chinese restaurant in a Canadian or American city. It was jumbled together with gasoline fumes and the occasional whiff of garbage. There was the smell of the inside of the taxi, too, a mix of body odour and beer, I think that’s what it was. And from somewhere, there was the hint of a flower smell. Like you were in a garden or a flower shop. But that smell wasn’t there all the time. It seemed like the other stuff overpowered it.
“Stop
