The story which follows is an account of the only negative experience I had during my many months in Phong Nha, so please don’t be put off visiting there. The biggest danger tourists face here is themselves, trying to show off on their scooters on the mountain roads. It really is the best place in the whole of Vietnam and few places I’ve been in the world have even come close to the national park’s wonder.
During a quiet period behind the bar, my good friends were giving me another lesson in Vietnamese. “Toi yeu ban” means “I love you”. Sighing “a-duuuuuu” means “fuuuuuuck” in a despairing, sometimes humorous context, while “du ma mi” literally translates to “fuck you” but with much more weight than in Western culture. Think of it as not solely cursing you, but also your entire family and everything you stand for. You’d definitely never hear it come out in general humoured banter, and my friends struggled to even utter the three syllables for demonstration purposes, as if they feared summoning a faeces-slinging scalp-hunting zombie-troll. While in western cultures we’d traditionally slap each other with a glove to challenge a foe to a chivalrous duel, the words “du ma mi” spoken out loud essentially mean “we’re going to fight to the death, and you have no say in the matter, lest you come out victorious”.
Come forward a few days and it’s now February 17th, 2014, which means two things: Firstly, Valentine’s day has just passed, and I’d convinced a girl I’d taken a fancy to, G for anonymity sake, to return to Phong Nha where I was working. Secondly, it’s the day before Tet. Tet is the Vietnamese new year, when all the cities empty as everyone leaves their jobs to return to their families in the countryside. Public transport shuts down and hotels stop checking in guests. Phong Nha, being a National Park, was for three days going to be cut-off from tourism. In their place, the village was to be filled by unfamiliar Vietnamese faces. The superstition is that your home will remain for the year how it is on Tet, so as symbols of wealth, any westerners lucky enough to find themselves stranded in Phong Nha will be invited from families left, right, and centre, into their homes to an abundance of food and rice wine. This means a short stroll down to take a photo of the river becomes a drunken door-to-door crawl. This also means a chaos of drunken motorcyclists everywhere, but the cops are all on strike and too drunk themselves to care.
In the three days since G arrived on Valentine’s, we’d had a great time exploring caves, mountains, and the beach. For today, I’d arranged with my friend, a local guide named Shi, for us to go on a historical mountainbike tour of the old Ho Chi Minh trails. On the 30-metre walk from my private hotel room to Easy Tiger (the hostel where I was working), a man was sat crouched on the floor. He was kind of stocky, with a metal bar in one hand. As I walked past he looked me in the eyes, waving his bar about while yelling in his native tongue. With him now behind me, I caught those three forbidden syllables of doom. “Du ma mi”. I pretended I hadn’t noticed and continued walking away. As this was going on, Gnoc, my super-friendly and well-tempered manager, was stood next to the man, keeping an air of calm around the outburst. Maybe, just this once, those three syllables were just in humour. Why else would one guy just randomly threaten another stranger, especially in broad daylight and so aggressively, if it wasn’t just play-acting?
Shi was in the Easy Tiger patio assembling the bikes for a group of eight of us. I’d realised I’d left something in the hotel, and went back. The guy was still there, his eyes already waiting for me to come back into view, his hand now beating the pole against the ground as I gave a wide berth, and an even wider berth on the way back again. I ended up walking past him several times that morning, each time his greeting was more aggressive than the last, and I was eventually crossing into the central reservation of the road to steer clear. At one point as we were preparing our bikes, he stormed into the hostel reception area, gesturing his fists around before storming back out, kicking one of the bikes over as he passed. My kneejerk reaction was to bolt upright and face the guy with my fists ready. A second later I came to my senses and remembered I didn’t want to fight the angry stocky man with the metal pole, so was thankful that he was too busy storming off to notice my challenge. Shi muttered something at him as this happened; it turned out Shi knew the man since they were in school together. Saemus was on reception at the time, he said he had no idea what just happened but to let Gnoc take care of it.
We were expecting another friend to join us, Dwayne, a colleague at Easy Tiger. He was oversleeping, but eventually joined us later in the morning, ranting about some crazy guy that just hit him on the head with a metal stick as he went to pick up the bike. Fortunately, he was already wearing his helmet.
That evening, the coast was clear, and we were sat in the hostel patio asking about this guy, now that some more of the hostel staff were around. They explained that the guy first showed up the night before, throwing plates into the seating area as guests enjoyed our live-band. At one point he stormed into the venue, unplugged the guitar mid-performance and held a butcher’s knife to the player’s throat until Mike, the manager on shift, heroically prised him off and out onto the street as Gnoc, while receiving a punch to the face, called the cops to take him away. After hearing the details, it became clear this was the same assailant who kicked off a riot a few weeks earlier.
That riot started off as some yelling and a scuffle in the street outside his family home, which happened to be a scooter rental opposite Easy Tiger. This had happened a couple of times before but was usually limited to yelling between a handful of people. This time however, over about an hour, this scuffle got more and more intense as more and more locals just gravitated out of the darkness and into the street-lit brawl. At one point Easy Tiger’s resident dog got hit by a scooter which swerved to avoid the crowd, and women were confiscating knives off each other, as the number swelled to at least a hundred people. That number includes bystanders as it was impossible to tell who was involved and to what level. It all came to an end when a couple of black saloon cars turned up, which in this part of the world meant VIP, and amongst people who know Phong Nha, I don’t think I’d be alone in speculating mafia from the nearby town of Dong Hoi.
Back to the present, it’s now the morning of Tet and Phong Nha, even by its own standards, has never been so tranquil. Easy Tiger’s completely locked up and void of guests, and the streets are empty. So silent, we could hear the muffled chatter of families enjoying lunch inside their homes, only to be drowned out occasionally by the louder garden parties and the occasional explosion. Now, at home we’re used to an evening of drinking before going out to enjoy the fireworks. Think of Tet in Phong Nha as a lot more.. explosive. I’ve already explained the drinking part, but the fireworks? Phong Nha was one of the most heavily bombed regions of Vietnam during the war. An overwhelming majority of these bombs, originally engineered for impact on German concrete, sank, undetonated, into the mud. During the year, these bombs are discovered, sometimes with unfortunate consequences, but usually stashed away somewhere safe like in someone’s garden or under the mattress, before being detonated at Tet. This starts sporadically during the day, with the majority going off around midnight. I guess this is all made appropriate by the fact that Tet is also the anniversary of the namesake offensive which eventually defeated the Americans.
The booms. They’d go straight through you, (especially felt through your lungs), down the river and reverberate on every karst along the way, with each echo hitting back at your chest half as powerful as the last. Some of these detonations happening in people’s gardens directly adjacent to where we sat.
At 2 A.M. the celebrations were over and we headed back to my room, a half-hour walk away. We arrived only to find it the lobby door locked. They said they’d leave it open for us! A piece of pottery smashes at my feet. Where did that come from? Oh. It’s him. Our resident psycho had lit a fire for himself on the opposite pavement. He was now walking our way with a knife in his hand.
Naturally I started pounding away at the door while mentally reciting various self defence techniques I’d seen in the movies. With Psycho now on our side of the central reservation, it was a relief to see the hotel manager appear and open the door. He ushered us in and quickly locked the door again behind us. The Buffalo Run group – a weekly tour operated by a group in Hanoi, popular with Australians and notorious for being drunk, stoned, loud and generally obnoxious to the local community – were hanging out at the back of the hotel, sober and in complete silence.
“He crazy! On drugs! He hit two tourists on the head with a brick, now they go to hospital in Dong Hoi!”, the manager’s wife went on to explain that the man was a good kid, going to university to learn English and hospitality, until something happened that got him into meth and heroin. Now he just starts fights with tourists, yet for some reason the cops would do nothing, and the locals too scared to take it into their own hands. With this in mind, it was becoming a certainty that at some point, I was going to find myself in a confrontation with this guy, and I’d have to make the first move, and it’d have to be a good one because in his state, he certainly won’t be fazed by pain. I’d then probably have to say goodbye to G and leave the country very quickly. Looking out from my hotel room, I could see he was casually pouring some liquid onto the fire while screeching out high pitched animal noises. The noises went on through the night, which was useful because it meant I could tell he was quite far from the hotel and not, for example, climbing onto my balcony. I was woken momentarily by a pounding at the front door accompanied with high pitched yelping. He sounded the angriest I’d ever heard up to that point, but a couple of bangs later and he was gone again. It turned out those bangs were him smashing the bodywork of a few motorbikes in the drive, mine included.
We didn’t see him the next day; we dutifully attended dinner at the family home of one of my colleagues, far out of town. Fast forward another morning, and we’re on another one of Shi’s mountainbike tours. This time we assembled at the other end of the street, so it wasn’t until we were on our way that we saw the guy. He was a passenger in a car with his family who were seemingly trying to keep him distracted from trouble. What struck me was that it wasn’t one of these modern black saloons I associated with the mafia, but a blue hatchback rustbucket. The income disparity in Vietnam is such that, you either own a nice car, or no car at all, with nothing available in between, this being the one bizarre exception. Regardless, it disappeared behind its own epic smokescreen, over the bridge of the Ho Chi Minh Highway. Finally. Good riddance.
Next morning (now at day three since Tet), we decide to go to Hue, 3-6 hours away depending on what state your motorbike’s in. Popping over to Easy Tiger for some pre-journey breakfast, a piece of fruit landed at my feet, followed an empty food can. I looked up across the street, and on the balcony of the scooter rental, there he was. Whistling, howling, throwing trash at everyone, and spitting on anyone who’d somehow obliviously found themselves in range. He’d been at it all morning, and Seamus was at the desk collecting witness statements to take to the police. Having only just reopened, most of the guests had only arrived that morning, while it was decided that my encounters which spanned a few days were worth reporting directly to the police in person. I reached the end of the drive, and saw Psycho there on the balcony, with a blowtorch in his hand, which I did not want to see come hurtling at me. I went back inside, grabbed Gnoc’s motorbike keys, and, with G on the back, ran the gauntlet, zigzagging the wrong side of the road at full throttle until I was confident that we were out of projectile range. Gnoc tootled behind on his own moped.
The station was empty apart from one lone cop. This guy was maybe two meters tall, so basically twice the height of the other locals. He has deep eye sockets and an expression that defined “Resting Bitch Face“. He sat there at the desk, listening to Gnoc’s account, and Gnoc’s translation of my account, but seemed to care more about who we were more than what we had to say. The whole exercise was a complete waste of time and we now had to wait another day before going to Hue, where we spent our last few days together before G caught a flight to Bangkok and I returned to my shifts at Easy Tiger.
Back in Phong Nha, things were back to normal, and everything across the street was quiet. Binh, the bar manager was lining up a shot in a game of pool. I snuck up behind him and gently whispered “aduuuuuuuu” into his ear, and right on cue he collapsed over the table into a fit of laughter. As I asked questions, the details came out. During my absence, a local bar manager had found Psycho in the street mumbling Viet Cong anthems. It became apparent this guy had suffered a serious trip into an alternative reality where he was in the Viet Cong, and every white guy was an American invader, which explained why his violence was only targeted at tourists. At this point, his family – probably finally exhausting all other options – snuck tranquilisers in his food, keeping him in a coma for a few days before putting him on a train to the military hospital in Hanoi.