Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

One morning in Phnom Penh, around eight o'clock, I left my hotel, walked along the riverfront on the embankment, A Cha Xao Street, to a certain street corner, and caught the bus to Saigon. The trip was only 150 miles, but it took all day because it involved a slow passenger ferry across the Mekong and the usual delays, hours of them, at the border crossing, two sets of immigration checks, into Vietnam. On the side of the bus was a gaily painted sign: Mekong Express. The passengers were mainly Vietnamese and Cambodian, and a backpacking husband and wife from England, all smiles, as well as four middle-aged French travelers, peevish because they had to speak English (almost no Cambodians speak French anymore) and pay for everything in American dollars.

Two rivers, the Tonle Sap and the Mekong, converge at Phnom Penh, flowing from the north, and they split again into two rivers, which flow southerly: the Bassac and the continuation of the Mekong. Phnom Penh sits at the western edge of the X that these rivers create, a point the French called Quatre-Bras because of the four wide branching streams.

We crossed the Bassac River on the Monivong Bridge, heading southeast towards the border. Just over the bridge were poor neighborhoods and the broad, flat countryside of villages, stilt houses overlooking swamps, cows, herd boys, lame dogs, and an unbroken expanse of paddy fields. I couldn't read or scribble notes on the bus. I gazed at the laboring Cambodians, who had been unfairly punished for decades by successive regimes and foreign interests, unlucky people still struggling to survive, all the sadder for their politeness.

A few hours down the bad road we came again to the Mekong, waited for the Neak Luong ferry (hardly larger than the three-car Edgartown ferry), then drove onto it and crossed the turbulent water. Hours later, the road improved near the town of Bavet, on the Cambodian border. We walked through the grandiose gateway—immigration and customs—carrying our bags. No inspection: I could have been carrying a treasure. Then another long walk, across the border to Vietnam immigration and customs, in the town of Moc Bai, as the sun set. And beyond another gateway, a different world.

On this stretch, the look of confidence was immediate. The Vietnamese road was well paved and the houses were in better repair, more substantial in size. There was better lighting, more activity, and finally, like a howl of hope, a great flow of scooters and motorbikes, buzzing outriders beside the bus, building to a bright noisy flow, the riders dipping and weaving, no one wearing a helmet. These motorbikes wobbled along the road, eight abreast, inches apart. The overwhelming density of the stream of bike traffic seemed to bear our little bus onward into the city center. And for the hour it took to get to the middle of Saigon, the unbroken line of shops, markets, and factories gave some credence to the many Thais who had said to me, "We're worried about Vietnam taking our business."

Because this was a sentimental journey, and so that I could get my bearings, I asked to be dropped at a certain spot near the Saigon River. Then I walked west to a familiar district: the Continental Hotel, the Rex, the Caravelle, a little park, and the main post office.

What I had remembered of the Saigon of 1973 were trashed and empty streets, the colonial façades of the post office and the French-looking city hall, the pinkish brick of Notre Dame Cathedral with its twin spires, some people on bicycles, and at night almost no one out except a few hopeful prostitutes, lingering under the lights at the broken curbs of street corners. That, and war fear and war weariness, like stinks in the smoke-darkened air.

This was the opposite—mobs of people and blatting traffic at ten P.M. Almost the first thing I saw was a great crowd on an apron of sidewalk, parents and small children, their faces gleaming, in a line to enter "Candyland," a bright display of goodies in a department store: children dressed up as elves, candy, music, happy moms, smiling dads yakking on cell phones, everyone well dressed. If there was an image that was the opposite of the Vietnam War, or any war—peace, prosperity, rejuvenation—this was it.

Cambodia was now a dusty memory of subdued chaos, and unlike Cambodians, who had tended to cling and softly importune, these Vietnamese were indifferent to me. They had other things to do.

That was my first impression. But the next night, while I was strolling back to my hotel on a busy street, a young man on a motorcycle pulled near me and said, "Mister, you want massage? You want girl? Nice girl?" and I knew that some things had not changed.

After that, many touts on motorbikes offered me women and massages, and seemed eager to whisk me away to be massaged, or perhaps mugged.