The Ho Chi Minh Trail

The second time I got into a four-by-four in the name of television I was at least up to speed on the correct title of the show. Forewarned is forearmed. This time my companion was the effortlessly brilliant Dame Liza Tarbuck. Instead of it being a Boorman-esque pairing (me soliloquizing about Bandura’s socialization theory and he about the latest tweaks to the BMW series 3 engine), we bonded over the fact we both love Diana Ross and both like behaving like four-year-olds.

I’m pretty sure we are the first women ever to have self-driven the Ho Chi Minh trail. I know we are the first women to have done it singing ‘Love Hangover’ the entire way. When the film was wrapped, I can only imagine the hell endured by the editors, picking their way through endless loops of poorly harmonized 70s disco with inane interjections about the landscape. I imagine the soundtrack in that cutting room went something like this.

Me/Liza:	Ah, if there’s a cure for this
	I don’t want it. [Ooh look there’s a pig on the back of that motorbike.]
	Don’t want it.
	If there’s a remedy
	I’ll run from it, from it. [Christ, it’s hot – got any sunblock?]
	Think about it all the time [Mind that water buffalo!]
	Never let it out of my mind
	’Cause I love you.
	I’ve got the sweetest hangover [If you had to sleep with one of the researchers, which one would it be?]
	I don’t wanna get over.
	Sweetest hangover …

As opposed to my trip to Alaska, I couldn’t tell you where I went. Not a Scooby. It was like a magical mystery tour, but with the word ‘magical’ replaced with ‘breathtakingly unhygienic’ and ‘morally questionable’. At no point were we shown a map or given directions or provided with any information that could have pinpointed our location. As a result, I can tell you everything that happened, I just can’t tell you where it happened.

Liza and I would punctuate the tedium of endless driving with games – the finest of which was the Water Buffalo Game. This involved driving into a massive, wet, freshly laid buffalo turd and seeing how heavily you could saturate the driver-side camera in shit.

I told you – four-year-olds.

This meant that when it came to viewing the footage back in London, the editor of the B camera had to listen to us singing ‘Love Hangover’, punctuated occasionally by a flying wet dung-ball smacking into the camera. I like to think it’s the video of the track that Diana always wanted to make but was too creatively blocked to realize.

One day, while travelling through the tiny village of I HAVE NO IDEA, Liza was at the wheel and spotted a ripe beanbag-shaped pile of fresh manure in the road ahead. This was around the same time I spotted, from the passenger seat, a young schoolboy, in pristine uniform, walking alongside us. Liza steered right, and before I could say anything, she had squarely hit the shit.

Liza:	[roaring with pride] Bull’s eye!
Me:	Oh God …

In the rear-view mirror we catch sight of the schoolboy, dripping with wet cack.

Liza:	[bellowing] I am so so sorry!
Me:	We’re not all like that!

In fact, we are – we are all like that.

Though technically a road trip, this adventure turned out to be more of a tour of Asian brothels. Whether the BBC budget was tight, or the production company had spent all the money on GoPros and other camera gadgetry, I don’t know. What I do know is that night after night we stayed in rooms that wouldn’t have looked out of place in The Human Centipede 2.

In the first hotel (definitely a brothel) there was a six-inch gap under my bedroom door. Every hour, on the hour, I’d hear a knock, followed by a thick smoker’s cough and a muttering in I DON’T KNOW WHAT LANGUAGE. Each time I would wake up, shout ‘No thank you!’ in my loudest, poshest voice, then try to bank another sixty-minute kip before it happened all over again.

The room was dank. In the corner, by the open-plan toilet area, stood a black Biffa bin full of stagnant water. Mosquitoes scudded across the surface. I studied it for a while. I was new to Asia and Asian sanitary ware – what on earth was it there for? Eventually I decided it was a kind of makeshift plunge pool, so stripped off, climbed onto a chair and then plopped inside.

Insects nibbled my shoulders. I sluiced then dragged myself out again.

At 5 a.m., after the regular punctuation from wannabe punters, I woke again – this time to a frenzied squawk, followed by silence, then a pool of blood running under the door towards the bed. It was obviously cock o’clock.

An hour later I got up for breakfast. As always when away from home, I had the vegetarian option – a cloudy soup with morning glory and garlic. Delicious. Delicious right up to the point I drained the bowl and found a chicken’s foot bobbing around at the bottom. ‘For texture,’ said the woman serving.

As we were packing up our things, I muttered over to Liza, who seemed to be trying to get GPS on her phone,

Me:	Interesting bathing scenario …
Liza:	What d’you mean?
Me:	Last night. You know – the bath …
Liza:	What bath?
Me:	That massive bin with the scoop in it.
Liza:	You mean the toilet water? The water to flush the toilet with?

I swallow very hard.

Me:

Yeah. Yeah, that water – the toilet water. Yeah.

You learn fast in Asia.

I have become very familiar with these rooms over recent years – the black mould creeping up the wall, the overhead fan with exposed wiring, the air con that weeps stale water down the walls. The soundtrack is familiar too: the endless scuttle of roaches and geckos. Do you know that big geckos actually say ‘GECKO’? I didn’t, until one spent the entire night doing so right next to my pillow.

‘GECKO! GECKO!’

I thought it was Liza taking the piss, but when I turned on my head torch, I became aware of its enormous dry body scuttling around next to me.

Once we arrived at a hostel (brothel) in I DON’T KNOW WHERE, and the door to my room was locked. Finally a bloke came out, red and sweaty, followed by a young girl. The room smelled of sex and stress. Reception seemed most put out when I asked if they might be able to change the sheets. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t sleep at all.

At some of the out-of-town places prostitution is a family affair. The mother cooks the dinner, while the daughter stares at the diners and touts for business. It’s a dynamic that makes me very queasy, no matter how long I spend in Asia.

I think back on these nights and all I remember is thick heat and the listlessness that comes with it, plastic tables and chairs, the smell of fried garlic, the hum of a fridge full of Lao beer. The sound of men laughing at another table, possibly at you,

very possibly at you.

Several days into the shoot, and after a twelve-hour drive, we arrived at a hostel like the one in Hostel. Within minutes there was a power cut. It was the first time I remember being grateful for darkness – just so I wouldn’t have to see the inside of my room. As dawn broke, I woke to the sound of Liza knocking at my door. She had the focused mania of the truly sleep-deprived. She hadn’t slept a wink and one eye seemed larger than the other.

Liza:

Right! We’re leaving! We’re going home. I’ve been up all night studying the map and I think I know where we are.

She points to a red squiggle somewhere between Vietnam and Laos.

Liza:	If we get in the car and drive due west, we can get to a checkpoint and get out of here.
Me:	But what will we say?
Liza:	We’ll say we’ve been held prisoner by a documentary crew who won’t tell us where we are or what we’re doing and that we want to speak to the British embassy.

There’s a sudden noise from behind us. It’s Ian, the director.

Ian:

What are you doing, girls?

… he says to the two forty-something women in front of him. We jump.

Liza:	Nothing!
Me:	Nothing!
Ian:	Right, well, let’s get on then, shall we?

We hop into the car, ready for the off. The fan blasts hot air into our faces.

Me/Liza:

‘Don’t call a doctor, don’t call her momma, don’t call her preacher, no I don’t need it …’

We set off. The convoy ahead inched forward at a snail’s pace, then came to a halt. We craned our necks to see the cause of the delay. There, at the side of the road, was Ian, taking a piss. We stared at him. He carried on pissing, waving us on with his other hand. It really doesn’t get more dismissive than that.

From that moment on, the battle lines were drawn. Him versus us. Man versus perimenopause. Whenever he handed us some notes, or moved to direct us, or even give us a friendly pat on the back, the poor guy would hear a chorus of:

Both:

Is that your cock hand, Ian?

Because we were following the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the content of the show was naturally very WAR heavy. Everywhere we went, we were encouraged to discuss WAR and all things WAR related. The problem was, whereas the programme-makers might have been keen to talk WAR, the Vietnamese contributors (many of whom had served with the Viet Cong) weren’t. It was extraordinary. It was almost as if the conflict had never happened. The locals we met wanted to talk business, the future, the Western world. The Vietnamese were well and truly done with WAR.

But the Americans weren’t.

One of the interviews that stays with me most from that trip (sadly heavily edited for transmission) was one we did with a couple of guys who’d been in the Mistys – a US Air Force squadron tasked with disrupting Viet Cong supply lines along the HCM Trail during the war. Flying low, they would identify potential targets, then direct in fighter strikes. These men, now in their sixties, spoke with such emotion and such candour – a world away from the Top Gun cocks-out bravado we’re used to seeing on our television screens. There was no rootin’ or tootin’. No fist pumps. No ‘Yee-haw’. They were thoughtful and humble and more than once their eyes filled with tears as they told their story.

Every day these two men would set out in their planes. Their regular tour took them over a particular mountain top and thence down into the valley beyond. Every day, on that mountain top, they would see the same kid, in his teens, rifle in hand, on sentry duty for the Viet Cong. Every day they would look down at the kid, and the kid would look up at them. They saw each other at the beginning of each and every day, these sworn enemies, and yet, for months and months on end, they failed to fire upon each other. They could have blasted that kid off the rock. The kid could have fired a shot that punctured their fuselage and brought them down. They didn’t. He didn’t. Some telepathic agreement existed from the get-go – that one would not hurt the other. Every other plane, and every other man further down that valley, was fair game. That kid killed other pilots. Those pilots killed many, many other kids.

After the war ended some Mistys returned to Vietnam, not only looking for news of missing comrades but also, in a spirit of reconciliation, to meet those who had once been their targets. In the course of this, the two pilots came face to face with that boy on the hilltop. They learned about his family and about those he had loved who had not been so lucky in the face of the American arsenal. It was an emotional exchange. They still keep in touch.

That conversation brought home to me so clearly how heavily the Vietnam War hangs in the American psyche, and how lightly it is worn by the Vietnamese. For the Americans, I guess, it remains the unwinnable war, or at least it was until Afghanistan and Iraq exploded again.

Even though a map was never forthcoming, I do know that we passed from Vietnam into Laos the next day. I didn’t need a piece of paper to tell me that – the landscape did it for me. I have never experienced an atmospheric and visual change quite like the one that greeted me at the border – like two different worlds stitched together by nothing more than a makeshift barrier and a security kiosk. In crossing that line, we passed from revving motorcycles, shops and high-pitched chatter into an ancient land of peace and tranquillity. Buffalo wallowed in red mud at the side of the road. Dense forest stretched as far as the eye could see. Even the light was softer, clouded by the breath of the myriad trees beneath.

Laos is a land with a deep contradiction at its heart. Its enduring beauty is forged by horror. The reason the trees have not been felled in their millions, like they have in Vietnam, is that is unsafe to do so, due to the tons of unexploded ordnance that remain in the ground from the WAR. In essence, those exact same bombs are safeguarding the beauty of the natural environment. How screwed up is that?

We were joined at the border checkpoint by five government shadows, representatives of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, the only legal political party in the country. The head dude looked a little like Fu Manchu, but less jolly. He had grey pegs for teeth and zero laughter lines – I imagine because there had been no laughter in his branch of the LPRP. Ever.

As with their neighbours over the border, the Lao people don’t dwell on what has been. They are resilient and resourceful. Every village we visited had houses built on stilts. Those stilts were made from empty shell cases dropped from American war planes. On the roadside small teams of women with wicker baskets picked shrapnel from the bushes. To venture even a metre from the cleared track is to take your life in your hands. Only a week before, a family of four had been blown to smithereens while playing in the land at the back of their house only a stone’s throw from where we were passing.

We got out of the car on a whim and went to talk to the women. We wanted to know what that kind of exhausting and hazardous work felt like to do. As we approached, the government officials got out of their vehicles and approached them too. We asked the women a question. They waited for Fu Manchu to answer it. They repeated his answer, which was then translated for us.

They told us just how much they loved their work.

Despite constantly being around the props of WAR, none of these experiences had been especially dangerous, so the team decided to up the ante. This was, after all, as I had learned to my cost in Alaska, a show called The World’s Most Dangerous Roads. The next morning Ian informed us that were heading off to the Sepon Mine, where we’d shadow a private UXO (unexploded ordnance) clearance team.

Liza:	What’s going on?
Me:	Apparently we’ve got to go and stand on some bombs.
Liza:	He’s not giving up, is he?
Me:	Nope. He won’t stop until we’re actually dead.
Liza:	[pause] I don’t want to stand on bombs.
Me:	Neither do I.
Liza:	Well, I’m not doing it. I mean, I’m not Ross Kemp.

So Liza, rather wisely, opted to stay at the base of the mine, whereas Lady Schmuck here crawled up a vast pile of rubble to meet the head of the UXO team.

Me:	[breathless] So who is this guy anyway?
Ian:	He’s an ex-special forces Swede called Magnus.

I immediately perked up. Magnus is a name that automatically invokes excitement in me. I have never met an underwhelming Magnus. This Magnus certainly did not disappoint. He was eleven feet tall, cooler than a skinny dip in Naimakka and with a body that looked like a thousand hammers wrapped in velvet.

I noticed that whenever he got close, my skin flushed and my voice shot up an octave. Damn – what is it about us women? The more remote and unreachable a person is, the more we want to save them. And so the more stubborn Magnus was with his answers the more I fell into his sex web.

Me:	So, Magnus, where have you worked?
Magnus:	Everywhere. Everywhere that is hell. Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo. Sudan was the worst …

His eyes are trained on the ends of the earth as he speaks.

Me:	Do you get to go home much?
Magnus:	Home?
Me:	Yes.
Magnus:	Ha! [A single, mirthless laugh] I don’t really ever go home.

I bet you don’t, you damaged Nordic mega-hunk.

Magnus:

I have a cabin in the woods. It is very simple. Sometimes I return there. Alone.

[Take me there! Take me there, you nomadic, lost soul!]

Me:	Do you … do you not have a partner?
Magnus:	No. A wife. Once. But there is no room for love when you face death every day.

[I am in love with you! I am IN LOVE WITH YOU, you remote, disconnected mess of a man.]

Magnus:

But …

He holds the pause for what seems like minutes. I lean into him expectantly.

Me:	Yes?
Magnus:	I do have …
Me:	Yes … [I whisper breathlessly]
Magnus:	… a cat.

And with that our relationship is over.

Now the possibility of a romance had disappeared, I was far more able to focus on the job in hand. Magnus walked me up what appeared to be a mountain of aggregate. We then took a cordoned-off path to the left, overlooking a large depression in the ground.

I stared down.

It is one thing to read that Laos is the most bombed place on the planet (over two million tons of ordnance were dropped on it by the Americans during the Vietnam War); it is quite another to see it with your own eyes.

In the crater down below was one of the most depressing sights I’ve ever seen.

A small clearance team was painstakingly working, not only horizontally, across the ground, but vertically down to the horrors beneath. The first layer had revealed unexploded phosphorus bombs, pineapple ‘bombies’ and 250-pounders, the second layer 500-pounders, then, going deeper still, all the way to the vast 3,000-pounders. The scale of the work, and its grindingly slow and meticulous nature, was beyond imagination. Magnus stood at the top of the ridge and calmly informed me that approximately 25 per cent of Laos’s villages are still contaminated with unexploded devices from wartime raids, which rained death from the sky, on average, every eight minutes, twenty-four hours a day for nine years.

Ian looked pleased – he had got WAR chat – whereas I felt saddened to my core. For all the team’s hard work, it was clear this project was a mere drop in the ocean.

And, then, just at the very point I needed to laugh, I looked back down to see Liza staring up at me, holding a pillowcase she had just personalized with a felt-tip pen. It simply read, ‘I AM NOT ROSS KEMP.’

By now, Ian had figured that out of the two evils presenting themselves to him –

• spending another week with us lunatics
• serving time in an Asian prison for our murder

– the latter was preferable. Now that his plan to blow us up had failed, he decided that the next best thing was to drown us in a river. That morning we woke to find an old man in orange robes coughing on the steps of our hostel.

Me:	What’s he here for?
Ian:	A monk’s blessing.
Me:	Oh. What for?
Ian:	It’s D-Day.

I had no idea what D-Day involved, but it sounded like something I might want to get blessed for. Liza and I were duly seated on plastic chairs outside our rooms and wrapped casually in thin skeins of cotton by the monk’s second in command.

A large bucket of water was placed beside us.

The monk approached, hacking. His skin was like greaseproof paper. There was more muttering. We respectfully bowed our heads in prayer. Now was not the time for ‘Love Hangover’.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, the acolyte threw the entire bucket over us. And then, as soon as it had begun, the ceremony was over.

Me:	Do you think there was any element of the religious about that?
Liza:	It was like he was washing a step!

I got up. The water had fairly and squarely sluiced my groin, and nowhere else. I had a blessed vagina. Finally, I had a blessed vagina.

We spent the next hour in damp knickers, driving to the top of a hill. Below, a river raged. We drove down again until we arrived at its banks.

Laos river crossings are often perilous, as the riverbed can be uneven and pocked with bomb craters. Instead of the depth being consistent all the way across, you can find the rock from beneath giving way so you end up totally subsumed by water. The traditional way to undertake a river crossing by car or bike is always to walk it first, bamboo stick in hand, prodding into the murk beneath and gauging the depth. Only this way can you be sure that your car won’t sink into a surprise hole.

We stood at the water’s edge. It’s fair to say neither Liza nor myself was raring keen to take part in what amounted to an Asian wet T-shirt competition. I drew the short straw (again). I slowly waded into the current, stick in hand. To the left of me I could see villagers eviscerating a chicken, and seconds later its alimentary canal floated past me like a bloody question mark. I had barely gone three or four metres when my footing disappeared, and I was plunged in up to my neck. Our guides sat on the bank muttering and shaking their heads. Even Fu Manchu, our communist watchman, seemed keen that we proceed no further – unless the thumbs-down sign means something totally different in that part of the world.

Ian, however, sensed this had the potential to become a properly Dangerous Road and excitedly shouted encouragement from the bank. He finally had the chance to literally kill two birds with one stone.

I found my footing again, but a mere ten metres in my stick was spirited away by the current. I could feel the rip tugging at my shins. I pressed my toes into the wet rocks underneath to steady myself, but there was simply no way I could carry on without being swept downstream.

‘I can’t tell how deep it is out here!’ I yelled as I inched my way back to the safety of the bank. Ian said nothing, but simply stared at us. It felt a little like a dare. And, as you know, I can’t resist a dare.

‘Come on, let’s do this,’ I said in a voice not unlike that of Jason Statham.

Ian carried on staring, before lifting his arm and waving us on.

‘Is that your cock hand, Ian?’ we chimed in unison.

We slammed the doors shut. The engine purred into life.

‘Whatever happens,’ said Liza, brightly, ‘we laugh. OK? However bad it is, we just laugh and laugh.’

So we did.

Liza put the car into first, hit the biting point and then stepped hard on the accelerator. We launched into the water. First the tyres were slicked, then coated, then submerged. For a while it felt like they had no traction at all, and that we were merely floating. The water came up to the window on one side, but we kept on laughing – my hand on Liza’s hand like an aquatic Thelma and Louise. We laughed all the way until the tyres gained purchase again and we were safe on the other side. Fu Manchu’s face broke into a smile as he stared across. Thumbs up. Thumbs up. And on we went.

Me/Liza:	Ah, if there’s a cure for this
	I don’t want it [Do you think they use pigs as currency here?]
	Don’t want it.
	If there’s a remedy
	I’ll run from it, from it. [I don’t know where I’ve got it from, but I’ve got a terrible rash on my arse …]

Our go-to guy in Laos was a man called Huang, whose main contribution to the project came in the form of an unfeasibly giant tub of cashew nuts (hereafter known as Huang’s nuts). When I say giant – I mean, it was a foot-and-a-half Tupperware tube. You could lose your arm in there. After the endless inedible tangle of street noodles, they were a welcome change – although, as the week wore on, and the more nuts were eaten, the harder it was to get those remaining from the bottom. In the end you were mainly dredging up hard commas of other people’s skin and bacteria.

As we ventured further into the jungle, approaching I DON’T KNOW WHERE, the roads became skinny. The hills got steeper and the car grumpier. We made it to the outskirts of a tribal village, whereupon we got stuck in a giant pothole. The engine screamed as we tried to rev our way out of it, but the wheels were embedded in thick red clay. We got out and pushed, but our flip-flops sank deep in the goo. The tyre tracks filled with buffalo piss, with mozzies skating on the surface. In the end we had to get the government guys to help us back to some hardcore where the wheels could get purchase.

We puttered past the village – by the wooden stilt houses, a family of pot-bellied pigs, a cluster of chickens. As we left the clearing, the track became treacherous again and we slowed to a near standstill. Suddenly out of the forest came two men, bare-chested, skin gleaming, carrying baskets full of chicken guts. Both had large, sharp machetes in their hands. Liza was driving. They approached my side of the car. One raised his machete.

‘Hello, boys!’ roared Liza, who had not yet seen the machetes.

‘Oh God, help us,’ I muttered, because I had.

The men leaned through the open window into the car. I could smell fresh sweat. I could hear my heartbeat. Time to die.

And then, suddenly, the atmosphere changed, moving from proper peril to utter calm. The reason? Well, the two tribesmen had just caught sight of Liza’s breasts and were now transfixed by them. Why wouldn’t they be? They are, after all, the best breasts in show business.

‘So, lads … Huang’s nuts?’ she said breezily, proffering the deep tub of cashews.

Fifteen minutes later, after a lot of gawping, nodding and eating, we finally left. At our next pit-stop the producer sauntered over to us, somewhat surprised.

P:	Gosh, they were friendly!
Me:	What do you mean?
P:	Well when we came for the recce, they came after us with knives! We had to put our foot down and get out of there … didn’t think we’d make it!

Much to the disappointment of those around us, we completed the Ho Chi Minh Trail safely. We didn’t get blown up. We didn’t drown. We didn’t get macheted by rogue hill-tribe warriors. After another seven hours of driving, we hit a tarmacked road, and from there we cruised to GOD KNOWS WHERE. I do know that by now we were back in Vietnam, propelled by the promise of a final night’s sleep in a proper hotel. It had only been a fortnight and yet it seemed like an eternity since I’d slept on something that didn’t look like an exhibit in an episode of CSI Asia.

The spa hotel was brand new, with polished slate and waterfalls and stuff. I looked around – paranoid – for someone selling their body or their sister’s body or their daughter’s body. Nothing. I looked for mould on the wall. Nothing. I listened for the sound of blaring transistors or the scream of chickens. Nothing. Just the faint whisper of pan pipes and the light scrape of muslin on toned thigh as a receptionist walked past. If Kelly Hoppen did prisons, this was the sort of place they’d be. Incarcerated. In taupe.

I read through the list of treatments and chose their Vietnamese Massage, which was, apparently, ‘famous’. I was led into a cool room, where I peeled off my clothes and lay on a bed, face down, placing my head in what looked like a large cotton polo mint.

Two hands pressed either side of my spine.

Heaven.

Then four hands.

Interesting.

It didn’t matter.

Finally, a happy ending.