Ha Tien - 1 - Arrival

Ha Tien is a frontier-town. A stepping-stone. A go-between. It sits at the western edge of Southern Vietnam where the Mekong River opens its mouth out onto the sea. Northwest, across the bridge and through the town, is Cambodia, a twenty minute drive on bike. Or else go west across the Gulf of Thailand and you will come to Phu Quoc, an island popular with tourists for its palm tree resorts and white beaches. Coming there you come from the Northeast, leaving Ho Chi Minh City, or you make your way down along the villages and towns that populate the Mekong Delta. You arrive in Ha Tien and you go one way or the other. You do not come to stay.

We arrived there on the night bus from Ho Chi Minh at 4.30am, three hours earlier than scheduled. We were woken from our sleep, tapped on our legs, told to get up, get off – ‘Ha Tien! Ha Tien!’ I had slept an hour or two, Sofie three or four. The sun hadn’t yet risen.

We stood for a while as some of the other passengers got taxis, or lifts on mopeds into the town – the bus station was a little way out. We had no hotel reservation, and no hotels wold be open this time anyway. We sat at a bus station café that was still, or perhaps already, serving and bought a pot of green tea. Too sugary, always. Sofie fell asleep. A Frenchman on the table to our right babbled to himself occasionally and drank his coffee. I drank the tea and smoked a cigarette and watched the sun begin to colour the sky.

We had arrived in Ha tien with three days left on my visa. The Lonely Planet entry for the town was limited: ‘Ha tien is certainly on the map’. The sights: a couple of nearby beaches, some temples, the sea and 'Pirate Island', a speck with a sordid history sitting just a little way out. 

The sun remained obscured by the tree line but the air was bright. The sky had shifted from darkened pink to powder blue and the greens had grown bolder. It was 6.00am. Sofie woke up. We decided to get a lift into town to the Hai Van hotel – cheap and ‘somewhat featureless’. We asked one of the people loitering with his bike nearby if we could get a lift. He called his friend over and they both loaded our bags on to the fronts of their vehicles and we climbed onto the back and they drove us into town.

Our journey was all of five minutes. We passed over roads scarred with cracks and holes running through the cheap cement. We passed the town’s grey hospital that looked abandoned at a passing glance, and we passed over the bridge over the Mekong River and through clouds of dust and the traffic and through the town.

When we arrived at the Hai Van Hotel a girl who looked in her mid-twenties stood behind the desk in her pyjamas. We asked her if we could get a room and she yawned and fetched an older woman who took our money and checked us in. The girl in her pyjamas led us upstairs to our room and gave us our keys. We dropped our bags, fell into bed and slept.