Yuko had asked me to go to Bui Vien with her so she could rent a scooter and if I could ride it home with her on the back. Two others came with us as they had the same plan. We got a taxi to our destination and decided on breakfast before anything else as we were pretty famished.
At the scooter rental place, Chi's Cafe, Yuko was rented a semi-manual scooter; it had gears, but no clutch. I had never ridden such a bike before and now I had to do it for the first time with a passenger and in Saigon traffic. Not to worry, how hard could it be.
When I first accelerated, the bike lurched forwards suddenly and violently. My gear changes were clunky and choppy but after a short while I kind of got the hang of it. We arrived back home without incident and all seemed well with the world until I realised I did not have my keys with me. We checked the house, I broke into my room, I called the place where we had breakfasted, checked the ground where we caught the taxi; nothing.
The only remaining possibility was that I left my keys in the taxi that took us that morning. Think about that for a moment; leaving your keys in a taxi, in Saigon. You would be forgiven for thinking it would be a lost cause and to just forget about getting them back, period. Not so!
For some reason, I took note of the taxi drivers name card on the way into town that morning. It was "Dang". Yuko and I went back to the taxi rank where we caught our cab from and tried asking some of the other drivers about Dang. One of them seemed to know his name and called over the lady who monitors all the taxi departure times and numbers down in her little book.
She pinpointed the time that we caught our taxi and we then conveyed to her with body language that I left my keys in the taxi. She seemed to understand and indicated for us to wait there and that the taxi would be back soon. A wave of relief came over me as I realised that I might get my house keys and scooter key back by some amazing chance. If we had not caught the taxi from a proper taxi rank, I think all would have been lost.
Yuko went back to check the house again, in case I had missed something when I looked previously; I remained and waited for Mr.Dang to return. While I was waiting, a group of four police arrived and setup a checkpoint about 20 metres away from me and began stopping people and "fining" them (read: taking bribes) for various road rule infractions.
Out the corner of my eye I noticed that the two other people we went with to hire the scooters were slowly rolling out into the street to start practising on their scooter. I ran over to them waving my arms to get their attention and warn them that the police were there fining people.
This may have been a bad move.
I returned to my waiting position and stood around. A short while later I notice one of the police riding slowly towards me on his motorcycle. He stops directly in front of me, gets off the bike, salutes me and removes his helmet. For some strange and cringe worthy reason, I thought he was being friendly to a foreigner so I saluted back.
He walks up to me and puts his face right in mine, about 15cm away and starts carrying on in Vietnamese. I do not understand a thing he is saying but he kept motioning towards his fellow police men and waving his hands in a "no" fashion. I did not know what to do, he just kept doing the same thing over and over, so I simply said "OK". This seemed to do the trick, as he turned, got on his bike and rode back to the checkpoint.
I am guessing that maybe he saw me warning the other two people about their presence and was not happy about it. Pretty stressful and slightly intimidating situation really. The taxi drivers and the taxi monitoring lady were all laughing at me after he left.
So eventually the taxi returned and I got my keys back. Hurrah! A happy ending to a stressful day.
Since I have no photos of anything I have mentioned so far, here is some of the food I have been enjoying recently.
Stay tuned for the next exciting episode!
No comments:
Post a Comment