Trips and Travels

Minggu, 18 Juni 2017

Nikita and CuChi Tunnel Tour in HCMC

Y'ello folks!
It's almost 7 days to go to Eid Mubarak in 2017, Alhamdulillah I still do my fasting even though the weather is super hawt and I so want to eat ice cream in the mid of the day *no no, tak boleh!*
and now exactly at 11 pm, I am having this random thought about people or strangers whom I met during my travel. Some are my friend's friends, some are my friend's relatives, and some of them are totally stranger I met: on the train, on the plane, in the bus, on the road, etc.

I once told a brief story about meeting up with two strangers on a flight to Perth, one is a cute nerd Frenchie guy who studied Biology and the other one was an old guy whom suggested me to visit Mandurah (and I did!), and there are other rest I will talk about them later but for this chapter I will talk about a guy whom I met in the bus in Ho Chi Minh.

The story of a lonely blonde guy.


It was in February 2016, I visited HCMC with Rosita and we booked two tickets to Cu Chi Tunnel. We booked it in our travel agent in the ho(s)tel we stayed, pretty cheap for both of us as we were excited to join the tour to the post-vietnam war caves/tunnels!

At 7am in the morning, I wore my blue tank top and hot pants and ready to catch the bus. Rosita was prepared too, as she always wore her sneakers, and I forgot to bring my sneakers so I only wore my oxford shoes. Yes, oxford shoes. Rather too fancy to wear to have some adventure in Cu Chi Tunnel. While we were waiting for our bus, I was with two other German fellows whom I thought they would go to the tunnel as well, then nope, their destination was Hanoi (they took 16 hours van to Hanoi, crazy enough!).

Rosita and I were called by the bus driver then we hopped on. I didn't like to sit in the back so I sat in the second front row. Behind me, there was a skinny blonde guy, with glasses, looked like a nerd then smiled at me. I just smiled back, I didn't want to open the conversation as I was shy, so I'd better quiet. This blonde guy behind me seemed relax and alone and no one accompanied him whatsoever then I rather pitied. 

I looked outside the window, there were some other buses, passing by, and some random white guy looked at the opposite side and waved his hand and smiled at me. what? This Vietnam vibe probably a bit... in the mood for lust, hahha everyone seemed like in the mood to chuckle and flirt :p (or perhaps, being friendly?). Ten mins later, the guide, a young Vietnamese boy introduced himself and gave us instructions what to do's and dont's during our trip, and suddenly another guy jumped to our bus and sat close to this blonde guy, but he seemed reluctant as he saw a girl next to my seat sitting alone and he rather sat with that girl (oh boy is always be boy). I don't know why I was not that interested to his attitude but I admired a bit of his puzzle piece tattoo on his ankle (now you know how observant I am). When I was observing him (like a creep), he looked back at me and said, "Hi, good morning!" and I just replied, "good."

For about 20 minutes on the road, our bus stopped and five old couples jumped onto it. The funny thing is, the guide was kinda worried about the condition of the old couples so he asked us to move our seat, the blonde guy sat closed to the driver (he sat in the small and fragile seat) then Rosita and I moved to the back. We met with two girls, Jemma from Australia and Stacy from Phillipines. We talked a bit and mostly I was sleeping during the journey. We stopped in some craft shop and I was looking around a bit, but mostly I just needed the toilet. Our bus didn't start to move as we waited for one person whom hadn't entered our bus yet, and 15 minutes later.. there was that lonely blonde guy whom was the person! hahaha, he strolled very calmly and very innocent as he came into the bus. He'd not brought anything, just himself and small waist bag.

Finally, we arrived at Cu Chi Tunnel.

I jumped out from the bus and gave my high five to Rosita as somebody called me, "Hey, where are you from?"

I turned my head and it was that blonde guy who called me, "Oh I am from Indonesia, and you?"

"Oh Indonesia, I thought you were from Iran, haha. I am from Belarus"

"Belarus? Minsk?"

"Hey yeah, how do you know?"
 
"I am just guessing."

"and... Jakarta?"

"Nope, Surabaya. My name is Vera."

"Nikita."

"Gorbachev?"

"Hahaha, no, not that one" , he laughed and we had the friendly handshake .

Apparently, we belonged to the same group, he was quite adventurous as he tried almost any "challenges" in CuChi Tunnel. We tried the Vietcong's small hidden cave, and we went through it! omg, I couldn't really record the 'journey' that I did in the cave, it was pretty intense, super narrow and small cave and it was 100meters! so we needed to walk 100 meters in a dark and we almost couldn't breathe due to the lack of oxygen... it made me think how could the Vietcong soldiers survive in this kind of place? dayum.

I sweated a lot after getting passed through the tunnel. Nikita gave me high fives, and he started to ask me about stuff. He asked me about the muslim population in Indonesia as he was really interested in. I told him, I am a muslim and he suddenly asked me if I could speak Arabic. I said yeah, I am a passive Arabic, and in a sudden he tried to speak Arabic to me! what the heck?

I was super astonished. It was super cool to know that he could speak Arabic fluently. Then, he explained that he could speak 5 languages: Russian, English, Arabic, German, and Italian. He did his master in Parma, Italy and used to live in Jordania to master his Arabic. He was the man of culture, I thought so!

Our conversation was getting deeper as he questioned about my travel time and life in Indonesia particularly. In the bus, before we finished our trip, he asked me for a dinner together but I was too shy to say yes so we just said farewell without even exchange some contacts.

When I arrived at the hostel, I felt regretful a bit, it must have been a cool idea just to get to know some stranger and discuss and blabber about some deep shite about universe.

This story is dedicated to him, to Nikita, the Blonde Belarussian guy!
dude, wherever you are, I should have said yes to your offer and we could probably be bestfriend!