Paul Theroux - The Great Railway Bazaar

'About a month ago the VC hit it,' Dial said. 'They got six or seven of the passengers in an ambush. They stopped the train with a pillar of salt – then they started shooting.'

'Maybe we should forget it.'

'No, it's secure now. Anyway, I've got a gun.'

At breakfast the next morning, Cobra One – this was the code name of my American host in Saigon – told me that the Vietnam Tourist Board wanted to see me before I took the train to Bien Hoa. I said I'd be glad to pay them a visit. We were eating on the roof of Cobra One's large house, enjoying the coolness and the fragrance of the flowering trees. From time to time a low-flying helicopter paddled past, weaving between the housetops. Cobra One said there was going to be a big campaign to attract tourists to Vietnam. I suggested that the idea might be rather premature – after all, the war was still on.

'You'd never know it here,' said Cobra One's wife, Cobra Two. She looked up from her newspaper. Below us in the centre of the compound there was a swimming pool, set amidst flower beds and rows of palms. A far wall held a coil of barbed wire, but that only made it seem more like Singapore. There was a hedge of red hibiscus along the driveway and clusters of giant ferns, and a man in a yellow shirt raking the gravel paths under the laburnum trees. Cobra Two, striking in her silk robe, kicking a furry slipper up and down, and rattling Stars and Stripes, said, 'Some of the best – hey, what hemisphere is this?'

'Eastern,' said Cobra One.

'Right. Some of the best lays in the eastern hemisphere are right in this compound.'

The office of the Director of Planning of the Commission for Vietnam Tourism was decorated in red velvet from floor to ceiling, and there were ribbons on the margins of the walls. We seemed to be sitting in an empty box of expensive chocolates. I said I didn't have much time, since I was going to take the train to Bien Hoa. The Director of Planning and the Deputy Commissioner exchanged uneasy glances. Vo Doan Chau, the Director, said the train was in bad shape – what I should do, he said, was to take a car to Vung Tau and go swimming. 'Vietnam is famous for its beaches,' he said.

Famous for its beaches! 'And much else,' I was going to say, but Tran Luong Ngoc, the American-trained Deputy Commissioner, launched into the explanation of the campaign. They were going all-out for tourists, he said, and they had devised a publicity gimmick that could not fail, the Follow Me! scheme. Posters were being printed showing pretty Vietnamese girls in places like Danang, Hue, and Phu Quoc Island, and the slogan on the posters would be follow me! These posters (pleiku -follow me!, dalat – follow me!) would be sent all over the world, but most of the campaign money would be spent to encourage tourists in the United States and Japan. Mr Ngoc gave me a stack of brochures with titles like Lovely Hue and Visit Viet-Nam, and he asked me if I had any questions.

'About these beaches,' I said.

'Very nice beaches,' said Mr Ngoc. 'Also woods and greenery.'

4Vietnam has everything,' said Mr Chau.

'But the tourists might be a bit worried about getting shot,' I said.

'Noncombat areas!' said Mr Ngoc. 'What to worry about? You're travelling around the country yourself, no?'

'Yes, and I'm worried.'

'My advice to you,' said Mr Ngoc, 'is don't worry. We expect many tourists. We think they will be Americans, and maybe some Japanese. The Japanese like to travel.'

'They might prefer to go to Thailand or Malaysia,' I said. 'They have nice beaches, too.'

'They are so commercialized,' said Mr Chau. 'They have big hotels and roads and crowds of people. They are not very interesting – I have seen them. In Vietnam the tourists can go back to nature!'

'And we have hotels,' said Mr Ngoc. 'Not five-star hotels, but sometimes air-conditioned or electric fan. Minimum comfort, you can say. And we have that bungalow, built for President Johnson when he visited.

It could be turned into something. We don't have very much at the moment but we have plenty of scope.'

'Plenty of scope,' said Mr Chau. 'We will appeal to their curiosity – people in America. So many had friends or relatives in Vietnam. They have heard so much about this country.' Sounding distinctly ominous he said, 'Now they can find out what it is really like.'

Mr Ngoc said, 'Places like Bangkok and Singapore are just commercial. That's not interesting. We can offer spontaneity and hospitality, and since our hotels aren't very good we could also appeal to the more adventurous. There are many people who like to explore the unknown. Then these people can go back to the States and tell their friends they saw where this or that battle was fought – '

'They can say, "I slept in the bunker at Pleiku!'" said Mr Chau.

There were really two selling points, the beaches and the war. But the war was still on, in spite of the fact that nowhere in the forty-four-page booklet entitled Visit Viet-Nam was fighting mentioned, except the oblique statement, 'English [language] is making rapid progress under the pressure of contemporary events', which might have been a subtle reference to the American occupation and perhaps to the war. At that time – December 1973 -70,000 people had been killed since the cease-fire, but the Commission for Vietnam Tourism was advertising Hue (a devastated city of muddy streets, occasionally shelled) as a place of 'scenic beauty… where historic monuments, yards and porticoes bear the mark of its glorious past', and urging visitors to Danang to travel six miles south of the city to see 'brilliant stalactites and stalagmites', not mentioning the fact that there was still fierce fighting in that very area, where gunmen hid in the grottoes near Marble Mountain.

Before I left the office, Mr Chau took me aside. 'Don't go to Bien Hoa by train,' he said.

I asked him why.

'That is the worst train in the world,' he said. He was embarrassed that I should want to take it.

But I insisted, and, wishing him well with his campaign to attract tourists to the battlefields, I set off for the station. There is no sign on Saigon Station, and, though I was perhaps fifty feet away from it, no one in the area knew where it was. I found it purely by chance, cutting through an Air Vietnam ticket office, but even when I got on the platform I was not sure it was the railway station: there were no passengers and no trains at the platform. The train, it turned out, was a short distance up the line, but it was not due to leave for twenty minutes. The carriages were battered green boxes, some wooden (with protruding splinters) and some metal (with dents). The seating arrangements, a narrow bench running along the walls of the carriage, were neither comfortable nor convenient, and most of the passengers were standing. They smiled, clutching their very discouraged ducks and chickens and their cruelly sunburned half-American infants.

There was another even older train parked on the far side of the yard. Attracted by the wrought-iron railings on the porches – a French feature of the car – I sauntered over. I climbed into this semiderelict train and heard a sharp howl of complaint. A girl jumped up two cars away (I saw her figure framed by the broken doors) and pulled on a pair of jeans. Then I saw a boy fussing with his clothes. I started off in the opposite direction and ran into two sleeping heroin addicts, both pimply girls with tattoos and needle scars on their arms. One woke and shouted at me. I hurried away: there were other lovers on the train, and children, and menacing-looking youths poking through the cars. But the train had no engine: it wasn't going anywhere.

The stationmaster, wearing a plastic-visored cap, crossed the track, waving to me. I hopped out of the derelict train and went over to shake his hand. Laughing sheepishly, he explained that it was not this train that was going to Bien Hoa but that one, and he pointed to the line of bulging boxcars. I headed for one of the cars and was about to swing myself up when the stationmaster called out, 'No! No!'