Bound for Vietnam Read Online Free PDF

each side fairy lights glowed that came closer together later as the river narrowed. It was very pretty, but I would rather have been asleep. At five there was a knock on the door. The young biologist had been brought by an officer to tell me to be ready to disembark at half past. We were to be escorted off first. My VIP status had now rubbed off on my two friends. More embarrassment! We three sat in the empty dining room watching the sun slowly turn the sky pink and light the buildings and ships that we slipped past.
    At six o’clock we passed under the suspension bridge and edged up to the dock. My bags were carried off the ship by a steward and with the help of my friends I was bundled into a taxi.
    I went to the Pujiang, the hotel I had stayed at on my previous visit to Shanghai. Here there was, as usual, no room at the inn. I left my bags in their care and went next door to the Shanghai Mansions for a very expensive, and meagre, breakfast. But I had the unmitigated pleasure of watching a family of four Chinese struggle to use knives and forks to eat their bacon and eggs. These were the first eating irons I had seen in a long while. The family held a piece of cutlery in each fist and tried to pick up their food as though they were tongs – a messy and not very successful operation. Meanwhile behind me there was a familiar slurping noise, which I took for granted to be a Chinese enjoying his gruel, until I discovered it came from an underwater vacuum cleaner that was being used to clean out the fish tank.
    Returning to the Pujiang to wait for a room, I sat in the foyer and chatted to an Australian couple who had two delightful kids in tow. After an hour they left seeking beds elsewhere, but I persisted in my vigil until after checkout time at twelve noon when I was told that there were no spaces in four-bed rooms. I was asked if I would take a single room instead. Would I what! The existence of this rare phenomenon had always been hotly denied in the Pujiang. I had been told that they never had any, not now, not ever. But the last time I had been here, only a few weeks ago, they’d had a restaurant serving breakfast. Now all knowledge of dining rooms and food was refuted, but the single room had appeared. I gave up on this puzzlement. Perhaps the restaurant had been converted into single rooms.
    My room turned out to be located on a floor way up in the Gods that must have been the former servants’ quarters. The lift and grand staircase ended at the fifth floor below it and from there you ascended a set of dark, steep stairs to the attic. I imagined the ghosts of weary maid-servants trudging up these stairs late at night.
    Most of the rooms on my floor were empty, but it was a good thing I did not have a lot of company. The polished wooden boards creaked and shook when anyone walked, or thundered, down the passage past my door. I turned on the television. The picture was heavily frosted, but Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev were dancing ‘Swan Lake’. Later it produced Dan Daily and Ernest Borgnine sprouting high-pitched, choppy Mandarin in a 1950s Hollywood musical extravaganza. I eventually worked out how to get the desk lamp to stay on. It only functioned when the switch was placed alongside the cupboard and the table squeezed up against it.
    One drawback to living in the attic was that the bathroom I had to use was three flights of stairs down on the third floor. I had to dash back up the main staircase with dripping hair, clutching my dressing gown and sponge bag to my chest as I passed respectably clad people going out for the day. The bathroom, in an annexe off the side of the building, was a dingy old square room covered all over in white tiles and with drainage holes in the floor that made it look like a gas chamber. The floor sloped away a good four inches as though the annexe was sliding down the outer wall. It felt as though I was still on the ship. Ancient pipes ran down the walls to two antique taps