My Most Terrifying Night As A Backpacker

I had a couple of skin-tingling, risky experiences in the beautiful country of Vietnam. Some by total misfortune and some that could have been easily prevented. In true karmic style this was by far my most terrifying and also the most preventable brush with danger, so please bear in mind that I am in no way dissing Vietnam when I tell this story! In fact it'll be pretty clear who I'm dissing as you read on...

My adopted travelling family and I had been in the coastal city of Nha Trang for a little less than a week, and in typical backpacker style had picked up some new friends - a couple from Australia. It always amazes me how easy it is for people to bond over the coincidence of bumping into each other a few times when you're on the other side of the world. Looking back, that's exactly how I ended up dating an investment banker with no soul and a terrible fashion sense in Thailand - you seek out something, anything you recognise and cling to it for that warm, fuzzy feeling of comfort... Or maybe I was just dumb at the age of 18, who knows.

We’d bumped into this rowdy couple at the awesome Vinpearl Land water park and again on several other day trips, so decided it was time for our first night out drinking together.

We all ended up at a pretty nondescript bar near the beach, and set about getting completely trollied. The more pissed we got the more dispersed we became, so I don’t think anybody noticed that the couple had left the bar - I certainly didn't. Until, that is, they arrived back and proceeded to scream their Aussie heads off. Turns out they had gone for a walk and a Vietnamese guy on a motorbike had done a bit of drive-by pickpocketing, sticking his hand in the girl’s pocket and nicking some money.

Now would be a good time to explain that in Vietnam there's what’s called a ‘motorbike mafia’. From my understanding, it’s basically groups in cities across Vietnam that band together and rip off tourists with incredibly unsophisticated but surprisingly effective schemes, e.g. offering drunk backpackers a ride to their hostel, but first stopping at an ATM and making them withdraw everything in their bank account.

Actually on my first night in Vietnam nobody had told me or my friends about these Robin Hood-esque gangs, so we stupidly wandered back from a bar with absolutely no idea where our hostel was. We came across a group of women with bikes - a few started talking to the guys I was with to distract them while the rest literally circled around me and grabbed my hands, “aaah pretty rings, very pretty hands”. More compliments than I ever got from the investment banker BUT IT'S FINE, I'M NOT BITTER.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of them dart behind me towards my bag, and realised what was going on. A pretty good crack at a mugging to be fair to them. Thank God, a taxi driver pulled up next to us at that very second and we jumped in. Only then did we understand what had happened when our knight in shining armor went on an angry rant in broken English, the gist of it being “fuck the motorbike mafia!”. Gulp.

Back to the bar in Nha Trang.

So the Aussie couple arrive back absolutely fuming, very, very drunk and, oh perfect, there happen to be some guys on motorbikes hanging around on the street out front. You can probably see where this is going. We all saw where it was going. Everyone but the couple saw where it was going. The girl starts screaming at them, and the guy starts screaming about them, announcing to the bar that they’re part of the mafia and they stole his girlfriend’s money.

Despite us trying to calm them down and shut them up, this carried on for quite a while, with the Vietnamese men just silently staring back with the most pissed off expressions you can imagine. This was going in a very dodgy direction.

I get the couple’s point of view; somebody had just stolen from them in such a blatant way, and I would be angry too especially if I was drunk. But you just can’t do that in South East Asia. You can’t shout at people in public, and you can’t cause a local to lose face. It’s a cultural thing that everybody should know before they travel there, and it also applies to haggling. Do it with a smile, or don’t do it at all. So to be honest, I see what happened next as being their fault. Remember how I said you'd know who I was dissing in this story...

The tension peaked as one of the mafia guys threw a beer bottle onto the pavement which smashed around the couple’s feet. Seeing that the situation had gone beyond repair, my boyfriend and I decided we couldn’t let them walk home alone, and so stayed with them until the bar closed and we were forced out. It was at this point we realised that our other friends had already disappeared home, and we had been left alone with them.

As soon as the four of us had made it down the street and around the corner, we heard a bike pull up behind us.

I remember the next bit happening in slow motion: looking around to see a man on the back of the bike jump off, swinging a baseball bat.

We ran, kicking off our flip flops and feeling the adrenaline of real, genuine danger coursing through us for the first time in our sheltered lives. He followed. I was just a few paces in front when he managed to smack the Aussie boyfriend in his back with the bat. I’m not sure at what point the girl decided that she didn't value life all that much and to run in a different direction, but suddenly her boyfriend realised and turned around, running back towards the man chasing us to look for her...

We carried on running, until my boyfriend came back down to earth and jumped over a massive sun umbrella that blocked an outside restaurant’s entrance, quickly squeezing me through from the other side. The owner, a sweet and incredibly confused old man came out, obviously wondering why two sweaty, panicked white kids had broken into his restaurant.

We mimed our way through the language barrier and thought he understood, until we heard a motorbike pull up outside and he went out to investigate.

We peeped our heads out from behind the umbrella... the driver was the same man who had thrown the beer bottle at our friends’ feet.

Not noticing our grimacing faces, the kind old man mimed that the driver was offering us a lift back to our hotel, and we should tell him where we were staying. “NOPE, NOPE THAT’S FINE. NO MOTORBIKE” we said while giving the old man ‘shut up you’re going to get us mutilated’ eyes, until he finally understood and shooed the driver away. Bless him, he got us some water and let us sleep across his restaurant chairs lined up in a row until it was morning.

I woke up with a water blister the size of an acorn on my arm from sunburn the day before, my boyfriend realised he had ripped his shorts open whilst jumping to safety, and we were both covered head to toe in mosquito bites.

Walking back to our hotel we passed the same motorbike gang hanging out on the side of the road, and all made silent, meaningful eye contact. We decided it was best to leave the city. As soon as possible. Which we did later that day.

For anyone who is wondering what happened to the Australian couple, we also bumped into them the next day as we walked past them having breakfast like nothing had happened.

"G'day guys, yous two look like bloody Shrek! Where ya been?".

I didn’t ask them how they got away from the men, or refresh their memories of what we had done for them the night before. I was so thrilled to turn around and walk away from them that it just didn't matter anymore.

The reason this story isn't aimed at dissing Vietnam - although it easily could be - is because as I said at the beginning, the whole thing was avoidable. The moral of the story is not to avoid adventure, culture shock or meeting new, crazy people. The moral of this story is DON’T BE AN IDIOT. Don’t get too drunk if you know you’ll make bad decisions, don’t be culturally insensitive, and don’t lead a night into such chaos that I wake up looking like Shrek the next morning. I won’t appreciate it.