As I write this, in an underground food court in Ho Chi Minh city targeted at Western tourists sceptical of the banh mi purveyors on the streets above, the world is worrying about one thing: the C who must not be named — coronavirus.
The World Health Organisation has just declared the outbreak a pandemic. From Sydney to London, panicked shoppers are stocking up on canned goods, soap, and — famously — toilet paper. And they’re not exactly wrong to be alarmed: by all accounts, the laissez-faire attitude adopted by many Italians towards the virus has proved inadvisable, as millions of people have been forced into quarantine in the north of the country.
Meanwhile, here in this food court, a man sneezes, and a ripple of alarm washes tangibly over the room.
I didn’t plan it like this. When I first booked my flights, returning to the UK after a year in New Zealand, the men of the moment were Boris and Trump: Boris then Trump, Trump then Boris— twin stars orbiting one another in a cycle of endless blunder. The word 'coronavirus' was about as frequently Googled as 'Patrick Stewart’s haircare routine’, and so the notion of breaking up my semi-circumnavigation of the globe with a couple of stopovers — one in Australia, the other in Vietnam — seemed like plain sense.
Subsequently, the COVID-19 story has gone on to dominate the global conversation in a manner not seen since we found out Dumbeldore was gay. Were I booking my flights now, I would likely have avoided East Asia entirely, and headed straight home.
As it stands, after reading the government’s official stance on visiting Vietnam, I decided to go ahead with my trip. So I’m here now, and, believe it or not, so are other Westerners, albeit fewer than I have seen on previous excursions to South East Asia.
When I visited Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia at the end of 2018, visibly non-Eastern folk made up anywhere from 5% to perhaps 30% of the people I’d pass on the street. The figure varied depending on the location in question —it was a lot higher in Chiang Mai, for instance, than in Hsipaw, Myanmar — but in any reasonably developed settlement one could expect to run into Westerners relatively often.
Here in Ho Chi Minh — a bustling metropolis of over 13 million people — it does feel like the Europeans, the North Americans, and the Oceanians have retreated somewhat. They’re here, but only in any noticeable concentration around specific tourist sites — museums, temples, bar strips, etc. Elsewhere, when travelling between these little islands of tourism, I am regularly the only non-Vietnamese face.
But what of the locals? Many of the faces rushing by on the river of motorcycles which flows through Ho Chi Minh’s streets are clad in surgical masks, but at least equally as many are not. Tubs of hand sanitizer sit on the counter of most cafés, free to use. People noticeably avoid opening doors with their hands.
Signs tied between trees in the parks order people not to spit in public spaces — though it’s hard to say if this is a preventative measure to stop the spread of COVID-19 or just an attempt on the government’s part to eliminate a habit. In restaurants and public bathrooms, posters remind us to wash our hands for 20 seconds.
When I checked into my hotel, a laminated sign on the desk informed guests that Chinese tourists would not be allowed to book a room. To be honest, it would be a miracle if any of them made it that far — at every step of the process of flying from Sydney to Ho Chi Minh, from check-in to boarding the plane, I was asked if I had been to China, Italy, Korea, or Iran recently. At passport control, an official scoured every page of my passport, searching, presumably, for any sign that I had been in a hotspot.
Before I was allowed into Vietnam, I had to fill out a form outlining where I had been, where I would be staying in Vietnam, and whether I had any symptoms. So, too, did every other person on my flight, and another flight which landed within minutes of ours. The result was a queue of maybe 500 people, waiting in line for a team of three young men to enter the details of our handwritten forms into a database. I could not help but wryly suspect that, had anyone in that mass of frustrated travellers been carrying COVID-19, by the end of the ordeal, we would all be infected.
Still, we got through it. And, as observed previously, here I am. Despite all the strangeness, the constant hand scrubbing and the overwhelming awareness of just how often I long to touch my face, life, it seems, goes on.
Perhaps I will eat my words, and in a few weeks or months the world will be halfway down the plughole. Perhaps the worst will come to pass; perhaps I will contract the virus myself — I still have a tense few hours' layover in Beijing airport to come, during which time I plan on subsisting on a single breath of air.
But, I have to say, despite the media frenzy going on, life here on the ground seems remarkably uninterrupted. Backpackers are still wandering around, avoiding the calls of “Hello, massage!” from enthusiastic masseuses; middle-aged travellers, steaming and pink, still lounge about in bars in the muggy midday heat, sipping on golden pints.
We’re all still here, doing whatever we tourists do. We’re all just keeping our distance that little bit more.
As for me, I’m getting out of the city. Not for any reason other than that it’s muggy and crowded here, and I would like to go to the beach, and then the mountains, which I have heard are quite beautiful in this part of the world. I shall be sure to pack my soap.
