Bureaucracy

Rain and flyovers and buildings of bad concrete tilting drunkenly against one another, and the demonic sparks of blue fire from the oil-black caverns of the welders’ shops. The bus rolled into Saigon.

I had given up. Ever since I tripped over the border somewhere in the middle of Vietnam’s drawn-out, emaciated torso I had been flailing hopelessly in the flow, battling against it, clinging desperately – and ill-temperedly – at passing branches, tying to haul myself onto unto banks and sandspits.
I had never been to a country like it. Tourism was stupendously regimented: a neat, army-ant column of foreign visitors trailing compliantly along the country’s narrow strip of road and rail, from designated stop to designated stop. It made no difference whether they were be-backpacked and braided or wore chinos and panama hats: all followed the same route in the same way.
I like to get to the bus station and find the correct bus myself, but it didn’t work in Vietnam. I realised something was wrong when the bus boy on the first battered minibus I caught down the coast to Hue demanded my fare in US dollars. And from then at every yellow-dirt public bus station, on every rattling public bus they first looked at me askance, and then asked me double, triple, quadruple the true fare – as often as not in US dollars. This, quite simply, was not the way you were expected to travel in Vietnam.
I headed south in the rain and my mood worsened. I met other tourists with nothing but good to say about Vietnam; about its elegantly decrepit cities, its charming people, its food. They were collected from the doorstep of their budget guesthouses by air-conditioned tourist minibuses, booked by the desk clerk the night before, and deposited some hours later at the sister establishment of the same guesthouse in the next city along the coast. Then they booked the budget tour to the village, or waterfall, or beach or palace, or whatever it may be, and they loved Vietnam.
I scowled, and grumbled snobbishly, unwilling to concede the very obvious fact: they were approaching Vietnam in the right way; I had it horribly wrong.
But by the time I reached Dalat, with its thin pines and cold rain and rust-red tin roofs and strawberries, I had had enough. I booked a ticket on a tourist shuttle bus from a travel agent and rolled down through the damp gunpowder grey of the morning to Saigon. The bus dropped me on the pavement right outside a budget guesthouse in the backpacker ghetto. Without a word of protest I stepped through the door and took the first room they showed me.
I wanted to go to Cambodia; everyone wanted to go to Cambodia. There were cafes and agents selling trips to the Mekong Delta, tours to the Cu Chi tunnels, tours of the city, transport to the border. But first I needed a Cambodian visa.

***

It was bitterly cold in Darjeeling in February. The whole town spilt from the razorback of a high ridge in the high hills, and looked as though it could slide free, down into the stony valley at any moment.
The sky was grey and empty and there were hawkers on the ladder-steps of the bazaar selling second-hand woolly jumpers and bobble hats from piles on the pavement. There was a smell of woodsmoke over all the tilting, crumbling eaves of the bungalows, and the monkeys sat on the slanting tin roofs sulkily hunching their shoulders against the chill. Everyone walked with their hands deep in their pockets and the Tibetan soup with thick noodles from the little cafes near the jeep-stand tasted fabulous. Only once, in the earliest morning when the rough concrete floor in the little bathroom of the guesthouse was so cold it burnt the soles of my feet through my threadbare socks, did the far-high massif of Kanchenjunga show, the colour of poached salmon, floating over long strips of white haze.

It was necessary to get a permit to go to Sikkim. First I had to walk downhill, back and forth through the switchbacks of the alleyways below the Mall. There was no wind at all, and no sun, and you could hear every noise, every clatter of hooves every crunch of a land rover’s gear change, every cackle of voices from the bazaar, very, very clearly.
On the edge of town, where the pine trees thickened a little before the slopes poured away down to the cool-stubbled tea gardens, was the District Magistrate’s Office. It was a fine old building of peeling white clapboard and broken guttering. The windows were jammed shut from a century of white gloss paint and there was moss on the doorstep. Inside it was full of offices of mouldering bundles of paper and men with moustaches and scarves and scratched desks.
In the District Magistrate’s office they gave you your form. Then you had to scramble back up through the gutter-alleys and step-flights and uphills of the bazaar, past the hawkers with their mounds of winter clothes, past the jeep-stand and under the white dormers of the old hotels beneath the pine-ridges to the Foreigners’ Registration Office. The building stood in a crook of the hillside where it was colder than anywhere.
The office was dark and ancient, and the light came in milky and pale from the high old window. There were dusty typewriters and sheaves of old yellow documents. There was a smell of tea and paraffin and the floorboards creaked underfoot. The clerks sat at their old desks with scarves bound up over their mouths and hats pulled down over their ears and coarse blankets over their shoulders. Their breath steamed in the still, dust-cut air of the room. There was a fire in a broken grate in the dark corner. It crackled, as if the air was too thin for it truly to breathe.
The clerks fumbled with my form in their fingerless gloves and stamped and signed where stamps and signatures were needed, then I walked back into the still, stinging air of the town, back down the hill, past the hawkers and the land rovers, back to the District Magistrates office. And they gave me my permit.

It was cold in Skardu too – far to the west along the same mountain range – colder than it should have been this early in the autumn. When I got back to town from Khapalu the grey murk that had swum along the hard ridge beyond the Indus cleared suddenly and there was new snow far down the mountainsides.
Skardu lay where the vast torment of mountains had drawn breath for a moment and let the great grey river stretch itself into a plain of grey gravel. But it was still a place hemmed in: there was no way out of here that didn’t mean hundreds of miles of travel along crack-platforms of broken road carved from sheer cliff faces above churning water.
I needed a visa extension.

The Deputy Commissioner’s office was on a grey hillside on the eastern edge of Skardu. From the scrappy gravel yard outside you could see the slanting sprawl of the town in its bed of thinning polar trees, and the grey gouge of the floodplain beyond.
The Deputy Commissioner had just taken over the post. He saw me personally in his carpeted office. There was an embossed coat of arms and a pastel-coloured portrait of Jinnah – drawn-cheeked and cold-eyed – on the wall behind his yellow desk.
The Deputy Commissioner was a big man with a trimmed black beard and a warm, deep voice. He called for tea and cream-filled biscuits, and he shook my hand and welcomed me. And of course he would allow me to have an extension on my visa, for as many days as I wanted – a month? Only a month? Why not make it three months, just to be sure?
We sat. He smiled and folded his huge hands on his ample belly.
"Please," he said, "have another biscuit."
"How long will it take to process the extension?" I asked.
"One, maybe two hours only. This is not a problem. More tea?"
"I’d really like to start the process now, if possible."
"Yes of course, but unfortunately, today it is not possible. The passport officer is on tour."
It was Friday; the passport officer would not be back until Monday. I caught a bus to Khapalu. There was a thin, freezing rain falling from the high grey mountains and I spent two evenings drinking green tea by flickering lamp light with huge Pashtuns from Waziristan who were in Baltistan selling socks and ladies’ underwear.

I was back in Skardu on Monday morning, and I went back to the Deputy Commissioner’s office under the new blue sky with the new white snow showing on the razor ridges around the town.
It was a long, low, one-storey building of those old familiar rooms of rough desks and bundled papers. A kindly man who worked in the ID card office gave me a place to sit, and a cup of tea. He had a neat moustache and hair that was sandy-coloured at the edges. He liked cricket. Village men in ragged turbans and threadbare shalwar kamises hobbled in and handed over forms for counter-signature in triplicate, then shuffled out again, along the corridor to some other chamber.

It was more than an hour before the Passport Officer arrived. He was an ancient man with a long, wiry tangle of grey beard and a dirty black and white keffiyah around his neck. His hands trembled and his eyes were cloudy and buried deep inside his old head. But he smiled warmly and shook my hand.
He riffled through various collapsing files, turning over torn and creased sheets of inky paper before he found the list he was looking for. For British citizens it seemed, there was no fee to extend a visa. He smiled proudly; the man with the neat moustache shook my hand.
"Congratulations!" he said; "This process is free for you! You are a very lucky man!"
The fee structure had no obvious logic too it. Together we went through the list of nationalities – and every country in the world was represented. The highest fee was, bizarrely, for citizens of Peru. For them it would cost several hundred dollars to extend a visa.
The man with the moustache laughed. "You are very lucky you are not from Peru," he said.
But there was another problem. There was a particular rubber stamp essential for the extension process, but it was not available. With the shuffling, trembling old Passport Officer, who flicked the ragged end of his keffiyah once around his neck as we crossed the yard, I went back to the Deputy Commissioner’s office.
He was again seated behind his desk under the portrait of Jinnah, hands folded on his belly, drinking tea. The requisite stamp was, perhaps, in the drawer of his desk, but he was new in the job. His predecessor had taken a new post in Gilgit, and, unhappily, he had taken his keys with him. The Deputy Commissioner rattled the drawer to prove that it was locked.
"This desk is government property," he said; "it cannot be damaged. It is highly irregular that he should have taken the key…"
There is sometimes – often – a bribe to be paid in these processes, but something in the faint air of grand bemusement that came from the Deputy Commissioner like a low electronic hum as he sipped his tea made me sure that this was not it.
We went back to the other office. The old Passport Officer looked utterly miserable and stood, shrugged, trembling. What could he do? He felt that he had let me down. He and the man with the moustache discussed, debated, and finally with a moment of grinning brightness came to a solution: the Passport Officer would go to the bazaar; he would have a new rubber stamp made. In the meantime, I must drink more tea.

I sat; I drank. More and more obsequious village people crept through the doorway, humbly proffering their tatty forms for signatures. Bundles of loose sheets were leafed through, shuffled and dropped into unmarked draws or slipped into unmarked files and piled onto sagging shelves. More tea was drunk.
I had been in other offices like this all over the Subcontinent, waiting for inner line permits or visa extensions.
Niggling, wriggling guilt seethed in my belly: we, the British, did this awful damage, created this absurd bureaucracy of forms in two or more incompatible languages, of signatures and countersignatures and counter-countersignatures and carbon paper and passport photos in quadruplicate. We blighted them with this mess that required an army of people with adequate but uninspiring education, and into which every new idea, new project, new plan disappears, bundled with the carbon copy and one signature space still unfilled in a damp grey folder on an unmarked shelf above a rusty filing cabinet and a broken typewriter.

It was two hours before the Passport Officer shuffled back, grinning and holding the new stamp proudly above his head with a trembling fist. It said: "Muhammad Shafa. Deputy Commissioner. Skardu." The letters were not quite lined up properly.
We went to the Passport Officer’s own office – a damp, bare room at the end of a corridor with flaking walls. Two dozen people were waiting outside for him, clutching forms and letters. He tutted and waved them aside as they crowded into the room after him. All of them – and I – watched him expectantly, agonised, as he shuffled with the mess of papers on his desk, losing the form, losing the stamp, the inkpad, my passport in the chaos. Then, on a sudden whim, he decided to go slowly through the great wad of past visa extension forms – dating back years to the happier days when some foreign tourists actually came to Skardu – numbering each page with a scratchy old fountain pen. There was an audible groan from the watching men with their forms, all of which needed nothing more than his signature.
Eventually he was done, and he pressed the smudgy, inky stamps into my passport, then hobbled outside again, back towards the Deputy Commissioner’s personal office. The DC was about to leave to drive to Gilgit – perhaps in pursuit of the lost keys. He took my passport and signed the extension on the bonnet of his jeep, shook my hand warmly and drove away into the bright midday.
We went back to the main building. Finally, with the waiting supplicants still watching desperately, the Passport Officer took from a cupboard a huge stamp embossed with the name of the Government of the Northern Areas of Pakistan, and using his whole meagre bodyweight to press it down onto the page of my passport, he provided the final validation for the extension.
A sigh of relief went around the crowd. He handed my passport back to me with a smile of such warmth and triumph that I wanted to cry.
"Done!" he said, his hands trembling. And there was not a single rupee to pay for it. It had taken only four hours.
I went back out into the pale sunlight and walked along the rough grey road into town. There were dust devils scurrying over the gravel-plains beside the Indus.

***

I woke in Saigon the morning after I arrived from Dalat with a headache. My bedroom was on the first floor, and I peered down onto the noisy street from the narrow window. There were motorbikes and bicycles clattering along the pavement edges and a raw cacophony of engine noise and horns. The sky was the colour of mud; it would rain again later.
Across the street, outside a café with bamboo tables, a gaggle of European backpackers were waiting for the minibus to take them on their organised tour of the Mekong Delta. They wore shorts and faded vest-tops. Their legs looked absurdly long and the young men amongst them stood – or sprawled – with their arms folded, as if there was something vital and difficult that they would shortly be called upon to do.
I showered and tried to wash the heavy, greasy sleep out of my eyes, then I did the most sensible thing I had done since arriving in Vietnam: I went to the little travel agent across the street from the guesthouse. A pretty girl with an American accent and glasses and a small mole under her right eye took my passport and photo and twenty crisp dollars. She gave me a little receipt on pale green paper and told me that my Cambodian visa would be processed by tea time; I could collect my passport from her then, or if I liked she would deliver it to the reception of my guesthouse – and, if I was interested, there was a minibus tour to the Cu Chi tunnels leaving shortly.
I smiled and thanked her, but declined, and went back out to the street. I had absolutely nothing to do. I spent the day drinking cold beer and eating banana pancakes in a café with bamboo tables…


© Tim Hannigan 2008