The Floods Have Found Us

The floods have found us in Hoi An.

I woke up at 4 am to the sound of rippling water. Our oscillating fan was pointed into the corner and noisily blowing across the inch and a half of rain runoff building up in what must be the hotel room’s lowest point

Water sloshed languidly across our tile floors, breaking against our strewn detritus and osmosing its way up through the wooden supports of our beds. 

Three pairs of shoes are worthless for the next while. The first thing I noticed was my pile of clothes gorging themselves on the grey sludge seeping from our room’s back wall. My backpack: soaked. Twenty pounds of books I’ve been hauling through Vietnam – maybe salvageable. Paper bus tickets are unrecognizable – a pulp of perforated green and blue and red ink smudges.

Our personal closet-with-two-beds-crammed-in-it is as close to the building’s center as possible. With foresight, or engineering exactitude or maybe just for laughs, whoever built this hotel left a five-by-ten hole in the middle. It’s as if they built the elevator shaft and forgot to put the elevator in. Up it goes, straight to the sky, interrupted by tiny windows jutting out at one, two, three, four floors to let lesser-paying guests situated away from the outer walls dine on a breath of fresh(er) air.

And it just so happens that the only door to this courtyard with the skyward view is in the back corner of our room. It’s been raining for twelve hours. Hard. The raindrops that land in the 50 sq feet of non-roof fall down to land on the same tiles that line the floor of our room. The outside is in our inside.

From underneath the rain soaked wood door the water seeps. It has now made its way out the front door of our room, to the hallway behind the reception desk where guests feel safe leaving their bags and clothing.

This hotel is a fucking disaster.

Sometimes its nice to hear the rain patter outside, safe in the comforts of your interior dwelling: a nice pillow, some music, maybe watch a movie. Our beds have bedbugs. And what we hear is not so much the pitter-patter of distant drops but a constant deluge against our stone floor. I get to watch the fractalized patterns as the cascading sheets of water slide down the double paned glass set into the door, which is pretty. But I’m also thinking about how I’ll get the funk smell out of my clothes.

This is the first of what could be a lot of time spent dealing with too much water. Our arrival in Vietnam happened to coincide with the arrival of some of the worst flooding Southeast Asia has seen in decades. We plan to march into Bangkok in a couple months, by which time the waters will in theory have subsided. But it’s impossible to tell what will happen. The floods were supposed to be gone a while ago, but so far they have only grown. Cambodia is neck-deep across huge swaths of the country. Siam Reap is only navigable by boat.

I’ve never seen water like this, the kind that you build your life around, annually. Which makes it kind of cool in an exotic, jungle-living type way. That’s part of the reason I came here, after all. I just didn’t expect to see it in my hotel room.