Lost in Sun World (Our Trip to Ba Na Hills) (Pt. 1)
No one knew anything aside from the foundational concept that we were going to film a commercial in Ba Na Hills for some French shampoo company, and we needed to meet at The Balance Cafe at 7 p.m. for transport to the hotel. I was the first one there aside from the Vietnamese crew manager, Quan, who sighed audibly when he recognized me. He was about five and a half feet tall and looked like a samurai, he had the long black hair and a Fu Manchu, banana-print clothing like a beach-going tourist. I'd been his actor in a commercial he'd filmed for Loc Phat Villa, the place where I was staying, and everything about that shoot had been awkward and absurd. It was me and this French girl, Emilie, and we were supposed to be a honeymooning couple coming to Loc Phat for a romantic weekend. We were a thoroughly bizarre-looking couple though. I'm unusually skinny, practically a rail, while Emilie was fairly big-- she clearly had twenty pounds on me or more. On top of that I was wearing clothes that didn't fit and old Nike shoes that even a hobo would look at in disgust. I was sweating profusely in the heat and humidity, my sporadic facial hair looked like a pirate's, and I had just given myself a haircut that had gone poorly, leaving a rooster-like poof on the front of my head and a choppy mess on the back. Regardless of how I'd handled the acting, it was clear that I did not fit the bill appearance-wise and that Quan was too polite to tell me to fuck off and seek out a better actor. Now, just as he was probably thinking he was done with me forever, I came walking right up to him outside The Balance Cafe, the first actor reporting for duty, wearing basketball shorts and a faded yellow t-shirt that said: B.P. BLOWS.
"Did you get the link I sent about wardrobe?" he asked immediately, eyeing my clothes. The link had been to photos of models, all wearing hip v-necks or collared shirts, no labels or words, the cloth tucked in only over the belt buckle like true douche bags.
"Yep," I said, "I've got some other clothes in my back pack that fit the bill, don't worry." This was true, in the sense that I did have other clothes, but they were hardly an improvement except that they didn't have any logos or words printed on them. Quan was clearly still apprehensive, but he went back to looking at his phone.
"Are we doing any filming tonight?" I asked.
He said, "No, no film tonight. We got tonight because we wake up very early. Ba Na Hills very far. Too risky to go in morning, so we go now."
One by one the rest of the actors started to show up, all of them Norwegians that had been recruited by my girlfriend Shirin, who had reluctantly accepted this task without realizing it would entail two weeks of incessant facebook messages and question relaying between the film crew and the Norwegians. There were thirteen of us in total, and as soon as everyone had arrived Quan ushered us into a van that was parked across the street, counted our heads one last time, then slid the door shut and nodded to his driver. Off we went.
The drive from Hoi An to Da Nang takes about forty-five minutes, and Ba Na Hills is about thirty or forty minutes past Da Nang. I spent the drive staring out the window, thinking about a sci-fi story I wanted to write about an app that lets you stream other people's experiences and a guy who gets addicted to living other people's deaths. Everyone in the van was eerily quiet aside from Felix and Aidan. They were in the front row playing each other in some online iPhone game called Golf Battle, both of them howling every time they'd miss a shot and laughing constantly. Felix would yell so loud I was sure the driver would spas out and drive us off a cliff, and several times the man looked back, clearly annoyed at the unpredictable yelling coming from just behind his head.
We kept expecting the van to pull off at some rinky dink motel, but to our surprise it kept moving further and further into resort territory. We all perked up, starting to speculate if our hotel would have a pool and what sort of dinner they might offer us. The van kept going, winding up and up, until we could see what had to be the entrance to Sun World: a giant wall, Imperial-looking, like the wall that incloses the city of Hue, and inside it were trees, giant sculptures, and replica buildings. As we were all marveling at that, the van pulled up to the hotel. The driver got out, then he helped us all to get out and collect our bags. He said, "Reception on secon' floor," then he got back into the van and drove off.
We all squeezed onto the two elevators then rode up to the second floor and approached the reception desk. We were intercepted by a staff member, who gestured behind us to a couple glass doors that led outside. Somebody asked "Does anyone know where Quan is?" We got outside and were greeted by a cardboard cut out of a lady holding up a sign that said "Xin Chao" -- "Hello."
We stood around for a second, not knowing what was happening or what we were supposed to be doing. Someone came around handing us little slips of paper with Vietnamese writing on it, then they started ushering us forward, past the cardboard lady, and we suddenly realized we were in the line for a gondola. Seconds after we'd received the slips of paper they were being taken from us again, ripped in half, and women dressed just like the cardboard cutout in red dresses were waving us through the turnstiles and toward the gondolas.
"Yo... man... this is crazy!" Felix kept yelling, in a voice that sounded less Norwegian than rasta. The girls were chirping "Oh my Goddddd!" like a bunch of birds, and Teodor, who always seemed more nervous or apprehensive than most, was asking, "Are we sure we are in the right place? Does anyone know where we're going? Does anyone know where Quan is?" For my part, I just kept whispering "what the fuck" over and over.
One by one we boarded the gondolas, none of us knowing where the gondolas led, nor how far up they went. On my gondola it was me, Shirin, Felix, and Felix's girlfriend Eenya. "Yo! This is crazy man!" Felix kept saying. "I know dude," I'd say back. "Like, what the fuck is going on?" Within minutes were were hundreds of meters above the hotel, looking down on the valley that held that fake Imperial fortress, a white-lit parking lot, the highway dotted with yellow lamps, the hotel and the yellow light of the gondola platform. The gondola-booth itself was pitch black, so dark we could hardly see each other, and there was standard elevator music pouring out from a speaker over our heads. Somebody fumbled around and found a little light that clicked on and shone like the lights over airplane seats, only bright enough to illuminate whatever they're pointed at. It was enough to cut our visibility out the windows, but eye-level on the doors there were some ventilation gaps with no glass over them. I went over and looked out of them, watching the jungle pass by beneath me and on either side, wondering what sort of animals might live down there and where the hell we were going. After only a minute or so, I looked up and realized we were heading into the clouds. As soon as I'd noticed them, we were already entering them, and almost instantly the world disappeared and it was as if we were under water, surrounded everywhere by a gradient of black, grey, and white, our little white light the only thing keeping it from becoming and sea of perfect black. Every twenty seconds a gondola would pass us on its descent, a tiny white light emerging like a ghost then disappearing no sooner than it had appeared. I stared out into the mist, trying to make out the tops of trees that only moments earlier had seemed so close. A black mass whipped out of the darkness and flapped past my face-- a bat. I pulled my head back inside and didn't stick it out again. I wanted to know how high up we were, though. So I took a banana out of my backpack and hucked it out the window. It took four seconds before I heard the sound of it crashing through a tree branch. We must have been almost eighty meters over the ground.
We kept waiting for the station to emerge out of the mist, but it never did. We waited and waited, and after we'd been on the gondola more than twenty minutes we started to get nervous. We couldn't see any more than five meters ahead, and the only thing that indicated we were still moving forward was the occasional rumble of the wheels as we passed a support beam. We could have been thirty meters from the station or thirty miles-- from the inside of a cloud there was no way of knowing.
Finally, after a small eternity, the yellow glow of the station lit up the fog and suddenly we were pulling in. We all cheered with relief, though we were still just as confused as were were when we'd arrived at the foot of the mountain. We all got off the gondola, and a staff member pointed us toward a staircase, which was soaking wet from the cloud filling its hallway.
When I got to the top of the stairs, everyone was standing around. "What's going on?" I asked the group
"We're waiting for Quan," somebody said.
"Is he going to meet us here? Has anyone talked to him?"
"I guess so," somebody else said.
We stood around there for ten minutes, and gradually it became apparent that nobody had spoken with Quan and nobody had any real reason to suspect that someone was going to meet us here. The only reason they'd gathered there was under the assumption that somebody would tell us what to do, that the production team couldn't possibly be so disorganized that they'd send their actors to the top of a mountain with no instructions for what to do once they got there. Alas, it appeared that the production team was, in fact, that disorganized.
At the other end of the hallway I could see neon light that intrigued me, and I was so tired of standing around that I just walked away from the group to check it out.
I ended up walking right into one of the most surreal things I'd ever seen. Up there in the clouds was a model city, a replica of a French village but decorated with neon lights, filled with mist but empty of people. It was being rained on by the very cloud it rested inside, and everything about it seemed to make no sense. Why had they chosen to remake an ancient French village? Why did they put neon all over it? Why was there a sculpture of a beer mug in spitting distance from a gothic cathedral? Why was there a cathedral at all? Who makes a fake church for a theme park attraction?
As I walked around the courtyard, my companions trickled out of the hallway behind me, all of them marveling in the same way I had and still was. "Yo! Man! This is crazy!" Felix yelled. I went into the church and was surprised to find that they hadn't skimped on the details. There was a paper-mache Jesus over the altar, a paper mache gospel in front of him. The artificiality and peculiarity of it all made it feel like a waking dream. Surely this couldn't really be happening
