Vietnam: The Mekong, Motos, and Mangosteens

Small stilted houses along the Mekong, thousands of motorcycles swarming the streets of Saigon like angry bees, and markets filled with unknown fresh fruits were my first impressions of Vietnam. Later, my impression would be rounded out by awesome historic sites, inaccurate museums, noodles, and people half my size that wanted to kick my ass.

Mekong Delta

We floated into Vietnam via the Mekong River from Cambodia and we passed by farmers working in the fields in their conical hats, houses on stilts, water buffalo, rice paddies, bathing children, and even a little boy pooping off of the side of a boat. Minus that last part, it was idyllic.

On our Mekong tour we also visited a floating market, which consisted of a number of boats centralized in one area that were selling all sorts of produce and other goods. We visited a fish farm, which consisted of a floating house that had traps beneath it that people used to hold and harvest the fish. As a part of our tour we stayed one night at a small home on one of the many channels of the Mekong. The hosts showed us their rice fields and talked about the difficulties they were having producing rice now that inputs (oil and food) were so much more expensive. Throughout our trip, it was interesting to see how the struggling world economy affects everyone in every country. Many people that I met spent a much larger percentage of their income on food and gas which meant that rising prices affected them much more severely. For us rising gas prices may mean we bike to work. For some of these people, it may mean they don’t eat.

Saigon

After several days on the Mekong we eventually got onto a bus and rolled into Saigon, also known as Ho Chi Minh City. The first thing you notice about Saigon are the motor bikes. There must be millions of them. They have a full set of lanes to themselves and they move like a swarm of bees. The second thing you notice, after having traveled through developing countries for a while, is how clean it is. There isn’t garbage piled up and there aren’t stray animals everywhere. The third thing you notice is the language. It is very nasally and sounds like people are yelling at each other.

Somewhere in our travels we befriended a Vietnamese American girl about Lauren’s age. She took us on a tour of Saigon, which included sitting down with some plastic tables and chairs on the sidewalk one evening and feasting on Vietnamese food. She insisted that we try the local specialty which included developed duck egg (an egg where the baby duck is actually partially developed--Yes, you eat feathers), clams, robin eggs, and snails that come in long shells. Apart from this little experiment, the food in Vietnam was actually quite good.

After eating developed duck egg, the second strangest thing we did was visit a Cao Dai Temple a few hours outside of the city. The Cao Dai religion mixes Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism and the temple looked like it came out of Alice in Wonderland, with its pink, garishly decorated exterior. Inside, the pink pillars were adorned with dragons. During a ceremony we watched hundreds of worshippers march into the temple wearing bule, red, yellow, and white robes while they chanted a language that even the Vietnamese said they couldn’t understand.

After the strange religious lesson, it was time to learn about how terrible Americans were from an always entertaining source, the Vietnamese government. We visited the Cu Chi Tunnels in a town that, although located in Southern Vietnam, had sided with the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. The informational video at the start of the tour showed old black and white footage of Vietnamese peasants fighting in the fields and hiding in the infamous Cu Chi Tunnels, a network of underground tunnels where the Vietnamese hid during bombing raids. A highlight of the video was the comment: “the devils and ruthless killers [Americans, for those of you who are dense] then bombed women, children, schools, chickens, dogs, and pots and pans.” So when you confess to war atrocities, where does the “yes, I bombed pots and pans fit in?”

Upon re-entering Saigon and taking a quick tour to the ugliest royal palace in South East Asia (we really shouldn’t let communists build palaces), Lauren and I visited the War Remnants Museum. The museum was devoted to The American War. A war you may still be mistakenly referring to as The Vietnam War due to its occurrence in Vietnam and because it involved the Northern Vietnamese fighting the Southern Vietnamese. As has become a theme in my travels, history takes on a different perspective depending on who is telling it. It was extremely sad to see all of the devastation that took place during the war. There was an entire area devoted to foreign journalists who were killed and to civilians who were disfigured from napalm. There was also a section on protests against the war that were going on throughout the world and a section describing all of the atrocities wreaked on the North Vietnamese, commonly referred to as The Liberation Army. According to this museum thousands of Northern Vietnamese soldiers died in the war at the hands of the Americans and South Vietnamese. However, there did not appear to be any South Vietnamese or American troops who died in the war at the hands of the North Vietnamese. Which makes the Northern Vietnamese victory that much more impressive.

Nha Trang

From Saigon we hopped a train to Nha Trang, a beach town about 7 hours north of Saigon. While the scenery was spectacular, the cockroaches crawling out of every hole and the blaring Vietnamese music were not. Once in Nha Trang we jumped on to our now preferred method of transport, the back of motor bikes, and went to our hotel. We decided to make dinner cheap that evening and bought potatoes and corn on the cob from a woman squatting in front of a grill on the side of a busy road.

We came to Nha Trang to check out the diving in Vietnam. As we arrived into town late, we went with the only dive shop that was still open. That probably wasn’t a good idea. My personal guide spoke such bad English that we had to get someone else to come over and translate for him. Luckily, when my regulator broke 20 feet under water, English wasn’t necessary as I pretty much used hand motions to tell the guy that I was getting the hell out of there. After that was straightened out, my unprofessional dive continued as my guide touched and picked up as many things as he could find underwater. On one hand, it was cool to get to touch so many things that you normally aren’t allowed to, on the other I felt a little bad that these “professionals” were following such horrible diving practices.

After the somewhat stressful dive, Lauren and I chilled out in some therapeutic mud baths on the outskirts of town. The “spa” consisted of about 15 bathtubs that get filled with silky mud. Lauren and I shared a bathtub with a Vietnamese Dutch couple who spoke no English and were a great time. They led us through the process from mud bath, to showers, to hot water geysers, to hot tub. I don’t know what was in that mud, but my skin definitely came out much softer.

Hoi An

From Nha Trang, Lauren and I reserved seats on a bus going to Hoi An, about 12 hours up the coast. The busses in Vietnam were following a most inefficient system. Instead of the passengers going to the bus station, the bus would come around to each hotel and pick up the passengers. That means that this massive, lumbering bus has to drive all over town picking up two people here and there. Our bus came and picked up two people at our hotel, left, and then came back to pick us up. At this point, the bus was running 3 hours late. After they wasted an insane amount of time trying to pick everyone up, we drove for about 5 hours and then stopped at a restaurant at midnight where everyone was woken up to have dinner and use the bathroom at the singular rest stop on this 12 hour journey. Did I mention the bus didn’t have a bathroom? The bus also was set up with bunk beds. There were beds one on top of each other running down the left side, right side, and middle of the bus. In the back, there were 5 beds across the bottom and 5 beds across the top. Lauren and I got those top beds and so we were squished between a French couple and some teenage Vietnamese boy. The beds were probably 1.5 feet across which meant you were definitely touching the stranger that you were sleeping next to. After 12 hours on the bus, we arrived in Hoi An. The bus proceeded to stop at hotels that give them a commission and tried to convince us to get off. Exactly what I like to do at 7am.

Once we finally got there, Hoi An had a wonderful section of town that was very old with small streets and classic Chinese-influenced houses. Most of the houses had been converted into shops selling a variety of artisan goods including vases, opium pipes, necklaces, notebooks, dishes, and paintings. We did most of our shopping here. We also popped into a Vietnamese cooking class which included a market and spice garden tour. It was a scorching 99 degrees with humidity outside and so we did most of our activities in the evening.

Hue

From Hoi An we booked a bus to Hue. Hue is known for its ancient Citadel and the Pagoda and Royal Tombs in the surrounding area that are from the Nguyen dynasty. The Nguyen Dynasty was one of the longest reigning in Vietnam and many people took Nguyen as their last name, which is why it is so common among Vietnamese people today. Both the Pagoda and the Tombs used a lot of wood and gold and seemed modeled after Chinese architecture, which is different from Laos and Cambodia which tend to look more like Thailand.

In my mind Hue is also the point where I began to wonder if I liked Vietnam. At one of the tombs Lauren asked a woman selling food from a kiosk about the price of an ice cream cone and was told it was 10 dong ($1.50). Lauren paid with a 20 and the woman returned 5 dong telling her the price had just been raised to 15. She refused to give her back the other 5. In a similar incident, when I got off of a motorbike that had given us a ride, the guy changed the price that he had originally offered us. On top of that, as I was pulling out my cash, I began to hand him a 100 dong bill (confusing it with the similarly colored green 10 dong bill) and he violently grabbed my hand and the bill telling me 10 dong would be fine and wouldn’t let me look at the bill. I finally wrestled it away from him and left him yelling after me. We had yet another problem trying to leave Hue when our bus company substituted a non-sleeper bus in at the last moment (which should have been nearly half the price) and refused to refund any of the money to us. I realize that all of this accounts for about $20 at the end of the day, but it was just adding to a list of grievances…

Hanoi

If I was surprised by those incidences, I was shocked by the way we were treated in Hanoi. I could go on for at least several pages on the number of times someone tried to blatantly rip us off, physically assault us while trying to blatantly rip us off, or chased after us screaming. Suffice to say that between the number of taxi drivers (3), bus drivers (2), tour guides (2), restaurants (1), and hotel attendants (2) that did these things, I was beginning to wonder what in the hell we were doing wrong. (Did I mention we were only in Hanoi for 2 days?) There really isn’t much you can do in these cases except refuse to pay people, which made them violent and psychotic, or steal their car keys when they aren’t looking. None of it really changes anything, but at least the latter made ME feel much better.

Thank God they at least had good food. Thanks to my friend Alisha’s recommendations, we pretty much ate and drank our way through Hanoi. (Alisha, I would also like to say that you must have the patience of a saint to have lived here for two years). We found that Vietnam tended to have three main food choices: fried noodles, noodle in soup, and fried rice. You would then add either chicken, beef, or shrimp to one of the above. In Hanoi they had wonderful noodle soups, great iced coffee with condensed milk, fresh fruit cups covered in condensed milk, and fresh fish.

Hanoi also has 2 highly recommended historical/tourist sites. First, was the stuffed Ho Chi Minh Museum. (I believe they actually call it embalming...) Either way, we got to see a really old, dead historical figure lying in a glass tube surrounded by lights and that was cool. We also had to walk side by side at a designated pace in order to view his casket. I even got grabbed (see here is the overly pushy physical touching again!) by an armed guard at one point for not keeping up the pace. It was kind of fun to act communist while checking out Chairman Ho.

Second, we visited Hoa Lo Prison. Our own John McCain spent about 5 years there during the Vietnam War after he crashed his (4th) plane into a nearby lake. It is commonly referred to as the Hanoi Hilton. The prison, now a museum, is mostly devoted to honoring the Vietnamese Revolutionary Patriotic Soldiers (that’s their wording for themselves, not mine) who fought against the French Criminals (again, their wording, not mine) for Independence in the 1950’s. However, there was a small section devoted to U.S. POWs which held John McCain’s flight uniform and showed a picture of him being pulled out of a nearby lake after he crashed. There were also some signs and photo captions referring to the prisoners “best conditions” and Vietnam’s “humane policy” towards POWs. The rest of the photos generally revolved around the POWs celebrating Christmas with lots of presents, a Christmas tree, and a turkey. It made it seem kind of nice. But then again, anyone who watches FOX news knows how easy it is to bend the truth.

Halong Bay

Speaking of fair and balanced, our trip of Halong Bay showed that we were not the only ones having “cross-cultural” problems in Vietnam. Halong Bay, a bay full of giant, grey limestone formations sticking out of the ocean, is where we did a 2 day houseboat tour with 15 other tourists. For our tour, Lauren and I boarded a houseboat for 2 days with 15 fellow passengers. We went kayaking and visited “Surprise Cave,” named for a massive phallic stalagmite that you see (mainly because it has floodlights on it) when you round a corner of the cave. (Yes, at least they have a sense of humor). We also got to jump off of our houseboat and go swimming. There were women rowing little boats around selling food and beer and so we had access to a bar while swimming in the ocean. Not a bad idea.

The tour was relaxing and fairly uneventful until the some of the foreigners on our boat had a blow up with the crew. Lauren and I were drinking enough to placate ourselves and so we tended to watch the drama unfold from the sidelines. The trouble started when a couple people realized that they had paid double the price and were not getting any of the boat amenities they had paid for. Then, the crew served the Vietnamese tourists on our tour twice as much food as the foreigners and then made all of the foreigners squeeze together at smaller tables. Then, on the last morning, the Vietnamese crew started knocking on everyone’s door at 7am to wake them up so that they could clean for our 12 noon departure from the boat. Being that we had downed a bit of whiskey the night before, a 7am wake up call was kind of brutal. When people came out and asked them to stop, we watched the crew continue to knock on doors, while laughing, just to piss people off. As a rule, I usually don’t mess with Texans or Israelis, but apparently no one told the crew that. I think they know now.

Sapa

While the rest of Vietnam was causing blood pressure spikes, Sapa was a welcome oasis. We sat in the “hard seats” on the overnight train to Sapa because we had been a bit late buying tickets and therefore could not get “sleeper beds.” While there is little to compete with the level of discomfort involved in sitting straight up on a piece of wood squished against the person next to you for 10 hours, we did save $7.

Once at the train station, we spent at least 15 minutes fending off drivers that were trying to pull us into their vans for the 2 hour ride to Sapa. We finally found a van and only had to move all of our things once to a new van because the first one decided it no longer wanted to go to Sapa. Of course this confusion of changing vans meant that the man we paid got lost in the shuffle and so when our van dropped us off in Sapa, the driver chased us through the street demanding we pay again. Did I say Sapa was an Oasis? Well it is, but you kind of have to get away from where all of the people are first.

Sapa, located in northern Vietnam and several miles from the Chinese border, is known for its ethnic hill tribe people. The best guess is that these people migrated here from China, Thailand, and The Himalayas over 500 years ago. Due to the mountainous terrain, these groups had very little communication with surrounding areas. That is why they have kept so many of their customs, the most obvious being their form of dress. The three main groups are the Ty, Red Dao, and Black Hmong. The Ty dress in somewhat traditional Thai clothing while the Red Dhao women wear large, red hats and pluck their hair and eyebrows. Why they pluck all of their hair was in dispute between our guides – it was either to keep away head lice or for beauty. The Black Hmong women wore skirts and blouses made of a darkly dyed cloth.

Sapa is beautiful and surrounded by green, rolling hills. Lauren and I took a two day, one night hike through the area. At the start of our hike we were followed by a number of women trying to sell us earrings and cloth. The rest of the trip was spent getting the silent treatment from our Vietnamese tour guide. About three hours into the hike on our first day, our guide informed us that the river had risen slightly and that we would need to walk through foot-high water for a distance of 10 feet. In lieu of having soaking wet hiking boots for the next 5 hours of our hike, I decided to take off my shoes and socks and wade through barefoot. My guide told me not to, I asked him why, he didn’t have a good reason, and so I did it anyway. After I made it safely to the other side and put my shoes back on, our guide fumed silently for about 10 minutes before he blew up on me screaming: “I am guide! All tourists listen to me! But you, no! You don’t listen to me! You need to do what I say because I am guide and you took off shoes when I said don’t take off shoes!” I really don’t have time for male temper tantrums and/or power trips, but I felt that I was justified in my decision to not walk for 5 hours in soaking wet shoes, and so I told him that. I also asked him what I should do if he told me to jump off of a bridge. That stumped him. We continued for several hours before he would speak to me again.

The one night we had on the trail we spent with a Red Dao family. The first thing that struck me about their house was that the father was sitting in the middle of the floor sucking tobacco smoke out of a long pipe that was immersed in water. I hadn’t seen a real water bong since, oh, about 11th grade. We sat around the fire on our little stools helping our cook make dinner. The cookware and fire were reminiscent of my kitchen in Peru. For dinner we feasted on rice, tofu, noodles, vegetables, and some rice wine that tasted like kerosene.

After our hike back into Sapa town, Lauren and I spent the night in a $12 per night hotel with beautiful views of the surrounding valley. The following day we took a 7 hour bus ride to the Bac Ha market. The majority of the people at the market were the Flower Hmong. The women in this group wear brightly colored skirts and blouses and reminded me of some of the rural areas of Peru. The rest of the people were predominantly tall Caucasians of European descent with cameras around their necks.

We then took our overnight train back to Hanoi. Once again we had not bought our tickets in time and got stuck with hard seats. However, this time we were smart and bought two hard seats each which gave us enough room to lay down. Unfortunately this made everyone else on the train think that there were empty seats and floor space and we spent the majority of our time fighting off weird men.

Back in Hanoi, my favorite city, I began to wonder what it was that made getting along with the Vietnamese so difficult. On one hand, I thought it could be the language barrier. I don’t speak Vietnamese and people in Vietnam do not speak English very well. Perhaps it is all miscommunication. Secondly, I thought that it might be what I refer to as the “what the f*** face” that the Vietnamese use. I used to think they actually meant “what the f***” when they gave me that look, but after getting the look in friendly situations, I began to think that it might be as significant as me scratching my head. Again, a miscommunication. A third idea is that we got mistreated because we were Americans. It would make sense. After all we barged into their country talking about dominoes and then they beat us in a war only to find that Americans got to go home to a 2 car garage and freedom while they got stuck with 2 more wars and a political system known for repression and ugly architecture. Not exactly justice from their perspective. However, most people thought I was German, and they were still mean to me.

It appears that I have had too much human interaction over the last few weeks and I am itching to get out of Vietnam. Our next stop, mercifully, has the lowest population density in all of Asia. Laos here we come!