Goodnight, Saigon.

We returned to Saigon from the Mekong Delta at around 3:00 pm. If you recall, on the previous day, I had gone out drinking early in the afternoon. Because of this I hadn’t had a chance to see many of the sights in Saigon, like the Reunification Palace or the War Atrocities Museum. I thought I’d take advantage of our final afternoon in Saigon and do that.

Well, you know what they say about the best laid schemes of mice and men. When we returned to Ho Chi Minh City, a couple of guys decided that on such a beautiful afternoon, it would be a good idea to go to an outdoor café and have a few beers. I couldn’t really find anything wrong with that idea, so I decided to join them. Knowing that we had things to do in the evening, this meant that my sightseeing opportunities in Ho Chi Minh City had come to an unfruitful end. (Because of this, I’m including some random photos of Saigon that somebody else took. Hope you enjoy them because I have no better photos to add for this entry.)

After some drinks, we met with the people in our group that is going on the final leg of the group tour that I’m doing. Other than two departures and two new folks, the group is completely identical as the Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City group. We went through the formalities of insurance and visas and then we went on to dinner.

Sadly, my final meal in Vietnam turned out to be a Western meal because that was the nature of the restaurant where we ate. That wasn’t a problem, though, because I’m pretty sure that I had had enough rice noodles to feel that I hadn’t wasted my opportunity to try the local cuisine in Vietnam. The most interesting part of dinner was the various people who came over to try and sell us things, particularly books. One woman was selling a bunch of Lonely Planet travel books. The guy sitting across from me bought one for Cambodia, bargaining the price down from US$15 to US$3. It was really interesting to see how the market was set because other people in the group also wanted to buy some travel books. The seller had lost of lot of her negotiating ability because she had already set the price at US$3, so when I tried to buy two books for six dollars and she started by asking for twelve, all I had to do was point at the guy in front of me and say, “he only paid three for his, so that’s all I’m going to pay, “ and then refuse to budge from that price. Needless to say, I bought my two books for six dollars.

That pretty much was it for my trip to Ho Chi Minh City. I sincerely regret not taking an opportunity to get around the city more and seeing some of the museums and governmental buildings. As was the case in Shanghai and Hong Kong, I think another day or two in Saigon would have been beneficial. When I start planning my next trip to Southeast Asia, another visit to Saigon definitely will be high on my list of places to go.

Touring The Mekong Delta

Our second day in Ho Chi Minh City, actually our only full day in Ho Chi Minh City, wasn’t really spent in Ho Chi Minh City for the most part. Instead, we left early in the morning to do a brief tour of the Mekong Delta.

According to our tour guide, the Mekong River is the fifth-longest river in the world, starting in China and traveling through Nepal, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and emptying out into the Pacific Ocean in Vietnam. All I really knew about the Mekong Delta is that it is often mentioned in Vietnam shows and movies. As beautiful as it was, it didn’t look like it would be a pleasant place to fight a war.

The trip started with a two-hour bus ride to a little town that serves as an entrance to the delta for tourists. There were souvenir shops everywhere as well as boats for hire to venture into the area. We already had a boat rented, so we went directly there and started on our journey through the delta.

We stopped at one of the largest islands in the area, which has been converted into a tourist stop. The star attraction on the island is the ability to watch the villagers make coconut candy (there were coconut palms everywhere on the island), from husking the coconut to the final stages. There also was a chance to sample some of the local wines and I had banana wine, coconut wine and snake wine. For the record, the snake wine was the best. The highlight of the island for me, though, was being able to hold an eight-foot python and to get my picture taken with the big dude.

From this island, it was time to head to the rowboats, though we didn’t do the actual rowing. We took about a 20-minute rowboat cruise down the river to a second island. The trip was hot and sticky and all I could think of the entire time was Apocalypse Now. I kept an eye out for Charlie, but I’m pretty sure I was safe the entire time. On the second island, we had lunch, which included fish egg rolls, soup and a few other items. We finished it off with a shot of honey wine, which I found to be a little too sweet, albeit tasty.

After lunch, we went on a little tour of the island in a cart seating six people that was hooked to the back of a motorbike. We had helmets, but the ride did seem a bit treacherous as we were going down narrow roads at a moderate speed and had to constantly be on the lookout for low hanging palm tree branches and electrical wires. We didn’t see a hell of a lot and I’m not sure what the purpose of it was except to demonstrate how the safety laws in everybody’s native country were inconsistent with those of Cambodia. Whatever, though. It was a fun-enough way to kill an hour or so.

We hopped back on the boat and returned to the little tourist town from which we started the trip. From there, it was a three-hour return by bus to Saigon – longer on the return trip because of the traffic. I think that I may have about 600 words left to say about Ho Chi Minh City, so I’ll try to finish it up in my next post.

Take Me Down To The Ho Chi Minh City

Okay, where was I. When I last posted, I was just arriving in Saigon at around six in the morning. From there, we went to the hotel in which we were staying but, because it was so early, we could not yet check in. Instead, we just dropped our bags off at the hotel and went to the Cu Chi Tunnels.

The Cu Chi Tunnels are the system of underground tunnels dug by the Viet Cong underneath the heavy clay in the Cu Chi area to the west of the Mekong Delta. It took a couple of hours to bus there. Once we got to the area, there were a couple of opportunities to go inside some tunnels, including crawling about 100 meters across and ten meters down into a tunnel. Personally, I can’t even sit in a window seat of an airplane because of my claustrophobia – and from the expressions that I saw on the faces of those who actually made the crawl, I think I made the right decision. It is absolutely amazing, though, that these tunnels could be built and that thousands of people actually could live in them during the Vietnam War.

Another display at the Cu Chi Tunnels demonstrated various booby traps that the Vietnamese set for the Americans during the Vietnam War. Many of them involved bamboo or steel spikes and were of the kind that you could see if you watched the Green Berets or various other Vietnam War movies. (I only mention Green Berets because I think it may be the worst war movie ever made.) There also was a firing range in which some people were firing off M-16s and AK-47s. At $1.25 per round, I decided to opt out of that particular experience, but those who did it enjoyed it.

We came back to the hotel and then I got a call from a friend of a friend who lives in Ho Chi Minh City and wanted to meet up. We walked around Saigon for a little while, including a trip to another memorial set up for a monk who cremated himself on the sidewalk in Saigon in 1963. Afterwards, we went to a little roadside bar that I liked because there were no other white folks in it. We had some beer and he taught me a little about Vietnam and we had some conversations with folks at other tables. Things started to get a little awkward when my new friend’s 18-year old boy toy showed up, but it was still fun. Around 9:00, I headed back to my hotel looking for dinner and a nightcap.

As I was walking on the sidewalk, up the street from my hotel, I felt somebody rubbing my arm. I was startled and first and turned around. It was a woman on a motorbike. On the sidewalk. She asked me if I wanted a massage and if I had a room. I politely declined her proposition, even though she was gorgeous, and went into a restaurant for dinner.

As I entered the restaurant, there were two couples dining and so I went to the third table in the restaurant. I ordered a beer and some dinner and around the time the beer arrived, the couples finished their meals and left. The waitress asked if I would mind moving up a few tables, so I did. At this point, I was the only person eating in the restaurant and I had four waitresses standing a few feet from my table because they had nothing else to do and no other customers to serve. It made me eat a little faster and stop after the second beer.

I left the restaurant to return to my hotel. As I got to the street on which my hotel was located, I felt – you guessed it – somebody rubbing my right forearm. Less startled this time, I turned around. It was yet another woman, more beautiful than the last, on another motorbike on the same street who was inquiring about my desire for a good massage. I politely declined once again and decided that I had better get to my hotel soon, while I still had the willpower to decline these invitations.

That was my first day in Saigon. I only had two, so we’ll get to the other one in the next post.

Another Day in Nha Trang

I still had another 24-hours in Nha Trang and I didn’t know what else I was going to do. I had gone to the beach, but the water turned me off of that. I had gone to some temples, but didn’t know if there were more that I needed to see.

On the final night in Nha Trang, we were going to a group dinner. Before that, however, a friend and I decided to have a few drinks. (I’ve really developed a taste for Bia Ha Noi.) We stopped at this little spot on the street that runs parallel to the beach and had some drinks. As an appetizer, we had “Crispy Onions.” As you can probably guess, those turned out to be onion rings. In a little unexpected twist, though, the onion rings came out with soy sauce and chili sauce. As it turned out, the onion rings with chili sauce may have been the best onion rings I’ve ever had.

Later, we went out for a meal at a restaurant set up in somebody’s home. (I may be off a day here and there. We were in Nha Trang for three days and all of them really did run together.) Later on, there was some drinking at a disco-type bar, which was fun.

We had to get ready for another overnight train, the last of the trip, but we had most of the day in Nha Trang while we waited for that. As I said, I already was running out of things to do, but at least the weather was nice. I spent a lot of time people watching on the beach. I also went from café to café getting a little bit of food here and a little bit of coffee there, trying to fill up both my day and my stomach.

Sometime around five, we all got together and there was time to grab dinner before heading to the overnight train. As Nha Trang is a tourist town, most of the food places are Western or mixed Western/Vietnamese. Three or four doors down from our hotel was a Spanish tapas restaurant that a couple of the girls wanted to try. It sounded good enough for me, so I went over there too. We had a ton of stuff – Patatas Bravas, Tortilla Española, Jamon Serrano, etc. It brought me back briefly to my summer in Madrid. The food wasn’t as good as it was in Spain, but it was pretty good and did the job.

After dinner, we met back up with everybody to go to the train station for what would be my seventh and final overnight train ride in Southeast Asia. This one was only about eleven hours, so we weren’t expecting much trouble. I got on the train at around seven; read for a couple hours; took some Advil PM and slept from around 10 pm until the train folks woke us up a 6 am to tell everybody that we had reached Saigon. Yes, I know it’s official name is Ho Chi Minh City, but almost everybody here still calls it Saigon.

Anyway, getting off the train in Saigon is where I’ll pick up the next entry.

Another Vietnamese Beach Resort Town

After Hoi An, it was time for another touristy beach resort town – Nha Trang. Nha Trang is known as the driest town in Vietnam and is also known for its beautiful beaches.

The trip to Nha Trang began with a bus ride from Hoi An to Da Nang. Once in Da Nang, we realized that the train was running a couple hours late, so we had a little time to run around and get some coffee and some last minute stuff. Unlike most of our other train rides, this was not an overnight train, but still it was a nine-hour trek. That was a bit of a pain, but after all of the 20-plus hour overnight trains we had in China, we could do a nine-hour ride standing on one foot. I laid down anyway.

We arrived in Nha Trang pretty late and took taxis to the hotel. Many of us were hungry, so we went to a little restaurant down the street for a quick bite and that was the first day in Nha Trang.

On the morning of the second day, we did a little tour of Nha Trang. We went to a Buddhist temple that is dedicated to five monks who set themselves on fire to protest South Vietnam’s policies against Buddhism in the mid-1960s. At this site, there was another giant Buddha. It wasn’t as big as the one in Hong Kong, but it was giant enough and I did get some better pictures of this one. Another thing that we saw a lot of at the temple is swastikas. The swastika, going in the opposite direction of the Nazi swastika, is a Buddhist symbol of reincarnation/circle-of-life and what have you. Still, it’s pretty weird when you run across unexpected swastikas.

Later in the day, I decided that it was time to take to the beaches. It was still cloudy, but the temperature was warm and the humidity was high, so I figured a little time in the water would be good. I went down to the beach and indeed, the beaches were beautiful. I took off my sandals and started walking in the tide. The water felt good, but it was a little nasty. Since Nha Trang is at the delta of a river, the water is naturally full of silt, which is okay. The real problem, though, is that there was a lot of garbage in the water. I saw clothes, boxes, bottles, bags, bodies, okay no bodies but all of the other stuff. It was harmless enough for me to walk in the tide at the beach, but I decided that I wasn’t going to go swimming in it.

Before leaving, however, I did manage to pollute the water just a little bit more. Just before I was planning to leave, I decided to put on my sandals when the Pacific Ocean (technically, it may have been the Sea of China) decided to come onto land and steal one of them. I waited for a while to see if the tide would bring it back, but it just wanted to tease me. I could see the sandal slowly floating out to the Philippines. Ultimately, I decided that my other sandal should have the same opportunity for freedom and sent it on its way to be reunited with its life partner. Since I was on the beach, I didn’t bring any money, so I couldn’t replace the sandals. Rather, I had to walk about ten minutes to the hotel across busy streets with no shoes. As I was walking people stopped me to try and sell me cigarettes and sodas. Nobody tried to sell me shoes. I guess Vietnam is still trying to get its hands around this whole capitalism thing.

All I Have To Say About Hoi An

From Hue, we went to Hoi An, which was about a five-hour bus ride away. We were in Hoi An for three days, but I may have only this entry to memorialize it because it wasn’t that exciting. I had a good time, mind you, but there’s not that much to write about. Anyway, that should help catch up the blog.

Hoi An is an ancient port city that thrived as the center of the Silk Road hundreds of years ago, but disappeared from maps and everywhere else until the past twenty years, when it was revived for tourism. At this point, I’d have to say that it is now one of the biggest tourist traps that I’ve ever seen. One of them. Don’t worry, Vegas, you still have the title.

The big thing to do in Hoi An is shop. There are tons of places to go to get custom made suits, dresses, shoes, rings and various other items that you may want to have made. These items aren’t necessarily cheap, but they are extremely inexpensive when compared to Western standards. The problem, for me, is that I’m not really a shopper. I’m a non-practicing lawyer. I have eight suits and no job. The last thing I need right now is another suit.

That is not to say that I didn’t buy anything in Hoi An. The stuff is so inexpensive, that I couldn’t help but buy some stuff. I got a couple pairs of shorts, some touristy t-shirts, some sandals, a sleeping bag and some souvenirs. As an example, the touristy t-shirts were $2 each, and could be bargained down to a quarter of that if you had the time or the interest in doing so.

There is also what is probably a nice beach in Hoi An. From our hotel, the beach is a 4 km walk, so I went down to check it out. It wasn’t bad – sandy instead of rocky and the water was nice. The problem, however, was that I happen to be in southern Vietnam during the wet season and the wet season in southern Vietnam is pretty freaking wet. It rained the entire time we were in Hoi An, so at the beach, I mainly just walked around and imagined how beautiful it might be in beautiful weather.

The food in Hoi An was fair to good, depending on where we went. Like other tourist cities, all of the restaurants offer “authentic” local foods as well as pizza, hamburgers and anything else that the restaurants think will bring in Western customers. I did have a delicious sautéed noodles dish at Café 96, though. That and a Vietnamese iced tea cost me 53,000 Vietnamese dong – or less than three dollars American. If you’re in town, I recommend it.

In addition, several of us participated in a cooking class. It wasn’t nearly as fun or interesting as the cooking class I took in Yangshuo because we weren’t actually cooking our individual dishes. We learned some recipes and ate what we “cooked” – though that basically meant we ate what we chopped and somebody else cooked. All the “cooking” we did was turning some spring rolls in a frying pan. It was fun enough, I guess, and I did think seeing the geckos crawling around the wall of the class was pretty cool.

The hotel that we stayed in was nice enough, with free wifi. It had a buffet breakfast which was passable, especially at $1.50 for all-you-can-eat. There was a café a few doors down with coffee and beer and across the street from that is a karaoke bar, where we were able to drink some Tiger beer and belt out some English-language songs.

Like I said in the beginning, Hoi An is a nice town and I certainly had a good time. There’s just not a lot worth writing about it other than about the markets, the beach and the restaurants and not a lot more about those than I’ve already said. In several hours, I will be in Nha Trang, which is another touristy beach area, so we’ll see if that is much different than Ha Noi. Don’t worry; I’ll let you know.

Passing Thoughts: Vietnam Edition

Currently, I’m on a train between Da Nang and Nha Trang. I’ve been in Vietnam now for roughly two weeks and it seems to me that it’s about time for me to do another Passing Thoughts entry, so here is my first one for Vietnam.

Food: As always, this is an important topic for me and, of course, this can be broken into several categories. Generally, however, I’ll write a little about the food. I have had very little western food since I’ve been here. What I have had is a lot of rice noodles.Whether it be in Pho or Bun or sautéed or fried, I have had rice noodles galore. In Vietnam, it’s not uncommon for people to eat them three meals a day. I’ve enjoyed them, though I have to say that the food here hasn’t been nearly as spicy as it was in southern China and I do miss the heat. You can get chili paste, though, and there’s some delicious chili sauces with garlic and onion that add quite a bit of flavor to the dishes.

Food, Part II: The other food of which I’ve had quite a bit since I’ve been in Vietnam is spring rolls. I’ve had them steamed, fried, I’ve rolled them myself, I’ve even fried them myself. I’ve had vegetable spring rolls, chicken spring rolls, pork spring rolls – okay, I’m beginning to sound like Bubba. I’ll just say that there are a lot of spring rolls here and most of them have been outstanding, especially if the sauce is good.

Food, Part III: Another thing that I’ve noticed here is that the bread in Vietnam is particularly good. It’s pretty easy to find baguettes and they are crisp on the outside and soft in the middle.I have to assume that it’s because of the French influence in Vietnam.

People: I have to say that, as a group, the people in Vietnam may be the friendliest that I’ve ever met. I’ve had meals by myself in restaurants and more often than not, somebody will come over to me while I’m eating and start talking to me about Vietnam or the United States or any other topic. And, on top of this, I’d have to rank Vietnam with Argentina and Italy as far as the places that I have visited that have had the most beautiful women. (And, no, I still have not visited Brazil.)

Vietnam War: As you can imagine, the topic is still very fresh here. The Vietnamese lost 3 million people during the war, and that’s just the official count. I have heard that there are still another 300,000 people still considered “missing.” Here, the war is known as the American War. (Makes sense, since every war here is a “Vietnam war.”) I guess that the level of bias that you hear here depends upon the story teller and his/her own story, but I have heard a lot about the atrocities of war since I’ve been here and it has altered the way I view the war, both from the perspective of an American and from the Vietnamese perspective. Most of all, though, I think that it has inspired me to learn much more about this period of American/Vietnamese history.

United States: Both here and in China, there’s been an odd phenomenon involving the following conversation. Local Person (“LP”): Where are you from? Me (“Me”): The United States. LP:Where? Me: The United States. LP: (Perplexed look of person who has no idea what I’m talking about.) Me: America? LP: OOOHHH. America. It seems that, despite the desires of nearly every South American I’ve ever met, the United States is better known as America here rather than the United States.

Okay, I guess that’s enough for my passing thoughts at the moment. I’m sure I’ll rip off another Passing Thoughts entry before I enter Cambodia. Later.