Come Fly With Me – Currently in England

Viet Nam has been the shock of this around the world trip and the culture shock of my 27-year-old life! When you learn history in school growing up you read about the 100-year war and big battles centuries ago. I didn’t fully appreciate that Viet Nam had finished there hundred years of wars just a few years ago. One of my tour guides asked me if I knew when the war ended, and I thinking I was a real smarty-pants piped up with “April 1975”. I was correct in the fact that the “American War” (as they call it and rightfully so as it was the USA that entered their country and not the other way around!) ended then. I was then informed that China then took the opportunity to have another go at the Vietnamese thinking they might be in a weakened state. They gave up in January 1980. That is when the Vietnamese feel real change started to happen. Their general feeling is that the 100 years of war they have experienced at the hands of the French, Chinese, Cambodians, and Americans to name a few, would not have happened if the French hadn’t captured and controlled it so many years ago. Because these people have adapted to a harsh lifestyle they are super strong, super nimble, super quick, and super fit. It is no wonder they win so many medals at the Asia games, which I had the pleasure of watching while there. All you need to do is keep up with a guide in Sapa to appreciate their nimble feet and fitness. To test their strength ask any old lady you see wearing a conical hat and carrying two baskets filled with god knows what, connected to a piece of wood over her shoulder, to stop and let you have a go at lifting it. If my experience is anything to go by, I found it difficult to lift and even harder to balance. All in all these people are hardy and resilient and I have the utmost respect for them and for their spirit.

I spoke to some Vietnamese girls slightly younger than me who now live in San Francisco, who had come back for a trip down memory lane. They told me their strongest memory as kids in Viet Nam was always being hungry. Viet Nam is still one of only five communist countries and they have only recently sorted the hunger problem out. They have declared open markets where you can buy as much food as you like. They also export a little less rice and keep more for their own people. At one time you could only get 1kg of rice per person, per month. The girls I met remember mixing the rice with potato to make the rice last longer. One of our guides told us that he can see such a difference in people’s faces, and that they are happy. No war to fight and no longer hungry. They refer to us tourists as “Big Ass Tourists” and with good reason. Most of the Vietnamese are perfect in dimensions and you can spot a tourist a mile away. Every morning loudspeakers outside their homes wake them up at 6am. It is the voice of the government “Educating the People.” One thing they say is “Get up…love your wife and kids…wake them all up and take them to play sports or Thai Chi. One child is enough, two is OK and three is too many.” The first thing is, if you have the pleasure of waking up for an early flight or a long haul bus ride, you will see all Vietnamese families in the parks and street playing badminton or some such sport. It is amazing and I felt extremely guilty for being dozy and un-participative. The second thing is they are not as strict as China with the two-kid law. They simply educate through this loudspeaker method and make it socially frowned upon if you have any more.

When we landed in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and were alarmed by the incredibly small size of their airport. (I must digress a minute and explain to my understanding of why this city has two names. Saigon was its given name from years past and roughly translates into a type of plant or tree that grows specifically in that area and close to the Mekong Delta. After the war, with the merge of north and south, the government in the north felt it important to rename Saigon to a new name therefore shredding the bad connotations relating to the war. The name was therefore changed to Ho Chi Minh City named after the man himself attributed with unifying the country. This is a rather recent change as it was renamed in 1975 and if you are anywhere in Viet Nam you should refer to it as Ho Chi Minh City. In the city everyone refers to it still as Saigon. One reason is it’s easier to say and the other is secretly they didn’t take kindly to having their city re-named. The other explanation I got which seemed like a cop out was that Ho Chi Minh is the entire area with all 8 million people and Saigon is just concentrated to the inner city of what area it covered many years ago.). As I was saying, we were surprised at the size of the airport. We went through customs and in ten paces we were out the front door. We caught a cab to our hotel and the entire way I had a white-knuckle grip on the car door. Viet Nam has 82 million people and 10% live in Saigon. Another stat is there are 8.5 million mopeds in Saigon. This combination led to the most terrifying car ride in my life. It took 20 min to the hotel and took 20 years off my life. There simply are no rules, you don’t stop you simply flow like water. If everyone drove cars traffic would never move but in scooters its like watching a school of fish on the discover channel moving as one big unit. On the mopeds, nobody wears helmets or anything resembling safety gear. They also use it as if it were a mini van for the family so you will see Dad driving, one kid on his lap, one kid behind him and completing the sandwich, Mum on the very back. Other sights include live pigs in cages on the back of the scooters and sometimes dogs (not on the way to a new family home as a loveable pet but rather to the same place the pigs were headed). A lady in the Mekong explained to me that if a guy has a nice motorbike he has a nice girlfriend, if he has a piece of junk he has an ugly girlfriend, if he has an old bike he has an old girlfriend, and if he has no motorbike he has no girlfriend.

Once at the hotel we were safe and alive. It was a Best Western, which was funny in itself (embracing the best of western culture?). When walking around to get a feel for our surrounding we were hit with different stomach turning aromas around every corner. It is safe to say that it isn’t the cleanest place we have ever been. During the day if you have rubbish you simply put it into a plastic bag, tie it up and throw it to the curb. Whatever the stray animals don’t get (of which there are a variety) little ladies in conical hats and handkerchiefs over their faces (they look like bandits) come along with home made bamboo brooms and pick up the trash and sweep up too. They then transfer this into larger trucks that you and I would recognize. It makes sense as they are able to navigate the narrow streets and manic traffic much better than the big trucks. After getting our bearings we found a cafe offering cheap tours to the Mekong delta so we signed up for the trip the next day.

The Mekong on a whole is a tad bit too touristy. During our one day tour we visited a local bee hive, had a snake thrown at us for a photo op, saw a coconut candy factory of sorts, and took a little narrow boat down some narrow waterways with massive ferns and greenery on either side (reminiscent of Apocalypse Now). The beehive was a hut where they served honey tea and a man with a homemade honeycomb slide (as per my pics). He was the same man who fetched the snake and put it over my unsuspecting shoulders during my sip of tea. The Candy factory again was a hut with a fire and some crude machines with 4 ladies wrapping the final product. We were whisked around as if we were on a belt of an assembly line. We went, we saw, we got wet. If you are a war buff and can imagine yourself on a military boat in that labyrinth of waterways with potential ambush around every corner you can appreciate why it looked like suicide in so many movie depictions. Muddy brown water and untouched greenery taller than trees, it was impressive but if I were to do it again I would stray away from the mainstream and create a little independent adventure.

After the Mekong we felt like we should take an internal flight with Vietnam Airways up to Hanoi and work our way back down the coast to fly out of Saigon. On arriving to Hanoi we could tell a difference right away. Prices were jacked up and merchants would not take no for an answer. In Saigon we thought the hassling merchants were a pain in the butt, but supposed it was part of the culture. They however seem to understand the western brain a little better. They ask once and understand to leave you alone after one “no thank you”. Their prices may have been increased by 10% for tourists. In Hanoi they hike the prices 5 times the value, and will follow you down the street not taking no for an answer. This leads to many tourists becoming irate and rude. I spoke to a young fellow in his second year university. He had come to the beach in Nha Trang to practice his English on tourists, he also sidelined as a guide for extra money. I asked if he found tourists rude and he said that everyone does and they accept that they are all like that and all the time. I explained to him that after the constant barrage of people tying to get you on their motorbike or sell you something you don’t want or that you have already bought 10 of, everyone becomes on guard and rude as a defence mechanism. He understood completely but I fear the rest of the country won’t for a long time. I feel ashamed that they have that opinion of all tourists and maybe that’s why they have no guilt when it comes to ripping us off. I have to say that ripping you off is between $5-$10 and even less for us on the pound, but it is the principal of the matter. I would probably not have bothered with half of the arguments I had if I was on a 2 week holiday but on an around the world trip penny pinching is a must and $5 here and there adds up after a while.

After walking around the old quarter of Hanoi we were ready to hit the road and Halong Bay was calling. Again we found the best way to see this was with a tour. We thought that each tour would not differ in standard by much but in fact they do. We should have paid a little more to get more. We got on the worst boat at the dock and boats next to us looked fantastic. That said, it did float and cruising the bay was beautiful. We saw caves along the way and stopped regularly to take a swim in the warm waters. The salt content was pretty high and it was so easy just to float on your back looking up at the sunset. We took in Cat Ba Island, the largest of the islands in the bay. It was very touristy and the only side trip away from the madness was a hike up a mountainside in the blistering heat to find a rusty old tower donated by the British. The tower was a little worse for wear and was inhabited by bees the size of golf balls so I felt happy with the view from the base. Despite lacking lavish transport and facilities, I can’t say enough nice things about Halong Bay. It was truly a gem and highlight of the trip.

After Halong we went back to Hanoi and felt before trucking down the coast to Saigon, we should go north to Sapa and the hill tribes. We went on a more private tour than our Halong Bay experience but other than not belonging to a group we didn’t see the plus side for the extra money we paid. Doing it again we would have booked at the more expensive Kangaroo Cafe in Hanoi who were more set up for western tourists. We took an overnight sleeper car to Lau Cai, which is right on the border with China. During this train ride Annamarie hit rock bottom. It happens to most RTW travellers, some early in the trip and some late. It was at this stage over tears and fits of anger she felt as though it was time to go home. She did not like Viet Nam, it was dirty and the people constantly badgering her had drawn the final straw. After hugs and an attempt at sleep on the extremely shaky train, she had partially recovered and was willing to give it a little longer like the super trouper she is. I must say at this stage our tour was booked with a hotel receptionist and nothing had been made very clear. We stepped off the train at 5:30 am and the platform was pandemonium. People touting for rides and selling breakfast out of baskets ECT. Miraculously I spotted a guy holding my name on a piece of paper. He was planning on driving me by scooter when he realized there were two of us + backpacks. He then put us in a van instead and we sat there for 30 min until the next train came in so that they could fill our minivan. The drive from Lau Cai to Sapa was filled with spectacular views on either side. The steep cliff drop offs and the sunrise though the mist on the mountains. It was my first glimpse of the staging they do to the land to capture the rainwater for crops. It looks as though someone had a copy of a topographical map and carved the lines to match. For those who still can’t form a mental picture it looks as though they made steps all over the mountain for giants to walk up and down. The thinking behind it is the constant rain they get would simply run down the mountains into the many rivers. By creating this flat staging the rainfalls and stays on the flat bits. We had the morning to recover from the rough train ride and in the afternoon were greeted by our guide who took us for a 3-hour walk to the nearest hill tribe village. Cat Cat village was a stunning walk around mountains and waterfalls. We got to see the hill tribe way of life and culture. As the walk was mainly downhill, at the end of the walk we were faced with a long steep climb up a road to Sapa. Like the true entrepreneurs they are there were handfuls of guys with scooters offering lifts on the back. I am not embarrassed to say we were sitting on the back of them before they could even ask if we wanted a ride! The kids go to school in the morning and then have the afternoon off. The schoolgirls however go to work selling the handmade wares to tourists while the boys play and catch the shade from water buffalo. The kids a truly adorable and I challenge anyone to go to Sapa and not come back with a handmade bracelet or something. If you mange it you must have a cold heart. The kids work until dark and then are free to play with their friends. We met a group of 9-year-old girls at about 10pm on our first night. Their English was outstanding., they asked our names, our ages, how many brothers and sisters we had, and they were able to give answers back to these same questions. It was only the next day that no matter what local you met they repeated these same questions almost like a mantra followed by “You buy from me?” while holding up something they had made. All this and the weather was finally nice and sunny with a break from the humidity of the lowlands with good clean mountain air to breathe. Sapa was my favourite place undoubtedly in all of Viet Nam!

Back in Hanoi we arrived at 6:30am and after another bumpy ride overnight we were exhausted. We had a bus booked to take us to Hue leaving at 7:30pm so we opted to go to a hotel for the day and sleep. Hotels are funny here as they don’t just lock the doors at night but drop a big metal shutter. The hotel we took a taxi to hadn’t opened their shutter yet so we waited 15min until opening time. When it opened we could see the night staff picking up the mattresses they had on the lobby floor where they slept for the night. When we worked in hotels we always knew nights guys snuck a kip but on the sly. These guys are open about it and they rubbed the sleep out of their eyes and sorted us a room out.

The bus to Hue! I don’t feel I should go on and on about this and believe me I could. For those family and friends I suggest you read Annamarie on Viet Nam email as she paints a very comical picture of the trip. for those of you who don’t have the password let me tell you it was a 17hr trip with a rusty old bus and no toilet on board. We stopped TWICE the entire trip (scheduled stops that is). We stopped about 4am when the bus broke down in torrential rain. While the two drivers banged around with big wrenches a fellow stepped out obviously bursting to go. At that time the drivers decided they may have solved the problem and drove off leaving the guy in the bushes somewhere in the middle of nowhere in the pouring rain with his luggage on board with us. To this day I don’t know what happened to him. On top of all this the bus had more people than seats so the locals all sat on plastic kid stools down the isle and a few got down on the floor and got some shuteye! I felt as though I had entered the Twilight Zone!

Sapa may have been my favourite spot in Viet Nam, Hue was my least favourite. We took a river cruise one day and took in a few temples down the river. This area was the ancient capital back when emperors ruled the country. Many of the dead emperors have temples dedicated to them lining the banks. We took in what was described as the two most impressive. The others we were happy to take in the views from the outside. This was partly because the river cruise included lunch and the boat for the day for $4 USD but did not include the entry into the temples. Hue also has a walled section known as the Purple City which housed the reigning emperor and his concubines. The cultural readers will hate me for this but really when you have seen one temple you have seen them all…and despite this I tried to see them all and now suffer from my memory bleeding them all into one. Hue got my vote for the worst place due to the aggressive sell to tourists. I have mentioned it already from other places in the country but this was very intimidating. The further south you go the more they seem to understand Western behaviour, that when asked to buy something and you respond “no thank you” they smile back and nod their head. The further north you go it seems “no thank you” translates into ‘please follow me down the street and continue asking me to buy whatever it is and questioning why I don’t want to buy it’. Sapa is excused because it is cute kids who do it and that is all they know, school in the morning, sell bracelets to tourists in the afternoon, and play with your mates after dark. Hanoi is slightly better than the rest of the north due to it being a big city with a lot of tourists. Therefore the next big place in the north is Hue. I felt that they perceived me as a dumb tourist and they could pull the wool over my eyes. I am aware that this is a general statement and may not pertain to every resident merchant in Hue but trust me when I say it happened everywhere I went. For the sake of not making this blog any longer than it has to be I will site only two examples. The first was at a Kodak developing store. I asked to have my memory cards transferred to CD. I was told the 1 CD would cost 30,000 dong. I agreed and presented her the 4 memory cards that would fit onto 1 CD. The teller’s colleague saw this and said something in Vietnamese to her and she proceeded to tell me for four cards to 1 CD would cost 100,000 dong. After trying to figure out why the extra cost as it would take the same amount of time and only 1 CD would be bought. I then asked how much for 2 memory cards and 1 CD and was told 60,000. In the end I paid it as I figured I would have this problem everywhere I went and later found other travellers had similar problems. It was so clear that she was making numbers up in her head and to be fair most tourists are there on a two week holiday and don’t question the cost. I do have to say that 30,000 dong is about 1 pound or $2.50 CAD so not a large amount but for me the principal of blatantly getting ripped off really ticked me off. The second instant was the Asia Hotel. On checkout they took my internet charge of $3.10 and made if $4, they then took my mini bar charge of $11.20 and mad it $12, to reach a total of $16. They then added it to my accommodation charge, which was already in USD. When I said I would like to pay in Dong, the receptionist did the conversion by %16. We then realized we didn’t have enough cash so asked to pay by credit card. The usual %3 for using your card was added which was expected but her credit card machine went though on USD so she calculated this time by %15 to get the final total and by the time I figured out what she had done she had already put my card throuh as the slick operator she was. I refused to sign my CC slip until I could figure it out and asked her to show me what she had done on the calculator. Miss speedy fingers wasn’t fast enough this time and I caught her out. When confronted she acted insulted, angry and rude and then handed me cash to compensate for the overcharged card when she could see I wasn’t backing down. All this just left a really bad taste in our mouths and to back up my rating of Hue, many other travellers we ran into afterward experienced a similar feeling some with more tolerance and some with less.

A short distance from Hue was Hoi An. This was described to us as a real gem of Viet Nam. I can certainly see why but as I was there on a RTW trip I was not in need of any souvenirs to take home or to have any garment out of the latest Next catalogue made for me in front of my eyes and to size. The town is tiny but still boasts over 200 tailor shops selling the most fissionable clothes for dirt-cheap. I would have stayed a week and shopped till I collapsed if I was in Viet Nam for a short holiday. It was a quaint town with a slower pace of life but at the end of it all I thought, why doesn’t someone open a pie shop or something other than a Tailor. There is a niche in that market let me tell ya!

We moved further down the coast to Nha Trang. It reminded us of an Asian Miami Beach. It had nice views and a beach that stretched the entire length of the city. The beach was good from a far but far from good as we discovered while taking a romantic stroll on it. We found it littered with rubbish and the dead bloated rat was enough to move the walk up onto the promenade (sidewalk). At one of the many excellent restaurants we read a blurb on the back of the menu explaining a hidden secret of the area. It seem the entrepreneurial nature of the Vietnamese went a little too far here, and the locals of Nha Trang instead of the regular cyclo rides and photo copied lonely planets, have taken to selling their children to visiting paedophiles. We were horrified and shocked not knowing wether to hate the parents or the paedophiles more! One night Annamarie went into an Internet cafe to web cam with her niece on her birthday. I stepped out to get some fresh air and in 30 sec an attractive girl pulled up in a scooter offering a massage and more. Needless to say a declined and retreated to the safety of the cafe as the air wasn’t as fresh as I thought it to be. Now don’t get me wrong, Nha Trang is a nice place on the surface but has a not so hidden seedy side that thankfully the rest of the country doesn’t suffer from or at least as badly. Our escape to Dalat was delayed a day while Annamarie recovered from a 24hr stomach bug.

Dalat is inland of Nha Trang and geographically not too far but oh so different. It reminded me of Sapa as it is a mountain destination but similarities stopped there. Dalat has a unique climate, which happens to be ideal for growing stuff. That is exactly what they do…grow stuff. But don’t let this fool you as Dalat seemed to me the 3rd largest city in Viet Nam (I am probably wrong on this one so don’t take it as gospel). We took a really nice day tour with a guy called Happy, and yes he was a happy chappie. He took us to the flower growing greenhouses, which were breathtaking. Apparently the majority of these Dalat flowers get exported to Holland. I figure most of Europe order their flowers from Holland and to keep up with the demand they use Dalat flowers to mix in their load. Naughty naughty Holland, and here I thought you could grow fab flowers on your own. After that we took in a silk factory, a coffee plantation, a mushroom plantation, and a rice wine distillery. This is probably too nice an image to paint. The silk factory was a falling down wood barn filled with machinery from the 50’s pulling the silk from the silkworm pods. The Mushroom plantation was a garden shed on the side of the road with plastic bags of dirt hanging from the ceiling (like a scene from the movie Rob Roy) . The mushrooms grew out of tiny holes in the plastic bags like fungus on a tree. The coffee plantation was the funniest for me as I don’t drink the stuff. They pull the pods off the bush/tree and simply lay it all over the place including their garden, the sidewalk, and the road. Cars drive over it, chickens and stray dogs relieve themselves on them, and even I walked on them. The bean is protected in the pod from these disgusting attacks and can live on the ground for just over a year. Farmers who deal in a few trades will wait for the price of coffee to rise and then sell the beans on the ground to supplement their other ventures in their off season. The Rice wine distillery was pretty funny as I stepped over the coffee beans in the driveway, we were greeted by a 12yr old girl (not in school) left to guard the place while the parents were out at the market. She knew our guide so we were allowed to roam free. We went down to their dirt floor basement/ barn and were able to see vats of rice fermenting and all the tools to make what I would describe as moonshine. I have sampled Rice Wine in Sapa and 2 glasses gave me the bravery and stupidity to try to ride a water buffalo! I must add that this “distillery also housed a bunch of pigs and piglets. I was told the owner regularly feeds his pigs the leftover fermented rice gruel as the alcohol makes the pigs sleep well!? I enjoyed our one-day whirlwind tour of Dalat but was eager to get back to Saigon.

When we returned to Saigon I realized that I didn’t fully appreciate it on my first visit. It was our first and last stop in Viet Nam and you can see they are laid back and geared to the tourist but in a pleasant way. I feel the rest of the country needs to take a leaf out of Saigon’s book when it comes to the treatment of visitors else I fear tourism and foreign investment will stop even before it gets started. The one thing I felt I had not done the last time in Saigon was taking a trip out to Cu Chi and seeing the tunnels. Off we went for a half-day and boy was it interesting! I am really glad our guide was a veteran and not a 30yr old who learned things second hand. He was a fountain of information and he explained that he never talks about the war with his family as it bothers him but that it was his job to take tourists to the tunnels and he wanted them to know some truths. Sometimes during the day he got quite emotional and had moments of silence and moments of ranting about one little point. The tunnel system is impressive and although I am not a war buff found it amazing how Charlie lived. The booby traps were crude and simple, and the war seems to me to have been won on brainpower. I got into a sniper hole and barely fit. I couldn’t drop down all the way because my shoulders were too wide. The tunnel system was dark and I went 100 meters on my hands and knees sweating to death. A highlight of the tour was a stop off at the rifle range where we were able to fire a few rounds from an AK47 and an M1. I came away a little deaf but pleased I got the full experience!

All in all Viet Nam was cursed at and used as a general curse word under Annamarie’s breath but for both of us this will be the country we both talk about for years to come well after this trip is over. I write this from Australia, which is supposed to be a fantastic country, but I find myself bored as it reminds me of a combination of my two homes, Canada and Britain. Viet Nam with highs and lows was an adventure and the type I was looking for when embarking on this world trip. It tested my limits and boundaries and made me grateful to live in places where poverty is not as big an issue. I feel privileged to have seen it at this stage of its development and know if I choose to return in the future it will have significantly changed to a more modern trading nation.