[This was my first trip to Vietnam. From back when I used to live in Cambodia. As such it contains my initial impressions of the country. As initial impressions are often wrong or misleading, it doesn't represent my views now. Having lived in Vietnam for 3 years now, my views on a lot of these topics are a lot more nuanced. But I won't get into that. I'll just let my initial 2011 impressions stand for what they are.]
Sunday, June 26, 2011
I’ve got the week off from school, so off to Vietnam this week.
First I suppose I should explain why I’m going to Vietnam in the first place. Especially when I haven’t even explored Cambodia yet. I haven’t been to Cambodia’s touristy coastal towns, Sihanoukville and Kampot. And I haven’t been to the infamous Angkor Wat, or Siem Reap. And I haven’t yet been out to the Killing Fields. Really I haven’t left Phnom Penh at all yet. So by all rights I really should do more exploring around Cambodia before I jet off to another country.
But I decided that since there are so many countries close to Cambodia, and that it was just as easy to travel to another country as it was to go around inside Cambodia, that I would just assume go to a different country. Partly for bragging rights if nothing else. I just want to up the number of countries that I can say I’ve been to.
I’ve been feeling self-conscious for a few years now about how under-travelled I am (as regular readers of this blog probably know.) And that’s been especially true since I came to Cambodia.
In Japan, much of the expat crowd was similar to me: Japan was their first big trip abroad. But the kind of person who ends up in Cambodia tends to be a bit different. All of my co-workers are veteran travelers. All of them have backpacked all over South-East Asia. And in fact most of them got the job in Cambodia because they ran across it in their travels. As far as I know, I’m the only one at work who came to the school right off the plane without having lived or worked in Cambodia before.
So all the time in the staffroom I hear them talking about Vietnam, or Thailand, or Laos, or Malaysia, or Indonesia, or Myanmar, et cetera. And I just felt I needed to start catching up quickly. So first vacation I’m off to a new country to try and up the number of countries I’ve been to. (Vietnam now makes 8 countries: US, Canada, Korea, China, Japan, Australia, Cambodia and now Vietnam.)
Anyway, I woke up at 5, showered and got ready, and went to the travel agency at 6:15 to pick up the bus. The bus was about a half hour late. And actually it turned out it was only a shuttle van to take us to the bus station, and then from there we loaded up the actual bus.
The bus consisted entirely of Khmer people, except for me, and one Vietnamese girl. The bus guide did the announcements in both English and Khmer, but the television entertainment was all in Khmer. (I had been warned actually by Remi, my friend from France, that when you take the bus anywhere they just repeat Khmer music videos over and over again. Remi complained about it like it was a bad thing, but I actually liked Khmer music, so I enjoyed the soundtrack.)
Mostly though I kept my eyes glued to the window to watch all the scenery going by. This was my first time out of Phnom Penh, and it was my first time seeing the Cambodian countryside. And I was amazed by how beautiful it was.
I guess the main word I would use to describe the countryside is just green. Much of the land is used for rice fields, but where ever the land has not been plowed for rice it is taken over by a very dense jungle like foliage.
The lifestyle of the people out in the countryside (from what little I could glean from the bus windows) seems very different from Phnom Penh. It is probably unfair to call these people poor, because really they’re not any poorer than their ancestors were who farmed this land for thousands of years. It’s the lifestyle of the rest of the world that has changed. This is almost the land that time forget—people out working in the rice fields by hands, children leading herds of cattle down the street, a man riding on a cart pulled by a horse, plowing the fields with water buffalo, huts made of straw and leaves—et cetera.
The same was true on certain parts of the Vietnam boarder as well.
[Really, it boggles the mind that 50 years ago anyone could possibly have cared whether these rice paddy farmers wanted to be communist or not.]
I didn’t get take any pictures from the bus, because it’s hard to take pictures of something while the bus is in motion. Although maybe I should have tried harder. But when you see something picturesque, by the time you try and focus the camera the bus has already moved on.
While still on the Cambodian side, we came across the Mekong River, which was absolutely huge (I never realized before what a huge river the Mekong actually is.) There was no bridge, but there was a ferry bringing vehicles across, which we rode on.
The bus stopped for lunch for about a half hour.
We also had to get off and go through customs at the boarder.
The Vietnamese girl on the bus spoke quite good English, so I talked to her briefly at a couple points. She had been in Cambodia to visit Angkor Wat, which she told me was the best temple she had seen in all of Asia. Made small chit chat at various points, but she got off the bus before we got into the center of Saigon.
(Officially the name of the city is of course now Ho Chi Minh City. But I’m given to understand the local people refer to it under both names, and historically it was always Saigon, so that seems more apt to me. Although in conversation with a Vietnamese person I was careful to always call the city by it’s official name.)
The bus stopped in Pham Ngu Lao, which is the main tourist area.
I should back up a minute and say I was a bit nervous coming into Vietnam, especially since the other teachers at work had geared me up so much to be on my look-out for scams, pick pockets, rip offs, et cetera.
Many of the teachers in Cambodia have taught in Vietnam before, and many of them have surprisingly developed a hatred of Vietnam.
Paul (from America) used to teach in Vietnam, and is quite vocal about how much he hated Vietnam. “I hated Vietnam,” he told me. “Hated it hated it hated it. Hated everything about it.”
Mike (from America) also used to teach there, and told me he didn’t like the culture there. He also warned me that people would try and cheat me on everything. “They’re not nice over there like they are here in Cambodia,” he said.
Jeff (from America) told me he liked travelling around in Vietnam, but couldn’t stand living there because of the traffic, and also because people were constantly trying to rip him off.
John and Adam (both from England) only went to Vietnam as tourists, but both seemed to have had negative experiences there, because they both told me they had hated it.
Even people who didn’t seem to openly hate Vietnam (like Anne-Marie and Richard) cautioned me to be on the look out for this and that.
And the Lonely Planet Guide Book has a couple pages warning you about pick pockets in Saigon, and shady hotels, and said to be especially careful walking around with luggage because that made you a target, and recommended ditching your bags at the hotel as soon as possible.
I was terrified of getting robbed in a foreign country and being stuck with no money, no passport, and no way to get back home again. I had taken the pre-caution of distributing my money in various parts of my body so I would still have something even if I got pick pocketed (stuffing some money in my socks, some in my wallet, some in a safety travel pouch) but I was still really geared up to be suspicious of everyone when I got off the bus.
As this was the backpacker area, there were several people waiting outside the bus trying to get them to go to this hotel or that hotel. Mike had warned me that a lot of these hotels aren’t very good, and had recommended one to me specifically, so I politely by passed the hotel hawkers.
Unfortunately I had trouble finding this hotel. So despite my best intentions not to, I ended up wandering around Pham Ngu Lao with my bags in hand and my map looking like a vulnerable tourist.
I ran into a Vietnamese girl walking the other way on the road. She had a bag of fruits and she opened it to offer me one. Not wanting to have anything to do with anyone until I had dropped my bags off and felt secure, I refused and simply walked around her.
She must have took offense at this because she starting talking at me in Vietnamese and following me.
One of the taxi drivers said something that sounded like, “Sorry, but she’s going to follow you now.” (I’m not sure if she has a reputation for following people around, or if I had just offended her.) But she followed me for several blocks as I wandered around Pham Ngu Lao, often just walking beside me in silence, occasionally talking to me angrily in Vietnamese. Once or twice I stopped to try and explain that I didn’t understand what she wanted, but she apparently spoke no English. Occasionally she would grab at my arm, and I would jerk it free again. I kept a close eye on all my pockets, but she didn’t try and steal anything from me. Eventually after several blocks (many of them the same blocks because I was wandering around in circles a bit) she stopped following me.
Actually, in my whole stay in Saigon I encountered nothing but friendly people. In retrospect, I think I had stepped off the bus a little bit too geared up and suspicious. Partly it was because my co-workers had wound me up so much about Saigon. And partly it’s just my nervous nature, and the fact that I’m naturally a creature of habit and like to stick to familiar surroundings, and get nervous easily in unfamiliar places (another reason I’ve done so little travelling in my life).
I found a hotel Hung Lao, which I think was the hotel Mike recommended to me. $25 a night, and it looked nice.
The bus ride had taken about 6 hours, and it had taken another hour or so to find the hotel, but I still had some of the afternoon free to sight see.
I found a place to get my money changed to Vietnamese Dong and just did some general wandering around Pham Ngu Lau.
Some initial observations on Vietnam:
Saigon is only 6 hours drive from Phnom Penh (actually probably only about 5 hours actually driving time once you discount stopping for lunch and immigration), but it’s amazing what a difference those 5 hours make. The skin color of the people seems to change visibly once you cross that boarder. On the Cambodian side, they’re a lot darker looking and almost Indian looking. On the Vietnamese side they look much more Asian, or Chinese looking.
Also Saigon is much more developed than Phnom Penh is. It’s a much bigger city, and the locals seem to be living a lot better here. There doesn’t seem to be as much poverty in Vietnam, or at least in Saigon, as there is in Phnom Penh. People aren’t rich, but there seems to be a healthy middle class here.
Part of the evidence of the increased prosperity is the increased traffic on the road. Actually I had had advanced warning of this from Jeff and Anne-Marie, who had both warned me about the insane amount of motorcycles on the streets of Saigon. “They’re much more of them than in Phnom Penh,” they had told me. “But they’re much more predictable. If you cross the street one step at a time, they will go around you. It’s a leap of faith the first time stepping out into traffic, but just walk one step at a time. Whatever you do don’t panic and run, or don’t stop, because that will really throw them off. You’ll be alright as long as you keep walking at a steady pace.” [The Lonely Planet gives similar advice.]
I had the opportunity to put this advice into practice shortly after arriving in Saigon. I didn’t cross the street quite as smoothly as the locals did, but it was true. The traffic does all go around you.
The other thing I noticed about Saigon straight off was how many other foreigners were there. (No doubt this was partly because I started off in the backpacker area.) All illusions I had that I was exploring new untouched ground were quickly shattered. To my sheltered West Michigan mind, Saigon sounded like the exotic ends of the earth, but just like Phnom Penh, it was overrun by foreigners. In this day and age of international travel, I suppose it’s hard to go to any corner of the world that’s untouched by tourists.
(Well, although the Japanese countryside had had very few foreigners. I suppose after all those years in Japan, I had assumed all of Asia was like this, and hadn’t realized how big tourism was in Indochina.)
I didn’t see any tuk-tuks (motorcycle carriages) in Saigon, but there were lots of motorcycle taxis, and Cyclos. They city wasn’t quiet as flooded with them as in Phnom Penh. You didn’t get hailed by them at every corner. But the ones that were there were much more persistent.
Usually they started up a friendly conversation with you, asking you where you were from, et cetera. Then they offered to show you around. And when I told them I was much happier walking, I found that they didn’t readily take no for an answer, and I had to argue with them as they followed me around, in some cases for several blocks.
I initially set out on the Lonely Planet walking tour of Saigon (which starts out, conveniently enough, from Pham Ngu Lao.) I went by the indoor market of Ben Thanh Market (but didn’t go inside) and passed the massive roundabout with a statue of Tran Nguyen Hai (where I had plenty of opportunities to practice Jeff and Anne-Marie’s advice about crossing the street).
Because it was fast getting late in the afternoon, I decided to at this point to just cut out from the Lonely Planet route, and head over to the War Museum.
I got caught in a downpour. It’s rainy season now, so one downpour a day is to be expected. (On the plus side, this is why it’s the low tourist season, and why I was able to do the whole trip without making any reservations in advance.)
The rain came suddenly out of nowhere, and I was thoroughly drenched before I could find shelter.
Ideally I would have liked to wait out the rain in a nice little café or something, but there was none near me when the storm hit. I stayed under an awning of some shop. I was worried I would be interfering with their business, but it seemed the common practice of everyone to just stop under whatever awning was closest to them. The rain lasted for about 20 minutes or so. I got a little bored waiting for it to finish, and eventually pulled my book out of my bag and read for a little while standing up. But eventually it did go away, and I was back on track.
I passed the City Museum, which looked very impressive (and had a long line outside of it) but opted to go for the war Museum first.
I had the usual confusion with the map that you have in new cities, missed my street by about several blocks, and had to do some back tracking. (All of this could have been avoided I guess had I accepted a ride from the motorbike taxis, but I’m of the opinion walking is the best way to experience a new city.)
Actually the motorbike taxis had all been offering to take me to the War Museum, so this must be the one of the most popular places for foreigners to go in Saigon.
It is a bit, I suppose, like the atomic bomb museums in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s something everyone needs to see if your in the city, but it’s not necessarily a pleasant experience.
It’s impossible to walk through the war museum without getting emotional. And it’s also hard to write about it without getting emotional.
The Lonely Planet writes “Many of the atrocities documented here were well publicized in the West”.
“Well publicized” might be stretching things. And there is of course, the Memory Hole problem. (If you read political works from the 1960s, many of the people at the time were well aware of what was actually happening. But this is distinctively different from what I learned in school). But at the very least, almost everything in the museum is publicly available information, and if you’ve read up a lot on the war, there’s little here that’s new to you.
And yet despite this, the cumulative emotional impact of seeing all of it all laid out in front of you at once almost makes you feel physically sick.
There is picture after picture of the children born deformed because of Agent Orange. Many of the deformed faces are hard to look at. The text on the wall notes that the US government has refused to pay compensation to the victims of Agent Orange, and so the burden of raising all these deformed children has been left to the peasant farmers unfortunate enough to live in these areas.
There are pictures of the My Lai massacre, mothers trying to protect their children before being shot down, and dead children stacked up in ditches by the US soldiers. There are on display some personal items that once belonged to the massacred villagers.
Other less-well known massacres of civilians (like the one Senator Bob Kerry took part in) are also documented.
There are pictures of US soldiers burning down Vietnamese villages, and the villagers being taken away to the new barb wire enclosed hamlets were the US government hoped to prevent them from being influenced by the Vietcong.
There’s a chart which shows just how many tons of bombs were dropped on both North Vietnam and South Vietnam by year.
There are pictures of children running naked crying after being burned by napalm, children watching their houses burn down, and a mother carrying her infant children while she swims across the river to avoid a US air attack on her village.
Captured Viet Cong soldiers being forced marched by US soldiers, pulled by ropes tied around their necks like animals-- in their own country. Pictures of VietCong soldiers being tortured by waterboarding by US soldiers, and pushed out of helicopters.
On one wall, there is a quote by Eisenhower to the US congress explaining why the US needed to send money to aid the French effort to reconquer Vietnam back in 1954. “This land is rich in tin and other resources that the US needs. And if a government hostile to the US is allowed to emerge in this region, I assure you it will cost us far much more in the long run.” (Something like that--I'm quoting from memory).
Occasionally the walls would have various placards quoting various decisions of the Nuremburg Trial next to the various atrocities being documented, showing quite clearly that International War Crimes law was completely ignored in Vietnam.
It is sickening to think that the people responsible for conducting this war were able to do all this, and were never brought to trial, never formally accused of war crimes, and when they finished destroying this small country were able to retire as rich respected statesmen.
It all just serves to illustrate Thucydides's quote: “The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.”
I’m probably not doing a good job of describing it, but it gets to you after a while. And it seemed to be having the same effect on the other people in the museum. There was a somber mood.
It was mostly other foreigners in the museum, but an older American man who was walking through at the same time as me was just shaking his head and making tisking sounds at everything he saw. Another person just sighed at everything.
The final floor of the museum is dedicated to the journalists who documented the war, and it is a fitting ending. There are many photos from Life magazine (for instance showing peasants trying to farm in the war zones, or captured Viet Cong soldiers pleading for their lives).
Occasionally the actual pages from Life Magazine are reproduced as well, and if you actually read what they say, the text is often at variance with the message from the photos. The author would say something like “Things may have been looking grim in Vietnam the last few years, but there’s still plenty of reasons to hope for a successful outcome.”
(I’m sure I don’t need to point out how we’ve all heard this same rhetoric now so many times with Iraq and Afghanistan.)
There were memorials to many of the journalists who died in the war.
Also, I didn’t know this but many Japanese photojournalists had taken an active role in document Vietnam. Many of them are mentioned in the main exhibit, and there’s a whole room dedicated to the work of one of them (I forget his name.)
Also on a positive note, the first floor of the museum (the first thing you see when you walk in, and then also again when you finish and walk out) is dedicated to the World Wide protests against the war.
Each country is given roughly equal space, so the section on the US doesn’t include everything it could have. Pictures of draft card burning, people who went to prison rather than go to the war, and pictures of Kent State. Also the pictures and stories of 3 US men who immolated themselves in protest against the war.
Japanese protest against the Vietnam War actually occupies the very first wall in the museum. There’s pictures of the Japanese Student movement and Beiheren (Peace in Vietnam Committee).
After completing the Museum, I stopped into a coffee shop to have a bit of coffee and cake and just try and recover a little bit.
[Vietnam is apparently quite famous for it’s coffee, and there’s a distinctive coffee here made from a French press. They serve it in small cups, but it’s very thick tasting, and quite strong. Presumably it’s influenced from the French colonial period. Actually it’s the same type of coffee they serve at a lot of shops in Cambodia, but it’s called “Vietnamese coffee” so because it’s famous here I made a point of trying sample it in many of the shops I went to.]
The day was now fastly drawing to a close, and by the time I left the coffee shop it was now dark.
I walked back to the Pham Ngu Lao tourist areas, and went into one of the several tourist agencies there. I inquired into plane and train tickets up to Hanoi, but didn’t make a final decision about buying any.
I did however book a day tour of the Mekong Delta area for the next day.
I walked down the street, and there was a bit of a spectacle on the sidewalk. A Vietnamese girl had her hand tightly curled up into a fist around the T-shirt of an American guy. (I’m assuming he was American because of his accent, but he looked Asian). She looked very pretty, actually, but she had a fierce determined look on her face, and she was refusing to let go of her shirt.
Since this was the main tourist area, a small crowd of other tourists were gathering around to watch the scene.
“What did you do to her?” someone asked him.
“Good question,” he said. “If someone can answer that, I’ll give them a million dollars.”
“Just let her rip the shirt off,” someone else suggested.
“She’s already ripped through 2 already,” he said.
They were locked in a stand-off. I think she would have liked to grab his shirt with both hands, but he held the other hand. With his free hand, he tried to pry her grip lose, but then she moved forward to bite her hand.
He alternated between trying to force her grip lose, and pleading with her to let go, and trying to appeal to help to any of the Vietnamese around.
Although I knew it was rude to gawk, I was very curious to see how the situation would resolve itself, and my curiosity overcame my good manners. So I stayed and watched. But after 5 minutes or so they were still locked in the same stand off, and I got bored and went to get something to eat. (15 minutes or so later when I went back down the same street, they were both gone.)
I got dinner at Subway, which is a bit pathetic I know to come all the way to Saigon and then eat at Subway. But I really like Subway. And plus they don’t have American fast food restaurants in Cambodia, so this is the first time I’ve eaten at Subway for 3 months.
[Sidenote: Although there are lots of restaurants in Cambodia catering to Western tastes, there are no American chain restaurants. Presumably because until just the last few years it hasn’t been economically viable to open up Western business chains in Cambodia. Kentucky Fried Chicken is the only American Fast food place in Cambodia. Surprisingly enough, they’re the first ones in so far—beating out McDonalds and Starbucks.
Actually one of the reading lessons in the textbook last term was about McDonalds, and it was funny because my Cambodian students didn’t even know what McDonalds was. To which all I could say was, “Just you wait. I’m sure they’ll be here soon enough.”]
Monday, June 27
Woke up early, got breakfast at the hotel, and went down to the tour agency for the Mekong Delta tour I had signed up for yesterday.
There was another guy there waiting for the same tour, and he struck up a conversation with me. His name was Masashi, he was from Japan, and he turned out to be a really interesting guy.
He was working in Kyoto as a professor of English at one of the Universities. He was on his way to Sydney to present a paper at conference on D.H. Lawrence. (His paper was examining the similarities between Yukio Mishima’s and D.H. Lawrence’s view of life and death.)
As we got talking, he gave me more of his life story. He had enrolled as a student at Kyoto University back in 1971 (he was a bit older than me obviously.)
“1971,” I said. “The Zengakuren [All Japan Student Federation] was active during that time, wasn’t it?”
Yes, he said, although it sounded like he had just missed the high point of the student militancy. When he was starting up in 1971, the universities were just now re-opening after they had been shut down for 2 years by student barricades. So when the universities finally re-opened, students who were supposed to be seniors were then enrolled in the same classes as Freshmen.
[Over my time in Japan, I’ve heard a lot of stories similar to this from people of that generation. For example Keiko, one of my Nova students, told me once how Fukuoka university had been closed down for a year because of student barricades, and so the students had just held teach-ins to educate each other in lieu of formal classes.]
Masashi had studied at Kyoto University for a year, but then dropped out because he was bored with school, and had spent 2 years travelling the world in 1972 and 1973. He couldn’t go to Indochina at the time because the war was still going on, so this was his first time in Vietnam. But it sounds like he got to just about everywhere else.
Of course, these days it seems like everyone and their brother is a world traveler. But back in 1972, I imagined it must have been a lot rarer. In fact my parents have told me it was not common for their generation to travel abroad. And I commented to Masashi about this. But he disagreed. “No, even back then I met lots of other Americans when I was travelling around,” he said.
He had several interesting stories from his world travels, like spending several days travelling from Malaysia to India on a cargo ship. (It was the cheapest way he could travel, but they didn’t have a room, so he just had to sleep out on the deck in the scorching heat and sun. Eventually he sneaked down into the first class rooms he said.) Or his story about being on the Pakistan/ Afghanistan boarder in 1973 right when a coup happened in Afghanistan.
The tour bus was about a half hour late in arriving, but I commented to Masashi that “I’ve noticed that punctuality doesn’t seem to be that important in this part of the world.”
Masashi was also amazed at the traffic in Saigon, and all the motorbikes that flooded the street. Having just come from Phnom Penh, I don’t think it fazed me as much as it did him. (It’s worse in Saigon, but not by that much.)
Masashi was also amazed at the way people just casually stepped out into traffic, and in fact pointed to an old woman crossing the street to illustrate his point. “Look at the complete nonchalance with which she’s walking,” he said. “It’s like she’s saying, ‘go ahead, hit me! see if I care!’”
The bus finally arrived, and we got on. There were several other people already on board from different tour agencies.
The tour guide went around asking where everyone was from.
After having seen the war museum yesterday, I was embarrassed to say I was an American, but actually it turned out the tour guide had family in California, and had lived there for several years.
When he found out that Masashi was from Japan, the tour guide commented “Ah, Japan, Aji-no-moto, right?”
(Masashi explained to me later that the Japanese spice, Aji-no-Moto, was actually much more popular here in Southeast Asia than in it’s native country of Japan. And come to think of it I had seen several advertisements for Aji-no-Moto around Phnom Penh as well.)
There were also several Vietnamese people on this tour as well (somewhat to my surprise. I would have thought these organized tour groups would appeal only to foreign tourists, but maybe Vietnamese people also view it as a convenient way to do sight seeing in their own country.) So the tour guide repeated everything twice in English and Vietnamese.
The tour guide spoke decent, but highly accented English. At first glance he had a bit of an abrasive personality, warning all of us that his directions would be repeated only once, and so he wanted us all to listen carefully.
Also he came around the bus to pick up our receipts. Masashi had lost his receipt, although he had clearly already paid for the tour since we had been picked up outside the tour company. The tour guide told him he would have to pay again. Masashi tried to cover the embarrassment by laughing, and the tour guide told him, “Don’t laugh, you need to pay again.” At the time Masashi and I thought he was actually serious, but it turned out he was joking, and actually throughout the day we found that he wasn’t quite as abrasive as his first impression led us to believe.
The bus ride down to the Mekong Delta region was 2 hours. I sat next to Masashi and talked to him the whole ride down, while also trying to take in some of the scenery.
We rode passed a lot of rice fields, and Masashi remarked that there were a lot of little shrines built in the center of these rice fields. He wondered if these might be places where people buried ashes of their dead. I remarked it looked a bit similar to the small shrines for cremated ashes you often saw in the rice fields in the countryside of Kyushu.
We then arrived at the Mekong River, and took one of the boats to an Island, where we were led to some picnic tables and benches.
There were several bee farms, and the tour guide brought out a panel from the bee farm. “These are Vietnamese bees,” he said, “so they don’t sting, they only kiss.” He blew at the panel until the bees moved away to create a vacant spot, and Masashi was encouraged to stick his finger there and taste some of the honey.
We were served small glasses of honey tea and dried fruits, and then encouraged to buy some of the honey and dry fruit packages they had for sale.
It was a bit of a tourist trap. And actually, the whole tour was a bit of a tourist trap. But as Masashi said to me later in the day, it was the cheapest tour he could find, so he hadn’t really expected too much from it. (I hadn’t even bothered to do any price comparing. I just booked the first Mekong Delta tour I came across, but apparently this was one of the cheaper ones.)
There was also banana rice wine. (They called it wine, but it was more of a hard alcohol, like sake.) And we got free samples of that as well. The tour guide explained that this is what the local farmers drank, because they couldn’t afford to buy beer, and this rice wine got you drunk much quicker anyway.
Then, from a cage, the tour guide brought out a boa constrictor snake.
Surprisingly enough, it was the Vietnamese girls on the tour who freaked out the most at this, screaming as soon as they saw it, and a couple of them even running away from their tables as the tour guide brought it over.
Several of my old Japanese friends, after having coming back from Vietnam, had shown me pictures of them with snakes wrapped around their shoulders, so I guessed that this was part of the standard tourist experience. When the tour guide asked if someone wanted to hold the snake, I volunteered. One of the Dutch girls on the tour took a couple pictures for me, so now I’ve officially done the standard “hold a snake in Vietnam” tourist thing.
After me, one of the Dutch girls also got her picture taken with the snake. But there were few other takers.
We then walked down to another station at the same island.
On the way, the tour guide stopped me and asked me if I was travelling through Vietnam alone. When I said I was, he seemed surprised by this and asked why I didn’t have a girlfriend. He encouraged me to make friends with the two Dutch girls who were also on the tour. And he also pointed me out to one of the Vietnamese girls and her mother, and said something that got them giggling, but I can only guess at what it was.
At the next table, we where we were served tea, and plates of fresh fruit. Masashi and I sat at the same table with the Dutch girls, and talked to them a bit. Both of them were students. If I remember correctly, they had just finished up their bachelor’s degrees, were preparing to enter Master Programs, and so were travelling around South East Asia for the summer (one was going into medicine, and the other sociology maybe.)
There was music provided at this stop as well, as several Vietnamese women (and one young girl) got up to sing for us. The singing wasn’t particularly good, but I thought it rude to talk through it when they were doing their best, so I stopped talking to listen, and the rest of my table followed suit.
Interestingly enough, after going through several Vietnamese songs, the women ended on a Japanese number, singing in chorus: “Shiawase nara te o tateko” (the Japanese version of “If Your Happy and You Know it Clap Your hands.”) They did this last song in Japanese as just part of their act without any sort of announcement or acknowledgement that they were switching languages, and I suspect nobody in the tour group realized that this last song was being song in Japanese except for Masashi, myself, and the Vietnamese members.
“They must get a lot of Japanese tourists here,” I said to Masashi as we were walking to the next stop.
“Oh, you noticed that last song as well, huh?” he said.
He explained that it was relatively recently, only in the last 10 years or so Vietnam had become a popular tourist destination for Japanese people. Mostly this was because it was now cheaper to fly outside of Japan and travel than it was to travel within Japan, and so more and more Japanese people were taking their holidays in Southeast Asia.
Next we were lead through a small path to a little river through the jungle. Here we all got into various little canoes (4 people to a canoe) that was rowed by a Vietnamese woman at the stern.
This was one of what must be hundreds of little tiny subsidiary streams to the Mekong Delta. On both sides it was covered with leafy bamboo like plants growing out of the water. (The tourist guide said that the local people here use these plants to build the roofs to their homes, and we did see a couple huts built in this fashion.)
As we rowed down this river, I felt a bit like I was on one of those jungle cruise rides that you go to at an amusement park as a kid. Only this was the real thing. (Well, sort of. We were still on the tourist path, obviously, but it was the real Mekong Delta.)
Eventually we emerged from the stream back to the main Mekong River, and were taken by another boat to another island with tourist shops.
Here the locals were engaged in making candy from the coconuts. We were given a small sample of the coconut candy (and encouraged to buy more of course) and invited to look at the process by which the candy was being made. I was more interested in just wandering around the small island and looking at the foliage.
There was also on display some sort of snake wine. (Rice wine which had been fermented in a jar with a dead snake). We were invited to sample this, and Masashi and I, on the theory that you should try everything at least once, were among the few who opted to take a shot of it. We were also offered shots of coconut rice wine, which we tried as well.
We got into another boat, and were taken through another subsidiary of the Mekong River.
This time we were on a motorized boat, and the river was a not quite as narrow as before. But the scenery still seemed very jungle like and exotic to me, and I tried to snap several pictures.
We passed several local children swimming in the river. Up on the banks, their older sisters were busy chatting away on their cell phones.
We were taken to a restaurant and seated on at tables on a wooden balcony overlooking the river.
Once again Masashi and I ended up sitting by the two Dutch girls, and we exchanged various travel stories with them and shared our impressions of Vietnam.
The basic meal was included in the price of our tour, although the proprietor came around with menus encouraging us to order something different and more expensive, but we all stuck to the usual meal.
As she drank the salty soup, one of the Dutch girls commented, “Nice to get some salt back in your body,” (Referring to all the salt we had all been losing throughout the day from perspiration.)
At the end of the dinner, there was the option of doing a brief bike riding tour. And most of us (including Masashi and I) opted to do this, because why not. Although it was very brief indeed. The bikes were old, and not very good, and (for someone like me especially) the bikes were a bit on the small side. We biked down this small little dirt road. It was a small road, and there wasn’t much traffic, but we did cause a bit of annoyance to some of the locals who were trying to get through on their own bicycles and motorbikes.
The tour guide (who didn’t go along) had appointed one of the Dutch girls the leader, and told her when she got to the main road, go about halfway down and then come back.
The main road had a lot more traffic going down it, and so we were all busy avoiding traffic the whole time we were on it (and some of us later questioned what the necessity of this brief excursion out onto the main road had been in the first place. But oh well.) Then we returned back the way we had come.
We then got back in the boats, and returned to the main part of the Mekong River, and then travelled back to the docks from which we had come.
At this point in the Mekong’s journey it is absolutely huge, and although it’s still technically a river, at this point it was bigger than many lakes I’ve seen. And Masashi agreed with this, saying his house is close to Lake Biwa and he thought the Mekong River was wider here than Lake Biwa was (at least at points.)
We got back to the docks, had some brief time to kill by the tourist concessions, and then loaded back in the bus.
There was a separation between people who were doing the one day tour, the two day tour, and the 3 day tour. (The 3 day tour, by the way, ends up back in Phnom Penh by way of boat, and if I had planned this trip out a little bit better that probably would have been a great way to conclude this trip and head back. But oh well—next time.)
Those people on the 2 or 3 day tour got dropped off at a different location, and we picked up some new passengers (people who were just finishing the 2 day tour). Masashi and I were both on the 1 day tour, so we waited on the bus for the new passengers to load. (For whatever reason, there was a bit of confusion about this point, and it took forever to sort out where everyone was supposed to go while Masashi and I waited patiently in the bus.)
It also started to rain heavily at this time, and rained the whole drive back. Well, what can you do? It’s rainy season. And Masashi and I commented that at the very least we had been very luck that the rain had held off until our tour had finished.
It was still raining two hours later when we arrived back in Saigon. The bus dropped us off a few blocks short of the travel agency where we had started the trip.
Masashi suggested we go and get a beer somewhere. I said okay, but I wanted to go back to the travel agency first and sort out what I was going to do about going to Hanoi or not.
We made a dash for it in the rain, but after one block we were just so ridiculously soaked we decided not to brave it the rest of the way. (Or I decided at least. Masashi might have been up for it.) So we stopped in at the closest restaurants to get some food and a beer.
This was in the backpacker area, so it was a Westernized restaurant catering to tourists. Which was just fine by me (although I think Masashi preferred to experiment with local places, but when it’s raining like this, whichever restaurant is closest is the one you go for.)
Eventually the rain did stop, and we proceeded to the same travel agency where we had started our day.
I made some inquiries about train tickets versus plane tickets, and one way tickets versus two way tickets.
It turns out that the train is indeed 30 plus hours. And it’s not all that much cheaper than the plane.
The plane was about $100 each way. There was no flight from Hanoi to Phnom Penh, so I’d need to return to Saigon and take the bus back from Saigon.
I debated whether it was worth the $200 to travel up to Hanoi or not. It would be nice to see Mai, and it would be nice to meet up with someone who would be able to show me around the city. But on the other hand, it did seem a bit exorbitant to pay this much money.
After a couple minutes deliberating in front of the travel agents and Masashi (all of whom were waiting for me to make up my mind) I figured “Why not!” and bought the tickets leaving for Hanoi tomorrow night. (No matter what decision I made, I’d probably think better of it one way or the other. So better a regret from action than from inaction.)
The $200 I needed to pay for the transaction were stuffed down at the bottom of my sock, and I embarrassed myself by having to dig for my money from out under my foot. The money was soaked, partly from being next to my sweaty feet all day, and partly from the rain, and I was embarrassed to hand it over, but what could you do? The girl behind the counter commented that it was very wet, but accepted the money anyway. (I figured money stuffed down into my sock would be safe from pick pockets at the very least.)
Travel arrangements satisfied, I was free to go out with Masashi for the beer.
Masashi wanted to get away from the touristy places and find a local watering hole. I didn’t much care one way or another, so I followed his lead.
It took us a couple blocks walk before we got out of the touristy areas. (While walking through here, the various street hawkers addressed Masashi directly in Japanese. “Oishii Yo. Yasui Yo.” (“It’s delicious. It’s cheap.”) Another sign that they were no stranger to Japanese tourists.
Once out of the touristy areas, we wandered down a few different side streets until we found a place where the locals were drinking.
It wasn’t inside, but there were several chairs set up on the sidewalk. (In fact, for the locals there appeared to be very few indoor places. Much of the food and drink places were just chairs and tables set up on the sidewalk.)
We ordered two beers. I took care to make sure we insisted they were in cans, so we didn’t get sick from beers diluted with local ice. Also, based on the advice of the Lonely Planet, I wanted to confirm in advance how much the beers would be so we wouldn’t get ripped of afterwards. But we never got a chance to do this, and in the end it turned out not to be a problem. (Masashi wasn’t worried about either of these things. He was a lot more relaxed traveler than I was.)
Once we had our beers, we just sat in the lawn chairs and watched the traffic go by along with all the locals.
It was an interesting set up. All the chairs were arranged in rows, so that everyone was facing the same way—towards the road. And you just sipped your drink and watched the cars go by. (Some of the local people were drinking beer, but others had tea or ice coffee).
Masashi speculated that this kind of set-up was a legacy of French colonialism, and the French outdoor café style. I wondered if maybe this was just because these people didn’t have TVs and computers back home, and maybe this is what people did in the days before TV. Or perhaps this was because most houses in Vietnam didn’t have air conditioning, so on a summer night it was cooler to sit outside than inside. Who knows.
Over a couple beers, I listened to more of Masashi’s stories about travelling the world back in the 1970s. He talked about “The Switchboard” and when I didn’t understand what he was talking about, he said, “Maybe it was a counter-culture thing. Ask your parents.” Apparently when you got into any town, you would go to the local University, find the Switchboard list, and call up people who would give you free room and board.
He also said there was a group called “The Jesus People” who were apparently quite prominent in the 1970s, and would go to bus stops and such to try and talk to people about religion. And, if he would pretend to be interested in Jesus, he would often get free meals and a bed out of it in return for listening to their spiel. But, while trying to get free lodging out of these various religious groups, he also had some stories of some run-ins with more scary and cultish groups (I guess the 1970s is when cults were kind of a thing, for whatever reason.)
After 2 beers I suggested we explore a little bit more and go to another place for our 3rd. But Masashi said he was feeling tired actually and wanted to just go back to the hotel and sleep. Actually I was half-relieved to hear him say it, because I was feeling really tired myself. (It had been an early start and a long day.)
We walked back to the tourist areas together.
Among interesting things we saw as we walked back were some Japanese convenience stores (Family Mart) and Japanese fast food chains (Lotto). And a strip of sidewalk where there were tons of people just sitting on their parked motorbikes waiting for something. We were really curious about this, but we couldn’t figure out what they were waiting for so we just walked on.
We were staying at separate hotels, and eventually we got to a point in the road where our paths parted, and we said good-bye for the night. (We had made plans to meet up tomorrow afternoon at 1 at the Notre Dame Cathedral.)
On my way back to the hotel, I walked through the park near Pham Ngo Lao, where a number of Vietnamese people were taking advantage of the night air to do laps around the park. One girl walking laps struck up a conversation with me, asking me how tall I was, and then asking me where I was from. When we got to the end of the park, she walking to talk to me, and then asked me if I wanted to go out for a drink.
Yeah, I figured, why not?
Despite this being the tourist area in Pham Ngo Lao, there were still lots of local places around, and she took me to a little outside where we sat on small little chairs on the sidewalk Vietnamese style. (Actually the first place didn’t have much in the way of beer selection, so went to a second one.)
She spoke decent English and seemed very friendly. I was initially on my guard, thinking this was some sort of scam or that she was a prostitute, but then eventually I realized that she was on the level, and she really just wanted to just have a drink with me. (Actually, re-thinking back, I’m remembering a couple other girls in the Pham Ngu Lao area who said hello to me, and I just walked past thinking they were prostitutes. Maybe they were also on the level?)
Her name was Lisa. Most of her family was living in the USA, but she was unable to live with them because she was having trouble getting a visa.
(In theory apparently if you’re family is living in the USA you should be able to get a visa to come out and join them, but her application kept getting stuck in the beauracracy, so now her parents were encouraging her to apply for a student visa instead.)
I felt sorry for her at first, separated from her family because of stupid beaurocratic rules. Although it came out later in the conversation that she wasn’t too eager to move to the US anyway. Life was much better in Vietnam, she thought, where the cost of living was lower. Besides all her friends were in Vietnam.
When she heard I had lived in Japan, she said she had made several trips to Japan herself. Apparently she and a Malaysian friend were part of a singing duo, which toured Japan singing at orphanages to entertain the Japanese Orphans.
She reacted with a bit of surprise when I told her I was currently teaching English in Cambodia. “But Cambodia is such a poor country,” she said.
It was, I admitted, but in many ways it was an interesting place.
“In Cambodia, they only have very rich people and very poor people,” she said. “Very few people just have a normal life style, unlike here in Vietnam.”
Just based on my few days observation, this did seem to be pretty accurate.
By the time I finished my 3rd beer of the evening I was thinking I didn’t want to drink anymore. So I said I should go. (I had already told her at the start that I couldn’t stay out very long, so this made it easy to leave now.)
She wanted to meet up for lunch the next day and take me to lunch. I explained that I was meeting Masashi at 1, but that I’m sure he wouldn’t mind going along. When she heard Masashi was Japanese, she said she knew a great Japanese restaurant, but I was sure Masashi would hate this. “I’m pretty sure he’s interested in eating local food,” I said. She said she knew plenty of local places.
We agreed to meet up tomorrow at 1, and I even promised I would give her a phone call earlier in the morning if I was free to do some sightseeing with her.
My cell phone had stopped working once I crossed the boarder into Vietnam, but Lisa helped me get a Vietnamese Sim card. (It cost only a couple dollars, and we were able to get it without even standing up from our seats. Lisa simply directed one of the bar staff to go down the street and get one for us.) She helped to put it into my phone, and we exchanged numbers.
Back to the hotel and to bed.
Tuesday, June 28
Woke up. Breakfast at the hotel.
I checked out of the hotel, but they let me leave my bag by the front desk so I could wander around the city unencumbered.
And so I set out to explore Saigon a bit more.
For the most part I wandered around the city pretty aimlessly, just walking down streets without any clear idea of where I was going, but following roads that looked interesting.
I decided that I wanted the freedom to wander around the city by myself, and so did not call up Lisa. (She called me at one point in the morning, I just ignored the call. And then I called her back in a couple hours, pretending to have just missed her first call. By this time, it was around noon, so it made more sense just to keep to our original meeting at 1)
Among some of the interesting things I saw that morning:
I stopped by Notre Dame Cathedral (built by the French between 1877—and 1883). This is where I had agreed to meet Masashi at 1, but I wanted to scout it out in advance to make sure I knew where it was first. I went briefly inside and looked around.
And across from the cathedral was the post office, also dating back to French colonial times. Went in there and looked around.
Later, I passed by some sort of official building (not quite sure what it was) but outside near the parking lot they had on display several of the tanks and military vehicles used to take Saigon back in 1975. Some of them had bullet holes in them.
I went down by the river and walked along the river bank for a while.
Within a few hours, I was a complete dripping mess of sweat, and had completely soaked through my t-shirt. But I was satisfied with having seen a lot of the city.
I made it back to the Cathedral a half hour early, so I went inside a coffee shop opposite.
The coffee shop was nice, air-conditioned, had Western style prices and (unsurprisingly) was filled with Westerners. But there were also a fair amount of Vietnamese customers as well.
Shortly before 1, Lisa called me up on my cell phone, and I went outside to meet her.
Lisa had brought along a friend—Joy, from Malaysia, who was her partner in the singing duo.
We met up with Masashi under a tree near the Cathedral. (Although the Cathedral had been open to tourists when I went by earlier, it had apparently closed it’s doors around 1, so Masashi was waiting for us under a tree across the road.)
Because Masashi didn’t have a cell phone with him (he himself admitted this was very unusual for a Japanese person) I had no way of clearing my plans with him to bring along Lisa to our meeting. But I figured he wouldn’t mind having a local girl to show us around. I made the introductions between Masashi, and Lisa and Joy.
Lisa suggested a local place she knew where food was good. We all shared a taxi.
Like a lot of Vietnamese/ Cambodian restaurants, this place was under an awning (to protect from the sun), but still in the open air. We sat near the back. Lisa ordered several dishes, and the food was very good. We ate a lot, and it only ended up costing us something like $1.50 each.
We talked about various things. Joy talked a lot about her home country of Malaysia, and particularly talked about religion in Malaysia. Her family was Christian, but Malaysia was predominately Muslim, so she talked about what things were like in Muslim country. She also talked about the various similarities between the Koran and the Bible (how the Muslims also recognized Jesus as a great prophet, et cetera).
Most of the Malaysians I’ve met in my travels have actually been Chinese Malaysians or Indian Malaysians. Joy was one of the first Malaysians I’ve met who is actually a Malay Malaysian. At some point (I don’t remember how this got brought up in the conversation) we ended up talking about the quota system in Malaysian Universities, but in contrast to what most of my Malaysian friends have told me, Joy denied that Indian or Chinese Malaysians were at any disadvantage in applying to University.
After we finished lunch, we stepped back outside and started talking about what to do next.
The girls wanted to keep hanging out with us, but were a little short on good ideas as to what to do. They asked us what we wanted to do for the afternoon, and made some suggestions such as going to Karaoke, going bowling, or going to see a movie.
Masashi rejected all of these options. “It’s my last day in Saigon,” he said. “I don’t want to waste it doing any of those things. I want to walk around and see the city.”
The girls objected that it was too hot to walk around the city in the heat of the day. (They didn’t seem like really outdoorsy type girls, and I’m sure they would have had a miserable time walking around the city and having their make up run down their faces in sweat.)
I decided Masashi was right, and that if we only had one more day in Saigon, it would be a pity to waste it. So we decided on a compromise. Masashi and I would walk around the city for a few hours, and then around 4 we would meet up with the girls again for drinks before we had to leave to catch our plane at 5.
This was actually cutting things pretty closely even as it was. And an additional complication would soon develop. Shortly after we parted company from the girls, my phone died on me.
I should have anticipated this actually. Ever since I got to Vietnam, I hadn’t been able to charge my phone. At the time, I attributed this to the fact that the electricity outlets between Vietnam and Cambodia must be different.
(Although once I got back to Cambodia, and I still charge my phone, I would discover it was because my charger was broke. It was just a coincidence that it happened while I was travelling around in Vietnam.)
Anyway, even if we would have had time around 4 (which we didn’t really) I was never able to call up the girls. Hopefully they didn’t spend all afternoon waiting for us. (I had gotten their e-mail addresses, and fortunately was able to at least send them an e-mail apologizing the next day.)
Masashi and I spent the next few hours wandering around the city. Since we didn’t really have much of a plan, much of this wandering ended up revisiting ground I had already covered in the morning, but I didn’t mind too much.
Masashi wanted to go through the Ben Thanh Market. I had walked past it before, but had never been in before.
The shop keepers were more aggressive than any other people I had seen. Not only did they keep encouraging me to come into their stall, one girl actually took me by the wrist and wouldn’t let go of my hand until I followed her into her stall. I looked besides me and saw another girl dragging Masashi into the same stall. “Ah, they got you too I see,” I said.
The girls tried to get us to buy something. And when we declined, they starting whining, “Why you give us bad luck?”
(Monika had previously warned me never to go to the Markets early in the morning in Cambodia, because if the first customer of the day doesn’t buy something it’s very bad luck for the shopkeeper. Apparently this custom exists in Vietnam as well, but at this late in the day I highly doubted we were the first customers. I think they were just exaggerating the bad luck we were going to bring them.)
After we got out of that stall, we made sure not to linger in front of any other stalls or to get within grabbing distance of any of the shop keepers.
“See anything here that interests you?” Masashi asked me.
If this had been a different environment, I would have been happy to linger around and browse at some of these shops. But, as I told Masashi, “I’m scared to indicate an interest in anything.” So we just did a quick walk through of the place and got out.
We came to the city hall, which dated back to the French Colonial period and had been the French administrative building.
There was a park with a statue of Ho Chi Minh in the middle.
We went down by the riverside. Masashi was getting a bit tired by this point and said he could use a break so we sat down on one of the benches for a while and tried to just relax.
Masashi had gone to the Vietnam War Museum that morning. (The day before I had cautiously recommended it to him, telling him it “is really full-on, but worth seeing.”)
Like me, he had found it a very difficult experience. “I mean, I grew up during that war,” he said, “So I had known about all that stuff before I went into the museum. But it was still very difficult to see it all again.”
We didn’t get much rest on the bench, as we soon became a target for Vietnamese trying to sell stuff to tourists. A man came up trying to shine our shoes. Masashi was wearing old sneakers, and I was wearing sandals, and we tried to explain to him that these weren’t the type of shoes that required shining, but he was reluctant to take no for an answer. (Actually during my trip in Vietnam I’ve had several people trying to shine my shoes, and despite the fact I was just wearing sandals.)
A woman came up to try and sell us sunglasses. We were both already wearing sunglasses at the time, and Masashi tried to point this out to her.
“One no good,” she insisted. “You need two!”
She was incredibly persistent. But to her credit, seemed to have a pleasant personality, smiling the whole time she was talking to us (a pretty face as well) and occasionally even laughing. When Masashi said he already had a pair of sunglasses, she would insist again, “One no good! You need two!” In a voice that seemed to say, “How many times do we have to go through this again? I’ve already told you that you need two!” And then she would look over at me and laugh as if to say, “Can you believe this guy?”
Then a tuk-tuk driver came up, and also refused to leave even after we had told him we didn’t need a ride. He just couldn’t seem to believe that there wasn’t somewhere at sometime that we wouldn’t need a ride to.
“Well what about tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yes, tomorrow is great,” I said. “Give us a ride tomorrow.” Thinking I would at last be done with him. But he wanted to confirm plans with a time and place, and so I had to backtrack a little and admit that actually neither of us would be in the city tomorrow.
Shortly after this he left as well.
We wandered around some more.
The sky was now looking like rain, and I was getting worried we would get caught in another downpour. But we never did—the rain managed to hold off.
Masashi wanted to buy some Vietnamese coffee at the government run department store, so I went in with him.
To get into the grocery store section of the department store, you had to surrender your bag to the security guard. I still had my shoulder bag with me, and I decided dealing with the bag check system they had there was more trouble than it was worth, especially since I wasn’t going to be buying anything in the grocery store. So Masashi went in, and I just wandered around the department store while I waited for him.
I figured because this was a department store the shop keepers wouldn’t be as aggressive as they were in the market stalls, but if I lingered too long at any display I would soon attract the attention of a clerk desperate to sell me something—anything. So after figuring this out, I made sure I didn’t stay too long in any one place.
Masashi eventually emerged from the supermarket with his coffee, and we headed back.
It was now getting close to 5, so we headed back to our respective hotels. The plan was we were going to split a taxi to the airport, so I gave Masashi the address for my hotel, and he would come swing by with his taxi later.
This worked fairly smoothly. We hit rush hour traffic on the way to the airport, but fortunately we had given ourselves plenty of time.
Masashi was flying onto Sydney, so he was going to the international terminal. I was going to Hanoi, so I got off first at the domestic terminal. Exchanged e-mail addresses with Masashi and promised to keep in touch. And then went off to catch my flight.
(I'll deal with my trip up to Hanoi in the next post...)
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