After the three hour bus from Halong Bay back to Hanoi, there was just enough time for me to find some mosquito repellent and dinner before boarding a night train to Lao Cai, a city on the Vietnam-China border. I met a Dutch girl named Laura at the train station and was relieved that I would indeed be with backpackers until we were separated at the train station by the guide. And then I was grouped with a retired Kiwi vet and his wife and their friends. Whom I then was separated from shortly after to take a 'soft sleeper', meaning only four beds instead of the usual six. The rest of my car was Vietnamese but aside from talking loudly they had little bearing on my train ride. It was comfortable, fast, and I was refreshed suitably by the time the train stopped in Sapa that morning. Sapa, my last stop in Vietnam, an old French hill station which, like Dalat - another old French hill station - would prove to be one of the highlights of Vietnam. I was there for three days of trekking through rice paddies, mountains, and minority villages and, unlike the trip to Halong Bay, I was not to be disappointed in any regard.
The first stop was the rather posh (by backpacker standards, especially) Sapa Summit Hotel to drop our bags, have breakfast, and meet our trekking group. The group: Laura, myself, two Belgian girls who had the weekend off from volunteering at a Hanoi orphanage, and an older Montreal couple. We were, in all respects, extremely lucky. Or at least I was. They were a great group and we had a spectacular couple days, but I'm getting ahead of myself. We set off around 9 AM from the hotel, stopping at the market to pick up a snack and some water for the trek. Our group was more than simply those listed above plus Doong, our guide, however. We were also accompanied by several girls and women from the village where we would be lunching, Lau Chai. While this sounds really tacky and fake, and certainly they have ulterior motives in guiding you down, it was actually a great experience to walk down with these sure-footed guides and talk quite easily in English with them about life. In fact, I would go so far as to say that far from being really bad and detracting from the day, their presence made the morning walk all the better. They did not, until the end, ask or even mention us buying anything, they just walked, talked, joked, and helped people less sure-footed than them.
That's twice I've mentioned their sure-footedness and it has to be seen to be believed. While we were covered to our knees (and for some varying patches on butts and arms) in mud their feet were always impeccably clean - and they were wearing sandles! I thought I did pretty well on the track, especially when the locals commented on it, but in comparison to them I was a tripping, clumsy fool. From the market, we walked down the road from Sapa and eventually turned off and plunged headlong into the rice paddies. Sapa is on one side of a valley and mountains framed the opposite side of the valley which were themselves framed and accented in wisps of cloud. It being rainy season, the sky was not blue, but this misty spread set before us was not only refreshingly cool but perfect for adding some mystique to the area. We passed local kids riding water buffalo as they foraged in the mists, villagers making the trek up to the Sapa markets laden with goods or empty, and the endless undulating and weaving path through and above the valley offered heaven-worthy vistas. I had taken over 200 photos by midday (though luckily for you, I have filtered many repetitive views and alternate angles, leaving only what I consider the best).
We made the village in plenty of time and found ourselves sitting around before and after lunch, about the only complaint I could conjure for the trek. It really is set for all types and so I found it neither demanding nor lengthy, finishing as we were quite early in the days. But lunch itself was great as were all our meals, and though I had no use for it, I bought a trinket from Mor, the girl I'd spent the most time talking with. All of us agreed the girls and women (one older one named Sue, I called her 'ba' which means grandma) were worth the price of a few handicrafts and no serious haggling. And then another couple kilometres to the village of Ta Van where we stayed in a village homestay and ate a delicious dinner, chatted around the table, and discussed the extremely large butterflies that are abundant in the hills. We also looked around the town and riverbank a bit until it finally started raining hard and we retreated indoors.
The next day was quite short. We didn't get going until 10:00 or so and were finished by 2:00. This is somewhat impressive as the trails were completely slick and every single person - save for the minority guides - fell at some point in various degrees of severity. Even I had a good slip a couple metres from a high path to a low one, though I managed to surf the mud down in a shaky and low centre-of-gravity surf crouch. It was also raining a lot and my poncho, well, they're really only good for one wear and don't travel well, so let's just say that it was difficult to ascertain which holes were for arms, heads, of due to ripping zippers and stretching backpacks. I enjoyed my shower back in the hotel after a nice lunch and, quite frankly, it's the nicest room I've had to myself since leaving home. I suppose the apartments in Manly would beat it, but I was sharing. The hike had been somewhere between 12-16km and while it wasn't much, the clean up was well overdue and appreciated.
Finally, the third day of the trek. It started a bit randomly as there was no guide around in the morning, but soon Doong was leading Laura, myself, and some Chinese tourists down to Cat Cat (or is it Cat Ba?) village, a tourist trap in comparison to our last two days. It was a nice walk though, in weather that made me want to walk all the way to Fanxipan mountain, the tallest in SE Asia. An almost perfect blue sky, bright sun, and an amiable breeze made it a pleasant though warm walk into the valley. Laura and I also had another chance to chat with the girls we'd walked with a couple days ago before leaving and soon we were at a three-waterfall junction at the bottom of the gorge. Then I wandered off at the guide's suggestion that I "go up and take a look" and it just kept getting better and better so I kept going up. Not to mention I wasn't sure if the group would be coming back this way so I didn't want to backtrack down and then back up again. Eventually I came across three boys sitting under a tree beside a mudhole dug into the mountain and filled to the brim with water buffalo. I took some photos and it was here, at a corner in the path, I decided reluctantly to go and see what had become of my group.
I made it all the way to the waterfall without seeing anyone, which left me with two options. They had either taken my path but turned off on a dirt track I'd noticed running along the rice terraces, or taken another path. I ran into another guide and asked about Doong at which point he let me know that Doong had left a message for me to catch up with them along the dirt path. This may sound worrying, but it was not even lunch, a beautiful day, and I knew exactly where I was and how to get back so it wasn't in the least. I contemplated exploring on my own but then decided I'd better let the group know where I was so I caught up with them just as they were boarding motorcycles to drive back up to Sapa. Doong waited for me and I went back with him, had lunch, and then my Sapa experience was over. I wanted to rent a motorbike and explore until the bus arrived at 5:30 to return to Lao Cai but discovered that I could get an earlier bus and - maybe - make it to the Chinese border with enough time to catch an overnight bus to Kunming. It was 30 days to my flight home on August 5th and I wanted as much time as possible for China, so I chanced the 3:30 bus back, waving bye to Vietnam and some great times in this beautiful country and, I felt, to the end of a saga: my adventures backpacking Southeast Asia. China awaited and it was an adventure all its own. I had no idea just how much of one it would prove to be...
It was a foreboding start. I sat on the street 40 minutes after the bus was supposed to pick me up for a 3-day, 2-night tour of Halong Bay. This is not unusual in Asia, but is extremely frustrating. The amount of time wasted waiting around that could instead have been spent getting other things done (like this blog) or, more often (and more truthfully), sleeping is criminal. No bus showed up, rather a man walked by on the street and asked me if I was going to Halong Bay today. Yes? OK, then follow him. We didn’t walk to where I’d booked the ticket, but rather to one of the ever-present Sinh Cafes that have spread through Hanoi and indeed southeast Asia like the bubonic plague. And there, waiting for a bus, was Nathan, my kiwi friend that I seemed fated to travel with. Whenever we parted paths, purposefully or not, we always found each other again. And now here we were, of all the places to book a Halong Bay trip, on all the days, not only in the same city, but on the same boat. Or so we thought. After they herded us onto a bus half an hour later (bringing total waiting time to one hour 20 minutes) the bus drove several feet then stopped. A woman ran on and told me I had to get off the bus. And then another twenty minutes I was on another bus bound for Halong Bay with, I imagined, the group I would be boating with. I should’ve known better; Nathan was not among them.
Indeed, the organization at Sinh Café exists at an unprecedented level of neglect. It is probably the most fantastically disorganized but still functioning thing I have ever witnessed. We arrived at the Halong City harbour where we waited 15 minutes in a sea of people coming and going and general confusion before being herded onto boats. Again, I was separated from the people I’d made friends with on the three hour journey from Hanoi and put on a boat with yet more strangers and some familiar faces, Nathan among them as well as an obnoxious American I’d SCUBA dived with in Nha Trang. Then we learned that contrary to the itinerary as given, we would not be sleeping on the boat that night. We’d be staying in the hotel. And so we cruised through the beautiful karst landscape of Halong Bay and on to Cat Ba Island where all of us – except for Nathan and the American – were instructed to get off. Apparently Nathan would be sleeping on the boat that night while the rest of us wouldn’t. I don’t think I can put into words the sheer amount of confusion and disarray felt by both us and our “guides”. Yes, plural, they changed from day to day and boat to boat so that nobody ever knew what was going on. If you were going to run a criminal organization and wanted to be at the top with your minions having no idea of your identity or evil intentions, Sinh Café (which I would soon learn was, in fact, a criminal organization) had the model perfected.
So I didn’t see much of Nathan in the end, unfortunately. But for all the mess I was lucky enough to find myself with a pretty great group. A nice couple from England and three really cool English guys with whom I spent most of my time. We got to our hotel on Cat Ba (not as advertised) and had the evening free to explore the town. We did just that and had some fresh beer which had far-too-high an aluminum content to satisfy the Alzheimer’s guidelines and a pretty early night. We had to be checked out of the hotel by 7:30 the next morning for our 3-hour trek to the top of some of the karst pillars. The morning came with some really bad (and chilled) pancakes served with honey that, I suspect, had been mixed with soy sauce and had bananas tucked between them. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds; at least there was no rice or water spinach. And then our trek. Our guide wasn’t much of a guide at all. He did bring us up the hill but left many in the dust as he set a new speed record for the trail all the while going incommunicado. We stopped at one point and he told us to continue to the top and then come back down. We did.
The view from the top was beautiful, which was no surprise, as we’d been treated to some amazing glimpses of the landscape on the way up. It was not especially challenging, though the heat and particularly the humidity were a bit much. And then back down to find our guide was not where we’d left him nor anywhere to be found, but we made our way on our own with the other group’s guide, by now soaked in sweat, and waited for lunch. Our three hour trek had been just over one and we had some time to kill before getting taken back to Cat Ba. We returned and then set out right away for the beach as the day had grown ever hotter, bypassing Beach 1 in favour of the more secluded Beach 2. Both had pounding waves and the day was spent playing in the surf and stretching out on a towel that, inevitably, was placed to close to the water and had to be moved back as the crashing tide came in. And then back to the pier.
We were supposed to be on a boat by 4:00, but arrived with no guide or boat to get on and watched them all sail away. We were left on the dock alone without explanation or guide for over an hour, left to fend off the women selling drinks and Oreo cookies for far too much money. 5:00 and one of our company’s boats arrived, but the guide on that boat told us it was not for our use. When asked what was going on with us, he neither knew nor cared to know or look up anything. Could he call and find out? Could he even stop to answer a question? No. Oh, we got in his way. It had a been a long day, a lot of waiting, and they had our passports, these unorganized and unmitigated clods. He wasn’t going anywhere until we had some answers, or that was the theory we had. Of course, if you’re not willing to really follow it up, then yes, he was going somewhere. So we let him go away, the only man who might’ve had the power to answer why we were left high and dry.
It was almost another hour before another boat arrived – by now, we’d been sitting in the middle of nowhere for two hours after we were supposed to be aboard. Were we supposed to be aboard this? Nobody was sure and then one man rudely waved us on as if quite perturbed to have to pick us up. Did he have our passports? Another, grumpier wave. Passport? ID? We knew he understood but just increasingly annoyed waves and dirty looks. Where’s my passport? Then he practically spit on me and turned away in disgust, as if asking if they had been given our passport from the hotel was the most unreasonable question ever. By now, as you might have guessed, I had about had it with this company and these people. With being treated like a virus instead of a customer. With being lied to. With being scammed. With being ignored and treated like I was an idiot. I took the small corner left of my over-priced Oreo and threw it at him. Yup - not my most shining moment. But he was paying attention again.
And then he was shouting and spitting and I was demanding my passport and he was calling me every name in the book and then grabbing a piece of wood. I stood and looked up at him on the boat and asked if he was going to hit me with it. And finally, word of someone that spoke English – a guide? – coming to the boat. Fine, I’d sort it out with her. She was having a perfectly good conversation in English but when asked by one of the English guys about our passports, she suddenly lost the ability to communicate. Great. While I don’t defend losing my temper (nor do I really regret it, if I am to be really honest – though I am embarrassed about the oreo), you have to understand the amount we had been and were being jerked around. That we had been given little of what we’d been promised and paid for. And that there is a scam here where they ‘keep’ your passport for a couple of days and return you a decent fake of it, meanwhile selling the original. You, most likely, don’t notice until the airport. And pretty much all of us were concerned that this was precisely why we were so steadfastly ignored when the question of passports came up.
Regardless, we were able to ascertain from this woman (eventually) that we were on the right boat and that they had my passport somewhere. Not really good enough, but as good as we were going to get. At least it seemed like the hotel had gotten it to the boat, though no, they couldn’t show me MY passport. And finally, 15 minutes later, our guide arrived. The man I’d confronted, who then confronted me with a stick, had been glaring daggers at me the whole time not to mention complaining to anyone who’d listen. I have little doubt he never mentioned threatening me with a board or being a rude and arrogant $@#^%&. The guide had the nerve to lecture me before having heard anything from our side. Apparently I have to respect him but he doesn’t have to return the favour. A while after that was dealt with, I sat the guide down and told him exactly what had prompted our collective annoyance and my angry response. And then, easy as pie (except for an eye-roll from our captain), he finally showed me my passport. Why, oh why, couldn’t they have just done that when we asked?
We had enough time to kayak 40 minutes (again not the three hours paid for) before it got dark and then left only to realize we were missing the English couple. We picked them up and had a good night on the boat with some of the new people. I partied with a Dutch couple who were very nice as well as Hazel and Alice (two English girls), who were likewise nice and good fun, too. Of course, it’s difficult to party when beer is so expensive, but we made the most of it and a cigar the Dutch guy had. And then our final day, which was supposed to include a swim, a climb up Monkey Island (some were told, not me), and who knows what else, but only included breakfast and a very slow ride back to Halong City. And then, a few hours in Hanoi after a pretty decent lunch and a crowded ride back before I was aboard a sleeper train to Sapa. In retelling this, I was forced to underscore the negative aspects of this company’s tour but if you put aside being lied to, scammed, and maltreated, the actual area itself was terrific and worth at least two days. Unfortunately, I think most of the companies are equally corrupt, so I’m left without someone to recommend, but I hope that if you do get here you’ll not be stuck with some North Vietnamese people endeavouring to keep stereotypes of extreme rudeness alive while undertaking to ruin your trip. Whether they succeed or not is up to you and I.
As my clothes were finally finished in Hoi An, it was time to start thinking about my plans for Northern Vietnam. It was already June 30, and not only did I want to maximize my time in China (I’m allowed 30 days all of which I want to use), but my visa for Vietnam expired on the July 10. As I sat and plotted, I came to the stark realization that I didn’t have time to see everything I wanted to in northern Vietnam. So great had the south been that I was out of time and I hadn’t even crossed the DMZ border to the north. I can’t imagine how I would’ve traveled this country in 2 weeks. So it was that I took the morning bus to the nearby city of Hue, a city with emperors’ tombs, walled citadels, concubine housing, pagodas, and the Perfume River. Arriving just before lunch, my first order of business was getting an evening ticket out to Hanoi – as much as there was to see in the city, I was confident I could use my travel skills to get a taste in an afternoon. Overnight busses – booked. Trains – booked. So my options were spending a whole extra day here or a plane for $30 more than the train. With plane ticket in hand, I set out to unravel Hue’s secrets in time for dinner.
On so short a schedule, the best bet was a driver, and I found one for 40,000 ($2.75) to take me to the citadel, pagoda, and one of the tombs. The citadel: a massive enclave of temples, homes, gardens, and areas once forbidden to the public now have the gates thrown open (for 55,000) to explore. Where that money is going is anybody’s guess, it certainly isn’t being spent on maintenance. The place is crumbling all around, overgrown with weeds in many areas and restricted in others. Some of the key areas (Queen Mother’s House) are pristine, and to be fair, parts ARE under restoration, or at least there’s scaffolding to give that appearance. It is surrounded by two walls and two moats, too. It’s funny to think they went to so much effort to protect it and now can’t even be bothered to keep it up.
Next stop: The Pagoda. About 4km from the city sitting on a hill overlooking the Perfume River and looking like the Tower of Babel or perhaps the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It was worth a quick stop, especially as it’s free, but nothing to write home about in more than two sentences. The final major destination, and one in which I had to argue to get included on the itinerary (he claimed we’d not agreed on the tomb), bringing total cost to 60,000 was the tomb of Tu Duc. En route, we passed a bunch of incense makers rolling sticks of aromatic elixir. The tomb itself was beautiful. It was littered with lakes, ponds, and streams, and had separate tombs for the Emperor, his wives, concubines, and other affiliates. It is essentially a large and elaborate hillside garden dedicated to the emperor. By himself. He died just over twenty years after it was finished.
And then the night flight to Hanoi, arriving in the city proper around 11:30. Arriving on a fairly dark street in front of a Sinh Café somewhere in the Old Quarter. It was tempting to simply take him up on his offer of $12/night and be settled, but I had until midnight to come back and I thought to shop around a bit even though most guesthouses, hotels, and even shops and restaurants were closed. And sure enough, $8 a couple blocks away. It was still June 30 and I needed three days each for a cruise of Halong Bay and a trek in Sapa, but before I could do either of those, I had to book a flight to Bangkok and nevermind exploring Hanoi. So I stayed in Hanoi the next day, explored the Old Quarter, and discovered that I couldn’t afford Hong Kong in any way. $300 for a flight there, nevermind over to Kunming after. This was something I’d been looking forward to since I decided to go to China, up there with the Great Wall, Three Gorges Dam, and Yangtze River.
But I took a little solace in the fact that this meant I definitely DID have time to do both Halong Bay and Sapa fully, and so I booked a trip to Halong Bay for the next morning, spending one night on the junk and one in a hotel and three days in total. I return to Hanoi at 4:30 on July 4th and catch an overnight train that night to Lao Cai where I begin my trek in Sapa, finishing on the 7th and catching an overnight bus into China and Kunming. I will be absolutely exhausted, I have little doubt, upon my arrival in China. But I wasn’t there yet, I still had to explore Hanoi some more, and I did just that after also booking a seat for the water puppet show that evening. Then I discovered the best Bun Cha in all of Vietnam, where Hang Mam becomes Hang Bac (C3 for LP readers). It’s right on the corner, and they barbecue what are basically meatballs (they taste like rissoles) and thin-sliced pork (like bacon) and throw them into a brown almost citrusy broth (lemongrass?) with vermicelli and some greens and mint. I’m not a soup lover, never have been, but I had two bowls of the filling stuff.
I had dinner sometime later in Cam Chi, the food street of Vietnam, and was the only white person there in the hour I looked and sat. I thought it amazing there weren’t more foreigners and was proud of myself until I got my meal and discovered that being a foreigner, at this particular restaurant anyway, meant getting the worst pieces of chicken, greens, and not getting one of the dishes you asked for. I didn’t even want to pay but what can you do? Indicate displeasure and then off on a cyclo for the water puppets. They were really good, mostly because of the traditional music which was in danger of stealing the show. The puppets themselves were cute and at times, despite a language barrier, had everyone laughing out loud. And then another short night in the hotel and I was off yet again for Halong Bay. It was already a tiring two days and the busy part hadn’t even started yet!
The road was perilous. It writhed and undulated around mountains as though the pavement itself was trying to shake us from its spine. The irony is that out the window, this vengeful road is nowhere to be seen. Only the earth falling away below is visible, ever waiting to swallow you whole. Dalat is situated 1500m above sea level and as any physicist will tell you, that's a long way to fall. Almost 5000 ft for the metrically challenged and for those who've been up flying with me, about 5 times the height I generally fly around the city. The driver would let the bus accumulate speed to the maximum possible turning speed, holding down the brake just enough to keep us on the road. An hour and a half of this and there was more of the brake pad in the air than on the wheels, so acrid that even the driver couldn't ignore it and pulled over. 15 miuntes overlooking the abyss while they dumped cool water from a mountain stream onto the brakes and then we were back on the bus, still not using the engine to slow our mad rush to the bottom. It was only a matter of time, I knew, before our brakes would fail entirely. I just hoped that it would be somewhere near a runaway lane or where we wouldn't have too far to fall.
Although I'd brought a book to read and was quite tired due to a lack of sleep there was no closing my eyes. The valley floor materialized in the distance and the brake pads were vapourizing once more and I watched intently in the hope we would reach it. As fast as we seemed to be moving, the valley seemed agonizingly far but finally we turned one last corner and there was no longer a dizzying drop out the window. I was going to make it to Nha Trang, a city on the coast of Vietnam, after all. I arrived with Nathan, the Kiwi I'd met up in Dalat and a couple other girls we'd met on the bus and began the hunt for a place to stay. The first thing we noticed were how aggressive the touts are here. Where others would take a "no" or two, they'd eventually leave you alone. Here, short of ripping them off their bikes and introducing them to a left and right, they will stalk you no matter how much you ask, demand, and yell. After all, they want to claim the commission for herding you in to a hotel even if you did your level best to shake them and ignore and do the opposite of everything they said.
Nathan and I checked into a place called Sunflower Guesthouse, quite central and $4/night each. We had the worst meal I'd had in some time at a place that had relatively decent and cheap beer, explored the city, and I booked myself on a SCUBA dive for the next day. Nha Trang is pretty well known as the place to dive in Vietnam, and while not comparing with other dives, it was well worth the price. For $45, I had lunch and three dive sites and saw my first octopus! Finally!! I have been wanting to see an octopus since I first started diving and there, where I least expected it, an octopus left the shelter of the rock and swam off, quite a big one. We dove off an island not far from land at three sites, Madonna Rock (my favourite site), Pipe Beach (home of many many pipe fish, relatives of the seahorse), and Moray Beach (famous for Frog Fish and where I saw my octopus). On the dive I met a nice couple from Melbourne and after dinner they invited me back to their five star hotel for a swim. I didn't turn them down.
One more day wandering the beaches and relaxing around Nha Trang and we were off on a night bus to Hoi An twelve hours north. Hoi An is also a beach town, but more importantly it's famous for the sheer number of world renowned tailors at quite reasonable prices. So after getting off the bus at 7:30 in the morning, checking into the Grassland Hotel (equally far from everything, but beautiful rooms and free bike rental) I was tailor shopping. The hotel gave me a free ride into town, or rather, the tailor "Blue" did, and I checked them out. My first inclination was to simply get prices and start shopping around, but I quickly realized this was more complicated than a simple "a suit costs x" and moreover, I had no idea what I wanted. What colour? Black? Gray? Brown? Stripes? Even if different fabric cost different amounts, how could I compare prices when I didn't even know what fabric to look at. And so I spent over an hour looking through magazines and realizing that I definitely wanted a gray suit as well as a black one. And I thought a brown one would be nice too after seeing them in the catalogue.
Finally, I'd decided on three suits and styles and therefore fabrics after a lot of comparison and gleaning what knowledge I could from Ms. Yum Yum, who ran the store with a sister and a few other friendly girls. I got a price from her, quite reluctantly, and then went on the town. I got a really good price from Nhu Trang - the owner came to see me personally. I didn't feel so confident there, although I had no reason not to. She certainly told me of some things to be wary of with other tailors, and then I went comparing some more. Another tailor seemed quite good and I'm somewhat convinced I could've gotten a great gray suit from. It gave me some confidence that after our chat and picking out some materials to price out, and when I was about to leave, she wanted to assure me of the quality and brought a suit jacket out. It was one she'd done for her husband, in gray, and - I quietly noticed - the same material that she'd picked out for me. As well, there was an Australian couple in the store who swore by her and said this was their fourth time here. And she offered, reluctantly, to match the price I'd gotten from the other tailor. I probably would've stayed there, truth be told, but for two things: 1) I really didn't think her black fabric was anywhere near as good as at Blue. 2) I couldn't remember the design for the black suit I liked - quite unique.
So back to Blue, where not only could she not match the price, but she realized she'd made a mistake in her math and couldn't give me the price she'd quoted. Perhaps a wiser man would've left at this point and gone to the tailor with a much better price who was either honest enough to pick me out a suit the same as her husband's or devious enough to let me fill in the blanks on my own. But Blue had the design, it had better material for the black and brown suits, it had people who I could communicate with a bit better, and she had the design for the black suit I wanted. I don't want to get an average suit, I want a nice, quality, tailored one. So I stayed with Blue and while it took a few days and fittings (the Aussies I'd met, who admittedly didn't look that savvy, said the other woman always got it right the first time), in the end everything turned out exactly as I'd hoped it would and I'm very excited to wear these clothes at home in a not-so-sweaty environment. And more importantly, I'm pretty sure the extra I paid was worth the extra attention to detail, the quality, and the experience.
Enough about suits and clothes, though. While my tailoring was never far from my mind the whole time and while I was in and out time and again throughout my stay, there is much much more to Hoi An than tailors. The old town is exceptional, authentic, and alive today as ever. Towards the end of the year, it is transformed and more specifically submerged as the water level rises 3m and motorbikes are kept in attics while boats become the primary mode of transport. Families move upstairs and the entire town bears only the vaguest resemblance to what it is. The famous Japanese An Hoi footbridge, rather than being a simple decorative piece or a backdrop to a really bad band, actually crosses water. Obviously I never had the opportunity to see it this way, but you can imagine the magic of such a place that people have been living in for many years, moving up and down as the river floods and ebbs.
The food of Hoi An also gives the city its charm. In addition to many places for great Vietnamese food, it has some delicious specialties that would probably be world famous were their recipes not closely guarded secrets. Cao Lao, for example, a delicious noodle dish that I call the Vietnamese Phad Thai. All I was able to find out about its creation is that water comes from a certain well, they take certain types of wood and leave it in the water around sunrise, mix in 'some ingredients' later in the day, strain the broth, heat it and then moisten the noodles which are mixed with some greens, pork, fried croutons of a sort, and enjoyed. Fried wonton, with a homemade sweet and sour. Special 'Quang' noodles. In addition to finding a great restaurant with cheap beer and delicious Cao Lao and a restaurant called Co Dam that Nathan discovered with amazing dishes the owner made us that don't even have a name I decided to take a cooking course here. I'd met a couple having some street food the night prior and joined their cooking course at Hong Phuc the next evening. We stuffed a fish with some fresh ingredients we chopped, diced, and sauteed, wrapped it in banana leaves and barbecued it. We shredded, wrapped, and booked our own spring rolls. We sliced, diced, and fried up some squid with lemon grass, garlic, and chili. And we brewed up our own sweet and sour sauce and smothered some fried wonton in it. Yes, Hoi An has some of the best and most unique food in Asia and I definitely took advantage.
Nearby are some ruins called Me Soon (spelled My Son) that are 1800 years old. Unfortunately, the Viet Cong took to hiding here during what they call the American War over here and naturally the Americans dropped bombs and leveled many of the ancient towers including the crown jewel, a once 24m high tower now 2-3m high. Some of the buildings were still intact, however, or listing into a bomb crater, and the red brick seemed to age the buildings all the more against a fresh blue sky and green landscape. We took the boat back, a mistake as there's little to see except a small village that is essentially a tourist trap. And the old town is filled with historical buildings and sites worth a visit. But if that's not what you're in the mood for, you can always head to the nearby beach, which is nice and hawker free compared to Nha Trang. I spent my last evening there and maybe stayed a little too late as it was getting pretty dark on the way home. But a local guy pulled up beside me and drove alongside or behind to light the way. And, eventually, pulled alongside again and basically pulled me home. Yes, it will be a hard place to leave, but tomorrow morning I'm off once more to Hue a few hours north.
Dalat is a small city tucked peacefully away in the southern hills of Vietnam. Four hours from Mui Ne, four hours from Nha Trang, it was an effective way of taking two sides of a triangle and leaving the hypotenuse to those more hurried in much the same way as this metaphor is an effective way of demonstrating I'm still as much a geek as ever. I arrived late afternoon, just in time to stroll and view a stunning sunset over the city as Nathan (a kiwi I'd met in the lobby) explored the town and looked for dinner. He's a vegetarian, which made the hunt for dinner a lot more difficult than usual - I never really appreciated how much freedom is afforded by just being able to eat anywhere without worrying what it is, exactly, you're having. Perhaps if you like it, hate it, or it looks a bit suspect, you remember the name or inquire further, otherwise my philosophy is, if they're eating it it probably won't kill me. How wrong I was...
Alright, so once again I had no interesting way to entice you and add enough suspense to keep you reading. I clearly haven't died and in fact have had nothing but great eating experiences here in Vietnam. The first real day in Dalat I spent wandering around the streets on foot. It's been a while since I've done this properly. That is to say, without a map or any clear agenda and with a tendancy to chance small side streets in the hope of overturning a hidden gem. I suppose I do this continually when seeking a meal, but hunting food is certainly an agenda and so this was a different and liberating feeling. A person tires of this after some time as I had, and forgets about doing it after a long 'break'. After that long exposition, you might expect that I found some amazing gem indeed, but the truth is that what I found was something more important - everyday life. I got away from the touts and tourists (of which there are few up here), and just watched people interacting, snapping shots from time to time. Two kids coming up the street shading themselves from an umbrella. An old woman pedaling a bike loaded with Durian to a food stall to have a chatty lunch with the ladies there. Couples sitting on their motorbikes in the park. A man and his two sons (illegally) fishing on the lake.
The latter I actually walked by without seeing as they were far down the slope of the lake shore, but they called out to me and waved me down. Curious what they wanted, I walked down the hill and soon had a glass of whiskey in my hand and a pair of chopsticks with various local foods being shoved in my face from the plastic bag of lunch they'd brought along. We talked as best we could for about a half hour or so with his daughters showing up a little later and eventually I made my leave and continued on to the markets. Markets are markets are markets, it seems, but this one had a sizeable candy markets of dried and sugared fruits and plenty of snake and eel to go around. I grabbed an early dinner at one of the upstairs stalls overlooking the market and my day of exploring the town ended quite happily.
Another day of exploration awaited the following morning when I got a driver to tour me around the countryside for about $10. We visited and passed some coffee plantations (and I ate a handful of beans which were pretty tasteless in the same way that peas can be). The coffee here is not as famous or tasty (so I hear) as that of Laos, but the plantations did look gorgeous on the red hillsides as we wound our way down past vegetable greenhouses towards a big temple. It's situated on the top of a waterfall, which I scrambled to the bottom of first, and then into the temple where there were several Buddhas and two many-armed Vishnus looking down on the polished tile floor and me, alone in the building. Around the back of this minority temple is a pretty large laughing Buddha, though his elevated dais means he could be laughing at just about anything.
Following that, we drove to a silk factory which was almost worth the trip alone. They take the cocoons that the worms they raise spin and soak them in hot water. They're cleaned somewhat there and a bit more before given to another woman who, while keeping them in hot water, collects them and bunches them together onto a winding spool where they slowly are unwound from the cocoon, wound to a thicker thread, and spooled. These spools are dried and tied by a woman with incredibly fast hands and then either sold or fed into a machine that weaves patterned sheets based on a punch card system. From start to finish it was an enlightening and interesting process. From there back up to Dalat and the Flower Garden, which was not worth the price of admission, around the lake, and to the railway station. It was built by the French a hundred and some years back and is Vietnam's oldest station, with a similarly old steam engine parked on one of the platforms. Grandpa, I thought, would love this. And finally, back to my hotel and past what has to be the largest collection of kites flying on a Sunday afternoon that I have ever witnessed. There was no occasion, no festival, just every kid and their dog had a kite and was running around the park somehow managing to remain untangled. I was in danger of becoming quite tangled in Dalat however, and so I had my dinner that night and booked passage to the coastal city of Nha Trang four hours downhill for the next morning.
Somewhere, five hours north of Saigon lies a quiet town tucked between giant sand dunes and an endless sandy coastline. Somewhere in that small stretch of green surrounded by blue and red, a young Canadian fellow by the name of Dean has disembarked from a bus and is speeding on the back of a motorbike towards a cheap hotel. He has arrived here rather randomly, after seeing a few pretty photos, and doesn’t have long in his time budget to stay. He is prepared to ignore this budget, should it prove necessary, as all good travelers must, but after finding cheap $5 accommodation on the beach at the Saigon Café, he has lunch, rents a motorbike for $4, and endeavours to explore the blue and red regions surrounding him.
The first stop is what he believes to be the white dunes. It looks rather unlikely – yes, the sand is white, but there’s scarcely more than a single set of prints going up the slope and a 1.5m retaining wall to scale. It’s hard to believe this is the place, but some locals assure him it is, and he trudges up. It later was revealed that no, the white dunes are twenty some kilometers away, but the view up here is probably far superior to what he might have seen there anyway. The rolling sand dunes are untouched and drop off into a blue sea littered with a hundred fishing boats. Small as ants, motorbikes silently crawl their way up the coastal road and the white waves disappear into the coastline in a peaceful rhythm.
On the way back from a drive into the countryside and the white dunes towards red, Dean’s bike coughs once and goes silent. Aside from the road arching up over a hill, there is no sign of civilization as he maneuvers the bike onto the shoulder and attempts to restart it fail. A young boy biking by stops to lend a hand to this hopelessly incompetent tourist and discovers that, contrary to the bike renter’s assurances, there is NOT enough gas to see everything there is to see in Mui Ne. The bike is without fuel, the sun is without mercy, and Dean is without a hat pushing the bike up the hill and making sounds he hopes are curses in Vietnamese – or, failing that, some language. Thankfully, it’s not more than a kilometre back to town and what goes up can roll down with minimal effort. The bike-turned-scooter is half rolled and half pedaled to a small restaurant where they see him coming and bring out a 1litre bottle of gasoline that they can sell at 25% more than the going rate. A pretty fair deal, when they know that he has no choice but to refuel.
A litre of fuel for the bike and a litre of water for Dean and he pays the 25,000 dong. The mother of the family running the restaurant nudges her 7-year old son and he ashamedly holds out his hand and says, “Mister, money?” There are a lot of things Dean would like to say about their corruption of their son and about work and money, but he finished his water, sets it down, and trudges up the red dunes. A young boy doggedly follows him up into the hot sun and the desert, ignoring protests that no, Dean would really rather not ride a crazy carpet down the sand dunes. They go slow, stop, and you end up full of sand with little to show for it, he knows, but the kid presses on. Thinking back to the other child sitting back and holding out his hand, it’s hard not to admire – if not feel pity for – this young boy working so doggedly for a bit of cash. So Dean gets to the top and pays for the ride, slowly slides down the giant dune and winds up at a standstill halfway down and covered in sand.
The final major stop is the Fairy Stream. The hour is now 4:30 and the sun will set in an hour or two, so this should allow just enough time to travel up to the waterfall at the stream end. More children attempt to follow and serve as ‘guides’ but give up eventually. Dean is glad for this, as he can quite capably walk up a stream on his own and the kids were just getting in his photos anyway. The stream is another example of colourful Mui Ne, walled as it is by green palms catching the late afternoon sun while the stream itself is mostly shaded by a massive wall of hardened red and white sand. At the end, he manages to find the waterfall and a way to the top but discovers there is little else to see and turns back as the entire stream is now covered in the hillside shadow. Back in town, there is very little by way of people as well, and so after a nice barbecue dinner of some of the fishermen’s bounty, he informs his guesthouse he will be leaving the next day and books a ticket for Dalat, a town high in Vietnam’s mountains.
After having paid for the ticket at a travel agent, the agent calls his guesthouse to inform him that there is not a 7:30 bus as promised but only a 1:00 bus. Quite a nice scam, because there is no way he’d book a bus in the middle of the afternoon for a short trip up the mountains (4 hours) losing an entire day. But an opportunity was provided to spend the next morning on the beach and exploring the blue side of Mui Ne. And at 1:00, a bus spirits him away to the next unscheduled stop on the itinerary, somewhere he knows nothing about but hopes will be worth the trek. It’s not exactly on the way or out of the way, but the short trip to Mui Ne turned out to be well worth the day and a half and he has hopes for more inadvertent adventure on the road ahead. And, somewhere in the recesses of his mind, he hopes you will join him there.
The small plane flew over the flood plains of central Cambodia, the green rice paddies of its western borders, and down to the sprawling city that was Saigon, Ho Chi Minh. From above, it was an interesting study in organic urban design. Streets sprawled along paths of least resistance between commons and the rest, it seemed, sprouted from those in random directions as the buildings alongside grew fat on the traffic of the more successful roads. I was in jeans so that I wouldn’t have to pack my large shoes in my backpack and a long sleeved thermal top to protect against the air conditioning. At 31 degrees in Vietnam’s largest city, both would prove a bit warm. Waiting at customs, an English girl came up to me asking if I was Dean. It turned out I had met her when I was hanging out with James in Siem Reap, however briefly, though I not only didn’t remember that her name was Sanna (short for Susannah) but I couldn’t recall her face. Having quickly admitted this, we passed easily through customs, grabbed our packs, and headed out to negotiate our way into the city’s heart.
We grabbed a taxi for $3 and he drove about 20m before stopping and asking for the money up front. We refused and were about to leave the cab when he grunted and started driving forward. Then we got to the gate and he wanted $5 from each of us to pass through. This hadn’t been negotiated and I felt pretty certain that was steep so we did exit the cab and walk out of the airport roads on foot. On the other side, two motorcycles were waiting and I managed to get them down to 40000/bike ($2.50) but Sanna wasn’t interested in hauling her stuff on a bike so we went in a metered cab. After all our work to avoid being scammed, we went in a metered cab. Of course there’s nothing legitimate about these meters. The second you’re not looking they jump from 60000 to 90000 dong, when the whole ride is supposed to cost about 50000 in the first place. So, our taxi cost $14 in the end which isn’t a lot in the grand scheme of things, but we were charged almost five times the real price and the jerk had the audacity to insist we were short changing him on the currency exchange.
I parted ways with Sanna pretty quickly as she is traveling on vacation money and so is quite happy to stay in places well outside my budget – nevermind transport. I found a place for $8/night right off Pham Nga Lao in the backpacker district, one of the cheapest I could find though quite expensive by my standards. It was at Godmother’s and I liked the staff and the godmother as well. Then I met with Sanna for a late lunch and we began our explorations right away. It’s interesting seeing how other people travel. She had her guidebook in hand, something I almost never do, and it made for a pretty efficient walk to our destination, the Temple of the Jade Emperor. We kind of did a combination of getting the general direction and landmarks en route with choosing streets by feel and rough general direction. It was a good mix and we crossed some interesting shops and other temples en route. The Jade temple itself wasn’t remarkable from without, but inside was great. Incense clouds gave the temple a smoky mystique as most of the light was from candles or streaking through the haze to shed a soft light to the rooms. Everywhere, some very human-looking papier-mâché figures watched with a decidedly sinister gaze.
Making our way back without the map was entertaining. It occurred to me that Saigon might have an English cinema in which I could finally see the new Indiana Jones movie, the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so after taking a look at Notre Dame cathedral – yes, the French influence is quite strong here – we saw the movie at Diamond Plaza. And I don’t know what the reviews have been, but I really enjoyed it. I admit that it seemed a little more formulaic than the others as well as more unpredictably unrealistic, but overall it was good fun, full of archaeological lore, and action. Did I think Indy should get married? No. Am I glad the hat didn’t end up in Junior’s hands? Yes. Not that I’m so against expanding on the franchise, but there’ll only ever be one Indiana Jones. Perhaps this is how people felt about Bond once upon a time?
The next day was another early one as we headed out to the Mekong Delta. I had been following the Mekong River all the way from the Myanmar-Thailand-Laos border where the mountains of China can be seen in the distance. I spent two days on it from the border of Thailand to Luang Prabang in Laos and ate fish from it while in Vientiane. I slept on an island in Si Pha Don in the south of Laos where the Mekong swelled to 14 km across and crashed on all sides and I sat and watched the sunset on its banks in Phnom Penh. And now here I was at last, where the river meets the sea, where the path of my journey opens and spreads around the world on oceanic currents. But I will not be leaving Asia on these currents, at least not yet. A trip north through Vietnam and China (two countries that I suspect have a lot more in common with each other than anywhere else I’ve been) begins. We took a boat from Saigon down to the Mekong Delta which was the perfect way to conclude it, and then wandered around in that very vast area. In truth I could’ve spent days crisscrossing the delta but we had one and spent it take a little gondola ride among some of the islands, seeing coconut candy, cream, and milk being made, riding bike through the villages, and wandering the markets.
Back in Saigon, I went for dinner with several of the people from the tour at my guesthouse and then for bia huoi (fresh/cheap/draught beer) on one of the small streets nearby. Some of us made plans to investigate the Cu Chi tunnels, where the Viet Cong had really harried the US troops and found ourselves watching a propaganda film the next morning. Cu Chi; A land of peace, love, and the friendliest people on the planet. Cu Chi; A land where honey soaks the valleys and the sun basks local cherries to plump perfection. The picture is painted, rather without subtlety, and then come the satanic Americans and lay the whole thing to waste, throwing out their backs in hearty maniacal laughter as bombs fall from B-52s and childrens’ tears leave craters in the barren earth. After 15 minutes on the unmitigated evil of the US and heroism of the Viet Cong, the show is over and it’s time to go look at some of the horrendous traps that were hidden in the ground for Americans coming through the forest. Spike traps and rolling wheels that pierce groin and belly. I’m not meaning to take sides in this at all; even after all the museums I’ve visited I still don’t feel I know enough of the story. I just hate propaganda, whatever the source.
Reaction aside, the tunnels, like the traps laid for the Americans (and I should add Australians, New Zealanders, Thai, and French) were ingenious. They had systems and levels to keep the water out. They had clever designs to disguise the entrances. And they were designed to make traversing them simple for Vietnamese and difficult for Americans. The latter is a nice way of saying they were built small. I wandered through some of the tunnels and was bent half over trying to cross them – and I wasn’t carrying a backpack or any military gear. Then out of the tunnels and up for a quick drink at the café while AK-47 rounds were being fired nearby with incredible loudness and back to Saigon. I jumped off the bus home at the War Remnants museum and took a sobering look around there. The propaganda here was more subtle, but that didn’t stop scores of scathing anti-American comments in the guestbook, which I perused while waiting out the pouring rain. I was admiring a tank immediately after entering and three English ladies were talking nearby. One of them was venting at Americans quite vehemently on the Vietnam war and then, when asked by her friend why the US even came to Vietnam, admitted she had no idea.
For me, the point of these war museums is to see one side of the war. Ideally, you’d see an unbiased look at both sides, but such a thing doesn’t exist anywhere I’m sure. Certainly we know that there were plenty of people in the US who were against it and in other countries too, but if you’re only reacting to the propaganda, surely you have a bit more education before you weigh in with your opinions? The museum was enlightening for me in that sense, and I thought about England’s colonial times and wondered how ashamed this woman was of the various horrible things that England had done here in Asia in the name of colonialism. This probably wouldn’t have crossed my mind except that I’m reading a novel called The Glass House about that very topic, following a young Indian boy living in Burma through to his children, grand-children, and beyond. It seems as unfair to write or speak scathing remarks about the Americans – many of whom the museum itself documents as being against the war – as it does to hold modern English responsible for things that happened 200 years ago.
But I digress. A visit to the war museum which was enlightening in an unexpected way and then a completely unguided wander first to Diamond Plaza for a trip to Narnia left me exhausted. And so I returned to my guesthouse and then went to the markets for dinner. Food in Vietnam: I’m still figuring out what’s what, but I’ll say right now that they have some exceptional spring rolls. I know, it’s nothing exotic or amazing, but whether it’s the oil or the ingredients or what they’re wrapped in, they are exquisite. Pho, a noodle soup, is typical fare for breakfast and popular everywhere. At the markets, I had some scallops (which were more like oysters than what I know as scallops) in butter, garlic, and chives; I had spring rolls; I had fried morning glory, and I had two drinks. A veritable feast at a total cost of $6. It is my intent to take a cooking course as soon as I find a fairly reasonably priced one to better appreciate what is going into the food and what makes the really good stuff good.
My final day in Saigon I spent wandering the streets, which is a very dangerous thing to do here. Not that you’ll get mugged or anything, no no. You might get pick-pocketed if you’re really unlucky but generally the worst you have to deal with are kids insisting that you need chewing gum from them or sketchy people (all of whom work for the tuk tuk mafia) trying to sell books, carting around portable scales, and you name it. I even saw someone with a virtual aquarium’s worth of live fish making a sale. But these aren’t the dangers either. The danger is crossing. You have never seen such ordered chaos. Motorcycles, cars, busses, all vying for a clear path on the road, weaving in and out, across oncoming traffic and through it, onto sidewalks, you name it. And there is rarely a break in the traffic. What this means is when you want to cross, you must steal a page from the Old Testament and attempt to part the sea. The trick is to cross slowly, making eye contact and looking in the direction of oncoming traffic, and be consistent, predictable, and unswerving. You have to have faith that nobody is going against the flow of traffic where you cross, and you have to know when to turn your head to look in the opposite direction. It is generally before you think, as there is no real dividing line (there is, but traffic’s too heavy to see it and even if you could they still wouldn’t abide by it). Do this well, and you will cross the road. Fail, and a massive bus which stops for no man nothing may be scraping you off the grille.
Saigon was an interesting stop and an exciting change from the rest of Southeast Asia. I had been getting a little tired of the inherent sameness of Cambodia, Laos, and the Thai influence there. Coming to Vietnam is a new experience and has recharged my travel batteries. The people so far have been quite friendly, contrary to popular reports, and the city has offered up plenty of interesting activities. My last day found me in the Post Office admiring the train-station type architecture, and at the Reunification Palace taking a guided tour through the three floors of meeting rooms, suites, ballrooms, and bunkers. Mui Ne was next on the agenda, an impromptu addition inspired by a photo I saw in a travel agency and a realization that I had plenty of time to explore Vietnam so I might as well not rush from highlight to highlight. And so I leave you for now, heading north to the beach and beyond.
