It’s been a while, and for that I apologize. I have been busy and hit a few speed bumps, to say the least. I’ve decided to take some initiative and write entries more frequently, starting with coverage of Vietnam. I’ve updated the software for this journal, so it now supports Microsoft Internet Explorer. It was a bit of work wading through the inconsistencies and standards errors, so for those of you using IE, you’d better be thankful! On to Vietnam.
Vietnam is a crazy place, but in a irresistibly fun way. For example, in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), there are enormous quantities of motorbikes in the streets, weaving around and through each other like schooling fish. Traffic lights serve as suggestions, and unwary pedestrians might be run over. All this, and it was the most enjoyable experience of crossing the street I’ve ever had. Here’s how you do it: before crossing, locate the spot on the other side you wish to go to, then begin crossing and walk in a straight line at a slow but steady pace - don’t stop, or turn around, or you may get hit.
Sam, Lan, Felix and I arrived on Friday, Sept 17 and spent that day, the next, and the day after that in HCMC. We saw the Reunification Palace, which was the main government building of the South during the war, and where the south finally surrendered. We also saw the War Remnants Museum, which had lots of pictures, information and equipment left over from the war. We went to the Cu Chi tunnels and saw how the Viet Cong set up traps and lived in the jungle. Our tour guide was a translator for the south army during the war. We had the opportunity to fire various guns (AK-47, M16, shotguns, handguns), but at $1/bullet, none of us wanted to take them up on it. HCMH has good food, but not a lot better than the rest of Vietnam, if at all.
On our third day there, we took a bus up to Dalat, which is north of HCMC and at a higher elevation. We got there around 1700, and decided to hire motorbikes to go to a waterfall. We got there and walked along the river for a while, but it started to get dark (and spidery) so we decided to head back. Once we got back, we walked around the city for a while to find food. Courtesy of one of our motorbike drivers, we eventually found a restaurant serving Vietnamese food. We decided to look for a cafe to get some dessert or drinks at and talk. We wandered around the city, looking for the Stop & Go Cafe. We didn’t realize that it wouldn’t be open late and that it was down a winding alley out of the main area, but once we discovered this we found another, probably better one called the 100 Roofs Cafe, a nice place with lots of totems and other strange things - similar to the Rainforest Cafe in look.
Did I mention the food was good? Throughout Vietnam the food was pretty consistently good, and very cheap. Most main dishes were around 20,000-30,000d , and shakes were usually between 5000d and 10,000d , so we usually got a fruit shake with our meals. Pho is probably the most often seen dish, and it is basically a noodle dish. As before, the thing I miss most about western food is the breakfast. Everything else, it seems, is available outside the states (with the exception of In’N'Out, unfortunately), but not scrambled eggs with bacon and orange juice. Don’t get me wrong… these things can be found outside the states, but almost never at the same time and not made the same way. I’ll have to get Kelly to take me to Denny’s late at night, even though she never gets breakfast food there… my weird sister, haha.
There were lots of opportunities for buying souvenirs in Vietnam, and I didn’t waste them. Most of them are presents for you folks back home, so I can’t say what they are. They, too, are cheap, but nice. Lots of people were out on the street trying to sell us stuff. They’d rush out of the restaurant we were passing with menus saying, ‘Hello, you eat here.’ Others walked up to us with a stack of books (all English, of course) held together with what might have been suspenders asking us if we wanted to buy a book. They were pretty good books too: Catcher in the Rye, High Fidelity, Catch-22, various Lonely Planet guides, books about Vietnam and the war. I ended up buying Catch-22 (which I read about six years ago) and the Cambodia Lonely Planet guide. These books are actually photocopies bound together in book form. They look very much like the original book though, and for the most part the fact that they’re photocopied doesn’t hurt readability of the text or hinder the images much. With the RIAA and MPAA all up in arms about piracy, maybe it’s a good thing there’s no Publisher’s Association of America (or if there is, that they don’t see this as a threat since it doesn’t seem to exist in the states).
Back to the narrative… So Dalat is a lot cooler and less humid than the rest of the country we visited. I woke up an hour earlier than I intended the morning we left (one hour behind Singapore, forgot to change my clock), so I decided to walk around the city a bit. Students were up at 6 and 7 in the morning! That’s insane, for the states at least. I later discovered that depending on the school and age group that school starts at wildly different times: as early as 6 and as late as 12 were what I heard. So we took a bus from there to Nha Trang. It took about five hours and afforded some time to study for my midterms the following Monday.
Nha Trang is a beach city, though the beach itself has particularly dirty (sand?) water. Beyond the first 200m or so the water clears up, which is somewhat infuriating because you can see it, but it’s a bit too far to go out. The bus ride in had some good views of nice, clear beaches which would have been nice to go to, but we didn’t. We rented bikes and rode around. These bikes were in the worst condition of any bikes I’ve ever ridden before or probably will ever, but at 5000d for one hour I didn’t complain too much. Possibly the only thing more exciting than walking through traffic in Vietnam is riding a bike through traffic in Vietnam. I can’t speak for the motorbikes, since I didn’t drive one myself, but the bikes were so fun! Now you are part of the school of bikes, weaving in and out and around - flowing really.
Nha Trang is also home to the Long Son Pagoda, which features a seated buddha about 10m tall. It is a really cool complex, and my only complaint was that it was at night. It should be seen during the day when there’s more activity and visibility.
We took an island tour the day we saw the Pagoda, which took us to four islands - not very exciting islands, but kinda neat looking and it was fun to be on the water. We had awesome food, and fruit for dessert. We went snorkling for a while and saw some fish and coral. Nothing too spectacular, but still cool. I got sunburned of course, but in a weird splotchy way because I applied the sunscreen myself, which doesn’t seem to work - I’m not flexible enough! Aside from the food we had a floating bar, which was cool but the wine was weird. It tasted like barbecue sauce - or ‘burnt’ as one of the Aussies said. We were all in life preservers and some people had their feet up on the bar (which was essentially a large life preserver), and the guide would ask them questions about stuff and if they said ‘no’ to anything, he’d force them to drink wine from the bottle. This happened to Lan twice, and she was not too happy about it.
From Nha Trang we took the night train up to Danang, a city that is not heavily visited by tourists. Not many speak English, there aren’t many touristy things, and even the LP guide forsakes it, saying that ‘If you end up here after getting bumped out of Hoi An, it’s not that bad of a city and affords a few interesting sights.’ That’s a paraphrase, and after seeing Hoi An I was inclined not to give it even that shred of credit. We saw a few things, like a Cham Museum and a monastery, but these things weren’t that interesting and the prices were higher in Danang than elsewhere, probably due to the lack of visitors, I don’t know. We went here mainly because Lan has family there, and visiting them and having dinner at their place was the highlight of our time there. The food was good - they gave us beef with lettuce, crab, and noodles. Oh and tons of this orange drink called Twister. We all had to make several bathroom trips that night. They also took us to Hoi An that night (always at night!) and we looked around, but it would obviously be better during the day - that and we only got about one hour there, so not enough time to see everything. I bought some cloth paintings there which now are on my walls here.
We made it up to Hue eventually, and got to spend a day there. Hue is the old capital city, and has a large Imperial Enclosure, complete with its very own Forbidden Purple City. The sights were interesting but a bit redundant. The complex is huge and without much indication of what things are. There are info plaques, but they seemed lacking somehow - not coherent. The next day (Saturday) we got on the train at 0800 and got off in Saigon the next day at 0500. That was a long freakin’ ride. Once back in HCMC, we looked at DVDs and CDs, but I ended up not buying any. We then walked around an area we hadn’t been before and into Chinatown, though we really just kinda skirted it. We took a taxi to this Pagoda the LP recommended, and it was really cool, probably the best we’d seen. There are pictures. Then we took the flight back home (to Singapore) and went to bed. Long entry eh? Pictures will come soon I just have to figure out a better system than what iPhoto gives me…