Adventuring in the Wild Blue Yonder: March 2011

Monday, March 7, 2011

Log 32: Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Nha Trang, Hoi An, Hue, Hanoi via LOOONNNG bus ride…

Having put the wrong time frame on our Vietnam visa back in November, we had to get an extension on arrival in order to stay in the country for more than 3 days. After arranging that with our guesthouse/travel agency, even with an express service we had to stay in HCMC for 5 nights. Not ideal as we were really pushed for time in Vietnam, and the big city wasn’t that appealing to us country bumpkins for 4 whole days. No other way around it we just settled in and relaxed more than anything. We went on a walking tour of the city and our first stop was the War Remnants museum, a very well done but obviously quite one sided account of the horrors done to the Vietnamese during the war. War is war, and it is never easy on the civilians in the war-zone but reading the accounts of the people and seeing the photo evidence was hard to take. There was also quite a big exhibit on the chemical warfare used and the heartbreaking effects of Agent Orange, and Agent Purple that not only damaged people directly exposed but it damaged their DNA so thousands of children were born still born, deformed, handicapped, mentally handicapped, etc. They did make the point that the Vietnamese were not the only people exposed, many American soldiers were directly exposed and suffered illness along with having children with the same handicaps as the Vietnamese.

Agent Orange, or dioxin, was used as a chemical defoliant to destroy the jungle with the idea that it would flush out the VC as well as make the tunnels the VC used more visible to bomb squads and foot soldiers. Millions of gallons of these types of chemicals were sprayed over the countryside and even now the environmental effects of destroying that much forest, as well as the run-off of the chemicals into rivers and water-ways are still being seen. There are still hot-spots in areas of Vietnam where dioxin is still found in the soil and water and people are still showing effects of exposure and babies are still being born dead or with handicaps and deformities from their parents exposure. It is a heartbreaking image and after leaving the museum, you can see the direct effects on the streets as people you once just saw as beggers or special, now became victims of chemical warfare.

Our last day in HCMC, I went on a ½ day tour of the Cu Chi tunnels. These were tunnels built by the Vietnamese people decades before the war, but were used during the ‘American resistance’ for guerilla warfare. The tunnels were already there when the war started, and the Vietnamese people are quick to tell you how the American’s put the main military base right on top of one of the most extensive parts of the 3 level tunnel system when they arrived. Even with the tunnels being widened, to get western bodies through them for a tourist attraction, they were still extremely cramped and I was crouching down and scooting along the 100m length tunnel. We were shown how they made fake termite mounds that were hidden air vents for the tunnels, as well as the different boobie traps that were used to maim and kill soldiers. In between the tunnels we were taken to a shooting range where we could be bullets in packs of ten to shoot AK-47’s, and throw grenades and set off land mines… somehow it just didn’t seem appropriate. I wasn’t hungry and hunting an animal that I planned to eat, or putting something ill or maimed out of its misery, so I saw no point in shooting a gun and thought it a little sad that others thought it was entertaining.

On our way home we were re-routed to a warehouse of souvenir crap supposedly made by ‘victims of the American resistance’. There were many of them walking around and diligently beating away on something resembling an unfinished craft, but the items were EXTREMELY over priced and everything there could be found in every other souvenir shop around the city. But being the bleeding heart that I am and the fresh dose of guilt from the tunnels tour, I managed to buy some chop sticks for 4 times the price they were in town. My naïve mind wants to think that the ‘extra’ I paid goes back to help the real victims of the war but the real world fact is that it was likely a huge scam. DOH!

After being reacquainted with our passports with our new visa extension, we hopped on an 8 hour bus to Nah Trang beach, which we stayed at for nearly an hour before getting on our first sleeper bus of the trip for another 10 hours. We quickly found some dinner and some cocktails at a bar to fill our stomachs and attempt to knock ourselves out for the journey but we were put in the very back and top of the sleeper bus… behind the rear axle… we BOUNCED for 10 hours but some sleeping was done. Matt’s seat had a pro a can. His seat terminated at the aisle so he had plenty of leg room, but everytime the driver hit the brakes, which was nearly every 30sec it pushed him towards the end of the seat and the aisle 3 feet below. He quickly decided to buckle in to keep from sliding into the aisle completely.

Finally arriving in Hoi An we bypassed the moto drivers, and taxis surrounding us with hotel offers and ‘cheap rooms’, and headed towards the rivers edge to search out our own accommodation that didn’t pay someone to stalk westerners at the bus stops. I crashed for a few hours then we walked around town seeing the historical sights and trying not to be talked into having anything sewn or tailor made for us. Difficult with every other shop selling clothes and hand-made shoes. Hoi An was spared somehow during the decades of war and had minimal damage so most of the old buildings and homes are intact, creating a very old, and quaint feel to the town. There aren’t the boring, box shaped, socialist buildings seem around most of Vietnam, but a combination of Chinese, Japanese, French and traditional Vietnamese architecture throughout. It was also extremely liberating to be OUT of a big city. You could casually stroll the local markets, still full of taunts and souvenirs but plenty of produce, meat, and every day items like fans, motorbike parts and tires, and a plethora of homemade medical masks. These are EVERYWHERE in Asia and I think they are worn more from misinformation of how disease is spread than actual protection of the wearer from disease and smog. They only protect healthy people if the DISEASED person is wearing one and sneeze. It’s a sneeze guard, not a disease guard.

At night the city was dressed up in glowing lanterns and lit animal sculptures on the water and after a supper of tradition Pho Bo ( a beef soup with noodles) and some Whites Roses (seasoned shrimp puree in rice paper, YUM!) we strolled along the streets and across the bridge just enjoying the scenery. For awhile we watched what looked like musical Bingo, where numbers were picked by a man and woman leader and they would sick a few lines taunting each other back and forth then end in a drama outcry of the winning number spot. The audience members with the called number on their paddle were rewarded with a flag. We didn’t watch enough to see what happened when someone won but it quite popular with the locals and tourists alike.

The next morning, staying with the pattern in every other country, I signed up for a cooking class to learn the Vietnamese style. We took a tour of the local market where they pointed out local fruits, produce and meats as well as coffees, spices, and cooking items specifically used in Vietnam. Then we loaded onto a boat to go down the river to the restaurant. We were shown around the herb garden, and then settled into our course with a very enthusiastic and funny chef, that knew lots of English slang and knew how to put it into joke format. It was entertaining to say the least. My favorite dish was an eggplant stew with onions and tomatoes that was to DIE for. I was excited to finally learn what to do with an eggplant, an underused vegetable in my kitchen.

I met up with Matt and we walked to the bus to get to Hue, our next city, and 3^rd of the 5 ‘H’ cities we were visiting in Vietnam. We walked to the King’s old palace, now mostly ruins since the way but restoration efforts are in full swing. We also rented bikes and biked 4km to a famous Vietnamese pagoda, and then onwards to the kings tombs. Before we found the tombs though, our Indiana Jones ‘map with no names’ took us through some locals veggie garden and the local cemetery where people kept pointing and saying HELLOOO, road! A nice food stall lady gave us ‘free parking’ at her shop so we could go see the tombs, with maybe a promise of buying a cold drink when we got back. The king and queens tombs were quite elaborate and we found out that the king that had them built put so much money and labor into building his royal refuge that a coup rose against him which he quelled with secret assassinations. It’s good to be the king.

We indeed go back and get a cold drink where our lady was patiently waiting for us, and another tour guide that came by for a rest and his lunch had us deep in conversation about his family, that he studied as a monk for 12 years, and many of the basic concepts of Buddhism. It was quite a relaxing and educational cold drink.

Back in the city, we packed our bags again and boarded the next sleeper bus that night to Hanoi, that lasted 15 hours. The sleeper buses are perfect for people 5’2’’ and shorter, for Matt being 6’2’’, it was a slight nightmare. He also chose the shortest seat on the entire bus. When we did our first, and only stop for the night, I couldn’t stand watching him in pain any longer so I swapped seats to give him an extra 6in of space. I was a bit more cramped but still manageable.

Pictures will come later (I'm posting from China after the computer was stolen...)

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Log 31: Trip across the border to Vietnam via bus, boat and Chau Doc

There were many options for buses to across the border into Vietnam, the regular bus to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) or tours galore. Having had quite a few typical drive through the countryside local buses, we thought we’d shake things up and go by mini-tour that took us to the border, on a boat down the Mekong river, a night in Chau Doc, then a bus ride to HCMC the next day, all for $30USD. This was actually quite a deal, as we would have paid this just in bus fairs and day trips to see the Mekong, and as it turned out we got more out of our tour than we should have.

We took a van from Phnom Penh to the border with a lovely older German couple that we chatted to the whole way. Upon arriving at the border crossing our strange trip went into full swing. We turned off onto a very narrow bumpy dirt road only to find an official passport stamping station, after our stamping and official ‘leaving of Cambodia’ we were shuttled back into the van where we came to the border patrolman. He was fast asleep in his hammock next to the red-stripped lift gate that looked into Vietnam. Our van driver, sighed, got out of the van and lifted the gate, we drove through, then he dropped it again, all without the ‘guard’ so much as stirring. We were taken to the official line, where we had to walk across with our packs, and onto a floating dock where we would take the boat from. We were escorted into a restaurant and told to wait while our passports were stamped and our boat.

After saving our German friend, Sabine, from a dodgy picture card that wouldn’t work in her camera, we loaded onto our Mekong river boat that took us up the scenic river past villages built on stilts for the rainy season, when the river floods meters above where it sits in the dry season. The people seemed poor, but simple and happy in their ways with much of their income and food from the river itself, along with rice farming vegetables beyond the houses. The Mekong is used for just everything too, fishing, washing people clothes and dishes, toilets, watering and bathing water buffalo, etc. With overpopulation along the river, over fishing, and all the excess nutrients going into it, it is not hard to see why there is concern over this river’s sustainability. There is a real worry that the river will be killed and millions of people’s source of food and income will be at stake.

Our boat dropped us at the harbor of Chau Doc, and we were immediately offered rides to our hotel from no less than 3 different cart drivers. This was all included in our ticket, but of course our drivers wanted a large tip for taking us the 1km that we insisted we could walk which made our ‘tip’ price go down by half. So Sabine, George, Matt, and I all packed our butts and bags onto two very small cycle carts that were not built for 2 people, let along 2 western sized butts. But we made it there with only a few new bruises from sitting on the edges.

As it turned out, our friends Mike and Maya, that we met in Indonesia had e-mailed a few days earlier and were going to be in Chau Doc for a days on their way to Cambodia. Thrilled to meet up again with people we knew already, we found their hotel and we all headed out into the city of Chau Doc to find a few beers and some dinner. We exchanged stories and tips of sites to see in Vietnam and Cambodia over a warm beer in a street market, while mixing in stories of the scams and ways to avoid them. Speaking of scams, even with bartering our beer was still more expensive than most of the locals would have paid for a meal, but was still just over $1USD for us so hard to argue with. We went to the one restaurant in town that wasn’t a street stall, and indulged on some fish hotpots, spring rolls, and noodles. Feeling crazy, Mike, Matt and I shared a bottle of banana wine that would be more properly described as a banana liqueur. For a few days we swore we were still burping the taste of the banana wine as well as the fish sauce but one MUST give these things a try. The Vietnamese fish sauce wasn’t subtle and tasty like the Thai fish sauce, the fish are fermented in a goo for 3 years and it takes on a very unique smell of rotting Mekong river. Its then used in many of the traditional dishes, and more commonly as a dipping sauce for spring rolls or noodles. I do eat anything and will try anything once, but once was enough for this sauce.

The next day we boarded a tour bus that took us to the dock once again where we went down the Mekong on Vietnamese row boats, rowed by some of the tiniest women, in size and stature, I had seen yet. I felt incredibly guilty and lazy being rowed out to the floating villages by these women, but their strength and ability to maneuver those boats was well beyond their size. They took us aboard one of the floating fish farms that are the main source of economy for the floating villages. They grow catfish in the cages attached to the bottom of their sheds and make the fish food themselves from rice and left over fish parts. They fed them some pellets to show us and the fish all but jumped out of the water and splashed everywhere on the surface! They make about $2USD a kilo of fish, that gets shipped all over Asia, to the UK, and the US.

Our next stop was to a Cham village, a Muslim group within Vietnam, to see their Mosque. The Cham people originally inhabited the whole south portion of Vietnam, and the Vietnamese were just in the north. Several hundred years ago the Vietnamese people came through and annihilated them and almost destroyed the culture. It still survives today and is recognized by the government so the children go to school with Vietnamese and the people now integrate with society. Our visit brought children selling little cakes that we were warned would give us diarrhea and not to buy, and handicrafts made by the people.

Back on the river our rowers took us back to the dock and we were loaded back on the bus to go to some Buddhist temples near Sam Mountain. This wasn’t supposed to be in our tour but the guide had no other way to get us to the bus so we went along. After the temple he took us to our ‘local bus’ that was to take us to Ho Chi Minh City, and a heap of directions to get us from bus to car, to taxi, to hotel. We wrote down directions, went over them 4 times with us, told us we looked smart enough to handle them, and also a letter to give a cab driver that he would pay for if he couldn’t arrange a car to pick us up at the bus station. Our guide found us our bus and introduced us to the bus assistant, who I’m pretty certain was threatened with death if he lost the two westerners because he stuck to us like glue even though he didn’t know much English. At a lunch stop, he had us wait on the bus then guided us to the depot to show us specifically where the toilets were, waited for us outside, then onto the lunch area and ordered for us. When we were finished eating it was THEN time for the bus to leave again so he shuttled us back to the bus door. Arriving in HCMC, the assistant then took us personally to the transfer car that would take us into the city, put us on, then peeked back in the door before the car left to make sure we were on it. As promised there was a car waiting for us, name tag sign in all, at the bus station to take us to our hotel, even though we didn’t have one booked.

It was nice to not have to worry about getting from place to place, and this was all included in our original $30USD, but if this is the way all tours for tourists go, I’m glad this was our first go of it. I felt like a 10 year old being put on an airplane to meet a parent in another city. No post-it note pinned to our shirts, but our white skin was as good as a post-it.

Finally in the backpacker district of HCMC, but still called Saigon by the locals and everyone else, we wandered down a few alley’s and booked a hotel that was fairly cheap for the city and the air-con, then headed out for a much needed drink. We met a German guy traveling on his own and chatted with him for a few hours about Vietnam since he had been in the country for 4 weeks already. The Lonely Planet is great, but first-hand experience and tips when you get to a place is always better.