Vietnam!

October 2, 2006
The morning we sailed into Vietnam we entered the Saigon River at around 5:30 am to get to Ho Chi Minh City port. Steph and I slept in and woke up a few times to check out what was passing by, and there was a long strip of land on the port side (the side that our room is on) that was very green, covered in bushes and trees. It took a long time until we saw a city, and we got into the Ho Chi Minh City port around 9am. There was no diplomatic briefing that morning for Vietnam but the night before we had the mandatory pre-port to prep us for the country. They gave us general information and the Vietnamese student on board (students get on board at each port who are from the next country), spoke to us a bit. She spoke broken English and wore a beautiful silk Vietnamese outfit. We gave her a present and she said she didn’t have anything to give us but asked if she could sing us a song. She was really nervous and asked everyone to clap and then she belted out a traditional Vietnamese song really well. Everyone cheered and stood up when she finished and she said “I think this is my happiest memory I’ve ever had”. It was a great way to enter the country and she was so happy to have sang for us.
When we left the ship we packed our bags for the next few days because we were going to be touring around Ho Chi Min and also flying to Hanoi (in Northern Vietnam) for a 2 night trip independent of SAS. Conor, Dave, Mio and I had decided to travel together throughout Vietnam so we planned out what we wanted to do beforehand. Dave had been on a high school trip to Vietnam 4 years earlier so he had a pretty good idea of what we should do and where to go. We got off the ship and took the semester at sea shuttle to the Rex Hotel, which was in downtown Ho Chi Minh (which used to be known as Saigon).
We walked around to a few hotels and found one that was pretty cheap and really nice (the prices in Vietnam were much less than Japan and China, around $80 for a room at one of the nicest hotels), and we put our bags down so we could walk around exploring. Ho Chi Minh looked like most cities, shops lined every street and there were vendors and people everywhere. It wasn’t too crowded and it was a bit nicer than I had expected. The one thing that made it very unique were the motor bikes that were absolutely EVERYWHERE. They crowded the streets and outnumbered cars at least 100 to 1. We had been warned on the ship that walking through the streets would be a totally new experience. Instead of waiting for traffic lights and being afraid of cars coming at you (which is what we are used to from home), we were told to cross the street wherever we could and not to slow down or hesitate when motorbikes came at us. This took a little getting used to but after a while it was pretty entertaining. You could walk across the street blindfolded with 200 motorbikes coming directly at you and as long as you kept a continuous pace they would all get around you easily. So after learning how to maneuver through the traffic, we met up with a few other friends and found a restaurant for lunch. It looked like a nice, traditional Vietnamese place so we walked in and were led upstairs to a table in an empty room. The waiters spoke a surprising amount of English but we still weren’t sure what we wanted so we basically asked them to bring us a few of the most popular dishes. We found out that day how amazing the spring rolls in Vietnam are and we all had them again at almost every meal on the trip. They are deep fried and filled with meat or vegetables and dipped in a reddish sweet sauce, and they were amazing. We also had shrimp served in a hollowed out coconut, fried rice, and cashew chicken. We were nervous about drinking the water or anything with ice since we’d been warned about the sanitation so we got sodas or bottled water (or Tiger beers which were around 1 dollar each and we’ve found in almost every country) to be sure that nobody got sick.
After our delicious and authentic lunch that ended up costing a few dollars a person, we decided to find a good tailor and get some clothes made. We walked a few blocks and went into a few of the tailors (there was at least one about every four or five shops) asking what their prices were to get suits and dresses made. After checking the quality and prices at each one we found a very small little shop that had great fabric and really nicely made suits. The boys got measurements taken and picked out their fabric and I found a dress in a magazine that I liked and decided to try and have it made for me. The women were extremely nice and very excited to make clothes for us. They actually knew we were from SAS because the trips come through twice a year and they are ready for a lot of business the 600 American students who are all looking for custom clothes. For the guys suits they charged about $100 with 2 free silk ties, and my dress was going to cost $40 and was made of black raw silk. Mio and I decided to get winter coats made because the tailoring looked like it would be really well done. I found a style in a magazine and gave it to them, then picked out a brownish tweed looking fabric with dark gold silk for lining. While we were shopping around in the tailor there were little Vietnamese kids outside asking us to buy packs of postcards for a dollar each. One really cute little boy waited for us and would ask each one of us every time we came out. He spoke perfect English and at one point he pointed to something on Dave’s shirt and when Dave looked down the kid reached up and hit him in the nose. We were cracking up and so we started talking to the kid who was eleven years old and named Long. He spoke almost perfect English and was hilarious. We told him we would come back after our trip and see him outside the tailor’s when we had to pick up our clothes.
We went to a rooftop bar at a hotel called the Majestic (probably the nicest hotel in Ho Chi Minh) for the view and some drinks. The view from the top was amazing, the river was on one side of us, and the city sprawled out on the other side. We sat up on a patio at the very top with some peanuts and cocktails for a while until some serious storm clouds started rolling in over our heads. The weather was hot and humid and rainy at times so we were ready for it to start pouring at any minute. We went back to our hotel to ask where a good place would be for dinner and went across the street to a tiny authentic restaurant. Six of us sat down and ate more than I thought was possible. We had tons of spring rolls, rice, chicken, vegetables, and beers. There were around 9 dishes of food and probably 25 beers between the 6 of us after our extremely satisfying dinner and it was probably 6 dollars a person. Everything was so cheap, the exchange rate was 16,000 Dong (Vietnamese currency) to 1 American Dollar. After dinner we headed back to the hotel for a good nights sleep before our flight to Hanoi the next morning.
Our flights to Hanoi were around $80 US dollars each way and only about an hour and a half. The airports were pretty small and the planes seemed tiny. Our knees easily hit the seats in front of us, but we must have seemed like giants to the Vietnamese. When we landed in Hanoi we had to find transportation into “downtown” so we walked around looking for cabs. We had also heard about a free shuttle that would go to a main hotel, but there was a man who came up to us right away and pointed us to a bus he said was cheap and would take us to a hotel. We found out later that this guy must have worked for a particular hotel and was trying to take us there and get money from us, but he was pretty persistent and the bus cost about a quarter for each person so we got on. We found out quickly that this was not the fastest way into town. The bus took us through back roads and picked up massive amounts of school children, and dropped them off at a bunch of different stops. Although it took us probably twice as long as it should have, it was really great to take some time to see the rural areas before making it to the city. Along these back roads the scenery was very strange to me and unexpected. I wasn’t surprised at the people sitting in broken-down looking restaurants and the dirty alley ways between the small buildings, because it was obvious that a lot of the living conditions were like this due to poverty. But there were also a few really nice looking small stores and these strange, tall, two story, thin houses that were adorned with gold and Indian-like decoration. They had balconies at the top often with plants and large beautiful windows, but the bottom floors were basically empty, usually cavernous looking concrete rooms. Nobody ever explained what these were or why they looked so nice and were placed randomly among the other poor looking housing. There were also many women and children out selling goods like packaged foods, and souvenirs as we got closer to downtown Hanoi. The bus finally ended up on a kind of freeway or main street and our “guide” who had led us on in the first place motioned for us to get off at that stop. We got off the bus and walked across the busy street, as cars and motorbikes drove around us on all sides. There seemed to be absolutely no traffic rules or regulations in Vietnam, and most of the time it was hard to tell where there were lanes and which direction cars would be coming from. After walking for about 15 minutes, following the man into the streets, we came to a hotel next to a tourist office and went in to ask about the prices. The Hotel lobby was beautiful, it was small but decorated very nicely, with free internet and a restaurant and tiny lobby on the first floor. We checked out the room rates which ranged from $25 a night for the standard rooms to $50 a night for the deluxe room with a balcony. We ended up getting two really nice rooms for about $30 a night.
After getting settled in the hotel we headed off into Hanoi to find food and plan our tour to Ha Long Bay. There was a beautiful Lake in the middle of the “Old Quarter” of Hanoi and we had lunch at a restaurant with a great view. The food was more American there, I got some great chicken and rice which was nice since we were starving after the flight, bus ride and walking. I also had Vietnamese Iced Coffee because I was starting to get tired and wanted to be able to stay awake while we explored the city more. Before this trip I have never had an actual cup of coffee and never really been a fan of anything besides coffee ice cream, but I have never had anything as good as Vietnamese iced coffee. They bring out a small silver cup that has the grains inside of it and place it over a glass that has a layer of condensed milk so that the coffee drips into it. When it is finished dripping you stir up the coffee and condensed milk and pour it all over ice (I stopped being careful about the ice because it was just too delicious, and luckily I didn’t get sick at all). I think I had at least one iced coffee every day in Vietnam and I’m dying to find out if I can get some Vietnamese coffee at home because it is one of my new favorite things in the world. After lunch we wandered through the market and booked a tour for Ha Long Bay for the next day for $20 a person that included a 3 hour bus ride, 5 hour boat tour of the bay, lunch, and ride back. Then we did some shopping and walking through the city streets and markets. Basically there were similar souvenirs on each street, mainly a lot of fake north face backpacks, jewelry stores, pearls, and a lot of post cards and pictures/paintings. We walked through a food market and I saw some of the craziest things I’ve ever seen. I thought that the Chinese fish market in Hong Kong was bad, but this was much worse. First of all, this market was not enclosed in a building, but was simply composed of small tables lined up on a street in the open air with people sitting and selling fruits, vegetables, and all kinds of animals. There were live chickens running around with cut up poultry a few feet away, being washed in a basin with dirty looking water. There were every kind of fruit and vegetable (which we weren’t supposed to eat because they had been washed in unsanitary water), and tons of containers and baskets filled with pungent smelling mysterious substances. There was one thing I saw in the market that I really don’t think I’ll ever forget. There was a bucket of boiling hot oil, and inside it, floating, there was a mother duck and three baby ducks. They all had been plucked of all their feathers and were obviously dead but were floating there just like they would in a pond with the babies trailing behind the mother. I was shocked by that, and the rest of the way Mio and I tried to get out as fast as we could because it was hard to look at a lot of the meat. At the end of the row there was a flower shop with unbelievably beautiful flowers. I noticed all over Vietnam that the flowers were some of the prettiest I had ever seen, and I’m sure a lot cheaper than we would ever get them for at home.
After being immersed in the markets we headed back to our hotel to rest for a bit, use the internet and relax before the night. We dressed up a bit and headed to a hotel that Mio had read about called the Metripole, which was at the opposite end of the lake. I can honestly say I think this was the prettiest hotel I have ever been to in my life. I absolutely loved the atmosphere. It was huge and white with pillars out in front and we went in to sit and have a drink in the bar while looking out at the gorgeous pool. Patio, and garden, all lit up at night. There were tons of white roses everywhere and the menu looked amazing, although the prices were much more American so we each had one 6 dollar drink and decided we’d go back out to Vietnamese prices. We ended up eating at a very American-like bar and I had one of the best cheese quesadillas I’d ever had (maybe it’s just that I was so hungry again after another long day of traveling). We headed to bed to be ready for our 7am wake up call for the Ha Long Bay Tour in the morning. The bus came to our hotel and picked us up, then filled up with another 20 or so tourists. That 3 and a half hour ride was pretty intense. One thing about driving in Vietnam is that everyone honks basically all the time, and anyone can pass other cars/motorbikes at any time. So we were exhausted but sitting in tiny seats and watching tons of motorbikes come directly at us while everyone was honking and passing each other. Luckily we’ve found that foreign bus drivers really know how to maneuver those things. We made it to Ha Long Bay and boarded an amazing long wooden ship that had three decks. There were a ton of these tourist ships lined up at the dock, all old and wooden and almost identical to each other. We were served lunch (a deep fried entire fish, rice, and mysterious vegetables) inside on the second deck as we sailed out towards the islands in the bay. Within Ha Long Bay there are 3,000 islands all made of limestone. We sailed around and got off at one island to explore a few caves that had been discovered as far back as the 13th century. These caves were unbelievable. We had to climb a ton of manmade steps to get into them, and inside they were cool and humid at the same time. There were all sorts of crazy shapes formed by water inside of them and I was totally in awe that such cavernous beautiful spaces could be naturally made inside the limestone islands. After exploring the caves we sailed by floating fishing villages. These villages were astonishing, each house was alone and afloat, usually with hammocks outside and families that lived there sustained by fishing. There were women and children in boats selling goods and food and trying to get us to buy something while we were on our boat. It was absolutely beautiful spending time in the bay, we all took a ton of pictures of the islands and the amazing floating villages. We sailed back to the dock and enjoyed another 3 hour bus ride, but in the dark this time. Luckily I was able to fall asleep but Conor said he was awake the whole time watching headlights come directly at us as our driver passed people and honked at everyone along the way. We made it back to the hotel alive! Starving again, we asked the front desk at our hotel for a recommendation for dinner and took a cab a few blocks away (even a 15 minute cab ride was never more than 2 dollars) to an outdoor Vietnamese restaurant. This place was fantastic. We walked through an archway into an area enclosed by a big tent and with small cooking stations all along the sides. There were at least a hundred people at a ton of tables inside but I think we were the only white people there. We sat down and ordered more spring rolls, of course, and also Pho noodles. Pho noodles (pronounced “Fuh”) are Vietnamese and they are white noodles in a beef broth. This dinner was amazing, and we decided to be adventurous with desert so we ordered some kind of coconut dish with sweet potatoes. It was like hot, thick coconut milk with sweet potato pieces and some sort of gelatin-like stuff also. It was definitely a good choice and one of the best deserts I’ve had in any country so far. After filling up again we went back to the hotel to shower after the long day of humidity. We decided to see what Hanoi’s night life was like so we walked towards a club called “New Century” that we’d read about in the guide books. When we got closer we hopped on cyclos (carts attached to men on bicycles, which were So much fun) to go the rest of the way. At the club we had to give our cameras to the military-looking officials a the door who locked them up for us until we came back. Inside was pretty bizarre. There were men running around in Hennessy jump suits serving drinks and a pretty crazy array of go-go like dancers on stage. Otherwise it was like a typical club, but of course filled with Vietnamese and not many foreigners besides us. We hung out and danced for a bit and then right before midnight the stage cleared and a man and woman came on dancing a sort of tango with a rose. When they stopped and it hit midnight a ton of confetti shot out onto the dance floor from somewhere above us, and we all stood there pretty confused. The confetti was also a weird mylar kind that ended up sticking to us and the colors bled onto our skin and didn’t come off for literally days. After the crazy club experience we decided to go back to the hotel since we had an 8am flight to catch. We hadn’t been on motorbikes yet so we took them back to the hotel (sorry Dad they don’t use helmets in Vietnam but they weren’t going too fast and I had to do it once for the experience). Being on the motorbikes was a lot of fun but also pretty scary. They know what they are doing but they all get really close to each other and without any traffic laws we weren’t sure quite what was going on. A few minutes of motorbiking was enough for me and quite the experience. We got back to the hotel and of course slept through the 6:00am alarm and ended up missing our 8am flight by a few minutes. So we had to sit in the Hanoi airport for about 2 and a half hours to wait for the next flight. I found some more coffee and luckily Pringles chips seem to be sold literally everywhere in the world so I had some American snacks to keep me occupied until the flight.
When we arrived back in Ho Chi Minh we went back to the tailor for our fittings. I tried on my dress and it was adorable, I was amazed that the women could see a picture in a magazine and almost perfectly recreate it fit exactly to my body. They used pins to make a few changes on my dress and the boys tried on their suits. Mio decided to get a dress made too because they said they could easily do one overnight and I got another one made in almost the same style in red silk. Our coats were amazing, they were tailored perfectly and lined with silk and only cost $80 all together. We bought a few more presents and souvenirs and then found our friend Long (who we had met two days earlier) outside. He was selling postcards and we were talking about wanting to go on a tour of the Me Kong Delta the next day so he said he could help us. He said his uncle would drive us and he knew a tour guide who would take us for $15. We loved Long so we agreed to let him go with us and he set up the tour for 9am the next morning. We walked around the markets all afternoon and Long came with us to translate and help us bargain prices. There are a ton of fake designer bags in Vietnam that are very real looking and cost between 5 and 15 dollars. They also have a ton of North Face backpacks for very cheap. Most of the stuff is totally fake but we found a shop owner who told us that some of the backpacks were made from the actual NorthFace materials that a friend of his had smuggled out of the factory in China and he assembled on his own. I couldn’t tell the difference at all but I bought a big backpack and some other bags for pretty cheap. After shopping almost all afternoon we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner with Long and then headed to the ship to drop off our stuff and change. We decided to take Long bowling that night so we met him again and he took us to the bowling alley. It was pretty similar to bowling alleys at home (with American music blasting of course) and a huge arcade attached to it. We all had a lot of fun with Long and then took him back to his aunt (who works selling souvenirs outside of the tailor). Long told us that he went to school to learn English but that he was poor compared to the other kids in his school and he had to sell during the day. He was out alone in the city all day unless he was going to school that day. And he needed to make money to bring home powdered milk for his family. Mio and I bought him two tins of powdered milk that were huge and actually pretty expensive. He said each one would last them for a month (he lived with his parents and two younger brothers). It was pretty sad to see an eleven year old who has to be out until 10pm every night selling anything he can to bring home food for his family, but he was one of the happiest and smartest kids I’ve ever met. It was great to be able to spend some time with him and gain some insight into Vietnamese life. After dropping Long off we headed to the Rex Hotel and went up to the beautiful rooftop bar that had been taken over by SAS kids.
The next morning we met Long in front of the Rex Hotel at 9am and the five of us (me, Mio, Conor, Dave and Long) piled into his uncle’s little SUV. The drive was about an hour and a half and pretty boring except for the motorbike accident that we saw. Based on how those guys drive I was actually surprised we hadn’t seen more accidents but this one was pretty bad. There were two motorbikes that had slid under the front end of a big truck and a puddle of blood on the concrete. We looked to the side of the road and saw a girl holding her face with a towel and blood dripping from her nose and mouth. It was pretty nauseating. After the traffic backup we all fell asleep until we arrived at the Me Kong Delta.
We pulled up to a small house and our tour guide came out to explain the tour and put us on the boat. It was nice to have a “private” tour compared to a lot of tours that were usually pretty crowded. We took the little boat across the Delta to a few different little islands and visited different villages on each one. The first place we went was a bee farm where they pulled out a wooden sheet with bees and honeycomb on it. The bee keeper took our fingers and had us touch the honey through a full covering of bees, it was a little scary but the honey was delicious. Then they made us a kind of tea that the Vietnamese have often in the mornings. They put a layer of fresh honey in the bottom of a glass and add bee pollen, a squirt of lime, and hot green tea. It was delicious but there were bees everywhere that were trying to get into the honey jar and landing on our spoons. I bought some honey to take home with me, and we checked out the souvenirs on the island as well. Next we visited “coconut island” which was where the Coconut Monk once lived. He was a crazy guy who lived off of only coconut and coconut milk for an entire three years. He gathered a following of women who lived with him on the island and built a bunch of really strange structures. There they sold a ton of goods, all made out of coconut shell and trees. Then we boarded a smaller boat to go through these amazing canals that where only about 8 feet wide and lined with tall leafy trees. It felt like we were rowing through the middle of a jungle in a small, skinny boat with rowers squatting on the front and back ends. It was such a small canal that we usually collided with the boats coming the opposite direction and the rowers pushed off with their oars. We stopped at another place where women sat making fresh coconut candy that was really good. The men took the coconuts and somehow turned the milk and flesh into a liquid that they stirred and cooked into a hot thick substance. Then they poured it into long molds and finally cut it up into small pieces and wrapped them. There was a giant snake there for people to hold and take pictures and we all did it of course, but the next thing we did with a snake was much more memorable.
We headed to lunch at a restaurant that had snake, rabbit, turtle, squirrel, iguana, and pigeon on the menu. We ordered snake and also some “elephant ear fish” which the Me Kong Delta is known for (apparently the fish is supposed to look like the ear of an elephant but I didn’t really see it). We got spring rolls first that were delicious and then they brought out the elephant ear fish that looked like it had been caught and just thrown into a deep fryer with eyes, teeth and everything. It was served between sticks so that it was upright and the waitress scraped off all of the scales and picked the meat out of the bones for us. The fish was really really good but I can’t say the same for the snake. We had asked to see the snake before it was cooked for us (I don’t know who came up with that idea considering I almost passed out about 5 times watching what happened next). The man brought out a 3 and a half foot cobra that he was holding tightly by the head and hold the tail wrapped up in his other hand. He then proceeded to take crayola quality scissors and cut directly through the snake’s neck. It took a few cuts to finally get the snake’s head to fall off at which point I turned completely white and felt a little queasy. The head just sat there, moving for a second on its own while the body squirmed until the man turned it upside down and drained its blood into a glass filled with rice wine. I still can’t believe I watched that without fainting.
They brought out the snake cooked in two forms; snake rice soup, and curried snake. I had some soup but couldn’t bring myself to eat a piece of hot, scaly snake out of the broth. The snake curry looked less intense so I took a piece that had no scales and ate it as fast as possible so that I wasn’t thinking about what was going down my throat. After I swallowed it and starting talking about how I couldn’t eat a piece that had scales on it, Dave started laughing at me and told me I didn’t want to know what I had just eaten. I found out later that the pieces without scaled were organs and I had probably just eaten the heart. I also tried a piece with scales so that I could actually say I’d eaten snake and it was pretty chewy and awful. Then our guide informed us that we were supposed to drink shots of he rice wine with the snake’s blood in it. At first I completely refused (being a person who normally passes out at the sight of blood I wasn’t about to drink it). But everyone else was all for it so I decided not to be the only one who didn’t drink snake blood. We gave some to our guide as well who was very excited because the cobra blood is supposed to be god for the body. We drank them as fast as possible and I immediately shoved bread in my mouth so that I wouldn’t taste it. That was definitely the craziest thing I’ve done on this trip so far.
We returned from the Delta after that and went back to the tailors to pick up our clothes and get any more last minute souvenirs. We had to say goodbye to Long and get back to the ship to stand in line to make on-ship time. Vietnam was more incredible than I had expected. We covered a lot of ground and got to see natural wonders in the south as well as the north of the country. This was a country I would love to go back to in the future and I would recommend to anyone.
Sorry this is so late! We hit India tomorrow and I’m working on writing up Myanmar…traveling wears you out! Thanks for checking the blog, I hope all is well at home.