Good Morning Vietnam, November 2005

Born To Be Wild! Nha Trang markets

Good Morning Vietnam!!! November 2005

…And so, Emma and I flew from ordered, organised Singapore direct to the insane chaos that is Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon, if you prefer), Vietnam. Below, you’ll find the original email I sent, and after that I’ll add a few more notes on things I might have skimped on!

Greetings from Nha Trang, Vietnam!

 I am one bloated little Buddha!

 For dinner tonight I had fresh scallops, and then for second course I had a whole fresh blue sea crab (it was still alive in the tank when we arrived), and for the main course I had (now wait for it) grilled lobster, still in the shell, topped with chopped fresh garlic, and with a fresh lime on the side. This was all accompanied by as much as I could eat of new potatoes, sauteed asian greens and veggies, and garlic bread. For dessert I had a small scoop of strawberry ice cream, and to drink I had bottled mineral water. What might one have paid for such a gastronomic experience,  hear you ask?

$20. Yes, AU$20 would have more than covered that whole meal, as well as the rather generous tip I gave to the staff. I am as happy as…. well, a very happy thing!!!

 Apologies to all for not emailing sooner. This country is officially nuts, and I have decided to go with the flow and run around like a nutcase local!

Emma and I started off in Ho Chi Minh City, where I think I had the closest thing to a near-death experience that a person can have… here, they don’t call it a ‘near-death experience’… they call it ‘catching a cab’. We got picked up at the airport and before we knew it we were scooting along at helter-skelter pace in between zillions of little mopeds, all of which carried anywhere between 1 and 5 people, and any amount of produce. It took all the guts I had not to scream like a baby every time I opened my eyes. Crossing the road here is a bit of a daredevil experience… they don’t bother with boring things like road rules, pedestrian crossings and traffic lights, oh no no no. In Vietnam, you just walk blithely into the street, not looking left or right and assume (or pray, in my case), that the traffic will avoid you. Again, I’ve had a number of screaming baby moments. In fact, the first time we tried to cross a road, we waited so long on one side that an old lady (yes, an old lady) came and walked us across. The shame of it!

Da Lat markets - so full of colour!

After the initial shock of Ho Chi Minh we got a bus to Dalat, which is an old French colonial outpost in the highlands. It’s actually so high up that when we eventually came down, all my water bottles were crumpled inwards, the way they do on a plane after descent. In Dalat we braved the night markets and a place called ‘The Valley of Love’, which is basically an old amusement park (complete with tacky stalls…. but none of the rides actually work) which is now old and decrepit, as are the people who run it. Its saving grace was the fact that it’s perched on the edge of an incredibly beautiful valley (hence the name), which allows views down onto a meandering, wide river and amazing greenery. We also visited a place called The Crazy House, where an old eccentric artist lady has turned her life’s dream into reality… a mansion with a huge number of rooms, all with a different theme… and from the outside, the house looks like a 20-metre-wide tree. Everything is a sculpture, from the steps to the windows to the beds… incredible.

Kids playing in the street, Nha Trang

From Dalat we made our way down to the coast, and now here we are in Nha Trang, in a hotel right by the beach. It’s much hotter here than Dalat, and a fair bit more expensive. Very touristy! But in some ways it’s nice to have the luxuries. After I write this email, Emma and I are heading to the local beauty salon where we are going to get massaged for the princely sum of d50,000…. which is about the equivalent of AU$4. Don’t mind if I do!

This morning we volunteered at a cafe to teach local street kids English. It was so much fun! The cafe runs a ‘Hands Off The Kids’ campaign, to fight child prostitution and paedophiles in the area, and to provide food, shelter and some education to local children. They were a good bunch of kids, and it was so sad to think they had all been victims at one time or another. They were also very quick to pick things up, too. We’ve been invited to a birthday party for one of them at the school tomorrow, and may just go along if the urge takes us! After that we’ll probably head to the Po Nagar Cham Towers (ancient ruins), and then maybe for a day at the Thap Ba Hot Springs Centre for a day of mud baths, mineral spas and more massages.

Our original plan was to leave for Hoi An later tomorrow (a town famous for its tailoring) but we hear that it’s pretty rainy there, so we may put it off by a day or two. After that, with any luck, we’ll head to Hue. It’s so nice to have a break here and just live in the lap of luxury for a bit. Despite a blase disregard for what I’m eating, we’ve had no big illnesses between us, and thanks to our super-strength mozzie repellent we’ve (mostly) avoided bites.

Welll… I suppose I had better force myself to go and have that massage. Oh, life is such a burden….!!!!

Keep in touch y’all, and take good care of yourselves.

Big love,

Tara. 🙂 xxx

Street scenes on our drive to Da Lat.

There are a number of things that come to mind now, years after leaving. I remember that the bus journey from Ho Chi Minh City to Da Lat was relative torture; the bus driver was obsessed with muzak and we had to listen to it for HOURS at full volume. He was particularly taken with an awful old number called ‘Seasons In the Sun’. I never liked that song to begin with, but after he put it on repeat for over half an hour I was WELL over it! I still have nightmares…! The only thing that stopped us from asking him to stop was the fact that he was so happy about it. He was gleefully singing along in broken English, totally taken with it; who were we to stop his fun?

I remember being caught in our first power cut… and then our second… and then our third, and so on, all over the country! It was par for the course everywhere, and people just took it in their stride. I remember one particular occasion when we were in Da Lat, halfway through dinner at a restaurant (I was obsessed with their awesome spring rolls). Whoomph! The power was gone, and a government truck went up and down the street making some sort of announcement. There was a very convivial atmosphere. Women came out into the street for a good ol’ natter, and everybody took a break from their terminally busy evenings to just chill. It was nice to see. Of course, as soon as the power came back on it was ZOOM ZOOM ZOOM all over again.

Also in Da Lat, I remember avoiding cages full of flapping chickens; the world was in the grip of avian influenza panic and we didn’t want our holiday cut short! When we’d had enough of the bustle and flying feathers of the central markets, we walked up the hill behind them and stumbled upon ‘The House of 100 Roofs’. It’s a cafe built by the same lady who owns the Crazy House, and as such was a visual cacophony of sculptures and greenery and random faces poking out of walls. Once inside, it was hard to get our bearings; was that a chair? Was that the wall, or a window? Could I sit on this thing jutting out of the floor, or was it just for looking at? How many floors are in this place? Built over many levels and deliberately poorly lit, it was like getting lost in Wonderland on an acid trip. It was nice to finally find a recognisable set of chairs and tables and sit down and order a bit of tea and ice cream. Negotiating the sculpted stairs back down, on the other hand… that was another matter! Still, I’m glad that that kind of creativity was being expressed. As the daughter of a high-ranking national party official, she probably had more artistic freedom than most, but at least it was there.

Po Nagar Cham Towers, Nha Trang

I’m surprised that I wrote so little about the Po Nagar Cham Towers (in Nha Trang) at the time of the trip; I guess that the slow, sporadic internet was probably a limitation on that. We saw a number of temple complexes in Vietnam, but Po Nagar was the first. It was by no means the largest or the grandest, and it was stuck in the middle of the city surrounded by concrete and cars, but it was the first, and therefore holds a special little place in my memory. It was also still in use, which I think also makes it a little more special. Often, throughout my trips, I visit these splendid places of worship, but nobody is actually inside them, using them, because tourists have overrun the place and show no respect. Po Nagar was still being used for its original purpose, which pleased me immensely. The orange-brick towers soared above us into the blue skies, and once inside, some of the buildings were strewn with flower petals and offerings of oranges and incense. Stately statues stood in the midst of their smoky haze. The buildings were made without the use of any mortar between the bricks – quite the architectural feat for them still to be standing hundreds or thousands of years later. As such, the chimneys were staggered, much like the interior of the pyramids of Giza in Egypt.

This is the life! Thap Ba Hot Springs, Nha Trang

After sweating our way around the temples, we got a cab to the Thap Ba Hot Springs. Here, domestic and international tourists (although I think the majority were domestic) filed into the park and changed clothes behind rickety blue-and-white striped canvas before being directed to the watery attraction of choice. Here, it was possible to be massaged, scrubbed, dunked into pools of hot mud, sprayed with cold water, soaked in baths of 42-degree hot spring water and generally be pummelled or heated into oblivion before relaxing on a deckchair or swimming in a heated pool. All of this in a place where the temperatures were already sweltering BEFORE you got into the tub. Still, we gave it a go and actually had a great time sweating some more. Emma had a massage while I sat in a giant outdoor hot tub, and then we played around under a hot waterfall before retreating to the shade, where we ate a light lunch and drank a LOT of water!

That was the good stuff about Nha Trang; I hate to say it, but there was a lot of bad stuff about Nha Trang too. First of all, the sheer number of gross old men out looking for the sex trade. Women, men, little boys, little girls… you could just see it on their faces. It was sickening. Unfortunately, as Nha Trang becomes more of a tourist haven I fear it will only become worse unless the government really steps in to do something. The people in Nha Trang also seem… harder than everywhere else we went; more eager to squeeze every last penny out of you, and much more aggressive about it. Our hotel tried to cheat us out of an extra night of accommodation fees after we checked out a couple of hours late. We had asked for permission from two different members of staff to leave a little late because we knew our train wasn’t leaving til later, and both had said yes. Then, when we tried to check out they claimed no memory of us and demanded the extra cash. It was sheer stubbornness on our part, and a mention of complaining to Lonely Planet, that finally got them to come clean and leave us alone.

We also had a run-in with some kids at a Buddhist temple in Nha Trang. All we wanted was to go and have a little potter; a large, white Buddha statue sat serenely at the top of a hill with the temple spread across the hillside below it. We entered, explored the first level, and then WHAP! there were about half a dozen kids in their mid-teens mobbing us. They asked us if we wanted to pay for a guided tour (no), then asked if we wanted to buy a brochure (no), “You want buy postcard?” (no) and then they got REALLY aggressive. They tried to separate us (3 or 4 of them with each of us), and they managed to drag Emma about 2 metres away round a corner. They kept trying to bully me into buying postcards for an extortionate price, and then they tried the guilt tactic – “we need money for school, etc etc etc”. I was trying to be polite (which is, I suppose, what they count on), but after about 10 minutes of bullying, cajoling, and eventually an attempt to grab my hands and upper arms, the Sri Lankan in me leapt loose and I shouted at them, pushed them away and made my way over to Emma, who had been confused, pushed around and harrassed to such a point that she was about to hand over the equivalent of $40 for three shitty postcards. I grabbed her and made to move off and they physically barred our way, at which point I told them that they were shameful to be doing this in a place of worship, that tourists would hate what they were doing and that they were not getting any money out of either of us. I told them that if they had asked nicely and not been so damn greedy, we might have bought something. Then the guy spat on Emma’s feet, and made towards me with his fists out, so I hit him HARD in the solar plexus and stormed off. Sons of bitches. And you know what made it worse? A monk was watching them do all this and made no move to stop them, which leads me to believe that this practice is encouraged by the monastery in an effort to raise funds. Positively disgusting.

Sadly, this seedy side of things left an indelible, dirty mark on my memory of Nha Trang. It was an ‘up-and-down’ few days. Thankfully, it was only a small part of the trip and the rest of our trip MORE than made up for Nha Trang’s shortcomings!

And so, from Nha Trang we hopped onto the infamous Reunification Express train headed North. And it’s here I’ll leave you until the next instalment.

If you’d like to see more photos from this part of the Vietnam trip, please click here.

Thanks for stopping by,

Tara.

Tags: travel, vietnam