Watery villages (and one very busy city)

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I started my Vietnam excursion from Chau Doc in Mekong Delta. I didn't do too much on the first day as my mood wasn't brilliant. I was still frustrated about the taxi scam on the Cambodian side and then there were all these people wanting more money from me. What I mean is that I encountered the thing that annoys me most in Vietnam many times already during the first hours. That is that every time when you bargain about something and eventually reach the solution and do the thing (most often the motorbike drive) the person who has been serving you asks for more money. It seems that they agree to a low price only to get the deal and then think that they can freely ask for more. Anyway, that makes me so angry and I never give more, even if I was happy with the service - I might if they didn't ask for it. What is the point with bargaining if it doesn't mean anything in the end? Usually the service provider gets angry too as they always seem to think that they have DESERVED more.

Well, it was only the third day during the whole trip when I was a bit depressed (the last day in Thailand and that horrible day with the moto driver in Battambang were the others) and always something good has followed shortly. This was the case this time too, as being bored with my own company I booked a two-day Mekong Delta tour including a home stay in a Mekong family house.

The trip started with a boat trip to see a floating village, fish farm and a minority (Shan) village, where we could buy the handcrafts and pastries made by the villagers. Soon after we were transferred by bus to Can Tho, the biggest town in Mekong Delta. There the five us who stayed with the family were taken by a boat to the island where the place was located. My companions were a German (Lisa and Omar) and Danish (Sophy and Rasmus) couple; all really nice people so we had a good laugh.

Unfortunately just two family members spoke English so we didn't quite connected in a way we wished. We for example would have wanted to help them to prepare the dinner (which required lots of chopping) and learn about the cooking at the same time but they didn't let us. So after we had had a delicious lunch of rice, fried fish, aubergine and bean soup and played a couple of Uno games we made a walking tour in the village. It was such a lovely place with lots of different fruit trees and many happy children on the way. In the evening more tourists came to stay (the family had also some guest huts) and shared the wonderful festive meal with us.

In the morning we left the house at seven and headed for the floating market, naturally by boat. That was a colourful event! After that we saw rice paper making, rice factory and some fruit orchards before returning to Can Tho for lunch. I happened to sit next to two adventurous boys and ended up eating snake with them. King Cobra can you imagine! Ok, it was a small bite and after I had removed the skin and tiny bones there wasn't that much to eat... It was ok but wouldn't order it. Or touch the snake eggs that were also part of the dish.

After lunch we were driven to Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City by its official name. I will call it Saigon here as that is what Southern Vietnamese people prefer. It is huge city, with 8 million inhabitants and up to 4 million motorbikes. Even if I had experience from the traffic in Bangkok and Phonm Penh it felt overwhelmingly scary at first. In the first place I just stood there for ages trying to collect the courage to cross the street. The green light doesn't help at all as there are still hundreds of motos coming right towards you. My friend Lisa was much braver than me (perhaps as she hadn't been run over by a car a year earlier) and by shadowing her I finally learned the trick. You just need to jump in the middle of the traffic but move very slowly. The worst thing you can do is to freeze in the middle of the road or try to return where you left no matter how bad it gets. It also helps to keep in mind that they are just motorbikes driving fairly slowly and it doesn't hurt quite as much to be hit by one as it did by a car.

I stayed in the friendliest possible place in Saigon. The guest house was called Madame Cuc's Hotel 64. The breakfast was included, as was dinner, internet and drinks (tea, coffee and lemon juice) all day. Because of these free little perks people sat in the lounge much longer and more often than in a regular hotel and I got to know new people every evening. Lisa and Omar stayed in another Madame Cuc's nearby and the staff let us freely have our breakfasts and dinners together, sometimes me at their hotel and sometimes they at mine.

On the first day we started the sightseeing with Lonely Planet's suggested walking tour that gave a good overview on the most central sights. Eventually we entered the must-see museum, the War Remnants Museum that concentrates on the war crimes undertaken by the US during the Vietnam War (or American war as the Vietnamese call it). Shocking stuff, although not particularly objectively presented. However, I think I had used all my emotional energy in Cambodia as I took the information in quite calmly this time. On the other hand, the presentation didn't go to such a personal level than the horrors of Tual Sleng in Phonm Penh. The most interesting part for me was to see the photos of and taken by the journalists who had died or gone missing during the war.

On the second day we (i.e. me plus Lisa and Omar) participated in the organised trip to the Cao Dai temple in Tay Ninh and Vietcong's Cu Chi tunnels. Cao Dai is a relatively new religion, officially established in southern Vietnam in 1926 and having some 7 million followers in Vietnam, being the third biggest religion in the country (after Buddhism and Catholicism). It combines elements from many of the world's main religions, including Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, as well as Geniism, an indigenous religion of Vietnam. The temple we visited is the main centre of the Cadoism and we had a chance to see the midday prayer ceremony which was very colourful and attended at least by a hundred people, some praying on the floor, some playing instruments on the mezzanine floor.

After the lunch we continued to Cu Chi tunnels to see how the Vietnamese tricked the Americans during the war with their impressive tunnel system. They were quite imaginative, being some 200 kilometres long and having lots of different levels and various different areas for different purposes (such as conference rooms or kitchens). We crawled of course through a short passage and even if the tunnels are widened for us fat tourists I still felt a bit claustrophobic. We also saw various (human) traps used by the Vietcong - quite primitive but extremely dangerous and evil! The place was awfully touristy and what I particularly didn't like at all was the background noise of guns - visitors could trial the old weapons for fee 😞

On the third day I was back in Saigon and continued sightseeing by going to see the Reunification Palace, which is the Presidential Palace build in 1962. The building is more or less in the state it was on the day of the reunification (i.e. 30 April 1975 when the North Vietnamese troops took over Saigon and ending the war). The sixties architecture made me understand how close all these incidents have been - somehow the black and white pictures you see everywhere give an impression it was all much longer ago.

I also did some shopping at the various Saigon markets. Ben Thanh is the most central one but you can't stay there for too long - the vendors FORCE you to buy stuff so it gets a bit painful. I also too a moto to Cholon, the Chinese area, and tried Pho, the most common Vietnamese dish of beef noodle soup - tasty.

By this time I had decided to extend my stay in Saigon from the planned three days. I felt there was still loads to see, but more importantly we had a great time with Lisa (who was now also alone as Omar needed to fly briefly back to Munich on business) and my birthday was coming and I didn't want to spend it alone. So I stayed for another FIVE days which was a bit of overkill and meant I needed to cut short visits to some other great places. On the other hand it meant I could take things really easy and for example start to go to gym. I did find a really good one and enjoyed doing exercise (particularly running!) after a long while.

We did plan my birthday carefully: there were options of a cycling trip, cooking course, pampering package in a hotel and yoga class. Eventually I picked the two last ones. We started the day with yoga in a fantastically cool spa - if only it hadn't been so very expensive we would have spent the whole day there. Well, it WAS about five times our budget so we needed to move to another place for the pampering thing. We thought we had found a great deal, even in Saigon's cheap prices: sauna, steam room, body scrub, massage, facial and manicure for $14 (plus tip). The hotel looked nice and we very much enjoyed the first part of sauna and body scrub - until the body scrub girls came with the "tip book". They asked us to sign for a tip of $7 if we thought the service is very good, $5 if good, $3 if ok and less if it was bad. We obviously found this ridiculous but signed for the lowest tips. Not surprisingly, the same procedure followed after the massage. At this point we found out that the girls didn't get any salary from the hotel - only the tips. All $14 went to the pockets of the management. We couldn't bear the disappointed faces of the poor girls (but who really is tipping those amounts there were requesting?) and just decided to skip the last two treatments. Off we went to tell the reception what we thought of their business. We threw the money (half of the package and the tips we had agreed to pay) on the till and run away leaving the manager shouting "excuse me, excuse me" after us. Well, we had had two good and long treatments anyway so the afternoon was still quite a pretty good one.

So what else did I do in Saigon? There was the Museum of Ho Chi Minh City - a beautiful building with some interesting exhibitions, such as one telling about the proposal and wedding procedures with different Vietnamese tribes. There were also numerous real life wedding couples (I saw five) as this seems to be a place to get your wedding photos taken in the city. We also went to Jade Emperor Pagoda, which an interesting Chinese temple. The history museum consisted mainly of pottery so that wasn't too interesting to me. And then there were a couple of more visits to the gym.

On the last day of my stay we felt that the sightseeing was done and decided to find an outdoor swimming pool and just relax a bit. We went through quite a few hotels until found the perfect and inexpensive roof terrace with the pool from the obvious place - Hotel Rex is one of the best known and most central hotels in the city with good views. It was perfectly cooling in that exhausting heat of the city.

I was also lucky to make two Vietnamese friends. Actually they were Lisa's friends, as she had met this girl called Anh in a shop where she had a dress tailored for herself. Anh was keen to learn English as she will soon move to Canada to study marketing, and they became quickly good friends with Lisa. Anh even invited Lisa to her home, which she shares with her boyfriend. On my last night we all (Lisa, Anh, boyfriend and me) had dinner together. It was so nice to get to know these lovely young people full of great plans for their future. They were also very hospitable - we wanted to pay for the dinner but they demanded that we would go for coffee afterwards so they could treat us too.

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Photos

Cruising with motos in the streets of Saigon
This is Lisa.

Comments

[Claire]

Hey Karoliina, I get so excited when I see the email in my Inbox that your have a new blog entry - you transport me away from my desk with your colourful accounts of your encounters with people and places. I liked the photo of you in the tunnels - I don't know if I would be brave enough to go into visit them, I like my fresh air!!