Ding-dong, Saigon

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After our heavy-going time in Phnom Penh we were definitely in need of a change of scenery and a less bleak outlook. Luckily our next destination was Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in Vietnam, another city/country that’s endured its fair share of war/oppression. Goody.

After a monumentally uneventful coach journey and border crossing from Cambodia into Vietnam we arrived in HCMC mid-afternoon and quickly got dragged into a little local guesthouse by a rather enthusiastic Vietnamese man (who had already snared a Swiss couple off our bus). The room was fine and we were in no mood to traipse around for long (mainly because the traffic there was MENTAL!) so we dropped our bags off and headed for a late lunch. Before we knew it the sun had set and darkness had set in, which in travelling terms means two things; firstly that Cate will usually have exhausted our camera battery by now taking numerous sunset shots, and secondly that there will be lots of Happy Hours for us to search out!

We got settled at a bar on the main shopping/bar street and indulged in a couple of cold ones while we decided what to do for the evening. As we’d come direct from Cambodia we were used to beggars coming up to us while we ate/drank asking for money, in Vietnam it seems that instead of beggars you get women usually carrying a baby selling toilettries and men selling sunglasses. The first two or three times you’re nice and polite and say “no thank you” in a rather English manner, but by the time they start coming back round to ask you for a second time it becomes more about not making eye contact with them in the first place ... so as we sat at our table and I tried my best not to make eye contact with people I noticed out of the corner of my eye but despite my best efforts I could still see that someone was making their way over. Not to fear, just persist in the non-eye contact and I’m sure they’ll go away I say to myself. By now they were at our table, and then started to rap their knuckles on the table ... t’was Damien from Pai/Luang Prabang - travelling’s a small world sometimes! We’d taken ourselves well and truly out of the loop of people from Pai/Laos when we skipped tubing in Vang Vieng, and then we further extricated ourselves by hopping on a flight from Laos to Cambodia, but it seems that even then you’ll still bump into friendly familiar faces. After a couple of beers and a catch-up with what we’d been up to we arranged to meet up with Damien and a guy he’d met called Krish for some dinner.

We’d not really properly experience Vietnamese traffic by this point, despite the fact that the roads around our guesthouse were busy they were certainly not what you’d call a “main” road. So the taxi drive with Damien and Krish to the restaurant was our first initiation into how busy Vietnamese traffic can be. Over our time in HCMC we’ve heard varying reports of the population size and the number of motor bikes, but (taking an average) it’s safe to assume that it’s a city of about 8 million people, there are 5 million motorbikes/scooters. So as you can imagine the roads are jam packed with motorbikes and scooters, dodging in and out of lanes, driving the right and wrong way up the road, driving on the paths and generally getting all snarled up all over the place. Our taxi to the restaurant actually had to perform a u-turn and find another route as the traffic was so bad that even a seasoned Vietnamese taxi driver didn’t think that he was going to get through!

We pulled up outside the restaurant and I think Cate and myself both questioned whether we’d been brought to the right place - we’d been promised that the meal would be cheap, and this place looked posh (outdoor terrace, fairy lights, and very busy). But Damien and Krish assured us that it was the right place, so we headed up to the first floor and got a table outdoor on the balcony. This was where we found out that we’d probably spent half an hour too long in the bar at happy hour, as we kept on ordering food then getting told that it was finished for the night. So after picking from a rather limited menu (mine was really cheap and really nice; Cate’s wasn’t so good) we got a taxi back to the bar strip so that Damien and Krish could indoctrinate us into the Vietnamese culture of Bia Hoi. Bia Hoi is (quite literally) home-brewed beer served on little plastic chairs by the side of the road (happily enough, really close to our guesthouse), and while it may lack something of a punch in strength it’s the freshest beer you’ll ever drink and very (and I do mean VERY) cheap; 12,000 Dong (approximately 40p) per gallon (yep that’s right, they serve it by the GALLON!). Brilliant! Oh, yeah, the currency in Vietnam is the Dong. Snigger, snigger.

We stayed out drinking this incredibly cheap beer which was actually being forced upon us by an old local man who looked disdainfully at us all when we ordered two gallons of beer for four of us to ensure that it kept cold in the heat of the evening. He kind of tutted and pointed at us at said four, not as a question, more of a, you have to get four gallons now. This was coming from a guy who was drinking his beer with ice in it. Loser. It was weak enough as it was. He actually became quite friendly when he noticed that the boys were getting through rather a lot of beer. One thing that tickled me that night was that a guy was going round on a bicycle with a load of smoked, dried squid on a board trying to sell it - didn’t try it but probably should have. The other was that there were a few guys riding up and down the street on their bicycles constantly ringing their bell with a small black official looking bag strapped to the metal bars at the back. I thought that they might be pedalling drugs, excuse the pun, but the next day found out they were offering massages when a man stopped his bicycle, came over to Matt and myself who were sitting drinking, ahem, beer in the afternoon and started to massage one of Matt’s shoulders casually. Matt didn’t partake. The third thing that made me laugh was that a small Vietnamese woman (who was perhaps 5ft) was wheeling around a height and weight scale, nearly double her height, that you might see at the gym or in a pharmacy - the ones where you put your money in and they give you your weight, height, bmi etc. Apparently Vietnamese people like to weigh themselves in public, in the evening, on the roadside, on a massive weighing scale. Strange huh?

Ho Chi Min City, despite being hectic is perhaps one of my favourite places so far. It is a frantic city where you take your life in your own hands by stepping out onto the street or onto the pavement of one-way streets where motorbikes whizz about you, threatening to ride straight into you, but sedate enough so that you never get hurt. The motorbike drivers are disorderly and ride wildly but are very skilled in that they can weave about, dodging cars, bikes, cyclos, pedestrians, little ladies with fruit balancing over their shoulders from bamboo sticks and everything else that moves into their line of fire.
We were fortunate enough to be there just before Christmas and although many Vietnamese people do not celebrate it, there were plenty of fairy lights, Christmas trees, santas, reindeers and sleighs etc on show. And my favourite, lots of little Asian kiddies in santa outfits!

HCMC is one of those places that is different enough so that you experience a different way of life, but modern enough so that you don’t feel you are stuck in the dark ages while you visit. It is charming and relaxing but takes things to the extremes!

Our second day in HCMC started slowly as we decided that we’d move guesthouse, we’d been recommended Madame Cuc’s by Damien and Krish so we checked out one of her three guesthouses and managed to bag ourselves a double room for $15 per night including breakfast and dinner, bargain! It wasn’t earth shattering culinary offerings (bread and jam for breakfast, banana sandwich for me - Matt’s never had one apparently! noodle soup and spring rolls for dinner), but as our first meal in HCMC had set us back over $10 we certainly made use of the opportunity to save a bit of money by massively reducing our food spend (coincidentally this seemed to free up a bit more money for cheapo happy hour beers; 10,000 Dong for a 450ml bottle of Saigon Beer ... that’s approximately 35p.)

Anyway, after sorting the room out, we added another mode of transport to the ever-growing list by taking a cyclo to the Ben Chaa market. Imagine a traditional bicycle with a wicker basket on the front; now imagine that the wicker basket is much bigger and with two westerners in it being (slooooowly) cycled towards their destination by a aging Vietnamese man. It was so slow going that I think we probably could’ve walked to the market quicker, but given that it is designed for one passenger and we’d squeeze both of our extremely lithe and lightweight bodies in it’s no surprise that the man struggled to pick up much of a pace.

Ben Chaa market is (outwardly) like most covered markets we’ve come across in Asia, yet the stall owners/workers are certainly schooled in the Chinese art of hassling customers; literally grabbing you as you pass their stall and trying to push/pull you in to look at their stuff - not as laid back as the Thai or Cambodian markets. When you add stiflingly hot, airless surroundings to the physical assault techniques employed by stall holders you can understand why we chose to hot-foot it out of there relatively quickly, and we headed off to the central district in search of “proper shops” and a pharmacy, (I’d got another big old blister bite on the go, brilliant news). After walking not too sizeable distance we found the first department store that we’d been in for over 5 weeks, as we walked around the vaguely familiar surroundings (fragrance counters, clothes stands, etc) it felt strangely exciting to be in a shop where everything had a price tag and there weren’t numerous Asian women insisting that you should “please buy somesing”. We spent most of our time in the supermarket section of the department store, me window shopping in the alcohol aisles and Cate buying some new pants (a strangely difficult task in the local markets, as they all insist that they have many colours when in fact by “many” they mean “two”).

After spending more hours shopping than we’d expected it was about time to see some sights, so I assured Cate that the War Remnants Museum was only a 5-10 minute walk ago and we set off. 30 minutes later my rather disgruntled wife and I finally shuffled up to the museum entrance.
It wasn’t that bad a walk and on the way I noticed that in HCMC they have mini traffic lights at motorbike height below the bigger ‘car’ ones which are quite cute. When we arrived, we paid an entrance fee and after a well needed toilet stop we started to wander around the museum. The War Remnants Museum was unsurprisingly, all about the ‘America War’ as the Vietnamese call it or the Vietnam War as we know it. It was a very interesting museum which had lots of photographs taken at the time by professional photographers and descriptions/explanations, guns and ammunition, pictures of war and peace drawn by children and real military vehicles. America was shown as the bad guys as they invaded Vietnam and killed so many innocent people. Some of the pictures showed horrific scenes, (one particular one of an American officer holding up the head of a Vietnamese person who had been caught in one of their bombs) and the writing described how American troops went into villages and shot and stabbed so many innocent people. There was very little, if any information about what Vietnam did in retaliation.

We learnt a little bit more about agent orange and it’s effects on people for generations afterwards. People were born with really thin, long bones sometimes in the wrong positions, disfigured faces, no limbs etc. There are numerous people in Vietnam that have physical disabilities and they often wheel themselves around on small seats on wheels that are controlled using arm power, begging or trying to sell things.

We arranged to go to the Chu-Chi tunnels the following day so we got up early and waited for our bus. Our guide was new to this particular tour but was very good at explaining things about Vietnam and had a fantastic sense of humour, at one point stating that we needed to be responsible for sticking with the group as he couldn’t help with that due to the fact that “you all look the same to me!” The Chu-Chi tunnels were created by people to live in during the Vietnam War. According to our guide, the people in Vietnam believe that the war went on for 20 years, from 1955 to 1975. However, apparently, according to the USA, the war only lasted for eight years, from 1965- 1973. There are over 200km of tunnels which were built in this area alone and they exist in three levels below the ground. The first level below the ground surface is about 3metres deep, the second about 4-6metres below ground and the third which was used only during times of severe threat was between 8-10metres below ground. It is thought that 16,000 people lived in their intricate networks over the years, with only 5000 surviving the war. The tunnels were very small as we found out when we went into one of the local ones and scurried through for 25metres which proved to be a tight squeeze and became very hot, very quickly. At the Chu Chi tunnels we saw booby traps to trap both German Shepherds that were sent to sniff out Vietnamese people hiding and US army troops who were after them. We spent an interesting few hours there and found out a lot about how the people lived underground, that they dropped to lower levels when the American’s tried to smoke them out and went to higher levels, closer to the surface, when they tried to flood them out using water in the nearby river. People cooked underground in kitchens and slept there also. After Matt popped one of his blisters in the tunnel we headed for our final activity of watching a really crappy film about the war, one we are sure we could have created better. However, one line narrated by a well spoken voice about the Americans did make me laugh...it went something like;
“Like a crazy batch of devils, they shot down schools, hospitals and ducks...”

Exhausted and sporting a newly popped blister-bite (yuck) we headed for some pre-dinner bakery goodies, before scoffing down our Madame Cuc’s dinner and deciding we needed further treats in the form of a frozen yoghurt shop; a weird cross between Subway and an ice-cream parlour, where you pay by weight for whatever frozen yoghurt you have, and can put innumerable toppings on ranging from weird bright blue globules of fruit to smarties. Typically my tub weighed twice as much as Cate’s, greedy boy.
The following morning Matt decided that he was going to try to get his hair cut in a barbers so he took himself off there and I went window shopping along the street of our guesthouse, not venturing much further for fear of getting lost (which I would have undoubtedly done!) Unfortunately Matt’s haircut wasn’t the best cut he has ever had with parts of it much longer than others so when we arrived in Mui Ne, after several requests, I took our tesco brand orange headed scissors to his ginger head and chopped chopped chopped. So now I am his wife, nurse and hairdresser. He is one lucky man.

Up until HCMC city we’d avoided buying trinkets and other local things from the (many) markets on the basis that we’re travelling for so long that they’ll undoubtedly get wrecked, but we didn’t want to come home without having some things for the house, so we decided to do a bit of shopping and post the stuff home. Being as my particular favourite hobby is eating it seemed only right that we got some bowls, plates, chopsticks etc, and with that in mind we headed back into the hot, sweaty, bun-fight that is the Ben Chaa market. As much as I have at times enjoyed the whole idea of bartering on the price of things, it was really hard work to try and get the things we wanted for a reasonable price, and in the end we probably ended up paying over the odds but just wanted to get out of there! So a few hours later and several hundred thousand Dong lighter we emerged happy (just about) and scooted off to the post office. We decided that sea-mail was the better option (as it was cheaper) so in 2-3 months our bamboo plates and bowls should be turning up at 35 South Knighton Road (if they’ve not been lost at sea).

I’ll leave you with a couple of notes about Vietnam: people here seem to be slightly more safety conscious than in the other Asian countries we have visited. When we arrived I noticed immediately that pretty much every motorcyclist had a helmet on which were very rare in other countries. The helmets are quite fashionable and go well with their fashionable face masks to prevent breathing in too much pollution. Unfortunately they are not so fashionable when it comes to hosiery. Many ladies wear beige socks or tights that have just two toe spaces to wear with flip flops. Honestly, it looks terrible!! Women try to sell photocopied books which they stack up and hold in one arm using their hip for support, the books towering way above them. It seems that many Vietnamese men are obsessed with English football and Matt has on many occasions struck up conversations with taxi drivers in particular about Manchester United and the like. And now I’ll leave you with a lovely thought. I was in a public restroom in a mall waiting patiently for a cubicle to become free, when unfortunately I was subjected to a disgusting site. It seems that Vietnamese people wash out their noses instead of blowing them, and this particular lady was using running water, snotting and her fingers to give her nose a thorough clean out. She then produced a tissue from her pocket to dry her nose with. Now I know where I have been going wrong all these years.

And with that our time in HCMC drew to a close, we purchased an Open Tour bus ticket from Sinh Tourist which for about £20 covers bus journeys from the south of the country right up to the capital in the north, along the route HCMC - Mui Ne - Nha Trang - Hoi An - Hue - Hanoi, and it’s an open ticket so you can stay in each place as long as you want. Makes public transport costs in England seem flipping ludicrous!
NB: We’re really behind with our blogs now, we’re writing about HCMC but we’ve already also visited Mui Ne, Nha Trang and Hoi An ... and we’ve found that writing them so long after the experiences makes it hard work (and probably even more deeply uninteresting to read than usual), so our new year’s resolution is to blog quicker. We’ll see how that works out.

Happy New Year everyone,

Matt & Cate x

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Photos

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Lashings of cheap beer

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Bia Hoi

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3 people, 1 cyclo

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War, what is it good for?!

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A big chopper

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One of the many ridiculous loads we've seen scooters carrying in Vietnam

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Blister bites, nice.

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Chu-chi tunnels, heading in

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tiny little tunnel, hard (and hot) work

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On the way out, tangible relief on Cate's face