What Did You Do Today?

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March 21st 2007

Published: August 6th 2007

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mattylee

Going Up

Cable-Car to Vinpearl.

Decisions, Regrets and Hangovers

What did you do today? I bet it was more pleasant than what I did, well I certainly hope it was for your sake. Let me explain.

As I have traveled around I have noticed that there are certain decisions, important decisions, which you should never entrust to some individuals. For example, you should never let my friend Alex choose a restaurant for dinner as you will either end up eating raw two minute noodles from a travel agent or doing even less enjoyable things with your toilet later that night. Today I found my own weakness, my own failing, the one decision that I cannot even entrust upon myself: deciding which bus to take.

Those of you who have been avidly following this journal will already be aware of the trouble I got into when traveling from Laos into Vietnam, all of which stemmed from my inability to make a rational bus selection. You would think that I had learned my lesson then and there, but today I did it again. To leave Hoi An for Nha Trang most backpackers take an overnight tourist bus and this method has several merits. Firstly, it

Vinpeal Land as Viewed From Nha Trang Beach

Vinpearl, Vinpearl, Vinpearl. That is where I want to be eating breakfast or dinner...

is cheap ($8) and being overnight it also saves you money on accommodation. Secondly, and most importantly, it is convenient as you get picked up from your hotel and dropped at a corresponding establishment at the end of the journey. The third merit, which most travelers would respect, is that the 6:30pm departure times means that you get to sleep off any residue from the previous nights revelry before getting on the bus. The alternative means of getting from A to B is to take local buses and this is something I have done quite a lot of. Being on a local bus is terribly uncomfortable and irritating, but it allows you to see the country from a more local perspective; something which is important to me. Additionally, I hate sleeping on buses so the overnight option did not appeal to me very much.

So this morning I was to be found awake at 8am, dragging my sorry head out of bed, trying to reach that infernal alarm which is inconveniently situated in the hardest to reach part of the room (if I didn’t place my alarm in such a spot I would go back to sleep every time).

Nha Trang Beach

More sun to fix my tan lines.

The previous night had been a good one, it was Saint Patricks day and also my last night with some friends in Hoi An. To put it in decent scope, I had only found my bed at 5:30 so to be getting out of it again two and a half hours later was unpleasant to say the least. But these things have to be done whilst you are traveling, or do they? A motorbike gladly ferried me to highway number one, some 10km distant, for some small rip-off fee. I was not in the mood for arguing so I let that slide. I then proceeded to stand on the side of a road, looking like death incarnate, awaiting the first long haul bus that was going to come past. I really wanted to go back to sleep, and standing in the sun felt like the most conceptually opposite thing to be doing at the time. When the bus did come I was just so happy to be able to sit down that I didn’t mind the rip-off price (only about 50 cents too much so it was ok). Fortunately for me, the bus had only just started its trip so

100,000 Dong Worth of Entertainment

Impressive but overpriced.

it was all but empty - I took my place at the back of the bus and stretched out over a number of seats. Drip, drip. Something wet fell on me, repeatedly. I went back to sleep and decided to care about it later.

When I woke up an hour later I realised that what was dripping was not water and it had stained my shirt (a good shirt too). The source turned out to be a fluorescent light fixture in the roof of the bus, why the light was full of liquid I can only guess, surely not even a smuggler would bother filling lights. I moved seats and continued to sleep on and off for a while, realising as I did so that I had missed breakfast - it’s very unlike me to do that. Because the bus was still empty we had to continually stop and pick up people; eventually the bus was full, and then some, with about 10 motorbikes strapped to the roof and not a whole lot of room inside. Unfortunately, the stop-start nature of the trip meant that by 4pm we had barely moved more than 150km!

The following hours can

Nha Trang From Above

The view of Nha Trang city from the cable-car.

only be described as painful. I think that I lost feeling in my left leg at six, but it could have been earlier. My right leg avoided numbness much longer but eventually gave in. They simply don’t make buses the right size here, I literally could not fit myself in the seat in any way that was not painful in some way. At 5:30 we stopped in some roadside food place where I was all but guaranteed to get ripped off and food poisoned, all with a smile of course, but I was just too hungry to care. I devoured my “meat” and vegetables in a display which has irreparably scarred the minds of 30 Vietnamese people before returning to the bus for the final drive to Nha Trang.

At midnight I was sick of it. Fourteen hours on a bus without a clue as to where I was and how long it was going to take to get to Nha Trang. I was just about to resign myself to sleeping the night away and seeing where we were when I woke up (Ho Chi Minh City perhaps?) when the bus driving told me to get off. The bus

Fun Central

The "attractions" at Vinpearl Land, can you see them both?

didn’t actually stop moving as I disembarked, it sort of just slowed a little so as to give the driver enough time to gesticulate wildly along a road and say “Nha Trang”. I got the point, 10km away from town was the closest I was going to get. By one I made it to town, a very nice moto driver took pity on me and drove me around until I found a hotel which was still open but clearly not in my price range.

So there, I chose to take the local bus so that I could experience Vietnam and also so that I wouldn’t have to sleep in a bus. The result was that the trip took 5 hours more than it should have, and for all 15 hours I was cramped into a hideously uncomfortable bus with smelly locals while trying to get over a hangover. I ended up experiencing a little bit too much local culture and I slept in a bus almost the whole way. Worst of all, I missed breakfast and lunch. I am never again going to trust my judgment when it comes to buses, I will trust my dice instead.

Landscaping

Part of the Exotica attraction on Vinpearl, the doors were locked.

Amusement Central

What did you do today? Did you pay a lot of money to ride a cable-car over the ocean to the world's most bizzare amusement park? I did, it was called Vinpeal Land. This theme park sits on the side of an island just off the Vietnamese coast near Nha Trang and I had read about the cable-car in a Hoi An tailoring shop; apparently it is a milestone in Vietnamese engineering and construction. It is visible from Nha Trang beach, principally beacuse of it's Hollywood-esque signage on the side of the island, and I thought that it would be a good bit of fun to ride the cable-car and soak up the sights from altitude.

Vinpearl Land itself is a wonder to me, it has three rides: a rollercoaster that could fit inside my house (literally), a merry-go-round with some of the strangest animals to ride (horses, pandas, deer, some weird unicorn/dragon/perversion hybrid to mention only four), and another small and nondescript carnival type ride. None of the rides were actually operational either. There are signs all around the walkways pointing to this attraction or that, places such as the Discotheque, the Wonders (I just

Cable-car

It's like 7 Eiffel Towers except in Vietnam and considerably less impressive.

wanted to know what that was about) or the Convention Hall but almost none of the places can be found (I could only find one of those three examples). To put it bluntly, Vinpearl Land can not be called an Amusement Park as there is nothing about it that is remotely amusing, not a thing was going on over the whole island! The only parts of the island that acutally moved in any way at all were the two escalators leading down to the shoreline (not counting the cable-car that is). Regardless of this lack of anything remotely resembling a reason for the park's existance, hundreds of holidaying Vietnamese people were milling around the area, presumably trying to find something fun to do so that their entrance fee would not be wasted. I searched long and hard myself, looking for something to justify the $10 I had spent getting into the park, until I found the most entertaining thing on the island, it was a faux-waterfall.

By far the greatest oddity about Vinpearl Land is the piped music. Everywhere I went on the island there were speakers cleverly hidden around, each of them blaring out in high fidelity Kenny

Kenny Can't Get Me Now

My hiding place at Vinpearl Land.

G's greatest hits (yes, both of them). I could not escape Kenny's blaringly romantic mood music anywhere, I was going insane when the third reprise of his second to last unknown song from his fifteenth concept album started playing for the second time, I had to escape. And the only place on the island where you cannot hear the music is behind the faux-waterfall. Between amusing rides number one and two (the escalators), the path leads underneath and behind a little fake stream/waterfall combination, the same sort of man-made water feature you see in every amusement park, and it was here that I found refuge for a few minutes as the falling water drowned out the dronings of Mr G. Unfortunately, the music was so loud that I could even hear it on the ride back across the cable-car - when I was 30 meters above the speakers!

So, after $10 and 4 hours I managed to see the world's freakiest amusement park. Was it worth it?

Boat Trip With the Beatles

What did you do today? Did it involve boats, snorkelling, Jonny Depp, a floating Vietnamese boyband, alcohol and swimming? Chances are that you answered

Merry-Go-Round

I don't even know what some of these animals are. The Panda is a nice touch though.

"No", and likely you also were quite thankful for that, but these are the principal memories of my day.

I signed up to go on a boat tour to four islands near Nha Trang today and was expecting the same sort of tour that I've done in places like Thailand and Cambodia. However, when I got onto the boat I realised that things were going to be different this time. First of all, the boat was completely filled with Vietnamese people who were all in one tour group - the type that wears matching hats so that they don't lose people. Secondly, it was raining very heavily which made the concept of snorkelling unthinkable. And thirdly, "Who'll Stop the Rain" by Credence was blaring out of a speaker next to my head. I joked to a few other foreigners who were also on the tour about how bad the day was going to turn out. We all pesimistically agreed that the weather was going to remain miserable and the boat would gradually degrade into a local Karaoke bar, a Karaoke bar that you cannot escape without enduring a long swim. Just after this we were informed that we would

The Band

The rocking band that entertained us on the boat cruise.

have to pay additional entrance fees at each island in order to disembark from the boat which made us even less optimistic.

The first stop was snorkelling and the weather actually cleared up just in time for me to do my usual floundering/drowing routine for five minutes before returning to the boat. Second stop was lunch and "Entertainment like you have never seen before". This is where things got freaky. After finishing lunch (a decent fare) the table, which filled a large section of the boat, was cleared and a drum-kit was brought out. Not a real drum-kit though, it was made of plastic bottles and pots, but it was put together properly and really did resemble a full kit. Next, the young Vietnamese guy who was in charge came out shirtless, with a bandana on and holding a microphone. The old guy who did odd-jobs around the boat then made his entrance with aviator glasses, some ecclectic wooden things around his neck and an electic guitar. Two more people emerged, one as the drummer and one as a back-up singer. Was this going to be real entertainment, or Vinpearl entertainment?

Well to be truthful, the entertainment was

Karaoke Time

Tim gets up and sings for Germany. Go team!

brilliant! Somehow they managed to make actual music, proper music. None of them had been properly trained for their instruments (you could tell by the way they played them) but they still managed to make good sounding songs. They were initially Vietnamese songs that they had written but then they started playing covers, one for each country that the tourists were from. The English had to sing "Yellow Submarine", the Germans had to sing some bad German song, everyone was getting into it (or at least being forcibly thrown onto the stage with a microphone so they could sing along). I managed to escape without singing by pretending that I was a German. They finished their set with a stirring rendition of "Ba Ba La Bamba" which we thought was a cute misinterpretation of the real lyrics, however, later in the day we heard the song again off a CD and the lyrics were also wrong there, so they boat crew were actually singing the covered song correctly.

After the entertainment the floating bar opened. This was where we all got into rubber tubes in the water and floated around drinking wine and eating pineapple, which was graciously served

The Least Fun Island in the World

We stopped at this island for an hour or so and we all decided that it was no fun at all. At least Vinpearl had rides!

by one of the crew from a, well, floating bar. I've always thought that alcohol and swimming was a winning combination and it truly is. Nothing can be so decadent as trying not to drift out to sea whilst also trying not to spill your wine.

The last stop on the cruise was at an aquarium close to Nha Trang. The building itself was made in the shape of a pirate ship, very much like the one in "Pirates of the Caribbean". The massive cement stucture was four stories tall and detailed so perfectly that from a distance it really looked like a ship. Strangely enough though, the inside of the aquarium only had five main tanks, albeit rather large tanks. Given the size of the tanks though the whole pirate ship exterior was well and truly over the top.

And so it happened that the trip ended and we all had smiles from ear to ear. We all had had a marvelous day but I couldn't help thinking back on how the day had begun. After being so pessimistic at the start we had all been taken by suprise. But then again, the boat had descended into

Team Germany

Tim and Andy.

Karaoke and we hadn't minded one bit...

Today

This is here just to make sure you are all up to date on my whereabouts. Looking back at what I've just written I have failed in my aim - I was trying to write something shorter because I know that you all hate reading walls of text. I must be exactly the opposite of Hemingway: talentless and verbose.

Today is my last day in Nha Trang before heading south. The weather has been bad since last night so it wasn't exactly a good day to go to the beach, however, three Danish friends and I jumped into the surf earlier. Because of the storm the waves were massive, the biggest I have ever seen (one of them must have been more than 3 meters high) and the beach is such that they break and crash extremely violently right at the shore. It was unbelievably foolhardy and exciting. We are all counting our injuries now.

I don't actually know where I am heading tomorrow. In a minute I am going to roll two dice, 9 and below means I go to Mui Ne for some more beach