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Published: October 20th 2010
For those who haven't been following weather in Vietnam, which i assume to be most, its damned wet here. To be honest the only real thing i knew about the monsoon before experiencing it was the running gag from the movie "Forest Gump" when he is in Nam and it starts raining and he describes all the different kinds. (my fav. being "big ol' fat rain") Right now vietnam is flooded is massive areas, thankfully ones we are not in nor need to pass through. We missed the problem by 12 hours. When we were driving south to get to Hue there was a section of highway under 1 meter of water that we had to drive through which filled our luggage compartment with lots of water and thoroughly soaked all my stuff but Jenna's remained almost completely dry. A minor annoyance that was remedied by paying for our guest house to do a load of laundry. Really it was MUCH overdue anyway.
Monsoon weather happens in 2 major fronts; the northwest and the southeast. The NW comes first and is comparatively lighter but, in my experience, generated more lightning. The SE follows and packs a heavier punch with longer
fish farm
in halong baydownpours and much more wind. The kicker with the SE isn't just its greater force but that the NW soaks and saturates everything so by the time heavier storms hit, flash floods and landslides are frighteningly common. The morning after we arrived in Hue we were catching up on news and realized that 2 states we passed through the previous night were flooded up to 8 meters in some areas and the area was impassable except by small boats. The buses and trains had stopped passing through and the military was distributing food and water to residents now confined to rooftops if they were lucky and boats if they had one. The waters have now receded somewhat but the monsoon isn't over yet.
As for vietnam in general, we are leaving much sooner than we expected to but that its a good thing... we do not like it here. There are numerous reasons but our biggest beef is that you cannot get around in a self guided manner... at all. There is a constant feeling of being babysat. Every country is different and we are not trying to compare and contrast them as they all have very good (or
bad) reasons why they are the way they are. That is the good part about not booking ahead and never buying into package deals or planning too far ahead however. Today we bought tickets to Saigon and plan to be in cambodia in 4days rather than spend the 2 weeks left on our visa here. We have a 21 hour train ride (1000km) then we are spending 2-3 nights in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City.. sorry). From there we will head into the Mekong delta to a border town where you catch a boat to Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia.
When i was reading up travel blogs about vietnam one day, trying to find some neat place that i felt would remedy our rather dull and annoying time here, i found out that there is a 5% return rate on tourists for vietnam. I dug deeper to find out we are not alone. The return rate for tourists who visit Thailand, a place we thoroughly enjoyed, is 50%! There are many undeniably wonderful places in this country if you can afford to get to them but everything is set up on rigid tours. Every 2 hours you are somewhere
new doing some other cultural blah blah. There is very little room to just catch a local bus at your discretion and stay in a little mountain village, meeting fun locals the whole way along. You are always in a group with only tourists and a guide. You are segregated from the people and places you come to visit and any meaningful interaction that could naturally happen is cut short by the next big thing on your itinerary. Jenna thinks that things are setup to minimize contact on purpose so as to keep any deep conversation absent... i am inclined to agree with her as the government seems quite keen on keeping folks separate here.
If you were to rent a car this would be a whole different picture. The freedom of movement is the major difference from other countries (even communist ones) and this way you could spend as much time as you wanted and hire local guides from small villages instead of being stuck with some sleezy city tour guy who doesn't even know or respect the landscape. Also the bus companies here are horrid. The operators are mean and disrespectful; one of them even tried to
use physical force to make me move... i smiled and told him to let go of me, nicely, even though i wanted to crack his chubby little face with my rock hard elbow but that would be improper. As improper as assaulting one of the people paying you to drive them somewhere safely?? The buses are overcrowded and neither Jenna nor i can fit in the reclining beds at all. They are not cheap and we both could not sleep as sharp parts of the bed apapratus poke you or cut off your circulation to your feet and legs. In short... no more sleeper buses and no more vietnam for us. It is sort of sad but we are unhappy here and the easiest way to fix that is to leave or stay drunk constantly.... i'd prefer to leave.
We love trains and boats and the next weeks will be filled with them more than buses so we have more pleasant trips to look forward to. From what we have read Cambodia is far more self directed, as we are used to and the locals tend to not be as hyper-capitalistic as here. Who knows we may hate
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Dean
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Nam 2
I was wondering about the weather as I did hear that the typhoon was headed there. It was one of the largest storms in years in the Philippines doing lots of damage. Good to hear that you missed the worst parts of it. Great photos and I really like the strange rock formations that you are seeing there. I thought there were more of those in China. Looks like they might be interesting to climb.