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Published: September 11th 2008
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August 31, 2008 I wasn’t feeling particularly well this weekend but was feeling better than throughout the week when I was offered this opportunity to go with some new volunteers, John, Andrea, and Andrew to Vung Tau beach about a 2hr bus ride away from Saigon. But we would not be going by bus but rather a hydrofoil, which sounded pretty cool.
Anyway here was the Vung Tau plan:
8:00am - Wake up
9:00am - Arrive at harbour to buy Hydrofoil tickets
10:30am - Board Hydrofoil and travel to Vung Tau
Noon - Arrive at Vung Tau
Noon - 4:00pm - Go site seeing around Vung Tau and maybe hit the beach and go home
4:30pm - Hydrofoil back to Saigon
6:00pm - Arrive in Saigon
The plan was flawless for a day excursion to the beach with Lonely Planet (LP) as our companion what could go wrong? So I thought “Vung Tau… Why not?”
Here’s the reason why not:
We woke up at 8am as planned, grabbed a taxi at 8:30am to go to the harbour to buy tickets for the 10:30am hydrofoil. Using LP as our guide, we gave the taxi driver the LP
address to what we thought was the harbour where you can purchase tickets for the hydrofoil. Only we found the location in LP was not for the harbour at all and the location was to a rundown, empty building not even close to the harbour. This was clearly not cool and kind of was a wrench in the plan. No problem though, I knew enough Vietnamese that I was able to ask the taxi driver to take us the harbour where the hydrofoils were located so that we could purchase tickets. Wondering if the LP book was outdated we found the LP book was published in 2001. This may explain why the address in the book was wrong.
When we arrived at the harbour to purchase our tickets for the 10:30am trip we found out the hydrofoil was sold out so we decided to get one for 11am instead since it was available and a 30min difference wasn’t a big deal. This made us realize that it was imperative that we get tickets for 4:30pm or 5pm as soon as possible. But we could not buy it right away because they only sold the return trip from Vung Tau,
so we had to arrive at Vung Tau to be able to buy the tickets to get back to Saigon. To me this seems to not make much sense and is inefficient.
The hydrofoil was neat to ride in, there was a plasma TV for us to watch for the trip there, however the TV only replayed the 5 or 6 commercials on the way there. For those that don’t know what a hydrofoil is, it is essentially a large speed boat.
12:30pm - Arrive at Vung Tau, which seems very pretty and we were following very closely to the plan. This was good. We then immediately tried to buy our return trip, but to our dismay “all” the rides back were sold out. How convenient… anyway another person from our boat found this out as well and lost it. He was cursing so much in English to the people selling the tickets. We were also upset, but it was out of our control so instead we just laughed it off, even though we were surprised yet not surprised at the same time. Since we were stranded in Vung Tau, we were just working out the accommodations with
the people selling the tickets so that we had a place to stay for the night and return the next morning. They were able to arrange for us a two rooms on the back beach of Vung Tau, but upon consulting with LP we decided to not accept this arrangement because LP reported that the back beach was polluted and not as nice as another beach on the opposite side of Vung Tau called Mulberry Beach and very far from the back beach. Instead we used the LP budget recommended hotel on the “nicer” beach. For two rooms it cost us 5-10USD each. So I phoned to book two rooms for us. When we went to check into our booked room using LP’s address for the hotel again, we arrived at a home that local residents still lived in. We found out we were renting out their rooms as if a hotel. Anyway, this family told us that all their rooms were full and that they had not received a call from me. Curse you LP for another outdated address. At this point we had enough of LP messing us up, so we decided to do the rest of the
trip without LP. We thought it was crucial to find the hotel we reserved, so we got the taxi driver to talk to the lady I phoned to make reservations and to find the address so that we could go there. According to the taxi driver, the location was very close to the incorrect one. We all piled into the taxi to drive a grand total of 3 houses down to find the home/hotel we reserved on the waterfront.
Everything would be forgiven if we were on the beach. We were on the beach all right, but the beach was full of large rocks and boulders, and our room was elevated with no means of going down to the water. Furthermore, the beach wasn’t nice at all and definitely not swimming friendly since there was no there at all swimming. Stupid LP, letting us down again!
Once our accommodation details were solved we went back to the harbour to purchase our return trip for the following morning at 8am. There we found locals trying to scalp us tickets for the 5pm trip back for double the price we would have to play. I see the trick now, the
locals were buying up all return tickets to force people to stay or scalp them to people desperate to return. Clever!
By the time we had everything organized it was 2pm so we decided to go site seeing. I heard there was a large 30m statue of Jesus at Vung Tau at the top of a mountain similar to Rio’s, so we decided to go see it. On our way there the taxi driver told us we would have to hike up the mountain to see it and that the weather would be very hot, making the hike very difficult and we should wait until later on in the day when the sun is lower so it was cooler to hike. We didn’t listen to him and figure it wouldn’t be that bad. In hindsight, we should have listened. The hike was very tiring and very hot like the taxi driver said. It must have been 32-35°C with about 90% humidity. Regardless, we did it and it was so worthwhile. The statue was very nice and we were able to go inside and walk up a small narrow flight of stairs about 1 foot wide up to the statue’s
shoulders. There we could walk outside and stand on the shoulders for a beautiful scenic view of the area. The back beach of Vung Tau looked so beautiful, inviting and so much more inviting than Mulberry beach. Curse you LP and your lies! I was able to take a picture of this. There was also a large Buddha statue located atop another mountain in Vung Tau, but it was far away and since we were so worn out we decided not to go there.
Our room was as LP described, very budge accommodations. The bathroom had no light, a toilet with no tank so we had no idea how to flush. There was apparently a shower, but the shower pump didn’t work. We figured it was because the switch wasn’t turned on but we didn’t know which switch to turn on since there were many switches outside and inside the bathroom. Even though we tried, we could not figure it out. Furthermore, there were electrical wires running through the shower which made me not want to try for fear of electrocution. Our room itself was budget too. The beds were so soft we sank immediately to the wood
Sweet house on it's own island.
I wonder how the residents get home. bottom. We had two lights in our room a fluorescent and a green Christmas light bulb. Only the green Christmas light bulb worked, so it was very weird having our whole room dark and green at night.
September 1, 2008 - 7:00am - We woke up and boarded the hydrofoil and returned home
Although, Vung Tau was a disaster, it was still fun and enjoyable experience.
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Brennen
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Vung Tau a head of its times
I think Vung Tau was acutally a head of its times man. That shower was acutally an electric shower just cleaning you with electrons, obviously indicated by the wire and that tolet was so advanced it just disintigrated you excrement hahah. Those asians as always thinking of the future hah. Just kidding man. Anyways glad to see you are still alive and having some fun out there even if the fun is from the unknown. PS since you are in the future let me know if the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) implodes the world will yea.