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Published: September 15th 2009
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From Sihanoukville, Cambodia we took a twelve hour bus east to Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, in southern Vietnam. The ride sounds terrible but it really didn’t feel so epic because the scenery was fascinating; huge green rice fields, modern wooden homes alongside barely standing metal and bamboo shacks, outdoor pool tables, red, bumpy dirt roads, cows, dogs and children scattered all over the place. The bus driver probably didn’t beep his horn for five minutes of that entire twelve hours. Frequently, the bus would slam to a stop after his loud and incessant beeping failed to force a cow to cross the road faster or to make his double-passing more successful.
Soon after crossing the border in to Vietnam, the bus failed to stop fast enough and crashed in to a car stopped at a crosswalk. In a way, an accident was expected, with the crazy way the driver drove added to the crazy way everyone else drove. But in another way, after not having an accident for eleven hours driving this way, I was pretty sure the bus was fully impervious to collisions. Apparently not.
Everyone was fine. The car passengers seemed a bit dazed,
while the bus passengers were unaffected, besides from the delay. Close to a hundred local people came to stand on either side of the road, watching intently the proceedings, long after the crash had occurred. There was very little to see, the bus had suffered a few dents, the rear end of the car was crunched up. One might think a quick peek would satisfy onlookers curiosity. Oh no. People stood there, watching, for thirty minutes. Cars and motorbikes slowed to a crawl, fascinated by the accident. Nothing was happening. The bus company was very efficient, sending a new bus within thirty minutes. The police reaction was not so proficient, they were just arriving as we left on the new bus.
An hour later, we dismounted the bus in downtown Saigon, by far the craziest, loudest city I’ve ever been to. Recall all the traffic rules I’ve previously mentioned, the constant beeping, double-passing, speeding, and add a dizzying number of motorbikes that drive on the sidewalk too. The beeping noises are nonstop. Crossing the street is like playing a game of Frogger. You must leave the sidewalk and walk bravely, dodging motorbikes, cars and busses, and continue slowly yet
constantly, so the drivers can calculate how to best dodge you.
The Vietnamese here were also very unfriendly, which was hard to handle after the charm of Cambodians and Laos‘. My favorite “making friends” travel tactic of smiling and saying hello to everyone was returned with nothing but a cold stare. Cheating and trickery is very common here among drivers and street salespeople, so we had to quickly become more aware than we had been in Cambodia and Laos. Our first few drivers, after negotiating a price for the ride in advance as always, tried their hardest to extort more money from us upon completion of the ride. This was the first place we’d experienced a street salesperson reneging on a vocal contract like this. We also had to ask for the price of street food in advance, something we never had to do before, as street food is always so cheap. But vendors here would up the price five times after the meal if you didn’t pre-negotiate! I’d ask the price pre-meal and they’d respond, 40,000 dong, to which I’d say, no, how about 8,000 dong, and they’d say OK. But if instead we didn’t ask the price
of the meal to after we’d eaten, as we usually did, we’d have no option but to pay the 40,000 dong. The currency exchange is about 16,000 dong to 1 US dollar.
An ex-pat I spoke to told me that the locals don’t see cheating tourists as dishonest or wrong, because the tourists have a few extra dong to spare, and the money is worth a lot more to the locals. I certainly understand that perspective but it’s worth noting that in other poor countries I visited the people did not believe it was OK to cheat tourists. They still thought cheating was wrong, despite knowing the tourists had more money than themselves. Also worth mentioning, is that the three countries I’m comparing are all Buddhist, suggesting how differently the same religion can be practiced in different countries.
Continued in Part Two...
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