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Published: August 12th 2006
blog by Bronia The one thing that you will have realised by the end of reading this blog is that South East Asia does not have a good bus system. A bus system it has. An extensive system it has. But a good one it does not.
Since our departure from
Thailand on June 11th with Sid and Kerry, we have taken you through
Laos and
Cambodia on bus after bus, as trains are relatively non-existent and planes are only convenient for crossing distance, not for seeing a country. So I imagine that it'll come as no great surprise to you to hear that the four of us: Sid, Kerry, Dave and Bronia - now a firmly bonded team - left
Phnom Penh, Cambodia with its horror and beauty forever imprinted in our memories on a bus bound for
Ho Chi Min City (formerly known as Saigon). It was July 7th.
The bus was relatively comfortable in so far as it had for once air-conditioning. Every bus a tourist is sold has "Air Conditioning" as part of the price but curiously, most buses that we took didn't have it or we'd have to fight for it to
At the market
Ho Chi Minh Citybe turned on. It uses alot more gasoline you see, so that means less profit to the bus each journey so the fact we actually had air-con was a joy to us. Ah the small things you come to appreciate as you travel!
The day we left
Cambodia and rode our last bit of dirt, potholed road it didn't rain but the journey itself was like a bouncing, lurching, bumping and tossing fairground attraction. As we pulled up the the Vietnemese border a complete transformation took place. Tarmaced roads, orderly street lines, traffic signals and a massive, imposing Border Crossing temple like Border post rose before us.
Just before the border our bus dropped us at the restaurant of his choice for us to eat a bite...and for him to collect a backhander from the restaurant.
We arrived in
Ho Chi Minh City mid-afternoon and peered through the bus windows at the new city, and in fact new country we were about to disembark to. Arriving in a new town or city is always thrilling. There is a sense of relief that the journey, often exhausting, is over and that you have before you a tantalising sample
of culture, people, sights, sounds and smells for you to explore and lose yourself in.
Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC for short) is no exception.
Our bus wound through streets that were covered, and I mean covered, in motorbikes. It was like a constant flowing river of motorbikes passing back and forth, crossing one another at four way junctions without stopping or braking, and flowing out along arterial streets that disappeared into the distance.
Bikes with one passenger, bikes with boxes piled up and tied with rope to the back, bikes driven by dad with mum and two kids gripping at the back, bikes with passengers carrying groceries, bikes with dogs balanced on the steering column... you get the idea.
After a night of rest we began our first day in Mannings Tour of
HCMC which consisted of taking in
Ben Thanh Market (see pic), a colourful streetmarket, the
Museum of Ho Chi Minh City, the
War Remnants Museum, the
Notre Dame Cathedral and the stunning
French colonial Notre Dame Post Office to name a few.
The
War Remnants Museum was interesting, educational and extremely graphic. It showed the Vietnam War from the point of view
of the Vietnemese (always interesting in a Communist country!) as well as wall after wall of journalists photos of American soldiers suffering all sorts of atrocious injuries.
Photos included a write up on the young naked girl in the photo running away from a napalm attack with her back burning. You may know the famous picture. There were pictures of her now, as an adult, with children of her own. She's written a famous book
"The Girl in the Photo" about the ordeal. Kerry bought and read it and said it's horrific but worth reading.
The walk took most of the day and we ended up wandering back to the start of it just as the sun was setting. Feeling a bit parched we sat down in a small side street at some hawker stalls and ordered some drinks and some fresh spring rolls. The sun set over the street (see pic) and we watched the Vietnemese night life begin as locals thronged to the hawker stalls for their evening meal out, a family of four out for a meal, a young couple on a date.... we just sat and soaked it all in.
One day we
did a day trip to
Tay Ninh to visit the
Cao Dai Holy See where we saw the most fascinating noonday ceremony in the temple.
Cao Daism is the most bizarre and unusual religion in that it was founded in 1926 by a civil servant turned mystic
Ngo Minh Chieu.
The religion is an attempt to create the 'ideal religion' by taking elements from Buddism, Confucianism, Taoism, native Vietnamese spiritualism, Christianity and Islam. They worship Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, Jesus and curiously...William Shakespeare, Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo who we saw in a giant painted mural at the temple entrance. It's quite fascinating, fairly odd and very surreal. The temple itself is a riotous feast of colour for the eyes with yellows, blues, reds and whites intermingled using ornate carvings of dragons winding up columns.
We also went to
Cu Chi and saw the famous
Cu Chi Tunnels. The
Cu Chi Tunnels are the most famous of many tunnels that were built by the Viet Cong (the Communist Vietnemese soldiers) in
Southern Vietnam to fight the Americans and the Southern Vietnemese that were 'pro democracy.'
The quick summary of the Vietnam War was that the Americans could see
the spread of Communism from
China through
Vietnam and the rest of South East Asia beginning to happen and went into
Southern Vietnam to fight
North Vietnam (that was much more communist than the south at that point) to oust the Communists and return
Vietnam to democracy. What happened in fact was that despite the awesome and devastating array of artillery and weapons that the Americans possessed, the Viet Cong were on their home territory and used simple but highly effective methods of attacking and ultimately defeating the Americans and their Southern Vietnemese supporters.
Simple methods like building with small shovels and wicker baskets as their only tools 250km of underground tunnels (this is in the
Cu Chi district alone) that allowed them to hide underground from the Americans and ambush them regularly (sometimes even burrowing under American camps to attack). In these tunnels and small underground square holds they fought, slept, had hospitals, cooked and lived hidden lives. It makes it sound as though the tunnels were roomy. They weren't. They measured approximately 50cm by 50cm the perfect size for small Vietnemese men, too small for the larger frames of the American soldiers to follow them, although some
small US army men were trained to be "Tunnel Rats" to go in and attack the Viet-Cong with grenades in tunnel combat. Not surprisingly the Tunnel Rats suffered from high casualty rates.
Anything the Americans tried, the Viet Cong seemed to outsmart them. As an example to their ingenuity, when the Americans began using German Shepherd dogs to find the trapdoors and locate the Viet Cong guerillas, the Viet Cong began to wash with American soap which gave off a scent the canines identified as friendly.
We wandered through a small section of the old
Cu Chi tunnel territory. We saw tunnels that none of us Westerners could dream of fitting down, we walked through young woods with trees no older than 30 years as Agent Orange and other defoliants were used to kill the natural cover that the Viet Cong used to hide in. We passed by huge craters, the sites of B52 bombs as well as old US artillery. A battered US tank lay in the woods, completely destroyed and now rusting with the passing of time. It had run over an anti-tank mine and its occupants had been shot as they attempted to escape. A
sobering sight of the true effects of war.
Walking through the
Cu Chi woods and seeing the woods really brought home for us a war that happened as we grew up and our parents were in their 30's. It brought the
Vietnam movies that we saw as kids and the phrases like
"back in 'Nam" to a new light and it made us realise that the US didn't stand a chance against a people who knew the land, the climate and the perils of the jungle and how to use it to protect them.
From
HCMC/Saigon we took a bus to
Dalat.
Dalat is a town set amongst hills dotted with lakes, waterfalls and evergreen forests. It was once called "Le Petit Paris", and boasts a small reproduction of the Eiffel Tower and is now a popular honeymoon destination for the Vietnemese. The bus ride to
Dalat was bumpy, hot, with no leg room and to top it off Sid was not feeling well with raised glands and a fever so when we disembarked into a cool, temperate day it was a joy. Our first hotel that we stayed in for one night, the
Peace Hotel was
not peaceful so we moved the next day to much better quarters.
Our stay in
Dalat was brief but restful. We wandered through the town, checked out a gruesome fish and poultry market where we could all agree that we could understand humans getting Bird Flu in such terrible dirty conditions. We sat in a cafe overlooking a main avenue drinking coffee and getting sugar highs on local corn sweets that tasted rather like Turkish Delight. We ate a very civilised 'european' style meal in a delightful
Art Cafe run by an artist who has lined the walls with his work.
On our last day we walked to the famed
Hang Nga Gallery & Guesthouse otherwise known as the
Crazy House built by what must be a very eccentric Vietnemese lady who lived in Moscow for 14 yrs and earned her PhD in architecture. Her hotel is reminiscent of Gaudi's fluidity with Dali-like animals appearing everywhere (see pic).
On the way we passed the
Dalat Cathedral (see pic) built between 1931-42 for use by French residents and holiday makers.
On the walk back to our hotel from the
Crazy House we had an unusual experience when a
crazed Vietnemese woman who was shouting at a shop keeper as we approached suddenly hit Kerry. Sid stepped in to protect her and the crazy woman then followed us up the street skipping, throughing noodles, screaming and shouting and finally latching on to Dave's arm and shouting at him in Vietnemese to a crowd of onlookers. We finally managed to shake her off by darting into a cafe with Dave wipping wet noodles off his arm.
We left the cool air of
Dalat and its honeymooners on a morning bus to the coastal town of
Nha Trang where we spent a couple of days enjoying a wide expanse of beach and Kerry, Dave and Bronia took the opportunity to go on a couple of reef dives off the coast. Sid stayed back and slept still trying to kick the 'flu' like bug that he was fighting.
The two dives were incredible, the visibility was a good 25metres and we saw amazing creatures such as: Trigger Fish, Parrot Fish, Puffer Fish, Pipe Fish, Clown Fish, Giant Clams, Brain Coral, and Cuttlefish to name but a few.
We then took a night bus from
Nha Trang moving north along
the coast to
Hoi An. If day buses in
Vietnam aren't fun, night buses are even less so. We once again bought bus tickets for an air-con tourist bus insisting that it was indeed going to be
air-con. It wasn't air-con. Not only that but it had plastic seats which in 35 degree heat plus humidity only serves to encourage sweating. So we sit, and sweat, and bump along the road with our knees hitting the seats in front of us at every jolt and praying that the 14hrs on the road will pass quickly. To add to our joy and comfort, the bus driver has the most blaring horns of all the blaring horns since we have been on the road travelling and long past midnight he was still pressing on it firmly as he overtook truck after truck playing chicken with oncoming traffic.
We arrive in
Hoi An at 6am, find a hotel, go for breakfast and then the four of us promptly go to bed agreeing to meet at 1pm when we feel a little more human. At 1pm we meet and begin exploration of the town which is a delight. The old quarter of
Hoi An is a mixture of French with Vietnemese architecture with low buildings along narrow lanes. Red lanterns hang in windows of buildings with French shutters.
Hoi An is an arts, crafts and fabric centre. You come here to buy original paintings of Oriental scene, to have tailor made clothing or a pair of shoes custom made.
Street after street is lined with tailors who call at you from the street to go in and be fitted for a suit, dress, shirt, trousers... you name it. Should you go in not knowing what you want the shopkeeper will pull out an astonishing number of catalogues, all foreign, all this season and all sorely tempting as you see NEXT, Oasis, Banana Republic, GAP catalogues and designs ready to be copied. Kerry caved to the temptation and ended up with a beautiful skirt and sundress to take with her.
If clothing isn't your thing then how about a pair of shoes? Shoe shop after shoe shop will make whatever style of shoe, boot or sandal you want from any colour leather with same day service. Not bad. Dave had a pair of flip-flop sandals made as his last pair got eaten
by a dog in
Thailand (see pic).
Back at our hotel we catch up on the BBC World news on a rare TV we have and see that Israel has bombed the
Beirut airport and Lebanese border. We also hear that Ta Mok, one of Pol Pot's henchmen nicknamed "The Butcher" for his horrific acts dies just months before he was about to be brought to trial in front of the Crimes of Humanity trial (see previous
Cambodia blog for more details).
Our meal that night with Sid and Kerry is a sober one as we talk of war, peace, justice and how nations and religions are brought together and torn apart over different ideologies, different views. Heavy stuff but travel through this part of the world brings all of this to the fore.
From
Hoi An we make a short day trip to visit the World Heritage site of the Champa people at
My Son. The ruins here are of the Cham's most important intellectual and reliegious centre where Cham monarches would have been buried between the 4th and 13th century.
My Son was heavily bombed and mostly destroyed by the Americans during the Vietnam War.
There are no towns around so we're not quite sure why they were bombed but all we know is that they sadly stood for hundreds of years and then were gone in an instant.
We move on, again by bus, to
Hué . Again we have a bus mishap. The bus is supposed to be (say it all together now) "air con" but it's not. I think we'd trully believe that there were no air con buses in
Vietnam if it weren't for the fact that every bus we are on passes copious amounts of tourist buses that are very obviously aircon on which we see refreshed, cool and relaxed Westerners enjoying their journey. In addition, the bus we are on to
Hué is supposed to stop and show us a couple of sights including "Marble Mountain" on the way. This is what we've paid for. However, we arrive at
Hué mid-afternoon not having stopped for any sights other than another lunchtime restaurant where the driver can get his commission.
We have another hotel with TV in
Hué and we watch as the situation in the middle east worsens. Dave and Sid also take the
opportunity of having TV to catch up on a game of cricket - Pakistan versus England to be precise.
We have another Mannings Tours in
Hué . The city itself is based around an old citadel with a 10km perimeter. The citadel has been designated as a World Heritage sight, the ramparts of which are 2 metres thick. The interior of the citadel is still largely residential except for the
Imperial Enclosure which is a citadel within a citadel. Sadly this too was heavily bombed and destroyed by the Americans during the war.
We spent a lovely and very hot, sticky day being taken around the main historical sights on cyclos, a sort of bicycle with a chair for a passenger on the front. Sitting in it and being driven along with a soft breeze blowing in your face was a most pleasurable experience (see pic).
We need to take a final bus to
Hanoi. It's a night bus. We are now sceptical and completely non-believing of anyone promising a good bus with air-con. We trudge the streets interviewing every travel agent we find and grill them about what kind of bus they will offer us to
Hanoi. We settle on our hotels travel agent in the lobby believing that they wouldn't sell us a bad deal if we were staying there. Would they? We wait for the bus to arrive. A man comes to get us to wait on the street. The bus pulls up and we load our bags. It's looking promising. No, no - we don't go on this bus - the man then says, it's another bus - and so the bus starts to pull away ....with our bags on it. We scream and the bus stops. Our bags get tossed off and we're left at the side of the road with an air-con bus driving away without us. Furious we go into the hotel and several phone calls later we are again standing on the street corner waiting for another bus that is promised to be good, comfortable and air-con. It arrives late, but it looks good and we climb on. Despite the air-con which was a saviour it was still a hellish bus ride. We decide that night buses, regardless of quality are just awful experiences to be endured as a traveller.
We are now in
Hanoi, one of our
final cities in
Vietnam to visit. We get there early morning and get scammed into a taxi with a false meter. By that I mean that his meter clocked over 8km which we had to pay for when in fact we'd gone less than 2km. With no way to prove it, despite having actually seen the distance meter move when we were at a standstill. We pay him and wait for him to get change. He jumps in his car and drives off without giving us change. We're fleeced again by the same guy and now really grumpy.
The four of us trudge off to find a hotel. Dave and Sid do the bag monitoring again and Kerry and Bronia hunt for a hotel and come back defeated. All are full or too expensive. We order breakfast and Dave offers to look for a hotel. He comes back with a gem - air-con, clean and the right price in the charming old quarter. Relief.
After another morning nap to catch up on sleep missed by the overnight bus we set about on yet another "Mannings Walking Tour." With Lonely Planet in hand, Dave guides us through the delightful
old quarter of
Hanoi.
"...and on your right ladies and gentlemen you'll see the well preserved Old East Gate to the city..." (we stop and take pictures)...
"and if we continue on down here you'll see the blacksmiths quarters" (we take more pics)
"...the towel shops, the herb sellers, the mirror shops, the leather shops.." (snap, snap, snap go our cameras)
".... hurry up ladies and gentlemen, there's still plenty to see." (Mannings Tours runs a tight ship!!)
The old quarter is fascinating. There are true deliniations between each product and where it is sold. If you want wrapping paper you'll only find it on the stationery street. Likewise for kites or plastic containers or incense and buddha statues. There is even a street of coffins! At least you know where to go if you are in need of one!
We also get up early one morning to go and line up with the masses to see
Ho Chi Minh's Mausolem. Here you can see the embalmed corpse of Ho Chi Min, the man who the Vietnemese honour for his role as 'liberator' of the Vietnemese people from colonialism and his communist ideology. If you are cynical (such
as we tend to be) you can see that the Vietnemese government have taken this man who had the people's interests in mind, and turned him into a symbol and icon of Communism and what the Vietnemese people should strive to emulate. Even the fact that apparently Ho Chi Minh wanted to be cremated upon his death rather than embalmed in a cold mausoleum seems to suggest that what Ho Chi Minh is remembered for is not what he really was and instead has become a mascot of Vietnemese communism.
We line join an enormous snaking line to the stark unfriendly granite grey block of a tomb that is his resting place. Past soldiers in stark white uniforms that would make good ads for Persil and Tide washing soap and into the frigid cold airconditioned bowels of his darkened tomb. We enter the room and snake around it in a U-shape able to see him from all three sides before exiting. He's in a glass coffin with fluorescent orange yellow lights on him that make his glow as though lit from inside by bulbs. He doesn't look real and the room exudes a harsh authoritarian macabre aspect. Preserved in
the same style as Lenin, Stalin and Mao he apparently is taken to
Russia every year for 'maintenance' which in itself seems inhuman and rather "Madame Tussaud's-like."
One night we go to a water puppet show which is funny, enjoyable and has an interesting history. It is said to have originated with rice farmers who worked the flooded rice paddy fields and used the water to hide the mechanics of the puppets whilst the puppets appear to float on the water. Stories and legends are told about traditional village life and the demons, gods that are said to influence their harvest and life.
From
Hanoi we decided to do a two day trip to the famous
Halong Bay renowned for its stunningly beautiful 3000 limestone islands dotted with breathtaking vistas and enormous caves that rise from the emerald waters of the
Gulf of Tonkin. In 1994 it was designated a World Heritage site.
Again it was an early rise of 6:30am to get picked up by bus for the three hour trip to the
Halong coast and our boat. This time the bus never even arrived. At 9am our hotel landlady called a taxi for us to
take us to where the bus was supposed to pick us up. It seemed our original tourist bus had left without us so we were now standing on the side of the road with about 30 Chinese youths who were on a Christian outing. The bus finally arrived and guess what? It was four seats short - for Sid, Kerry, Dave and I.
At this point we kicked up a fuss at the mismanagement of a trip that was now over 5 hours behind and when the bus company were going to kick some other tourists off the bus to make room for us we pointed out that they couldn't kick other tourists off just because they had miscounted seats so the solution was they hired a taxi to take us to
Halong Bay. Along the way we stopped for drinks and picked up two lovely guys, Chuck and Rob, from
Ohio, USA who had also been in an over cramped bus full of Western tourists some of whom were drunk Irish gals who'd been drinking Vietnemese whisky (scary stuff) since 8:30am.
When we finally arrived at the port we then proceeded to sit waiting and waiting and
waiting to be assigned to one of the many boats that sat moored up. As the day and the journey wore on we got more and more depressed and nervous that we'd signed up for an expensive disappointment.
"These limestone carst rocks better be pretty damn good" we kept saying to ourselves - well, that's the polite translation!
The limestone islands were worth the trouble, the wait and then some.
Halong Bay was spectacular. It is one of those places that adjectives are almost defeated in the face of such awesome beauty.
Halong Bay is an area just off the east coast of
Vietnam almost parallel with
Hanoi. As far as the eye can see there are huge limestone crags jutting from the shallow sea. We all agreed it was some of the most spectacular scenery we had ever laid eyes on.
The boat that was to be our home for the next day and a half was a lovely looking old junk style ship, with half a dozen or so cabins on board. This was a fantastic way to explore the bay and get the best possible views of the foliage covered spikes or rock. Whenever we
got the chance the boat would anchor up and we'd all take a swim, enjoy some kyaking or even venture onto the islands to explore the caves. We found this excursion to be one of the most rewarding of the whole trip - despite having a berth that doubled as a sauna during the night.
We were sad to leave
Halong Bay for a number of reasons: it had been the end of a fantastic couple of days in a trully unbelievable natural setting, it was the end of our stay in
Vietnam which we had, despite the hassles - really enjoyed, and it was the end of our six weeks of travel with Sid and Kerry. The next day we would fly to
Hong Kong and they would move on north in
Vietnam to
Sapa for some hill climbing and trekking that our timing and itinerary didn't allow for.
We had a fantastic last evening in
Hanoi going out for a much too expensive meal in a beautiful vegetarian restaurent with delicious food and wine that brought to an end a most memorable time. Kerry & Sid were absolute sweethearts giving us both Vietnemese pendants/bookmarks as a
parting gift and Dave and I returned to our room that night to pack for our early morning departure saying that although we could have travelled through
Laos, Cambodia and
Vietnam on our own, doing it with Sid and Kerry has made it one of the highlights of travel during our trip as we laughed every day, had debates on everything from politics and the meaning of life to the merits of various lagers, and helped one another through all the tough bits of negotiating, finding rooms and fending off sales people of all kinds thereby making one of the most difficult places to travel in Asia, the most pleasant and enjoyable experiences.
So if you two are out there and reading this blog of our trip - a big thanks to you. Keep the dream alive! And keep safe and healthy!
And to the rest of you readers, wherever you may be in the world, thanks for continuing our journey with us - we've loved sharing it so far - we're nearly half way through and we'll see you next in
Indonesia where we will be making a bee-line for the beach......
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linda
non-member comment
Love reading about your trip. Such good writing too - I feel like I'm there with you. Keep them coming!