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Published: January 6th 2009
We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, our last stop in Vietnam, on the 23rd of December. This gave us only one day to sort out what we would do for our first Christmas ever outside of our home towns. Therefore, having had a decent nights sleep at a hotel, we set off early the next morning to find somewhere a little better to stay. Walking around we initially found a few decent looking places for around $50-$70 a night, but none really stood out. This soon changed. One hotel we went to had rooms available for between £$35-$65 (a discount off the usual price as they had only opened 2 days prior). We first looked at a room for $35, it was ok but there was a better one for $45 - only a bit more, so we looked at that. But then there was an even nicer one for $55 - still only a bit more, so we looked at that…... Eventually, and unsurprisingly, we ended up staying in a room for $65. It was worth it though, not only did it have all the usual things you’d expect with a decent hotel room, but it was called a
‘suite’, had a doorbell and it’s own private Jacuzzi!
The rest of the day we didn’t do much, after all, we’d been very busy for the last week or so and it was Christmas Eve! Early that evening however, when we tried to fill up the Jacuzzi, we encountered something of a problem. After all our excitement, it didn’t work… So Helen phoned the reception:
“Hello, our Jacuzzi is broken, could someone come and fix it please?”
“Sorry, I don’t understand”
“The Jacuzzi is broken”
“The TV is broken?”
“No, the Jacuzzi”
“The security is broken?”
“No, no, Jacuzzi, like a bath - it doesn’t work”
“No, I don’t understand”
“The Jac-u-zzi”
“Ah! The Jacuzzi!”
“Yes!”
“Ok, we’ll send someone up”
And they did, shortly after the phone call a bloke came up to help. After showing me several times how to empty the Jacuzzi of water by taking the plug out (clearly he thought I was a total idiot), we managed to ascertain that it was indeed broken and needed fixing. So off he went, leaving the door open behind him - a sure sign that he’d be back soon. He wasn’t. In fact he never
came back at all. The reason for this is unknown, though it may have been due to the fact that Vietnam were playing Thailand in the first leg of the Asia cup (football) final.
An hour and a bit later we found out that Vietnam had won the match 2-1 (mostly due to cheers from downstairs). All they had to do now was draw or win in Hanoi (on the 28th) and they’d be crowned champions for the first time ever.
If England had won the first leg of a game like this, then people would have either been cautiously optimistic (“It’s a good start, but we’ll still need to play well in the next game”) or just downright pessimistic (“They’ll only throw it away!”). Not the Vietnamese though. About 30 minutes after the game had finished we looked out of the bedroom window to see thousands upon thousands of Vietnamese motorbikes clogging up the roads, beeping their horns, banging pans together and waving flags. The video above shows quite how many of them there were and when you think that it shows just one small road in a massive city, you can imagine how many had actually
gone out to celebrate. Having taken plenty of pictures, we decided to head down and join them. Besides, the time was 11:15pm and we’d planned to get to the Notre Dame Cathedral for midnight mass.
On the way down we spoke to the reception about the Jacuzzi again:
“Hi, we spoke to someone earlier about the Jacuzzi being broken, but the man who came to fix it just disappeared and never came back”
“Sorry, I don’t understand”
“The Jacuzzi is broken”
*They look at each other with blank faces*
“The Jacuzzi…? Water…Bath...?”
“No, don’t understand”
“Can I have a pen and paper?”
So, I drew them a lovely little picture of a man sitting in the bath and tried to explain it wasn’t working. They seemed to understand and off we went, hoping that when we got back it’d all be sorted.
We soon realised that our plan to get to midnight mass was going to fail…Having walked for 20 minutes we’d got nowhere. The pavements had been turned into extra roads and were filled with motorbikes - walking anywhere was virtually impossible. We eventually stopped at an area where there seemed to be some kind
of Christmas show going on. Ahead of us was a big dome filled with Christmas ‘things’ such as a snowman, Christmas tree and a train (?) with a light show going on around them. There were also Christmas songs being played loudly out of nearby speakers. Thinking that something must happen when it reached midnight (like a big fireworks display!), we hung around….
5 minute before midnight - The light show and music are still going on as usual
1 minute before midnight - The light show and music are still going on as usual
Midnight - The light show and music are still going on as usual (My watch must be wrong).
5 minutes after Midnight - The light show and music are still going on as usual (Watch must be very wrong)
15 minutes after midnight - The light show and music are still going on as usual (Turns out nothing happens here when it gets to 12).
Maybe more interesting than the show, we saw that, despite it being Christmas eve and Vietnam having won an important football match, some Vietnamese can’t get away from just trying to make money. One lady close to us
was selling cigarettes from a small cart. She then all of a sudden walked in front of us, moved a random person's motorcycle (they weren't on it) and walked back. We were initially quite confused, but it turned out that she wasn’t happy with the prospect of some people not directly passing her little stall so she’d attempted to block off any other way of getting round. In fact, when she saw that some people were still getting through she came back and moved the motorbike again so it was even more in the way.
After watching the light show for a little longer we gave up and headed back. When we finally got to our hotel room we inspected the Jacuzzi. It wasn’t fixed, but someone had let all the water out….
We woke up on Christmas morning and went down for our free breakfast. Helen had bread with Jam (though we think it might have been Jelly) and I had pasta, chips, rice and fruit. A pretty traditional Christmas breakfast I’m sure you’d agree. We then went off to the market (as our room was being cleaned), booked a Christmas lunch at a nearby 5-star hotel
and again asked for the Jacuzzi to be fixed (we almost had the same ‘Jacuzzi’ problem, but one woman recognised us and remembered the problem). I can’t say much about the market aside from the fact it was the usual ‘you buy something?!’ affair. On the way back we also bartered a bottle of sparkling wine down to £2 - we figured we could drink it in the Jacuzzi.
It still wasn’t fixed though. When we walked back in the hotel the woman behind the desk made a ‘damn! I’ve forgotten about the Jacuzzi’ face... Still it didn't matter, as eventually someone did come to fix it who looked like he’d know what he was doing.
But he didn’t. Yet again, I was shown how to put water into and out of the Jacuzzi and yet again it took a while to explain that the water wasn’t the problem, it was the bubbles! Finally, he also agreed that there was a problem and left, leaving the door open. And never came back.
Whilst we waited, Helen decided to smash the bottle of wine we’d bought on the floor. I guess she figured that as there was no
Jacuzzi, we didn’t need the wine.
Having read through the lunch menu several times and made ourselves sufficiently hungry, we headed off to eat, looking forward to having a very nice (if slightly expensive) Christmas lunch.
The meal was good, but maybe not quite what we had hoped for. Firstly, the buffet was self-service, which (seeing how much we’d paid) we were a little disappointed by. Also, there seemed to be several items on the menu that weren’t actually in the buffet. Now the lack of caviar I can live with (though Helen had promised to try some) but when there seemed to be no Yorkshire puddings I was disgusted! One staff member apologised and said how they didn’t have any, but then another pointed out that they did. Turns out that the Vietnamese’s idea of Yorkshire puddings is to take a small roll, cook it too much and stick some beef inside. Needless to say, I was not impressed, you can’t have a proper Christmas without Yorkshire puddings!! I guess shouldn’t complain though, the rest of the meal was very good, the drinks were all free and (hence) we were treated to a selection of Christmas carols
sung by a group of drunk English and American people at the end of the meal.
Upon getting back to the hotel we explained again that the Jacuzzi was broken. This time someone came up and rather than showing me how to take water in and out, actually fixed it!! Our Christmas afternoon was therefore spent sitting in the Jacuzzi (drinking fruit juice, rather than wine) and watching ‘Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium’…
Having not really achieved too much in the past few days we then spent our last days in Ho Chi Minh City doing all the tourist things. The city itself was better than we’d expected, though there was much more traffic than anywhere else in Vietnam, they had these strange things called ‘pavements’ on which you can walk without a motorcycle (usually) driving at you. Unfortunately though, there was still a fair bit of harassment from people trying to sell you things (including lots of people selling hammocks - why on earth would I want a hammock in the middle of a massive city!!?). In fact, over my few days there I think I discovered what English responses mean when you are asked if you want
to buy something.
Vietnamese Person - " You want to buy something?"
Your Response:
‘Yes’ - Yes, I will definitely buy your goods/service and will pay 4 times the actual value.
‘Maybe’ - Yes, I will definitely buy your goods/service and will pay 2 times the actual value.
‘No’ - I might buy your goods/service, ask me again in roughly one second.
**Just ignore** - Even though I might have said ‘no’ before, the fact that I haven’t responded shows I have not heard you, please keep asking and telling me about your goods/service.
One the first day (after we checked out of the nice hotel) we went to see the Reunification Palace. Which was shut due to some meeting. So instead we went to the War Remnants Museum. The museum wasn’t too bad, though a little wordy, it had lots of very good photos and wasn’t quite as biased as some of the other museums we had been to. That’s not to say it put forward a fair reflection of the war though, there was a huge section on the American atrocities but not a word about the North Vietnamese doing anything bad.
The
next day we went on a tour to the Cu Chi tunnels, the tunnels that the North Vietnamese used during the war. The first thing we did was watch a film, which was good but only in that it was probably the most biased thing I’d seen on the whole trip so far. Basically this was what happened in the war:
There was peace in Vietnam, then all of a sudden, and for seemingly no reason, the American’s came. What did the reason turn out to be? Well that’s simple! They came to kill women and children and to feed their desire for death! After being forced into a fight the Vietnamese spent the rest of the war killing the stupid Americans. There were also lots of heroes, who had been awarded medals for ‘killing many Americans’. As always there was very little mention that the South Vietnamese were even involved, it was basically just the evil Americans.
After this we went to see some very nasty traps and then got to go into the tunnels themselves. At the start of the tour we were told that the tunnels had been enlarged greatly for Westerners and that there
were 3 levels we could go into, each going lower down and becoming smaller. At first we’d thought that I would just do the first 2 levels (not being a big fan of small, enclosed spaces) and that Helen would try and do all 3 levels.
However, having been in the first level of tunnels we changed our plan. Not only were the tunnels incredibly small, but they were hot, went pitch black in places and the situation wasn’t helped by people ahead of us stopping constantly to take photos (leaving us crouched on our knees in total darkness and not being able to move). The experience did make me have a new found respect for the people who lived in them though.
The only downside to the tour was that there were far, far too many people in our group. Most of the time you couldn’t see, let alone hear, the guide and everywhere we went Asian people were just running in front of things to have their picture taken. The standard Asian pose seems to be to pout and make the peace symbol (the ‘v’ sign) in front of various things while people take your picture.
This is all well and good, but I’m not 100% sure it’s appropriate when standing in front of a trap that’s designed to dismember people. In fact, I saw a girl doing the same thing the previous day at the war remnants museum, whilst standing in front a baby foetus that had been killed due to American’s dropping chemicals.
Our final day was spent doing a tour round the Mekong Delta, an area in the south of Vietnam that’s known for good scenery. To be honest though, the tour wasn’t great… We tried some honey tea, watched some more traditional singing (one woman’s singing sounded like a goat), took a boat down a river, saw some ‘coconut candy’ being made, went on a ride on a horse and cart (complete with stupid hats) and got to hear some drunk members of our tour group do karaoke. It was all fine, but nothing really stood out, it was pouring down with rain and, yet again, the there were far too many people in our tour group. The best part was meeting another very nice couple from the UK, who we went out for meal with that evening.
The meal
we had was good and we were having a nice time, but then there was a big roar and all of a sudden the all the staff started jumping around and shouting and the chef ran out of the kitchen to jump around with them. We looked at the TV screen to see that Vietnam had just scored the winning goal in the Asia cup final, with literally the last kick (well, header) of the match.
The rest of the evening was then spent watching in amazement as thousands upon thousands took to the streets again, this time making even more noise and waving even more flags than before. Not wanting to miss out we bought a Vietnam headband each and put them on.
All of a sudden the local people changed from being fairly rude and just wanting to sell us things, to giving us lots of smiles, saying hello and even a few asking to take pictures with us. It was one of the highlights of the trip so far as we all got a beer and then just watched then all celebrate. I stupidly hadn’t taken my camera with me that night but the bloke
we were with has promised to send us the pictures he took.
Anyway, tired and weary, we went off to bed knowing that we had to get up at 5:30am the next morning to get a bus. Our next destination was Phnom Penh in Cambodia. On the BBC news website it was voted the 6th worst city in the world to live and the following are quotes from Wikitravel:
“For western visitors, even those who have visited other Asian cities, Phnom Penh can be a bit of a shock…Visitors who cannot adjust to rubbish-filled streets, constant harassment from tuk tuk drivers and touts, and large numbers of beggars, may not enjoy the city.”
“Most of the time, Phnom Penh bars and clubs are safe enough and a lot of fun - however, some of the more "hip" places are popular with the notorious local "elite" youth (and their minders) who carry firearms and other weapons, and who are allowed to pass through so-called "security" checks without being searched”
“Heart of Darkness has long been the most infamous nightclub in Phnom Penh, closed in August 2005 after a patron was shot to death but is now back
in business. Some seating is reserved for well-heeled (gangster elite) Phnom Penh local youth, so move if you are asked.”
Would we survive…? Helen will update the blog to let you know soon…
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wisa
non-member comment
awww well despite the erm...interesting yorkshire puds..?!( think I'll pass that recipe onto the Deli...), it all looks ammazing!!! when can i fly out and meet you!? hehe have to say, i think pink is just your colour david, that hat suits you :) and you both look so tanned...damn you people in your hot places! Glad it's all going great still...oh and i liked the anniversary car...almost as sloppy as the one me and sus managed to find :) enjoy the swanky hotel in huahin! am not jealous at all!! xxxxx