After Saigon I was on my way to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and the popular thing to do in between is visit the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam. For some reason this never brought up wonderful images in my mind so I was always kind of on the fence over even checking it out. But I did leave myself time for six days before my visa extension expired, so I could either stay in Saigon or head straight to Cambodia if I wanted. Saigon was relatively expensive and very crowded, and I did want to see what the Mekong Delta was all about, so on I went.

There are actually around 8 or 10 towns in the Mekong Delta that have some kind of tourist infrastructure, and in the end I chose two of them to spend 3 days each in. First I would go to Can Tho, which is the largest city in the region, and then I would go to Chau Doc, which is near the Cambodian border and hosts various boat trips directly to Phnom Penh.

On to Can Tho

I had booked a seat on what is supposed to be a “luxury bus” from Saigon to Can Tho, and the modest price of around US$8 included a taxi ride from my hotel to the bus terminal. The taxi ride was about two miles, so that alone would have cost $8 in many places, but this was just the beginning.

I was dropped off at some kind of travel office where no one spoke any English that I was aware of, but the people seemed to know who I was and where I was going, so I wasn’t worried. A few minutes later they signaled that my bus was here, so I went out to find what looked like one of those parking shuttle buses at airport, with big seats, lots of legroom, and plenty of space for luggage.

Finally! I had found the luxury bus I was after. The slightly frustrating thing about Vietnam, and this is more my problem than theirs, is that there just isn’t really much of a demand for Western tourist buses for individual riders, so even their high-end bus companies are made only to fit the locals. It makes perfect sense that they’d only need to make sure that people who are never over 5’8” have enough legroom, but it can be a problem for those of us who are nearly 6’4” and also wider than average.

So this shuttle bus thing pulled out and picked up about 10 or 12 other passengers, and then started heading out to the main road. There were maybe 18 seats on this thing, so not only did I have lots of legroom, but I also had an empty seat next to me.

After about 45 minutes of driving in heavy street traffic the bus turned into a huge bus terminal, and I was crushed (figuratively). It turned out this was only a shuttle to get us to their main terminal, and the other people on the thing were probably going to other destinations as well.

Someone pointed me to my actual Can Tho bus, and I climbed aboard. It was just like all the others before, meaning that my knees were permanently mashed into the seatback in front of me. And once again, every last seat was taken before we left, so I’d be in that position for 3 more hours (minus the halfway rest stop).

I’d gladly pay $16 for a seat on a bus with more legroom, but they don’t exist in Vietnam. Yes, I could conceivably buy two seats, but not only is that embarrassing, but it would also probably be nearly impossible to pull it off since my seatmate and I don’t speak a word of each other’s language. Besides, sitting sideways is barely more comfortable than sitting straight forward with my knees locked in.

Arriving in Can Tho

If I did have any romantic visions of the “Mekong Delta” then arriving in Can Tho would have trampled them. Basically, it’s a huge city (maybe 1 million people), which just happens to have a wide river running through part of it. I’d really enjoyed all the Vietnamese cities I’ve been to so it’s not a problem. I’m just saying that there was nothing special or unique about it that I could see.

I was dropped off at the company’s bus terminal on the close side of the delta, about two miles away from the small tourist zone. I was the only English-speaker on the bus, and fortunately a couple of people there outside the terminal spoke enough English to find me a taxi and get me on my way. One of them phoned for a taxi and then asked for money for the call, which I paid.

Soon I was dropped off at the Tay Ho Hotel, which (according to various reviews) was the cheapest hotel in the small tourist district that actually overlooked the river. I’d also read that the place had opened about 5 years earlier and was quite nice, but ALL the recent reviews said it was filthy. I usually think online hotel reviews say more about the reviewer than the hotel, so I was fairly sure the place would be fine, and what can you expect for $10 per night with a great view?

For example, I’m constantly seeing hotel reviews that insist that the “hotel staff was VERY rude!” and yet in the many hundreds of hotels I’ve stayed in I can’t think of a single time I was treated rudely. My guess is that people book the cheapest room they can find on the internet, and then ask to be upgraded to one with a view or a larger room, and then when the desk clerk says no they decide to get their revenge with a nasty review.

But this time, it turned out the Tay Ho Hotel was filthy indeed. I’d honestly never seen a place like it. When I first checked in they put me in a room without Wi-Fi, and then moved me to a room with good Wi-Fi, and then finally to a room (as I’d requested) with a river view in the front (for $2 more). So I was in three rooms within about an hour, and all three of them had dust on the walls and several other things that demonstrated that the housekeepers only cleaned about 70% of the things they were supposed to, and completely ignored the rest forever.

There were no rats or weird smells or other things that would make staying there impossible – it was mostly just things like there were front windows with shutters on them and it was clear that they never actually cleaned the outside of the window. And they were careless. When I woke up the first morning I rolled over to find that my earplugs had fallen out next to the pillow. Then I remembered I hadn’t used my (identical) earplugs, so these were from the previous guest, and probably trapped under the far pillow the whole time.

Anyway, I stayed all three nights and I was glad I did, rather than moving to another hotel without that view. It was so insanely hot and humid all the time that I didn’t actually do much more than just walk around the tourist area a few times. I do have a couple of observations though.

Market-based attractions and me don’t mix

The primary “attraction” in Can Tho is the opportunity to take a small boat over to a nearby “floating market.” One problem for me was that these small boats are all piloted (for some weird reason) by old women, and they aggressively try to recruit passengers for these private rides. One even accosted me as I was checking into the hotel and then kept bugging me for two days.

The weird hassle with this is that they beg you to let them take you on their boat, and then when you ask how much it costs they quote a price that’s about five times what I know is the going rate. So either you WAY overpay, or you end up in a bitter haggling session with an old lady so you can get her down to $2 per hour for her and her boat. Either way, you feel like a jerk.

I would have done it anyway, and I’ve done that sort of thing many times before, but the bigger reason I didn’t go see the floating market is that I’ve officially had it with “markets” that are meant for tourists.

I’ve been to a few floating markets before, including one earlier on this trip in Halong Bay, and they are indeed fascinating. The problem is, just like all other markets, they tend to be a lot alike.

Also, this, like many other tourist regions, is filled with markets. There are outdoor city markets, indoor city markets, fresh meat and veggies markets, night markets, weekend markets, flea market-style markets, and so on.

Each is very interesting at first, but as mentioned above, they almost all look exactly alike after seeing a few of them. One minor exception was the Vietnam War surplus market that I visited in Saigon, but even that one was mostly fake and gimmicky items alongside mountains of normal stuff.

Continuing with this rant, these markets in these tourist areas are nearly all set up for locals to trade with each other, but whenever they see a foreigner coming to snap photos they all make sales pitches for whatever souvenir items they have alongside the local stuff.

So walking through most markets means constantly hearing “Hello!, Hello!, Hello!” shouted from every other vendor. While it certainly is a friendly greeting to hear in a sea of Vietnamese people speaking Vietnamese to each other, to engage them is to hear their souvenir sales pitch.

Since I am backpacking indefinitely rather than heading home on a plane soon, I have no use for souvenirs. This means I end up wearing my iPod earbuds as I walk through these markets to drown out the Hellos, and after a few trips up and down the aisles I realize that I’ve seen all this stuff several times before, and it might have been a mistake to go out of my way to come to this market in the first place.

Believe it or not, floating markets work the same way. They exist in river areas that are prone to flooding on the banks, so traders can haul their stuff to a central location regardless of flooding conditions. Nearly all the stuff is meant for locals, but ones that have tourist visitors also have some souvenir items, and when you are in a boat being piloted by someone who gets a commission from everything you buy, you mostly just get one souvenir sales pitch after another until the tour ends.

So my new policy is that I’ll avoid market-based sights unless it’s something I haven’t seen before, or I happen to be in a position where I can buy souvenirs. I actually love buying little trinkets in Asia, it’s just that I have no room for them now.

My apology to markets

I just want to say now that I’ve found dozens of markets around the world to be fascinating and worthwhile, even in spite of the constant sales pitches. When I get to Istanbul I’m looking forward to touring through the Grand Bazaar. It’s just this brings up one of the complications of long-term travel and spending a long time in one region in general. Things tend to look similar from one place to the next, and they blend together, taking some of the thrill out of seeing the new stuff.

It’s still a thrill to go to a brand new place and start all over again.

The anti-sun lifestyle in Southeast Asia

The other major thing that hit me, finally, when I was in Can Tho was how the climate impacts the general lifestyle all over this region. In Vietnam more than any other country here, the women all wear those surgical mask-type things whenever they are in the sun. Some say they wear them to combat the smog from all the motorbikes, but the real main reason is they want their face in particular, but also their whole body, to have the lightest skin possible.

I’ve heard from many people that “people in this country or that country prefer to have light skin” but I’ve also discovered that is true of nearly all of Asia. Evidently this used to be true in the Western world as well, where those with dark skin were obviously laborers, if not farmers, and those without a tan were the upper class or at least working indoors.

Obviously now that’s switched in the West, as a tan means you have lots of leisure time, but here in Asia they actively discriminate against those with dark skin. Sound familiar?

The above part I had come to learn early on in Vietnam, and I was already aware of it for the most part. But what I saw in Can Tho was different.

I’d known that the Vietnamese generally do the siesta thing, where they literally take a one-hour-or-so nap right in the middle of the workday, usually a bit after noon. That really bugs me in Spain, but at least in Vietnam they don’t close the shops, they just take a nap and stay open. I’ve gone into restaurants around 1pm to find all three employees fast asleep on benches.

And I’d also heard that they tend to be quite active in the morning instead. A British guy I befriended in Nha Trang told me he’d seen the beaches packed with locals at around 5am, and to be honest I didn’t really believe him.

So probably the best thing about the Tay Ho Hotel was that the room overlooked what is more or less the town square public park of this part of the city, and there’s a long veranda out front with benches, so it was comfortable sitting out there and observing. The centerpiece is a large Ho Chi Minh (Uncle Ho) statue, so you could tell this was not just a neighborhood park.

I noticed that at noon this park was completely empty to the point of seeming eerie. And then after the sun went down the place began filling up, to the point that by around 9pm it looked like the county fair. There were food stalls and people selling other items, plus thousands of locals.

The following morning I was woken up by an unusual sound. It was 5:30am and I looked out to the park to see that the noise was a rather loud hacky-sack game, being played by about 6 guys dressed all in white. The rest of this park was jammed with people as well, almost as it was the night before. Many people were exercising, or at the very least doing that odd-looking Chinese thing where you slowly make simple poses for some reason.

The same thing happened the next two days as well. They aren’t staying in the park all night, they are going home to sleep for 5 or 6 hours, and then coming right back to get some exercise., and it’s all due to the always-hot-and-steamy climate.

Only the rich in Vietnam have air-conditioning, so nearly everyone uses fans and open windows to cope with the heat and humidity. They can’t really exercise when the sun is out because that can give you heat stroke if you aren’t careful. So they come out for a couple hours literally before the sun comes up, take a nap a bit after noon, and then come out for a few more hours after the sun is down.

It’s a very strange life-rhythm to me, but it seems to be pretty much universal in this area. So when tourists like me complain about the ridiculous heat and humidity every day and every night, it’s because we haven’t even begun to adapt to it like they have. They honestly don’t even walk while the sun is out, preferring motorbikes or bicycles for even the shortest of trips.

On the other hand, it’s pretty much impossible to switch to their life rhythm as a tourist. The main attractions are only open from 10am to 6pm or so, and some do shut for a couple hours in midday. So it’s not like we can go to museums at 5am or 9pm, unfortunately.

On to Chau Doc

My final three days in Vietnam would be spent at the border town of Chau Doc. I got a bus from the same company, and this one was smaller like a van, but at least I was assigned a seat just behind the wheel well with no seat in front of me, so I could actually stretch out.

Again, they dropped me off at their terminal at the outskirts of town, but this time there was no one at all who spoke any English. There were about a dozen guys crowding around me, and all of them were bike-rickshaw drivers who were begging me to hire them for my ride into town. The problem was that these bike rickshaws have a unique design that makes the thing more or less just a shallow bucket.

I could have gotten in, and my luggage also would have fit, but I would have been very uncomfortable, so I walked out to the main street to look for a taxi. One of the drivers followed me and then eventually called me a taxi, which showed up a couple minutes later. Soon I would be in the center of Chau Doc checking into the Trung Nguyen Hotel.

This hotel reminded me a lot of the one I stayed in in Hanoi, except this was only $9 per night instead of $22 per night. It was like a boutique hotel with a very comfortable bed, though the room was barely big enough to fit it. The best part is that each room has a large balcony overlooking the central market of Chau Doc, so I was able to closely observe daily life from 5 floors up.

Honestly, there is almost no tourist infrastructure in Chau Doc for English speakers, except for a couple of large 3 and 4-star hotels on the river. For the budget traveler there are only a few restaurants that have English-translated menus, and none of them I tried were any good.

So I did almost nothing except walk around the city a few times, and check out the big central market a bit. This market was just like the others, but since there were almost zero Western tourists they aren’t used to badgering us, so they pretty much left me alone.

I took two HDR photos from that balcony that I really like. The one above is obviously of the central market, and the one just below is of the city itself just turning the camera about 90 degrees. I really like all the textures, colors, and detail of this photo, even though the subject itself is pretty ordinary.

Three days later I climbed into an 11-seat “fast” speedboat to Phnom Penh, and my four months in Vietnam would end about 30 minutes later when we got to the border crossing on the river, which I will discuss in the Phnom Penh section.

After a seemingly interminable bus ride from Dalat (it took 8 hours and the first 4 of those were actually fantastic), we arrived on the outskirts of Saigon. It wasn’t until about an hour later that we made it to the city center, and this is one of many things that would remind me of Los Angeles.

After spending 18 days in the mild Dalat weather, it was a rude awakening to arrive in Saigon, where it was about 96F and extremely humid. I looked it up online a bit later and the Heat Index was 126F, which was certainly the most extreme of my trip so far.

I’d had the Dalat hotel woman call for me and reserve a room at a place called the California Guesthouse. It is located about 6 blocks from the main backpacker area in District 1, in a cluster of small hotels that were said to be a good alternative to the madness of the central area. It turned out that the only person who speaks any English at all at the California Guesthouse was the daughter, who was elsewhere when I arrived. The mother first had me wait for a while, and then she sent me to another hotel down the block. Later I came back to find that they had indeed held a room for me, but the mother didn’t know about it, but by now I was checked in to the other place.

In other cities in Vietnam I’ve really enjoyed staying a bit outside of the tourist heart, but this cluster of hotels seemed to have no tourist restaurants or shops nearby, so that would mean having to go at least 4 or 5 blocks every time I wanted anything. It wouldn’t have been so bad, but the whole area was very thick with local businesses and such and heavy with traffic, so walking longer distances in this area was not fun. After that first night I checked out and then check into a nice place in the heart of the backpacker district, where I stayed for 9 total days.

Impressions of Saigon

Just by riding in on the bus (I was riding shotgun), I could see that this is a massive city, and especially once you get near the downtown area, it’s much more modern than Hanoi. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of tall apartment and office buildings, with many dozens currently under construction. Most of the main sights are within the downtown area, but still the sprawl here was a bit intimidating and a bit surprising.

The historic center of Hanoi definitely feels like a European-influenced town that was laid out before cars and car-parking were considered, but Saigon feels almost American in that regard. Still, about 90% of the road traffic was motorbikes rather than cars, and it’s not really well designed for those. For the record, there is an active debate about which city has crazier motorbike traffic, and I think Hanoi is far crazier. Saigon may have just as many motorbikes on the roads, but all the streets are wider and there is traffic control (stop lights) at nearly every intersection.

Another big difference that surprised me was the backpacker district has several big nightclubs, which literally rage on into the morning hours. It’s clearly operating as a buffer between the West and the real Vietnam. It’s sort of a clumsy and over-the-top introduction to Vietnam, which might actually scare more people away from the rest of the country than entice them to see the rest.

Street vendors of Saigon

Another thing I had heard before was that the street vendors in Saigon have no equal, and this part turned out to be true. If you stay and drink and dine in the heart of the backpacker district then you learn this quickly, and if you keep hanging out there you can’t really keep complaining about it, but still it’s amazing.

In front of my hotel there was always at least one or two motorbike taxi drivers who’d ask if you want a ride the moment you step out front. Then there are several more on every street corner, and they ask pretty much every time, even after you turn them down 20 times in a row. As mentioned before, I now wear earbud headphones pretty much every second that I’m out and about, mostly so I can tune these offers out more easily, but also to combat all the motors and bike horns.

Then, when you sit down at one of the many restaurants in the neighborhood it’s never more than a few seconds before someone comes by trying to sell you sunglasses or cigarettes or books or souvenirs. If you sit out at the front tables they will literally often line up so one is waiting for a vendor to move on so they can begin their own pitch. Once you realize this part you begin selecting tables well inside the restaurants, but this only filters out the weakest of them. Even in places like Mexico the restaurant owner will shoo away these intruding vendors that are ruining the experience of their customers, but here the vendors have an all-access pass.

I’d love to hear the training they go through, because they all have nearly identical styles. They come by and politely inquire if you are interested in what they are selling, and the tourist will politely say no and maybe even explain why. I think they literally don’t know the meaning of the word “no,” so they continue to stand there and maybe they’ll suggest something else from their selection. I’ve tried not making eye contact at all, and not only does that feel a bit rude for a guest in their country, it doesn’t seem to phase them at all, as they’ll just stand in front of you for a minimum of 20 seconds just to prove that ignoring them is futile.

The only bright note is that they do seem to remember the tourists pretty well, so after they’ve pitched you twice or so they’ll often move along after only 5 seconds and one query on future meetings.

One of the weirdest, and also most common items you see throughout Vietnam is books. Whether they are men or women, they’ll have a stack of at least 20 or 30 books, including Lonely Planets, books about Vietnam, and current bestsellers. I already have one Lonely Planet and I’ve switched to audiobooks for everything else, so I never looked closely at these street offerings, and it wasn’t until I reached Nha Trang that I learned they were photocopies of books, and sometimes had pages missing or out of order. This explains how books like this can be sold for $30 and up legitimately, but around $10 on the street.

Sights of Saigon

I spent 10 days in the city, and on most of those I was working at least 5 or 6 hours in my hotel, but I did have a chance to see some of the main sights. There are things like a few cathedrals and pagodas and a Chinatown that I never looked into, since I’d seen so many of those elsewhere on this trip and on previous trips. I decided to just hit the main and unique ones that actually interested me.

Ben Thanh Market

Only about half a mile from where I was staying is the main central indoor market for District 1 of Saigon. I’ve mentioned this before, but again, I do generally like shopping, but on a trip like this I’m going out of my way to buy only things I need or perhaps a tiny souvenir here and there. For this reason, going to these markets can be more than a little frustrating, and I only have myself to blame.

Seeing all the local produce and meats and god knows what else that these people sell one another daily at their main market is fascinating from an anthropological sense, and I’ve spent a lot of time doing this in the past. The problem is that, at least within one small country, they tend to be alike. So the first one can feel amazing, but the 7th one feels awfully familiar.

Another problem is that the markets that double as tourist destinations all have various souvenirs mixed in, and the merchants on hand will call out to you as you pass pretty much every time. If I were in Vietnam for one month and then headed back to my house it would be great to buy an extra suitcase worth of trinkets and souvenirs, but when you don’t officially have a home and won’t be going back anywhere anytime soon it’s pointless.

So for this market I quickly walked through looking at all the local stuff and saying no thanks to the souvenir dealers, quickly exiting again and wondering why I’d even gone in at all.

Reunification Palace

Also within walking distance of my hotel was this grand building, which is surrounded by gates and grassy areas, and evidently was the main strategic base for the South Vietnamese Army, and also the sight of their last stand. Today they say it’s used a few times a year by the federal government (based in Hanoi) for meetings, but it’s mostly just a time capsule and tourist attraction.

It appears that literally nothing has changed since 1975, when the North finally conquered the South. There are conference rooms and the residences of the premiere and first lady, as well as the underground command center, a movie theater, dance floor, and even a helicopter landing port on the roof.

Admission was only 75 cents so I was surprised that it included a one-hour guided tour from a lovely female guide who spoke pretty good English. It looked like the Chinese-language tour had a much bigger group, but still there were almost 10 of us in the English group, including (curiously enough) three Japanese guys. I guess since this is sort of like Vietnam’s southern White House, and a major source of pride, they make sure that visitors actually learn what it’s all about, which isn’t true at many attractions in this country.

War Remnants Museum

This seems to be the most touted attraction in the city, and it was originally called “The House for Displaying War Crimes of American Imperialism and the Puppet Government [of South Vietnam]” and then “Museum of American War Crimes,” then as the “War Crimes Museum,” but I don’t think the displays have changed much since they changed to the current name.

Some guidebooks even go so far as to say that in spite of the obvious propaganda inside, it’s important for Americans to see the (North) Vietnamese version of the events, but I honestly found it quite tame. Perhaps they actually have rewritten most of the captions, because the entire inside of the museum consists of blown-up photographs with an explanation of what might have gone on there.

For example, one photo was of some village people, and the caption said, “This photographer said that right after this was taken these people were gunned down by American troops.” There are photos of American soldiers, some of them wounded, but again there really isn’t anything that accused the US of anything unusual.

Even if you accept their versions, it’s nothing that we haven’t heard a million times before about every war in history. There are, of course, some John Kerry quotes, but none by all the people in his battalion who disputed his version as dishonest and politically motivated. So he joins Jane Fonda as someone who is a minor star in the North Vietnamese version of events, but again nothing new or shocking.

Outside there are some tanks and planes and helicopters and guns and such. I guess they were American built and captured when Saigon fell, but even that part isn’t too clear. Overall this is an interesting stop, but the more I think about it the more I think they must have toned down some of the crazier stuff in recent years. It seems the Vietnamese government is anxious to have good relations with the US, so having such a hostile museum in its most popular city might have been unconstructive.

Also, Americans are very welcome in Vietnam. The first question that anyone here asks a tourist is “where are you from,” and when I say America I get nothing but, “oooh, that’s nice,” and a smile. They’ve had two wars since the American War here, and most people here are young and don’t hold a grudge at all. I think at this point “American” is a code for a tourist who is more likely to overspend and at least a little likely to tip in a restaurant.

Dan Sinh Market

One of the stranger attractions I wanted to see in Saigon was the famous market where they sell old American war surplus. Evidently in the years or even decades following 1975 you could buy cheap army supplies from this one market, which happens to be located only a few blocks from my hotel in District 1.

It turned out to be disappointing, but not at all surprising. It’s actually the exact same phenomenon that has plagued “army surplus” stores even in the States. Even into the early 1980s they seemed to have actual fatigues and other clothing for sale, and at very low prices, but since then I don’t think the army has much extra stuff. So army surplus stores end up stocking brand new and often cheaply made versions of the same basic stuff, and try to sell it at weirdly high prices. This is what has happened to the Dan Sinh Market as well.

I went over there around 1pm, which is smack in the middle of the siesta hour, so things were very quiet. For some reason I had pictured this market being outdoors, but it turned out to be all indoors, in a very crowded building. Many of the merchants were actually fast asleep, and it always amazes me a bit the level of trust and honor they all seem to have. Anyone could grab nearly anything from one of these stalls and just walk away with it while the person is sleeping, but no one does. I’m sure the electronic stuff is all kept safe, but still it’s really nice to be in a place where everyone assumes everyone else is honest.

Evidently the main item that used to be popular for tourists to buy was a Zippo lighter once used by a GI. I’ve read that the authentic ones have been gone for a long time, so now there are thousands of new lighters with various things etched into them that resembled the originals. You can buy those from half the vendors walking up and down the streets, and several of the stalls in this place had large selections of them.

A bunch of other places had green army-looking outfits, but all of it was new and none of it was interesting. There were also plenty of places selling electronics and other miscellaneous items.

I found a really good Swiss Army-style knife at one place and the woman told me it was 100,000 dong ($5). That sounded like a fair price, but I hear that locals don’t respect you if you don’t haggle. I offered 60,000, hoping to get it for 80,000, and she just kept repeating “100,000 maximum.” I walked away hoping she’d drop the price, but she didn’t. After looking at a few more stalls I realized no one else had these knives, but still I couldn’t bring myself to give in.

Later that day I was eating at a restaurant in the hotel district and a roaming merchant kid came up and among other things he had the same knife for sale. He started at 600,000 dong ($30), and after continually insisting that I knew exactly where I could buy one for 100,000, and him telling me I was mistaken, I bought one for 120,000 from him. As long as the sellers are friendly here I don’t mind paying more for things.

Next stop, Can Tho and then Chau Doc in the Mekong Delta, and then on to Phnom Penh in Cambodia.

The main reason I chose Dalat over Mui Ne is the promise of some cool weather. According to the Accuweather page I’d been looking at, Dalat, which is in the mountains at around 5,000 feet, gets to about 85F each day and down to about 65F each night. While that might not sound cool to most people, I’d just been in a series of cities where it’s around 90F or more every day, and around 85F at midnight, and always somewhat humid too. The thought of being able to possibly sleep with a window open and no air conditioner really sounded wonderful.

It turned out Accuweather must have been using a reading from the airport, which is about 20 miles from Dalat down the hill. It took the first couple of days in the city to realize that the temperature was within a few degrees of 70F every minute of every day. It stayed like that the entire 18 days I was there, punctuated by quite a few heavy late-afternoon rainstorms that cooled things down even more for a few hours. It was lovely and my fairly luxurious hotel had double-pane windows but no A/C at all since it wasn’t needed.

The guy who ran my hotel in Nha Trang actually warned me from going to Dalat at all. He said people get sick when they go there, and that I should trust him because he knows all about it. At first that all sounded ridiculous to me, but after thinking about it I realized that people who never experience temperatures under 80F their whole lives probably do get a bit of a runny nose when they spend a few days in a place where it’s 67F at night.

Impressions of Dalat

In addition to the mild weather, I’d read quite a few times that Dalat was like the “Paris of Southeast Asia.” After my first few days there I decided those people must not have been to the “Paris of France,” because the similarities are few.

First off, Dalat is in the mountains, and it’s somewhat hilly even in the middle of town. There aren’t many backbreaking hills to climb up, but it’s still set in a way where you notice it every time you go walking. And normally hill towns are very scenic, and while parts of Dalat definitely are, it’s actually a very dense and crowded city with 3 to 5 story buildings lining every street, so unless you are on a high floor or a hilltop, it just looks like a crowded city.

Fortunately, the hotel I moved into after the first three days put me into a 5th floor room with a nice view of some mountains to the west of the city. It was also the only room on the top floor of the hotel, only shared by a big Jacuzzi and two saunas for guests to use, so the fact that there was no elevator was a minor inconvenience for the other benefits.

I actually spent the first three nights in a different hotel on a main street a few blocks away. I arrived on Reunification Day, which starts a major 3-day holiday all over Vietnam. Many hotels had tripled their prices for that weekend, so I booked a place that was only $23 per night, which I later found normally went for $8 per night.

It was clearer in those first three days than it was in the remaining 15 days that Dalat is a very touristy city that seems to attract about 98% Vietnamese tourists compared to 2% foreigners. It’s a strange feeling, passing hotel after hotel and restaurant after restaurant where I can’t read a single word on any of their signs. I wouldn’t say it was uncomfortable, but I would say it was unusual to be in a place with so few English-speaking tourists.

Once at the second hotel I was in the center of the small cluster of Western-oriented hotels and restaurants, so it was a fun little enclave, which turned out to have several really great restaurants mixed in. For me the only thing about Dalat that reminded me of Paris was that most (but not all) of the restaurants I went to had French-inspired dishes on their menus, and also rather fancy tablecloth service.

I finished the first writing project I was doing after a couple days there and started on another, so I was working 30+-hour weeks while I was there once again. It’s really quite nice to be able to afford to stay and eat in nice places by working a bit at the same time, and then having more money in the bank at the end that when you started.

Attractions and highlights

Dalat doesn’t actually have too many tourist attractions. The most popular thing to do seems to be a one-day tour around the city, done on the back of a motorcycle ridden by one of the many Easy Riders (a motorcycle-guide group in Vietnam), or in a minibus. On these tours you can literally see all the main highlights of Dalat in about 6 hours, and most of those are actually outside of the city itself.

Here’s an overview of the main ones.

Ho Xuan Huong

This artificial lake dominates the center of town. It’s around 4.5 miles in circumference, and much to my surprise, it had been drained “for cleaning” in January of 2010, and won’t be refilled until January 2011. Evidently they do this once per decade, so I just got unlucky.

It’s really strange what something like this can do to one’s first impression of a town. I’d imagine that when filled-in the lake is really lovely and serves as a centerpiece around which many people stroll. But this way it’s basically an ugly construction zone that much of the town is pointed at. Neither of my hotels had anything close to a view of this lake, so I only saw it when I’d go trundling over to that part of town, but if I did pay extra for a “lake front” room I would have been extremely disappointed.

The central market

Just up the hill from the lake is a big outdoor market that is really the true focal point of the town. I admit that I only walked through part of it once in Dalat. These kinds of markets are literally in every city, or even every neighborhood in this part of the world. The first few you see are fascinating and really colorful, but they are also crowded, loud, and usually a bit smelly too.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed walking through many of these things before. It’s just that most of it is highly perishable food, which doesn’t have much appeal for someone staying in a hotel indefinitely. And mixed in with the food are various dry goods stalls that sell everything from soaps to souvenirs. The ones that sell souvenirs are always scanning for tourists, so it’s rare not to get a somewhat aggressive sales pitch each time you pass by. Largely for this last reason, I choose to minimize my town market visits.

The TV tower

All over Vietnam you see these communications towers, and I think the taller ones have TV and radio antennas mixed with the mobile phone transmitters. In Dalat there are a few in the center of the city, and the tallest one looks a bit more like the Eiffel Tower than most of the others. It really does make for a good photo if you can find something interesting for the foreground.

I walked to the base of the big one and wasn’t really surprised to see nothing there at all but a locked fence. If they built one with an elevator or even stairs that you could climb it would be a really nice attraction, but this is just a TV tower.

The Crazy House

This is a classic “roadside attraction” except that it’s in a mostly residential neighborhood. I walked the 2 miles to it early in my trip, and then went there again as part of the bus tour I took near the end.

The story goes that there is a local woman architect who is obsessed with building the weirdest house possible, and she’s well on her way. Big chunks of it are still under construction, even though they started building like 15 years ago, so this is like the Vietnamese Sagrada Familia church.

Most of it really looks like a mansion that you might find in the town of Bedrock. It’s all molded into a cave-like structure, except there are weird stairs and tunnels between each room, and some of the rooms are maybe 4 floors off the ground.

It cost only 75 cents to get in, so it was easily worth it, but the Lonely Planet book warned that the novelty gets old pretty fast, and they were right. There’s almost no explanation in any language, much less English, and no guides either, so visitors just walk through this unusual twisted house, and you draw your own conclusions.

Only on my second visit did I learn that it’s also a hotel too, and that you can rent any of the weird rooms inside for prices starting around $25 per night up to almost $100 per night. That might sound cheap, but in Vietnam that money can get you a far nicer place with less novelty, and in a better part of town. I think it’s mainly used for romantic getaways for Vietnamese people, and during both my visits I didn’t see any signs that any of the 20 or so rooms was actually occupied.

City tour

I quite like driving motorbikes around myself, but I don’t feel comfortable riding on the back when someone else is driving, especially since it’s unlikely that they have much experience with someone my size on board. So instead of the Easy Rider tour I booked a minibus tour, which basically goes to all the same places in the same amount of time, and cost $17 for the whole day, similar to the Easy Riders.

My group turned out to be fun, and I mostly chatted with a Scottish woman who used to be a schoolmate of Bill Forsythe (director of Gregory’s Girl, Local Hero etc). There were 5 other people with us, and I was again the only American. We had about 8 stops and most of them were in a valley about 30 minutes from Dalat, so here they are in order…

Flower farm

Dalat is known for having very fertile meadows and fields around it, so they produce tons of vegetables, fruits, and flowers, which prefer milder temperatures and a bit of shade, I suppose. Our first stop was a flower farm with these huge covered fields filled with various flowers. I’d never been to anything like that before, so that was quite nice.

Minority village

Our next stop was in a “minority village” which is basically one long street of homes and buildings owned by these hill people who really do look very different from the Vietnamese people. It’s only one block off a main highway, so it’s not too exotic, but interesting to see nonetheless. Weirdly enough, these buildings actually look more like US houses than Asian houses, so this small mountain-people minority had something in common with me.

The brochure promised a stop at a cricket farm, but our guide (there was a guide and a driver) told us there was nothing to see at this exact time of year, so he spent about 10 seconds with a confusing explanation of how a cricket farm works, and that was the end of it. This was while driving to the next stop, rather than in front of the cricket farm, by the way.

Coffee plantation

We are also promised a stop at a coffee plantation. I’d seen a full-blown one in Guatemala, so I knew what to expect, except that in this case we just stopped by the road and the guide pointed out some coffee plants with mature berries on them and some other plants with no berries on them. Evidently Vietnam producers more coffee than any country on earth besides Brazil, and the coffee here is quite good, but on this tour we just looked at the plants, got a quick explanation of the process, and moved on.

Silk factory

In perhaps the most interesting stop of all, we parked out in front of a few old buildings, and entered a silk factory filled with busy workers (even though this was Sunday). It was incredibly loud and the equipment inside appears to have been designed and built perhaps 100 years ago, no joke.

There was one station where they’d take the cocoons with the worms still inside, and they boil them to kill the worm quickly. Then someone strips out the worm carcass, which gets turned into animal feed or something, and then someone takes the cocoon and hooks it up to a big machine that begins turning it into thread.

Several steps later and they are making silk cloth right there about 30 feet away from where the living worm was murdered. It’s quite amazing to see and hear it all at once like this. I’m pretty sure that in most of China they have modern factories to do all these same steps, but here labor is so cheap that there isn’t much incentive to spend a fortune on new machines. I’d guess that these women were making no more than US$2 for a 10 or 12-hour day, but it might be as high as $3 for the day.

When we were led out they took us near two stalls where we could buy silk goods, but within two minutes or so we were all back in the van. On tours like this just about everywhere else in the world they consistently lead you through overpriced handicraft shops and other gift shops, since the tour guide makes about 20% off everything the group spends there. Here in Vietnam they have yet to master that strategy. From the perspective of the traveler this is actually much nicer. It’s just that it’s really unusual since everyone else in the world seems to be pretty hardcore when it comes to that unfortunate aspect of organized tours.

Distillery

Next up was a rice-wine distillery. It was still late in the morning, but that wasn’t too early for a tour of a small alcohol factory. It’s fairly primitive, and the main equipment is in this barn-like building with animals roaming around. The still itself looked a couple of sizes larger than the one Hawkeye owned on MASH, and otherwise similar.

The rice wine first made me think of sake, but this has 65% alcohol so it’s way stronger than sake. Of course, we each got to sample some of it and it was much better than any of us expected. It was more like a whisky or a good tequila than like sake.

They sell a full liter of the stuff in a lovely ceramic bottle for $3, which would have been great if I was headed home the next day, but that’s a lot of rice wine and the bottle was too heavy to drag around. An Australian guy in our group asked if they has smaller sizes, and they told him they’d sell him half a liter in a plastic bottle for $1.50. He got one, and then I got one a bit later. It mixes really well with Red Bull, as I discovered.

Elephant waterfalls

I’ve seen many waterfalls in my day, and I’m usually surprised by how entertaining they tend to be, considering that all they are is a river changing altitude suddenly. Supposedly the best one of the many in the area is Elephant Waterfalls, and I was looking forward to seeing it, but I ended up passing on the close-up view, along with a few other people in our group and another group at the same time.

They parked the van and we were led to the top of the falls, which look impressive enough, and then were guided down a path toward the base of the falls. After one steep and treacherous portion I noticed that the next sections of the path are actually way worse. These “steps” are just sections that are sort of carved out of big rocks, often with drastically different distances between them. There was a guardrail on that really bad part at one point, but all that was left now were the rusted posts that used to hold it up.

Everyone in our group that went down did so safely, and chances are I could have too, but they also said it’s not all that special down there and playing it safe was the right move. In addition to being a big and tall guy with big feet, I was carrying a backpack and a fairly expensive camera, and there is a lot that could have gone wrong.

One very major difference between traveling in the “developing” world and traveling in the “developed” world is you can’t really trust their sense of safety. When I got back to my hotel I googled Elephant Waterfall and found a blog post by a couple who visited just a few days earlier, and the guy in that couple missed a step and slid about 10 feet down a rock before he got wedged into a place to stop. He cut up his leg pretty bad, and that kind of stuff happens a lot in places like this, partly because there are no lawyers or insurance policies involved at all. If you hurt yourself, the tour company will probably bring you back to the city and maybe even to a hospital, but that’s about it.

All of this “tourism on the edge” stuff is fine with me, it’s just why I am also very careful in places like this. If there were serious hiking injuries every few days at the Grand Canyon, they’d shut the thing down and rebuild it, but here there’s little or no incentive to do such things.

Pagoda and Buddha

Adjacent to the Elephant Waterfall was a large , new-looking pagoda with a couple more Buddha statues behind it. We were sent in to have a look, and it was all stuff I’d seen several times before, and once again stuff that would have been far more interesting with some kind of explanation.

All the tours and attractions in Vietnam are very cheap, so it’s hard to complain, but one thing I wish they did a better job at was the guide should provide more of an explanation about many of these things. Perhaps the problem is that anyone in Vietnam who speaks English really well already has a more lucrative job. So the guides seem to work mostly from prepared scripts, more or less, and they are often unprepared to answer deep and spontaneous questions.

These pagodas and statues all look alike, so while the first few you see are really exotic and entertaining, the next dozen feel a bit like reruns.

Embroidery demonstration

Next we had lunch at a mediocre restaurant near the first hotel I stayed at. We ordered and paid ourselves, and I think the tour company must get a small percentage of what we spent, but it was fine and the prices were okay. Next we went to the Crazy House, which I described above. After that the last stop was an Embroidery Factory or something, which turned out to be in the absolute center of Dalat, and that I’d passed in front of many times before without knowing what it was.

It turns out they make these complicated needlepoint things there, which come in all sizes and start at around US$40 for the smallest ones, and hundreds of dollars for the larger ones. They were nice, but nothing I’d ever buy. This was the only stop on the whole trip that felt like we were mostly there with the hopes we’d buy something. We did get to see workers upstairs making these things, but it was mostly a big series of showrooms. I guess if they sell something to every 100th person who walks in it’s still pretty good money in this country.

After that our tour was done, and even though a few parts of it were mildly disappointing, I had a very nice day with a good group of people, seeing things I won’t soon forget.

Two days later I took a long bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City, which everyone here still calls Saigon.

I ended up spending exactly six weeks in Nha Trang, nearly completing the project, and otherwise living almost like a local. I had the nicest room in a small hotel about half a mile from the main tourist district, and it cost a whopping $9 per night.

One of the key lessons I learned, which I carried over from my stay in Hoi An, is that staying outside the main tourist zone, even by a bit, can save money and also preserve one’s sanity. As I’ve mentioned before, the roaming merchants in Vietnam are similar to most other parts of the developing world in that they are fearless and relentless.

If you are staying in the heart of the backpacker district in any major tourism city in Vietnam you’ll be approached or pitched at least 4 or 5 times on every block. Often this will be xe om (motorbike taxi) drivers who seem to beg for your business and then will try to rip you off by quoting you 5 times the normal price for the trip.

Since I was staying in a district a bit north of the main backpacker district in Nha Trang, I went days at a time without being hassled, and it was really nice. I continue to wear ear buds while listening to my iPod nearly every second I’m outside, partly to drown out the traffic/honking and partly to be able to tune out all the salespeople, but it’s even nicer when there aren’t any around.

Impressions of Nha Trang

I’d read that Nha Trang is Vietnam’s premiere beach resort city, which was one reason I wasn’t too thrilled about going in the first place, but I wanted to check it out and it’s right on the main train line. When you spend months in the tropics you’re usually trying to hide from the bright sun, so sitting on a beach in the sun isn’t all that appealing.

Anyway, the city was pretty much what I expected, both good and bad. The quality of the food was a noticeable step down from Hoi An and Hue, but in exchange there was a much greater variety of Western dishes on offer. The whole city, or at least the main backpacker area, seems mainly aimed at catering to Australian budget tourists, since it’s incredibly cheap once you get there, and the weather is warm even when it’s winter in Oz. So it really feels like the city is set up as a “cheap beach holiday” place, which just happens to be in Vietnam.

The beach itself is quite nice, probably about 20 to 30 meters wide in most places and miles long, but again this reminds me that Huntington and Newport Beaches, where I grew up, are far nicer and are easily among the best beaches in the world.

In Nha Trang you can rent a padded lounge chair in the sun (or under an umbrella) for $1.50 per day, and then have $1 beers delivered to you as you bake away. You can also get a massage without even getting up for well under $5 for an hour. If I had just come from a cold place then all of this would have been wonderful, but instead I’d been sweating and burning up for 6 weeks straight already, so the novelty didn’t add up to much.

Most of the restaurants did seem to have some Vietnamese dishes on their extensive menus, but usually they called themselves Italian, or Indian, or Hamburger restaurants, and even one was a Mexican restaurant, which turned out to be rather disappointing. The food was always decent, but rarely anything special like up north. I had quite a good and filling sushi meal at an outdoor café for $5, including 3 pints of beer.

Highlights of Nha Trang

Honestly, during the 6 weeks I was there I would barely leave the street my hotel was located on for 3 or 4 days per week. I’d often walk the two long blocks to the beach late in the afternoon to go for a walk after I finished work, but that’s about it most days.

On two different occasions I rented a motorbike for $5 per day and it was wonderful, as it had been in Hoi An. I ended up having a flat tire when I returned the bike on the first time, and I felt a bit bad that when they fixed it this would be a hassle and also wipe out what I paid, but I later learned that it happens all the time, and they can patch them quickly for next to nothing, and even a new inner tube costs only $2 or so.

I learned this all when I got a flat tire early on in my second rental, riding through a street filled with rocks where locals don’t go. It’s a long story, but the bottom line is I paid to have it patched once and then replaced after the patch broke, and none of the people I dealt with spoke a word of English. It was a bit stressful and this time the second rental ended up costing more than $5 extra just to get on the road again, though in the long run it was easily worth it.

Monkey Island

The main highlight was driving down to where you catch the ferry for Monkey Island, which is about 10 miles north of Nha Trang. I wrote about it for my other website (on the link just above) so I’ll only briefly sum it up here. It’s a private island that features a nice beach area and a weird dog and monkey circus-type show, and there are supposedly over 1,000 monkeys living freely on the island.

I’ve been to other monkey areas before and this one was a bit different. Most of the day there are no tourists there at all feeding the monkeys so I was there alone with the tribe. A guy I met earlier at a café told me you can give them beer and they’ll get a bit drunk, and to be honest this was my main goal of going. The woman running the little concession stand near the monkeys assured me that they do like beer, and in fact they like everything that humans like.

The first time I went the “king” monkey wouldn’t let anyone else near the food or the beer cans, and he wanted the beer but hadn’t mastered the use of cans. He couldn’t get a drink properly so he ended up pouring it out on the rocks, only getting a few drops when he tried to slurp it up from there. The second time I went back I poured some beer into an empty and clear water bottle, but none of them could figure that out well either.

They aren’t dumb though. On my first visit one of them jumped on me in a surprise attack and he ended up unzipping both zippers on my backpack in far less time that it’s ever taken me, but his reward was an empty cookie bag that he’d seen me put in there before so the joke was on him. I was worried they’d take my camera or something and hold it hostage, but luckily that never happened. On my second trip one of them snuck up behind me and swiped an unopened cookie bag out of my hand while I wasn’t paying attention. He then took the whole thing and climbed up to the top of a nearby palm tree while a couple of attendants fired rocks at him with slingshots. Fortunately that lesson only cost me 75 cents in cookies.

Monkey Island itself was pretty cool, but honestly the scenery on the empty road that goes there was amazing, as was the scenery in the fertile valley just north of the ferry landing. Both times I rented the motorbike I mostly just cruised around soaking in the scenery. On the busy roads it can be hectic since huge trucks are passing very regularly, with oncoming trucks often using the entire oncoming travel lane, so motorbikes have to ride in the “bike lane” sort of thing to the far right. Still, it was fabulous.

The Seated Buddha

As far as I could tell there are only two historic tourist sites in Nha Trang, and one of them is a Seated Buddha on a hill near the train station. I walked over there with low expectations, and those expectations were met. One problem with a long trip like this is the sites tend to repeat from one city to the next, so it’s hard to get excited about the prospect of seeing the 4th largest Buddha I’ve come across in the last week.

Anyway, I had plenty of time so I headed over there, and I was met out front by a group of students who claimed they were orphans who lived at the adjacent school as well. Two of them, each about 10 years old, decided to be my volunteer guides, and they began telling me about the orphanage. I told them that it sounded much nicer than where I grew up, since I knew they would soon be asking me for money, but it didn’t phase them a bit.

They explained a few things in surprisingly good English and then guided me halfway up the long staircase to a new Reclining Buddha, which is made of concrete to resemble the famous golden one in Bangkok that I’d seen 5 years before. I think they could sense that I wasn’t a softie with an open wallet, so they cut things short and gave me the pitch how their orphanage and school only operate on donations, with their hands out, of course. They assured me that they had to scurry back to a class right away.

I appreciated the information so far, so I gave them 10,000 dong, which is about 50 cents and quite a bit of money in this country, but they seemed almost offended by my meager offering. I guess the orphanage angle is good for at least 20,000 or 50,000 out of many tourists, but I figured they were lucky to get anything from me, and I was tempted to snatch it back based on their reaction.

I then headed alone up the rest of the steps to the Seated Buddha, and it looked just like other Seated Buddhas I’ve seen seen. The best part was the almost 360 degree views of the city, so I took quite a few photos from up there before I headed down again.

Halfway down the stairs there was a woman selling drinks and some souvenirs right next to the steps. I bought an enormous coconut that she carved up so I could drink the bland water inside. Unexplainably, she was also selling sombreros, which I haven’t seen before or since here in Vietnam.

Speaking of these mobile merchants, it’s one of the many things I love about this country. In spite of this being a nominally “communist” country, it’s more like there are no permits or regulations or rules of any kind. From what I hear it’s just a matter of a regular bribe to the local police and you can do anything you want. The upshot of this is you can walk no more than 100 feet in most areas and you’ll find someone selling cold water, sodas, beers, snacks, and sometimes even vodka. A cold beer usually costs around 75 cents whether it’s in a nice restaurant or from an old woman on the sidewalk out in front of the restaurant.

When I got all the way down I wasn’t at all surprised to find those same two kids who guided me working on some other tourists who’d shown up. They lied about having to go to class, the little bastards. I’m sure they make way more money doing that than taxi drivers do in a day.

The Cham towers

Those same people who built the My Son ruins that I saw near Hoi An also left some structures behind in Nha Trang. I decided to walk over to them before I knew I would later rent motorbikes, and there was some lovely scenery, and more lessons learned about Vietnam.

It was about 3 miles each way, and even though the weather was hot, I was in the mood for the walk. The real problem is that the sidewalks in this country are treated like something their grandparents once needed, but which are now crumbling and/or parking lots for motorbikes.

Even after four months in Vietnam I still can’t get used to it. The locals never walk anywhere. With the exception of a few older women carrying vegetables around on those scale-style basket things, the only people walking around are tourists. And since the sidewalks are crumbling and/or filled with parked motorbikes, you have to weave out into traffic maybe half the time. All of this makes a 3-mile walk feel like a 20-mile death march.

Nevertheless, I made it and it turned out that these Cham towers are at least as nice as the ones in My Son, and way easier to reach too. They were also larger so even if tourists were leaning against them you could still get a good photo. It also rained like crazy for part of the time I was there, but fortunately there was some shelter available, so the timing actually worked out fine since both long walks were rain-free.

The expat community

The only other somewhat interesting thing I came across was a very pleasant and small community of expats, mostly Brits, who seem to live in Nha Trang for 8 or 10 months per year, if not permanently. There are two bars, both called Guava, which are both owned and run by two Canadians from Vancouver. Since I was there for so long I actually became friends with many of the regulars and I am still tempted to go back at some point.

It’s a cheap and pleasant town with a nice beach so there is a lot to like as long as you don’t rely on the local economy to earn a living. You can rent a nice, furnished apartment there for around $400 per month, including broadband internet and other amenities. If things in Thailand get crazier then I might head back to Nha Trang for a couple months, or even just to break things up.

One small motivation for returning is that I have a bottle of Absolut vodka that literally has my name on it. The last Sunday I was there one of the Guava bars was holding a big BBQ to celebrate the opening of a local skateboard shop, and among the activities was a hot dog eating contest. When I first heard about it I predicted I would win, but later I wasn’t even sure I wanted to enter. As the huge American tourist I felt like the person written into the movie that you are meant to root against.

The BBQ itself was crowded and a lot of fun. I purposely hadn’t eaten anything the whole day, so I was a bit unhappy that the contest wasn’t until around 5pm, near the end of the day. I was still unsure I would even enter the thing, but next thing you know I heard Quinn (one of the owners) booming over the loud speaker that the contest wouldn’t start “until Roger was seated with the others.” So I made my way through the assembled audience toward the last empty seat at the table for 7 in the center of the main area. When I was getting close Quinn announced that I was “Roger, the ringer, from California.” Later on he told me he was pretty sure that a local guy was going to beat me, so I think I was meant to be the villain, but I sat down anyway.

Each contestant had 6 hot dogs of dubious quality and oversize buns in front of us. We had five minutes to eat as many as possible, and the one who ate the most would get the bottle of Absolut, which is like a $30 value even in Vietnam. I was introduced to the only local competitor, a guy named Nguyen, who was an average sized Vietnamese guy who evidently had won this exact contest every time they’d held it before. The other 5 competitors were a mix of expats and tourists, with only one of them being a large man.

I was hungry but I’d never practiced this before. The countdown was on and we started. The hot dogs actually went down really easily, but (as they say on the July 4th show) the buns are a bitch. Fortunately they gave us each a big glass of water, and I kept drinking a gulp between each bite, as this is the only way of getting the bun down quickly.

With less than a minute to go I was starting number five, and I looked over at Nguyen who was sitting next to me. He was eating as fast as he could, but he was also staring at me with eyes wide open as if he’d never seen anything like it before. Only later was I told that this was his first defeat, so I guess that’s what he was thinking about. I finished five and a half dogs, while he didn’t even finish his fifth one in time. So I won my first and probably only competitive eating competition.

Nguyen and everyone else were great about all of it, and it was a lot of fun, but I was leaving town soon so I left the bottle of vodka behind, and perhaps the bigger bummer was that I was now too full to eat any of the excellent barbeque that they’d prepared. Quinn even said that I could eat free BBQ as the contest winner, and I definitely could have eaten some, but I probably would have regretted it later.

Still, I am looking forward to coming back to Nha Trang at some point, and hopefully my bottle will still be there waiting for me.

Normally I will pay a premium to stay in a central location. I’ll be happier with a 1-star hotel in the city center instead of a 3-star hotel a ways out of town, even if they are the same price. I normally just don’t like staying in far-flung suburbs and feeling like it’s a major trek to reach the area that I’ve come to see in the first place, but in Vietnam, at least for me, I’m changing my mind on that.

I’ve heard lots of complaints from tourists to countries like this, and I’ve made some of those complaints myself, about the relentless offers from souvenir merchants and taxi drivers and god knows who else that is looking at you like a wallet on two legs. It seems to be a universal problem in countries where the tourists all have more money than 99% of the locals. Vietnam is definitely one of those countries, and evidently it’s possible to make an okay living hounding tourists, even though there are thousands of other people doing the exact same thing.

Hoi An’s unique old town

The specific deal with Hoi An is that it has this fairly large section near the river that looks like a Chinese fishing village of yore, and it’s so well preserved that the whole thing is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Many people describe that area as Disneyland-esque and that’s not too far off the mark, but on the other hand it all looks very authentic and it’s definitely not a brand-new recreation of a village so if anything Disneyland is built to look like places like this.

It really is beautiful, and another bonus is that for many hours on most days it’s free of motorized vehicle traffic. That you can walk through this area only joined by bicycles and other tourists is really lovely.

There are a few dozens restaurants in this old town area, plus another dozen or more right along the river that runs through town. The food in Hoi An is amazing, but we’ll get to that a bit later.

As far as I can tell, most of the people who dislike Hoi An are those who stayed right in or very near the old town, and most of the people who love it seemed to stay in the tourist/backpacker districts a bit outside of the historic area. I think the problem tends to be that those who stay in the historic area never leave it, since it’s where most of the attractions are, as well as more great restaurants than anyone could try on one trip. But those who stay a bit away from that are more or less staying in the “real Vietnam” so they get to experience both styles, and don’t get burned out so quickly.

There are excellent restaurants all over the place and in the 17 days I was there I probably only ate in the old town area maybe 10 times or so. I should also point out that I was working on my new website in my comfortable $10/night hotel room for much of the time, so I only did touristy things on maybe half of the days I was in Hoi An.

Hoi An is famous for its tailor shops

I’d read about this before I got to Hoi An, but it was still surprising to see how huge the industry is when I arrived. The city has 200 tailor shops that are ready to make you nearly anything you can think of in about a day, for far less than it would cost in a store. I read you can get proper business suits starting around $100, and shirts and dresses etc starting around $10.

Since I’m traveling with a fairly full backpack and I have no official home at the moment I really had no interest in having anything made for myself. The one upside for me is I could actually get something that fit me, which really isn’t possible in stores in Vietnam. I’m probably 8 inches taller than the tallest Vietnamese men I’ve seen, and about twice as wide too.

If you research the tailor shop topic you’ll find that there are many people who love their purchases as well as many people who feel ripped off by either being overcharged or getting seriously flawed and cheaply made garments. Evidently it’s yet another one of those things in Vietnam where you kind of have to take your chances and hope for the best.

The area where these 200 tailor shops is has maybe 600 or 700 businesses altogether, so you really can’t go more than half a block without seeing one, and a few streets are completely lined with them. A few of them make shoes instead, but most of them dealt with fabric and they all looked exactly alike from the outside.

It’s also clear that they don’t actually make the clothes in or near the shops, which kind of surprised me when I noticed this. I had imagined that there would be samples and books and fabric swatches in front and an army of sewing machines in the back, but it seems that these shops just take the orders and then subcontract to a local sweatshop that actually makes the thing. I walked by one of those sweatshops that’s door was open and inside I saw at least 10 people sewing away.

The closest I came to having something made was when I found a seamstress in the back of the food market and had her sew up the strap on my daypack that had seriously frayed and was a few days away from coming apart completely. She repaired it nicely, but it didn’t look as slick as I expected. She asked for $2 and I’m sure I could have bargained her down to $1 but I didn’t bother and I gave her 40,000 dong, which is about $2.20. From what I hear that is the typical daily wage in Vietnam, so she probably made as much in 10 minutes from me as she did the rest of the day.

Highlights of Hoi An

I’m already rambling too much and I haven’t even mentioned anything I did so I’m going to just hit the highlights below. Again, I was working much of the time I was in Hoi An so I probably could have done all these touristy things in about 5 days if I wanted to, but I’m glad I didn’t rush like that.

The awesome food of Hoi An

I’m planning on writing another whole post about food highlights of the country, so I won’t get too specific on some of that here. Suffice to say, Hoi An is the best food city in Vietnam, and among the best in Asia or in the world for that matter. It’s tropical and far enough south that it seems they can grow just about anything year round. The main food market is enormous and kind of a tourist attraction unto itself, so it has a weird combination of ridiculous souvenirs and fresh food.

Speaking briefly about the souvenirs, the single most popular thing you see on t-shirts is the phrase “Good Morning Vietnam” and that’s also the name of a chain of well-regarded Italian restaurants in this country. I guess it is one of the most famous things that uses the word Vietnam in it, so it’s better than t-shirts that just say “Vietnam War” on them. That war is called “The American War” here, by the way.

Back to the food, I’m not sure exactly why Hoi An is the good-food capital of Vietnam, and actually Hue, which isn’t far away, had great food too, but this place is in a league of its own. It could be that the city attracts more “cultural tourists” than most other nearby cities. Honestly the one city that Hoi An reminds me of is New Orleans. They don’t look much alike. It’s mostly that both cities are very touristy and yet very cool at the same time. They both have excellent food and that adds to the similarities.

One thing about Southeast Asia and food in general is that refrigeration, from what I’ve read, has only come to this area in the last 20 years or so. It’s hot as hell here nearly all the time so buying and running a refrigerator probably isn’t cheap, and for most things they don’t really need it anyway.

Imagine if there was a farmer’s market a few blocks from your house and everything there was in peak season all year round, and also everything was grown within 10 miles of the market, probably organic, and picked less than 24 hours before it went on sale. Also imagine that everything at the market was so cheap that it might as well be free. This seems to be the case in much of Vietnam, and definitely in Hoi An.

Another way of thinking about it is, if you were going to prepare a complicated dish that had 5 or 6 different vegetables and herbs in it, and you went to Whole Foods to get the best quality you could find, it might cost $10 or more. If you wanted to make the same thing here it might cost $1 for those same things, and they’d be at least a day or two fresher as well. This helps explain why the food here is so amazing and so cheap at the same time.

There are a couple of local dishes only made in Hoi An, namely a pork and noodle dish called cao lau, and an elegant shrimp dumpling dish called white rose. Legend has it that both are made only from water from a specific well, so it’s pointless trying to recreate them elsewhere. I tried both and really liked them, and I had cao lau on many occasions in fact. It’s a hearty dish that is topped with fresh greens, and a decent size portion costs between 75 cents and a dollar even at fancy places.

The banh mi sandwich incident

This might be my fondest memory so far in Vietnam, and it’s probably the best single story so far too. I actually wrote the whole thing on my new site, about the best banh mi sandwich in the world, so check that out and you can see all the photos and such.

The short version is on the show No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain they visited Vietnam on a memorable episode. Much of it takes place in Saigon, but about halfway in they fly to Danang for a short stay in Hoi An. Tony and his old French boss who has accompanied him visit the local market and have breakfast, and at some point someone tells them about the best place to get a banh mi sandwich there.

After breakfast they find the small sandwich stall and order one to share. The video of that segment is embedded near the top of the full story on my other site, and it’s 90 seconds well spent if you want to understand the story. The sandwich looks amazing so I had to look around to find this exact place.

On my second try I found it, and I had a sandwich that was really good, but not quite like the one on the show. I went back the following day and I had my iPhone with me, on which I had saved the video from the show. It was a different woman making the sandwiches this day, and it turned out this was the one in the video.

At first she asked me if this video was made by a friend of mine. Evidently her first thought was that this was just a home video of a friend, although she must have noticed the large camera, sound man, and producer along with the two on-camera guys. Anyway, this was the first time she’d seen this footage and she loved watching it. She called a friend over and had me play it again, and that went over well as you might expect.

In the following days I went back there a few more times and a couple of those visits she had me show the video to yet another nearby friend and I could tell how tickled she was by this. Starting on my second visit I got the ‘banh mi deluxe” version with the egg on top and they were awesome, plus only 75 cents each.

Visiting the My Son temple

The Cham people (I’d never heard of them either) lived here for like 1,500 years, only disappearing about 200 years ago, I believe. Their legacy seems to be mostly gone, but there are a few various temples, or ruins of temples, dotted around the countryside. The largest (I believe) and most famous of these are called My Son (pronounced ‘Mee Sen’) and they are about 30 miles outside of Hoi An. You can get a bus tour that takes you there, along with an “English speaking” guide for around $6, but then you have to pay $3 more to actually get into the My Son complex.

Of course I eventually did one of these tours, and it reminded me of how much I dislike packaged tours in that sense. A huge bus pulled up in front of my hotel a bit after 8am and then it stopped at about 10 other hotels in the area until every last seat was taken. The guide was a local guy who did speak English, but as usual it was hard to understand him much of the time, and beyond his prepared speeches it seemed like his English really tailed off quickly. He was a nice enough guy, though his presentation wasn’t really all that informative, partly because his accent was very thick so it was impossible to understand every word he said.

After about an hour since packing the bus full we arrived at the temple complex. We first had a 15-minute stop at a large souvenir shop that also had a restaurant inside, and these inevitable stops are nice as a bathroom break, but they also tend to be a big waste of time. The tour company gets about a 20% commission on any overpriced souvenirs that the group buys, so these shops are included on every single tour you can find, unless maybe it’s a high-priced tour through a posh hotel, but even then I bet they have to stop at these places.

Once we finally got to the temple at around 10am I realized that I probably should have done the early morning version. Not only was it hot and humid as could be already, but the way these ruins are laid out means that tour groups are literally crawling all over them all day, so pretty much any photo you might take is partly filled with other tourists posing for their own shots, or just climbing up and down the temples themselves. It’s a beautiful place that reminded me a bit of Tikal in Guatemala, though this is much, much smaller.

A British/Canadian guy I spoke to several times at my hotel told me he took the early morning version. That tour left at 5:30am, which is about an hour before dawn, so you get there as the sun is rising. The guy told me it was just he and another guy in a private car, and once at the ruins they were pretty much alone as well. On my bus trip we were treated only a little better than cattle, and the mass of fellow tourists at My Son pretty much ruined most of its charm as well.

I had originally paid only $6 and intended to come right back on the bus, but shortly after I boarded the guide convinced me that I should pay $3 extra to return by boat, with lunch included. This turned out to be a mistake.

The bus drove at least halfway back to Hoi An before we got to the boat. About two-thirds of the people on the bus also did the boat portion, so I was far from alone, but still it pretty much sucked. The lunch was a small plate of rice with a few vegetables and a scrambled egg on top, so it was maybe a 25-cent value by Hoi An standards, and also not very good.

The scenery on the boat was disappointing as well. It turns out it’s a wide and muddy river when you get outside of Hoi An, and from the boat you could only vaguely see rice fields on each bank. The weirdest thing about the trip for me was that a Chinese girl sitting right in front of me videotaped almost the whole boat ride. I feel sorry for her friends and family when she tries to get them to watch it later on.

Before getting back to Hoi An we stopped at another nearby island that is known for wood carving. In theory this would have been nice, but in reality our guide herded us directly into the “showroom” of one of these carving shops, where he’d obviously get a commission if anyone bought anything. The rest of our time on the island was spent going to two other nearly identical showrooms that were each only a few meters away from the first one, and then we were herded back onto the boat for another 10-minute cruise to Hoi An.

If you are going to Hoi An yourself, do the early morning trip to My Son, and skip the idiotic boat ride.

Enjoying the world’s cheapest beer

Since my new website is based on the prices of things for travelers, I felt obligated to investigate what seems to be the cheapest beer in the world. I mentioned “bia hoi (fresh beer)” in Hanoi, but there it’s more of a novelty than anything else. In Hoi An you can actually find a better version of the stuff offered up at some of the nicest restaurants in town.

It costs between 3000 and 5000 dong, which is between 16 and 26 cents per glass, and the stuff is served cold and it’s quite good. My favorite restaurant called Café 43 got a fresh keg of the stuff every morning and it would be polished off by that evening, often with my help.

I explained more about it in the article linked above so I won’t repeat it all here.

A cooking class

Another article I wrote for my other site is about taking a cheap cooking class in Hoi An. It seems that at least half the restaurants in the city offer a cooking lesson of some kind, almost all by appointment only. I’d read that many of them are half-day or even a full day, and those start at around $25 and go up from there. That’s definitely not a bad price for a 4-hour class, but when you are paying $10 a night for a nice hotel it seems like a bit much.

So I eventually discovered that Café 43 gave cooking lessons for $5 plus the cost of the dishes you prepare. I wrote the whole story and included loads of photos in that article linked just above in case you are interested. I’m now looking forward to a time when I have a kitchen again so I can make it for myself at home. Perhaps when I get to Bangkok I’ll rent an apartment in which I can give it a try, and it’ll be extra nice there since the ingredients will be easy to find and cheap too.

Renting a motorbike for a day

The last story I’ll relate about Hoi An was one of the highlights of my whole trip so far. Motorbikes rule the roads here but I normally prefer to walk anywhere I can. Unfortunately, the sidewalks here are almost always used for motorbike parking so walking often means doing so in the street, dodging a bit of traffic as you go.

You can rent motorbikes easily and cheaply here, but I never really had a good reason to do it, other than just cruising around for a day. So in Hanoi I did exactly that. For $5 I rented an automatic (manuals are only $3 per day) motorbike, along with a helmet big enough to fit my oversized noggin. The bike was really fast and powerful, even to the point that I didn’t dare riding near full speed even on the open road.

Hoi An is about 2 miles from a rather nice beach, and except for briefly seeing it as I rode in a taxi on the way in, I hadn’t seen it. So my first stop was the close beach and then a tour of some of the new resorts just a bit down from the public part of the shore.

I then drove down a dirt path that a really good SE Asia website said would lead me to a temple and a vegetable farm, but I never found those things. Still, it was really lovely to be free to zoom around and see anything I wanted after being in the town for so long.

After going back to my hotel briefly I started out again toward Marble Mountain, which I’d seen on the drive in, since it’s close to Danang where my train dropped me off. On the taxi ride to Hoi An the driver asked me if I wanted to stop at Marble Mountain to take photos and I said no. He stopped anyway, promising it was a free bonus on the ride, but of course he pulled up in front of one of those large souvenir depots, this one filled with marble statues and figures. I looked around for about 30 seconds and then used their restroom and I was back on my way, but in that short time I could clearly see this Marble Mountain was all about souvenirs.

So now on the motorbike I got directions from 3 different people about how to get there, and each said to go a different way. The 12-mile road I ended up taking was probably the fastest, but instead of going along the beach as I’d imagined I was on the main road that was basically one small village after another. This turned out to be very interesting since the villages probably get zero tourism so I could see what Vietnam is like when they are just selling things to each other instead of trying to sell them to tourists. It turns out it looks pretty much the same.

The road suddenly got wide and modern as I neared Marble Mountain, and when I was about a mile away a woman rode up along side me and asked where I was going. I told her I was headed to the mountain I could clearly see in front of me, and she offered to show me the exact way there. Her English was quite good so I already knew what was about to happen, but I appreciated the way she approached me offering to help so I went along with it.

She showed me a somewhat hidden road that took us to the base of the mountain, and then she waved me to park in front of what she admitted was her family’s marble store. She showed me where to take the best photos of the structures up on the mountain and then offered to show me where to go if I wanted to walk up the thing, but this was motorbike day so I was fine just taking photos from the base.

After that she insisted I take a look at the various statues and tchotchkes they had and it was all impressive. I explained to her that I’m traveling indefinitely with only a backpack so I can’t buy anything. That line doesn’t work on most merchants here and it didn’t work on her either. She showed me some very small items, including one that I rather liked.

Long story short, I ended up buying what could either be an incense holder or a toothpick holder (they have toothpicks everywhere in this country, no joke, and incense everywhere too) made of what appears to be white marble. I assume it is, since the mountain itself is supposedly a big marble mine of sorts. After a spirited negotiation that included me walking away twice, I ended up paying $5 for the thing. She told me it took her father a full day to make it, and even though that might be BS, the average wage here seems to be around $2 per day, so it’s possible.

After Marble Mountain I drove back to Hoi An along China Beach (the one that TV show was named after), which is the same route my taxi took when I first arrived. Interestingly, the long sandy beach is lined with a few international resort hotels, plus a whole bunch more being constructed currently. Evidently this China Beach area will soon be a fancy hotel area like Nusa Dua in Bali, although it remains to be seen how many people will want to spend $200 per night in Vietnam. There are definitely a lot of pricey and fancy hotels in each city, so it just might work.

Once I got back to Hoi An I looked at my map again and realized I had never seen what was south or west of the city so I set out along the main roads to check it out. I was kind of just driving for the sake of driving, but it was very nice. I stopped frequently to take photos of weird statues or signs or of rice fields that had really lovely colors.

It was also kind of interesting to see what basically amounts to the “suburbs” in Vietnam. On Google Maps you see a city and then a long road that leads to another town, and you might expect it to be empty in between. But in Vietnam it seems that almost all of these roads are actually lined with homes and shops so you almost never really feel in between towns. I’m sure in the rural parts of the country there are plenty of open spaces. From what I’ve seen out the train windows the country is more than half rice fields, and some of those are actually close to the city centers as well.

Eventually I felt like I’d seen everything I could see in the area so I brought the motorbike back to my hotel and gave the keys to the rental guy whose shop is only two doors away. With virtually no stoplights it really is wonderful and liberating to be riding along in such a beautiful country going at any pace you like. I now have a better appreciation for why people love to ride Harleys up and down the coast of California, and if they weren’t so dangerous I’d consider doing that myself some day.

After spending 17 days in Hoi An it felt like time to move on, so I took the train to Nha Trang, which is a beach resort city about 300 miles to the south, and is where I’m writing this now.

Let me begin by mentioning that I arrived on one of the night trains from Hanoi, and even though my night train experience going to and from Sapa was pretty good, this one was fairly miserable so I am going to take as few of them as possible in the future.

After Tet in Hanoi I had the choice of a bottom bunk in a 6-bed sleeper cabin one week after, or I could wait an entire week more to get the bottom bunk in a 4-bed cabin. I had been in Hanoi for quite a while already so I chose the earlier train and figured I’d be asleep for most of the journey anyway.

The train left Hanoi at 11pm, which seemed convenient as it would allow me to get to sleep shortly after we got underway, I hoped, and the tricky part was that it didn’t arrive in Hue until 11am the following day. Long story short, the train wasn’t nearly as smooth as the one to Sapa, so it was like trying to sleep on the back of a donkey cart going over a cobblestone road. Perhaps the upper bunks are better, but I doubt it.

The other problem is that with 3 bunks on each side of the cabin, there isn’t nearly enough room for me to sit up in a comfortable position, so I had my choice of being slightly curled up in a flat position, or standing up altogether out in the corridor. At least in the corridor you can see things passing by, but I wasn’t expecting the rail company to have sold extra tickets to about 15 people who were lying on the ground out there or sitting on their own plastic chairs. That meant that even going down the hall to use the bathroom meant stepping over and around a bunch of people who were trying to sleep.

Arriving in Hue

I got maybe 2 hours of sleep on that wild ride, but I felt okay as the train pulled into Hue late that morning. Although I was going to walk to the hotel where I wanted to stay, I got an offer from an actual taxi driver to take me there for only $2, which seemed like a good deal at the time. It’s probably almost two miles, since this hotel was on the other side of the main tourist district from the train station, so it turned out to be a bargain considering my big backpack and computer bag.

First impressions of Hue

I’m definitely not going to do anything close to a blow-by-blow description of what I did in Hue, partly because I really didn’t do all that much, as I got quite a bit of work done on the new website I’m developing, and partly because the attractions in Hue were pretty underwhelming anyway.

The city is on both sides of the wide and brownish Perfume River. It didn’t smell like perfume, but it didn’t smell bad at all either, so that much is fine. The most famous attraction is the Citadel, and that huge complex, plus the so-called Old City, are located on the south bank, while the tourist district and more residential areas are located on the north bank.

The main difference from Hanoi that I could immediately see is that Hue isn’t nearly as pretty as the capital. Hanoi at its heart appears to still be mostly intact from the French colonial era, but apparently Hue was the main northern base of the South Vietnamese side during the army, so it was bombed to bits first by the North Vietnamese when they took it over, and then later again by the American side when they took it back.

So as a result, most buildings are new, and really cheaply built, with no real sense of style at all. It’s a bit like one of those strip malls in a city without codes to make the buildings match in some way. So most buildings don’t look like what’s next door, were built within the last 30 years, and most of them seem to be falling apart already.

But on the other hand, the tourist district of Hue has a vibe that I really like. There are big corporate-type hotels that overlook the river, but on the other side of those is a really nice and well-defined pocket of cheaper hotels and businesses that cater to travelers. Even the similar tourist district in Hanoi feels like a hornet’s nest of activity with hundreds of thousands of locals always passing through, but in Hue it’s more peaceful so there is room to breathe.

I guess you could say it’s a bit that Hanoi is like Times Square and Hue is like Las Vegas. When in Times Square there are plenty of other tourists, but zillions of New Yorkers are whizzing by you and it is probably very intimidating if you don’t speak or read the language at all. With Hue being like Las Vegas, it’s more spread out and you only ever see tourists and people in the tourism industry, so it’s a bit easier to take. Oh, and there’s no legal gambling in Hue, so that’s where the analogy ends.

The food in Hue

As much as I liked the food in Hanoi and Sapa and even Halong Bay, it turned out that food in Hue is even better, and cheaper as well. The noodles are made from a different kind of flour and there are a few other fundamental differences, but it was mostly that they used more herbs and different vegetables, and everything seemed a bit fresher. Hue is like 400 miles south of Hanoi, and it’s warm or hot pretty much every day of the year, so I think they can plant anything at any time and it’ll grow well, unlike the more seasonal climate up north.

Since I spent 8 days there I had a chance to try out at least 12 or so different restaurants, and pretty much all of them were good. Main dishes start at around $1 but ones I had were usually around $2, and starters (like spring rolls) were around $1 each or even less, so I could have a wonderful meal and a few beers for around $5 total, including tax, no tipping.

The signature dish of the city is called bun bo Hue, which is just the Hue variation of the popular beef and noodles dish that is also popular in Hanoi. Sometimes it was served with a bowl of rice, a bowl of leafy greens, and the main bowl of beef and veggies, which you’d combine yourself in small quantities in a small bowl that was provided. Other times it all came together, but I quite liked it no matter how it was served.

Attractions in and around Hue

As mentioned, the big attraction in the city center is the Citadel, and I went to check it out on my second day there. This used to be the capital of Vietnam and I guess this was a city inside a fortress where the top people lived, but at this point there really isn’t much to see. There’s one preserved part that costs about $3 to enter, and it had a constant stream of tour groups going in, though I don’t think many of us knew what we were looking at. The guidebooks I’ve read warn that it’s not a very special attraction and they were right.

It’s quite spread out, plain looking, and slowly falling apart, just like many other things in this part of the world. I suppose if you had a particular fascination with the tribes that used to rule this area a couple hundred years ago then this would be meaningful, but if not, the site doesn’t really stand up on its own.

A couple days later I hired a cyclo driver to take me to the main market nearby and then take me on a tour of the parts of the Citadel complex I didn’t see on foot. The place is almost all residential and commercial now, so most of it just looks like a pleasant-enough Vietnamese neighborhood.

The river cruise from hell

The other main thing to do in Hue is take a cruise along the Perfume River that stops at 6 or 7 temples and pagodas, and with only a couple days left in the city I finally did it.

It costs $5, not including entrance to a few of the sites along the way, and it includes lunch so it’s not much of a financial risk.

I was picked up from my hotel, not on the bus I was promised, but by a motorbike. There’s a strict helmet law in the whole country now, and the “guest helmet” my driver handed me fit like OJ’s shrunken glove. It sort of covered the top part of my head, but in a real accident it probably would have flown off long before my head hit the pavement, or maybe even stayed on and wedged into a hard surface in a way that caused more damage than not having a helmet at all. The driver and the guy from my hotel both agreed that it fit just fine. Fortunately it was about a 400-meter ride to the boat, so I could have walked there in like 5 minutes had I known.

I was one of the last on the boat, and I was disappointed to discover that this cruise would take place on a double-hulled “dragon boat” that on the inside was literally nothing more than a flat surface where passengers could choose a loose plastic chair and then sit wherever you could fit. It was really hot and humid already even at 8:30am when we set out, and it would only get worse.

Our first stop came after only about 10 minutes, and it was a martial arts school that we had to pay extra to see their demonstration. I went in and it was worth the $1 or so, but not much more.

The next stop was a really interesting temple sort of thing, but the problem was that our guide was a local whose English was basic and hard to understand, so he never really bothered trying to explain anything in depth. One thing I’ve learned here is that native English speakers (Americans, Brits, Canadians, Aussies etc) struggle to understand Vietnamese speaking English, and everyone else finds it pretty much incomprehensible. Most of the people on my tour were Germans or French or Israelis and whatnot, so for them it was almost like not having a guide at all.

The next stop was about an hour away, and it turns out the Perfume River gets even less scenic when you get out of Hue. And the boat moves slowly so there was almost no wind to help perspiration evaporate, so it just got hotter and more uncomfortable as we went.

The next pagoda thing was also quite nice, as was the one after that, but honestly with so little explanation it doesn’t have much meaning at all and gets old quick.

After that we were served the included lunch on board the boat, and it consisted of a few pieces of tofu, cabbage, and carrots, on a small plate of fried noodles. It wasn’t bad, and is probably the sort of thing the locals have for lunch every day, but its street value would have been about 40 cents and I’d rather have a kick-ass $2 meal.

At my lunch table I met a young couple from Bristol, England and a Dutch guy who did logistics at a poultry plant in a part of the Netherlands I’d never heard of, so it was social enough, but still pretty basic.

After lunch we were sent off to another huge temple complex, and this one was the grandest of all, though still had almost no meaning attached to it for most of us on the tour. I read that pretty much all of these things we were seeing were built by low-level rulers about 150 years ago as vanity projects, so it’s all pretty new when compared to the fact that Hanoi is celebrating its 1,000th birthday this same year.

From there we boarded a bus to our next few temples, and the description of one of them sounded so horrible that everyone on the bus literally voted to skip it once we pulled up front. The guide told us on the way there that it was the hottest single place in Vietnam that day since it was 100% concrete and way up on a hill, plus you had to climb like 200 stairs just to get to the front entrance. “So who wants to go inside this one,” he asked, “anyone, no?” Okay, and on we went to the next one, which was near a village where we got to see conical hats and incense being made.

I really like incense, and I love that they always have like 20 sticks burning at each of the temples, so I was psyched to see how it was made. The demonstration was short and concluded with a strong pitch to buy incense, but it was still interesting to me.

I didn’t go inside the final temple thing, partly because we had to pay for each one ourselves a la carte, and they were mostly around $3 each, but I was also tired and burned out after 7 hours or so in the draining heat. I was pretty happy when we were back on board the bus headed for Hue again, and even happier when we arrived about 15 minutes later.

The bottom line

As mentioned near the top, I actually quite liked the vibe in Hue and it had a kind of beachy, vacationy feel to it, being set alongside a wide river, and the food was fantastic. But the “attractions” weren’t much to write home about at all, and even though I had read that they were underwhelming in my guidebook, I feel like I have to do the main ones anyway. It’s not like you can go to a city around the world from your home and then brag about how you skipped the main sites because you heard they weren’t all that great.

That’s one thing about traveling to new places like this. I end up doing many things that I’ve heard aren’t all that great ahead of time. I actually do skip quite a few things if they sound boring to me, but I try to at least give the most famous and popular sights in each city the benefit of the doubt. Once in a while I’m pleasantly surprised, though usually they are about what you are expecting them to be. I just like seeing for myself, as long as they don’t cost too much.

In case you haven’t even heard of Halong Bay, it’s a bay that’s about 100km from Hanoi that is filled with almost 2,000 small islands, most of which are limestone. As you can see in the photos on this page, they are mostly tall and sticking out of the water in a pattern not seen many other places on earth. Also, the weather in the area seems to make the bay either misty or foggy nearly every day of the year, so most photos you’ll see have a slightly magical feeling, similar to the way that most photos of Machu Picchu in Peru show clouds below the city on the mountain’s peak.

Getting there from Hanoi

My final week in Hanoi (waiting for the post-Tet craziness in long distance travel to settle down) was actually quite cool so I timed my overnight trip for the warmest day of the week, which happened to be the day before my train to Hue would leave.

It’s possible to see Halong Bay as a day trip from Hanoi, but that means climbing on a bus around 8am and getting back to Hanoi around 12 hours later, with 8 of the hours in between sitting on the bus itself. That wouldn’t be too fun, and the overnight cruises are as ridiculously cheap as the hotels in Hanoi anyway, so of course I chose to spend the night on the bay.

In case you are curious about the details of how the cruises work and whatnot, I’ve written a very long article (with photos) on my new travel site called Halong Bay Cruise: prices, photos, and a review. That article is really meant to help people who are in the process of choosing a cruise themselves, so I’ll put a more basic version here along with my best photos.

Two days and one night on Halong Bay

After doing quite a bit of research I decided to opt for a 3-star cruise, and I paid $68 for a trip that supposedly would be less crowded, fancier, and have better food than the 1-star trip that I could have booked for around $45. Both those prices include the infamous “single supplement” of $15. Had I wanted to take a risk of sharing a room with a stranger I could have saved the $15, but this was my first ever cruise and I didn’t want it ruined by some chain-smoking snorer.

A bus picked me up in front of my Hanoi hotel (the wonderful Prince II in the Old Quarter) and four hours and a stop at a big overpriced souvenir warehouse later, we arrived in Ha Long City around noon. My boat from Cristina Cruise had 9 cabins and a maximum capacity of 24 people, but we only had 11 passengers and a crew of 5, including our guide (a local guy whose name is tough to pronounce so he asks people to call him “Lucky”.)

The boat is big enough that it can’t pull right up to the dock, so we first load into a small tender, which then takes us out to our main boat and then is tied alongside the main boat for the rest of the trip.

Once on board the main ship we are assigned our cabins and then served lunch before the ship even started its engine. Now, I had been eating really good meals in Hanoi restaurants for a couple weeks by then, with main dishes averaging around $2 to $3 each, and the lunch that was served on board was freshly cooked and probably would have been worth $10 to $15 by comparison. It was an almost never-ending series of shared dishes that the six of us at my table would divvy up on our own plates. There were pork and chicken dishes, plus octopus and a whole sautéed fish, in addition to quite a few rice, noodle, and veggie courses.

The boat got underway and about an hour later we arrived in the most famous and densely packed part of the bay, and the scenery was stunning in every direction. I’d been taking photos starting once we were moving, but most of those shots are pretty weak compared to the main event that we’d now reached.

Activities in the afternoon

In addition to the bus from Hanoi, the cruise itself and all the meals, these trips include several afternoon activities. There’s a trip through something called Surprise Cave, followed by optional kayaking and swimming. It was too cold for swimming that day, but a few people on my trip did the kayaking while the rest of us hung around on a pier in one of the floating villages. But the highlight was Surprise Cave, which would probably be constantly packed if it were in the US and even cost like $15 to get in.

You walk up about 140 steps before you enter and then it’s down and up stairs while you follow one approved path through three main “rooms” in the cave. The place is lit with different colored filters and it’s amazingly well done. There are a few other caves in this bay, but evidently this is the best one so I was lucky that it was on our agenda.

Dinner and karaoke

Back on board after the various activities, we had dinner that was basically a repeat of lunch except with more of an emphasis on deep-fried things. Again the food was delicious and abundant. It was a nice treat after a couple weeks in Hanoi and Sapa, since portions in this part of the world are more sensible and less American.

After dinner we got to do karaoke by the ship’s bar. Of the 11 passengers, 6 of them (including me) were foreigners and the other 5 were actually Vietnamese people. None of us foreigners wanted to sing but several of us were interested in listening.

The whole thing turned out to be far more tame than you might expect. I recorded the video below of Lucky, our guide, singing a local English-language hit (I first heard this song in the taxi on my way from Hanoi Airport when I first landed, and it seems to be originally sung by someone from this area, in English). All the other songs that the local people performed were in Vietnamese, so it was just about as odd and exotic as you’d expect.

Apparently karaoke continues to be wildly popular in Asia, including Vietnam, and having a good voice is not a requirement to join in and feel comfortable.

The next day

After a pretty good night’s sleep on the most comfortable bed I’d slept on in the country so far, we had breakfast at 7:30am, and it was only toast and mini omeletes, but still pretty good and plentiful enough.

We were asked to pack and check out of our cabins by 9am so they could clean and prepare them for the next day’s guests. I guess this is typical of cruises in general, where they don’t want to waste a day in the harbor if they don’t have to, so they keep the schedule tight and only stop in the harbor long enough to move one group off and another on board.

I was hoping that we might have some interesting morning lighting to contrast with the hazy mist the day before, but it was pretty much identical all morning. Still, the scenery we witnessed during the 90 minutes or so of cruising on a different loop back to the harbor was stunning nonetheless.

The bottom line

Especially for the money, it’s an amazing bargain. These cruises are probably the single most popular thing for visitors to Hanoi, and I felt it all lived up to the hype. Seeing all those islands coming out of the mist was really breathtaking, and something I doubt I’ll ever forget, especially since I took nearly 200 photos.

I’d read that there really aren’t any must-see attractions in Vietnam’s capital, at least in the sense that the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and Christ the Redeemer statue are must-see attractions in Paris, New York, and Rio de Janeiro. As far as I could see, that turned out to be true, but of course in a city of 6 million people that has been the area’s capital under many different rulers, and that was also celebrating its 1,000-year anniversary, there are at least a few worthwhile things to see in Hanoi.

The week before Tet vs. the week after Tet

Tet, as you probably know, is the Vietnamese version of lunar new year, and the country goes wild for it. I arrived about 10 days before the big day, and after my side-trip to Sapa, I was back for the holiday and then for another week afterward. As previously described, Hanoi is a complete madhouse as Tet approaches, since each person is buying new things (like clothes and shoes) to make the new year as happy and as lucky as possible.

And then starting on Tet day itself, the city gets relatively quiet, and it seems that about two-thirds of the businesses close down for the whole following week. That part seemed nice to me, and there were enough choices among tourist restaurants and small shops to keep visitors happy. A few more businesses seemed to open up every day, so it felt like an insane asylum slowing coming back to life.

The problem with just wandering around Hanoi randomly

As I think I mentioned before, there really are no pedestrians in Hanoi, at least not local pedestrians. Honest to god, every single person scoots around on a motorbike or, if they are unlucky, a bicycle. The only people actually walking more than just a few steps at a time are tourists and old ladies (almost never old men) carrying those balanced stick carrier things.

The result of this is we tourists stand out like sore thumbs even more than we otherwise would. Being a “well-fed” Westerner that is over 5’6” tall already makes you a target for a seemingly infinite number of xe om (motorbike taxi) or cyclo (bike taxi) drivers who are constantly calling out to you, but when you are also the only person on foot within a sea of motorbikes, there is just no hiding.

After my first three days of this I was still finding it quite stressful. I have no problem saying “no” and/or ignoring people making offers, but when you have to do it literally every few seconds for as long as you are out and about, it gets old fast. So I discovered that wearing ear buds and listening to something pleasant on my iPod was a great solution. I still got constant pitches, but if I mostly looked down as I walked it became much easier to just tune the whole thing out.

Still, you can see why a person wouldn’t want to just randomly wander the streets like you might do in New York or Amsterdam, so I picked my spots and usually did one touristy thing each day, spending most of the rest of my time trying out dining and drinking opportunities, or just hanging out in my fancy-but-small hotel room in the Old Quarter.

So here’s a report of some of those highlights:

Water Puppet Theater

I’d heard good things about this combination puppet show/live music performance, and with tickets being only $3 for the good seats, I decided to check it out, even though I heard it was best for children. I went to buy a reserved ticket early in my Hanoi stay and I asked for one ticket for the 2:30pm performance (there are about 6 shows each day). The crabby old woman manning the ticket both told me the 2:30 show was sold out, presumably because she wanted me to buy a ticket for a later show instead.

But I had plans later, so I just thanked her and started walking away, and then she started calling out to me like we were haggling in a souvenir market or something. I came back and she said she had a ticket for that show, and I pulled out a 100,000 dong note (about US$5) to pay for the 60,000 dong ticket, and she insisted I pay with smaller bills instead. In case you haven’t spent much time in these so-called developing countries, everyone always wants you to pay with small bills.

If I’m buying a 10,000-dong bottle of water then I know better to try to pay with a 100,000-dong note, but this was a damn 60,000-dong ticket, and this was a big cashier booth in a big and famous theater that sells these tickets all day long. In this case I didn’t have smaller bills anyway, so once again I just marched on down the street. Because of this (and the fact that it’s most recommended for children), I never went back. Screw that Water Puppet Theater and that old lady!

Hoa Lo Prison (the Hanoi Hilton)

Especially since this might actually be the most famous Vietnamese thing still in Hanoi (since Hanoi Jane Fonda lives in the safety and comfort of the USA), it was actually at the top of my list. It was a relatively short walk from my hotel, and only 10,000 dong (50 cents) to get in.

I’d read that most of the former prison was demolished so they could build a glass skyscraper on the lot, and that is all true, though enough of the prison remains to get the idea. It only took me about 30 minutes to walk through and see the exhibits, and along the way I saw an American man who probably served in Vietnam (and maybe even in the prison itself) checking it out as well. I’ve heard that it’s a popular stop for Vietnam vets in Southeast Asia, and I can see why.

The one thing I kept thinking about is that old saying that “the winners get to write the history books.” In this case, which is a rare one, the opponents of the USA were the winners so all the displays were wildly slanted propaganda, which I’m sure is also exactly what they teach kids in school as well.

Interestingly, only a couple small sections were anti-US propaganda, and most of it was anti-French propaganda. A plaque in front described the way the French (who were running things in the late 1800s when the prison was built) destroyed a thriving craft village in order to build the prison. Inside it described how the French tortured and killed the Vietnamese revolutionaries who were prisoners there until the early 1950s. A real guillotine was one of the more sobering displays.

The next section was a collection of photos of various people and groups demonstrating and protesting the war, which seemed fair enough, even though of course they don’t mention that to this day the locals aren’t allowed to protest anything themselves (or even use Facebook).

Then near the end you get to the section devoted to the US pilots who were shot down in the area and kept at the “Hanoi Hilton.” John McCain was famously one of them, and his sworn accounts of torture and ill treatment don’t match at all with the photos on display there. The prisoners are shown having volleyball games, receiving gifts for Christmas, enjoying cook-outs, and generally being treated like they were on a cruise ship. The only thing missing was Isaac, your bartender, pointing at you with both hands in the background before he mixes them up a pina colada.

I’m glad the thing is smaller now than it was, as it made for a fascinating and quick visit.

Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum

In the tradition of such communist leaders as Lenin and Mao, Vietnam’s favorite guy is still on display in the capital, in spite of him being dead since 1969. They call him Uncle Ho (no joke) and he seems to be as popular as ever.

The mausoleum was about a 1.5-mile walk from my hotel, which turned into almost double that since I got lost at first. I reached the place just a bit before its 5pm closing time, and I joined up in the line of (mostly foreign tourists) who were there to pay our respects. The rules out front and in the guidebooks say no short pants, no laughing, and definitely no photos, so I was careful about all of those things.

I didn’t know what to expect from such a strange sounding attraction, but heck, it’s free to enter and I had time to kill. The line shuffled along at about half normal walking speed until we actually started going up the front steps and entered the building. Everyone just walks in line, and the huge number of uniformed military guards in the area discourage you from any possible hi-jinks.

Inside the building the line goes up another flight of stairs, and suddenly you feel some very refreshing air conditioning. It was a steamy February day so I appreciated the AC as much as Uncle Ho probably did. Around one more corner and you are in the room with him. Visitors are about 20 feet from his waxy-looking body, so you can’t really see many details. Evidently they close this thing down for 2 months late each year as the body is sent to Russia for maintenance.

You enter near his head and walk down to the end of the room for a left turn, and then another left turn so you can see his other side, and you are done after about 20 meters total. A family in front of me slowed down for a quick moment and one of the guards tapped them to keep moving. I think that’s mostly so the line itself keeps going rather than them being afraid of a security breach.

Honestly, I spent maybe 4 minutes inside the building, with less than half that inside the corpse room. Especially since it was free and air-conditioned, I didn’t mind much, but still you just never expect to be done so quickly at a major attraction.

Once outside the mausoleum you can walk straight ahead to the Ho Chi Minh Museum, but I wasn’t really interested in that so I just skipped it and walked back to my hotel.

Huu Tiep Lake (aka B-52 Lake)

One of Hanoi’s weirder attractions is something that doesn’t seem to be in all the guidebooks, but it interested me nonetheless. Evidently a B-52 named Rose 1 was shot down over Hanoi in late 1972, and it crashed into a lake in a residential area. The locals just left the wreckage sit exactly where it is, so it’s now a minor tourist attraction.

This was quite a walk from the Old Quarter, and I might have skipped it altogether except I was feeling energetic on the main Tet day, and I figured I would barely be hassled my drivers and merchants on such a solemn holiday. Well, the city actually turned out to be way busier than I had guessed.

My understanding was the Tet itself is spent with your immediate family, and later days are spent with other relatives and then friends and such, but in reality it seems like half of Hanoi spent Tet riding around on their motorbikes just like it was any other day. Many of them were dressed up, some even in suits, but traffic was crazy, though most cyclo drivers weren’t out, making it a bit easier to deal with for a foreign pedestrian.

Not only was it a long walk, but the map on my iPhone couldn’t really convey what I was in for. When I got close it turned out that the roads I needed to take were no more than tight alleys, with enough room for me and one passing motorbike, but not two. There was plenty of traffic out there and I wasn’t even sure I was going in the right direction, so it was a weird feeling as I wound deeper and deeper into a suburban residential neighborhood.

But just where the map said it would be, there it was. It’s not actually a lake, but more a drainage pond of stagnant water that takes up a city block and is surrounded by buildings. I was the only tourist there during that time, and from the looks of things, maybe for the whole day or week. It’s definitely off the beaten path.

The amazing thing to me was what a lovely setting it is in general. There’s bright-green algae covering much of the “lake” and really interesting French colonial buildings surrounding it. I took about 25 photos and they are some of my favorites from the whole city, mostly for the colors.

Shortly after I arrived an old man came out of one of the buildings and I’m pretty sure he was trying to invite me inside for food or a drink. I’d read that it’s very lucky to have a “wealthy” guest as your first guest in the new year, and though I’m not wealthy, my camera probably cost half as much as his house, so I guess I qualified.

Unfortunately I couldn’t understand him at all, as he spoke no English at all and I still no zero Vietnamese. For all I know he was threatening to call the cops, but I do think he was actually inviting me in, which was nice, but I decided it would be too awkward to attempt to accept his invitation, especially since I couldn’t confirm what he was actually inviting me for.

The walk back to my hotel was less stressful than the walk there, and that’s how I spent my Tet.

Other attractions

There are a few other notable things in Hanoi, including the lovely Hoan Kiem Lake that is just south of the Old Quarter, and I checked out a bunch of them, but none are really worth mentioning here.

I had part of a day to kill between the time I checked out of my hotel and before the night train to Sapa left, so I went to see Avatar in 3D at a theater complex in a modern mall. Seeing the mall itself was quite interesting. The movie ticket was $5 and the mall was fairly posh and filled with young people, so Hanoi isn’t really the impoverished city that I was expecting. There are definitely people making US$10 and under, but honestly nearly every one of them seems to own a new $700 motorbike, so things aren’t all that bad for everyone.

And just in case you were wondering, I was the only tourist in the theater, and the Vietnamese seemed to be rooting for the noble Na’vi savages and against the “American corporation” just as you might expect.

When I first arrived in Hanoi it was hot (in the high 80s) and really humid, so the weather combined with the general insanity of the place made this “colonial French mountain station” called Sapa sound extra nice. My arrival in Hanoi was a little over a week before Tet (lunar new year) begins, and the pace of the place is a bit hard to take, especially right off the plane from Portland.

To give you an idea of what Hanoi before Tet is like, imagine you are living in a storefront in Times Square with people racing by at all hours. Now imagine that you don’t understand what a single one of them are saying or doing, and that still about 10% of them are constantly calling out to you to hire a motorbike taxi, or buy some used books, or a Vietnamese army hat. As nice as Hanoi is, it was a little overwhelming, especially at first.

Off to Sapa

So I booked a night train in a sleeper car for US$25, and this was in a so-called private car that is nicer than the state-owned carriages that cost a bit less. The train left Hanoi at around 9pm and arrived in Lao Cai around 6am the following morning. Lao Cai is on the Chinese border and it’s at the base of the eastern Himalayan mountain where Sapa is located. The hotel in Sapa I’d reserved a room at had a van waiting for me and a handful of other passengers there at the station, so after about an hour driving up the mountain we arrived.

The main draws of Sapa, as far as I can tell, are the mild mountain weather (Hanoi is steamy most of the year), the wonderful scenery, and the small craft villages that surround the town. I had a very pleasant 2.5 days in Sapa, but I have mixed feelings about two of those three things.

The scenery in Sapa

The town is nestled in between these sharp and forested peaks, so the views really are wonderful in pretty much every direction. The downside is that the area is famous for its hazy weather, which is pretty much always present, except when it’s completely fogged in. It was really nice to see in person but I didn’t really think it would translate into photos all that well, especially by an amateur photographer such as myself.

Scanning my photos I’m actually pleasantly surprised by how well many of them turned out. This is my new DSLR but I don’t know how much that had to do with it.

The Sapa crafts and the town itself

Here’s where things went a bit sour for me. Hanoi, as I described above, is so frantic that I was really looking forward to spending a bit of time in a place where thousands of people weren’t constantly scrambling around. Be careful what you wish for, because in Sapa, which has a population of around 25,000, I think, it felt like every single person in town was either a tourist, like myself, or someone trying to sell crafts to tourists. I’m not exaggerating when I say that at any given moment on the street the number of salespeople to tourists was about 5 to 1.

These water buffalo were on their own, just cruising back home

Without anything else going on in the town (quite a few businesses were closed in preparation of Tet), I’d walk out the front door of my hotel and a group of traditionally dressed mountain women would race over toward me, shoving embroidered pillowcases and wallets in my face. They are relentless, and since there were so few tourists in town at the moment, I couldn’t really blame them for being aggressive like that.

Here’s how the conversations always went:

Them: You buy from me?
Me: No.
Them: Later?
Me: No.

That exact exchange took place about once every minute as long as I walked around the city. And that is exactly why I mostly stayed in my hotel during most of my visit. I’ve encountered this sort of thing in many places on my travels before, and it seems that many tourists are too polite to say they won’t buy “later” so the merchant uses that as leverage the next time they meet, which will be sooner than the tourist usually thinks.

This sort of thing is sadly common, where the financial divide between locals and tourists is so great that the locals pretty much scare off tourists. Again, I can’t really blame most of them, but it does cast a bit of a shadow over visiting places like this.

My normal rule when living out of a backpack for an extended period of time is that I don’t buy anything, ever. If I were only here for two weeks I’d actually buy quite a few trinkets from these people, but I don’t want to carry a small carved aluminum box with me for months just because it only cost US$2.

I did actually buy one thing though. For around US$2.50 I’m now the proud owner of this local Jew’s harp-like thing that sounds exactly like the opening bars of the Globe Trekker (formerly Lonely Planet) theme song. It comes in a decorative tube that is about the size and shape of a fancy pen.

Hotel was wonderful but the local sites weren’t much

The best part of my stay in Sapa was the Cat Cat View Hotel where I was staying. My room was US$20 per night, and even though parts of it were a little rough around the edges, it would probably cost $300 per night if it were in the mountains of Hawaii.

A huge common balcony was just in front of my room, and the wonderful scenery surrounded it in every direction. A surprisingly good restaurant/bar was just a staircase away (my room was on the 7th floor and it was on the 8th floor), and there you could get good and cheap food and drinks pretty much all hours of the day. I ate there many times and enjoyed the views from the privacy of this resort-like hotel.

A walk to nearby Cat Cat Village

Most of the sights in the area were to be arranged as part of organized tours, as I found out, and they seem to be set up for private parties, so as a solo traveler I’d have to pay for the whole thing myself and go alone (with the guide). I skipped those and instead I did the one thing that is walkable from Sapa, which is a stroll to nearby Cat Cat Village.

Once I set out on the road out of Sapa that goes to Cat Cat, I was immediately badgered by (xe om) motorbike taxi drivers who wanted to take me down the hill. I heard that it was only about 1.5 miles, and it was downhill, so I refused. But one in particular, who called himself Nokia and had that name scrolled on his helmet, just kept following me. I eventually told him I might be interested in a ride back up.

Walking down this steep mountain was pleasant enough. I had to pay an entry fee of about one dollar, and then a bit farther down the road you switch from a steep road to an even steeper set of staircases. Long story short, it’s like walking about 1,000 feet in elevation down a mountain, and then walking down about 50 (no joke) flights of stairs, except the stairs are uneven, jagged, and have no hand rails.

Continuing down the stairs I would occasionally pass a crude house-like structure built along the side, and inside about half of them was someone wanting to sell me craft items. I kept going and going, and when I finally reached a small and unspectacular waterfall and a few “shops” at the bottom I realized that this was the so-called village. It was interesting to see, but I can’t say I’d recommend it to anyone, especially considering it’s so steep and a bit dangerous as well, and that’s in good weather.

Once I finally got back to the road portion of the loop, which is back up a steep path and quite a few more staircases, I saw Nokia the xe on driver waiting for me, just as I expected. The weather was sunny and around 70F so it might have been a pleasant walk back up, but this is in the mountains and the thinner air already had me gasping a bit once I started back up, so I ask Nokia how much for a ride back up. He said 100,000 dong (about $5) and I began walking away, so we quickly settled on 50,000 dong, and I had my first (and so far only) motorbike ride here in Vietnam.

It was well worth it. The distance is no problem but with the elevation my heart probably would have exploded about halfway up, so $2.50 was a fair price to avoid that and return to my hotel looking fresh as a spring morning instead of covered in sweat and barely able to move.

The town is nothing special

As I hinted at above, there isn’t much to the town of Sapa itself, except for a very busy public market, where locals trade food of all kinds plus general household items in the town square. I’ve seen similar markets dozens of times before, and while they do make for good photographs, the problem is that it’s a bit rude to take a snapshot of a poor merchant and then just walk away without buying anything. I took very few photos as a result.

The train back to Hanoi

And so, about 60 hours after I arrived, I was back at Lao Cai waiting for the train back to Hanoi. It was a pleasant few days, marked by especially nice weather, and it was very cheap as well so I am glad I did it. But otherwise I think a person can come to this region and skip Sapa without feeling too cheated about it.

I hear they have to buy certain things, like new shoes for good luck in the new year, as well as various decorations and food items to prepare for the big holiday. And raising prices to try to accumulate more money for Tet is accepted and normal.

So I got to Hanoi about 10 days before Tet, and the city feels like a complete mad house to me, with people racing around in every direction at all hours of the day. The problem for me is that I don’t know if that’s close to normal or quite unusual. As I write this I’m in the mountain resort town of Sapa and it’s quite mellow here. When I get back to Hanoi on Friday morning it’ll be 2 days before Tet begins, and I’m told that by Saturday most everything closes down and the city becomes a ghost town for at least 3 or 4 days. I purposely timed it to leave this week and then see the place again during this “ghost town” phase, but once again I’ll have no idea what normal days are like.

After all the craziness I’ve seen, I feel like I owe it to myself to see the nearly empty version of it, even though I’ve been told it might be a minor struggle to find places to buy food and drinks, at least at normal prices.

Hanoi for me so far

I’m staying in the Old Quarter, which is the historic district full of interesting architecture (though admittedly a bit run down as well), and the traffic of infinite motorbikes and a few cars mixed in makes it feel like pandemonium at every hour of the day. Old timers say that 15 years ago it was 50 bikes to one motorbike, and now it’s pretty much the exact opposite ratio.

The only pedestrians are my fellow tourists, and the occasional woman carrying two balanced trays of local produce. Aside from that, it’s almost 100% motorized vehicles, nearly all of those being motorbikes. The thin sidewalks in the Old Quarter are used as motorbike parking, so walkers have to walk right with the traffic in the street. It doesn’t really feel dangerous, until you have to cross the street.

Near the lake in the Old Quarter

I had heard and read about this before so this wasn’t surprising, but it’s still amazing to see in person. There is literally no traffic control (stop lights, stop signs, traffic cops) of any kind in the Old Quarter, so motorbikes just drive ahead and carefully weave through cross traffic or other obstacles (like pedestrians). If you wait for a break in the traffic to cross you might be waiting all day, so the key is to just wait until stepping out a few steps looks safe, and then go. After that you stare into traffic and move forward a step or two at a time. The key is to NEVER step backwards, as drivers are used to people crossing this way and they’ll drive around you as long as you move in a predictable pattern.

In a way it’s fun, but in another way it’s stressful and terrifying. I’ve been told that an average of 5 people die in traffic in Hanoi each day, though I have no way of confirming that stat. It’s a city of 6 million people so on any given day the odds are with you, but still this is a terrible and uncivilized system that seems to have gotten this way incrementally so no one involved ever noticed it because it came on slowly to them. In a way it makes me really appreciate European-style planning. If they saw something like this coming they’d make motorbike licenses hard to get and build streetcars and buses to carry people around.

The food is great, and cheap

I’ve always liked Vietnamese food, which is one reason I wanted to come here. The signature dish is pho, which is a soup with rice noodles and vegetables, plus beef, pork, or chicken if you please. It’s served at all hours of the day, and evidently is most popular for breakfast. You can get a modest bowl of the stuff at a sidewalk stall on nearly any block in the city for around US$1, but that means eating it while sitting on a tiny plastic stool surrounded by locals staring and laughing at you. Fortunately there are plenty of small restaurants catering to Westerners, so for only a bit more money you can eat in surroundings that are more comfortable for tourists.

Bowl of pho for breakfast at a proper restaurant

One restaurant that I went to did have dog on the menu, along with scores of non-canine options, but I hear that pet-eating is quite rare here and only practiced by a small minority of locals, and generally not only for poverty-related reasons. Also comforting to me is the fact that they seem to use pretty good cuts of meat in the meat dishes, at least the ones where tourists usually eat. I remember being in Hong Kong and when you’d order beef you’d get hooves or knuckles or various unidentifiable organs. Chicken in Hong Kong meant heads or that butt thing and whatnot. But here they serve desirable cuts that are exactly what you hope for.

Beer is cold and easy to find

At the top of my list of beverages to try is what they call “bia hoi” (fresh beer), which is served at sidewalk “cafes” around the city, with one famous corner in the Old City known as Bia Hoi Corner, since 3 of these places are famously competing facing each other. The downside is that you have to sit on those same tiny plastic stools, but particularly on Bia Hoi Corner, there are plenty of other tourists there so it’s not quite such an ordeal. So far I’ve only managed one glass of the stuff, and then they ran out for the day.

It seems that this “fresh beer” is brewed each day and then a single keg is served up at each place until it’s gone, usually starting around 4pm. The stuff is watered down and about 3% alcohol, but it’s also about 15 cents per glass, said to be the cheapest beer in the world. When I’m back in Hanoi I intend to drink more of the stuff.

Preparing my 75-cent sandwich for dinner

Aside from bia hoi you can get cold bottles of Tiger (from Singapore) and several other local lagers that are actually world class. Even in tourist-friendly restaurants you can usually find 500ml bottles for around US$1 so it really hits the spot in the oppressive heat and humidity.

General impressions of Hanoi

I’ve visited a few attractions and I’ll write about those in another post, so I’ll wrap this up with my overall impressions of the place. I had actually considered coming back to Hanoi to find an apartment and work for a month or two, but I really don’t think that’s going to happen. There are just too many things that are too frustrating about the place for an extended stay like that.

For one thing, I’m a bit surprised by how little English is spoken in Hanoi. I’m told it’s different in the south of the country, but this is the capital and center of communism, so as of 20 years ago there was virtually no tourism and a generally negative feeling toward Americans and most other Westerners.

Just as is true is many other parts of the world, people tend to speak just enough English to complete the financial transaction with you, be it at a hotel, restaurant, bar, or tour company. Beyond that it’s just about impossible to communicate, and if you do find a local who excels at English then they are definitely working up to a sales pitch of one kind or another.

Of course I realize that I’m in their country and I have no interest in learning Vietnamese, so this is my problem and not theirs. Still, their tourism industry can be greatly improved when more people can communicate with the visitors with money.

I mentioned the traffic chaos earlier, and that is another thing that would make a longer stay out of the question. I am fine walking longer distances even while others are driving, but in Hanoi it’s just not pleasant at all, especially the whole street-crossing lottery you have to enter every block.

I’m looking forward to experiencing the mellow version of Hanoi during Tet, but even then I’m sure it’ll be frustrating in different ways.

Still, as a tourist stop the place is exciting and exotic and the challenges feel worthwhile so far. I’ll be heading for a one-night trip to the famous Halong Bay next week, and then a train down to Vietnam’s cultural capital, Hue, which is also famous for being on the dividing line between north and south during what they call The American War.