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Vietnam is not for the light traveler. The type of tourist you see around, when
you do see tourists, are rough, tough, and carry with them a strong sense of
awareness and street smarts. There are
no families with kids, young students or old folks. The tourists are limited to their 20s, 30s
and 40s and are characterized by adventuresome individuals and
entrepreneurial businessmen. Vietnam
is a military state so anything goes with them and you have no say. The military airport police took away a man
for “issues regarding his visa” right in front of us, and his business
partner half-heartedly joked that he would never see him again. We were worried about our visas-on-arrival,
and there was a bit of delay in the processing. Fortunately, the processing went through,
my stranded luggage was found, and we made it to our hotel without getting
ripped off.
We set out to explore the nearby Reunification Palace,
but were stopped every other minute by people trying to sell us goods or
services. The streets were maddeningly
overflowing with scooters and cars that honked continuously—the drivers
literally honk their horn every few seconds to let people know they exist. The Palace was just okay, and we skipped
out on our tour to find some more action.
We found a cabby who wouldn’t rip us off, and got dropped of at the Cholon bus station, where we boarded a bus to Mytho along the Mekong Delta. The bus ride was less than comfortable,
though we did manage to get a couple naps in along the 2 hour ride. The arrival in Mytho
was a struggle—the faces of 25 guys on the edge of starvation lit up upon
seeing our white faces in the bus. The
rushed us with a swarm of shouting and directions causing us to instinctively
ignore everything and push our way through with negative determination to
point B, which really was an arbitrary point away from the crowd. We finally found refuge in a grocery store,
where we caught our breath and strategized a game
plan. We ended up walking for an hour
through a never-ending market, where Carmel
was disturbed by the bloody slaughter of still-live animals and odd smells
from drying frogs and other elements of protein, as I rationalized to
maintain sanity. We never made it to
our destination, which was a poorly described Lonely Planet riverfront
office. Exhausted, we sat down
alongside the street looking for a cab to take us back to the bus
station. A cab never came by so
finally we broke down and hopped on the back of a scooter, where we took a
precarious zig-zag jaunt to the bus station. On the bus ride back, I endeared myself to
some Vietnamese youths by singing with them in broken English Hotel
California, Backstreet Boys (thank goodness for the youtube
lip synch video), and I even did a bit of beatboxing
for them.
We eventually made it to another Lonely Planet recommendation
for dinner, where we feasted on fresh spring rolls, lotus leaf salad, beef
with flower stems, eggplant, tofu and vegetables, purple yam soup, Hanoi beer, watermelon
juice and pineapple juice. After
dinner, we stumbled our way through a refreshingly posh and trendy
neighborhood on our way to an even trendier club called Apocalypse Now. I got a couple more different Vietnamese
beers, danced to some decent club music, and crowd-watched. Strangely enough, they were showing Tom
& Jerry on the plasma screens, which reminded us of a strange scene at
the airport whereby all of the security guards lined up in a perfectly symmetrical
semi-circle to watch Tom & Jerry in between flights (remember, we were
stuck in the airport a bit waiting for our visas). Anyway, Carmel and I must have looked like a couple
of happenin’ yuppies at the club, and we were given
two $20 certificates to use at the biggest and most luxurious hotel in the
area, the Calypso Hotel. I blew my 20
in 5 minutes on video poker, but Carmel,
for some reason, kept winning at the slots.
Right when she was about to go broke, she’d end up winning big and
coming back up again. Finally, we were
getting tired so we decided to cash out at $15, but they wouldn’t let us cash
out at less than $20 as they had given us $20 for free to start with. So we said, fine, and she dumped her $15
back in the slots, hit the button, and went up $8. We cashed out at $3 and popped back to our
hotel for the night.
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