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Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Xin chao from the South – Through the winding hills and cliff top coastline, we travelled for four hours from central Vietnam, south, through to the beautiful coastal town of Hoi An. It really has that old world charm, with a slight European feel. The city was founded as a port in the 15th century and had traders from China, Japan, Holland, France and Portugal. You can definitely see the mark these countries have left. It’s the only town in the country to keep nearly all its architecture intact and perfectly restored. There are only 100,000 people here but the majority live around the outskirts of the town centre, not in the centre itself. The centre is a world heritage site named the Old Town and is about 2km square. This remarkable place looks as though it’s now purely for the tourist trade. There’s hundreds of well presented shopfronts winding through narrow alleyways. Get this, motorbikes and electric bicycles are only allowed into this area for a few hours each day – cars are never allowed. For the majority of time it’s only walking and push bikes. You know it’s a ‘non motorbike time’ when calm music is playing from the lamp posts. We loved being able to cycle through this town or walk in the middle of the road and stop wherever we pleased for a $1.50 lunch and .20c beer. YES, after a lot of dedicated research, we did better the .25c beer. Between $2-$4 seems to be the standard meal price in southern Vietnam. I nearly choked when I read it gets cheaper the further south you go.
A place without traffic really changes the atmosphere. At night it changes again. The place is scattered with lanterns, hanging on shop fronts, in trees and above the trafficless road. Shops also must dim down their lights to truly set a warm mood. My conscience tells me it’s not right loving a town that you don’t really see how the locals live, as it’s such a touristy town. Yet, we only saw a hand full of westerners throughout our stay. But after having lunch in the town’s first restaurant, which only opened in 1992, I got a real appreciation of how much this town relies on and appreciates tourists. 1992 really wasn’t long ago, but the reality is Vietnam is such a new country to the world of tourism.. I took a picture of the menu and how this restaurant expanded. It’s well worth enlarging the pictures of the menu, and having a read of one or two items on the menu. When it opened, the restaurant owner hadn’t heard of any western food and wanted to learn how to expand her Vietnamese only menu. Imagine going into a town that had one restaurant and explaining what a pizza was, shopping for substitute ingredients and teaching the chef how to make it. Over many years that’s how this menu was developed. She would learn from the travellers what garlic bread, pasta etc was and then create it. Quite remarkable and not that long ago.

Any given day on tour:
A 630am electric bike ride around the outer part of the town shows us where and how the locals live. Following an early swim in the ocean, we head by bike to the city with Stephen. There’s something quite liberating going full speed on an electric bike. This really was one of my favourite memories to date. This town is known for the tailors, literally every second shop, all with $50-$70 suits and $10-$15 shirts! Intrepid recommended we go to one particular tailor as they have the best quality in town and donate some of their profits to the local kids welfare. At mid dayI got measured up for a suit (or two), at 4pm was the first fitting and a few hours later they delivered it to the hotel. Three staff, including the actual tailor were taking measurements and then it’s sent upstairs to get made. We had to see how they were made, so we visited the engine room where hundreds of sewing machines were humming away. Walking into this tailor is like walking into Spotlight, complete with a lounge room for patient husbands, 8 changing rooms, 30 sales staff and 300 tailors – the shop is 50m x10m in size and is simply huge! In between fittings, Shaz, Damo, Stephen, Nick and us wandered to the lantern lit city, bar by bar drinking $1.85 cocktails and more .20c beer. For that price – why the hell not? we started at 12pm and finished at 12am and spent less than $15 each! We even managed to squeeze in the time for snake wine, complete with a cobra. I wish I could tell you more about the historical sites in Hoi An but we opted for having a break from being tourists sightseeing to being people having drinks with friends. Over drinks I was analysing this new person I have become, saying I’m normally a stressed, highly, strung person who continuously worries. I was chuffed when Stephen said he couldn’t see that side of me at all. It’s true. I haven’t laughed so much or been as chilled as I am now. We’ll both remember this week in years to come.

We came down from our high once we landed in Ho Chi Minh City, formally known as Saigon, and began with a quick bus tour around the city. Although I hadn’t done any research into this town (nor on ANY town) I didn’t expect it to be so modern with so many designer shops. It’s a blend of old and new, East and West. It’s blatantly obvious that it was once influenced by the French. Much of the beautiful 100 year old French architecture still remains – slightly odd to see as we are in Vietnam! This country was at war for 100 years with the French, then 20years with the Americans in the Vietnam war, then again with the Cambodians a few years later. It astounds me how established and outwardly happy this country and its people are, considering how recent the bloodshed was. Visiting the War Remnants Museum was an eye opener. I don’t think words could describe the photos we saw or stories we read. One observation however, the museum is in the eyes of the Vietnamese – not the Americans. In their eyes the “innocent Vietnamese were attacked by the vicious Americans and their agent orange”. How there is always two sides to every story.

“Random beer story #268: While the boys where waiting for us girls to return from the markets, they found the dodgiest back road to drink beer and watch the revolving doors of the prostitutes. It sounds bad but they sat down at kids stalls on the foot path at one place where beer was $1. The second place also had $1 beer but with a bit of bartering between the two roadside drinking holes, the second place reduced their beer price – They felt ‘slightly’ bad when the kids had to get off their chairs for us to sit down.”

20th June – married one month. We headed further South today to the Mekong Delta which runs for 4,350km through China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia. It finishes up in Vietnam before hitting the sea. 17million people live over 10,000km in this particular provence. The main boat delivered us to a coconut candy factory on one of the 4 islands. This sounds random, but coconuts and banana trees are everywhere. In preparation for holding a python, we sampled toxic rice wine, banana wine, snake wine and coconut wine. I’d assume that’s what flavoured petrol tastes like. It suddenly felt very tropical once we left the banks of the river and headed inland. I couldn’t understand why we had to wear helmets on these 3 wheel ‘motorbike tuk tuk bike meets bus thing’ until the over hanging banana trees slapped me in the face and on the head. On the way to lunch we stopped at a remote fruit shop (someone’s house) to sample the local fruit – complemented with chilli powder. (I thought of you both, Allison and Adriaan). Lunch is in the heart of the delta where Elephant Ear Fish is served in rice paper rolls – along with 6 other local courses. Logically, the main mode of transport in this area is on the Sampans. Also known as small rowing boats, they transported us back down the delta. Back to Ho Chi Minh City where we farewelled our new friends who weren’t continuing onto Cambodia with us in a few days time. We farewelled them with a huge, huge night out on extremely strong but cheap buckets of cocktails. I’ll worry about our heads tomorrow. Thankfully we’ll be seeing Stephen again in Australia.

“Random fact #139: the biggest
cat fish in the world are found in the Vietnam Mekong river and are 3 metres in length.”

’Interesting’ would be the word used to describe our visit to the Cu Chi Tunnels. In the War, they were dug and used by thousands of local ‘gorilla’ people, supported by the army of the North (the communist party). They’ve got places for hiding, accommodation, meeting and fighting. The underground kitchen have barrels to contain the smoke until it was safe to release. The 3 levels of tunnels are 3m, 6m, 8-10m deep and stretch over 250km. The original tunnels were so shallow, it’d be a squeeze to crawl. The 40m of tunnels for tourists have been expanded to 1.2m in height and slightly wider.
Each story has two sides but interestingly, the visit here was a one sided view. We watched actual footage from 1967 of the life of the Cu Chi people during the war. The reporter’s view was that this war was about bad Americans killing the Vietnamese. They failed to articulate the fact the South (anti communist) was at war with the North. The odd gruesome, spiked traps scattered around were chilling to see. The ear piercing sound of continuous shots being fired in the shooting range was a surreal feeling – it wasn’t hard to imagine the past as we walked through the lush forest above ground and warrens of tunnels below.

There are a few great things about doing all our trips through Intrepid, including the small group numbers and experiencing travel from a locals perspective. But the biggest thing is the amount of money (our tour trip money) that is put back into each of the communities we visited and seeing our old clothes at the end of the trip sent to those who need it most. Although Vietnam is great, it certainly has another heart breaking side involving young kids doing street vending. Our farewell dinner was at a restaurant Intrepid supports, named Koto. This fine dining, not for profit restaurant is designed to take disadvantaged youths off the street and put them into the restaurant’s hospitality training program as well as providing them with a source of income to support the welfare and training for the students. The food was exceptional and meeting the chefs in the kitchen afterwards was incredible – it was moving to see these kids making the steps to change their lives, and a generational change. It was a perfect place to celebrate Dave handing in his work notice too!

Initially, the reason Dave wanted to visit was to say “back in nam” and I wanted to eat Vietnamese spring rolls. If that was enough of a reason to come and discover this truly remarkable part of Asia, we are thankful. Vietnam offers the friendliness of Bali but is less pushy. It has 1920s prices for beer served on little plastic chairs perfectly situated curb side. It offers amazing beauty in the north, culture in the centre and flavour in the south. I believe over time this place will flourish with tourism. My takeaway from Vietnam is having an understanding of the war that took place and the effects it had. The more you talk to people from different walks of life each with a story to tell, the more you realise how little you know. The more you see, the more you want to see and discover.

The week here wouldn’t have been the same without our tour group. The best thing about travelling is the instant friendships you make and the pure enjoyment you can fit into a day. Stephen, Shazza, Damo and Nick, it’s been a blast – even if we have only had 10 hours of sleep this week.

The week in Nam can only be summed up by the Vietnamese Beer Economy @ .20c each:
– prostitute 125 beers
– athletic shorts 25 beers
– accommodation in Hoi An 200 beers
– cheese burger at Hungry Jacks 18 beers
– flight from Australia to get you to this awesome place 5,000 beers

The number of times you can raise your glass and say “mot hai ba yo”… PRICELESS!

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