Saigon River and Camera parts (10th November)
What did we have for breakfast on Monday morning? Why, fried eggs of course, but we only just caught them before they started packing up. And it was only half past nine.
We twiddled our fingers for a while and then decided it would be good and worthwhile to walk ourselves down to the river running through town, and have a look at that and the area around it. We were wrong; the river and the riverside was basically a dump, although the streets leading there were what you would call a good part of town. On the way back to the hotel we bought some of the propaganda poster we had been admiring, as well as a new lens for the camera.
In the Ben Thanh market we acquired a fresh pineapple for 10,000 VND from a lady who sat herself up on a table and carved each fruit freshly, with two VERY sharp knives. She cut off all the spiny skin and chucked it, then removed the eyes very quickly by making two diagonal cuts either side of each eye, doing each one just right so that the final result was a juicy fresh pineapple with spirals running down the outside. Then she cut it in half and into quarters by wedging the whole blade about halfway in, and turning the knife upside down and whacking the top of the blade on the edge of a tub. The pineapple fell off both sides of the knife; that’s how sharp it was.
‘How many would you go through before you could learn to do it that quickly?’, Alice asked.
‘Pineapples or fingers?’
Then we went back to amusing ourselves in the hotel, catching up with the World again, and contemplating catching up with our travel journals, which were really getting out of hand. I think we were in Saigon and our journals were in Hanoi.
(sigh)
Later on we walked not very far to the KFC and got some chips because we felt like eating chips again, and took dinner back for Sophie, was alive and well and had organised her means of transport back to her group in Cambodia, and would be leaving tomorrow morning. So we chatted about this and that for a few hours and then went back to amusing ourselves. Amongst other things I have started organising photos into collections for each country; when we get back we’d like to properly print and frame at least one picture for everyone so you all should start looking through now to work out what you’d most enjoy.
Greg
Loafing in Saigon (9th November)
First thing in the morning we were only going one place; out on the footpath for eggs.
Dat had to get something from the Intrepid office so we had an extra half hour before going visiting; then we got a tax over the hospital which turned out to be an International Clinic designed more or less for travellers, with doctors of various nationalities. Turns out Dengue Fever has an incubation period, then a seven day course, the worst day of which is the seventh day. And they had established via various medical result that this was the seventh day.
We’d nominated ourselves as being present if necessary because we were staying in Saigon until Thursday morning, so we could go and get bottles of water or whatever. According to the Australian doctor Sophie could leave today or tomorrow if she wanted.
So we walked ourselves back to the hotel, taking an accidental detour past the Reunification Palace, and basically loafed around for the rest of the day, sending off emails and looking at pictures and wondering why the balcony of our new room (503) was sealed off. There was a door, or there had been, but someone thought better and took the hinges out and more or less glued the door in place.
At 4pm Sophie arrived from the hospital, walking and talking and everything else, and was conveniently put in the room next to us.
We went out for dinner over in Pham Ngu Lao and had something like Shepherd’s Pie and a pretty good Vegetable Lasagne.
And that’s about all there is to tell for Sunday 9th November.
Greg.
Cu Chi Tunnels (8th November)
The 8th of November was a Saturday morning.
We got up at 7am to go to the Cu Chi tunnels, but due to inherent sleepiness needed to find breakfast quickly, and didn’t really have time to walk ourselves down to the Pham Ngu Lao section. So… we walked the other way down Ly Tu Trong, and came across a lady with a gas burner seated upon the footpath. She had some kinds of meat-related items bubbling away in a dish but she also had fresh eggs in a carton so we gestured at those eggs and she nodded and all was understood; and we sat at the plastic tables, on kindergarten-size plastic chairs, on the footpath.
After about three minutes we were bought eggs fried on one side in one of the silver dishes which they simply lifted off the gas burner and bought to your table, sitting atop another plate.Meanwhile a different cheerful lady had come and gone and ascertained whether we wanted coffee. I was getting a bit carefree with my Vietnamese so I asked for ca fe sua da (which is your bog-standard hot white coffee, made with condensed milk), but accidentally got ca fe sua nong, which is the same but iced.
Just the same it was good. We made a bit of a mess trying to get the runny eggs, and bits and pieces from the plate of coriander, cucumber, carrot, and radish into the toasted white buns they bought with the eggs. The locals weren’t doing that. They weren’t breaking up the eggs using the spoon and fork, pulling chunks out of the bun and spooning the egg in small amounts onto the bun, and mopping up egg with the bread, and it was obvious that we should do these things too.
Once again we had a van full of seats for four people – which I’m sure cost Intrepid far too much but that’s their problem – and once again we left half an hour later than the other larger Intrepid group, for the two hour drive out to the Cu Chi tunnels, which took us not much more than an hour. And most of it was going through Saigon, not through countryside. Just before we pulled into the tunnel complex we went through a large plantation of rubber trees which we were going too fast to get a particularly good photo of, but there turned out be an unusual solution at hand.
We arrived at the same time, give or take a few, as the other group, acquired tickets, and then sat down to watch a film about the tunnels, what they were for, how they were used, etc. Only the film was made in 1976, and to call it propaganda would be understating the point somewhat. It started with a lovely video montage of the Cu Chi region, overlaid with some truly kooky but quaint music, then dropped into battle scenes and bomb noises and all that, then told us all about how the tunnels were built to help repel the evil foreign devils.
‘Who are these crazy devils?’, the Vietnamese voice-over lady asked. ‘And what are they doing here, blowing up our peaceful Cu Chi area, and putting out land mines, and sending rockets over?’
It went on like that, even showing some of the young women who fought for the Liberation Army and explaining how good they were at killing Americans, and how they got medals for being No. 1 at killing americans, or for being brave American-killers in battle.
It was an instant modern classic of tragically hilarious proportions.
After that we had something even better; Tuan got up and took the metal metre pointer in hand, and pointed here and there on the map and explained about where the majority of the tunnels were built, how many kilometres were built (270) and how many metres the US managed to destroy (70), and how they kept each individual room ventilated by means of thin bamboo pipes that reached the surface. Not only that, they built the tunnels narrow, so that Americans cannot fit in them.
Tuan didn’t put it quite like that, actually. He said something more like ‘and we know that Americans eat McDonalds so they cannot fit in the narrow tunnels’. This provoked general giggling, both at the back and in the front. From there we did a big lap around the Cu Chi Tunnel complex, looking at the some of the very narrow entrances to the tunnels, preserved old tanks, and even some of the types of bamboo traps which the North Vietnamese used to use, with lots of sharpened bamboo poles waiting for the unwary. Some of them were really cunningly awful.
I thought they had installed sound effects for realism, but as we got closer the shots sounded very real; they had installed a firing range, just over near the gift shop, so that people could fire some of the actual Vietnam war weapons, like your good old Colt .45 and the AK-47 (or more likely one of it’s 99,000 types of rip-off copies); they even had an M-60 which you could let rip with. Insane. Some of the chaps from the other group had a good go on the firing range and enjoyed in mightily, as we saw in their videos later on that afternoon.
On the other side of the shop was a lady demonstrating how to make those circular rice paper rolls (of course…), and then we went over to the main show; the section where you can actually go on down into the old tunnels. There are four joined sections; so you can go crawling through poky humid tunnels for 25m, 50m, 75m or 100m. The guide went ahead of us with the torch but the ladies flaked out after one section and the gents flaked out after 50m. I can’t see how people living under there for up to and including 8 years didn’t just go insane.
Back on the surface, a little further along the trail, we sat down at a wooden table in the shade and had some brothy tea and cassava with a peanut, sugar and salt powder-mix to dip in. This, said Tuan, is what they used to eat most of the time in the tunnels, basically for the duration of the war, so that’s why they serve it as morning tea in the tunnel complex now. It was a fascinating experience to see the whole complex, mainly because of the fiendish level of detail which the Vietnamese applied to the whole project they were carrying out. They the peanut mix because it had salt, sugar and protein, and it’s salt and sugar that you would lose in the dehydrating atmosphere of the tunnels. They gave up their land without giving up their land, by going underground, and dug tunnels at night, hiding the dirt they had excavated in bomb craters.
There was another gift shop at the exit, and we couldn’t resist purchasing here the VCD of the Cu Chi tunnels ‘documentary’, which actually gave you a pretty good look at what the rubber forests look like. However, at the hotel we discovered that it wasn’t the authentic item. The voice over was a different. It was, this time, instead of a slightly bewildering sounding Vietnamese lady, it was a pleasant sounding Vietnamese man, who used terms like ‘medal for bravery’ instead of ‘medal for American-killing’. Such a shame.
Around the corner, near the Ben Thanh market was a restaurant called Pho 2000 which had some large framed photos of when President Clinton had eaten there in 2000, shortly before he ceased being president. In my head I heard the Simpsons episode where Clinton gets cloned by aliens who then try to take over Earth.
He gives an election speech on the news saying ‘I am Clin-ton. As overlord all will kneel trembling before my brutal reign. End Communication.’
Moving on. I had an excellent lunch of Vegetable Curry which was kind of like a laksa but had potato and okra and things, Alice had a beef stir fry, and we all had our last group meal with Tuan. At the end of lunch we heard that a girl from the other group had been taken to hospital with dehydration, but would be OK, and then we went for a stroll with Tuan to organise our bus ticket to Phnom Penh. At the hotel we spent most of the afternoon going through photos from the trip, which now that I think it about stretched as far back as St Petersburg on the 10th of September, and we looked at some videos of people firing serious guns at the Cu Chi firing range. They let you click off five rounds on single to get the idea, then put it on full-scale auto for five rounds, which didn’t take very long to dissipate. The looks on their faces after sending five real bullets into the scenery in about half a second were pretty entertaining.
Adam and Catherine were flying out to Siem Reap the next day, so we went with them over to Pham Ngu Lao and had dinner in a restaurant there, which got funnier and funnier as we went on because no matter what we ordered, something similar but not quite right would come out. I don’t know how it kept happening, but we all ended up eating each other’s desserts and drinks because things came at different times, and you would think they got it wrong and this one must be mine, then something nowhere near what anyone had ordered would come along. So Adam had two desserts; a lemon pancake on top of which he put steamed banana with cream and rum.
We said goodbye to them back at the hotel and then headed out a little later to find the bar the other group had gone to, to have a final drink with them before everyone disappeared and we had to go to Cambodia. Somehow in the last six months I have come to be absolutely rubbish at pool; I was never particularly good but Andy and myself were beaten by one ball after he sunk six. You get the picture. It was a sports bar, run by an Australian, so there were international rugby games playing on three TV’s (England vs Pacific Islands, Australia Vs Italy, Wales Vs South Africa), and the toilets were labelled ‘blokes’ and ‘sheilas’. The last place I have seen a toilet actually labelled like that was in Kings Canyon, near Alice Springs.
Anyway.
We had a good time and agreed with Dat, the leader of the other group, that we would go with him to see Sophie in the hospital tomorrow morning, as it turned out she didn’t have ‘dehydration’ but rather Dengue fever. There must be some communication over names or between languages because neither Dat nor Tuan, nor Kevin – the Cambodian group leader who would be taking the other group to Bangkok – knew what Dengue fever was.
And our room, despite having had the window open all day, still smelled like paint.
Greg
Ho Chi Minh Saigon (7th November)
3am is not a great time to be waking up on a train.
At least the station wasn’t very crowded, although the train seemed to have arrived early because there was an Intrepid bus coming to get us, but we waited maybe 15 minutes for it to come along. At the hotel we only had a luggage room booked but they happened to have one with two beds in it; a queen size and a king single. So it seemed fair that we take the narrower bed, and Adam and Catherine (who are siblings) should have the wider one. Tuan had his own room which apparently smelled strongly of smoke.
Then we all went back to sleep, and woke up at about 8am in my case and 9am in everyone else’s. The standard joke was: ‘I had the worts dream that we were on this train somewhere, and for no reason everything was new..’ In room 303 we had a balcony so I sat myself down out there and read a book for a while, then took some pictures of people doing all kinds of business and leisure on the footpath. Something that I didn’t see or understand happened, and then two young men rapidly picked and moved four motorbikes from the footpath back into the shop, and five minutes later moved them out again, while the shop owner stood against the door frame, smoking, and impassive.
I did go down and walk around the block looking for a bakery, but I could only find motorbike shops on both sides of the street where our hotel was, and around the block only laundries or shorts shops and various species of other inedible items, and cyclo drivers that follow you for about two hundred metres suggesting places you might like to go, but don’t.
With a sense of foreboding I had to go upstairs and deliver the bad news: ‘If anyone wants to buy a motorbike or scooter, I’m sorry, but there are no motorbike shops anywhere in this street.’ Soon enough everyone came to feel that they were halfway awake, and we split up to go and find breakfast. On Tuan’s recommedation we walked ourselves about 10 minutes across the city to a street called Pham Ngu Lao, where there were, as promised, lots of restaurants and tour-booking places and other things that backpackers might be interested in. One fabulous omelette and coffee later, we were feeling 100% better about things and about the world, and returned to the hotel where we were allocated Room 601.
Which smelled badly of paint.
Just the same we had a shower and tidied ourselves up and set about checking email etc. while waiting for our cyclo tour of Saigon at 2pm, when it proved to be a nice temperature for sitting still in the wheeley-chair instead of even contemplating walking around. It was definitely too warm for contemplating walking around. We rode first down our street (Ly Tu Trong) and then took a right past the Ben Thanh market, which is a large white building housing a permanent daily market. There is a large roundabout there with a statue, around which we rolled before exiting down Le Loi, which takes you past the Saigon Centre (a shopping and office building), as well as the Opera House and a large billboard ad for toothpaste which is built in three dimensions so that the toothpaste as actually being squeezed out of the tube. And some hotels which had no significance at the time but which I discovered (from Alice) later were places where Journalists and other foreign Americans used to hang out during the Viet Nam police action.
Motorcycles swarmed left and right.
We plodded along to the Notre Dame cathedral and the Central Post Office, across the road from each other and examples of good things the French did in Viet Nam. Notre Dame is similar to the one in Paris but far less ornate in the intricacy of carvings and reliefs on the outside walls. We didn’t go inside so I can’t tell you if the inside compares to the real deal. The Post Office is a post office but still quite nice while it’s at it, nice windows, nice lighting and a big picture of Uncle Ho. That sort of thing.
Around a couple more blocks we wheeled on past the Reunification Palace and then around the corner to the War Remnants museum. It was 3pm and we had an hour to look around the place. I had been warned that some of the pictures were reasonably graphic – e.g. results of agent orange, results of land mines and aerial bombings – and indeed they were, but then some of the things that happened were quite unpleasant, so I guess that’s just how it is. They also had the grace to include a rather nice photo exhibition of pictures loosely under the category ‘Viet Nam war’, and also under the category ‘Viet Nam’, and then finally a small exhibition covering protests against the Viet Nam war in many countries including Russia and even Argentina. There were even some old framed newspaper stories about US pilots who refused to fly more missions and suchlike. But they didn’t miss the chance to parade to evils of the South Vietnamese government that ‘existed’ until 1975.
Then we trundled on back to the hotel, paid the cyclo riders and went upstairs to kick around for a short while before dinner @ 6.30pm. As the sun went down I couldn’t resist going to photo some photos of the absurdly manic roundabout just up Ly Tu Trong. The statue in the middle is not actually of Ly Tu Trong (his is in Hanoi next to the West Lake); I forget whose it is but there is a photo in a later day’s collection than this which includes the name.
Since our tour the Ben Thanh market had been transformed slightly; on a short but wide street they had set up rows of marquee tents, under which food-related commerce ensured. In one of the establishments I had a beer and a fried rice with egg, which I greatly enjoyed, while Alice waited around for her roof tile to warm up. When it warmed up she cooked beef on it, rolled it in rice paper with some various greens, and enjoyed it greatly.
The inside and permanent part of the markets had closed, but outside there were still many kinds of stalls in operation so we had a look through those and then wandered down Le Loi where we discovered a gallery exhibiting old propaganda posters, framed in small and large formats. Some of them – I’m thinking particularly one labelled ‘Nixon will pay with blood for our blood’ – wouldn’t look great on the walls, but some of them were absolutely brilliant as artworks; you can see why they would have been effective propaganda.
And then we returned to our chamber of paint fumes, to dream surprisingly non-electric dreams.
Monsoon in Nha Trang (6th November)
The rain in Vietnam falls mainly on Nha Trang; or so it seemed.
Our last day there we did have grandiose plans of swimming and then lounging in the shade all day, but we were almost confined to barracks by the precipitation. It didn’t actually rain for the whole day; if I said that it did I’d be telling big big lies, but it rained very regularly and very heavily.
We went all the way next door for breakfast, and pottered around the hotel room, waiting for it to be lunch time so that we could go and have tropical shakes again.
Check out was midday but that only meant that we had to move our bags into the other room by then, and leave them there until 5pm. It was a bit sad that what we really wanted for lunch was pizza instead of something properly Vietnamese, although I guess the sakes count as Vietnamese, don’t they? In the restaurant there was what you might call a ‘portly gentleman’ from the Gold Coast talking at some German tourists who had long since ceased to be interested what ever he was talking about. But they were distracting him from bothering us…
It’s difficult to describe just how good these tropical shakes were; one day I will learn to make one properly, and then people will come around to visit, and we will set them down and show them what we mean.
We took our time over lunch and then wandered over to the beach again for one more look, although we could see more clouds appropriating the sky and didn’t really want a repeat of yesterday’s debacle where we had to grab all our beach stuff and run to stand under the pavilion. I liked the beach at Hoi An far more anyway, because there were a few buildings around the waterfront but not many, and because the sand was not so grainy.
On the way back to the hotel we stopped for important things like a chocolate bar and a bag of M & M’s to take on the train to Saigon with us, while Catherine spent about ten minutes bargaining with a lady of some sets of postcards. In the end she did get her price, and set one of them back to her current place of employment with a caption on the back saying not much more than ‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’, then a pause for breath, and then Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha-ha’. And so forth.
Having no room other than the luggage room to loaf around in after lunch, when the rain came along again, then stopped for a bit, then came again, we loafed around in the lobby, on the hard wooden chairs. I wrote some travel journals, and posted them, and resolved to try and write more quickly next time.
At 5.30pm we were catching a taxi back to the station for our final overnight train, of this trip and of our entire trip, which would be pulling into Saigon at …. (wait for it)… 3.30am.
Hooray!
Come 5pm I went to the little supermarket across the road and got some snacks for the trip, like a packet of biscuits marked ‘Tiger Energy biscuits’, and some more bottles of water, and something which had a picture of TIm Tams on the front of the packet but was really just a weak imitation. 5.30 arrived early and we didn’t really have our bags properly sorted when the taxi arrived to just pick up and go, but with a bit of extra fiddling around we got into the taxi in several connected pieces, and arrived at the train station pleased to find our train already waiting. We weren’t late; it was early.
And it was brand NEW!
Yes, no kidding. I got on first of the group and had to pinch myself when the door labelled ‘auto door’ did actually open automatically.
‘Am I still in Viet Nam?’, I said to myself. ‘Yes. I must be.’ The whole train was new. The beds in our cabin were new. The corridor and the lights were new. The TV in our cabin was new, and so were the wood shavings around the screw mounting that held the TV on. The speaker playing awful music was new, but it got old, and Adam reached up and turned off the music to the whole carriage. I didn’t hear anyone complain.
Each cabin had a room service menu, and some little cacti in a pot on the windowsill, and a telephone! Unthinkable! And we would have to get off halfway through the night…. why? Anyway, we were too busy luxuriating in the newness to care, until the phone rang. Catherine answered it, but all she could hear was someone giggling. Then Tuan came walking along from his cabin, still giggling. Turns out the bit of laminated paper which we thought was instructions for calling room service was actually just telling you how to call other cabins… so he thought he’d give it a go.
We seriously contemplated, and at one point even put into action, a plan to just stay up all night so that we could enjoy the new new new train cabin for as long as possible. The only way we could do this was by playing cards, but I was already tired from a rubbish night’s sleep the night before, and kept making odd mistakes like putting a 7 on top of an 8, which you can’t do, or an 8 on top of a 7, which you can’t do. Adam cracked first and went to sleep, and we all followed on at about 10.30pm.
Greg
Nha Trang Beach (5th November)
I’m pleased to report that a large part of Wednesday the 5th of November was spent on the beach.
In the morning the rain was coming and going, the sky ranging from overcast to scattered to sprinkling to downpour. The hotel we were staying at was famous (in guidebook circles) for having the occasional decorative naked lady adorning the bathroom wall. Adam and Catherine thought I was talking about Alice when I said that there was a naked lady in the bathroom, but no. As a man I cannot truthfully say that I wanted her gone from the fixtures forthwith, but I can say that I was puzzled about what she was doing. I mean, it wasn’t like a bad copy of The Birth of Venus, or anything of that sort; it was a photograph of a naked lady which had been converted to tiles and set proudly upon the wall. But why?
Anyway; no more of the naked bathroom wall lady. Look at the picture for yourselves, have a mystified giggle, and move on.
Next door to the hotel there was a cafe, where I had a mushroom omelette with cheese, and Alice had something similar. Only, almost anything marked ‘with cheese’ in Vietnam is served on a plate, with a small wedge-shaped plastic wrapped piece of cheese much like what we used to call Kraft cheese sticks. Halfway between margarine and actual cheese. Bread with cheese is a bread roll, with a wedge of cheese. Omelette with cheese is an omelette (and sometimes a bread roll) with a little triangle of cheese. It seems always to be the same type of cheese; with a grinning cow on the front, and the cow for some reason has a big silver earring.
By midday the rain was drifting away, and we could see no more large clouds looming over from the ocean. So we walked on down to the beach, which was less than 750m from the front door of the hotel. This beach was much like the one on Hoi An; wide and flattish but no waves of any recognisable dimension, just a bit of frothing in the last 5 metres before the shore line. Just the same, perfect for wallowing around in. I was starting to get hungry and had bought some kind of large flat LP-record sized coconut/sugar wafer thingy from a lady with bags and bags full of them, for 10,000 VND each; and you’d be amused to know that it tasted like a cornflake. A giant cornflake.
We had wallets and stuff to acquire lunch with later on, so we took turns having one person laze on the beach under the shade of the palm trees, keeping half an eye on the gear, half an eye asleep, and the other on the procession of people walking past trying to sell you things. If you look totally asleep they don’t bother you, but otherwise consider yourself fair game.
We did get hungry, and went into a beachfront restaurant which had it’s own pool table and swimming pool, and brewed beer, but it was strikingly expensive, and instead we walked back into the streets and found a cafe where we could have a pizza (which came with a bonus beer). The pizza was pretty good, and beer never tastes better than when it’s free. Alice struck gold when she picked off the menu a tropical shake, which was a blend of pineapple, coconut and mint. If people at home could kindly begin experimenting with different amounts of these ingredients, so as to determine the appropriate recipe in time for our return, that would be greatly appreciated.
Unlikely, I know, but it seemed worth asking…
We got back to the hotel in time to slope around for an hour or two and then get into a taxi with Tuan to go and visit his uncle’s restaurant. From the road our hotel was on, you drive west, then make a left, drive along there for ages, past the waterfront and the yacht club and some large flower-shaped memorial building, and then left down a wide-ish street about another 100 metres. We knew in advance that it was a BBQ restaurant, and that you had the pleasure of grilling your own, but we had no idea how much fun it would be, or that the BBQ would be an 8-inch round stone cauldron, filled with hot coals, with a wire rack on top. We all got a plate each to supervise; fish, chicken, beef, vegetables (including pineapple, tofu and cassava), and the fun began. Until we learned to pay attention to the grill, and not to our beer or to the hammering rain outside or to the vast amounts of smoke filling the high tented enclosure from the top down, all the food was charcoaled-style.
Yep… it was fun.
For the purpose of scenic tour we preferred to walk back to the hotel, seeing as there were about two turns to make, one vast puddle at the intersection to navigate around, and only one marijuana seller to dodge along the way. It’s common for people to try and hand you a bit of paper advertising their restaurant, less common to see other tourists attempting to hand out these types of things. But we saw that on the way back as well. Good luck to them, I say.
Greg
Train to Nha Trang; waiting in Danang (4th November)
People who read yesterday’s journal first might be wondering which plan we ended up hatching, and nesting.
People who didn’t read yesterday’s journal first might want to do so, because otherwise it won’t make much sense if I just say that it was plan B, and that it was a staggeringly uneventful day.
The third group of people will be those pressed for time who wish that I would kindly illuminate. The train from Hanoi was indeed late, so we left Hoi An at 11am, got to Danang at midday, waited in the waiting room until about 2.45pm, watched football on a large TV there, while a larger TV played bits and pieces of cartoons and old movies, all of which looked suspiciously like they were from the shop window display mode catalogue.
We bought chocolate bars, paid 1000 VND to go to the toilet, which wasn’t that bad, and while I was peering at the lady womaning the entry desk, wondering what amount she was saying in Vietnamese, the gentleman next to me produced a thousand from his wallet to indicate that was how much it was. Vietnamese people, on the whole, are very helpful and understanding people; for me, this explains why there are surprisingly few motorcycle crashes on such crowded roads.
On the train, because it was originally scheduled to be a day trip, we had booked into a carriage much like what you would find in an aeroplane; two rows of four seats, about 30 seats long, and a narrow aisle down the middle. That would be great for a day trip; not so great if you arrival time in Nha Trang has been bumped back to about half-past-midnight. But with major floods around you just play the cards you’re dealt.
We amused ourselves pretty well looking out the window, taking pictures of the cabin and of the spectacular scenery, and playing Sudoku on Alice’s phone. She also discovered another game wherein you push blocks around to make groups, basically like 2D Tetris, which quickly became addictive. After that we sat on the train for a while, and ate our banana rolls and some of the left over packet egg soups (from China!), and talked about whatnot, and eventually Tuan woke up and we had a good time going through the pictures on our laptop, which he rather liked, so we put a few on his thumb drive, and he also told about some of his favourite and least-favourite tours through Vietnam. And some of his least-favourite groups from 3 years working for Intrepid, the details of which we shall not divulge presently.
One other thing; just before we rolled into Nha Trang there were narrow fields either side of the train line, with networks of lights throughout them, all looking rather magical. These lights, it transpires, are to help the fruit grow; Tuan said that if we had come in the daytime we would see that the train line runs only a few metres from the edge of the water, and you can see all the way across the bay, and we were missing out a little bit. But the night arrival with fields full of lights was pretty nice to see as well.
We didn’t wait long at all for our taxi to the hotel, given it was actually half-past-midnight, and the hotel wasn’t that busy when we arrived so we could check straight in and go straight to bed.
Greg
The Old Town in Hoi An (3rd November)
Ordinarily rain on a monday morning would be a bad thing.
On holidays, you can leave what you were going to do until later, and stand out on the balcony taking pictures of reflections of bicycles in the water, and of ladies dropping their school books off the back of the bike. So we had a pretty lazy morning and then left around lunchtime to have a better look around the old town and use up some of the free passes our ticket had bought us. The Mermaid cafe once again proved a good option for lunch, while we went through the brochure and figured out which things we would like to see and how to leave ourselves time to walk back to the hotel, rent bikes, and get on down to the beach.
We hadn’t yet been inside the Japanese Bridge, so that was a must, and there was an old preserved family temple not far away.
The Tran family house was just around the corner, so we started there. The temple is a small part of a house owned by merchants, and it’s at least 150 years old. There are four or four five guides waiting to take you on a short tour, to explain about the traditions of ancestor worship, and reveal some other historical facts. In Sapa they had scrolls representing each ancestor, but here they had a box for each one with the name engraved; there were probably 100 individual boxes. In addition to consulting the ancestors people would also have their own set of Ying-Yang coins; the two silver coins are slightly smaller than a 20c piece, with a square hole in the middle. The Ying coin has two blank sides, and the Yang coin has two sides with writing. You ask whatever question you want answered, throw the coins, and if you get a Ying-Yang that’s good luck. If you get two the same – DO NOT PROCEED! You’re allowed best of three, but if you get Ying-Yang on the second or third throw this means you may have some difficulty with your venture. To throw the coins a fourth time would be unthinkable; it would be like asking nicely for bad luck.
Inside the Japanese Bridge there is an altar, but asides of being amazed at how good the craftsmanship is and how well the bridge has lasted, that’s about all there is to it. The bridge contains a great deal of history, and has been flooded more than a few times since being built. The old town is quite amazing as well; although many of the streetfronts now contain shops and restaurants (and one excellent photo gallery), those mercantile enterprises inhabit very old buildings. So it is a bit touristy but it doesn’t really look it, particularly after the shops start to close down and you are left with stone alleys and locked wooden doors.
At the front of the hotel there is a concrete ‘apron’ that serves as a car, bus, motorbike and bicycle park, and on the footpath next to this apron another friendly lady maintained a stall selling sweets, cigarettes, water, soft drinks and snacks. She greeted us (and everyone) else as we left the hotel and as we came back; it’s good for business, and she soon got to know that all we usually wanted was two 1.5 litre bottles of water, but no cigarettes and no fanta.
This same lady was also in charge of the bicycle rentals, and on the way out earlier in the day we asked about the price, which is 1USD per bike per day. At 5pm, the price can of course be negotiated down to 1USD for two bicycles, for the remainder of the day. The slow and relaxing ride to the beach (about 3km) only strengthened my resolve to do what Douglas MacArthur promised he would do. The locals must have smelled it coming because when we got the beach, unlike yesterday there were about 10 people hanging around, including one lady who promised not to worry and she would watch our bikes if we bought a happy gift from her maybe later?
A large and dramatic cloud bullied across the sky, coming in from over the ocean, almost directly above the inlet between the two points of land curving around from the left and the right. There would be rain. But first there would be idyllic swimming at a deserted beach, in warm calm water. As the sky leaked it’s last light we left the water, and the rain droplets fell, lightly. We towelled dry and rode ourselves back to the hotel, in the faint beginnings of the rain.
We had promised the lady who owned the restaurant next to the hotel that we would come back for dinner the next night, and also we both wanted to try the steamed banana, which was somewhat adequate. And easy to figure out how to make… (no cooking school required).
The rain began to tumble down for a little while after dinner, while we lazed on the balcony and wondered what would happen the next day. Someone had paid the weather gods and paid them handsomely, because there were major floods in Hue just before we landed in Hanoi, minor floods and heavy rain in Hue and Hoi An while we were up in Sapa (where interested readers will recall that we trekked in dry sunny weather), and then while we went to the beach in Hoi An, Hanoi was rapidly becoming the new Atlantis. We heard tales of streets under a metre of water, and far more substantiated stories of the Reunification Express trains not being able to leave Hanoi, and therefore being totally unable to pass through Danang where we were supposing to be getting on the train.
So… plan A was to leave the hotel by minibus at 10am, to get on the train at 11.30am, and arrive in Nha Trang just after 9pm. Plan B was sketchy but involved the trains being late by either a little or a lot, us leaving the hotel at 11am to arrive in Danang at midday, wait around for the train and get to Nha Trang eventually. Plan C… stay here and go back to the beach. Either way around it we would have plenty of time for breakfast, so none of us were really that perturbed; just mystified at how we had managed to slip through the weather net.
Greg
