Day 11 (Part 2) - Going Hué Down Now

Trivia - The post title is a play on words of a song by which band?


We finished eating at the Little Buddha Vegetarian restaurant and made our way back toward tourist cafe that was getting our plane tickets ready.

On the way we saw a sight that we had seen several times in Ho Chi Minh City, that I haven't mentioned in previous posts. All over Saigon there are people on the sidewalks, either sitting in place or walking around, with scales for weighing people. It was one of the odder ways I've ever seen poor people try to make money and didn't seem like it would be that profitable. But there were many different people with scales in just about every public high-traffic area around the city, so it must have been something people do. Maybe the Vietnamese don't have scales at home. Of course I don't think we ever saw an overweight Vietnamese person on the entire trip so I'm not even sure why they need to weigh themselves.

We got back to the tourist cafe, picked up our tickets for the two flights (Saigon-Hué and Hué-Hanoi) as well as our luggage and went out to find a cab. There was a guy across the street with a little brown piece of crap sub-compact and a taxi sign on the top. He ran over and helped us across with our suitcases and I asked him how much to the airport.

"Run meter," he said.

At the end of the ride he really did charge us the meter price, about 130,000d. I gave him 200,000d and told him to keep the change. I guess the best cabs to take in Saigon are the ones that look like independent drivers with worn out used cars. He was the only one that didn't try to take advantage of the stupid American tourists.

We had quite a while to wait at Ho Chi Minh City airport since we got there really early. Lisa left me in a cafe with our stuff to go look for souvenirs and snacks, while I commenced getting liqueured up.

I really hate flying. But after an Ativan and a couple of beers it's not so bad.

We got on the plane and it was only about half full. For those of you wondering, Vietnam Airlines flies regular jets like Airbus and not little third world prop puddle-jumpers like you were imagining in your Western mind.

After the plane took off the male flight attendant came over the intercom to make announcements. He first spoke Vietnamese, naturally. In the middle of his spiel he said something odd. It basically sounded like this - "<Vietnamese, Vietnamese> Captain Randy <Vietnamese, Vietnamese>"

Lisa and I looked at each other, "Did he say Captain Randy?"

The flight attendant then spoke in English and it was the usual airline speech of welcoming you aboard and blah blah blah. And he did in fact welcome us on board on behalf of Captain Randy.

After we leveled out the intercom came on again and a very American sounding voice said "this is Captain Randy from the cockpit..." and did the usual pilot talk of telling us the weather at our destination and how long our flight would be. The weird thing was that what he said wasn't translated for the Vietnamese people on the plane. You know, the actual people whose country we were in.

So that was odd. We got to say goodbye to Captain Randy as we got off the plane, a typical looking pilot with the kind of mustache common among pilots, supermarket managers and members of the Village People.

We got off the plane in Hué about an hour and twenty minutes later. When we walked out to the cab it was raining. It was also, for the first time on this trip, not hot. In fact, it was even kind of chilly. It was also raining, which is something we heard it did a lot in Hué. Lisa even read something that referred to it as the "Seattle of Vietnam."

After about a 30 minute taxi ride we got to the Orchid Hotel and were met at the sidewalk by a bellhop with an umbrella.

If you are ever going to go to Hué you need to stay at the Orchid Hotel. This place is incredible. The staff was super nice to us and the hotel is really cute. They apologized to us over and over about the lock on our door, which was broke due to it being an electronic key-card lock with a dead battery. There was no real put-out to this, they just had to open the door for us every time we came back because they only had one manual key. But they kept apologizing for it anyway. This was not the original room we had reserved because we came a day earlier. They let us keep this one for both nights at the same rate even though this was a bigger and more expensive room, and we were the ones that needed the extra night at the last minute. We tried to tell them to go ahead and charge us the full price but they would have none of that.

And the room was fantastic! A "family room" with a big bed, a separate single bed (good to know for when we take our kid to Vietnam in a few years) and a cheap mini bar, topped off by a balcony over the street below.





It was late and we were slap-happy by this point, remember our day started with the canceled train in Saigon, when I discovered my favorite part of the room. In the closet were some damn sexy silk robes.


I never would have imagined it was possible to look creepier than Hue Hefner. But I think I proved that it is.




Next - The day in Hué

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Day 11 (Part 1) - Waiting At The Station...And Waiting, And Waiting....

OK, I know it has been almost a month since I did any of my SE Asia travelogue, but today I pick it back up with our last day in Saigon. A monster of a day trying to complete the seemingly simple task of departing for Hué.

November 19, 2008 - What a freaking day! What was supposed to be a low-key day of waking up late, strolling through the market and then making our way to the station to catch our train to Hué turned out to be anything but low-key. It turned out to be the longest damn day of the trip and we didn't even really do anything.

We woke up a little late that morning, had some breakfast and then went over to the Ben Thanh Market, where we had bought our hats and Lisa's áo dài the day before. We went back to the same hat stand as the day before so Lisa could get a summer hat this time, finally convinced she needed one after the previous day of walking around in the sun of Ho Chi Minh City. She found one with just the right cuteness factor for her taste and we were on our way.

Our next stop was back to the railway ticket office in the backpacker area. I hadn't taken enough money with me the day before so I only bought the tickets for the first leg of our trip north, the overnight train from Saigon to Hué. We still needed to get the tickets for the daytime train we were going to take to Hanoi after spending a night in Hué. This is where we hit our first glitch of the day.

The morning train from Hué we wanted to be on was sold out. We had to pick a different train and the next one with available space left in the late afternoon instead, which meant we had to buy sleeper spaces instead of seats since this one would get into Hanoi the next morning rather than the same evening. OK, a little setback, no big deal. Costs us a little more money and some time in Hanoi, but we get a bit more of Hué as a trade off. The real downside was that now both trains we were going to take through Vietnam would have the majority of travel time during the night, so we wouldn't see as much of the country as we planned.

We stopped at one of the Internet places in the backpacker area and Lisa emailed the hotel in Hanoi to tell them of our later arrival so they would hold our room. Then we headed back to the hotel to get our bags, stopping along the way to buy bread and jam to go with the peanut butter we bought at the market. We weren't sure what kind of food options the train would have and we would be a couple of very hungry vegetarians by the end of the ride if they only had meat options.

We checked out of the hotel and grabbed a cab outside. This time we asked the price before getting in, learning from our mistake the night before, and the guy told us 40,000d (about $2.50). We gave him 60,000d when we got to the station.

Our train was scheduled to depart at 1:00pm and we were at the station pretty early, probably a little before noon. We spent the time looking around for a place to buy some bananas and water, with little luck. I did eventually find a cafe a short walk from the station doors that had water.

We sat and waited.

Being the big train geek that I am, I was really looking forward to this part of the trip ever since we started planning it. A trip up the entire coast of Vietnam and adding to my ever-expanding collection of pictures of me standing dorkily on a train platform, standing on front of a subway car or lying on a sleeper compartment bunk. This would end up being the only picture we got:


(click photos for larger image)

It was getting really close to 1:00 but no one was starting to make their way to the platform. I kept looking to see if there was a train outside, there was not, and the doors to get to the tracks were locked shut. There were no announcements being made in English, but ours was the only train leaving anytime soon so we just waited for the crowd to start moving. Ten minutes until departure time and still nothing. Finally Lisa prodded me to go up to the window to ask. I had read in the guide book that there was always an English-speaking line at the station but I didn't know which one it was since there were no signs in English. I just went to an open window and tried to ask the lady when our train would be boarding. After a minute or two of trying to communicate with each other she was able to find the English word "canceled."

"AW CRAP!"

She pointed down to the window at the end and said "English." So I went down to the end and waited in line. I yelled over to Lisa that the the train was canceled and she brought our bags over by me so we could try to make a decision on what to do once I spoke with the woman at window #1. She confirmed the cancellation and then told me that the next train we could get on would be the 11:00pm, ten freaking hours later! That train wouldn't even get into Hué until 5:00pm the next day, which would give us less than 24 hours there.

We're standing there trying to figure out what to do and suddenly I (the guy who hates flying and loves trains more than anything) say, "Let's look into flying."

Lisa tells me that there is no way it will be affordable trying to buy tickets the same day but I argue for at least checking it out. Everything else in this country is cheap, so what the hell?

I leave Lisa with our stuff and go out to try to find an Internet cafe. The station in Saigon is not in the middle of town like it should be so I wasn't sure if I would find an Internet place. After a little walking I came upon one. I went online and googled Vietnam Airlines. There was no way to book flights or check fares on their site, so that was no help. One of the other sites that popped up was advertising tickets for $67 but it looked suspicious. I decided to just go to Expedia and try it there. $287 for two tickets from Ho Chi Minh City to Hué taking off at 6:30pm. OK, a little steep but not really bad for last minute.

I head back to the station and tell Lisa. She goes to find a public phone so she can call the hotel in Hué to see if they would have a room for us a day early since we had originally planned to sleep on a train that night. After she checked that out I then went to use the phone, a public phone with an attendant you paid instead of putting money in, and called one of the reputable tourist cafes listed in the guidebook to see if we could get the tickets cheaper.

Bingo! I talked to a woman that could sell us tickets for $66 each. But we had to go down to the cafe to buy them. So off we went again. First we stopped by the ticket counter and got a refund on our Saigon-Hué tickets. We went out to the line of cabs and asked how much to go to the backpacker area and a cabbie told us $5, or about double what it cost us to get there. I was in no mood to haggle so I said fine and we jumped in.

On the way to the tourist cafe it finally dawned on me that our train trip from Hué to Hanoi would be almost all at night so there didn't seem to be much of a point of riding the rails up the coast. I told Lisa we should ask how much it would cost to get a flight for that leg when we got to the tourist cafe. I still can't believe these flights were my idea. I mean, I hate planes.

We made a feeble attempt to still be tourists along the way and managed to take a single picture of some kids we saw exercising in a park. Our exciting sight of the day.


We got to the tourist cafe and arranged for both sets of tickets after getting a quote of $65 each for the second flight. We left our bags there while they got our tickets ready and went to the railway ticket office to get a refund on our second set of train tickets, minus 10% since that train wasn't canceled.

Then we stopped at an Internet cafe again to email the hotel in Hanoi for a second time to let them know that we won't be arriving late as we wrote just a couple hours earlier, but in fact will be arriving even earlier than our original time we told them when we booked. At this point we were wondering if they even wanted these two flaky Americans staying at their hotel.

FINALLY got all this shit taken care of and we went to find some food. We found the Little Buddha Vegetarian restaurant in mini-hotel row. I never wanted a beer so bad in my life. I had two of those big-ass bottles of Tiger beer that I was drinking all through Southeast Asia. Lisa snapped our last picture in Ho Chi Minh City:



I was spent, and this day was only about half over.



Next - A surprising voice on the plane and some damn sexy robes

Day 10 - War Remnants Museum, My New Favorite Hat & Frogger In Real Life

Even though we had just had two really long days of traveling in a row I was up at 7:00am on November 18th. I had to run down to the backpacker area to hit the railway ticket office. It is the only place to buy train tickets outside of the actual Sai Gon station. We needed to get tickets for a sleeping car on a train leaving the next day and the ticket office was already closed by the time we got into town the day before. There really isn't a good way to get tickets in advance for the Vietnam Railway and I was a little nervous we weren't going to get a sleeping compartment. Getting stuck in just a seat for a 19 hour ride to Hué didn't sound too fun.

Luckily we were OK. He had berths available in first class. I pulled out my wad of Vietnamese Dong and started counting out the fare. It was pretty damn funny to hear a total of one million, two hundred and fifty thousand as a price for something. That tells you something about their currency in Vietnam, too many damn digits involved, kind of like the old Italian Lira. 1,250,000d was about $78, which is a really nice price for two berths in first class for that long of a train ride.

I was going to buy our tickets for the daytime train we planned to take from Hué to Hanoi the day after the first train but I forgot to take enough money with me. I wasn't too worried about that, though, because we only needed seats on that one anyway.

Travel arrangements for that day done I went back to the hotel and got ready for the day. The wife and I had breakfast at the hotel then headed out to the streets.

The traffic in Ho Chi Minh City, holy shit. Dealing with crossing the streets in Bangkok and Cambodia had seemed pretty hard up to this point, but now those looked like child's play in comparison. It is really hard to describe what it was like trying to cross the street in HCMC and really do it any justice. The best I was able to come up with is that it was like playing a real-life version of the old video game Frogger. On acid.

At least in Frogger the cars stayed in their lanes. Here you didn't know where they were heading as all the motorbikes and cars would dodge and weave to jump at any open space they found in the madness. It is also really hard to capture in still pictures.

(As I recently discovered, click on any picture in my Asia posts for a much bigger version)

It basically worked like this: When you came to an intersection, you just walked out into the traffic. OK, that is a little bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. We learned that you couldn't wait for an opening because one would never actually come. The few traffic lights they had in the city were not always heeded too closely. Many times we had to cross by huge roundabouts where the traffic would never cease. What we had to do was find an opening just in the lane next to the curb and step out. Then we would just slowly make our way across as cars and bikes sped by on both sides of us in each direction. There was a lot of faith involved; you just have to trust that they are going to go around you.

We found, as did a lot of other tourists, that a really good method was to stand right next to a local and just go when they go, sticking right next to them the whole way across. If they are from Saigon and still living they must know what they are doing.

We made our first stop of the day at the huge Ben Thanh Market right around the corner from our hotel. One of those huge Vietnamese markets where you can find anything and everything you want. At the outside walls you can find you fresh flowers and produce...



...and inside just about everything else. Somewhere in this area we bought peanut butter to be able to take with us on our train ride the next day.

We went deeper into the market and it was a maze of goods. Shoes, shirts, handicrafts, nick-knacks, luggage, jewelry, ceramics and just about everything else you could think of. Lisa wanted to buy an áo dài while we were in Vietnam so we kept on the lookout for those. It wasn't too long before we found them; they were in the áo dài section, naturally. The market, like most we would see in Vietnam, was set up kind of like New York with its districts for everything. You want flowers in New York you go to the flower district or for Indian food you hit one of the Indian rows. Or for those of you who watch The Simpson's if you want a hammock you go to the hammock district.

We paused slightly in front of one of the áo dài stalls and we got pounced on quickly, as was the standard method of operation if you stopped for a millisecond and looked mildly interested in something.

A pregnant woman at the stand had Lisa in the stall and was putting them on her in no time, ripping open packages and snapping on the áo dài. While I was standing there watching another woman kept trying to get me to look at stuff, and held up a Polo shirt. I tried to explain politely that I hated Polo and she brought something else that looked very American. At one point she grabbed me hard by the arm and pulled me over to her stand. I eventually wrested myself away from her stand since she had mostly American looking clothes so what would really be the point of that except for paying less than I do back home?

Lisa was almost done trying on áo dài and had picked out two different colors and both black and white versions of the pants that go under them. The pregnant woman looked at me and told me my wife had "perfect Vietnamese body" for wearing the áo dài.

We eventually made our way around to other shops and I picked up a Vietnamese flag t-shirt that I would find out later I paid too much for. Then we hit up a hat stall.

Even though we were in SE Asia Lisa wanted to look at winter hats, because she can never find any she likes back home for under $300.

I really needed a hat, too. Have I mentioned so far in these posts that the whole trip up to this pint has been really freaking hot and humid? Well it was. And really sunny. I already got a slight sunburn and I didn't have a good hat for being in this part of the world. I started looking at hats and trying them on. This stand had just an insane amount of hats sitting out and they had even more in another location, because every time I tried one on and wanted to know if they had it in a different size or color the girl would throw it to another girl who would run off and come back with more versions of the hat.

Lisa got herself something for the winter and I scored the best hat in the world. A perfect traveling hat with a great rim that had instant character the second I put it on.

From here on out almost all of the outdoor pictures of me on this trip will have me wearing the hat, much like this one:


It cost me a total of 30,000d, or about two bucks.

And some point during the trip I decided it might be a good idea to find some sandals. My feet were pretty hot in closed shoes while we were walking around and Chuck Taylor's aren't exactly the perfect walking shoe.

I saw a huge sandal/shoe stall and sat down to try some on.


After being told a couple of times that one I was looking at didn't come in my size I had to just ask which ones I could try on. I've got fairly large feet, but I guess for Vietnam I have monstrous feet.

The girl at the stand put a pair on me and really had to shove them so my heal was right up against the very back. My toes were literally hanging over the front of the sandals and she declared, "Fit perfect!"

I took a different point of view, figuring that having my socks off weren't going to make up the difference. She said that was the biggest one they sold so I moved on. This wouldn't be even close to the last time I failed at finding sandals on this trip.

We took our bounty from the market and dropped it in out hotel room. We only had today as our real full day in HCMC so we decided to follow one of the Lonely Planet's walking tours, with some variation. This took us to most of the major sights in one day.

We hit the War Remnants Museum at one point. A very interesting place to see as an American - the Vietnam War from the point of view of the winners. Most of the grounds of the museum were old fighter, tanks and artillery guns left behind by the American military. I won't really go into a whole detailed version of the tone of the museum but up until Clinton re-established diplomatic ties with Vietnam the name of it was the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes. That really tells you all you need to know.

As we walked through the city we saw signs of the one-party state that seemed pretty obvious in what it was trying to say.


And other random weirdness.


As well as the People's Committee Building with the statue of "Uncle Ho" in the plaza across the street.


We walked a ton that day and ended the tour near the Jade Emperor Pagoda. We were going to hit it up but it was on the other side of a major road with about five lanes in each direction. We decided we had enough of crossing big, busy streets that day and we were getting hungry.

We walked a little ways on our way back to the backpacker area but it was taking too long so we hailed a cab. It was like a five minute ride and I had made the mistake of not getting the price in advance. To be fair, this was the one place we'd been that the guidebooks said that the taxis actually used meters so you didn't need to get the price.

When the guy pulled up to the curb he tried to tell us it was 200,000d ($13) even though the meter read 12,000d (<$1). We weren't about to be ripped off by a guy that was trying to charge us about double what it would cost for a cab in New York at the same distance. He changed his tune to 120,000d when I pointed out the meter, trying to convince us that there was an extra zero there. I argued with the guy and finally told him I would give him 20,000d and no more. He acted all pissed but took it anyway. Guy was idiot, though. We probably would have given him 50,000d if he was honest, because we'd been tipping that well the whole trip.

We hit a vegetarian restaurant on mini-hotel row in the backpacker district the stopped for dessert at the cafe in the fancy and Westernized New World Hotel on the way back. Got an apple tort and a mousse to go. Walking into our room after a day of sweating a lot I don't think air-conditioning has ever felt so damn good.

Next - Vietnam's railroad seems to have the same management as Amtrak

Day 9 - Floating Market Of Can Tho

When you consider the fact that we were in Can Tho for only about 18 hours we really took an amazing amount of pictures. There was just so much cool stuff to see in this Mekong Delta town.

We woke up early in the morning on November 17th and got to see what the view from our hotel room was like. We were not disappointed.


And we had not one, but two balconies.



We were left an assortment of complimentary items in our room, which included a bag of rice and a bottle of rice vinegar. I suppose it keeps the guests from stealing the towels. And just in case there was any question that we were tourists, being white people in an Asian country and all, Lisa could always put on the free hat and confirm it.


We were up early for our breakfast cruise and tour of the floating market, a package that is offered by the hotel. We were met in the lobby by our tour guide and he led us out to the boat dock. We got on a small boat and cruised a little ways down the river to meet the Lady Hau, an old rice barge turned into a luxury boat for the hotel. We were greeted by lovely ladies in traditional áo dài as our waitresses.


We then feasted on a traditional Vietnamese breakfast of...

...made-to-order omelets, coffee and pastries. Well there was some exotic fruit, too, so it wasn't 100% Westernized.


We had breakfast and cruised along the river for a while, taking in the scenery.




Finally we came upon a huge collection of boats. We were at the floating market of Can Tho.



Our tour guide, who had dropped us off at the Lady Hau earlier, showed back up in a smaller boat, as did several other guides with boats. I hadn't realized until that point that we would have a guide all to ourselves. We got on board with our guide and the two guys running the boat. We headed into the thick of the market.

I'll let these pictures do most of the talking, but here is how the market generally works. Farmers come from their fields by small boats early in the morning, from as far away as 40 miles we were told, with a load of produce. The larger boats are the wholesale merchants, they buy the goods from the farmer to sell to the restaurants and shops. No individual buying goes on at the floating market, only bulk.

The merchant boats have long poles running up the front where they hang whatever it is they are selling. Some boats sell one thing only and others seem to sell whatever they can get their hands on. So on some poles we would see a single watermelon and on others we would see the entire produce section of a Whole Foods.








It looked like you could buy anything on the river, from furniture...


...to caskets.


Our guide then took us a little farther down the river where we docked and walked through another market area. One where you could buy a couple of pieces of fruit or a fish and some rice.


We walked through that market and down the walkway, passing the local convenience store along the way.


We ended up in a local rice noodle business. We got to watch the process of rice being boiled down (or something to that effect) to a soupy batter and then turned into noodles. A woman would then take the batter and spread it over this flat, hot cooking surface.


A few seconds later another woman would pick up the now dough-like sheet and spread it out on a bamboo rack to dry.



Later they would be cut into strips.

This was a total family business we were observing. It looked like daughter at the hot plate and mom with the racks. And baby was hanging out, too.


We took the boat again to another, larger market on the river. There didn't seem to be anything you couldn't buy there. Every kind of vegetable and fruit, every kind of thing that swims, flies, or walks and a huge variety of rice. We didn't take any pictures of the living things for sale because it was just too damn depressing.





We boarded the boat again.



We turned off the main part of the river, went under a low bridge and made our way up a small canal.







We ended our tour at the coolest little spot. We ran up against a bank in a small part of the canal and were helped off into a fruit orchard. We sat at a table under a tree, ate fruit and drank tea. There was another group of tourists there when we arrived but they soon left and we were joined by the man who owns the orchard.

He was this wonderful 69-year-old guy who was so nice. We sat and talked with him for a long time. He had actually been in the South Vietnamese army and did a year of training in America in 1968. He was an engineer who went around to bases fixing refrigeration systems. He even showed us his certificate he got from the U.S. military for his training. He kept it all these years and even had it laminated. He had no trouble talking about that period of Vietnamese history and was an infectiously happy man.

As much as we were having such a great time there, so much that we forgot to take pictures again, it was finally time to go. We shoved off after loading into the boat and made our way through the canal back out to the river and the hotel. After packing and going down to the hotel bar for a quick lunch it was time for us to travel again. I couldn't believe it was only the day before that we had gone all the way from Phnom Penh to Can Tho by boat, van and tuk-tuk.

This time we were being met at the hotel by a boat driver that would be taking us to Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon. We hired a charter because there is no public boat service (at least that a tourist can find) between Can Tho and Saigon, and I'm so glad we did after seeing what it was like to be on the roads in this part of the world.

The ride to Saigon was uneventful, just taking in the scenery and watching the amazing amount of commerce that goes by on the Mekong River. I can't even begin to imagine what they could possibly do with that many barges of sand. We made it to Ho Chi Minh City in about 4 hours, disembarked and caught a cab to our hotel.

After a night at the Victoria Resort in Can Tho, the Ha Hien Hotel in Saigon seemed like a Days Inn. And the view from the room was definitely not quite the same.



It was already after 5:00 by the time we got in to Saigon so we basically walked around for a little bit in the ABSOLUTELY INSANE traffic of the city. We found the backpackers district where all the tour offices were and bought a Lonely Planet guide from a girl selling them on the street. Young guys and girls selling books on the street would become a common sight the rest of our time in Vietnam. The Vietnam guidebook we brought with us, Fodor's See It, turned out to be a pretty worthless piece of crap so we needed an upgrade. We only had to pay $7 for the Lonely Planet on the girl was selling, and we soon learned that it was because it was a pirate copy. It was still good, it was just obviously photo copied pages of the Lonely Planet guide. Sometime the pages were crooked or had shadow lines from a copier. A great deal for seven bucks. You know, for us, not for the people that put all their work into the Lonely Planet guides.

We went and had some Indian food then dodged cars and motorbikes all the way back to the hotel. I'll write more on the crazy driving and traffic in Vietnam later, but I was already worn out by it and had only been in Saigon for a few hours. After the day we had it took us no time at all to fall asleep that night.



Next - War Remnants Museum, an awesome hat and the fruitless search for sandals that fit