From Phnom Penh, I shared a Toyota Corolla taxi to the Vietnamese border. Four passengers shared the cab, and a fifth sat in the trunk, holding the lid of the trunk down over himself so the driver could see. It cost me about $14, or double what everyone else was paying.
After clearing customs at the Vietnamese border, I saw a bunch of motorcycle "taxis" waiting to take people to Saigon. One of the guys approached and told me in belligerent English that it would be $10. He had a big, clean, black bike. A little old guy, who spoke no English indicated that he would take me for $5. I looked at his decrepit bike and turned back to the big guy. Again, $10. I protested, "But he'll take me for $5!" "8 dollars," he said. I rolled my eyes and went with the little guy.
It was possibly the most uncomfortable, jarring motorcycle ride ever. When he slowed down by the first hotel in downtown Saigon, I was happy to jump off. A crowd of Vietnamese men were pointing at the hotel. Bowlegged, I walked in followed by one of the men, ready to scoop up his commission. I got a tiny but pleasant room with air conditioning for $12. As I found out later, room prices are somewhat fixed in Vietnam, and it looked like nothing in the whole country was less than $6. Quite a contrast to the little $1 or $2 rooms in Thailand and Cambodia.
I took a Meking Delta tour with Kim's Cafe. Kim's Cafe is a tour agency that offers tours, transport, and mediocre Vietnamese and Chinese food. Singh's Cafe provides identical services. The transport is useful - they have a fleet of buses that run up and down the coast, and you can buy a set of dateless tickets to the towns in one direction. This means that you can stay in a town as long as you like and take the bus out on whatever day you wanted - the buses were never full. The great advantage of this is that the prices are posted. If you try to get a low-grade public bus ticket, you are likely to get ripped off. You will at least need to spend time haggling vigorously, which gets on my nerves.
When I needed to travel to a town that was not on the Kim's Cafe route, the bus driver tried to charge me some ridiculous amount at least 20 times too high. When I asked for the price in American dollars, he quoted another incredible price. I did the conversion from dollars to Dong in my head and realized that these prices were not even close. The guy must have been naming random large numbers. I offered to pay a price that I knew was at least double the local price and held firm until he let me on the bus. Haggling with Vietnamese men was the worst part of my trip in Vietnam. It seems like many of them try to get rich off tourists. Saigon is full of idle rickshaw drivers. It is impossible to walk around without being followed by at least one of the desperate pedalers. Saigon is also known for its motorcycle purse-snatchers and other thieves. You can not walk the streets with anything loose or exposed, even a beverage.
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| Making rice noodles in the Mekong Delta. A thin rice gruel was poured onto a circular griddle, then lifted onto bamboo mats allowed to dry in the sun. |
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| Incense in a Chinese pagoda in Saigon. There were many beautiful old Chinese temples in Saigon. |
I arrived in the pleasantly cool, high town of Dalat, and I was approached by a motorcycle driver. Ugh. I had spent most of my time in Saigon avoiding persistent underemployed rickshaw and taxi drivers. I was perhaps a mile from town, and he offered to give me a free ride to a hotel. I figured that he would charge the hotel a commission, and that doesn't really affect my price, so I agreed. His name was Ho Vui, but he said that his name meant "happy", so I could call him "Happy". I called him Ho. I agreed to let him take me on a half-day motorcycle tour of the area. The tour went fine, and I decided to take him up on his offer on a longer trip into the countryside off the Kim's Cafe trail.
| Lodgings in Daklak Village. Daklak is a tiny village a little off the standard tourist path. I traveled with Ho and three other tourists with their own private motorcycle guides to get there. We stayed in traditional housing for $6 a night. |
Khmer-era ruins in My Son, with Cat's Tooth Mountain in the background.
There was a VC base on Cat's Tooth Mountain, and the ocean beyond that.
During the war, Americans tried to lob bombs at the VC base from their
ships, but they often missed, and the bombs would sail over the mountains
directly into My Son. Most of this area is now craters, which are labeled
with the names of the temples that had been there before.
Reminders of the War were everywhere. Hills all over Vietnam, especially to the west along the old Ho Chih Minh trail, are still recovering from the ecological devastation of "Orange Bomb", or as we call it, Agent Orange. Even more striking is the persistence of American music from the 1960's. I heard that song that goes "Sha La La La La" almost continuously, as well as Credence Clearwater and Hendrix. I even heard the "Good Morning, Vietnam" soundtrack in the streets.
I was walking through a market in Hue, in the middle of Vietnam not far from the DMZ, when I met "Mr Franky". He gave me one of those complicated handshakes in which you constantly reorient your arm to get your right hand aligned with his. "Hey man, I flew a chopper on Hamburger Hill". His words were drawn out, like an 18-year-old GI trying to keep a load of reefer in his lungs. But this was a middle-aged Vietnamese guy who didn't appear to be on anything. He gave me his card, which proclaimed that "Mr. Franky" gives motorcycle tours of the DMZ and surrounding areas. He claimed that he fought with the Americans during the war, and from his accent, I believed him. Where else would he learn to talk like that? Vietnam is in a thirty-year-old time warp.
Che was my favorite find. It is a tall glass full of ice, stuff (beans, jellies, diced fruit), and condensed milk. Drink/eat with a spoon. I found it at little roadside stalls everywhere, and even found a che-bar in Hue where the local youths hung out, much like an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor. The ice at little stalls is suspect, possibly frozen river water. When I ordered one in the middle of nowhere, my driver handed me a stomach tablet and ordered a Sprite for himself.
Pho and other noodle soups were ubiquitous. They were especially good at the roadside carts and market stalls. The best bowl of noodle soup I ever had may have been at cooked on a little burner in the DMZ. A woman had two large pots of noodles in broth - one with little crabs floating in it, the other with chicken. The seafood noodles were fat and perfectly cooked and flavored. I ate it squatting by the stall as a crazy ex-Viet Cong guy chatted with me in English before crowing like a rooster and wandering off.
Ca phe sua da was my standard drink. A little cup with fake condensed milk with a tiny drip coffee maker sitting on top. Pretty much like drinking coffee-flavored candy.
Seafood was great, as you would expect of a long, narrow, coastal country in the tropics. Hoi An was a good place to spoil yourself with a $5 4-course seafood dinner, which could include shark, shrimp, crabs, and squid. Hoi An also happens to have some other nice specialties, like little dumplings like the Chinese. I had a fine meal aboard Mama Han's Boat Trip in Nha Trang. Most of the backpackers did not feel like shelling their own prawns or crab claws, but three of us were happy to. So they passed enough prawns and crabs to feed thirty people down to the three of us and we had a feast.
Bia hoi was the word for local draft beer, usually very cheap, perhaps $1 for a liter in a funny-looking plastic jug. It was always pretty good.