We imagine there will be two, three at most times in one’s life when you can cross a border and shout ‘Gooooood Mooorrnnnninnnggg Viiiieeeeetttnaaaaaaammmmmm!” Crossing from China to Vietnam at 2am meant we weren’t totally compos mentis and therefore we missed our first opportunity, but we’re certainly hopeful there will be another as Vietnam was a great place to travel...
So we left you in China, and since then we’ve gone ‘Full-Tourist’, ruling ourselves out of any travel awards in 2010 (like full-retard (Tropic Thunder) no-one goes full-tourist and gets accolades). The train trip to Vietnam took two parts, the first being a 5 hour jaunt in a standard seated carriage with fifty other Chinese families on holiday. Being on holiday, all had cameras on them so 90 minutes into the journey one of them plucked up the courage to request a photo with ‘Ron Howard and Caroline Zeta-Jones’.
What followed was a 2 hour photo shoot one family at a time, with offerings of food between shots, ‘Hello Kitty’s’ being flagrantly thrown left, right and centre and personal space being totally disrespected. Despite the constant ‘you so beautiful’ comments, it was all too much for Mat who faked some sleep while Caroline continued to front the camera, making a pen-pal along the way and personally tutoring a young artist.
The second part of the trip was where we went ‘Full Tourist,’ having by chance got tickets to a private cabin for the 10 hour blast across the border into Vietnam. Finally, a train trip all to ourselves, so we lay back, plugged in the laptop and fired up one of the many movies loaded to hard-drive before departing London. While full tourist includes power plugs, it unfortunately doesn’t include power so we weren’t able to fire up a movie for more than 60 minutes. Never mind, the beds were conducive to some shut eye for 2 hours at a time, intervened by border formalities in China and Vietnam.
Once in Vietnam, we rendezvoused (second use of French in this blog series) in Hanoi with Kate ‘Morty’ Morten, fresh from a 50 hour working week in Sydney (ahhhhh work, we kind of remember that). Being the trooper that she is, Kate greeted us with reduced cream and seafood soup-mix for a chip and dip extravaganza at some point over the fortnight of travels together. With the team three-strong, we hit the Hanoi old town to take in the atmosphere.
From Hanoi, we plotted a foray to Halong Bay, a few hours east. Planning was complicated by the apparent range of options (100+ travel agencies), range of prices (£20 - £50 for the 2 days option) and the difficulty in finding a recommended operator. The latter point was best illustrated by Lonely Planet’s recommendation to use ‘Sinh Cafe’, an original Halong Bay operator with a good rep.
One of the major issues for members when considering whether to let Vietnam join the WTO was Vietnam’s lax approach to intellectual property and copyright. Concessions were made and Vietnam was welcomed to Geneva on a commitment to better enforce copyright protections. So within this context, you have to feel for the ‘actual’ operators of Sinh Cafe. On our walk through Hanoi Old Town, we encountered only 14 places claiming to be the original Sinh Cafe, all featuring the same logo. We never managed to determine which was the real Sinh Cafe, but narrowed it down one operator at the original address and one a few hundred metres down the road who’d invested in rebranding and a massive sign saying they’d moved address and were definitely the original. Our money went on the latter option given the investment in concocting a believable story and the fact the guy at the original address did not come off as a long-term operator of a successful tourism company.
Halong Bay was pretty but a bit overrun with tourists on the gringo trail (which we freely admit we’re part of). Certainly a beautiful place, but a lot of that beauty is lost in the number of people visiting and the footprint that follows (rubbish in the water etc.). But what got us talking was the ‘paint by numbers’ approach of the tourism operators who offered exactly the same trip with the only variation being on the price of the trip, the quality of accommodations (in our case, we went the ‘air conditioning with flooding toilet package’) and the price of drinks onboard. We all agreed there is a massive opportunity for someone to enter the Halong Bay market with a product that differentiates on something other than price. To get it off the ground, we decided it was best to call it an original Sinh Cafe tour and to use photos of the sunset in all our promotional material...
From Hanoi, we threw those five letters into the hopper and Bongo’d ‘Hoi An’ as our next Vietnamese destination. Having previously gone full-tourist, and with Morty limited to 14 days between a friend’s farewell, studies, a job interview and more work, we opted to continue the full-tourist trend and went for an internal flight that would be 15 hours shorter than the bus trip between destinations. Despite the obvious incentives of the flight, we still cut it a bit thin and nearly missed our flight (picture three gringos running through an airport terminal in faux (third French word – officially bi-lingual) Havaiana jandals laden with travel packs while little Vietnamese people yelled ‘quickry quickry’).
Hoi An is famed for its tailors (200+ of them in a city of 125,000) and located not far from the coast, was a great place to stay. We all took the opportunity to have some extra clothing made to fit. The set up there is very easy – a range of fabrics on show, some garments so you can check the quality of the seamstress and the latest ‘Next’ catalogue from which to choose the garment you want. So when in Rome, one purchases 2 bikinis, 2 silk dresses, 3 summer dresses, 3 pairs of shoes, a pair of shorts and a pair of boardies...
While in Hoi An, we also took in a great cooking class with Gioan. The food in Vietnam was fantastic and was certainly far better than anything we’d mowed down in China. Having a chance to learn the recipes was awesome, made all the better by our great teacher who laughed at every joke we made. We laid the law down with Gioan early – 2 of the 3 of us are not bad in the kitchen so we want to be hands on (the third, the ginger one, is energetic and will do the dishes).
What followed was an expert class in Vietnamese cooking where every instruction was kept minimal and preceded with ‘Hello’. So where Jamie Oliver would say ‘Add one cup of finely diced carrot’, our instructor would say ‘Hello carrot’. Where Nigella Lawson would seductively lick a finger, flash some cleavage and say in a sensual tone ‘slide the wanton into the fry pan’, we got ‘Hello wanton’. And where Gordon Ramsey would say ’when I say more garlic you stupid f@*king twat, I mean now’ - f@*k me, we got ‘I said hello garlic’.
The next stop on our rapid transit through Vietnam was the city formerly known as Saigon but now known as Ho Chi Minh City (like Prince, the new name never caught on so this place still goes by Saigon). The order of the stay in Saigon was the history of the Vietnam War (known in these parts as the ‘American War’). Within Saigon, there were plenty of reminders of the past, from the numerous images of Ho Chi Minh to the tanks and military aircraft preserved on the grounds of many public buildings.
The war museum in Saigon was particularly good to visit, though understandably a little one-sided in the portrayal of events. The highlight of the museum was defiantly the exhibition of photographs by war-time photographer’s stories behind the images. Just out of Saigon are the famous Cu Chi tunnels where the Viet Cong lived and hid underground during the war in this part of Vietnam. While the visit to Cu Chi was again a bit paint by numbers, the tropical thunderstorm and the sound of some AK-47s going full tilt on the neighbouring gun range was probably as close as we’d get to what ‘Nam’ might have been like.
Weather wise, the afternoon and evening tropical thunderstorms are brilliant. One watches the clouds billowing and once the first drops fall, you have about 2 minutes until it is throwing it down and the streets become small rivers. Watching the locals swing into action as the storm approaches is brilliant, as street vendors raise an awning or move their goods to higher ground, while out of nowhere a dozen people selling ponchos and umbrellas will appear. Meanwhile, generally there will be a group of lads who’ll spark up a game of football for the duration of the storm.
So a rapid push through Vietnam is behind us, the next stop is Cambodia. Big ups to the Tasman Makos who have registered their first win of the season against the Magpies. Also, a highly commended to a big fan of the Magpies, Mr Fitcherina who is batting 0.75 on comments posted on blog entries (missed the Barish entry mate!). Hope those comments are being made on company time mate. Mental note to others - make a comment, get a shout out!
Hey there--Amanda here (masquerading as Keith) Hope you picked me up a replacement pink-with-stripe-and-star helmet in Vietnam! You can get it to me next time you're in London or I'm in Nelson :-) . Nice photos--surprised you didn't note the thousands of powerlines everywhere in HCMC... After the scooters, that was the second-most remarkable everyday thing about that city to me. Glad you're having such a good trip. And of course, big shout out to the peeps at Moutbarrow House.
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