Touching Down in Deep Humidity (Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam)

After nearly 24 hours of continuous travel, I have reached Vietnam. The travels could not have been derailed any more than they were. My original itinerary: Seattle to San Francisco to Hong Kong to Saigon. My first flight was canceled due to mechanical issues (apparently it was the same plane that was canceled a day earlier, and apparently it was much to my benefit that I got to the airport so early so as to get rescheduled to the next plane). On board the next plan to SF, I would still make the connection to Hong Kong (but by a hair). I explained my situation to the United employee at the main desk, who bumped by seat up to an upgrade (not First Class, but approximately 15 rows closer to the front) so I’d get off the plane earlier and have a better chance at making that flight. All was lost, however, when the delayed plane, presumably the same exact aircraft that had the earlier canceled flight, was approximately 1.5 hours late in taking off. It was around 1 hour delayed when I woke up from the nap in my upgraded seat and the captain announced people could get off the plane to get food, or rebook. I decided to “deplane” and then get rebooked. This was a wise decision on my part: I talked with the amazing desk person, Mika, who got me the original upgrade, and after about fifteen minutes of her artistically figuring it out, I managed to get a transfer over to Asiana (the Korean airline) that would put me through Seoul/Incheon and then to Saigon. Glorious! And the cherry on top of the cake: I would get to Saigon 1.5 hours ahead of the previous route. When I got to the desk at the South Satellite terminal of SeaTac, the Asiana desk person, who was just as sweet and helpful as Mika, got me aisle seats for both planes. On top of all these delays? A couple meal vouchers that kept me running and in high hopes via coffee and baked goods.

Having been on Asiana, I was not surprised by the amazing quality of the entire flight experience. In fact, I enjoyed it so much this time around not via surprise but via contrast to a recent trip on Delta to NY. Though Delta is trying to pick up the slack of USA airlines with new technology and “experience”-based flying, they still fall short. Asiana’s seats are some of the most spacious. Their food is fantastic and free whiskey is actually a little more valuable than one thinks when the day is filled with stressful flying. All the free movies, music, and games built in to each of the seats is amazing as well. It’s hard to describe the “Asian” experience of Asiana, but I will say it’s similar to being on an Air Asia flight, and a China Air flight. Anyway, long story short: if you’re American and haven’t traveled East, then you haven’t traveled. You don’t know what you’re missing. It’s kind of existentially break-through.

I only had about fifteen minutes between getting off in South Korea and getting on the plane to Saigon, but I will comment that the entire process was smooth and enjoyable. Maybe because I’ve done it before? On the previous plane I watched such mediocre hollywood hits as Jupiter Rising, Monster University, and Seventh Son. I fell asleep to Exodus: Gods and Kings. I read bits and pieces of Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual which is delightful and makes great travel reading. It’s one of six books I brought on this trip. I listened to Billie Holiday. There was, needless to say, a lot of sleeping.

Getting through security, passport control, and customs at the airport in Saigon was also very easy, and I think it was so enjoyable because I didn’t have to wait in any huge lines. I do remember all of my previous times in Vietnam being counterpointed with Jason. This time around, I had myself to keep myself company. Me alone with my thoughts. The taxi ride was familiar but silent. Inevitably we got to Bizu Hotel District 1, located right in the heart of the backpacking district, the same general location Jason and I stayed in when we came here 2 years ago. Nothing has changed, though the young Vietnamese kids hanging out drinking and partying look even younger than I remember. I picked up some smokes and some water, and in the course of doing a short walk to stretch my legs, lasting 15 minutes, the familiar shouts and calls for massages, marijuana, moto drivers, and beer specials washed over me in numbness. It’s my goal to not do any drinking while in Vietnam. We’ll see if I can hold true to that desire. I look forward to taking it easy and having a slow pace that meets with the humidity and the long, frantic trails of the tiniest ants in all the world.

Tomorrow I’ll be going out with my real camera, taking pictures of parks, pagodas, and other sights that I missed the first time around. I’ll also be meeting my dear friend Dede, who I regularly spent time when we both worked in Cambodia last year. Hopefully I’ll still enjoy the coffee with condensed (sweet) milk, the baguettes, and the noodles all on the horizon. Hopefully I’ll continue to stay active and engaged with my friends in the USA via G-chat, Facebook, and Whatsapp. Vietnam, though blocking Twitter, offers free international texting via T-Mobile. It’s these small amenities I didn’t have the first time visited that are truly making this experience different in subtle though alarming ways.

Videos: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

Saigon Paper

Saigon Traffic

Public Dancer in Saigon

Saigon Rain Window

Photo Reflections: Ho Chi Minh City

This will be the last post of our travels in Asia.

After visiting Saigon, Jason went back to the United States and I, well, I went to where I am now: Phnom Penh. There are a lot of pictures here in this post, and a lot are missing. I decided to cut two corners: one, instead of separating the experiences like the previous posts, I decided to play it lazy and post the entire batch in one go. Likewise, I cut the rotation corner and decided to not take the time to rotate all the pictures that WordPress screws up. So there are some images you won’t see, but that’s okay–there are plenty you will see.

Saigon is a place like no other. Like Phnom Penh, the streets are dominated by motos and vendors of all kinds. Unlike Phnom Penh, the roads are huge, the buildings considerably consistent in being taller, and the city as a hole is just, well, bigger. The food in the city is pretty damn good, too. And the culture is much different. Despite the Vietnamese government culture, the city feels rebellious and cool. Cool in one traditional sense of the word. In addition to exploring the many sites of the city, we got the chance to hangout with some amazing locals. At the end of the journey through this metropolis, we felt calm, collected, and ready for the next steps in our lives.

At the Cheeky Monkey:

Hanging out with Boorin and her friend:

The Post Office:

In the Vincom Center arcade:

“Confirmed to the Honey shop style.” Below: the only Starbucks in the city.

“Unlimited serving of 12 juicy succulent BBQ meat cut.” Below: 71 Saloon.

Out with Huong and family!

Jason’s favorite beer:

“Ego expression character.”

The Bitexco Tower:

And so that wraps up the photo reflection. I suppose I owe readers some general comments on my time traveling around. Not only my readers, but myself too. I can promise I’ll be posting something descriptive soon. And then what? Then, let the writing about life in Cambodia commence! Until then, you can check out my library blog for some updates on my internship experience.

Photo Gallery: Saigon and Da Nang Airport Life

“Skynet Coffee.”

“What we think is being a forest.”

“Choco Rock.”

“Mexico Vanila.”

“Seaweed Ham Bread.”

“Linda’s Fish Market.” In the airport.

“Antler Capsule.”

“Peanut Durian Coconut Candy.”

“Morbidi.”

Our Last Hotel Tiger Beer

It’s been a great trip. There’s less than 48 hours before the holiday is over, and this is the last night of drunken revelry. Cheers! Taken from room 402 at the Le Le Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City.

Some Impressions of Vietnam

Here’s basically what happened: we took a bus that took about ten hours from Kep, Cambodia, through Ha Tien, Vienam, up to Saigon, Vietnam. It was a pretty wild ride . . . met a couple British girls along the way, and we ended up joining forces and eating pho together at one of the few rest stops for the sleeper bus, and then we ended up in District 1 and got a dorm-style hostel together. They were nice though a bit arrogant, making vast generalizations about all of Vietnam. But aside from that distinct flaw in their personalities/perspective, I thought they were nice and helpful–very courageous and very good at bartering with the taxi drivers.

We were supposed to get a plane from Saigon to Da Nang the night we arrived but of course we missed it by about two hours, so we ended up staying the night. Jason immediately went to sleep and the girls immediately went on the computers at the hostel and went onto Facebook. I was like “I need Viet Dong [the local currency] now!” so I went off in search of an ATM. I stumbled onto the seedy “Bourbon Street” of Saigon, in District 1, which was only 5 minutes from the hostel. The place, which is comparable to similar streets in Siam Reap and Phnom Penh, had all manner of drunken white people, bars, clubs, street food vendors, and of course lots and lots of prostitutes. There were also military/police type people on all the corners, which I found incredibly unsettling, like parents watching their children at birthday parties. But it’s okay. I walked back, we woke up the next morning, and caught a plane to Da Nang.

Da Nang was great. Just, simply great. We spent one night there. We ended up going to this huge computer center I found (thank the SEO gods) on Google because I need a laptop and now that we’re done all our trekking and island hopping and rainforest adventures I figured it would be a good time to get one. Cambodia doesn’t have any reputable shops (fakes of everything) whereas Da Nang, the third largest city in Vietnam and the original base for American troops who had to get to the inland Ho Chi Minh Trail area during the war, has significant stores. Everywhere says iPad and iPhone–kind of obnoxious, but there is a section of town that’s for all tech needs. I ended up getting this laptop at this place where no one spoke English (the company, Phi Long, was 5 stories tall). After you choose a computer and pay at this small desk in the back (opposite the obnoxious USA cashiers at the FRONT of the store all in a line and all fast), they make you wait an hour. Why? Because they’re installing the operating system and making sure everything works. We were sketched out at first, but once you realize that this company is simply operating on a different wavelength, it’s fine, and actually cool. Instead of the instant gratification of getting your expensive product (my laptop, which probably would have been a couple hundred dollars cheaper in the USA, was $600 USD), you get to wait for an hour and muse over the rest of the store. They also give you a coupon for two free drinks at the cyber cafe on the top floor, which was awesome. We climbed floor after floor (avoid elevators at all costs!) and entered this dark, mysterious room where there were couches and chairs all over the place. And screens. Maybe 30 large screen televisions were scattered around the room. The chairs and sofas could have probably held around 300 people at max capacity and there were probably 200 people there in total. But it wasn’t noisy because they were playing the greatest hits of Britney Spears. Yes, you read that right. And guess what they were playing on all of those screens? The remake of the Last House on the Left, the brutally graphic horror movie. Look the movie up, watch the trailer, and then imagine it with the pop music and Vietnamese subtitles. Absurdity, hm? And then, to top it all off, the “repair center” for the laptops is in this rectangular room in the very back, so there is a stream of parents and teenagers bringing their laptops in to be serviced, and they have to walk through the whole place to get to the center, and they end up seeing all of the brutally graphic scenes of violence in the movie. Meanwhile, young people are drinking iced coffee (always served with complimentary green tea which is actually an orange color but called green tea) and smoking cigarettes. Yeah, pretty much everywhere we’ve been has allowed smoking inside–everywhere but hotels and fancy restaurants, basically. So they gave me the laptop an hour later just as expected, and it came with a mouse and carrying case, which was great.

The thing about Da Nang is that it’s a huge city but like Saigon most of the people live around the city (in the metro) and not actually in the city proper. So a lot of people visit Da Nang on the evenings and weekends and they come from what we expect to be very non-tourist places. But Da Nang is the closest airport to Hoi An and thus a lot of people travel through Da Nang but don’t spend time in it. We even met people in Cambodia who were basically like “Da Nang sucks, there’s nothing to do there.” Dumb people. The bridges in Da Nang are worth seeing alone, and are some of the coolest modern bridges I’ve ever seen. The highlight is this bridge that’s shaped like a dragon which glows different colors and breathes actual fire. Look it up. Pretty amazing. Here’s another moment of absurdity: as we walked the bridge, all of these Vietnamese people from outside of Da Nang who were visiting with their family would come up to us and ask us our name and then ask to have a picture with us. It was like a thing. It happened once with this guy and his family: he asked us to pose with his wife and son and he took a pic of us. We were surprised and he knew a lot of English so we had a pretty basic conversation with him. He was so happy. But then we continue and basically every ten steps we get approached by someone else. In some cases entire families. In some cases boyfriend/girlfriend couples. And in one instance this man was with his son and he asked us to hold the son while he took a picture of us all! Wild! That level of trust and excitement and cultural exchange would never happen in the USA. Jason and I felt so happy about it… everything we hate about American tourists and American ignorance and stereotypes was put on hold while we represented our culture and ethnicity with a magical degree of pride.

Da Nang’s waterfront is also something to talk about. With the lights of all the buildings being dazzling, and the three bridges (one of the two I didn’t mention has a very Space Needle like quality to the middle of it) lighting up the water, and endless party boats (non-drinking party boats–but party boats with loud music nonetheless) in their neon trim making a really nice ambience to the water, there’s also the lights in all the trees along the water. Hard to concisely describe the image, but it’s nice. We strolled up and down only a small section of the city-side of the river (the other side is walkable too, for miles it seems) and watched kids do tricks on rollerblades (similar to skaters in the US), families hanging out with children, numerous Futurist-esque sculptures, and vendors of all kinds. Aside from one Brit, we saw no other white people in Da Nang, which is incredibly crazy. Okay, I lied–there were a few at this bar we went to, called Bamboo2, which is themed after 70s rock music and has cheap beer (Larue and Saigon are the two Vietnamese beers on draft everywhere, or in bottles), and is three stories tall, includes an overlook of the water, has graffiti on all the walls, and has Foosball. A highly fun spot after walking up and down the river.

The next day we were stumbling around looking for some espresso after lunch and were approached by a couple of the “Easy Riders,” this collection of tour guides that take small groups around Central Vietnam on those old school motorcycles–just like in the movie Easy Rider. They approached us on the street and we thought it would be fun and cheap to get a tour from them. They took us to Marble Mountain where we saw amazing views of the beach and too many Buddhas to count, and then to this tailor in Hoi An (which was extremely pricey, but the clothing is damn good, and I needed work clothes for my internship anyway). Once in Hoi An, we arrived at the Ha An hotel, which had flower petals over everything, fresh fruit (including a round type of pear and dragon fruit), and access to free bicycles. We’ve been taking it easy here over the past 30 hours, trying to do some cycling, visit some of the local shops, and eat delicious food. Food in Vietnam is, like Cambodia, very cheap and very fancy. Service here is impeccable and the coffee beverages (espresso, anyway) are some of the best I’ve had in my life. We went to a bar called Cheap Drinks or something like that last night, and played pool and met a guy from New Jersey and an angry Slovenian who was also all about free love. This town is quieter, much friendlier and oriented towards tourists. After Angkor Wat and Siam Reap I would say this has the most tourists I’ve seen–mostly older folks, too.

Tomorrow we will have half a day and then we fly down to Nha Trang, where we will be a whopping three nights. We’re hoping to take it easy there at the beach before heading down and ending our touring in Saigon. I will either go up to Hanoi before heading to Phnom Penh (for a couple of days), or I will save my pennies and get settled into Phnom Penh a week and a half before my internship is scheduled to begin. I can easily see myself returning to Vietnam in the near future. I definitely want to go into the Ho Chi Minh trail and the mountains–Da Lat, especially. I also think Hue is worth checking out. But it’s a big country and, like Malaysia, deserves multiple visits to really get the gist of what’s going on here–in terms of tourism and in terms of the local cultures.