The second half of Vietnam

Written September 10th

You: What's Vietnam like, Alison?" Me: Let me tell you...

I knew a few weeks ago that posting my Vietnam posts would be a challenge because of the blocked internet sites in the country, so I basically stopped writing after the motorcycle trip.   I knew I would eventually have a piling up of stories and didn’t want to post too many at once. (**It's October 7th and I'm finally getting this uploaded -- ugh!)

So, this one will be a little different.  It’s going to be more like a brief summary of the various cities we traveled to after Hanoi and Halong Bay.  The reason for doing this is tri-fold: 

1. I think people are really interested to hear what Vietnam is like, especially Americans.  The Vietnam War, though over 30 years ago, still leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of many people and for some people, violent news or movie scenes flash through peoples’ minds when the country is discussed.

2. This is the first country so far on my travels that I have really fully experienced.  Mostly, that is due to the simple shape of the country.  You have no choice, once here, to either go down or up the coast.  The major Vietnamese airports are in the north (Hanoi) or are in the south (Ho Chi Minh City) so you end up going from one to the other along the coast and seeing everything in between.  

3. I think Vietnam is low-down on the list of places to visit for many people.  I’m not going to try to convince anyone to come here, but I’d like those who won’t ever experience it for themselves to hear about it from me!

Dragon boats.

So, without further ado, my summary of cities visited, things that happened, places that were seen...

- Hue: Hue was the city we departed from before the motorcycle trip.  We had been told before we got there that the city was pretty boring.  Looking back now, I don’t think we gave it a fair chance.  (As a matter of fact, looking back now, I wish I didn’t listen to anybody’s opinions about any place I’ve traveled to because I find that those opinions have made us pre-judge a place, which isn’t fair.)  But moving on... We decided to only stay in Hue for one day because of its reputation.  The one thing we planned on was to take a dragon boat tour, which was recommended by a few people.  The best part of it?  The boat itself, carved into dragons at its front.  The tour was a joke...  We visited a pagoda where the caretaker showed as the perimeter of the garden surrounding the pagoda, only pointing out what tree produced which fruit (none of which were producing, so she could have been lying for all we knew) and then charging money for her “tour.”  We also visited a temple whose claim to fame was that it held the car that the monk who burned himself in protest of the Vietnam War had driven to get to Siagon to do the aforementioned task.  The next day, we left on motorcycles.

A row of custom shoe shops.

- Hoi An: The city of tailors!  I had been told by several people that Hoi An was awesome. When we got there, it was off the charts hot and we found a guesthouse with a pool.  This pool ended up being the highlight of Hoi An!!  During the day, we would gather around the pool for breakfast, followed by some of the group going to check out the tailor shops and others staying to get some r & r by the pool.  At night, the town seemed to die down to a whisper, and we found it hard to locate where the travelers were.  However, finally we found a few bars with people and a beach-front bar/club that we frequented a few times.  All in all, Hoi An was a good place to go if we had wanted to be low key....

My view from my beach chair in Nah Trang.

- But, we didn’t want to be low key anymore, so off we went to Nha Trang!  Turns out that Nha Trang was also a pretty chilled out place, but this time, we had the ocean to relax by.  We booked into a guesthouse that was two blocks from the beach and went there during the days to lounge by the ocean.  In the evening, we tried out the local restaurants and found our favorite bar, the Why Not? bar.  Whether or not we wanted a late night out partying or not, we all started off at Why Not? playing card games.  We sometimes had more than 15 people at our table as we taught them the rules and talked about where to go and what to do after Nha Trang.  To switch things up a little, we went to a waterpark one afternoon via the largest over-water cable car in the world!  I really wish I could have taken photos of us on the slides, but alas, I had already replaced one camera and didn’t want to get another due to water damage.

The silk factory.

- Dalat: Nothing too crazy or exciting here, but I think it was due to the time of year.  It is no longer tourist season, so Dalat seemed pretty dead.  We scheduled ourselves on a motorcycle tour of the surrounding areas and for the first time in months, we all needed to wear pants and long-sleeved shirts.  I was actually happy about that, but everyone else kept complaining about how cold it was.  It made me realize that I am better suited for cold than for hot -- bring on ski season!!  But I digress... On our tour, the coolest thing we saw was how silk is made at a silk factory.  We were shown silk worm cocoons and how they were processed all the way into the material we’ve seen all throughout Asia so far.  

The red dunes.

Mui Ne: Another beach town, this one was way more chilled out than Nha Trang.  We settled into bungalows near the beach and found a restaurant owned by an American from Vermont that ended up being our home while in Mui Ne.  We went on a day tour of the various sand dunes around the city one afternoon and were able to take some spectacular photos.  The red dunes were amazing and Carola went on a sand sled on the yellow dunes where she got to ride down a dune as I photographed.  

In the tunnels.

A sign at the Vietnam War Museum.

- Siagon/Hoi Chi Minh City: Our finale for Vietnam.  We knew before we arrived that this was the start of the “heavy stuff” we were going to see over the next week or so. The city itself was large, busy, and dirty... for most of my traveling buddies, it was uninteresting and overwhelming because of 
this.  Me, well, I wished I had had more time to explore it both during the day and night.  However, we didn’t have much time, and the two things we ended up seeing were the Vietnam War Museum and the Cu Chi Tunnels.  The museum was a sobering view of the war and was definitely anti-American.  There were photos of terrible war atrocities and quoted comments from world leaders about the mistakes that the US made.  There was a lot of tough stuff to digest.  The Cu Chi Tunnels were also presented in quite an anti-American manner, but frankly, some of the verbiage was so blatantly biased that I had to laugh.  Let me state that I do not find the things that happened to either the Vietnamese or the Americans funny, but just thought the presentation of the material to be a bit off.  However, despite the way the tunnels were presented, it was really interesting to actually see the tunnels that the Viet Cong used during the war.  We crawled through a tiny portion of one tunnel and I couldn’t imagine how people could have stayed living below ground using those tunnels for years!

Some snake wine we tried on the "Mekong" tour.

And now here I am, on a “Mekong Delta Tour.”  I’m quoting because it is not really a tour... we’ve just been brought to several random places and haven’t seen much of interest.  It probably is our fault... we should have given more time to properly explore the region, but we’re really out of time.  I need to get to Cambodia asap and then back to Bangkok so I can get down to the Thai islands and then to Bali! First, maybe I should buy my flights though? ;)