Sarah and I were headed to Vung Tau on the southern coast, where Sarah had booked a room at a resort for 2 nights. Even though Ho Chi Minh City was hot as hell, polluted, and louder than eighty skeletons fucking on a tin roof, somehow, I was going to miss it. For our departure, I insisted on the most shamelessly touristy travel option available: cyclo rides. Compared to scooters, these bicycle-rickshaws are not only slower and more expensive, but you also get a terrifying front-row seat to the oncoming walls of traffic you'll be defenselessly pedaled into.
From the river we take a hydrofoil to Vung Tau, where we flag down a taxi who only takes 3 tries to get us to the correct resort, charging us all the way. Now, when Sarah agreed to come traveling with me, one of her stipulations was that we spend at least a few nights in a nice hotel, where she could relax and sunbathe and generally have an actual real-person vacation. Somehow, I had acquired a reputation for more...uncomfortable traveling, and she wanted at least some respite. Nonsense, I say. I like a good resort as much as the next fucker. Bring on the Thuy Duong Resort & Hotel, and I'll luxuriate with the best of 'em.
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| Bring it, you Gilded Bitch. |
When we try to check in, we are a smidge disconcerted to find that the front desk staff don't speak English. That's cool, Vietnam and all, but the front desk? At an international resort? Whatever. They scrounge up one guy who knows some nouns and verbs, and we're shown to our room. On the way there, we discover that all of the hotel facilities are closed, and the place is almost completely deserted.
Additionally, no one smiles, ever. Maybe it's a rule, or maybe this is the Vietnamese Bates Motel. Either way unsettling, and a little rude, especially if we die. Our room is out of range of the wifi, which Sarah makes fun of me for getting upset about, only to discover that clouds have moved in over the private beach, making sunbathing impossible. Oh, and you can't swim in the water either, because the waves are too dangerous. Before he leaves the bellhop tells us if we need anything we can just call room service, but there's no room service book or number to be found. At this point, I wouldn't have been surprised to find the phone cord cut anyways.
With little else to do, we take a nap until dinner, and discover that they didn't bother to turn on the pathway lights, leaving us an ominous darkness to tiptoe through back to the main building. The hotel restaurant is overpriced, in addition to being cavernous and empty, but there are no other options. We ask about getting a taxi into town, and are told that the resort is too far away and no cars come by here. One worker does offer to take us on his personal scooter, if we give him 10 dollars. And he could only take one of us. Lucky for Sarah, I've seen both Hostel movies and opt instead to eat in the quiet, echoing restaurant. By this point, I think I had only seen two other guests the entire day. But to be fair, they could have been ghosts.
On the way back to our room, I stop off at a bathroom, and it was more or less what I expected:
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| You're doing it wrong. |
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| Four star luxury. |
On the bright-ish side, during our stay they upgrade us to a nicer room, that actually has a room service book, and wifi, and even a little bathtub. I especially appreciated that we were not murdered in any way. In fact, on the day we checked out a couple of vans pulled up full of Vietnamese vacationers, and just like that the resort was suddenly full of people.
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| The most blingin' of vans. |
The facilities were opened, and I imagine after we left the pathways even had light at night. Maybe the staff even smiled, just a bit.
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| Just the way this lady and her powder blue power suit would have wanted. |
I would also be remiss if I didn't note that this hotel was the first time I saw the penguin-shaped trash cans that would soon become ubiquitous throughout my time in Vietnam.
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| Vietnam and the penguin have a rich cultural tradition that goes back thousands of years. Or, it's kind of like their crying Indian, maybe. |
We hydrofoil back to Saigon and grab a taxi to...well, we didn't quite now. Hanoi was the plan, but up until now I hadn't given any thought to how we were actually going to get there. Now seemed like a good time. The train apparently takes about 33 hours, so that was out. As Sarah and I discussed the possibility of plane tickets, our driver chimed in (while idling the car with the meter running, naturally), saying that he knew a guy. Good enough for me! He immediately gets on his cell to someone whom we assume works at a travel agency, and soon our cab is booking it through the afternoon traffic to pick up our tickets.
As it turns out, the guy he knew was nothing more than that, a guy with a scooter who drove to the travel agency before us and picked up a couple of tickets. While we pay out our inflated taxi fare and give a tip to our driver, and to his friend with the scooter, we're treated to a stern lecture on how we should book our flights earlier in the future. Now someone tells me.
At the airport, we wait as our flight time gets changed twice, from 8pm to somehow 7:40pm, then to 8-ish. The television screens in the terminal are playing the fight scenes from Fearless on a loop, which I watch while booking a Hanoi hostel for the night on the shitty (but complimentary!) airport internet kiosk. With plane tickets in hand and a decent hostel booked for the night, you'd think Sarah would be content, but I could see in her eyes a fear forming, with a tinge of trepidation. So traveling with me isn't the most reliable, but it's never boring! And that's what's important. Right?
On the plane we're seated (again in the emergency row) next to a fidgety Vietnamese man who was clearly a flying-virgin. Sarah had the window seat, and offered it to him without hesitation. He accepted, but soon wanted back in his original seat, perhaps made sick by the view of the naked Earth we were rocketing past in our metal affront to gravity. However, before long he was back in spirits and asks to switch seats yet again to get more of that precious window.
Upon landing, we make it out of the airport with minimal fuss, and the notable sight of another white dude, with a rugby shirt, two popped collars, and traditional fisherman pants, arguing with his angry girlfriend, who was dressed in the same awful mix of backpacker fashion.
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| Pictured: Locals? They must be, with that authentic pantwear. |
We're picked up by an employee of the Rendezvous hostel and soon shown to our room, which for 10 USD a night is somehow better than the 30 buck a night resort suite we just came from. The Rendezvous Hotel in Hanoi, ladies and gentlemen.
With our stuff stashed away, we become eager to get out on the town. I consult wikitravel, which mentions Ma May Street as the place to be, and off we go. The most immediately striking feature of the Hanoi nightlife is the silence. Where in Saigon there was chaos and volume, Hanoi adheres by a curfew (to ensure that students can concentrate, or something to that commendable and lame effect). Instead of drunks stumbling to and fro, the sidewalks are instead occupied by worker families sitting and taking their dinners. The only open venues were foreigner-centric, and one in particular caught my eye:
The EZ Rider bar, inspired by and decorated in tribute to the movie Easy Rider. There, we eat, drink, and listen to a table of loud expats smoke hookah and bitch about their jobs. If I had a dime, etc. Next, we stop by a bucket bar creatively named Bar Bucket where Sarah and I order, naturally, a bucket drink. For the uninitiated, a bucket drink is where you take a bucket, like those you might make a sandcastle with in your youth, and fill that sucker up with rocket-fuel booze and whatever tooth-rotting slurry you call a mixer. Once we felt appropriately sloshed, we leave the bar and run into some locals outside. The kind of locals who hang outside foreigner bars in the middle of the night asking if we need anything. Well, it just so happened I was planning to go with Sarah to Ha Long Bay in a couple days, and I had read somewhere that marijuana was just the thing for a Ha Long Bay sunset. I ask one kid: "Tai ma?", being the man of the streets I am (and having read on webehigh.com what weed is called in Vietnam).
"Yeah yeah, I can get for you, no problem," my nefarious associate responds, pulling out a cell phone. "Just need to call my girlfriend, she can get, you know?" After a minute or two of what I assumed to be congenial Vietnamese on the phone, he motions for Sarah and I to get on the back of his scooter. Well, I didn't quite now, but somehow this felt right. Maybe it had something to do with the literal bucket of alcohol I had just ingested. Or maybe I was just a streetwise go-getter. Off we went on the drug dealer's scooter.
After scootering a few blocks, our driver/dealer stops, pulls out his phone, and has another conversation. "She says she can no get, I'm sorry." We convey the appropriate disappointment, but then our host is struck with another idea. "But I know friend! Maybe he can get?" I look to Sarah, she shrugs her shoulders. We've come this far.
A few minutes pass, and another Vietnamese guy on a scooter pulls up to our darkened street. He walks over and has a hushed conversation with our driver, presumably so we cannot listen in to the rapid Vietnamese being spoken. Our driver walks over to us. "He has tai ma, 500,000. You buy?" 500,000 VND was about 25 bucks, which seemed a little steep for a couple grams. I tried haggling, but this guy wasn't having any of it. With the utmost discretion, he pulls out a bag, and holds it up for me to smell. In the dim light of the sidewalk I can't see the contents, but I certainly smell weed. I look to Sarah again. "You want it, it's up to you." Having come this far, fuck it. I buy the bag.
And that is the story of how I bought a bag of tobacco with a little bit of bud at the bottom (for the smell) for 25 dollars.
The next morning, Sarah takes off to explore the city by herself, and I decide to check out the sights. First, since it closes the earliest: The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, where Ho Chi Minh lies entombed, for some reason in Hanoi and not his namesake city. I hop in a taxi, but the driver instead takes me to the Ho Chi Minh museum. By the time I get to the mausoleum, it's closed. So much for seeing that sweet, sweet corpse. I sigh dramatically and, after a Vietnamese man insists on having a picture taken with me, head back to the museum.
Which just so happens to have some of the weirdest displays I've ever seen, in a museum or otherwise. For example, the Coc Bo cave, where Ho Chi Minh engineered the Vietnamese revolution, presented in the form of a human brain:
I present to you a series of photos of other displays, sans commentary:
After the museum had left my mind sufficiently fucked and maybe brainwashed just a little bit, I headed to the One Pillar Pagoda, which turned out to be in comparison pretty boring.
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| Might be better with more pillars. |
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| It also isn't always made in the most sanitary conditions, but you're not gonna live forever anyway. |
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| And no longer want to. |
At 5 dollars, it was awful and overpriced. No one should eat pigeon. There is a reason we have turned our chickens and turkeys into monstrous steroid-ridden meat blobs. It is because pigeon is an awful, awful bird to eat.
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| Although I never did try the intact head or feet. Perhaps an explosion of flavor awaits. |
I console myself with several more glasses of bia hoi. Outside, some old ladies ride by on a scooter and wave at me. Meanwhile, outside it's quickly turning to dusk, so I head back to to hotel where Sarah is waiting. We decide to get food, and see a puppet show.
Things get weird.
