Sunday was another rest day (it was a late night). No real highlights to speak of, other than the following:
- lots of sleep
- the new Transformers movie (first half was decent then it got a bit crap)
- Robin Williams movie – Man of the Year which was pretty good
- Pho Bo
- lots of fanta
This morrning we set off for the Cu Chi tunnels, a network of tunnels used by the Viet Cong as a base from which to attack American forces. The bus trip was about 90 minutes each way, and while it was kind of interesting, it did feel a bit contrived and possibly even a little triumphal.
Perhaps I would have appreciated it better if I had gone down into the tunnels themselves, however confined spaces really aren’t my idea of fun, and I was physically incapable of doing it anyway.
When we got back into Saigon, we went straight to Quan An Ngon, a restaurant that had been recommended to me by a couple I met in Hanoi. They offer a variety of local dishes from all over Vietnam and it was really rather good. After lunch, I went back to the hotel for a bit of a snooze and some more cricket (bloody saffas!) before heading out with the group for one last meal together at a Mexican (wtf?) restaurant called La Cantina. I was pretty dubious about this as I hadn’t come to Vietnam to eat Mexican food, but it turned out to do some pretty good Vietnamese stuff as well, along with some excellent 3-4-2 mojitos…
After dinner, I was cajoled into making a thank you speech for Phuong, who had given us a truly excellent three weeks (though he still owes us a big night of Karaoke). The speech went down well and we moved across the road for a last night of pool and drinking…
So much for 4am. We alighted from the train a few minutes after 3am, which is a ridiculous time of the morning to do anything except sleep or drink. Thankfully, our bus to the hotel was waiting for us and it was a mercifully short journey.
Just as Phuong was saying “watch the step”, I stepped off the bus onto a weirdly sloping bit of kerb and went down very hard on my ankle, yelling relevant expletives. For a few moments I thought I’d actually broken something and would be heading home in time for christmas, but after a few minutes, it was fairly clear that it was just a very bad sprain.
We checked into our day rooms (four guys, one double bed – oh well I had a good excuse for taking one side at least) and dozed/watched a movie (likely to be mostly dozing as I can’t remember what the movie was), while I iced my now very swollen ankle.
At 8.30am, Phuong took us out for breakfast and a walk around some of the major sights, well more of a hobble for one of us. Breakfast was at Pho 2000, famous beause Bill Clinton ate there on 17th November 2000 (which would have been while Gore & Bush were fighting over the Florida result), a fact they were only too eager to remind everyone of. My Pho Bo was actually a little disappointing so I won’t be going back.
Next stop was the War Remnants museum which, along with an interesting collection of American tanks, helicopters, aircraft, field artillery and bombs contained some very confronting photographs of victims of Agent Orange and napalm, among other atrocities. Ria and I were accosted by a bookseller with no hands who guilted us into buying a book each. I got “The girl in the picture” about a fanous photograph of a small naked girl running away from a napalm bomb, a book that I’ve wanted to read for some time. Ria got a book about the war written by a Vietnamese author. Of course, these are nothing more than careful photocopies, and they weren’t all that cheap (£4 isn’t that cheap for a paperback in the post-Amazon world) but we didn’t feel bad about it.
We then walked past the Reunification Palace, where the South Vietnamese regime finally fell in 1975, and through the cool, tree-lined park to the Catholic cathedral (Notre Dame, of course) and the rather impressive Post Office (designed by Gustav Eifell), before heading back to the hotel.
Later on I went out again and after a quick bite of spring rolls for lunch, I shuffled down the road to the Ben Thanh market wherer I bought one last Vietnamese t-shirt (I think this one might be my favourite though). After getting away from the grabby hands of the t-shirt stall holders, I made my way out onto the street with a vague notion of finding a park to go and lie down in for a while. I was starting to feel almost dizzy now (I’d been up, more or less, since 3am remember) and fell prey to the inevitable cyclo driver standing on the corner. He took me on a pretty relaxing trip around the posh end of town for about half an hour before overcharging me by about $5. I was in no state to argue the point so I took it on the chin. I hobbled back to the hotel, with a quick ice cream on the way, then discovered that for some reason a South African sports channel was available on my TV, so I proceded to watch the action from the Australia versus South Africa cricket test from the WACA in Perth. Naturally, as with any cricket watching session, there was a good deal of snoozing also involved. At stumps on day 4, things were pretty closely balanced with both sides having a good chance of a win.
Dinner was at one of the BBQ restaurants that appears around Ben Thanh market in the evenings and was pretty good. The Red Saigon beer was certainly going down a treat. After dinner we went for a wander and came across the most extreme traffic I think any of us has ever seen – the fact that it was Friday night might have contributed, but this was an amazing sight..
Thursday was another lazy day (for all the same reasons). The highlights were a spot of relaxing on the beach, including an expensive plate of fried rice and possibly the most expensive can of fanta in Vietnam (well I was being waited on at the beach so I wasn’t complaining, though some sun would have been nice). At 5pm we headed off to the train station for our ride to Saigon. This was a really lovely train that I would have gladly stayed aboard a lot longer than we were going to. As this train originated in Nha Trang and terminated in Saigon, it is difficult to understand why it left at 6pm, and was scheduled to arrive at about 4am. A 9pm departure perhaps?
After quite a late night, Wednesday was quite a lazy day. There was no real sun but a visit was made to the beach regardless in the afternoon, after I’d bought a cool new (but rather expensive, at least by Vietnamese standards) t-shirt. In the evening, Phuong took us up the beach by taxi away from the tourist area to a great streetside seafood restaurant where we proceeded to feast on the local delights, including barbecued prawns, squid, seasnails and fish. There had been some initial discussions about the quality of the local lobster (high) and the cost (low), so part way through the meal a couple of these were weighed (not easy with live lobsters!) and priced. Simon and Ria were keen and I couldn’t find a reason to decline a £5 lobster, so these were dispatched to the barbecue, where I suspect they suffered a rather unnecessarily painful death. Oh well, they tasted fantastic.
Once back in town, I took the group around the corner to Guava, a very cool western-oriented bar whose manager (from Nottingham) I’d met at the little streetside stall where we’d had our last beer in the early hours of the previous morning. She was very pleased to see us and we all partook of the local speciality (2-4-1 during happy hour on wednesdays only), which was a frozen mix of various liquids including peach juice that met with universal acclaim. As happy hour had ended once we’d got through our drinks, we headed off to Why Not bar again (where happy hour runs till midnight), where we finally managed to get the two groups together for a couple of drinks. Most of my group only hung around for one drink but Simon and I proceeded to get quite drunk on the local ‘bucket’, an orangey concoction served in a large plastic jam jar that was very good value for the amount of grog in it.
It was another wet morning but there was hope for sunny days ahead. Got a bus to Danang train station where we met an American who was kind of interesting though he clearly hadn’t spoken to many people lately and was a little too keen to continue on the conversation. Luckily, he was seated down the other end of the coach when we boarded the train. The train itself was reasonably comfortable, though the airconditioning didn’t really touch the sides so it was pretty muggy for the whole journey. After we finally left Danang, we proceeded for about half an hour before stopping in the middle of nowhere. This stop lasted about half an hour and was apparently due to the engine packing it in, so we had to wait for a new one to arrive. I’m pretty sure a new one didn’t arrrive and we moved on again for about another half an hour before again stopping for a solid 20 minutes at least. It was by now becoming clear why the trains here are so slow – it’s not that they’re that slow as such (they seem to cruise along at about 80km/h easily enough), it’s just that they keep stopping, for excruciatingly long periods of time. The second stop turned out to be a small station and we since then stopped again for at least 20 minutes at another station. I’m beginning to have an idea about how to speed these journeys up…
While we were actually moving, things were pleasant enough. The landscape changed slightly as we progressed south and many fields have new rice crops planted, giving a welcome green tinge to the view.
The conductors also finally cranked up the audio-visual entertainment (there’s a couple of TV screens in each carriage), initally with the local news, a fairly dull affair including lots of stuff about the president meeting people, always sitting in front of the same enormous bunch of flowers. We were then forced to endure one of the George of the Jungle movies, complete with Vietnamese voice-over (it’s not really dubbing as they just talk over the original voices), followed by some weird Macaulay Culkin christmas thingy.
We finally arrived at 11pm, about an hour after the other group that had caught the later train (they left about 2 hours after us). Had a quick meal and then headed around the corner to the Why Not bar to play with the other group.
Another wet morning but it stopped raining just in time for our bike adventure. Phuong took us around the outlying villages and fish farms of Hoi An.
We went back to the streetcorner cafe for lunch – I had Spring rolls, Lau Cau (the local noodles – not my favourite) and Spinach with prawns. This was followed by a tiny spot of shopping (I finally gave in).
After lunch, we retired back to the hotel for some more pool and couple of beers before Phuong took us off on a slightly dangerous bike ride across town, to his friend’s restaurant, where we had an awesome barbecue dinner. Back into town, where we popped into the Before & Now bar, a pretty standard tourist bar where we snuck in just before the end of happy hour, in time to buy 2-4-1 vodka and 7-ups which had basically zero alcohol in them. Needless to say, we didn’t hang around but instead returned to the hotel for one more pool & beer session.
The morning started wet but had dried up by the time our cooking course started at 11am. Only four of us attended the course – Simon, Ria, Niels and myself. We started with a very informative trip to the market, then returned to the restaurant to prepare five courses:
- sweet & sour chicken soup
- fried spring rolls
- green papaya salad
- fish in banana leaf
- eggplant in claypot
Han, our teacher, was very good (and very funny) and I’ll be making most of these dishes again (assuming I don’t lose the recipes).
After lunch, I grabbed a bike from the lady out the front of the hotel and joined Hannah on the 10 minute ride down to the beach where we were ripped off by the bike parking guy (oh well, only another dollar) before going for a long walk along the windy beach, admiring the stupidity of the new beachfront developments that were already being eroded away by the waves.
We went back into the old town for dinner at the streetcorner cafe which involves a number of different operations, all in the same place. This was great cheap food so I had three courses and some fresh beer for the king’s ransom of 80,000 dong (£3).
Later on, I enjoyed some pool and some beers at the hotel garden bar with some of the folks from the other Intrepid group that were staying at the same hotel.
We headed off for Hoi An by bus at 9am. This was a relatively short journey (about four hours, including stops) so was pretty painless. We had a couple of stops, including at China Beach (big R&R beach for American soldiers during the war), where I had a very quick swim.
Phuong took us for a quick walk around the old town, then we had a quick lunch at Banana Leaf, by the river (food wasn’t as good as the restaurant of the same name in Clapham, sadly). After lunch everyone headed off to check out the tailors and see what clothes they needed making. I have no interest in buying a new suit at the moment so I headed back to the hotel for sleep. Annoyingly, the map the hotel had given us was so misleading that I spent a solid half an hour walking around looking for it.
I then overslept and missed the rendesvous for our group dinner. I had a walk around the old town instead before heading back for an early night.
Phuong had promised us that today would be one of the best days of the tour. He had planned a full day motorcycle tour through and around Hue, and as this was his home town, I had pretty high expectations.
First stop was the beautiful Thien Mu Buddhist pagoda next to the Perfume River. This was built in 1601 and is one of the most famous pagodas in the country. It was the monastery of the monk Thich Quang Doc who drove into central Saigon in 1963 and set himself on fire in protest against the anti-Buddhist policies of the South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. The grounds of the pagoda contain both the car he drove and his grave.
We then raced through the backstreets of town, many of which are barely wide enough for a small car, and across a frighteningly narrow track with iron walls, attached to the side of a rail bridge. This was literally inches wider than a moped with a small vietnamese guy and a big aussie guy on it and I imagined living the rest of my life with the use of only leg for most of the crossing. Loc, my driver, however was quite good at staying upright so we survived this one (there were a few near misses later in the day but he managed to recover gracefully each time). Our next destination was a coliseum built by the Vietnameese King in 1804. About a quarter of the size of the Coliseum in Rome, this was built for matches between lions and elephants. The elephant is more revered than the lion in Vietnam, so the result was always a forgone conclusion as the lions were hobbled by having their claws and teeth cut off as well as being starved for five days prior to battle.
Next stop was Bunker Hill, a strategic hilltop position outside Hue, alongside the river from which the French and then the Americans tried to control central Vietnam. There’s not much left here apart from the original concrete bunkers but it does afford a great view up and down the river.
It was then a short trip down a main road to the incense village, a strip of stalls making and selling incense. Everything here was so lovely that I ended up buying a number of little things. We also enjoyed some of the local tea, which is normally too bitter, but when taken with some thinly-sliced dried ginger, it’s really lovely. I bought a couple of packets of this ginger and have been enjoying it ever since.
For lunch we headed to a Buddhist nunnery where they had prepared an awesome vegetarian lunch for us. Having gobbled this down, we then had a little lie down for an hour or so (yes, just like at pre-school), which was all very peaceful.
Our next destination was back into the suburbs of Hue where we dropped in on Thuy, the famous one-handed conical hat maker. She was born with no right hand as a result of her mother’s exposure to Agent Orange when Thuy was pre-natal. Her family and Phuong’s had been neighbours at the time. Thuy has been making conical hats full-time since about her tenth birthday and has been featured on Vietnam Airlines marketing, apparently. She was very welcoming to us and provided us with one more striking example of how far this country has moved on in the last thirty years.
Last stop for the day was a quiet rural village set amongst flooded fields. On the way we came upon a herd of water buffalo grazing on the verge, and stopped to take some shots. I discovered that one of the buffalo had an enormous leach (about one inch thick and six inches long) attached to its belly. We alerted the kids who had been sent out to round up the beasts and they promptly flicked it off onto the ground, where it lay in an enormous pool of deep red buffalo blood, which we all got to enjoy as we set off again.
When we reached the village, we had a wander around and were then soon mobbed by a group of local primary school girls who were very keen us to play a game with them which is similar to hackysack but involves a plastic ‘ball’ with a feather tail. I was then talked into a quick palm-reading, which was interesting. All pretty positive, though apparently I am due at the jewellers rather soon…
It was a great tour around the area and we’d seen so much that I was struggling to remember it all when I got back to the hotel to write some notes. Later on, we went out for a meal before heading back to DMZ for some more pool and local vodka.