Vietnam (19.10. - 25.10.02)

The bus drove us directly into the backpacker quarter where the search for a room started. At the first places I inquired they only offered me a single room for 7 USD, which was a lot to much. Then I met some Israelis who had a double for 5 USD and guided me to their place. Unfortunately they also wanted 5 USD for a single room. As soon as I said that I only want to pay 4 USD one of the women led me to another guesthouse in a small alley. There I got my 4 USD room, which is almost the cheapest you can get in Saigon.

For the rest of this day and also almost the whole second day I did nothing but sleeping, writing and reading. Then I decided that I have to see something in this country and so I went to a couple of travel agencies and booked tours to the Chu Chi tunnels and to the Mekong Delta.

The tunnels were used by Guerrilla fighters first during the war with France and then during the war with North Vietnam. They are a big network or narrow alleys in 3 levels. In the first level (close to the ground) are kitchen, dining room and meeting room. In these rooms you can stand easily. The connections between those rooms are small tunnels, which have only about 1 m of height. During the tour we were only in this first level. Below it are a lot more small tunnels and also a escape to the river.

The entrance to the tunnels was very small so that only slim Vietnamese could go through them. Westerners are likely to get stucked. None of our group tried it but it looked really easy when the Vietnamese showed it.

After the tunnels we went back to town and the bus let us out at the war museum. But as I was not in the mood for cruel war stuff I was just walking around town. First I went to Notre Dame Cathedral, which looks pretty cool from the outside. In front of it was a young Vietnamese marriage couple posing for pictures and of course all the surrounding tourists also took pictures of them. Surprisingly (at least for me) the wedding cloth was exactly the same like in Austria.

After that I went to a department store where I bought a lot of Soya milk drinks and local sweets. It's always fun to go to supermarkets in other countries and in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) you can get a lot of stuff in the supermarkets.

Vietnam is a lot more developed concerning Western standards than Cambodia, which means that it is also more expensive, at least Saigon. Other traveler told me that Vietnam is cheaper than Cambodia but the only cheap things I found up to now are books, CDs and Internet. Books and CDs are very cheap because they are copied. Someone told me that digital cameras are also cheap here but the prices were a lot higher than on US WebPages.

After having some food in the department store I went down Dong Koi, a street where all the GI nightclubs have been during the war. Now there are a lot of street shops, restaurants and bars.

At the end of the street is the river Saigon where you can see big fishing ships, little junks and speedboats. The speedboats are connecting Saigon with the cities in Mekong Delta but as the tourist price is 20times as much as the local price I decided to go there with a bus and a travel agency.

Along the river is also one of the busiest streets in Saigon and at rush hour you can watch thousands of motorbikes on the streets. There are hardly any traffic lights and pedestrian crossings are completely ignored. If you just wait at one of them until the cars stop or the traffic gets at least lighter, you will wait for hours. The only way to cross the streets is by walking slowly between all the motorbikes, cars and rikshaws. If you wait long enough there might be a Vietnamese who helpes you over the street. The other alternative is to take one of the rikshaws whose drivers will not miss any chance to persuade you. It can be really annoying having them always by your side trying to sell.

But the only really annoying things of Saigon are the sales-kids. In Cambodia the kids were really clever and nice but in Vietnam they are just mean.

In Cambodia, especially in Siem Reap, they always had a good answer to a non buying argument, e.g.

Tourist: I don?t want to buy now, I come back tomorrow.

Kid: No, today is Sunday and on Sunday I have no school. Tomorrow I have to go to school again and so you cannot buy from me tomorrow.

Tourist: I have no money.

Kid: No problem, I give you credit.

A conversation with a Vietnamese kid was like that:

T: I don?t want to buy.

K: But you have to buy. You are in my country.

T: I?m leaving your country now.

K: You are still in my country, so you have to buy.

This kid was following me for about 5 minutes and told me a lot of bad words. Other kids were grabbing arms and legs of customers and some were even hitting them. I don?t think that they have any success with that. But that?s what all the kids are doing. The sales women on the other side were a lot nicer and polite. I just hope that those kids change when they grow up.

On the other side there are of course also nice people in Saigon, especially if you are not in the tourist areas.

The trip to the Mekong Delta was nice but didn?t really match the descriptions of the travelagent.

After a 2hour busride we travelled with a small motorboat on the Mekong River and on some smaller canals. Our first stop was at a fruit market where we bought the fantastic dragon fruit. It is big and red from the outside and white with black dots in the inside. The taste is like kiwi, it?s really good.

After the fruit market we went to an island with a coconut jungle. Within the jungle is a nice path for walking or even riding bikes. But it is still a nice surrounding. After lunch we went to a place where people made a lot of things out of coconut: candies, furniture, burning material and of course coconut juice and coconut flesh.

The last stop was at a bee farm where we got good honey tea and played carefully with a baby cobra. (I have everything documented with pictures, just go to: http://www.geocities.com/be_an_angel/pictures/vietnam).

Somehow I wished I had seen more of Vietnam than only Saigon. As I also missed out Laos, I might do this on one of my next journeys. There are so many places to see and so little time.