Adventures in Vietnam

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Day Thirty-Five: Saigon or Bust

     It's here. Ho Chi Minh City, or as it's more commonly known, Saigon. My last stop (okay, so I still get to go to Phu Quoc, but this kind of feels like the end, since it's where I'll depart from a mere ten days from now). After I got off of the sleeper train, I was unsurprisingly overrun by moto drivers looking for my business. Not wanting to spend another small fortune on a taxi, I agreed, and hopped on with a driver who would get me to my hotel for a mere 70,000d. Generally you pay less for a moto than a taxi, due to its...well, riskier nature...but at 4:30 in the morning, even Saigon traffic isn't too overwhelming, and it was quite a pleasant drive through a city just waking up. My hostel was locked up for the night, but my driver yelled through the gate in Vietnamese until a sleepy receptionist appeared for just long enough to drop my bag into storage and tell me that I couldn't check in until 2 p.m., before dropping back off to sleep. Not that I could blame him. I took his advice to "explore the city," and by 5:00 I was out on the streets.      This is where my love of Saigon began. Going out just as the sun came up and the temperature was still bearable, seeing the shop owners setting out their wares, the locals settling down for an early breakfast of pho, and the street food vendors preparing for the day among the city's combination of green parks, western style skyscrapers, and barely navigable alleyways; hearing the honking horns begin, and seeing the traffic build from its semi-normal night self into it's chaotic normalcy: this is what heaven must be like.      I started at the beginning, the place where all tourists to Saigon must go. I got to Reunification Palace immediately after it opened, a beautiful place of lush greenery set among Saigon's soaring business offices. Gated off from the rest of the city (and it's motorbikes), the Palace is an oasis. A beautiful building, home to Ngo Dinh Diem (before being bombed and rebuilt), and later President Thieu, this is the site where in 1975 the RVN flag was lowered and the VC flag proudly raised in its place (both are still on display inside the palace), and where Duong Van Minh, the President of the RVN (for a grand total of two days), officially handed over power to North Vietnamese officer Colonel Bui Tin in 1975, to which Bui Tin famously replied "There is no question of your giving up power. Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you do not have."      After the palace, I headed over to the War Remnants Museum, previously known as the Exhibition house for US and Puppet Crimes, the Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression, and most recently the Museum of American and Chinese War Crimes, if that gives you any hint as to its contents. This was perhaps the best exhibit of any kind that I've seen since arriving in Vietnam. Somewhat less propaganda-ey than it's counterpart to the north, it has four stories of exhibits including an entire floor dedicated to photojournalism during the war, and another on the negative effects of dioxin - Agent Orange - both past and present. And of course, outside, there is the requisite display of American aircraft captured during the war.      After the museum I hit Pho 2000 for lunch. Although I didn't realize until being seated inside, it's signs, advertising "Pho for the President," are a reference to Bill Clinton's visit to Vietnam when relations were normalized between the U.S. and Vietnam. Apparently the then-president dropped by for a bowl of Pho, and the restaurant's walls are now plastered in newspaper clippings and photographs of the staff with the President. The vegetarian pho, at least, was fit for a president, and successfully re-energized me. After lunch, I hit Ben Thanh Market, just across the street from Pho 2000. A market clearly aimed towards tourists, the prices were high, but anything and everything that a shopper could possibly want is to be found at Ben Thanh, and in a country where bargaining is the norm, high price tags can be remedied. Well, they can if you're a better haggler than me, at least. I ended up with two items, both of which I managed to bargain down to the price which I would have paid for them at a regular market, but oh well. At least I tried, and in the end, it's probably only a dollar or two difference anyway.      A gift and a souvenir bought, I set back out on the streets. The city had picked up to its full pace at this point, and traffic was at its busiest. I wandered down Le Loi to the People's Committee Building, saw the opera house, the post office, and the Saigon Notre-Dame Cathedral. All are beautiful old buildings built by the French, and all still in use, though the post office is the only one which is easy to enter. The opera house requires opera tickets, the Cathedral can be seen if you're attending a church service, and the People's Committee Building is a no-no at all times, so I made do with pictures of the gorgeous exteriors. After wandering the city and getting some more snacks courtesy of several street vendors and one pastry shop, I eventually made it to the Bitexco Financial Tower, a 68-story building with a 49th floor skydeck. The $10 for the ticket was well worth it, and I spent nearly two hours soaking up the stunning 360° view of the city (which stretches as far as the eye can see in nearly every direction).       By this point, I had been out and about for just shy of twelve hours, and knew at least the main streets of District 1 fairly well. I took the long way back to my hostel, where I checked in, and as soon as I made it into my poorly air-conditioned dorm room, proceeded to pass into blissful unconsciousness. Waking up around 7:00, I wanted to go get dinner, but knowing the dangers of wandering the streets of Saigon alone after dark, I made do with a small restaurant tucked away in my hostel's alley. I had happened to see it earlier - Taj Mahal - and Indian food is good at all times, so I figured I'd at least glance at the menu. When I walked up, however, the restaurants patrons consisted of several groups of Indian men appearing to be conducting various business deals, which seemed to be a pretty good advertisement, so I skipped the menu and walked straight in. The curried lentil soup and garlic naan made my tummy happy, and I went to bed early, but contented.

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Day Thirty-Four: Forward march! But first, some shopping...

     It's that time again. Time to move on that is. Which also means, time for another one of those posts that involves me whining about early check-out times and their inconvenience when combined with sleeper trains. I once again checked out about three hours before it was necessary for me to (Why? No idea. I'm smart like that.) and spent the morning wandering in and out of the shops along the tourist-filled streets of Nha Trang, trying and failing to find things to buy for people at home. Several hours later, and after a few stops for smoothies and coffee that were more to satisfy my need for a fan than my need for a drink, I gave up and returned to the common room of my hostel. The staff being ever welcoming, I was still able to get my free cold water and use the computers, books, and couches in the common room. If you ever find yourself in Nha Trang, Mojzo Inn, people! That's the place to be!      Aside from wonderful staff, I also had a wonderful roommate, who wasn't checking out until the next day. He found me attempting to nap on the couches in the lukewarm temperature of the common room (and while I've only ever heard the term lukewarm applied to liquids, as much water as is in the air in that country, it fits), and offered up his bed to me, since he planned to be out for most of the day. Score. I took a two hour nap in the wonderfully air-conditioned dorm room which I had thought I'd seen the last of, before heading into town once more. I spent another few hours out and about, most of which I spent at dinner (at a restaurant called Texas BBQ & Steakhouse - score number two), before catching a cab to the train station.      Yet again my taxi cost me too much money, although this time the blame lay solely with me. For the first time this trip (but not the last), I drove away with my laptop still in the safe at the hostel. But luckily, I remembered only a few minutes after leaving, and the driver spoke enough English that he understood that I had left my laptop and needed to go back. Or at least he understood the word "hotel." I'm not really sure which. In any case, my laptop was secured, and I arrived at the train station about half an hour before my train was scheduled to depart, where I ran into some girls I had met at the hostel earlier. After consulting with them, I found out that their train (which had been scheduled to leave about an hour before I arrived at the station), had been delayed by two hours. After attempting to consult with the guard who played the part of ticket control, and receiving a very informative "no" in response, I went to join my fellow travelers.      We sat and chatted for around an hour before they left, and then I got to sit by myself for another hour or so before I was finally allowed onto the platform. After another half-an-hour-ish of waiting on the platform, my train arrived, and after it was emptied of its previous inhabitants, I hopped into my last sleeper cabin of the trip. Next stop, Saigon!

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Day Thirty-Three: Vinpearl, AKA Hollywood?

     I didn't really have any plans when I came to Nha Trang, save go to the beach. After being put on antibiotics which seemingly made me burn within seconds of setting foot outside, and being quite disappointed in the quality of the beach at Nha Trang, I decided against that, and had to find new plans. I had heard a few people at my hostel discussing a water park in town which they had enjoyed, and having not been to a water park in quite some time, I decided that this could be a fun way to spend my time.      I allowed myself to sleep in for the first time in days, and ended up setting off for the park at around 10:30. After covering every exposed inch of skin liberally in sunblock, I went towards the beach and turned right. I walked, and walked, and walked....no water park. But having already come so far, I didn't want to turn back, and the faux-Hollywood sign of the Vinpearl Resort (on it's own private island reachable via cable car or speedboat) looked deceptively close. So I figured I'd spend a few extra bucks and go to a place that I knew I could find, and kept walking. I walked, and walked, and walked some more, until I had been trekking along the beach road in my swimsuit and flip-flops for a good forty-five minutes. And that darn Vinpearl sign never seemed to get any closer - nor did the cable cars that would allow me to reach it. Eventually, having given up on ever getting there on foot, I flagged down a moto taxi and hopped on for a five-ish minute ride, plus one quick stop to buy a resort pass. I guess I should have kept walking after all. I handed over my pass, climbed a set of stairs up to the cable cars, and hopped in with two girls and a guy who would turn out to be my companions for the rest of the day.      One of the girls, Charlie, seemed to be on the verge of full on panic attack, so I struck up a conversation to distract her. As it turns out, the three of them (Charlie, her sister Clare, and Clare's boyfriend Brendan) had been traveling around Vietnam for a while already, and were headed home in a few days. They were spending their last nights in Vietnam in luxury, at a resort somewhere outside of Nha Trang. Having heard good things about Vinpearl, though, they had decided to head for the resort's water park as well.      After disembarking the cable car, we proceeded to lock up our belongings and spend the next five hours or so going down water slides, working our way up to the biggest ones in the park, spending a few minutes chilling out on the (much nicer) resort beach, and eating a yummy and surprisingly not overpriced lunch on the water, before heading back up to the cable cars for our ride back to the only slightly less touristy town of Nha Trang. While Vinpearl was fun, and I certainly don't regret spending a day there, I feel about it as I did about Furama Resort in Da Nang. I'm glad that I can't afford to stay in these kind of places, because I wouldn't have seen the real Vietnam. Vinpearl, while very nice, was a little piece of the western world. Aside from all the staff being Asian, I almost could have been in America. That said, it was a good day spent with good company, on and off the resort.      Note to future self: If you travel with others, you can afford taxi fares. Real ones. Like ones that don't involve you hopping on the back of a strange man's motorbike.

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How I spent my birthday...

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Day Thirty-Two: Russians Everywhere

     I arrived in Nha Trang at around 5:00 in the morning. Now it generally isn't a good idea to take moto taxis after dark, but after arriving at the bus station I found that, for once, there were no taxis anywhere to be found. Maybe the drivers were all asleep like sane human beings. Moto drivers not being sane by any stretch of the imagination, there were droves of motorbikes sitting around, and I figured that 5:00 was more before light than it was after dark anyway. Despite getting a bit nervous when we turned down into a warren of dark, narrow alleys, I soon found myself in front of my new hostel, where I was greeted by a warm and friendly receptionist. He asked about my journey, gave me a bottle of cold water, and then cheerfully told me that although my room wouldn't be ready till that afternoon, I was welcome to nap in the common room or use the computers there until I was ready to go out. He also gave me a breakfast voucher - I couldn't get free breakfast that morning, but I could get it at the hostel restaurant for 30,000d. Can't complain about that.

     I ended up waiting in the common room until my bed was ready at around 10:00, alternating napping and filling out study abroad applications. Hey, if I've got spare time, may as well be productive! After I got my keys, I (a) virtually passed out in the air-conditioning after a bout of extreme nausea brought on by antibiotics, then (b) went to the beach. In all honesty, the beach in Nha Trang was probably my one disappointment in Vietnam. Though it's touted as the nicest, whitest, best beach around, in reality, it's covered in litter and it's waters are murky. The sand feels more like ground up rocks than like sand, so even laying out is uncomfortable. With a gorgeous beach like My Khe behind me, and the (supposedly) gorgeous beaches of Phu Quoc ahead, I opted not to spend overly much time at this particular spot. Instead, I chose to wander around town and explore a bit. 

     Nha Trang is refreshingly easy to navigate, and is also home to a wide variety of delicious restaurants, though most of them are extremely pricey compared to the rest of Vietnam. It is also entirely overrun by Russians. Seriously, though. I can't think of a single place where there wasn't a sign in Russian to match the one in Vietnamese; in some places the signs were only in Russian. The same goes for menus; me being a pale blonde, restaurant owners would hand me Russian menus without question, and I would have to specifically ask for an English one. I was even mistaken for Russian by several Russian tourists, who wanted directions from me. Having just arrived myself, I wasn't much help. I ate lunch at a wonderful Indian restaurant called Ganesh, which I would return to several times during my four day stay, and then did some window shopping, before returning to my hostel for a break. That pneumonia is nasty stuff. I remained in my bed, checking e-mail and killing time, until three English guys who I was sharing a dorm with mentioned that they were going to grab dinner at a really good Vietnamese restaurant in town, and asked if I'd like to join them. Of course I agreed. 

     We shared a enjoyable dinner exchanging stories about our two countries. The topics of conversation included the prevalence of public transportation in America vs. Europe, and drive-through ATMs, which they had never heard of and thought sounded like the laziest thing in the world. I, meanwhile, had never even considered the fact that drive-through ATMs might not exist in other countries. Oh well. Leave it to Americans...

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Day Thirty-One: More Buses

     After checking out of my hotel at noon, and only being able to pay the bill thanks to the calculator on which the non-English speaking staff could punch out a price for me (at a grand total of $14, I couldn't really complain about the comfort or service I received), I decided to take a risk and try to walk down to the public stretch of beach that I had visited from my first hotel in Da Nang. Still being quite severely affected by the heat, it took me a solid 45 minutes to walk to the beach, but with six hours to kill, I didn't really care. I ate at a seaside restaurant for the ocean breeze (the closest thing one can get to air-conditioning in a Vietnamese business), and reluctantly set out walking again. 

     A friendly Vietnamese lifeguard (who I would guess was in his mid-forties, not some high schooler on summer vacation) used hand gestures to invite me up into his little guard shack to join him for lunch. Having just eaten, and gotten a severe stomachache as a result, I turned down his offer of food, but accepted some bottled water. We made conversation using more hand signals than verbal language, but quickly ran out of things which we could communicate in this manner, so I excused myself and headed back down towards the restaurants where I knew the taxis to hang out.

     I had more than enough time left that I could walk back to my hotel, but feeling quite ill, I opted to pay the $5 or so for a taxi in favor of spending more time resting in the hotel lobby. My memory, unfortunately, was faulty, and the lobby wasn't nearly as cool as I remembered it to be. Not only not air-conditioned, but also fan-less. *sigh* I spent another three or so hours sitting and killing time on my laptop before calling a taxi to the bus station. Naturally, the taxi driver misunderstood what I said, and twenty minutes later we arrived at the train station. After finally managing to communicate to him that this was not, in fact, where I wanted to be, we backtracked several minutes to the bus station. It pained me to have to pay the extra $5 or $6 for the trek out to the train station and back, but I wasn't in the mood to fight about money, so I payed and headed inside. Finding my bus was surprisingly easy, and I was the first one on. I clambered up into my middle-row bunk (the worst, because you have no window to look out), and spent the night, needless to say at this point, not sleeping.

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Day Thirty: Twenty on the Twentieth

     I had planned to be many, many kilometers south of Da Nang on my birthday, at Mui Ne Beach. Instead, my twentieth birthday found me in a small room in Da Nang, at a hotel with not a single English speaking staff member, a bed that felt like a sheet pulled over a piece of plywood, an air-conditioner which barely worked, and a TV with such bad reception that it wasn't worth turning on. Determined to celebrate the end of my teenage years, though, I walked across the street to the four star Furama Resort, which at $350 a night was a little out of my price range to sleep in, but offered $11 day passes. I spent the day swimming in the beautiful beachside pools, reading a book by the ocean, going parasailing (which apparently didn't follow my doctor's orders to "take it easy," and wiped me out for a good two hours), and eating overpriced but delicious food at the resort's various restaurants. I even managed to get some birthday cake and ice cream. What could have been a rather disappointing day turned into a fun and relaxing, albeit exhausting and slightly sickening day, due to the high doses of antibiotics that were busy ripping my stomach to shreds. All in all, a good birthday, though. After spending a good ten hours relaxing and having fun at the resort, I returned to my now even more disappointingly uncomfortable hotel for one last night; Tomorrow, Nha Trang!

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Days Twenty-One to Twenty-Nine: Things you don't want to happen in a foreign country, part II

     Being sick is never fun. It's even less fun when you're in a third world country, in which you speak little of the language, and know too much about the medical system for comfort. Stories of ambulance drivers who argue over which hospital they'll get the biggest commission from until their patient dies during transport; nurses who refuse to use new syringes; and rooms with six or seven patients and no a/c - because it "causes respiratory infections" - abound. So when I found myself running a fever less than 24 hours after arriving in Hoi An, I immediately decided that I would be better off to stay in bed and nurse myself back to health. After four days of extending the hotel room, alternating radiating heat and feeling chills so severe that all the blankets in the world wouldn't have been enough, extreme nausea, severe chest pains, and several bouts of near-unconsciousness, I decided that it might possibly be necessary for me to see a doctor. Not so much because I thought I wouldn't recover eventually on my own, but more because I knew I either had to head south soon, or...well, that's about it actually. Time was ticking, and I had to head south. Seeing as how I could barely stumble down to the reception desk (one whole floor), I knew I wouldn't do so well on a twelve hour sleeper bus, which are uncomfortable at the best of times. So, I had to find a doctor.

          After reading every possible review I could find about the medical options in the area, and e-mailing the U.S. Consulate in Saigon, I decided on Family Medical Practice Da Nang. The consulate recommended the public hospital in Da Nang as having English speaking doctors; they also noted that there was one major English speaking hospital in each province. Those being the state run hospitals, they probably had no other option. At least this is my assumption, since the consensus among every person that has ever sought medical treatment in Vietnam is to avoid the public hospitals at all cost. That narrowed it down to essentially two options: Family Medical Practice in Da Nang, or Pacific Hospital, right down the road from my hotel in Hoi An. I had read good reviews of Pacific Hospital dating back to around 2011, and terrible reviews from 2012 on. It was also said in these reviews that westerners were charged an arm and a leg for medical treatment, so Da Nang it was. 

     I told my hotel that I needed a car to Da Nang, and that I would be back that afternoon to book my bus tickets to Quy Nhon. Boy was I wrong. 45 minutes later I arrived at an unobtrusive building in Da Nang. So unobtrusive, in fact, that it took me two tries to find the front door. Once inside, the place seemed clean, the staff spoke very good English, and there was even a sign in English and Vietnamese reminding me that I should get my flu shot. A minor detail, but one I took as a good sign. After a brief wait, and the requisite weight/blood pressure/temperature checks, I got to speak to the doctor, who was Filipino, and spoke English with complete fluency. Relief. I rattled off my symptoms again, and mentioned that I had been traveling with someone in Ha Long who had later contracted Dengue Fever, to which she said that I was in fact displaying many of the textbook symptoms. Blood tests ensued. Then listening to my lungs, and a chest x-ray, followed by a urinalysis, and an ultrasound. Half an hour later, she came in. "I have good news, and I have bad news. Good news: You don't have Dengue. Bad news: You have a severe case of bacterial pneumonia." As it turns out, the severe chest pains were from pleural effusion - fluid surrounding my left lung. I had to be admitted.

     This unfortunately meant trusting the hotel staff to pack up my belongings (including laptop, camera, and other valuables), and bring them to me in Da Nang. A few hours later, I had my bags, a few items short, but all worthless enough that I'm sure it was accidental. Irritating, but accidental. I could talk for a long time about the next approximately 120 hours that I spent confined to a hospital bed, getting woken up for nebulizer treatments every four hours and having painful drips of IV antibiotics, but there isn't much point. Suffice to say it was a decent hospital, that at least had a TV, wifi, and air conditioning, and I spent the next five days in a state of extreme boredom. Two days before my birthday, I was released, and on doctor's orders, booked a room in Da Nang for a few days. Apparently the pneumonia would be sticking around for the next two weeks, and I was to take it easy. After paying a driver $30 to take me to Hoi An and back again - to pay my hotel bill and pick up my passport, which was being held hostage by the reception staff - I checked into a nice but extremely overpriced hotel a few blocks from My Khe Beach. Nine days of doing almost nothing but laying in bed had left me severely weakened, and I found that even the slightest exertion wore me out. Accordingly, I spent most of the day in my room, venturing out only to grab a small snack and a large bottle of water to take a dose of each of my approximately twenty million medications. Having done nothing of much note for the day and a half after, other than to change hotels, I will end this entry and pick up again on the day 30, the 20th of June: my birthday!    

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Hue to Hoi An: The Hai Van Pass

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Day Twenty: The Hai Van Pass

     After spending two days longer in Hue than I had intended, it was again time to head south. Instead of getting on yet another bus, I opted for the slightly more expensive, but significantly cooler option of doing this leg of the trip by motorbike. If you watch the show Top Gear (the British version, mind you), and happen to have seen the Vietnam special, this was the part of the trip that contained by far the most stunning scenery, along what is known as the Hai Van Pass. The pass itself is relatively short, compared to the full trip (which took around ten hours including multiple stops), but the entire journey is quite pretty.  

     That morning in my hostel, I ran into three other backpackers who were also making the trip, but rather than hiring a guide, they had rented their own bikes. They asked if I wanted to travel with them, and I agreed: this way they got a guide to navigate, and I got some English speaking company. When my bike and guide turned up for the day, to my surprise I found that it was my same guide from the imperial tombs. Unfortunately, his bike seemed to have suffered some in the two days since our last encounter, and it took him a solid ten minutes to get it running. Once on, it seemed fine, however, and our little caravan set off south. 

     Our first stop was, surprise surprise, for breakfast. All of us had already eaten, but exactly as he had told me two days before, "I breakfast. You picture." *sigh* With people to talk to the wait wasn't bad, and after another several minutes to get the motorbike restarted, we headed out again. A few hours later we stopped at a place called Elephant Springs, where we took a quick dip in the cool waters (which have become unfortunately polluted). Our next stop was for lunch, and despite three of us arguing with our guide for a good fifteen minutes, we ended up stopping at a restaurant a few kilometers from the beach where we actually wanted to eat. According to our driver, there were not, in fact, any restaurants anywhere on the beach. Knowing this to be false, we still gave in eventually. After being charged ridiculous amounts for subpar food and warm drinks, and waiting for our guide to eat his much more tasty looking several course meal (provided for free due to his bringing in our business), we headed to Lang Co Beach, perhaps the nicest beach I have seen in Vietnam. Shallow for a long way out, crystal clear waters, and little tide all made for a perfect place to lay on our backs in the water and chat. And should we have wanted to eat, there were, in fact, several very nice looking restaurants right on the beach.

     Next was the Hai Van Pass, what we had all been waiting for. The views were as gorgeous as promised in all the brochures, and I was glad I was able to enjoy them without worrying about navigating the hairpin curves along the mountain road. We made a brief pit stop at the top of the mountain to see some old war-era American buildings and get some overhead views of Da Nang, and then headed down into the city. Our stop in Da Nang was to visit Marble Mountains, a collection of five limestone and marble mountains which are covered in pagodas. We took an elevator up about a quarter of the way, and had to get up and clamber up the slick marble stairs from there. The caves on the mountain, most filled with incense burning at the feet of Buddha statues, were a nice relief from the boiling 104° air outside. The sun was out in full force as we headed for the top, and after climbing to several places which I thought were the top, only to have to climb back down and up another equally high set of stairs for a similar view a few minutes later, I decided that I didn't actually need to see all five mountains and headed for the (slightly) cooler climes below. 

     At the bottom, we met up with our driver, who told us "Hotel next." After arguing with him over the fact that we were supposed to visit My Khe beach (which we had actually passed a ways back when we first entered Da Nang), and only winning the argument by showing him where, on our map, the tour booking agent had circled the beach as one of the destinations, he finally agreed to take us. Although he actually took us to a beach right across from Marble Mountains, rather than My Khe (which he had apparently skimmed right by in the hopes that we wouldn't notice and he wouldn't have to stop), the sand was white and the water was cool, which was all any of us really wanted: a place to rinse off some of the sweat and grime that had been accumulating since our last swim break. After one last attempt to guilt us into going on without staying at the beach (by saying that he now wouldn't get back to Hue until after midnight), he gave up and let us swim. We went in groups of three, with the last person rotating out to guard our bags from theft on the beach.

     Finally, around 6 p.m., we got to Hoi An. Our guide pointed my comrades in the direction of their hostel, and then turned the opposite direction to take me to my hotel. I was splurging at $22 a night, though not so much by choice as the fact that the cheaper options were booked up. After arriving at my hotel, though, I was glad of it. The nicest place I had stayed by far, it included a restaurant (with surprisingly reasonable prices), a spa, a clean swimming pool, a minibar in the room (with drinks as cheap as I could get them anywhere in town), and, best of all, a real bathtub. Now I shower instead of taking baths, but a bathtub means a shower curtain, and a shower curtain means that the entire bathroom isn't covered in water 75% of the time, and you can get dressed without getting all of your clothes wet - a rare luxury here. I ate in the hotel, and feeling slightly feverish with a slight headache coming on, I took some Advil PM and passed into blissful slumber. 

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The DMZ, part II

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The DMZ, part I.

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Some views from Hue and its surroundings.

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Day Nineteen: The Demilitarized Zone

     One of the things that I was most looking forward to while planning this trip was getting to tour the DMZ, which stretches for five kilometers on either side of the 17th parallel. However, the more I looked into going, the lower my expectations got. I was still excited about seeing everything, but I had heard almost uniformly from review sites such as tripadvisor that unless you get really, really lucky, and have a fantastic guide, the DMZ is almost universally disappointing. As it turns out, I'm really lucky.      The day started bright and early, with the minibus picking me up at my hotel at 7 a.m. WIth most people having been picked up an hour earlier to eat the breakfast that was included with the tour, I was the next-to-last one on. Since breakfast was also included with my hostel, and I couldn't get both (unfortunately - not being one to turn down free food, I did try), I opted to sleep in an extra half hour and eat breakfast at my hostel. When I had asked the booking agent what came with breakfast on the tour, I got the standard Vietnamese answer of "bread." Now granted, I have been told this several times now, and never has the meal solely consisted of bread. Usually there's a baguette on the side of some other, more filling, meal. I'm fairly sure that "bread" just happens to be the only English food word they know, so that's what they say. However, I knew that I had multiple options for breakfast at my hostel, all of which were good, so I figured I'd play it safe. I later heard the breakfast through the tour also consisted of numerous options and was quite good, but at least I didn't have to get up at 5 a.m. like everyone else.      After one more stop at a quite fancy hotel, the bus was completely full, and we headed north. Air-conditioning was virtually non-existent, and the body heat didn't help matters any. The windows did not open, and by the time we got to Quang Tri a few hours later, we were all drenched in sweat. It was here that our guide hopped on, and I was pleasantly surprised when she was perhaps the first person I have met in this country that I could qualify as being completely fluent in English. Her accent wasn't even difficult to understand, a rare delight. As we drove along, she pointed out a few things along the way, including several cartoonish signs along the road depicting land mines. She explained that unexploded mines were still quite a problem here, and children their most common victims, due to their ignorance of what mines look like. The cartoons were aimed at helping children identify mines and provided them with a phone number to call should they stumble across any.      After another quite long ride, we stopped at the river which formed the post-1972 border between North and South. This is further south than the 17th parallel, and became the new border after  U.S. troops pulled out and the north made a successful push towards Saigon. This is also the site of a point on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, where numerous troops and supplies were moved from north to south and back again. The original bridge was destroyed in bombing raids, but a new one has since been built. We then made a quick stop on the side of the freeway to take some pictures of "The Rockpile" - a small but important observation post for Americans during the war, reachable only by helicopter - which is now basically just a big pile of rocks. However, some war-era photos provided by the tour guide made the stop a bit more interesting, as we could see not only the American flag on the base (which has now been replaced with a barely visible Vietnamese flag), but also the defoliation caused by use of Agent Orange in the area. She then pointed out the clearly visible lines in the forest - different colors of green - and explained that the dark green areas, for instance, were new primary forest, planted since the war. There were still a few bare areas which had not been replanted, where the effects of Agent Orange were still visible.      Our next stop was Khe Sanh Combat Base, a site that is perhaps most well known for its role in the 1968 Tet Offensive. *begin history lesson* In late 1967, General Vo Nguyen Giap, the commander of the People's Army of Vietnam, had put together a plan to gain quick control of the South and end the war. It was a two phase plan that involved tricking the U.S. into thinking that there was a major attack planned on Khe Sanh by moving NVA troops north towards the Cambodian and Laotian borders (phase one), and then having VC units in place in all major southern population centers attack on Tet, after the American soldiers had left (phase two). Phase one was overwhelmingly successful. Giap fooled General Westmoreland into moving a vast number of U.S. troops into Khe Sanh, playing on Westmoreland and President Johnson's fears that this would be the American Dien Bien Phu. Phase two failed. The VC attacked, but the southern Vietnamese people did not rise up against the American backed South Vietnamese government as expected, and ARVN (the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, pronounced Arvin), fought better than they ever had before or would again. Only in Hue did the fighting rage on for a few weeks, destroying much of the Imperial Citadel (see previous post). *end history lesson*      Khe Sanh, part of which is now a coffee plantation, was actually really cool. A small museum inside detailed certain parts of the war, with some wonderfully anti-American captioning on photos of the base as it appeared during the conflict. There were the requisite captured American war planes on display outside, as well as some examples of the types of bombs used during the war. There were also original bomb shelters and trenches that could be wandered through, sandbags and all (okay, so the sandbags were probably new).      Finally, it was on to the Vinh Moc tunnels, in which a town full of people lived during the war. Tunnel systems like these were part of the reason that American bombing proved so ineffective. When the planes would come, the entire town would simply move underground. They lived like this on and off for six years, with seventeen babies even being born inside the tunnels in the "maternity ward," which was barely big enough for one person to lay in (or so it seemed). The family rooms, in which two parents and two children lived, hardly looked big enough for two of us smaller girls to squeeze into (although granted, as westerners, we are still a bit bigger than even most Vietnamese men).      After the tunnels, it was a two hour ride back into town, where we ate lunch at a surprisingly good restaurant, and then headed back out for one final stop. It was Doc Mieu Firebase, and the sole remnant of an American presence here is an overgrown U.S. tank sitting across the street. What I'm presuming was once the main part of the base has been turned into a cemetery for Vietnamese soldiers who died during the war. With the tall memorial in the middle, and small, uniform white gravestones all around (many of them sadly anonymous), this place put me in mind of Arlington, albeit a significantly smaller version.      We got back into the now boiling hot van for one last long drive - half an hour into town again to drop off our guide, and another hour and a half after that back to Hue - but having now spent nearly twelve hours in each other's company, and being much less sleepy than in the morning, there was at least good conversation instead of awkward silence. An English girl sitting next to me, whom I immediately took a liking to after I saw her taking notes on the tour guide's lectures, found out that I had taken a class all about the war the previous semester, and immediately began grilling me. Happy to oblige her curiosity, I gave her a rundown of everything I could readily recall involving America's original entry into Vietnam, the anti-war movement, the Tet Offensive, Agent Orange, and of course the battles fought in the area around the DMZ. By 7:00 p.m. I was back in Hue, exhausted but delighted at my particularly good choice of tour (booked through the DMZ Bar, should anyone be interested), and after grabbing a quick dinner, promptly passed out in my dorm. Tomorrow would be another early day, and I wanted to be semi-sort of-ish rested up for it. 

[adventuresinvn]

Day Eighteen: In Which I Do Nothing

     Today is the day in which I pay for my unpreparedness....sort of. I planned to do the DMZ today, a full day affair, as it's a bit of a trek from Hue. However, having not decided by 11:00 p.m. last night which tour I wanted to do, I ended up with no tour at all, and so had no plans at all either. While theoretically I'd like to make the most of each and every hour spent traveling, in reality, that's impossible to keep up for two months. It's exhausting. So, to have a day off, planned or not, was a bit of a relief. I spent the day wandering the streets and alleys around my hostel, laying on the balcony reading, eating yummy Vietnamese food, and drinking lots of delicious nuoc mia (sugar cane juice). Hard to complain about that.

[adventuresinvn]

Day Seventeen: Hue, Part II

     One of the standard tourist attractions of Hue are the imperial tombs which surround the city. While most city tours hit two of the most impressive (those of Minh Mang and Khai Dinh), I decided that I had enough time to take the day and go to all six, plus the biggest pagoda in the area, Thien Mu. I hired a moto driver for the day through my hostel, and we set off at around 9 a.m. Unfortunately, despite clearly stating that I wanted to start at the pagoda (the nearest point to my hostel), the driver said okay and promptly took me in exactly the opposite direction. When we arrived in a small town, I asked him if we were going to the pagoda (although clearly we weren't), and his response was "I breakfast first." Awesome. Perhaps if this had been a last minute thing, it would have been less irritating, but not only had it been planned in advance, he also turned up half an hour earlier than planned and ended up rushing me to leave. Now generally, this is due to the fact that drivers get a free meal if they get their clients to eat at certain restaurants, but he didn't even try to make me eat; apparently he just didn't want to have to drive to this town for breakfast, into Hue, and back out again. He urged me to go and walk around by waving his hands and saying "you picture, you picture," until I did just that to appease him. It took me all of two minutes to grab some photos of the town and get back to the restaurant, where I felt no guilt about sitting and staring rather pointedly at his meal until he stopped trying to talk me into going to an extra tomb that I hadn't planned on going to, and started eating at a reasonable speed.      Again, I finally agreed to go to the tomb just to appease him, after assurances that I would have plenty of time to see everything that I had originally wanted to, and we set off for the tomb of Emperor Gia Long, the furthest point on the map from my hostel. After a long drive down very bumpy unpaved roads, too small for any car to go on (or at least any car with a sane driver), we arrived at the rather unimpressive building that houses the bodies of Gia Long and his second wife. His first wife is buried in a separate building next door. Although a bit unkempt, it did have some interesting statues that put me in mind of the Chinese terra cotta warriors. After this, we went to the tombs of Minh Mang, Khai Dinh, Thieu Tri, Tu Duc, and Dong Khanh. The first two, the grandest and best preserved, I paid to go into; the latter three I made do with taking some photos from outside. At $4 a pop, quite a chunk of money by Vietnamese standards, I figured I could live without seeing another tomb that looked more or less like a dozen other 19th century buildings I've seen since arriving in Vietnam. Our final stop was the Thien Mu pagoda, a tall building overlooking the river. The pagoda itself wasn't overly large or even particularly impressive, but the grounds surrounding it (including the monks' living quarters) were wonderfully quiet and peaceful.      After the pagoda it was back to the hostel, where I reveled being in air-conditioning for a few hours before joining a new Italian friend on a trip to the night market. It wasn't massive (at least not by Hanoi's standards, my only comparison), but it had some interesting knick knacks and good food. We opted for a frozen yogurt dessert, that was literally yogurt, semi-frozen, in a plastic ziploc-type bag with a straw stuck inside and tied off with a rubber band. It was actually really refreshing. On our way back to the hostel, we stopped and grabbed a drink with another friend of hers that we ran into on the street, and then it was back to rest up for my DMZ tour, which would come far too early the next morning.