Vietnam: A Well Kept Secret

the saigon river

Vietnam surprised us all. Jason said, “I was picturing a giant battlefield that was never cleaned up.” Whenever we hear about this country in the States it is almost always in the context of the war or some South-East Asian disease statistic. It is actually a very green and very beautiful place. The people are very welcoming and friendly and the landscape is largely high grass rice fields, white sand beaches, waterfalls, smooth orange sand dunes, and river communities. It is home to one of the natural wonders on the world – the one voted most beautiful. It is now added to my list of unexpected vacation destinations and I think that in a few years when the secret gets out, people will flock there from the states.

Dean Dan would have a hard time arguing that we were irrelevant in Vietnam. Upon arrival, there were 20 Vietnamese women holding a giant banner that said “Welcome Semester at Sea.” They had set up shop right in front of the ship. A lot of these ports that SAS visits twice a year know us and know what to expect from us. They know that when 800 Americans arrive for a week, they are going to make bank. One guy in Singapore said that his schedule corresponds with us. In Chennai, there was hand made signs in the windows of shops that said things like “special discounts for MV Explorer.”
(Haha yeah right – what that really means is “we jack up the price for tourists but we lower it back to almost its real value for you guys.”)

Every morning The Voice wakes us up gently at 9:15 by saying, “Good morning voyagers – today is Sunday, March whatever, today is a B schedule day etc…” Our morning of arrival Dean Al, who studied theatre, came on over the speaker and yelled “GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM!!!”

I went on a city orientation that first day in Nam. We saw a Buddhist temple and Reintegration Hall (where they house the tank that ended the war) and our guide kept saying “whore” instead of “hall” and it was all we could do not to laugh out loud. We saw the red phone and the bomb shelter and a giant statue of Ho Chi Minh. We ate lunch at a very beautiful restaurant and I finally got to try a Singapore Sling, which wasn’t very sweet. Before heading back to the ship I went to an ATM to take out money. The exchange rate here is the wildest it has been. 1 US dollar = 20,850 dong. I took out the equivalent of $50 dollars and got to hold in my hand 1,000,000 dong. My hand was shaking. A dollar goes a long way here, but nothing was more exciting to me than the DVDs. I’d heard they were cheap, but I was still shocked. For 65 USD, I got the ENTIRE series of LOST, the ENTIRE series of FRIENDS, the ENTIRE series of the Big Bang Theory, 150 Disney movies, Eat Pray Love, The Kids are Alright, and Black Swan. And the craziest part – I was totally ripped off! I couldn’t care less. The seller and I parted ways, both feeling like we’d gotten the better end of the deal.

The Vietnamese are the nicest people I’ve met. Maybe not the friendliest like in Ghana, but the nicest. The cab driver who took me and Jason a hour and half away to see the Mekong Delta and then waited for us for 3 hours before taking us an hour and half back, shared his terrible coconut snack with us and only tried one time to get more money than we’d agreed upon. When we refused, instead of getting angry and following us around like in India, the driver smiled and thanked us warmly and just let us go. It was such a foreign concept that I almost felt like I was cheating him by just giving a normal tip.

Being on the Delta was strange, it is very “old Vietnam.” It looked a lot like the Amazon. People live in little villages on the islands in a very quaint way. At one point our guide was showing us a beehive and grabbed my hand and shoved into in a honeycomb covered in bees. I was petrified, but when I pulled my hand away, it was covered in fresh honey that was the sweetest I have tasted. We were served fresh fruit, including this beautiful pink, green, and white seedy fruit called Dragon Fruit, and got to make our own honey tea and to cap it all off, we sampled Snake Wine. I don’t know how they make it and I hope never to. The man dipped our glass into a glass vat of brownish liquid that was filled top to bottom with coiled snakes, a king cobra’s skeletal head poking out the top. You could see his fangs. As we held our glasses Jason said, “I remember the doctors saying something about snake wine, but I don’t remember what it was. Oh well, cheers!” I got to hold a cobra too, which I’m glad I did but have no desire to ever do again. It weighed about 60 lbs and was clearly stronger than me. We rose motorcycles on the way back to our boat, which was fantastic. Everyone, literally everyone rides motorcycles here. There is hardly any other form of transportation. I wondered what happens when it rains, and I got to find out. During the storm that hit our third day, I witnessed whole families under three or four headed ponchos. It looked like those Chinese dragon puppets.

!!!!!!!!

our snake wine

During my research, I learned that up in North Vietnam there is a place called Halong Bay. It is one of the 7 natural wonders of the world and as I mentioned was voted the most beautiful. The guidebook said it has won multiple awards for its “universal aesthetic appeal.” It is a series of thousands of limestone monoliths that jut out from the bay and there are caves and lakes and greenery all around. When I heard about “beautiful Vietnam,” I was hearing about the North: Hanoi, Sepa, Halong Bay. Three of us tried to go last minute. We even made it to the airport for the 12:30am flight and were told that there were seats available. It didn’t end up working out, technical difficulties with the plane and the whole airport was really sketchy. It just didn’t feel right. From what I’ve heard it is just as well, there was a storm brewing and the government stopped letting people out on the bay, although that might have been after we would have left, I didn’t look in to it too closely. My other goal was to go see the sand dunes, which are also supposed to be gorgeous, but they too were far away and my being sick and also exhausted made it all too easy to just stick around Saigon.

One of my SAS trips was to the Chu Chi Tunnels, which is the underground system the Vietnamese built during the “American War of Aggression.” There are three levels to the tunnels, the first level is only 4-6 feet deep, but we went down into the second, which is 8-10. The tunnels didn’t have the same affect on me that the War Museum had later that week, but it was still terrifying. It was pretty odd to hear about this war from the other side, and it was downright creepy to see all of the traps that are still in place that were used against the American soldiers. We watched an informational video before going down into the tunnels where the Vietnamese voice explained in English how so-and-so won a “greatest American killer hero award.” The ground all around the tunnel system is booby-trapped; the kind of stuff out of cartoons really, with a deadly spin. They have the revolving trap door covered in leaves, but at the bottom there are two foot-long rusted spikes. We traveled in a single file line through the maze of tunnels, which was all fine and good on the first level, but as we went deeper it got much darker and so the people in front of me kept stopping to feel out a stone slide or because there was a family of bats in their way. When we were stopped I was starting to freak out. The tunnels were so low that the largest of us had to crawl and so narrow that the spiders on the walls were too close for comfort. At times there was no lighting and so I used my camera flash to find the way. I kept screaming at the people ahead of me to not stop and please go faster. Our guide had limited English and had not told us how long the tunnels were, and I just wanted out. There was tunnel on all sides and people at my front and back and it was hot and humid and hard to breathe. After a while I saw a man crouched in a tunnel that branched off of ours. I asked him, “Is it much farther?” “Yes!” he replied instantly with a smile. I felt my heart pounding through my chest and I started getting dizzy. I tried to go back but the way was clogged. Fortunately, it turned out that we were only about 40 feet from the end, and that that man had spoken such little English that he would have responded “yes” to any question. It was late in the day and the sky was covered in dark clouds and the place was very creepy.  It poured rain our whole way back and I saw the most impressive lightening of my life. The streets flooded which did not affect our tour bus but did affect the thousands of people on bikes and motorbikes. It was so high it covered more than half of their wheels. I saw people using brooms to sweep water out of their stores and public busses and trucks so crowded that people were literally on top of each other.

On our way to the tunnels we stopped to see a Cao Dai Temple, which is one of only a few in the world. The religion is a hybrid one, it was designed to be the “prefect” religion and draws on existing beliefs from both Eastern and Western faiths as well as the ideas of philosophers. I don’t know what I was expected but the temple blew my mind, it didn’t look like any temple I have ever seen. In was part temple, part playground, and part planetarium. The predominant colors were pink, turquoise and gold. Everyone inside of it wore nothing but pure white. There were nine levels, and also two spiral staircases leading up to a second story where we observed a ceremony that occurs 3-4 times a day. There were many controlled flames and eyes in the windows and on the main feature of the predominant alter. On the blue ceiling there were white cloud dragons and hundreds of 3D silver stars.  Most temples and churches that I have visited have had a cold and serious feeling on the inside; you almost don’t want to move around for fear of moving wrong. This place was totally different; it was extremely welcoming and full of light and warmth.

On our last day I went to the War Remnants Museum. It was definitely a wise choice to go, but it was very difficult. The museum did not protect the visitor the way they do in the States. Many things were not behind glass. You could actually touch the shells of missiles and a piece of pipe that a family had used for shelter before they were exploded inside of it. They even had a case of actual human fetuses on display in the middle of the Agent Orange room. The photographs were the hardest part, harder than simply being an American inside this place. Not only were there photos of the war itself, but there were dozens of photos taken of deformed children born even just in 2008 who are still suffering the effects of Agent Orange. I later had breakfast with a member of the UVA medical team who is sailing with us from India to China to visit hospitals, and he told me that the photos were very manipulative. He said that chemicals could not possibly have caused many of the deformities that were pictured and just occur naturally everywhere in the world. He said that the harmful chemical that the signs say the Americans deliberately unleashed on the Vietnamese was actually an unintentional contamination, and actually affected the American soldiers more than anybody else. He said he thought it was interesting how there was no mention of either the Chinese or the Russians and also nothing about what the Vietnamese did to each other. They did not mention the North/South feud; they presented themselves as united victims of an unwarranted American attack. Its hard to wrap you head around what actually happened because learning about it in either Vietnam or the States in going to have a biased perspective. 

 
In the market there are signs on many of the stores that say “fixed price.” I noticed that all of those sings are in English, I bet its not fixed for locals. People were just a pushy with their stuff here as they were in India or Ghana, one woman actually grabbed me and pulled me to her shop and physically held on to me, quite tightly, so I could not leave as she showed me shoes. I think shopping culture is different here. In the West we can go window-shopping and look at things we have no intention of buying. In these poorer places, people only buy what they need and know what they want before they enter a store and so when I showed interest in a pair of sequined shoes, the women assumed I was out to buy shoes and if I didn’t get them from her, I would have to find them somewhere else. All I actually wanted was to see how they were made. That is maybe why it offends them so much when we refuse—they think its personal. 

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A description of Vietnamese Water Puppetry:
A pool about 2 feet deep of dark water. The pool extends out into the audience and also back behind a bamboo curtain. Metal puppets enter and exit though the curtain as music plays and voices are heard over a speaker. The puppets are on sticks being manipulated by the people sitting in the waist deep water behind the curtain. They can do flips and move in any direction and also leap out of the water and attach (by magnets I assume) to the set pieces. There is also pyrotechnics, the dragon puppet really breathes fire and the snake puppets spit water at each other and at the audience.

the puppet theatre

the puppets!

Recipe for really good tea: fresh honey, a pinch of sesame seeds, half of a small lemon or lime, hot water.

The phrase for bathroom in Vietnamese is “the happy room” because you go in unhappy but when you come out, you are happy!

we took some deaf children to the zoo one day, this girl is demonstrating the asian "thumbs up"

It’s interesting how all of these Global South countries all kind of look the same. The types of trees are different (although I think I have seen palm trees in every place we have been) the colors are a little different and what is sold at the roadsides stands is slightly different. But all places have the outdoor roadside shops, they all have the dilapidated buildings, the animals in the road, the shoeless people, the packed vehicles. If all I saw were a snapshot of a street scene without the faces of people in it, I would have a hard time identifying which country I took it in.