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Beer Mat Scribbles from Vietnam.

Medway, United Kingdom

By: Green Fuz on the 4th March 2009 at 9:15pm

Fun - Travel - Ramblings

Nothing to declare: Saigon.

I had met my wife Thanh Thuy in Vietnam back in 2003, at the French restaurant where she worked in Nha Trang – not on the ‘internet’ as some of my friends might insinuate! We married a year later at a small ceremony in her village, a quirky event under a garish marquee with a lot of dress changes for her and a lot of drinks for me. We returned to England together for a life of cream teas and unpredictable weather. This year we were back in Vietnam with our three-year old daughter for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year.

We flew straight into the urban chaos of Saigon, I write Saigon because not even the locals seem to call it by the official moniker of Ho Chi Minh City. Pham Ngu Lao is the dirty noisy backpacker area overflowing with tourists, touts and the occasional crook. Here you can buy a ‘Gucchi’ bag, a Hippo lighter or an iPod that looks strangely like a chunky old Nokia phone. I once bought a ‘Rolex’ watch at Ben Thanh market for $10. After three weeks all the number digits had fallen off apart from the twelve and the six, so it became difficult to tell the time unless it was six o’clock, or maybe twelve thirty. What really sets Saigon apart from other major cities is the sheer volume of motorcycles. Buzzing round the city in chaotic disorder, filling the air with a constant drone like a giant angry Bee outside your hotel window.

I woke up my first morning in Saigon at a shabby Guest House in complete agony, my nuts felt like they were being squeezed in a vice. My plumbing was most definitely up the spout. The rather expensive ‘Foreigner’ Doctor I found had no idea why, but he gave me a shit-load of drugs. I had Brufen Ibuprofen 600mg tablets (hardcore), Ciprobay antibiotics 500mg, and Mictasol Bleu Urinary Tract Infection tablets 500mg, which turned my piss blue. I looked at the packet to see if a cyan slash was a normal side-effect and this is what the packet said; "CHI DINH, CACH DUNG & LIEU DUNG, TAC DUNG PHU." Which sounded a bit like an infection all of it’s own.

Pantone 2915 blue piss or not, the drugs seemed to do the trick and I felt better the next day. Just as well, as I had to spend the whole morning at the Saigon Cargo Depot, collecting crates of formula milk for my daughter Dharma, which had been sent at great expense, to you the taxpayer, all the way to Vietnam.

Collecting the milk was a lot more difficult than sending it. On arriving at the depot my left shoe started to fall apart. First I had to sign in at a reception, then I had to walk to an office building, take a number then wait my turn to pay a cargo charge and get a receipt, which I then had to take to another building on the opposite side of the lot, to get another piece of paper for something or other, which I had to take to a small office in a warehouse to collect another piece of paper of something or other else, which had to be taken to the other side of the warehouse and stamped at another small office. All of this nonsense, with the sole of my left shoe flapping off. When my shipment finally arrived I had to take it through to customs, which was surprisingly easy, the customs official said, "Open". So I opened the crate lid. He didn’t bother to look inside he just said, "OK." And waved me along. I thought to myself, I could have sneaked in an additional few kilos of ‘Keith Richards dandruff.’

Is that a Dong in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?

Dharma, our three year old, had not been eating well since arriving in Vietnam, the only things we could get her to eat were biscuits and crackers, which made her poo really hard. She squeezed out a log - I swear to God - that not even I could have managed. Poor thing!

Thi, my wife comes from beautiful little village near Ba Ho Falls, 30km North from the coastal resort of Nha Trang. Turning left off Highway One down a small dirt path, the village appears like you’ve stepped back in time. It’s the Viet Nam I had always imagined, old ladies in conical hats, bright green rice paddies, cows, chickens and dirty children wandering around willy-nilly.

My father-in-law had a new ‘western style’ crapper built at the back of his house. By western style I mean you sit on it like you would if you were driving a rattling assault tank, not crouching over a hole in the ground like you would if you were, um, taking a shit. Well it occurred to me after a few days that I was the only one using it. And I thought to myself that was kind of special. How many of you peasants have had your own porcelain thrones built in your honor?

There wasn’t much to do in the village during the evenings, the sky was so black and clear that you could see every star in the galaxy, you had to walk around in complete darkness as there was no street lighting and the insects came out to attack in force. The only source of entertainment was an alfresco coffee shop, which consisted of a few Hobbit sized plastic chairs and tables round some trees, plus two billiard tables and one full-sized pool table, with cue balls so big that you could probably fire them from a cannon and take out a castle wall. I discovered a new Vietnamese sport called Night Pool. It’s just like regular pool except you play it at night in the dark with no lights on. The black ball is particularly tricky. I think you get extra points for pulping any insects or bugs and imprinting them on a speeding ball.

I’ve befriended a pig, which I’ve named ‘Tet Surprise’ because that apparently, is when we’re going to eat him.

The main activity at Tet (New Year), apart from drinking and eating and drinking; is gambling. The Vietnamese play a game on a board numbered one to eighteen, using three dice hidden under a cup. The bank or old lady with her underwear full of (quite literally) filthy lucre, shakes the cup and you place your money down either below ten or over. I started with 6,000 Vietnam Dong and finished 70,000 VND better off. Which was great until I realized that was less than three quid.

They’ve got cigarettes over here called BASTOS. No kidding. You are what you smoke.

Bai Hoi.

Nha Trang is Vietnam main coastal resort, set in a beautiful bay the skyline has been ruined recently by a crop of large luxury hotels. Nha Trangs Lodge hotel used to be the tallest, but has been dwarfed recently, by newer taller eyesores. “Big hotels,” my wife plainly stated, “Big and empty.” I dreaded the influx of tourist it would require to fill these monstrosities. I’m not a fan of large impersonal Hotels. I’ve always found more pleasure at small family-run guesthouses, they have a warm and personal touch, more interesting guests and are usually centric to local colour. But hey, that’s just me. If you like getting a lift up to the thirteenth floor to room six hundred and whatever, that looks identical to every other room in the hotel, then that’s obviously your pleasure.

I’ve digressed, and been a little unfair, Nha Trang is beautiful, one of the most stunning coastlines I’ve ever seen. The city is filled with great bars and restaurants, bountiful in fresh fish and seas food.

One day, for some inexplicable reason the government had allowed a Korean Heavy Metal band to play on Nha trang sea front. The locals were in the mosh pit sat on motorcycles, looking on in a mixture of bemusement and bewilderment as the lead singer shouted and wailed his way through the set which sounded like a bin liner filled with dustbin lids and kittens, being tossed down the stairs of a very tall Building.

My favourite bar was called Bai Hoi. It’s not really a bar, it’s a small room with toy plastic tables and stools. You could quite possibly swing a cat in there, but you run the risk of decapitating the bastard if you did. You can buy a small jug of draught beer for 7,000VND. A small jug gets you roughly two and a half glasses. There is about 26,000VND to the pound (it used to be 30,000 until everything went tits up). So for a pint of beer it costs, um 7,000 into 26,000 doesn’t go… but it’s roughly… and then you divide that between two point five, and then, um your beer costs… well fuck all really.

Dodgy Operations

On the coach to Hoi An, I could not help but notice the driver was running some sort of secret smuggling operation.

He stopped seemingly in the middle of nowhere, where a mysterious van was waiting. We all had to wait with no explanation while some rather shady looking geezers loaded up the coach bay with huge containers. The men were quiet, efficient and never uttered a word. After they finished we took off into the night again. A couple of hours later we made another unscheduled stop in the darkness, where another identical van was waiting with another platoon of mysterious chain-smoking geezers. They removed all the large containers then drove off never to be seen or mentioned again.

What the hell was in those containers? Here’s my best guess:

1. Mexicans

2. Enough Rice for an Army.

3. An Army.

4. Enough Drugs to O.D. a fat Elvis on the crapper.

5. Enough Drugs for the Rolling Stones to have for breakfast.

I had a lovely day in Hoi An. The first thing I did after arriving was to get a haircut. A crowd soon gathered round to watch the bewildered street barber shave the bald white dudes head. (It was necessary I assure you, if I don’t trim my melon every two weeks I start to look like Max Wall or a Benedictine Monk.)

I enjoyed a slow wander through the streets of crumbling yellow colonial buildings, my peace only occasionally disturbed by Vietnamese touts going, "Motorbike?" Or "Book, postcard my friend?" Or "Hashish? You want Boom Boom girl?" One day I’m tempted to go up to one of these guys (who can’t really do that much business), and say, "I want a book, a motorbike, some Hashish and Boom Boom. And I want it now!" Just to make his day. Not that I would of course. I have plenty of books.

Ha Noi Jane.

I had booked a sleeper bus to Ha Noi but the tour company could only provide a seated bus. The sleeper bus had been cancelled because a lady had lost her baby on it somewhere. There’s no answer to that, so I endured the twelve hours to Ha Noi dozing upright, occasionally head butting myself awake on the glass window. The bus only made one stop, so by the time I got to Ha Noi and found a random hotel, I had to piss like a horse.

I met up with a bunch of fellow travelers from the hotel, they came from exotic places such as France, Holland, Croatia and er, Newton Abbot. We’d heard about a bar called the Rock ‘N’ Roll Tavern which was featured in the Lonely Planet guide book, the tavern had a live Vietnamese band playing sixties counter-culture classics. Pretty unmissable I reckoned. Unfortunately we walked around Ha Noi half the night but could not find it. "Have you seen the Rock ‘N’ Roll Tavern?" I asked a local.
"Lock an lull?" He replied. He had no idea.

Turned out, my copy of Lonely Planet was a 2004 edition in a 2007 cover. The bar no longer existed. That’s what you get if you buy a photocopied book from a cardboard box on the back of some old lady’s bicycle.

We eventually walked into a Jazz bar with extortionate drink prices, but to be fair we were treated to live music, if you like the kind of music you hear in Hotel lobbies, or say, if you’re on the phone to British Telecom Complaints Department when they have you on hold.

We decided we needed to find Bia Hoi. Not wanting to walk around wasting more valuable drinking time, we jumped in a Taxi who took us all the way round Hoan Kiem Lake, which seemed rather unnecessary, when we suggested this to our driver, all he had to say was, ‘One way’. Looking on the map we discovered Bia Hio Junction was practically the next street down from the Jazz club! But what we paid for in nocturnal extra-curriculum sight-seeing, we made up for in cheap beer. The Bia Hoi lady outlandishly washed all the glasses in soapy water without rinsing them, so our beer had a rather peculiar floor-cleaner aftertaste. But at least the glasses were clean I suppose.

Ha Long Bay

Ha Long Bay was beautiful; sculptured limestone rock formations emerging from the mist of the South China Sea, but don’t take my word for it, look at some photo’s, I’m not going to waffle on about it like some travel bore. It was nice to escape all the rampant commercialism of a developing Nation, but even in somewhere as remote and far removed from civilization as Ha Long Bay feels, there are always signs that it is just around the corner. Mostly in the form of Vietnamese ladies in little rowing boats filled to sinking with cans of Cola and packets of Oreo biscuits. I’m afraid in my experience, the only way to avoid people these days is to drink a bottle of Buckfast for breakfast and keep very poor personal hygiene.

Babes and Bikes.

I was suppose to be doing some serious trekking up in the Central Highlands, and by trekking, I mean serious boozing. But sadly my little one, Dharma, has had a poor tummy, so I spent the week back in the village covered in steaming baby crap.

We took Dharma to Nha Trang hospital and I couldn’t believe the amount of hot nurses. And I mean smoking hot nurses. No kidding! I seriously thought about having an examination, pretend I’ve got balls ache or blue piss again, get my tally wacker the once over. But I found out in good time the reason for so many hot nurses was because they were all actresses, filming a TV drama in the hospital. I stayed and watched the action, it was a bit like Hollyoaks meets Holby City, but with convincing acting and hot Asian babes.

P.J. O’Rourke wrote that you need three things to survive driving on the roads in Vietnam, "Whiskey, Whiskey and more Whiskey." You don’t need an MOT, license, insurance or highway test to get on a bike in Vietnam. All you need is enough Dong in your pocket to fill one up with petrol. Everyone and his uncle’s monkey has a motorbike in Vietnam, or if they haven’t, everyone and his uncles monkey gets onto ONE motorbike. I’ve seen entire family’s, livestock, fridge freezers traveling on the back of motorbikes. There was even one incident with a large mirror on the back of a bike. I was speeding towards it in the opposite direction and thought I was going to drive into myself.

The horn is the most important piece of equipment on a bike, (You don’t even need brakes) the louder the better. It’s not rude to sound your horn in Nam, it’s a polite warning, it says, ‘Look out I’m coming very fast and I’m not slowing down and I’m not looking where the hell I’m going.’ Of course the problem with this is, because everyone is sounding their horn simultaneously, no one takes a blind bit of notice of you, so what you actually end up with is a very noisy street with a lot of silly accidents.

Phouc you too!

The Vietnamese have a knack for creating great names for their towns and villages. Here are a few of my favourites:

DONG HA

HANG PAC BO

NUI COC

CAO BANG

VINH PHUC

PHOUC SON

TIEN PHOUC

TUY PHONG

HON MOT

KRONG BONG

GO CONG DONG

HO COC BEACH (My favourite, definitely going there).

Speaking of funny names, there is a chain of children’s clothes shops in Vietnam, appropriately called The Pet Shop.

I’m back in Chatham now, I’m gazing out the window and it is cold grey and wet outside, with not a coconut tree in sight. Chatham is a scenic port town, a bit like Hoi An, but with Chavs and crap weather. Actually it’s nothing like Hoi An at all. If Kent is the garden of England, then Chatham must be the dung heap. How wonderful it is to be back.

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Lambeth, United Kingdom

By: Some Dude on the 5th March 2009 at 10:40am

Jeez... What a holiday. You have done more in your short holiday than most in their lives.