Saigon (Feb. 25, 2011) -- It's not the traffic in this city that I'll be honoring in this latest ramble, but rather the seemingly happenstance way that sky scrapers sit next to crumbling buildings while beggars are on street corners as brand new Bentleys cruise silently by.
Bi-polar spending -- Being in a country that's really cheap has done strange things to me. For example, I'm staying in a $16-a-night hotel room that resembles Martin Sheen's room in the opening sequence of "Apocalypse Now," yet I've spent $23 the last two afternoons sitting by the pool at the Carvavelle Hotel drinking $5 beers when the going rate in the city for a beer is $1. I was quite shocked the first time the pool-side waitress told me how much the beers were. If I was in any other region of the world, mind you, $5 beer by a gorgeous pool would be a bargain.
I feel guilty about lounging about, but the pool is just so nice and it's too hot to really see many sights around town without sweating profusely. And plus, it's hard going back to coach once you've been in First Class.
Along these same lines, I've started hailing and hiring scooters to get around town since they are cheaper and more efficient than a taxi. A ride on the back of one of these scooters costs 20,000 Vietnamese dollars (about $1) and yet I walked away today from a guy who wanted 40k instead of 20K. That was a bit extreme, I thought afterward.
I did see my first scooter accident today. It wasn't a bad one -- a minivan clipped a moto and the guy riding the moto fell off but he was OK. So we can cross that off the list of things you must see in Asia.
Daka Daka -- When packing for the trip I threw all the usual things in the bag; bug spray, swimming shorts, sunscreen and a baseball cap for the heat. I never considered the baseball cap and how it looks.
My baseball cap that I'm wearing right now as I type this is an old school Atlanta Braves cap. It's three-quarters blue, with a white front and a bright red 'A' in the center.
So...red, white and blue. As if to make things worse in an effort to appear to be the most patriotic man ever to leave America, it has '1974' on the back of it. The year is to mark the season that Hank Aaron passed Babe Ruth's home run record.
Yet 1974 was also the year that the last Americans evacuated Saigon. So basically I look like a member of Team America, possibly here to even the score.
The locals seem more amused than angered by my choice of headgear.
It's blazing hot though right now in Saigon and so the hat is being worn no matter what the appearance.
Speaking of America and Vietnam, I went to the War Remnants museum this morning before hitting the pool. There's always two sides to every story, I realize, but the 'Home of the Brave' sure doesn't come out very well according to the way that the Vietnamese tell the tale. (Agent Orange, anyone?)
It just goes to show that no one ever really wins a war.
Traffic update -- There are painted lines on the street here, so that's a start. Yet they still run red lights and crossing the street remains something that is so nerve wracking that I exhale deeply once I'm safely on the other side.
Halong time coming -- Shortly after sending the last dispatch about all the bad luck that I had been having, I joined a tour group on a visit to Halong Bay, a body of water that features massive outcroppings and islands scattered about.
Our boat was four hours late leaving, so not the best start. And of course I had told some people on the tour about my string of bad luck. So they jokingly started blaming the lengthy delay on me. ("Bad luck Brett" will not be a nickname that I answer to, by the way.)
Once we were on our way though it was amazing. Our boat cruised past islands and outcroppings and it was me and a group of British travelers and a French couple and that was it, besides the staff of eight or nine Vietnamese dudes.
Dinner was a formal feast and then we played cards and ended the night fishing for squid off the back of the boat.
The next day we spent cruising around some more, but not before some of us went kayaking into a secluded cove where we watched a family of monkeys playing on the rocks. It was a great trip despite the bumps in the road and I took it as an end to the run of the bad travel luck that I had experienced thus far.
Coffee -- It's amazing here. Really strong, really cheap and with hints of chocolate. The French taught them very well in this regard.
Zen babies -- I've seen lots of babies here since families tend to live together and their shops are usually at the front of their living quarters -- and yet I've not seen a baby crying. It's strange. That is all.
Old white dudes -- "I wish I was an older man." Those are not words that one usually hears a 32-year-old man say, and yet that is what my friend Nick said as we sat at a bar the other night.
Nick, who has lived here for several years, was bemoaning the fact that simply because he was young, the hostitutes tending bar at a place where we stopped to have a beer were ignoring us in favor of all the older men in the place since they presumably had more money and more desperation than he and I had.
It was a rather bizarre scene to begin with. All the Vietnamese women behind the bar (there might have been 20 rotating in and out -- it was hard to tell) were identically dressed in red shorts and black tops. Their job was to sling drinks and flirt with the guys at the bar chugging beer.
And these older dudes at the bar looked like they had just found the fountain of youth. I imagine that they probably felt like they had indeed done just that.
So that's Saigon. Things have improved greatly since the last dispatch. I'm heading out to the country in the morning to see some Vietcong tunnels and some temples. And then on Sunday it's off to the Mekong Delta and then Cambodia from there.
With about a week of fairly rough and dusty travel awaiting, a little time by the pool didn't seem too extravagant, $5 beer or not.
Take care,
Brett
