Vietnam: The SE Asia ‘Can’t Leave Your Self Behind’ Guide

From A to B – Getting Around

Trains

The trains were fully booked when we were in Vietnam which was a real shame as travelling North to South, or vice versa, is both a logical route and well supported by the train network.  The best I can do is direct you, once more, to the Man in Seat 61 website.

Buses

A little known fact is that Vietnam uses 92.6% of the world’s motor horn allocation.  Drivers honk to clear the path, honk to express alarm, honk to express recognition, honk to say hi, and honk when they haven’t honked in the last five seconds.  Sometimes they forget to honk so do a double honk to make up for their oversight.  Bus drivers have the most impressive horns in Vietnam, and the largest predilection to use them.  Biggest vehicle wins in Vietnam so riding a bus is akin to riding in a tank, scattering mopeds and pedestrians hither and thither as the bus motors on down the road, all accompanied by a near constant HOOOONK!  Take some earplugs.

The buses are OK in Vietnam.  We took a 20 hour sleeper bus from near Hanoi to Hue.  It was an experience.  I noticed that westerners were often placed at the back of the sleeper buses.  This could have been coincidence, but perhaps not.  The upside to being on the back row of a sleeper bus is that you get to put your travelling bag down behind the back row and, well, that’s it.  The back of a bus is bumpier, and in our case had five beds lined up next to each other.  Each berth is perhaps two foot wide, and six foot long. I struggled, sandwiched between Helen on one side and a kindly Vietnamese bloke on the other.  Sleeping etiquette in these cramped conditions is quite a skill.  Sleeping on your side requires that you face away from the person next to you so as not to snore into their face.  If everyone does the same then it happily morphs into a strangely intimate five person spooning configuration.

You can avoid this intimacy by not getting a berth on the back row.  Even better, get one on the lower level as clambering up into the upper level decks requires some climbing skills.  Whatever you do, avoid berths near the toilets, for obvious reasons.

To summarise:

• Use earplugs
• Avoid upper level, back row sleeper berths, unless there’s five of you and you’re swingers
• Avoid a berth near the toilet
• Pass the hours by purchasing a child’s toy steering wheel with horn to attach to the seat in front and pretend to drive

Mopeds

You have to be a bit mental to hire a scooter and drive around a big Vietnamese city.  The riding is hard, with few recognisable traffic rules.  Navigating is even harder.  If I’d have known where I was going I’d have done it for shits and giggles.  I didn’t, so I didn’t.

Hiring mopeds outside of the large cities is more realistic.  Just remember; size wins.  You are at the bottom of the vehicle pecking order so be prepared to get out of the way.

Flying

Flying domestically in Vietnam is a feasible proposition; especially with the great value fares Jetstar offer.  The obvious downside is that you miss a large part of the country.  We flew from Danang to Ho Chi Minh City because all the trains were full and I couldn’t face another night of awkward intimacy on a sleeper bus.   

Where the Magic Probably Won’t Happen – Sleeping

Huenino Hotel, Hue: This was probably the best guesthouse we stayed at in SE Asia.  Reasonable rates, slightly above average (approx $18 USD per night), but worth the extra outlay.  This place does very well on Trip Advisor for good reason.  The rooms are small but nicely designed.  The breakfast is excellent but what really sets this place apart is the staff, all members of the same family.  The one act of service that exemplifies this is that they give you a cool fresh fruit juice every time you come back to the hotel, and a cooled flannel.  This is five star stuff at guesthouse prices and I got the feeling that one of the family had been trained in an international luxury hotel.  Or they were just naturally hospitable.  Either way, great place, worth booking in advance.

Beach Club, Phu Quoc Island: If you’re going to this island (and you should) then you may as well stay on the beach.  This place is at the southern end of the long beach and offers beach cottages.  We paid $30 per night for the beachfront bungalow, and $20 per night for a bungalow slightly set back from the beach.  Both were good.  The food is average, but the setting great.  Beautiful sunsets, good swimming.  It’s a bit out of town so you need a moped to get around, but this is a sound investment anyway, and it’s worth negotiating a rental rate for your entire stay.  Take it easy when riding out of the hotel and up to the main road – this dirt track can easily throw you off balance. Not that this happened to me, oh no.

Nmm nmm nmm – Eating and Drinking

Iced coffee – wasn’t expecting this at all, but the iced coffee in Vietnam is delightful.  Rich and chocolaty coffee, sweetened by condensed milk, it’s available pretty much everywhere.

Nina’s Cafe, Hue.  This is another winner on Trip Advisor, and again it deserves the plaudits.  A small place run by the eponymous Nina it offers great food at low prices.  Nina herself is delightful; friendly, kind and thoughtful.  She is also smart, and realises that word of mouth, or of internet, is the best way to make her business a success, along with running a tight ship.  I admired her for this, and urge you to go to experience the great food and to support someone who has justifiably earned a good reputation. 

Random fish restaurant, Rach Gia: Can’t remember the name of this place, or give you directions, or remember the price (it was cheap) yet despite these Michelin-guide levels of information I would urge you to track down this local restaurant.  They seemed to serve only one dish; a huge fish that comes with rice pancakes and other stuff to make your own fishy delights.  I’ve included a picture so that if you cross this place you can dive in.  They were surprised to see us there, which is always nice, and amused at my attempts to squeeze my frame into the tiny child-size plastic chair.  They were even more amused when I tried to get out of it.  

Night market, Phu Quoc Island: This is the place for seafood on Phu Quoc.  Stalls line both sides of the road offering up a wide range of sea treasures.  Pick the busiest place.  We’d befriended some fair dinkum Aussies on Phu Quoc who came from a long line of fishermen and they assured us that the quality of the fish was top-notch.

Other stuff

Riding the Hoi An pass, from Hue to Hoi An

This route was recently made famous by Top Gear’s Vietnam special and though the programme manages to fake pretty much every scene they shoot they can’t fake the splendour of this magnificent stretch of road.  We completed the day long trip with a company called Hue Riders, our guide Mr Dung ushering us through the hairpins and city madness.  I rode myself on an automatic scooter and Helen rode pillion on Mr Dung’s motorbike. Our heavy packs were transported separately to Hue and we picked them up at the end of the day.

The ride takes in several stops along the way including Elephant Falls; a chance to have a dip and wash the dirt away.   Motoring along this stretch of road, Arcade Fire blasting through my headphones, was one of my happiest times in all of SE Asia.

Video footage of us riding this road is available on my YouTube channel

Riding around Phu Quoc Island

To continue with the biking theme, renting a moped and taking off around Phu Quoc Island is a great way to spend a day or two.  The north west of the island boasts the most beautiful scenery as you hug the coastline.  The ride up the north east coast road is the most fun as a rider as you need to cross some eroded sections of road, using impromptu bamboo bridges.  It takes a little experience, and some conviction to ride this, but I’m an amateur and we managed it, with Helen riding pillion.  And spanking my bottom, like a racehorse, to get extra thrust up the steep sections.

Again, video footage of this road is available on my YouTube channel.

Tour into the Mekong Delta from Ho Chi Minh City

I’m in two minds about this.  On the one hand, it’s a very good value way to see the Mekong, and meet other travellers.  On the other hand, it’s incredibly touristy and there is a significant amount of herding that goes on.  I’d definitely recommend against doing a one day trip as the vast majority of your day will be taken up with travelling to and from the Mekong.  I wrote more about it in this previous post.

What I didn’t mention in this post was the charming Singaporean man we chatted to on the tour.  I’d just been reading about Singapore and in particular the suffocating surveillance society that seems to be the price Singaporeans pay for a prosperous, safe and clean home.  Conscious that this was an opportunity to ask about his perspective on this, away from government snitches, we had a fascinating chat on the subject of ‘what price freedom?’  It was his response, however, to my explanation of our year long career break that really made me chuckle, and stuck in my mind.  That’s a very European thing to do, he said, sounds like a mid-life crisis.  I loved his bluntness, his jovial taunting, and we both giggled when I sheepishly added that I had just biked the Hoi An pass so maybe an early mid-life crisis was an accurate summary. 

    

Early morning at Hoan Kiem lake in Hanoi

Get up early and take a walk around the lake before the humidity takes hold to experience how Hanoi wakes up, and to see the most eclectic mix of people exercising.  This experience is so in contrast to the craziness of Hanoi that it left quite a mark on me.

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People are strange

Luang Prabang, Laos and Hanoi, Vietnam

“Oh, hello, you were on the plane with us from Luang Prabang” she said, scurrying across the busy Hanoi street and leaving her (his eyes seemed to suggest) long-suffering husband on the other side.  Whilst it pays to be just the tiniest bit suspicious of random people claiming to know you in foreign cities, the middle aged north-western woman, with her camera toting husband in tow could, I felt, be swiftly placed in the harmless category.  Harmless maybe, but boy could she moan.  “How did you like Luang Prabang” we asked, wishing five minutes later that we hadn’t as we were treated to a rundown of the numerous failings the city had amounting, if I followed correctly, to there being ants in her room and the boat that transported them there being grubby.  I have no issue with people having higher expectations, particularly if they’ve paid enough to justify such expectations, but writing off a whole city – a UNESCO world heritage site at that – on the basis of a tour company screw up seems a bit disingenuous to me.  “I refused to get in the bed on the first night”, she continued, images flashing through my mind of her hanging upside down from an alcove instead, arms crossed over her chest, her husband ordering extra garlic bread at dinner.  “Oh, well I hope you’re enjoying Hanoi a little more” I politely responded, keen to move the conversation into a moan free zone before I had to get all Buffy on her arse and pull out my wooden stake or fashion a couple of ciggies into a makeshift crucifix.  “Oh, this is much more like it”, she replied, “the hotel’s beautiful, I’ll be two hours tops out here and then it’s straight back to the pool - a bit of luxury, just like we’re used to”.  Our eyes met, sharing a look that I suspect is unique to Brits, indecipherable to any other nationality, that said ‘yes, that’s right, you’ve just slipped into show-off mode, now we both feel uncomfortable’.  Hastily back-pedalling she added “you know what I mean, we’re older, we’ve done all that doss-house stuff before”. 

I should be clear here, I didn’t dislike this woman – I may not want to be trapped in a lift with her, but I didn’t dislike her.  She’d chosen to go on a tour through South East Asia, deciding against numerous more comfortable experiences, and she and her husband were most likely spending a good chunk of the savings they’d built up through the summer of their youth to do so.  But the reference to her age made me inwardly chuckle, bringing to life the irony of a sumptuous passage I had just read in Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star:

Luxury spoils and infantilizes you and prevents you from knowing the world. That is its purpose, the reason why luxury cruises and great hotels are full of fatheads who, when they express an opinion, seem as though they are from another planet.  

This woman, in the autumn of her life, had chosen, precisely because of her age, a holiday that would spoil and infantilize her and which was resulting in a grown-up tantrum on the side of a busy road in Hanoi to two complete strangers.  By vowing to spend time by the pool instead of time in the city she was clinging to a comfort blanket, knowing that the only strange foreigners she’d have to deal with would be those serving her Martinis poolside, trained no doubt to international standards and in the international language of the service industry, English. 

This sounds scathing, but it really isn’t meant to.  I genuinely hope that she has a nice holiday, and that she stops stressing the little things (and whisper it, they’re all little things in the end).  I hope that she gets up early one morning and sees how the residents of Hanoi keep fit without access to a five star pool, stretching, tai-chi’ing, and slowly jogging around the city centre lake as the steam dissipates off the surface and before the cloak of humidity takes hold.  I hope that as the sun rises her concerns and fears and frustrations will set, and that the ‘Dangers and Annoyances’ section of the Lonely Planet (which, be honest, everyone morbidly flicks to first) will no longer say to her scam, charlatan and thief but opportunity, understanding and friendship. I hope that she begins to revel in the giddy sensation of ‘otherness’ that travel in a strange land can engender, and that she starts to see this otherness as a blessing and not a curse.  I hope that she realises that it is more often the people, strange though they may be, and not the places, that make for a great experience. 

I hope I can do the same.

(Oh, and I really hope a priest hasn’t blessed that swimming pool water because that would be, well, messy.)

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