Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) Part 2/Halong Bay

Here’s the thing about Vietnam… or, at least, here’s one of the things about Vietnam: The traffic is the epitome of !!!’s There Are No Fucking Rules. People literally do whatever they can and want to do, and horns are merely a way to tell the people around you that you exist in that space in that moment. Everyone drives motorbikes in giant throngs that weave in and out of traffic, alleyways, sidewalks, pedestrians, buildings, whatever might be in the way. The only way to cross a street is to plunge headlong into traffic and move deliberately, hoping to God no one fucking hits you. And I will say this: so far, no one has.

You just kind of... step forward.

We visited the Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh, which was really just a bunch of fancy rooms in a building I wouldn’t exactly call a palace with plaques explaining how this is the room where some talks happened that eventually lead to the surrender of South Vietnam. Not terribly exciting, but breakfast beforehand was because I had my first Vietnamese coffee and Pho for my first meal of the day.

Vietnamese coffee is the bomb diggity.

After the palace we proceeded to the Basilica where plenty of weddings were going on. It’s very cool for me to see how bridal style (or any style, really) differs from culture to culture.

Wedding photos are awkward in any language.

Various tourists and locals alike, in all languages, signed the bricks on the outside of the Basilica in white ink. You could only go into the foyer of the church, as the inner chamber was reserved for prayer. So we shopped for a bit, then hit the Ho Chi Minh City Museum, which was all about the history of the city. A young man stopped us and asked us where we were from. When we told him, he proceeded to give us a history lesson all on his own.

He told us that Vietnam was colonized by the Chinese for over a thousand years, and then colonized by the French for over a hundred years, and then invaded by the US. He told us they had only recently found their freedom as a nation, and that in the old days, Saigon as a city had only been one giant marketplace where no one lived. People migrated into the city from suburbs to sell any kind of thing you could think of in the streets. He told us he was from Hanoi and we told him we were going there later that day. He gave us a list of things to see and do; insisting Hanoi was more interesting and modern than Ho Chi Minh City.  I asked him his name. “Uh, well Guan. But you can call me Jarod. It’s my American name I got touring with my band.”

We thanked him, went back to the room to pack, and shipped off to the airport. About half way through the flight, I started noticing my throat hurting.  I figured that between the lack of sleep and the pace of travel it was pretty inevitable I was going to come down with something. By the time we landed and found the room, I was feeling pretty wrecked. We found a restaurant that, really oddly, served spaghetti Bolognese. Coston informed me that we would only be in the room for one night, but refused to answer any further questions, only telling me we were going “somewhere” to do “activities.” We had to be up at 6:30 the next morning, so we passed out.

Come the next morning we were up, packed, and grabbing a cab by 7 am. I still felt pretty hellish, but what are you going to do? We took a cab to a back alley travel cruise place, got on a bus that took us on a 3 hour ride that took us to a dock, where we got on a boat in Halong Bay.

The bay was filled with steamer ships, fishing boats, cruise vessels, and any other manner of floating transport one can imagine. This is a place I didn’t even know existed, but apparently Coston has wanted to go for many years. When you get out into it, it is utterly beautiful. A seemingly endless bay where mountainous boulders loom in every direction up out of the blue-green water.

The first thing we did was eat lunch on the deck while gliding past some of the most stunning scenery I’ve ever has the fortune of witnessing, going further out until the only other ships we saw were the occasional small fishing boat of a local.

They loaded us all up into a motorboat and took us to a floating village, literally a village of homes on blue plastic floaters where fisherman and their families live on and from the water. These villages are soon to become a thing of the past because the Vietnamese government is forcing them to move to land in order for their children to be educated to governmental standards, which is impossible to do on the water.

The locals were kind enough to row us in small boats around the village, which took about an hour, and then drop us off at a small pearl shop at the end. One girl was in the process of inserting seed grains of sand into oysters, which they would pull out two years later as pearls.

Back on the ship we showered and changed, and came up to sit on the sun deck. But alas, it had begun raining. Luckily they were doing a cooking demonstration below decks, which was less cooking demonstration and more splitting us into two groups and pitting us against each other in a fight to the death over who could roll more spring rolls in a two minute time period. Naturally, my team won and we all got free beer. Dinner was just a delicious as lunch, but by the time we were done we could barely keep our eyes open.

Our beautiful room on the ship.

All through the night it rained, but at one point it become basically a typhoon. Lighting was striking so close to the ship that it was lighting up our whole room through the curtains and the vibrating thunder shook the entire boat. It was very cool to sleep to, knowing you’re in the middle of Vietnam surrounded by ancient boulders and floating on the water.

We woke up this morning around 6:45 for breakfast at 7, after which they loaded us all back onto the motorboat to go to the beach of one of the islands. As I stepped up into the boat, Coston came up too close behind and knocked off my flip-flop, which landed in the water and immediately sank. I ran back to my room to grab my only other pair of shoes, pink flats that have seen better days. Small price to pay to the Gods of Halong, in my opinion.

They gave us a kayak, and we tooled our way around between the islands (I say tooled, I mean I did most of the paddling and Coston just watched and laughed). Back on the beach was a wildly pregnant dog who did not minds a good petting, and she got it. Poor thing looked very uncomfortable and I’m pretty sure she was about to pop. The water was the temperature of bathwater, and it was only sprinkling by this time, so most of the group opted to go swimming. I stayed behind and sat under an umbrella.

They shuttled us back to the boat where we showered, changed, packed, and ate lunch. We unloaded back onto the same dock and got in our respective buses. About half way back to Hanoi they took us to a small village that put on a water puppet show for us. Admittedly, it was kind of lame and weird, but anything to see more Vietnam I approve of. And now here I sit, back on the bus and almost back to Hanoi. We have only one more night here, then we fly out tomorrow afternoon for a layover in Hong Kong just long enough to see a little of the city, then back to Okinawa for a week.

I’m having a great time, hope everyone is healthy and happy and excited about getting presents.