Good morning Vietnam

Apologies for the epic delay.  India has been amazing.  I have eaten everything that has come my direction, and it is all delicious.  I am currently at an ashram in the holy Himalayan city of Rishikesh, and can't really believe I am going to be leaving for Qatar in less than 48 hours!  It will be so good to see family again, but I am already mourning the end of my big adventure.    


I hope you enjoy all of the pictures.  The thing that takes me the longest is sorting through the hundreds and hundreds of photos and picking just a few to share.  Namaste!


Day 27 - Wednesday, August 31st

I wake up for free breakfast decide to go check out the Ben Thahn Market and the War Remnants Museum with a British girl named Hannah. We head straight for the museum. Propagandizing aside, there is a lot of interesting information and heart-wrenching photos of the after effects of the defoliants. As we walk through the exhibits we wonder how anyone could have thought the war was winnable, and what winning even meant. As seems to be the pattern for modern war, the civilian casualties and the atrocities they suffered leave us outraged, and we hope, though we can never know, that we could never commit such acts of horror. That said, it's not hard to imagine the confusion, frustration, fear, and anger of soldiers fighting an enemy they couldn't see or sometimes even define.

I didn't study history or political science or international studies, but it seems to me that the parallels between the Vietnam/American War and the wars we are currently waging in Iraq and Afghanistan are impossible to ignore. As we continue past wall after wall of pictures and stories of children (mostly Vietnamese, but a few American as well) born with unimaginable handicaps, innocent but for their parents' exposure to defoliants, I wonder, how do we define winning? And at what cost?

The top floor of the museum is an exhibition of photos taken by photojournalists who were killed in the war. It is a moving memorial to the dedicated men (and one woman) on both sides who risked and lost their lives in order to show the rest of the world a tiny piece of the reality of war. Arranged chronologically, we walk through the change from black and white to color photography, and eventually to television.  The exhibit is worth every bit of propaganda, though I think everyone could have done without the dead babies floating in a formaldehyde tank.

 For lunch, Hannah and I head to Pho 2000, a pho restaurant graced by the one and only President Bill Clinton on the first diplomatic visit from the United States to Vietnam after the war.  The pho is good, perhaps not as good as the street corner pho of last night, but I've never met a bowl of noodle soup I didn't like.

I spend the afternoon searching out FedEx to ship home some Cambodian souvenirs in order to make room for Vietnamese ones.  I eventually find it inside the gorgeous central post office that sits kitty-corner from an equally lovely cathedral.  On the way back from the post office, I stop by the Sheraton for the sunset views as recommended by the Lonely Planet walking tour.  I am immediately sized up by the rooftop bar staff and offered the two-for-one happy hour special.  I watch the sky turn dusky and the city lights twinkle as far as the eye can see.  I end my night as all nights end in Saigon, drinking cheap beer and watching the street.

Day 28 - Thursday, September 1st

I wake up at the crack of dawn to head off on my two day Mekong Delta tour.  We start with a long bus ride and then switch to a boat that takes us from island to island.  We stop by a bee farm that is more of a ploy to get us to buy pollen clumps or royal jelly before carefully settling ourselves, complete with conical hats, into the carousel of slim wooden boats ready to take us on an authentic delta boat journey.  Yes, it is touristy, and it lasts only a few minutes, but gliding down the serpentine waterway beneath a canopy of leaves was an experience I am not likely to forget anytime soon.

We get lunch and then next up is a coconut candy factory visit and more shameless ploys to get us to buy things, but the coconut caramel process is reasonably interesting and the speed with which the two woman packing team can wrap and then package the individual candies is very impressive.  We jump back on the boat to go back to the bus which takes us to the city of Can Tho.  We deboard the bus in front of the hotel, and I (and one other couple) are whisked around the side of the bus to meet our homestay hosts.  A young guy on a motorbike smiles, hands me a helmet, and gestures to me to get on.  I am getting good at hopping on the back of motorbikes.  We are on our way in a flash and fairly fly along a highway before turning off onto a narrow lane running along a bit of the delta.  My driver stops next to a slim wooden boat and gestures across the river.  I get on the boat with several local women and seconds later we are on the other side.  Now what.  I am standing on a dark dirt path next in the middle of the Mekong Delta with no idea where I am supposed to go.  The ladies on the boat gesture off to the right, so I hesitantly set off into the darkness.  I have no idea what I am looking for and worry that maybe I should have followed the Lost Child Rule #1: do not leave your original location.  So I go back to the boat landing and wait.  I figure that even if no one does show up, the chances that there is not a single family in the area who will take me in for a night and return me to a travel agency or tourist area of some sort tomorrow is slim to none.  Before I even have a chance to contemplate which house I would try first, another young man on a motorbike appears out of the darkness and gestures for me to get on.  Ordinarily it would seem like a bad idea for a lone female traveler standing along a dark dirt path with no idea where she is to hop on the back of a strange man's motorbike, but in this instance I am quite sure it is the most sensible choice.  I am rewarded when he delivers me to my "homestay".  In reality it is more of a delta village guesthouse where every guest gets a room with a bathroom in a long woven bamboo building next to the water.  The only other guests are a particularly horrible couple and a pair of lovely Swiss girls.  Apparently the couple has some grievances they want to air and so they basically shout at women who obviously can't understand a word they are saying.  It is extremely embarassing.  That said, the two Swiss girls and I have a reasonably good time.  We learn to make some sort of fried roll thing and chat a bit with the owner (though he had recently come back from a party to celebrate some relative's baby girl, so it was more of a drunken ramble than a conversation) before heading back to our spacious rooms for bed.

Day 29 - Friday, September 2nd

The Swiss girls and I wake up at the crack of dawn for breakfast and a brief tour of the local market before getting into another slim wooden boat and setting off to meet the tour group.  This is our chance to see life on the Delta minus the tourists.   We join up with the tour group and head over to the famed floating market where we get into more small boats and do a circuit.  I luck out and get a front seat which means a totally unobstructed view.  Though the market is very cool, from the vantage point of the water level, it's less a riot of colors and conical hats and more of a local experience.  The photos aren't like the postcards sold on every corner, but it's nice to be in it.  After the market we visit a rice paper factory where the mystery of the "tire marks" on rice paper (as I used to think of them) is solved.  The factory is also home to a group of impossibly adorable sleeping puppies, all of whom I want to adopt.  We get back to Can Tho around lunch time and then pile back onto the bus for Saigon.  After bumping into Swana (from the hostel in Cambodia - it's unbelievably how many people you run into again and again along the way) on the street my first night in Saigon, we made plans to meet up after our respective Mekong Delta tours.  Before I even get a chance to meet up with Swana, I bump into a British woman named Jo that I hung around with in Kampot as we attempted to avoid getting talked at by Adam (of Sheepshagger).  I invite her along, and we find Swana and a French woman named Claire that she met on her Mekong Delta tour.  The four of us have a few drinks on the street before Jo heads back to bed and Swana, Claire, and I pile 15 people into a van taxi and set off for a club that someone thinks they remember hearing was good. 

Day 30 - Saturday, September 3rd

I wake up the next morning to a strange man in the bed next to mine (I repeat... next to MINE, not next to ME, important semantic detail) telling me that we have 10 minutes before free breakfast is over.  My sleep-deprived brain is not so sleepy that it will pass up free breakfast.  Over coffee and a mini-baguette I learn that the man with the alarm is Ralph from a state I can't remember.  I have a night bus to Nha Trang to catch and a whole day to kill.  Ralph and I decide to wander around the city for the afternoon.  We check out the market, have extremely disappointing pho at Pho 24, send postcards at the post office and then camp out in a cafe to write more postcards.  Ralph reminds me, almost painfully at times, of a friend from Japan.  I catch myself forgetting that I have not known him for more than a few hours and acting like we are old friends.  Then I remember and am briefly resentful of his very existence because he is just a stranger reminding me of someone far away.  I get over it, and we get much better pho for dinner where he convinces me to jump on the Valium bandwagon.  (the Valium bandwagon is full of tourists in Southeast Asia who prefer to travel at night because it kills two birds with one stone.  however, sleep on these night buses/trains/etc is not always the easiest, and many of these budget tourists swear by the over the counter and shockingly cheap Valium available in the very same Southeast Asian countries.)