HCMC

We arrived in Saigon (south Vietnamese tend to still call it Saigon, while northerners call it Ho Chi Minh) around 5PM and took a Grab (the ubiquitous Uber copycat) to our Airbnb outside of the central tourist area, a neighborhood of cute little streets and small buildings bordered by scores of new high-rise apartment complexes on one side and the river on the other. After settling in to our enormous and ridiculously wood-paneled room, we walked around our neighborhood a little, enjoying the bustle and being nearly the only foreigners around. We got banh trung cut nuong, a kind of hot quail egg salad, from a nearby street vendor, then walked over to a slightly younger and more student-y neighborhood nearby. We found a super cute little hipster beer garden where Chandler had a couple craft beers on draft while we shared some snacky food and listened to several very hip-looking young people beautifully sing a series of romantic ballads on karaoke.

The following morning, Chandler went out on a fruit-finding mission, wandering among all the various vendors, picking up not only a couple of kilos of several kinds of fruit but also two small yoghurts, some coffee, and two banh mi, all for about $5. We feasted on our fruit by the window in our room, looking out over our little corner of the city, feeling really happy and peaceful.

Later that morning, we took a Grab downtown and walked around the central tourist area a little bit, visiting the gorgeous post office building and Ben Thanh market. A friend in Denver had put us in touch with a friend of his in Saigon, Khang, and we had plans to meet up with him at about 4 at the base of Bitexco Tower, the tallest skyscraper in the central business district. Turns out Khang works at the World of Heineken exhibit as the front-end manager of the bar located on the 60^th floor of this building. This is effectively the symbolic headquarters of Heineken in Southeast Asia, where the beer is apparently hugely popular. Heineken, we learned, also owns Tiger Beer, which by itself accounts for over 70% of the market share in Vietnam. Crazy.

We went up in the elevator and did a quick little tour of the small Heineken museum there, which included getting a “pouring lesson” where we poured a Heineken from a tap and also playing around on a Formula 1 racecar simulator (which made driving an F1 car seem extremely difficult). After this, we walked down one level to the Heineken taproom, which wraps around the whole floor so you get amazing views of the city in every direction. We had a couple beers (on the house), admired the views, and chatted a little off and on with Khang as his duties permitted. He was very enjoyable to talk to, and the whole experience was actually really cool, despite being so brand-centric and something we would not normally choose to do.

We watched the sunset from the top of the tower, then said goodbye to Khang and took a Grab back to our part of town. After a short rest, we went out in search of dinner, eventually stopping at a small pho cart on the street with a few simple tables laid out. The food was tremendously delicious, and we enjoyed watching--and feeling like one small part of--the quiet bustle of the neighborhood going about its collective evening routine. From there, we walked back over to the student area where we sat at another little outdoor café, had a beverage, and enjoyed the warm breezy evening, indulging in a little alternate-life fantasy where we move to Saigon, learn Vietnamese, and live a romantic expat life in this hip and beautiful neighborhood.

The following morning (our last in Vietnam), we started the day with another breakfast of fruit and banh mi in our Airbnb before packing up, leaving our luggage downstairs, and heading back into town. Up to this point, we had not really come face to face with the fact of the US war in Vietnam. On a superficial level, the country seems amazingly well-adjusted and healed from the conflict. Signs of it are few and far between, mainly just leveraged into tourist-trinket imagery, if anything, and we certainly never encountered any animosity or even caginess related to our country of origin. That said, we did want to have the experience of confronting the realities of the war a little bit, or maybe just felt it was kind of a responsibility we had as guests in the country. Having passed up famous historical sites and museums in Hanoi and central Vietnam, the War Remnants Museum in Saigon was our last chance.  

The museum is laid out in three floors. The bottom floor focuses primarily on international sentiment regarding the war. It includes exhibits on global anti-war movements spanning all continents, but with an especially mature and thorough portrait of those within the United States (including extensive coverage of the GI anti-war movement, which, in our experience, is under-taught in US schools). The overall effect is one of laying the blame squarely on the US government rather than US citizens (a sentiment many of us can strongly sympathize with) as well as folding the US anti-war movement into a larger global outcry. There is also a moving section on collaborative international efforts to help Vietnam heal post-war, and gratitude is expressed towards many countries that helped in the immediate aftermath of the conflict.

The second floor is the really tough one. One section details a variety of war crimes committed against Vietnamese civilians by the United States during the war, most notably the My Lai massacre but also others. The exhibits effectively accomplish the difficult job of enumerating the atrocities in a matter-of-fact way that manages to be deeply empathetic without resorting to sensationalism or finger-pointing. The facts themselves are so utterly devastating that they don’t really need any flourishes or embellishment. On the other side of the floor is an exhibit documenting the effects of Agent Orange and similar chemicals, using mostly large black and white photographs to chronicle the natural and human damage, the effects of which can still be found even in the third and fourth generation since the war. Included in this exhibit is a scathing denouncement of Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Diamond Shamrock, and other US corporations that developed and manufactured the chemical weapons used in the war. Even today, a lawsuit is still ongoing that would force these companies to compensate Vietnamese survivors affected by Agent Orange.

Finally, one half of the third floor contains a detailed timeline of the war from the beginning of Vietnamese armed resistance to the French in 1945 to the final north Vietnamese victory in 1975. It convincingly paints a continuous narrative of the 30-year struggle for Vietnamese independence against first the French then the Americans (supported by the misguided Saigon puppet state), though it does, somehow, fail to mention the involvement of the USSR and China in all of this. The other half of the floor consists of a moving tribute to photojournalists who died while documenting the war, without whose work the museum itself would not exist. Credit and gratitude is expressed equally to journalists working on all sides of the war: not only Americans and Vietnamese (north and south) but also Japanese, French, Australians, Cambodians, and people from over 50 other countries as well.  

All this is to say that we left the museum better-educated visitors to Vietnam, reeling from the horror of war, and sadly reflecting that nothing has changed and there may well be a similar museum in Iraq in 40 years. We walked about 20 minutes to a restaurant Khang had recommended, specializing in a highland Vietnamese dish called “banh uot,” which is a kind of thin rice pancake wrapper that you stuff with a mix of meat and vegetables and dip into a variety of dipping sauces. The restaurant was in another absolutely delightful part of town, and the food itself was delicious and quite different from any meal we’d had thus far in Vietnam. Quick Grab back to our Airbnb to gather our bags, then off to the airport to fly back to Thailand.

Next up: Ocean time! Khao Lak & Ko Similan.

Our fancy Airbnb (model not included)

Night bridge

Breakfast bounty! Name that fruit!

Central Post Office (feat. Ho Chi Minh)

Views from the top

Heineken!

Last pho

Just another street food cart

Banh uot

Mekong Delta

On the evening of Feb 18, we took an extremely short and cheap flight to Can Tho, the principal city of the Mekong Delta region in the far south of Vietnam. The Delta, like most deltas, is known for its river culture, fertile agriculture, and proliferation of trade along literally thousands of fen-y waterways. In our imagination, Can Tho was a quaint town of lazily meandering streams and quiet provincial life. But nope, it's the fourth-largest city in Vietnam at over 1.5 million people with some hustle and bustle to show for it. We got to our weirdly-way-too-nice-for-us hotel well after midnight and finally fell asleep close to 1:00AM.

We had arranged to jump on the last two days of a three-day/two-night tour, and we met the group at their hotel at 6:30. First, we all walked a few blocks to the riverfront and boarded a boat, riding about 45 minutes upriver to a large floating fruit market. This market was very unlike our preconception of a floating market: tourist-centric reed paddle boats selling mostly Chinese-made tchotchkes and other trinkets. This market was thoroughly active, not at all romantic, and quite interesting. Hundreds of motorized riverboats milled around, most of them selling a single kind of fruit to much smaller boats that then sold the fruit in smaller surrounding communities as well as at various markets in Can Tho city. We were told the market is much smaller these days than even 10 years ago. But even so, it was very impressive to see the number of people still making a living this way along with the variety of produce on offer.

From there, we putzed another 10 or 15 minutes upriver to visit a small rice noodle factory. Again, we had low expectations that were far surpassed. We saw how they make large vat-fuls of a kind of batter-like paste from rice flour, tapioca flour, water, and salt, which is then spread across a two-foot hot plate (heated by a fire fueled by rice husks), carefully rolled onto a bamboo stick, and laid on a large bamboo pallet to sun-dry before being cranked through a small gas-powered noodle cutter. We were told that nearly all of the rice noodles consumed in Vietnam (which is presumably an absurdly huge quantity) are made in small family operations using this same process. I don't know if that's true, but if so, that's pretty amazing.

After another stop at a totally underwhelming old fruit orchard turned tourist trap, we boated back to Can Tho city where we had a very nice seafood hot pot and pork noodle lunch provided by the tour and also dropped off about two-thirds of the people in our group (for which we were very grateful). The remaining 10 of us got on a much smaller bus and drove about 3 hours north to Tra Su Bird Sanctuary.

Tra Su consists of a huge swampy flooded forest crisscrossed by little canals, dykes, and bamboo boardwalks. It's famous for its huge bird population as well as the gorgeous scenery. We spent about two and a half hours there with the group, but could easily have spent much more. We took two boat rides, one motorized and one human-powered, climbed up to a 100-foot canopy observation deck and also walked almost 3 kilometers along one of the boardwalks. Despite the mid-afternoon lull and the loud boat engines, we still saw a lot of birds, including many grey-headed swamphens, an oriental darter, some kind of brilliantly blue kingfisher, and a bunch of herons, bitterns, and egrets.

Then another hour in the bus to the much smaller town of Chau Doc, very near the Cambodian border on the Bassac River, one of the innumerable tributaries and distributaries of the Mekong. By the time we got there, we were quite happy to have a little independence and be away from the others on our tour (mostly 50-somethings) and our guide, whose inefficient communication and overly-cutesy mannerisms were starting to wear on us a little. We grabbed a bite to eat at a surprisingly good nearby sidewalk restaurant and crashed early.

5:30 AM wakeup again the following morning, and we were back on the river by 6:45.We first stopped by a small fish farm operation, where they keep the fish in a netted area underneath a kind of floating house, before continuing on to a nearby Muslim Cham village, one of southeast Asia's ethnic minority groups. We feared this would be an exploitative-feeling or overly-fabricated experience and were again pleasantly surprised to find a very real and thriving little village behind the touristy textile storefront. The entire community is raised up on stilts some 10 feet, since the river level fluctuates many feet during the monsoon season. We walked around a little bit, trying to imagine the village fully engulfed by the river that was currently several hundred yards away, and passing by (but not permitted to enter) a local mosque.

Several of our group were taking the boat to Phnom Penh, so there were just three of the original group on the bus back to Can Tho, where, like a tributary of the Mekong itself, we merged back in with a larger group for the nearly five-hour bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon.

Next up: HCMC.

Whacked out at 1 AM

Cai Rang floating market vignette

Some noods on the boat

Moving product

Drying future noodles

Swampy boat ride

Tra Su observation tower

Tra Su

Another kind of bird at Tra Su

Bassac River sunrise

Floating river homes

Elevated boardwalk to Cham village

Looking down

 

Mosque entrance 

The boats have eyes

Bus time

Hue & Hoi An

Map's back!

Hue and Hoi An are renowned as the culinary and cultural heart of Vietnam. For us, that mostly means eating lots of meals and wandering around looking at stuff. Interestingly, they are also south of the historical North-South border, and our immediate impression was that people seemed much warmer and friendlier towards us and that the tourist infrastructure is also much more developed. By and large, exchanges with vendors, restaurant staff, etc. have been feeling a little less pushy, cold, and purely transactional than in the north.

We arrived in Hue bleary-eyed and sleepy at about 9:30AM, took a short taxi ride to our hotel, and promptly fell asleep. Chandler roused himself after about 45 minutes and got a leisurely lunch and did some work in a coffee shop for a couple hours. Michelle got up in the meantime, and we did some trip planning that afternoon before finally setting out to check out the city together. We wandered around a little, getting a quick meal consisting of some local specialties, nem lui and banh khoai. From there, we meandered through the tourist area and met up for a drink with one of the people who had been on our tour to Cat Ba Island and Lan Ha Bay.

The next day, we walked across the river to the old city that was the Vietnamese imperial capital for most of the 18th and 19th centuries. This area is surrounded by two layers of moats, with the old city walls still standing, circumscribing hundreds of palaces, temples, old living quarters, elaborate gates, gardens, and other structures. We walked around for a little while, but it was extremely hot (heat index around 100F), and Michelle decided to sit in the shade and draw for a little bit while Chandler walked around for another hour or so. The most impressive thing about the imperial city was simply its scale, and it was fun to imagine the thousands of courtiers, attendants, and other functionaries that must have lived there during its heyday.

After popping into a cafe with AC to cool off, we took a taxi to the other side of town where Chandler had read about a restaurant he wanted to try, Com Hen Hoa Dong. The place was on Con Hen island, which sits in the middle of the Perfume River and is only accessible by a single bridge that's only wide enough for motorbikes and bicycles, so the taxi dropped us off on the mainland side and we walked over. The island had an incredibly peaceful, charming vibe that we hadn't yet seen in Vietnam. People smiled like they were happy to see us (or at least amused by our presence), and there were lots of kids out playing in the streets which were busting with bikes and scooters but no cars at all.

We easily found the restaurant and ordered a com hen and a bun hen (local baby clams with rice and noodles, respectively). This was one of the best meals we've eaten on the trip. The clams were so tiny and the fishy taste was mixed so perfectly with all the other flavors that even Michelle loved it. We ordered another bun hen each and also got two of the specialty desserts: che bap, a kind of gelatinous sweet corn-and-coconut pudding, which was also delicious. After eating, we walked around the island a little more, just taking in the scenes of daily life as well as a beautiful sunset over the Perfume River.

The next morning, we took a bus about three hours south to Hoi An. Equal to Hue as a culinary destination, Hoi An also has the added benefit of being absolutely adorable to walk around, kind of like a Vietnamese San Miguel de Allende. Besides food, Hoi An is also very famous for the quality and quantity of its tailors. The woman who runs the guesthouse we stayed at recommended her sister's tailoring business, Faifoo, if we were interested in having any clothes made. After getting  some lunch (two of the local specialties, mi quang and cau lau), we wandered over to Faifoo and chatted to the sister in question. She was very knowledgeable and not at all pushy and helped us understand the process as well as the various options. Plus, the price was right, so we just decided to go for it. Chandler got a suit, two long-sleeve button-ups, and a short-sleeve button-up and Michelle got two dresses. We chose the fabrics, colors, and cuts, having to be helped through every decision because we don't really know anything about this kind of thing. They took our measurements and told us to come back the next day.

That night, we had bought tickets to a production called "AO Show" that was billed as "Vietnamese Bamboo Circus." The show took place at a really beautiful little theater that was a very short walk from our guesthouse. We had fairly high expectations, but were still absolutely blown away by the performance. It amounted to a series of vignettes, each of which told a little story that incorporated various combinations of acrobatics, circus skills, modern dance, performance art, physical comedy, pastiche of cultural mores, live music, and a brilliant use of props. The settings ranged from rural villages to modern cities, and each little story was convincingly told, technically amazing, and really heartfelt. Overall, it was one of the best live performances either of us have been to, and we both had a blast. After the show, Chandler chowed down on some charcoal-grilled squid and octopus that had been caught that day.

The next morning, we got another slow start before grabbing a quick breakfast of cau lau and settling down in an absolutely adorable coffee shop called Faifo (confusingly just one letter different from the tailor). We did a bunch of work and admired the beautiful view out over the quaint, shingled rooftops. For lunch, Chandler had yet another seafood extravaganza. This time, a giant steaming hot pot with various kinds of seafood cooked in an aromatic and savory lemongrass-garlic-ginger broth.

We went back to the tailor and tried on our new clothes, getting some recommendations for small adjustments, before setting out again to wander around, take some photos of this incredibly photogenic place, pop into some small shops, and enjoy a beverage on a small balcony overlooking the street.

We had most of the next day to kill too before an evening flight south to the Mekong Delta, and it passed in much the same way as the previous day: coffee shops and seafood meals, capped off with a delicious fresh-caught grilled lobster that Michelle enjoyed right along with Chandler. All in all, a pretty relaxing, delightfully food-filled, and logistically productive time in central Vietnam.

Next up: The Mekong Delta

Hue street scene

Some local specialties: banh khoai and nem lui

Making banh khoai (Michelle in full falang mode)

Hue ancient city

Com hen & bun hen

With the owner at bun hen restaurant

Sunset on Con Hen Island

Some weird dessert on the left. Flan, right.

 

Hoi An street scenes

Classic coffee shop scene

Bits of the Hoi An ancient city

Lobster

Tam Coc

On the morning of Feb 12, we got up early to a drizzly and rainy Hanoi to meet our tour heading south to Tam Coc in Ninh Binh province, a place that has relatively recently come to popular attention as one of the top places to visit in northern Vietnam. We were incredibly sleepy, and grateful that there were only 10 people on our tour and the bus was very quiet. Our first stop was Hoa Lu, which was the 10th century capital of the northern part of what is currently Vietnam. The surrounding landscape was a stunning introduction to the area with jungle-covered limestone mountains and ultra-green rice paddies. The palace complex itself, however, was slightly underwhelming with hordes of tour groups everywhere. We mainly just sat and watched the rice farmers work.

We then drove the remaining 20 minutes or so into Tam Coc, first going for a short bike ride with the group through some very cute little alleyways and along some more flooded rice paddies. After a quick buffet lunch, we walked across the street to the main attraction, a boat tour along a small winding river with rice paddies on each side, all of which is framed by more towering limestone karsts covered in lush vegetation. The day itself was overcast and a little gloomy and there were more hordes of tourists here, but the scenery was indeed truly amazing. Each of these small boats is rowed by a local person, mostly women, and they've all learned to use their feet to manage the oars, which was pretty amusing and startling at first, but actually seemed to be more efficient as time wore on. We had a boat to ourselves, and the hour and a half trip was actually quite peaceful, notwithstanding a couple of hard sells as well as a kind of intense haggle about the tip for the rower right when we got back to the starting point.

We had booked a night in Tam Coc town, so after the boat trip we parted from our group and walked a few blocks to our homestay. True to it's name, this was basically just a room in someone's home. At first, the family came off as quite serious and a bit grumpy-seeming, and we turned down a couple more hard upsells. Plus, there was an extremely rambunctious six-year-old boy who would just start screaming sometimes. So not the most welcoming vibe, but we did end up having several positive interactions with them and were grateful that they opened up their home to us. Plus the price was right at about $9/night. That evening, we did some trip planning and had a simple dinner nearby before calling it a night.

The next morning, we rented a scooter from our host family and rode about 15 minutes north to Hang Mua. We weren't really sure what to expect and balked a little at the nearly $10 entrance fee. Once inside, though, we were really glad we had come out. First of all, the whole bottom area was a kind of Instagrammer's paradise with scores of cutesy little photo ops that had been set up. It was kind of kitschy and a bit ridiculous, but also very beautifully landscaped and actually quite charming despite itself. There were a few very nice man-made lakes to walk around as well as a couple of small caves to explore. The main attraction, however, was a windy 500-foot staircase built directly into the side of the mountain that leads up to two of the craggy limestone peaks, one with a small pagoda and another with a large stone dragon statue built along a narrow ridge. It was already pretty cloudy and just got foggier and denser as we climbed so that by the time we reached the top, we were basically just inside of a cloud, absolutely drenched from sweat and mist. Despite not having the usual spectacular views and having to negotiate around huge groups of fashionable young Vietnamese influencers taking hundreds of elaborately posed photos, it was very atmospheric and mysterious-feeling and well worth going.

From there, we scooted off to the opposite side of town (about 15km total) to visit the Thung Nham bird park. The ride through the countryside was tremendously peaceful and breathtakingly beautiful, and it was a huge relief to get away from the cloying crowds of Tam Coc. The park itself was tucked into a valley surrounded by jungly peaks on all sides. Some sections were very nicely landscaped while others were left more or less wild. We walked through Mermaid Cave, which had a bamboo boardwalk winding through a series of flooded caves for about half a kilometer. The ceiling was at about 3-4 feet the entire time, so we had to hunch and sometimes crawl to make it through. At the far end of the park was a huge lagoon with several clusters of trees on small islands, each completely full of nesting birds. One tree had hundreds of openbill storks, another was full of some kind of egret. On the opposite side of the lagoon, we could see dozens of herons dotting the hillside, more regal and less sociable-seeming than the storks and egrets. After winding through the rest of the park, we decided to take the short boat ride from the main entrance back to the lagoon, cruising slowly by the storks as they squawked and jostled and slept and flew around and built their nests. As it neared dusk and our boatman rowed us back to the dock, egrets and storks flew over us by the hundreds, returning to the lagoon for the night. All in all, a pretty spectacular experience.

For that night, we had booked the overnight train from Ninh Binh to Hue. Online reviews of the train were mixed to say the least, with several absolute horror stories. After waffling several times and calming Michelle's fears, we had finally decided to just do it. At around 9PM, we took a taxi about 15 minutes to the Ninh Binh train station, waited for a little while, then boarded the train at about 10:30. Turns out, all of our fears were completely unfounded. We were in a four-person berth with two young Germans who were tidily asleep when we arrived. The beds were small but clean and comfortable, and we spent a pretty pleasant night, even if not totally restful, before arriving in Hue the following morning.

Next up: Hue, obv.

Cruising around Tam Coc

 

Tam Coc boat tour

Insta-famous

Windy stair into the clouds

Model shoot

Hang Mua Trek

Thung Nham bird park

Workin on the overnight train