That even­ing, while we sauntered around the tour­ist dis­trict look­ing for some­where to eat we came across numer­ous cafes.  How­ever, these are not cafes in the way the west know them, no: a café here is dif­fer­ent.  For sim­pli­cit­ies sake, every time I say “café,” replace that word with “travel agent.”  The café busi­ness is big busi­ness here and uncount­able oper­at­ors vie for atten­tion, and the tour­ist dol­lar, on every corner.  Sim­il­arly, Viet­nam is not much for trade-name copy­right and it is pos­sible to find mul­tiple cop­ies of the more fam­ous oper­at­ors; together with the offi­cial logo and more.  They also tout to each other, as we soon found out when book­ing ourselves onto a full day trip to the Cu Chi tun­nels and Cao Dai temple.

Cesca is someone who takes choice very ser­i­ously; it takes her an age to choose any­thing (apart from say­ing “Yes” to me on one par­tic­u­lar occa­sion!) and I fully respect this (although it can be funny to watch).  For her the selec­tion of the cor­rect tour oper­ator is of para­mount import­ance.  Unfor­tu­nately, this care­ful pro­cess means that should the tour dif­fer­en­ti­ate by any amount she will get annoyed and even blame her powers of choice.  I am much more prag­matic; all the tours are the same, the offices and front­ages are just ‘sales’.  The back-end is always some­what of a crap­shoot.  That is unless you are pay­ing for some­thing spe­cial.  Our budget puts us firmly in the low-to-mid ranges and thus into the melt­ing pot.

Sure enough, the tour turned out dif­fer­ently than expec­ted.  The first ink­ling that some­thing would be amiss came when the guide changed the order of the tour as soon as we got onto the bus.  We have been trav­el­ling for long enough to know that this is not a good sign in a tour.  Our first stop then was the Cu Chi tunnels.

These large and wide­spread tun­nels were the key ingredi­ent of the VC forces in the fam­ous Tet Offens­ive.  Their size and depth even allows for under­ground hos­pit­als, three level quar­ters and dis­guised kit­chens.  Our trip around them was at a little of a break neck pace for us, but we did see the vari­ous build­ings, cleaver dis­guises and felt the indom­it­able nature of the VC sol­diers who fought and died here.

The clas­sic photo, but I couldn’t fit

Appar­ently, the sys­tem was so well hid­den that one US fire­base was built dir­ectly above a tun­nel com­mand sec­tion!  The sur­prised Amer­ic­ans had to deal with enemy sol­diers com­ing up all around their tents!  We also saw a large col­lec­tion of the vari­ous man­traps the VC used to booby trap US forces.  These were all low tech but ingeni­ous in their fero­city and inventiveness.

The “door” trap

The real traps were smeared in poo and there­fore the main killing weapon was the envir­on­ment itself.  Mind you, step­ping into a pit of spikes would def­in­itely hurt as they were clev­erly designed to tilt into your flesh and pre­vent you from being pulled out.

A US tank dis­abled by the VC around the tunnels

The high­light of the visit was a chance to go down a tun­nel itself.  Now the fight­ing VC sol­dier was gen­er­ally very small indeed; sub­sist­ing on a very simple diet does not make for chunky sol­diers.  Con­sequently, the ‘tun­nel’ open to west­ern­ers has been con­sid­er­ably widened.  It made no dif­fer­ence as there was no way I was going to fit in there.  Cesca even­tu­ally went in alone and repor­ted that it was not pleas­ant.  I won­der how it must have felt for the war­ri­ors of both nations to meet in such tunnels?

Down the tunnel

The US had its own “Tun­nel Rats” who risked their lives to attack down these tiny, trap rid­den and pitch black holes.  I am glad that, due to my size, I would not be selec­ted for such oner­ous duty.

After that flash-visit to the tun­nels we were driven at break neck speed to the Cao Dai temple to see the lunch­time cere­mony.  Cao Dai is frankly the strangest reli­gious move­ment I have ever seen.  Once a power­ful force in Viet­nam, armed and ready to cause trouble, they have been beaten back to a small num­ber of churches around the Mekong.  Their Chris­tian inspired and very col­our­ful church sits majestic­ally on a large space of land and hold ser­vices a few times each day.  We arrived in time to be ushered into the rooftop cloisters and view the lunch­time service.

The col­our­ful temple and worshipers

They wor­ship Jesus, Buddha, Con­fucius and Lao-Tze (Tao­ism) all at once. Each mem­ber wears a col­oured robe to sig­nify their par­tic­u­lar alle­gi­ance and the cere­mony has much in com­mon with a Chris­tian Church ser­vice, but with men­tally banging Viet­namese music per­formed by the band in the rafters. It gets stranger; the sym­bol of Cao Dai is the “Eye in the Pyr­amid” akin to a mil­lion Illu­mi­antus con­spir­acy the­or­ies and bear­ing an uncanny resemb­lance to the back of the One Dol­lar bill. Even stranger still is their idea of a “saint” includes author Vic­tor Hugo!

Frankly bonkers. Nev­er­the­less, col­our­ful and a real spectacle.

After this, the bus stopped at a typ­ical lunch res­taur­ant. The kind only vis­ited by tours. There we met and spoke to a nice couple of Swiss guys who poin­ted out that it was only lunch­time and that their tour was identical but bet­ter spread out; this lunch being in the middle of the two stops. We had been screwed then. Sure enough, the “day” tour had ticked off both major items by lunch­time. Cesca and I looked at each other as we both knew where we would be going next.

The unsched­uled stop at a shop.

This is an Asian clas­sic. Every single tour, every single taxi, every single tuk-tuk you take in Asia will want to take you to a shop of some sort. With taxi’s etc, a firm “No” usu­ally gets you out of it, but with a bus tour you are trapped. Sure enough, half-an-hour later we arrived at a fact­ory that made and sold lacquered, shell inlayed, tour­ist tat. I do not mind such excur­sions in prin­ciple; many of these places are gov­ern­ment run and provide work for the dis­abled. How­ever, I don’t like being “hard sold”, in fact I am imper­vi­ous to it and more than this I dis­like being rushed through what I paid for only to find the tour slow to a crawl when passing through these places.

We were there for 45 minutes, longer than we had stayed at Cao Dai. Suf­fice to say, des­pite the qual­ity of the items, Cesca and I declined to buy any­thing and spent the time wan­der­ing around the large and soul­less dis­play room. In my case being fol­lowed the entire time by a gig­gling group of Viet­namese sales­wo­men who found a visit by someone of my size to be a spe­cial event. I am, by the stand­ards of my race, not a giant by any means. How­ever, I do tower above the Viet­namese girls and have received a lot of atten­tion from the ladies in this country.

Arriv­ing back in Ho Chi Min, we declined fur­ther tours from this oper­ator and went to the com­pany the Swiss guys were on. We wanted another trip into the Mekong, this time for two nights on the waters. This tour went really well in comparison.

As usual, the bus booked and the bus gained related to each other in only the flim­si­est of terms; as in they both had two sets of wheels, but the tour did get off to a good start on its way out of the city. The guide gave us lots of inform­a­tion regard­ing the cul­ture of Viet­nam and the city of Ho Chi Min and I found that inter­est­ing. A few hours later we arrived at the boat deck and swapped our bus for a col­lec­tion of 10 per­son long tailed boats.

On the Mekong again!

These motored us around what was in effect, but dis­guised, water based theme park of small “vil­lages.” At one we learned how to make coconut candy (and of course were invited to pur­chase) and at another we found out the pro­cesses of cre­at­ing rice wraps; the sort used in spring rolls. This sort of very arranged exper­i­ence was masked as much as pos­sible from seem­ing too “touristy” (a hor­rible dirty word that Cesca and I pretty much use only in its most derog­at­ive way), but after so long away and seem­ingly hun­dreds of such tours, I could sense that the little rivers, vil­lages, jump­ing on an off boats, row boat rides, and tromps across paths through forests amoun­ted to about 4 acres of actual travel. Lunch and refresh­ments were provided along the way at small “vil­lage” res­taur­ants and the food was OK or edible. It is just the sad fact that any­thing inter­est­ing, culin­ary speak­ing, res­ults in the server try­ing to sell you the product you have just tasted. One such example was teas infused with bee pol­len fol­lowed by a “local music show.” I can appre­ci­ate that this, so far, does not sound all that fun, but it was at least divert­ing. At one point I was invited to hold a large snake, some­thing they expec­ted me to either recoil in fear from or equally have that sort of red-faced male west­ern enthu­si­asm, which I sup­pose is fears’ oppos­ite. In fact my time work­ing on an animal sanc­tu­ary in Aus­tralia had pre­pared me to handle the snake without bat­ting an eye­lid and appraise the ser­pent with some­what of a trained eye. It was, of course, a python of sorts and we quickly made friends.

How to make rice sheets

As the theme park drif­ted away we were offered an upgrade in rooms. Some of the people on the tour had booked to stay in a “tour­ist vil­lage” down river with the room being huts over­look­ing the waters. We jumped at this and left the greater por­tion of the tour group out­side a city hotel. Then we jumped into an enchant­ing long-tail boat ride through the night towards the vil­lage. On arrival we espied our accom­mod­a­tion and were impressed. The vil­lage was quite new and the rooms were well designed bam­boo huts. They each had bal­conies over­look­ing the water and fine bed covered in a good mos­quito net. After set­tling in we were invited into the kit­chen of the main build­ing to help with din­ner, which was a basic course in cook­ing spring rolls. I opened up a local beer and Cesca and I star­ted rolling, and then dunk­ing the rolls in hot oil. After hap­pily apply­ing ourselves for ten minutes, they provided a fish din­ner to go with them and, sit­ting down with some oth­ers, we star­ted to eat. I was able to show off for the second time in the day by being able to prop­erly fil­let the fish for every­one, some­thing we did back in Lon­don almost every day (fish being our main diet).

A spring roll and the local brew, all leads to a good meal

The real high­light was the next day. The Mekong trips here are jus­ti­fi­ably fam­ous for one thing; the visit to the float­ing mar­kets in the morn­ings. Cesca had spe­cific­ally picked a trip that vis­ited all the mar­kets in the area, to max­im­ize the chances of good pho­tos, and we eagerly motored into the throng to catch a sense of the event. These mar­kets are real, not just for tour­ists, and we loved watch­ing all the char­ac­ters and spy­ing the dif­fer­ent types of shops (iden­ti­fied by the flags or items hanging from the sails). One boat floated up and I ordered a bliss­ful Viet­namese ice cof­fee, which is like half a litre of espresso poured over ice cubes and that is it. Viet­namese cof­fee, like all South East Asian cof­fees, is of very high qual­ity and unique in taste. It is often noted as the thing “most missed” by those return­ing home and I fondly remem­ber it now (I am writ­ing this in India, where they have NO idea about coffee).

A cold cof­fee injec­tion wakes me for the morn­ing markets

We vis­ited the second mar­ket, which included a small col­lec­tion of boat build­ers – a fas­cin­at­ing trade to watch before leav­ing the water for the bus again and start­ing our way back to the city. On the way back Cesca and I had a very funny exper­i­ence. We were on the large ferry tak­ing us across one of the big­ger rivers, when a gaggle of ump­teen uni­ver­sity kids found our European’ness, and espe­cially my size, to be of great humour. Soon the giggles behind hands turned to one unfor­tu­nate being thrust for­wards from the party to ques­tion us. Simple and nice ques­tions came forth and my replies caused no end of gig­gling, as obvi­ously they did not under­stand a word of my responses! Soon after this one girl declared that I was “beau­ti­ful” (well, thank madam), Cesca was “beau­ti­ful” (tell me some­thing I don’t know) and inquired if could she take a photo of she and I? As I agreed she trust her­self down next to me and clasped my arm in hap­pi­ness. This res­ul­ted in a line form­ing and Cesca and I being pho­to­graphed with the entire class one after another! Includ­ing the boys! The last to sit down and grasp me was a man who informed me, as he hugged my arm, that he was the teacher! Of what, I do not know!

One the ride back into the city we got speak­ing to a cool pair of American’s trav­el­ling together. Little did we know, but we were destined to bump into these two many times over the com­ing weeks.

A final night in Ho Chi Min and we boarded our trans­port out and had our first exper­i­ence of Vietnam’s bus net­work. This is pretty much is the only way to get any­where in the coun­try and is all privately run tour­ist busses of vastly var­ied qual­ity. Our first exper­i­ence was dif­fer­ent to say the least. The overnight bus puts each per­son in a “pod” of sorts that is a reclin­ing chair and plastic legs shield arrange­ment. One strange thing was that you had to leave your shoes at the door in a plastic bag. Each pod is sin­gu­lar and they are stacked in two levels all facing for­wards. These are skil­fully made busses and quite advanced as such things go. Each pod has air-conditioning and light­ing, and blankets are provided.

Wel­come to the crush-bus

How­ever, they are designed for people under 5.5ft. Who have no hand lug­gage. At my size, espe­cially my feet size, the exper­i­ence of merely get­ting into a pod was akin to being tor­tured by a com­bin­a­tion foot crusher and neck vice. At Cesca’s level of hand lug­gage (quite a col­lect­ive of bags, cam­eras and presents), she could just fit in her pod, but had to clasp all her bags to her chest for the entire jour­ney. I even­tu­ally had to sit half way up the chairs back and hold on for grim death as the bus flew though the night at just under light speed. I ten­derly looked down the aisle and saw the road ahead. Our bus was spend­ing more time on the wrong side of the road as the cor­rect side. We were passing everything in flashes of lights and roar­ing horns. Corners, rough roads and nar­row passing lanes were as noth­ing to this vehicle and it made for almost unbear­able watch­ing. As I pulled away I caught the drivers face reflec­ted in the glass and made a sol­emn oath never to do so again. If that was his nor­mal work­ing face I shud­der to think what his paint­ing in the attic looks like!

Our morn­ing arrival in Nha Trang was most wel­come and I unfol­ded myself out of the pod and pain­fully left the bus into the wel­com­ing arms of the Tuk-Tuk hired by the hotel to pick us up.

Nha Trang is mostly a beach­front city and as such is packed solid in the hot sum­mer months. We were hap­pily not in these months and so while the beach lacked the bright sun, we had a calm and leis­urely walk down to the Sail­ing Club for lunch in its high class out­side lounge.

Nha Trang is a quite pretty city

After a quick meal, Cesca and I played chess for only the second time in our rela­tion­ship and then looked around the front. The food costs in Nha Trang can rise into ser­i­ous Lon­don ter­rit­ory as the French influ­ence here is strong. Our high­light was an unfor­get­table trip up to the large temple on the far side of town. This temple led up the side of the hill to two excel­lent giant Buddha statues; one lay­ing down and one in the clas­sic med­it­at­ive pose. Both Cesca and I agree that this hill-top statue was the most impress­ive we saw in all of South East Asia and even more impress­ive than that found at Bod­hgaya in India!

Big B at the moment of enlight­en­ment and upon enter­ing Nirvana

The view of Nha Trang from the top was enlight­en­ing in itself, it showed the city clearly as a beacon of civil­isa­tion amongst the massive jungle forest. If we had not had climbed up the many steps to this temple top we would have not have received this view as from the streets the city blocks the jungle and you can quite for­get that it is there. Well, it is– in spades! Stretch­ing for miles in all dir­ec­tions and encroach­ing into the city before being broken up by the civic struc­tures. It reminded me of Rio as seen from the Christ statue.

Jungle abounds over the roof tops of Nha Trang

How­ever, we moved on from Nha Trang on the next crush-bus. Or at least we tried to. A very drugged/drunken west­ern girl had sat in someone else’s seat and the forth­com­ing dom­ino effect was that almost the entire bus had to up and move seats/pods before we could leave, a pro­cess that took over an hour of shout­ing and local curs­ing. Cesca and I did our best to be very civil and obli­ging to the bus com­pany rep­res­ent­at­ive as he quite looked fed up with the whole thing.

Our des­tin­a­tion was Hoi An. A city that requires an entire post all of its own, com­ing next!

Regards,

Basho

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