The breakfast is great. All sort of exotic fruits with yogurt and a banana crepe with a banana shake. Beats anything! I will try and see what I’ll get tomorrow. The rest of the food is OK and sometimes predictable, but the breakfast is the best and you can get breakfast anytime during the day . And if you want traditional, you have to thank to the French colonialists that introduced the baguette and the croissants and crusty rolls. It goes a long way.

After this magnificent breakfast, I left for the bus and at 7:45am I left towards the Mekong delta. Huge group, an entire bus. Lots of French, arrogant as usual and convinced that the world’s civilization rests on their hands and Germans bored to the level of the bench that they are sitting on. The previous night I watched a couple, probably very well to do, at the Korean BBQ. They were bored to the bones, she was playing the entire dinner with her cellphone and they barely exchanged more between themselves than I exchanged with the waiter to order my dinner. Money obviously do not make people happy and it can be a curse if you don’t have the brains to know what the hell you are doing with them and with you.
Anyway, long drive, about 2 hours to the delta, but not too many to tell. We had a quick stop iin a place that had hammocks for water and toilets and we reached the boats that took us in a floating market in Cai Be, no big deal because we were made aware that the market is slow today, but I have the feeling that is slow everyday. Overall the entire day was quite uninteresting, the river is flat and lazy and the canals are nice but the temperature was around 95F. We had lunch after which we got bikes to ride around, again on boats and latter on a bus ride and a last boat ride to Cantho, the largest city in the delta, where I am now. I had an interesting dinner of Fish-Squid-Beef dipped in boiling vinegar in a business restaurant built for the new money, that is right on the shore of the river, actually on stilts inside the water. The dinner was not great but interesting. Worth a try in any case! Many times I asked people here about various places and they have no idea. I heard a discussion in Cantho at the table where the locals did not have the knowledge that the city of Cantho is the largest and many times I ask people where a temple is and they have no idea, no matter that in one situation you could see it on their window. But they could not care less. And everybody is picking on the Americans that they don’t have a clue! After dinner I passed by the staue of Uncle Ho, the largest in Vietnam, a little Internet, and I went to the hotel for a good night sleep.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The preferred currency in Vietnam is the US$. Surprising , Isn’t it? All major prices are in US$ and the only reason you may need dongs is that sometimes you have to pay under 1US$ and probably coins do not go. The higher rank hotels and restaurants quote first in $ and latter in dong, the local currency. Finally I went today to the bank and I exchanged $200 in dong, in this way being easier to buy pineapple or papaya on the street. Even in such a situation, in the market or even on the sidewalk, the change may come in US$ and dongs! The Americans are still in vogue in spite of the war and the past sufferings, Saigon is swamped by foreign investments. The inflation is high, the rate being somewhere around 1$=16000 dongs so today I got 3 millions dongs from the bank.

I decided to stay in the city for the day. The first part of my visit, that ended up taking almost the entire day was Chinatown named here Cholon. It’s a large area in District 3 that has lots of temples, Fujian style most of them, that are spectacular. I saw many other temples before but I think these are the best. All of them hang on their ceilings fumigating spirals and the fumigating sticks are everywhere giving a spectacular and mystical look inside. Also, they are the khang, a sort of oven outside, where they burn offering papers for the dead, this is being part of the ancestor cult where you mainly offer fake money that you may have to buy in advance. Even here the most desirable are stacks of copied US$100 bills that you can buy in the stores and burn in the khangs. I started a walk but eventually I hired a cyclo, samlor in Thailand, that brought me for a long drive to Cholon market. He dropped me in front of the market, and I paid him $3. He schemed me with the typical fifteen/fifty but when I was in the cyclo I was starting to feel bad because the road was very long just for less than a 1$. The market is spectacular, for most of the stuff from there I have no idea what they are. I roamed the market and shot spectacular footage, interesting stuff. Lots of tourist also in the market, being part of the city tour. The city tour was added in the recent years by the agencies but is rushed and incomplete so I decided to skip it. After I finished the market, I roamed the streets around it and I started to visit , first a church, Catholicism being extremely strong in South Vietnam, and latter all the pagodas one after another ending at the Cholon mosque. Some of the pagodas were hard to find so I went back and forth repeatedly to locate them. I took a motorbike to bring me to the center but this was lost in translation, if it existed something like this, and I ended up in Pham Ngu Lao, where is the hotel. Because I arrived there, I took a short pause for a beautifully decorated French ice cream, lots of fancy places like this being in Pham Ngu Lao catering mainly for foreigners, and I started to read the guide and noticed that I missed two more pagodas close to Cholom that are very important. So, I hired a motorbike for 40000 RT and I went there. It is hard to describe the traffic in Saigon, a city with 8 million people and 3 million motorbikes that roam like flies the boulevards, streets and soys. The traffic is super chaotic, there are lights but most of the times motorbikes and cyclos run them. The only similarity would be a Brownian motion looking of lots of flies in a jar. To cross the street is an adventure and is a technique that you have to master; the flow of motorbikes is continuous and if you would wait for a lull maybe you may get one at 3am. So you start walking relaxed and slow in the middle of this mayhem and as long as you don’t make abrupt moves or want to be somehow creative, like stopping, the traffic will flow around you. If you choose to run, you get creamed. Period! The same rules apply when you are on a motorbike and you want to get into traffic on the other side of the street. No matter how heavy the traffic is you start getting out and crossing. The horns will blow out, there will be some screeches but you will be safe, hopefully, on the other side. Otherwise, forget about going out! There are very few cars in comparison with motorbikes, first because is impossible to park, and the motorbikes are parked in paid parking everywhere in town, and second you move slower in a car because you cannot get ahead. So, a lot of people prefer to buy motorbikes, that are more like mopeds than Harleys. The price is low, you can get one locally made with $300-400, but when you ride it you take your life in your hands , somebody told me that only in the last 10 days 200 people died in traffic in Saigon. In any case, the guy I hired brought me back safe from Cholon’s Gai Lam pagoda, a feat for which he tried in the last moment to add another 10000 dongs to the bill, the bonus that I was alive and I even shot video in traffic from the motorbike. After a short stint at Kim’s cafe to make arrangements for the Mekong trip I left in the center of town to go to Rex Hotel, that was the defacto command center for the Americans in the War. It has and had a terrace on top that is very neat. Now the Rex is just one of the hotels but still one of the glitziest. The center of Saigon is in a boom and the landscape changes when you come from Cholon , that looks like a regular Asian town, or even from Pham Ngu Lao that is the backpacker area. Suddenly , when you come to the city center, restaurants are sporting prices 3-4 times higher that in the backpacker area, clubs abound, chicks roam the streets asking if you want massage and pimps come directly to you to ask if you want a lady. It is not exactly sleazy but definitely is a little unpleasant. When money talks , bullshit walks and this is valid in the Workers’ paradise that is Vietnam, that like the Communist China is a brutal capitalist society from where USA looks like a social state. I ate in a Korean BBQ restaurant, the ubiquitously bibimbap that was great and comes with tons of additions here, plus the local Saigon beer, and after I gave another tour shooting a little video, avoiding the girls and the pimps, I went back to the backpackers ghetto where the atmosphere was quite different. Obviously , the girls are looking for money and you cannot carry too much in a backpack, so in the backpackers area you are not hassled. After that again, the internet stint that was painfully slow last night and unusable in the entire area, a call home and a good sleep, and I was able to wake up at 4:00am. 2 more hours and I get in the right time.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I could not sleep. It is impossible to get to sleep when you go to bed at 10-11 am by your biological time. I got in the room at Tuan An Guest house around 10pm and after a shower I got in bed. It was relaxing to lay down after so many hours in the plane but I could not sleep, just relax, so at 6:00 am I was up and leaving the place with my luggage because I did not like it. It was not very clean and very expensive for nothing. I moved across the street at Ngoc Diem Hotel in a room at the fourth floor with fan for $9 or AC for $13, with nice bathroom and fridge loaded with drinks and snacks. It is clean and very nice with some kind of view no matter that I did not take advantage of it.
At 7:00am I was at Kim Cafe and I booked the tour for the tunnels, had a breakfast with eggs and good crispy French bread and chocolate croissant, well there were the French here, and I bummed on the streets and called home till 8:30 when the bus was coming.

Saigon is major tourist hub. I did not see so many tourists in Cambodia., but here you feel that everybody comes. Young and old, on short hauls or long time traveling guys you see all of them. The bus was full of them from all over the world: USA, Canada, England, Israel, France, Germany, Sweden to name just a few. The guide used to work for the Americans in the war as translator at a very high level, because he met several times McNamarra, during the war, and talked a lot and very sensitive about the entire conflict. He looked like he spent many years in reeducation camps after 1975, but he had a common sense and a joy of life that you can see only in few people, mainly those who pass through ordeals of this nature. Unfortunately it was not easy to understand his pronunciation. We left to visit Gaodai temple, that is the core temple for a separate religion widespread in South Vietnam, a concoction of several religions. They accept all the religions’ patriarchs on their church with equal rights, and are based on seance sessions the core believes being established in some seance sessions from the 1920s. It was established by a mystic in the second part of the 19th century. Quite interesting and colorful, the temple being super garish, with the large symbol of the eye everywhere and lots of deities that adorn the temple like on the temples in Rajasthan. We attended the mass that is impressive, the tour arriving there at the mass time, 12:00, and I shot a lot of video from the top galleries. The main spirit/soul that keep visiting them is Victor Hugo and his spirit plays an important role in the church.

From there we stop to eat, typical touristy stuff, and I met a guy from Inwwod, NY, Brandon, who workes for a German bank in NY in midtown and a girl from London, a Cambridge graduate, Sarah, who just quit a job with P&G to travel the world and now she got in Vietnam after 2.5 month in New Zealand and Australia and will continue to Laos , Cambodia, HK and Japan before going back to London. Another 2 months.

We arrived at the highlight of the tour, the Cu Chi tunnels, built by Vieth Minh south of Saigon to be able to penetrate the American front. I did not like the tour and the tunnels but I do understand both the propagandistic aspect and the obsession with the wars that preoccupied the locals relentlessly for a long time. I got in one of the tunnels but the experience is not pleasant and I have to go down on all four to fit. They built the tunnels for the smaller Viet Minh guys, and for sure Americans did not fit inside. The networks is very large but now the entire exhibit is just thatched roof holes that show how the Viet Minh where operating inside the jungle. When we got back to the bus the trip and the lack of sleep got a toll on me and I was dozing in and out of sleep the entire way, so when I got in Saigon I was barely able to walk. Also it was a very hot day 37-38C and the only thing that I was able to do is take a quick shower in my 4th floor room and get back down to eat something. After dinner I went to an internet cafe to write in the blog but the only thing I was able to do was to answer to a Claire’s email and after that super reluctantly I got back inside the room at 8:00pm because I could not stand anymore. I got in bed and got asleep instantaneously at 8:10pm , after about 50 hours of being awake.

I woke in the night around 2:00am fresh and start reading the “Sacred Willow” and waited for the day light to get in city and call home.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

The good news was that I got a door seat in the plane. It is good news for a 17 hours flight that takes a toll on you. Luckily the book I got from the library was pretty good and gave me already a pretty good insight in the history of the country seen by the Vietnamese and not by their colonizers.
But still there were 17 hours, so I ate 3 times and I read also the Lonely Planet and I got in BKK at 5:50pm local time. The flight to Saigon was only 1 hour and 10 minutes and left a little delayed and when it wanted to land tried twice because first time may had some problems with the landing gear that apparently was almost disengaged but not completely. The captain apologized and we got to see twice the same view over the city. Long lines at immigration and customs. They checked everything. It is faster in the US even after 9/11. At customs they scanned all the luggages!
I got a cab ride in town for $7, more than the regular price and when I got to the hotel where I booked my room they did not have any rooms available so one of the guys took me on a motorbike to another hotel. Probably they overcharged me, $18, but no big deal. There are lots of rooms in town so it is not necessary to book in advance.
The place where all the foreigners stay, called Pham Ngu Lao, is similar with Khao San Road in BKK but larger with lots of glitzy cafes mostly catering for travelers. I got some brochures for the trips around here and I have to figure out in what order I will do them. I called in NY but nobody was home and neither in Bucharest.
Tomorrow, I may take a tour in the city or go in a day tour to see some Vieth Minh tunnels and a temple for all religions.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.