The worlds finest, cheapest clothing, Tunnels and Traps and Bullets Oh My!, and a fond farewell to yet another country

The tourism industry is a great and thriving giant in Vietnam, and not one that slumbers particularly often. Wherever goes a person with a backpack, so goes a guest house employee to attend to them. To be an "independent traveler" in this country is nearly a concept that is being phased out. Every interesting place has been tagged like so many toys in a store and every week seems to be some sort of enormous sale. This is wonderful for the tourist, but a bit of a nuisance for one who tries to separate themselves from that title and the gaping maw of consumerism that it implies. Still, being able to buy an "open" bus ticket that would take me all the way from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), during which you can "hop on, and hop off" at 6 different cities along the way, presents itself as a sort of "you'd be really, really dumb not to take this" option for travel throughout the country. Huzzah for progress!

So I found myself on a bus with mostly other travelers, headed down to the clothes producing town of Hoi An (a note about Hoi An; If you rearrange the letters, you get "hanoi". This creates more linguistic confusion than you would imagine at first blush). Hoi an is known for one thing and one thing alone: tailors. In this sleepy, quite enjoyable little town, there are roughly 300 tailors to meet your tailoring needs. And apparently, some people's needs are vast. The services provided are almost too fantastic to believe. Want a beautifully tailored, 120 thread wool suit with a silk lining in 3 hours? No problem. 60 Dollars. You can wait til tomorrow? Great! 55 dollars. You can have shoes made with your name and a catchphrase sewn around the sides. You can have gloves, handkerchiefs and scarves made. Or, for the ultimate in luxury, have a tiny Vietnamese woman size you for custom made underwear and socks. 12 dollars for the underwear, 2 for the socks. Guaranteed to fit.



Silk worms. Not only do they custom make your clothing, but they grow and make the silk there as well.





I didn't want to spend a ton of money. I really didn't. But you start picking fabrics, you start looking through fashion catalogs and then the proprietress tells you that the incredibly cool looking material that you're holding can be turned into a perfectly cut dress shirt in about 2 hours for 10 dollars, and suddenly my credit card seemed to leap from my hand and did the lombada with their reader. Fine. I'd buy a !#@load of clothes.

I won't bore you with details, but suffice it to say that if you need a well dressed man to appear with/for you at any social function, I'm your guy. If you see me wearing a suit into a McDonalds it's only because I now have enough suits that I can do things like that and still have reserves enough for a whole April's worth of weddings.

The only other notable event that occurred in this town was the following exchange:

(Scene: The bars close in Hoi an at midnight, all save one, the Full Moon Bar. This bar is horrifically inconveniently located 20 minutes outside of town. As such, the moto drivers all stand around outside of the local drinking establishments and come bar close, do their best to get you to ride out to this bar with them.)

Me: (Yawwwwwn) Okay guys, now what?

Moto Driver: Hey! Hey where you go?

Me: Dunno, kinda tired

Moto Driver: No, not tired! You come to Full Moon bar! Very good!

Me: Eh, maybe. I'll see

Moto Driver: No, you must come. There will be...MAXIMUM DANCING (thrust hips and waves hands around)

Me: Wow. Maximum dancing. Sold. Lets ride.

I mean come on, could you turn down MAXIMUM DANCING? Be honest with yourself, you couldn't.

Unfortunately, the MAXIMUM DANCING had to occur sans benefit of music, as by the time we arrived the power had gone out and the only light was provided by candles. We accommodated this problem by getting a group of people together and for some reason singing the theme song from Baywatch over and over and over.....and over....and over....

Weird night.

The next bus stop was in Nha Trang...

Owner of my guest house in Nha Trang. She was exactly like my Grandma, except Vietnamese. Seriously, she was awesome





...a town which is very well known as being one of the most popular with tourists, and not always the nice kind. It is an inevitable fact of travel that you will come across things which people do which disgust you. It may be what foods they eat or their hygiene or something else, but eventually, you will find something that you don't particularly like to hear about other people doing. Such as pedophilia. A bit of a heavy topic to be sure, but in Nha Trang, it is one of the most prevalent problems in terms of the tourists. Nearly always men, but of any age, race, and nationality, Nha Trang has earned itself a reputation over the years as being a prime area to engage in underage sex tourism. The government of Vietnam is well aware of this, yet is also aware of how much money such tourism brings in. It's not that they condone it, but they are certainly not doing very much to curtail it.

Enter "Crazy Kim." Crazy Kim is 5 feet, 7 inches of whup-ass, and she reserves this power exclusively for child-predators. She is a Vietnamese-American who returned to Vietnam several decades ago, and, upon finding the sort of scum that you can only really imagine pervading Nha Trang, she decided to do something about it. It started off with her simply watching the beaches (where the predators usually troll for young children to sleep with), and in some cases following them back to hotel rooms, getting into the rooms and kicking the living shit out out of the perpetrators. In recent years, Kim has opened a self-titled bar, which not only is one of the largest and best run bars that I encountered in Vietnam, but also holds classes every day for the poor Vietnamese children to come to to learn English. She continues her pedophile ass-kicking crusade through public awareness, particularly through T-shirts emblazoned with her logo "Hands off our kids!", and talking to law enforcement all the time to get and give updates. The capture of Gary Glitter, the infamous British ex-rock star who was caught in Vietnam on a child-sex mission was thanks in part to Crazy Kim's assistance.

I relate the above for two reasons. First, because it was something that was very in your face and gave a definitive character to Nha Trang, and second, because I know that many of you who read this site are travelers yourselves, so should you find some time to hang out in Nha Trang, you can sign up to teach English classes (any English speaker can do it), you can talk to Kim and ask how to help, or you can simply buy a t-shirt, the proceeds of which go to help continue her fight. It's a worthwhile cause, and it's a thankless cause. She can use all the help that she can get.

I spent several nights in Nha Trang, doing my best to avoid engaging in any activity that smacked of culture, then moseyed on down to Ho Chi Minh City, also known as Saigon (and hereafter referred to as HCMC).


Aidan, Lorraine and Zorro...I mean Normo








Betcha can't guess what this is....guess yet? (see next picture)












An aquarium! (No seriously, it wasn't even a pirate aquarium. Somone just decided "hey, I want to build an enormous pirate ship out of paper maiche and stone. Hmmm, but it needs to make money...Eureka! Fill it with fish). Not particularly logical, but cool nonetheless






Day boat trip. Home made drum set. Drinking mulberry wine in the South China Sea. Ahhh...the tough life.




HCMC is as bustling and wild as Hanoi was, albeit with slightly wider streets.

...and Burritos. "Why did he take a picture of his Burrito?" You may ask, or even "Why is he capitalizing 'Burritos'?"...Because it was fantastic, that is why. Plus, how often do you get a Burrito served on a banana leaf?




Unfortunately, these streets seemed to be just as full of zooming motos as the old city in Hanoi was. Crossing the street was just as dangerous but it took twice as long. Oy.

Also Dragons. Dragons would eat you if you crossed the road too slowly. Big hassle.








This is a park. No clever comment here, but isn't it nice?






As in the rest of Vietnam, the Vietnamese people themselves were nothing short of very very lovely. Really, nothing short of that at all. I was directed in turns to the National Palace (not particularly impressive), the Art Museum (mix between impressive and really not impressive art)

This is the courtyard at the National Art Museum. Yes, of course it's a badminton court.










Cau Dai temple. So weird as to completely defy explanation.










Essentially, they believe that God has spoken to man 3 times, once with Jesus, once with Moses, and recently with Victor Hugo of all people. I don't get it either. Very nice people, very cool outfits




...and the War Museum

I was told that this was a large eggplant, I think that the sign-writer from the Hanoi Hilton had something to do with it...






"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal...etc."
-The Declaration of independence
Source: "A History of the United States" Houghton-Mifflin, 1966

This quote, from one of our own most important national documents, led off the exhibit about American atrocities. This did not make my time at the museum any easier

This museum deserves a note or two, as it will remain in my memory as one of the most emotionally grueling and vivid museums that I have ever been to. If I had to put it on an emotional par, I would probably choose to compare it to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. Though less well funded and organized, there is a certain kind of raw feeling that goes along with a visit. The most vivid exhibits are a massive photo exhibition composed of exposures from photographers who died during the conflict, and a series of pictures of the victims of various painful realities of war. Of the former group, what I found myself stumbling teary-eyed into a bathroom after was the series of photos by a woman photographer named Dickey Chapelle. Her work most often showed a very human side of very tired soldiers. Medics attending to a wound, two GI's, both heavily bandaged smoking cigarettes etc. What made this section so moving were the last two photographs. The second to last showed Ms. Chapelle in her younger years and the caption told about how it was her favorite picture of herself. The last photo was of the same woman, visibly bleeding on a battlefield strewn with other bodies. There is a helicopter in the background and soldiers in motion all throughout the frame. The dominant figure of the shot is a priest, standing over the woman and giving her her last rites. You can see the pain on her face, and the caption states simply that she passed away in the helicopter on the way back to the base. It took me about 10 minutes before I could carry on down the line.

The latter group of photographs, those of the victims of the various war happenings were equally discomfiting and moving. Included were the two Pulitzer prize winning photos, one of the mother swimming through a river clutching her children to her, and the other of the little naked girl covered in napalm, running straight at the camera. Again, some time was needed before I could resume perusing the exhibits.

I don't know very much about photography, so I'm really not a good judge of which photographs had good composition, details, clarity etc. What I am capable of judging is what emotions were elicited from me by these pictures, and without any hesitation I can say that I was deeply, and irrevocably moved by the museum. Though these are pictures that could be found with a simple Google search, there was an immediacy to seeing them in the context of that particular museum in that particular place that cannot be achieved through the filter of the internet. Thus I have not tried to reproduce the experience here, choosing instead to merely described my response to it.

An important part of a visit to HCMC is to visit the Cu Chi tunnels, in which Vietnamese guerilla soldiers lived and fought during the Vietnam War. The ownership of the tunnels is incredibly confusing, as at different points they belonged to both the North Vietnamese, and the South. This means that at different times, there were American soldiers fighting in the tunnels against soldiers, and at other times fighting from the tunnels. Of course, the fighting in the tunnels is the case that gets highlighted. Upon arriving at the tunnels, all guests are immediately sat down in a dingy room and shown what has to be the most blatant propaganda nonsense video that is still used on a consistent basis today. The main subject of the video was a young woman who distinguished herself (and earned a medal) as the "Best Killer of Americans" in that part of Vietnam.

This made me slightly uncomfortable.

Carrying on, we found ourselves following the guide out into the "jungle" (very sanitized for tourists at this point). Here, the guide hopped down into a tiny (read: tiiiiiny) hole in the ground.

Guide: "Too small for Americans. You (pointing at me, having already been identified as such), try to get in!

I tried.


Popping up out of the tunnels. I am sneaky.








I got stuck. I bascially had to force the hole open wider to get out. Point taken. We were then shown the various traps and tricks that the soldiers used to ensnare unwitting aggressors. I only have the one picture below, but the rest were equally horrific.


Viet Cong foot trap. This would hurt.







Then it was down to the tunnels!


I really did not fit in the tunnels very well. Oh, and since there was no light, this was how I decided to make life harder on myself by blinding my eyes with my own flash. Brilliant!




At the end of it all, the big finish so to speak, was that you could go down to their shooting range and fire off some rounds from guns used during the war. AK-47's, M-16's, and even an M-60 machine gun, which is the most Rambo looking thing you could ever hope to see. It was such a great deal, that bullets were only 18,000 dong apiece. About $1.20.

So did I gleefully blow away some targets? I did not. I couldn't quite (and still really can't) put my finger on my objection to the activity, but there was a smacking of impropriety that I couldn't reconcile. It may have been all the talk about killing Americans, the traps, the general knowledge of what the place represented, or something deeper than all of that, but I simply couldn't find the fun or amusement in shooting a gun purely for sport in a place where so much gun shooting for other reasons, none of them very pleasant, had occurred. Call me crazy, still can't quite figure it out.

The final phase of my time in Vietnam was as a passenger on a boat, meandering through the waterways of the Mekong Delta. The Delta is not as interesting a place as I was led to believe. The boat ride is one of the big hyped-up things that all the guest houses try to book you on, and since the ride would take me all the way to Phnom Penh in Cambodia, I figured that I'd let the buses survive without me for just one trip and travel in da boat. Though I haven't acknowledged except really to point out the ways in which it has inconvenienced me, the Mekong river is very much a part of the life of anyone who lives or travels in SE Asia. It is the principal source of fresh water for many remote areas, provides irrigation measures, and represents the food and a livelihood through fishing for many people. As a traveler, it is a kind of flowing companion, always accessible one way or another, and ultimately as important to the success of your travels as it is to the success of the communities which it supports. Throughout the different countries that the Mekong passes, it changes in nature. In Laos it was narrow and quick, a slicing current hurrying boats along steeply banked rivers, enclosed with ivy hills. Here in Vietnam, it looks much more like a major waterway, a Mississippi or a Nile, than simply a navigable river.









The "tour" that I was on included a visit to a coconut candy factory (oh my was that good candy!) and some assorted other activities...



Such as boat riding...









...and hat wearing!










Our guide rode comfortably...








After passing though massive bamboo stands in a swampy type area, we got back to our main boat and started the trip up the Mekong to the border with Cambodia.

"...3 stories, 2 bedrooms, HUGE backyard swimming pool..."






Our last stop before the long-haul 5 hour ride commenced was a fruit market in Unpronouncable Vietnamese Town. We ate some lychee and dragon fruit from grubby stalls among hundreds of locals, foul smelling cattle and naked children. Business as usual for me these last few months. The border crossing went smoothly, the only incident of note involving myself, a group of children begging for money and candy, and my realization that 1. I could lift the children high into the air with little, to no effort and 2. That the roofs of the huts surrounding the border area were only about 5-7 feet high. Thus, several precocious children found themselves stranded on rooftops for a few minutes while I let them think twice before going after the contents of my pockets again. When I got them down, I was assaulted with big smiles, a wave and even a handshake, then they went scampering off. My time in Vietnam was ended, and I can say without qualification that it was my favorite country to visit in South-East Asia, for the reasons enumerated above and others which simply cannot be translated into text. Should I ever have the chance to return, I would jump at it like low-hanging fruit, when I am hungry, and it's hot out, and I really feel a...well a hankering for fruit. In other words, I would seize it.


Next: Patriotism, America and independent travel. Can they work together?