It's been more than a week, and as usual I've been procrastinating about writing about the trip. I've been giving myself so many excuses, that I've run out of excuses. Out of a refusal to accept that I am a bum, I have finally managed to open this damn window and attempt to start writing, if albeit slowly and reluctantly.
Saturday, 4th, Singapore-Danang
We flew it on an early Jetstar flight and changed planes/terminals in Ho Chin Minh city. I was very thirsty in the terminal and wanted to buy a bottle of water, but had 17,000 VND and a 500,000 VND note. A bottle of water was 18,000 VND. The girl shrugged and took my 17,000 VND. Only in Vietnam are bottles of water in an airport lounge negotiable.
On TV in the terminal, there was a Korean movie, dubbed into Vietnamese playing. It was a horror, about some weird skinny ass guy dressed in his underwear brutally trying to kill a girl. As to why he was trying to kill her in his underwear, by hitting her with a wrench, was beyond me. He also missed a blow one time, and hit himself in the hand instead. One wonders if it was really a dark comedy instead. However was was notable about this was that good guy (who was trying to find the girl), bad guy (wrench boy) and hapless girl (who died by the way), all spoke with the same, high pitched, female voice. It's like they could not be bothered to put effort into dubbing and had the same female person speak all the roles, which absolutely no effort into trying to vary the voices. This made the show seem unintentionally hilarious, I mean, how do you take a male murderer who speaks with a girl's voice seriously?
For lunch was ate at a Chinese place, on recommendation from the hotel people. It was apparently one of the fancier places in town, and was probably one of the lower-end places if it was in Singapore. I had wintermelon tea there, which was like shit.
We first took a cab to the Ho Chi Minh military museum in Danang, which was very very old and run down. What was upsetting was not the state of the museum, but that the taxi driver had tipped himself 8,000 VND and refused to return it, so my mood was a little ruined. The run down state was attributable as Danang is not exactly a tourist place. It was then (well and the bigass Communist flag flying out front) that I remembered that Vietnam is still a communist country. From amusing propaganda articles, to even the titles of exhibits, it was gloriously propaganda-istic.
From there, we walked to the Cham Museum (a mistake, since it was far-ish, extremely hot, and the roads were not really walkable), to see sculptures and artifacts taken from My Son (an Angkor Wat like place). Then we walked to Han Market, which was the local market that sold both dry goods and wet ones. It was extremely chaotic inside, and the stores were all packed to the brims. My mother bought a pack of cashews, slightly salted, from there. Tired, we headed back to the hotel around 5pm and rested till 7pm.
On recommendation from Rough Guides, we went to a place called Viet Nam. It was filled with locals, and the waiters did not speak English at all. We ended up pointing at random things on the menu, struggling to ask for vegetables. It was the best meal we ate in the entire trip. The vegetables that came was a salad, with garlic oil dressing, which was wonderful. Then there was the cook coming out and saying beer beer beer, which resulted in her taking my dad's beer and giving him another one (before that she tried talking to me in Vietnamese and failed. This happened many times during the trip. I must look Vietnamese then.), and then returning his beer with like 10ml missing. It later transpired she cooked our prawns in beer... ohhhh lovely. But the best dish, was some beef which was braised in a lime-y, vinegar-y peanut sauce, with larges doses of lemon grass. The taste, was so so wonderful. I spent the rest of the trip trying to look for that dish, but was unable to, sigh.
Back at the hotel, I watched the end of Kung Fu Panda on TV and went to sleep early.
Sunday, 5th, Danang-Hoi An
Early in the morning, we took a taxi to Hoi An. It took about 45 minutes from Danang. We checked into Cua Dai Hotel, and then walked into town. We passed by a lot of tailor shops. We bought the tickets to allowed us to visit different locations, and went into random museums and old houses. Hoi An was very hot. It was the hottest day of the entire trip, and believe me Vietnam was much hotter than Singapore and heatstroke material. At one point I felt woozy, like I was going to faint.
We wandered into an Art Gallery, and there an old lady got up and asked me in English where we were from. I said Singapore, and she replied Xing Jia Po? (Singapore in Mandarin). I replied back in Mandarin and then she started to get all excited and happy. She said when she was younger, the family was all Mandarin speaking. She hadn't spoken Mandarin in years and felt sad about it. She was born when the French were still around, learning it for many years in school and even teaching it as a teacher. She was the 4th generation of Chinese in Vietnam in her family. My dad spoke to her the most, since his Mandarin was the strongest and my mother as usual, wandered off to go shopping. It was sobering for me, because it made me think about how I would never get so excited about speaking Mandarin as I did not regard it as my mother tongue, yet here was this old lady who was practically in tears at being able to converse in the language of her ancestors.
Hoi An was charming in it's sights, and architecture. But there was nothing outright significant about it. It's a place one goes to relax, and was probably the best stop of Vietnam. On Patrick's advice, I ate lots of Cao Lao (hahaha sounds like chao lao), which had all these glorious crunchy bits of what I think was fried pork skin or fat. My mother and I had items tailored there, and I now have a very nice black pencil dress which I am thrilled to bits with. My mother managed to tailor a 3 piece suit for USD99 (talk about a bargain!). I want to go back there again, before I start work.
For dinner, we ate at some place nearby the hotel. The food took ages to come, but was ok. The meal is memorable in that my exposed feet and 1/4 of leg was mercilessly bitten by sandflies while there. Now my legs and feet are all scarred up. The sandfly bites were also severely aggravated by the intense Vietnamese sun, ho boy. It was very terrible trying to not scratch.
Monday, 6th, Hoi An
Woke up early, to a really great spread of food provided by the hotel. Had very yummy pho. Then it was off to My Son for a half-day trip. The bus that picked us up was really weird, because there were no conventional seats but sleeper seats instead, the type that is totally reclined. It was incredibly strange. After a while however, they changed us to a normal bus which had other people loaded onto it. My Son was nice, but also terribly excruciatingly hot. The fact that the Americans had bombed large parts of it to bits helped a little, as it was very well that there was less to see since it was so damn hot. All one wanted to do really was hide in the shade.
Then we took a boat ride, with a small serving of rice and vegetables as lunch, and saw a handicraft village. Watching the wood carvers was quite something. Then the tour ended in the middle of Hoi An. My mum and I went to try on our clothes, which was disgusting since we were coated in a layer of sweat and grime. Then, all 3 of us returned to the hotel where we hid in the nice cool swimming pool for the rest of the afternoon. Night time, we returned downtown to pick up the clothes and had lunch at a nice place there. We ordered Vinegar Beef (again me hoping for the dish from the first night), and it came out as raw beef slices, with a hotpot to dip it in. It was quite interesting, but was not as tasty as originally hoped for.
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I feel lazy to type further. There are still 5 more days to write about. Time will tell if I every really do complete this.
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