Vietnam… A Snapshot
Vietnam was our most challenging country so far. Not because it’s hard travel, in fact, it is very easy to get around. The food is really good. The accommodation is cheap and mostly clean.
The challenge was the intensity of it. 86 million people in one small hot place makes for a pressure cooker and we saw more than one fist fight. Vietnam made me realize just how western I really am. Not only did I get my first taste of Southeast Asia, this was my first time in a communist country.
I found I could not think too much about why the Vietnamese do things the way they do or it drove me insane.
For example, why park six million motorbikes on the city sidewalks so pedestrians are forced to walk in the already insane traffic? Why do riders blast out of the side streets without looking or stopping? Why do people drive the wrong way down the street? Why do I have to haggle over everything right down to a bottle of water and why do the locals think I should pay three times the price? Why is anything that involves volume so damn LOUD?! Why do locals build a good business name for themselves only to have dozens of imitators spring up with the same exact name 2 doors down? Right down to the company logo!
To keep my sanity, I reminded myself: This is not home buddy. I shelved all my opinions and questions but the last one–this could be so frustrating at times
According to a tour guide, who hopes to open a business of his own one day, you need permission from the government to set up shop. My question, from a capitalist perspective, is how then can someone just register with your exact business name?
Why is this even a concern to a traveler? When you are trying to find the well reviewed private bus company in a city that has 2 dozen imitators within four blocks all claiming to be “The Original” it gets annoying. Even the guidebook doesn’t know the truth. I spent one overnight trip in the back of a dumpy bus crammed into a four foot bunk and woke up covered in sweat with an old lady’s triceps covering my forehead and a big German guy spooning me.
Vietnam is a great country if you can somehow get past the face of the tourist industry. Some hotel clerks, tour companies, touts, taxi drivers, can be unusually rude especially in the northern part of the country. I constantly had people snap at me for asking a question. Was I provoking this? I don’t think so. The travel forums are filled with stories from other travelers encountering the same thing–or much worse.
What was going on? Anti-American sentiment? That’s possible but I don’t think it was the case.
Reading The Girl in the Picture
Evidently I’m not a good communist. I don’t aspire to be one anytime soon.
If you can get beyond the tourist industry the local people are wonderful. WD spent one morning listening to an old woman explain her religious beliefs as she proudly showed WD her prayer beads and small shrine in her home. The explanation was all in Vietnamese and WD didn’t understand a word-but she understood. Another woman chased WD down in the rain one night to give her a banana leaf to cover her head after WD had helped return the woman’s lost shoe.
The country seemed to contradict itself like this constantly. It’s tough to summarize an entire country if you’ve only spent a few weeks there and it’s not right to do so either. You can tell as much about a country in so short a time as you can about a person from their photograph. I left with just this snapshot of our experiences.
