October Vacation, Part 5: Tale of Two Cities

Hoi An, Vietnam - Saigon, Vietnam

For the the 18 hours of mileage between Hanoi and Hoi An, Vietnam, we packed ourselves like sardines into a sleeper bus.

"Sleeper" is really a pretty misleading name. The bus interior consisted of three rows of double-bunked reclining seats, situated so that when you're laying down in them, your legs are stuffed inside a coffin-like trunk, which supports the upper half of the person sleeping in front of you. It actually wasn't bad once I settled in on a top bunk, and the rocking of the bus became more soothing as the night went on. But how anyone can really sleep with a Vietnamese variety/game show blaring on the overhead television and the bus driver honking at anything and everything that crosses the road all night long, is beyond me.

Tucked in for the night... and then some.

Although every bed was sold when we left Hanoi, the bus driver picked up about 20 additional passengers at various unofficial stops throughout the night, charging them for the floor space in between bunks. Every time I woke up and peered down over my bed railing, there were a few more old men crammed into the narrow aisle floor below. This meant that in order to get to the bathroom in the back of the bus, you had to basically monkey bar-climb along the bunk ladders, so as to avoid stepping on a sleeping body. I stopped drinking any liquid around 9 p.m. so as to avoid such trips.

Hoi An by night, a beautiful sight.

After a "surprise" 7 a.m. 5-hour layover in Hue, we finally made it to Hoi An. It was absolutely gorgeous, and worth every uncomfortable (but at least entertaining) bus mile. Hoi An is in the center of Vietnam's eastern shore, almost smack dab in between Hanoi and Saigon. It's a city unlike anywhere else we visited in Vietnam: quiet, friendly, and preserved in a way that literally takes you back in time while you roam the streets. The artisan shops glowed at night with handmade lanterns, and at day you could walk the whole city along cobbled stone streets and bridges. It felt a lot like walking around Downtown Disneyland, except everything was authentically just that beautiful.

Riverside in Hoi An 

Hoi An is famous for two things: 1) expertly skilled tailors (you can have a whole tailor-made outfit made in 2 days, for about $30) and 2) incredible food. I indulged in both. Since we stupidly only gave ourselves one full day in Hoi An, I didn't have time for an entire dress or coat to be made, and so settled for an incredible pair of custom, traced-to-the-shape-of-my-foot sandals. Whenever we needed a break from walking and sightseeing in Hoi An, we stopped and ate; cau lau, a special noodle dish found mainly in Hoi An, and "roast duck in a pot" (for $2), and a strong cup o' Vietnamese joe were my primary sustenance for the 36 hours we spent there. And of course, a glass here and there of the world's cheapest - 20 cent - beer. When in Vietnam...

We begrudgingly packed our backpacks in Hoi An after just a one night stay; our pre-booked train ticket urged us onward toward Saigon. While we waited in the lobby for our taxi to take us to the train station, I sat and "chatted" up the old man whose family owns our hotel. He told me, in broken English, about his two kids - both around my age, and studying at university. I told him how much I loved Hoi An and Vietnam, and showed him the book I was reading, Catfish and Mandala, about a Vietnamese-American man's yearlong bike trip up the Vietnam coast. He took the book carefully in his hands, turned it over to look at the author's jacket photo, removed his cigarette from his mouth, and gave me a huge grin. "Vietnam!" he exclaimed. Then, in the spirit of cross-cultural exchange, he angled the television set towards me, on which he was watching a Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, and pointed to the screen. "America!" 

I griped about the sleeper bus in the first part of this post, but truly, it wasn't so bad. The train from Danang (outside Hoi An) to Saigon, however, was rough. We boarded the train 3 hours after it was supposed to arrive at the station, and made our way to our 4-person sleeper car. Our fourth roommate in this two bunk-bed car was a 50-something year old Vietnamese man with a smoker's hack, which left us sleepless for most of the night. Cockroaches climbed on the walls and in between the sheets, and at 5am the snack cart man came pounding on our door with fish chips and popcorn. At 7am, we were already itching to get off the train with 9 hours to go. The only meal we ate was in the "dining car": a bowl of noodles with onions and cuts of pork belly, which still had some hair-like particles attached to the skin and grossed me out too much to finish. For the rest of the afternoon, we sat up in our bunks, exhausted and antsy.

The unpleasant addition to our train car.

About an hour outside of Saigon, Anna got up to go to the bathroom. 5 minutes later, I heard her shriek my name from down the corridor. She had sliced her fingers - badly - on the train car door, and was dripping blood everywhere. I took her arm and we rushed through car after car looking for a conductor. Grandmothers and mothers and babies ran out from their bunks to see what the commotion was all about.

Finally, we found a group of train staff standing at the window. They saw Anna's other hand cupped full of blood, and their eyes grew huge. They pulled out a First-Aid kit from storage, which was really just an old black black seemingly full of everything but medical supplies. Out of the Mary Poppins purse came extension cords, rumpled papers, assorted utensils (I think I saw a fork hit the floor)... and at last, a half-used roll of gauze and tape. They rinsed her hand in the sink and bandaged her up while we sat on the floor - Anna with her head on my shoulder and eyes closed - and in no time, the bleeding had stopped. We thanked them profusely. On the walk back to our car, an elderly Vietnamese woman stepped out and gently grabbed my arm. She gestured to Anna and clucked her tongue, stroking my hand apologetically. I thanked her too. 

We hit Saigon that evening, and after a first stop to a medical center to get Anna's hand stitched up, checked into Madame Cuc's guesthouse in the city center. Madame Cuc was a tiny woman in her thirties who had to practically jump down from her stool at the front desk in order to show us a room. The main attraction of her hotel was that it served complimentary breakfast AND dinner: coffee, eggs and baguettes in the morning; ramen noodles and juice for supper. For gals on a tight budget, it was an easy sell.

View from the Reunification Palace, Saigon

At first glance, Saigon could have been any big city in any big country in the world. The city streets were packed with a slow moving stream of honking cars and motorbikes. Storefronts and apartments stacked on top of each other at the street edge. Sprawling urban spaces appeared in every direction. The only things that really stood out as distinctly Vietnamese were the noodle stands reading Pho and the Kindergarten-sized furniture laid out in front of restaurants on the sidewalks. 

But by the end of our four day stay in Saigon, the city felt very Vietnamese. We visited famous pagodas, Saigon's Chinatown, and the Reunification Palace - which has been preserved to look exactly as it did the day that Saigon fell to the north in April 1975. Our last full day, Nicole and I visited the War Remnants Museum - a brutal, graphic, emotional, and unabashedly anti-American account of the Vietnam ("American") War. Although the whole museum was only three small floors, it took us over two hours to get through the exhibits - even leaving out some rooms on the top floor. From what I could tell, we were the only Americans in the place (and in general, we ran into fewer American tourists throughout Vietnam than other nationalities). By the end of our walk-through, I felt exhausted, sad, and so chock-full of horrible images that we spent the rest of the afternoon in pretty sober moods.  

That night, Nicole and I decided to have last night of wandering the city. After paying our hotel fee, we each had about one taxi ride's worth if dong left in our wallets, so we decided to do an abbreviated, non-alcoholic-drinking kind of wandering. 

Craaaazy Buffalo: shoulda known this street was
going to bring bad news.

Two minutes into this abbreviated stroll, on a dark but pretty well populated street, I felt a sharp tug on my purse strap and a rush of air whirl past me. I looked over, stunned to see half my purse missing and the rest torn to shreds, with my entire wallet (and the rest of my 10,000 baht savings, and credit cards) gone, and a two-manned motorbike speeding off ahead with the goods. I was shaken up by the moment, but Nicole kept me together. We ran inside the nearest shop to tell them what had happened - although we both knew full well that without traveler's insurance and with it mostly just being cash stolen, there was nothing to be done. 

Back at our hotel, Madame Cuc knew it too. But she saw me upset, and gave me an long, awkward, and sweet hug in the lobby. She also shoved some free bananas into what was left of my purse before sending us upstairs to bed. 

Luckily, I had Nicole with me who generously agreed to be my ATM/Sugar Daddy until we got back to Nan to sort out my stolen credit card issues. Very luckily, I had left my passport and camera in the hotel room that night. It was a lot of money lost (especially by Asia standards), and I could try to hold a grudge... But in the end, Vietnam was too incredible, strange, beautiful, and completely extraordinary of a place to not want to revisit before my time in Asia is done. Plus, our next vacation stop was to the white-sand beaches of Krabi, Thailand. Who could be pissed off there?