Hoi An

My relationship with Hoi An got off to a rocky start. Getting there was a nightmare, one of the worst travel days I've had. It was expensive, complicated and frustrating. I arrived in town before sunrise. I was wandering around trying to find a room just after sunrise when I saw something surprisingly rare in this part of the world: a traffic accident.

Motorbikes are the preferred mode of transportation in Vietnam. (I'm told there are six million motorbikes in Saigon alone, and having been there, I believe it.)

Bicycles are also still common. At any given moment dozens of each will be crossing an intersection. It all seems chaotic and dangerous to American eyes. But then you realize these people aren't talking on their celphone, drinking a cafe latte, programming their iPod and smoking a cigarette while they're trying to drive. They're actually paying attention to the road.

In the early morning a moto driver came around a corner too fast and crashed into a woman on another moto. The two of them crashed into a young girl on a bike. The driver who caused the accident was unharmed, of course, but the other moto driver was unconscious in the street. I couldn't figure out why the girl was sitting up in the road until I realized that her left leg had snapped below the knee and was folded under her.

I was standing on the other side of the intersection with my backpack on. Luckily I didn't have to do anything because dozens of people appeared instantly. One of them went to fetch a minivan from a travel agent. They loaded the girl and the woman (who had come to) into the van and drove away.

I thought perhaps I should heed the omen and get the next bus out of town. But I didn't. I am so glad I didn't. Hoi An is my new favorite town.

I had arrived in part of town where there were a number of guest houses. But everything was closed. I arrived before sunrise, so the area looked desolate. I didn't know if I was in a good or bad part of town. (It turns out it was right where I wanted to be, just a five-minute walk from the riverside.)

I was incredibly fortunate to find a nice room at a nice price at 6:20 a.m. The girl at the front desk was nice enough to let me use the room, even though it hadn't been cleaned. Most guest houses won't let you check in until noon.

It was early enough to book a tour to the Cham ruins at My Son for that morning. Since I was already up I did it. (I'll talk about the tour in a separate post.)

I was hot, sweaty, deliriously tired and starving when I got back from the tour that afternoon. I stopped at a food stand to get some pho (pronounced fur, but like a question, and without the hard American 'r' on the end.)

Pho is a Vietnamese staple dish. It's a noodle soup to which you add fresh greens and condiments. As I understand it locals eat it for breakfast but you can get it anytime. It's cheap, filling and you usually know what you're going getting.

Usually.

This was easily the worst meal I've had in Vietnam. It was terrible. On occasion I've had to ask for fresh greens. Maybe some places don't serve them to tourists because they figure we don't know better? Who knows.

I asked for chili. She didn't have chili. I asked for veggies. She didn't have any. It was greasy broth with what tasted like store-bought noodles and a few pieces of stringy meat. I don't know what the American equivalent would be. Maybe screwing up toast and butter?

So Hoi An and I were off to a rocky start. I still hadn't seen the town. I went back to my room for a shower and some rest. Then I went out for a walk. That's when I fell madly, deeply in love with Hoi An.



What a great place. Perhaps the simplest way to explain it is to note that the 2002 film adaptation of Graham Greene's novel "The Quiet American" was filmed here. The film, for which Michael Caine received an Oscar nomination, takes place in Vietnam in the early 1950s. Hoi An in 2009 looks the way you would imagine Vietnam did at the time.

It's a small town, with a population of about 80,000. The historic riverside area has both traditional and French colonial architecture. Trees and flowers line the streets. Stores selling silk lanterns add to the colorful tableau.



Cars are not allowed along the riverside. You have to dodge motorbikes and bicycles but all in all it's a pretty stress-free place to go for a stroll.



Even though my first meal there was atrocious, the food in general was some of the best I've had anywhere. There's a block with a covered pavilion divided into different restaurants, and by "restaurant" I mean a small portable kitchen and a dozen tables per establishment. It was crowded with locals and tourists, so I thought I'd have a seat. But at which restaurant? I made the logical decision to pick the one with the prettiest cook.

It's too bad she's already married because I would have proposed on the spot after my first meal there. She made some of the best food I've had anywhere in the world. If you're in Hoi An go see Miss Lien and try her cao lau, a noodle dish which is a Hoi An local specialty. Also try her banh xeo, a sort of pancake-crepe with bean sprouts, shrimp and pork that you eat rolled up in rice wrappers with fresh greens. Outrageous.

I ate there every day but I did try other restaurants as well. The food wasn't quite as good as Miss Lien's but it was still pretty darn tasty.

Another thing I saw in Hoi An, which I had also seen in Saigon is "fresh beer", what they call draft beer. Most places sell it for 4,000 dong per glass, which means that you can have four beers for a dollar and get change back. It tastes like dishwater and you'd have to drink a keg to get drunk but, hey, the price is right. You can get a plate of Miss Lien's cao lau and a beer for the equivalent of $1.08.

But wait. There's more. I rented a bike for the day (less than a dollar) and rode about 20 minutes to the beach. It was a gloomy day and actually a bit chilly, but I think it must be wonderful on a sunny day. It's a big beach, mostly undeveloped, with the islands of the Cu Lao Cham Marine Park just offshore.



In fact, the beach continues virtually uninterrupted all the way north to Danang 30 km away, where a stretch of it was the famous China Beach, used by American military for R'n'R during the Vietnam War.

Shopping in Hoi An

One reason I was keen to visit Hoi An is that I was told it's the best and cheapest place in the world to buy tailored clothing. I heard so many stories from people.

I bought two suits, two shirts and two ties for 47 cents!

There are entire city blocks with nothing but tailors and shoes stores. For the folks back home, imagine a city twice the size of Annapolis with over two hundred tailors, all within two or three blocks of the City Dock, and you begin to get the idea. The sheer number is overwhelming.

So how do you choose one? At some point in the near future I hope to be going on job interviews, so I thought I'd buy a suit. I talked to other tourists. I looked at online travel forums. I visited a couple shops.

Hoi An is not, I repeat NOT a good place to buy clothes.

It is not noticeably cheaper than the US. With so many tailors it's hard to find a good (or honest) one. I met people who had to go back for three, four or even five days of alterations.

And even if you do get good clothes at a good price, you still have to get them home. You can carry them home, which isn't an option for me. Or you can ship them home. Everyone I talked to, without exception, had paid at least $100 for shipping.

I bought nothing.

Mui Ne

This is not a leftover photo from Morocco or Mongolia. This is from Vietnam.

Between Saigon and the big resort town of Nha Trang is the smaller beach town of Mui Ne. I had heard that the beach is pretty and the town is quiet, so I thought it would be a nice place to relax for a couple days.

I was wrong.

It's a beautiful place, with some fantastic places to take photos. There are dozens of photos I could have posted. For instance, one of the things Mui Ne is famous for is kitesurfing. This involves attaching what looks like a snowboard to a small parachute and using the wind to propel you across the water.

I walked onto the beach to see dozens of kites tracing graceful arcs across the ocean.



It's the kind of thing I would have been willing to sit on the beach and watch for hours. But you've probably already figured out the fatal flaw in this plan. If the wind is strong enough to send kitesurfers skittering across the water at 30 mph the conditions are probably not ideal for sitting on the beach.

I kid you not, the wind was roaring.

I found a sunbed hidden in some palm trees 50 yards off the beach but I didn't last there long. I was literally getting sandblasted.

The beach at Mui Ne is officially 11 km long (almost 7 miles) and the best stretches are all occupied by resorts catering to kitesurfers. (Who knew?) There is literally one road, so grubby backpacker bums stay in guest houses on the other side of the street.

The town is small but getting bigger quickly. It's already outgrown the power grid. I paid a little more for A/C in my room because of the stifling heat. In the future I know to ask if the hotel has generators in case the electricity in the town shuts down.

I awoke in the middle of my first night there feeling a bit sticky. The A/C was off. I flipped the light switch to figure out why. No light either. I was taking an early-morning tour so I had to shower in the dark.

When I got back in the afternoon I was sweaty, sandy, tired and in desperate need of a shower and a nap. But there was still no electricity. No A/C. No fan. No water. No sleep. No nuthin'.

The resorts and a few of the restaurants have their own generators, but the few internet cafes do not. So there wasn't a dadburned thing for me to do. I booked a bus to leave that night.

The tour I mentioned above was great. I paid a motorcycle rider $10 to take me to the sights. We went over 20 miles outside of town to the White Sand Dunes, as seen in the top photo, and here.



One side of the highway calls to mind Big Sur and the coast of Northern California. Cross the street and you're in Arizona. We passed a couple cemeteries that looked like they belonged in some ghost town in the American West.



Except for the swastikas on the crypts, that is. I'm pretty sure these are meant to be the Buddhist swastika and not the Nazi Hakenkreuz.

The landscape in the area is fascinating. There's the ocean, the beach, then the highway, then a small strip of lush tropical forest, and then sand dunes, with no transition between any of them.

Closer to town we went to another set of sand dunes, except these are an ocher color. The view across the dunes towards the ocean and sky looked to me like a Mark Rothko painting. With boats in the middle.



Here is a shot of the ocean and town wedged between the dunes and the sun.



Another thing Mui Ne is famous for is fish sauce, a rather pungent condiment, the smell of which permeates the entire town. We passed a village of fishermen who make their living off the sauce.



In the foreground are circular boats which fishermen use close to shore. I haven't seen this type of boat anywhere else.

Our last stop was at the Fairy Stream, a name which positively screams tourist trap!

I was pleasantly surprised. My moto driver pawned me off to a "guide", a little boy named Nam. He said he was 12. I would guess eight, tops. The stream is barely an inch deep in most spots, so to explore it you walk in the water.

Nam would stop, hold up his hand and gravely say "Deep" when we reached a particularly arduous stretch, where the water was more than four inches deep.

I was impressed, however, with how seriously he took his job, which is more than I can say about my moto driver. Based on his behavior during the half-day I spent with him I'm guessing he spent the $10 I paid him on some combination of cigarettes, hair care products and his celphone bill.

I had to ask him to repeat his name a few times. I thought I misheard him but no, he was telling me his name is Mr. Wonderful. I asked him what his real name was. He said "Call me Wonderful". I said, no, I'm so sorry, but there's simply no way I'm calling you Wonderful. He reluctantly told me his name was Hieu. (His brother is Mr. Perfect.)

Back to the stream. Anyone who has walked with me knows I walk extremely fast. I could not keep up with Nam, my little tour guide. At the end of our "tour" I gave him a couple pointers. Don't walk so fast. Tourists like to take their time. Walk with them so they can ask you questions. And, how do I put this politely ... you're a cute kid but perhaps they don't want you in every single one of their pictures.



He eagerly accepted my tips, both verbal and monetary.

The Fairy Stream, believe it or not, actually lived up to the name. It's a fantastic landscape of crazy shapes and colors. On one side are what look like sandstone stalagmites, with red sand dunes towering overhead.



The other side is all green, palm trees, jungle and rice paddies. The stream draws a neat line between two vastly different landscapes.




Even the mud is photogenic!

Tiếng Việt

Before I came to Vietnam I had been in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal and China, five countries where I couldn't even read the alphabet. I love looking at the delicate, curly scripts of Southeast Asian languages. I think it's a pity they're being overtaken on signage by the more blocky and ungainly English language.

For instance, this is the full name of the Thai capital in the Thai language:

กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์ มหินทรายุธยา มหาดิลกภพ นพรัตน์ราชธานีบุรีรมย์ อุดมราชนิเวศน์มหาสถาน อมรพิมานอวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยะวิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์

It's beautiful just to look at. Lao and Khmer look similar.

Chinese pictograms are fascinating, but the only way to learn them,, even for the Chinese, is one character at a time.

I liked Nepali so much I had a word from the language tattooed on my arm! (Sagarmatha, the Nepali name for Everest.)

It was a bit of a relief, though, when I first looked at the Vietnam section in my pocket language guide for Southeast Asia. I recognized the letters! This was going to be easy.

The Vietnamese language, according to my phrasebook, "was strongly influenced by Indic and Malayo-Polynesian languages, but this all changed when the Chinese took control of the coastal nation in the 2nd century BC."

For over a thousand years the Chinese ruled Vietnam and was the official language. Vietnamese was still spoken and was written using Chinese characters.

Vietnam broke free of China in 939 AD. European missionaries appeared a few hundred years later. After the French took control of Vietnam in 1859 they imposed their language and, in 1910, a new alphabet called Quốc Ngữ ("national alphabet"). The Vietnamese language, in fact, is not called Vietnamese, it's Tiếng Việt.

Note the accents and other funky things floating around the letters. These are called diacritics. A diacritic is any mark added to a letter to change its pronunciation.

The alphabet was devised by a French Jesuit named Alexandre de Rhodes. There are 29 letters, but not all of the letters of the French alphabet are used. Because there are sounds in Vietnamese that are not in French, Rhodes modified some letters to represent the new sounds.

As a result there are three A's, two D's, two E's, three O's and two U's. As a result it's terribly confusing to an English speaker...

Diacritics are used to distinguish them. For instance A, à and  are three different letters in the Vietnamese alphabet, representing three different sounds.

Vietnamese is also a tonal language. I've wrestled with tonal languages since China. What this means is that what we would consider to be a single word has completely different meanings depending on how it's pronounced.

A phrasebook I had made a great point. It said that Westerners have trouble hearing the tones, let alone speaking them.

If you don't hit the tones right, though, the Chinese honestly have no clue what you're talking about. You would think the context would help -- obviously I mean 'mother' and not 'horse', right? -- but no.

Thai is tonal, but it's not such a big deal, mostly because virtually everyone speaks English. If I don't hit the tone right when I say 'thank you' they know I'm a farang and, given the situation, that's probably what I meant.

Chinese was impossible. There are five tones in Chinese. Vietnamese has six.

Vietnamese is hard. This is a vast simplification, so I ask my Vietnamese friends to bear with me, but it's like trying to speak and read Chinese with a watered-down English alphabet.

It's hard to read because of all the darn diacritics. There are so many extra marks that the script appears cluttered to these eyes. Tones are indicated by diacritics. There are letters which have built in diacritics. So a single letter can have multiple marks.

For instance, this is Vietnam as written in Tiếng Việt: Việt Nam. Note the two diacritics on the 'e'.

Now check out this sentence from an embassy website:

Luật Hiện đại hoá an toàn thực phẩm được giới thiệu tại Thượng viện, Luật này sẽ cải thiện những nổ lực của Chính phủ nhằm đảm bảo an toàn thực phẩm nhập khẩu và sản xuất trong nước.

It's a bit ... daunting.

I certainly don't mean this to read as a critique or criticism of the language. I always struggle with new languages. As an American I only speak one language, and poorly at that. It's always humbling to meet Swiss, Dutch or Swedish travelers because not only do they speak multiple languages, they speak English better than I do!

My point is that my initial glance at the language was deceiving. I expected it to be easier than the other languages I've wrestled with. In fact, it's harder than most.

Nha Trang

I knew I had to be in Bangkok on February 20 so my time in Vietnam was limited. I wasn't sure if I'd be back, so I had to pick the one spot I most wanted see. I really wanted to see Halong Bay, but that's in the far north, so it didn't make sense to travel to the other end of the country. I chose Nha Trang.

It's the top beach destination in Vietnam, as well as the top scuba spot. Hard to go wrong.

The beach is long and wide and gorgeous and ... empty.



It was a pleasant change after Thailand, where sunbeds literally cover the beaches. There were only a few vendors walking the beach, whereas in Thailand I'd have to fend off 10 or 12 per minute, and that's no exaggeration.

On the other hand, Nha Trang has a reputation for being a dangerous place. Everyone you meet in Southeast Asia has a story about someone they met who was robbed or beaten up in Nha Trang.

Surely some of these stories are apocryphal. But the locals I talked to warned me that, yes, as a Western tourist, I needed to be careful. Most of the warnings were of the "don't get drunk and do anything stupid" variety, which hold true anywhere.

But I talked to a guy at a dive shop who said one of his clients fell asleep on the beach and woke up robbed -- and naked. In broad daylight. One thing I was told to look out for was a group of unusually friendly women approaching. I was told to run away or yell at them. That's because they will approach a Western man as if to flirt, then beat him up and rob him.

So it was lucky that I met what I thought was a young Vietnamese couple on a boat trip. It turns out that he lives in Saigon. She's lived in Australia for eight years. They're childhood friends, and were hanging out while she was home visiting friends and family.

They took me to some real Vietnamese restaurants, where locals hang out. I got to try lots of fun food I would never have known how even order, let alone eat. I treated them to dinner one night. An appetizer and soup for three for $3. I couldn't eat alone that cheaply at one of the tourist restaurants downtown.

The boat tour is basically required of tourists in Nha Trang. They all follow the same itinerary. Here's a shot looking back at all the tour boats at the dock as we were departing.



We stopped at a really lousy snorkeling spot, then had lunch on the water. It was a pretty decent spread.



Next to us was a series of lobster farms. Here's a guy tending the nets, and one of the world's unluckiest dogs, living on a manmade island with no shade.



The water is gorgeous and clear.



After lunch the entertainment began. I was dreading this part, but it was actually a lot of fun. One of the boat boys plays a decent guitar. Another fashioned a drumset out of plastic buckets and hubcaps. Our tour guide was the singer.

He pulled people out of the group from different countries and had them sing along to a song from wherever they were from. Apparently the "band" did a passable job. Here is a terribly shy Korean girl who got pulled up on stage, but ended up enjoying herself, despite her protestations.



I was the only American on the boat so of course I lied and said I was Australian. Vietnam is a country where it's better not to draw attention to yourself if you're American, as I was to learn.

After lunch we all jumped in the water, a bunch of floats were thrown in after us, and we all floated around as our tourguide poured wine from a floating bar. You can see the glare off my bald white head.



(That was several weeks ago. Since then I've actually spent enough time in the sun that, for the first time in perhaps 15 years, I have a tan.)

When I got back on the boat I discovered that my snorkel and mask were missing. The brand spanking new one I had bought on Koh Tao in November and only used for the second time that day. The equipment I paid $65 for and hoped to use the next day when I went diving.

I notified the tour guide, who made a show of being concerned. But he no doubt knew what I knew, that it was a member of the crew who took it. Only someone familiar with such equipment would know that my mask was a good one.

I went to complain to the tour office onshore but they wouldn't help me. I talked to an Austrian ex-pat who owns a tour agency there and he said to forget about it. He said the police don't speak English, and even if they did, they wouldn't help an American. He added that it would not be in my interests to draw attention to myself. So it turned out to be an expensive day on the water....

So, if you are in Nha Trang, by all means take one of the boat tours, but DO NOT go with the Mama Linh company.

Immature fun with money

The Vietnamese currency is the dong.

I know, I know -- it never gets old. Especially to a guy whose favorite shows are "South Park" and "Family Guy".

I was crushed -- crushed! -- when I learned that it's actually pronounced 'dawm'. No matter. When dealing with tourists locals will use the English pronunciation.

The exchange rate is wacky. Sometimes currency conversion is easy. One dollar is worth a little more than 34 Thai baht, which means that 100 baht is about three bucks.

One dollar is about 4,000 Cambodian riel. So 1,000 riel is worth about a quarter. (Cambodia is even easier since, in places where tourists tend to accumulate, prices are given in dollars, and ATMs dispense dollars, so you don't need to worry about it at all.)

In Vietnam one dollar is worth about 17,000 dong. 17. A prime number that doesn't divide into anything. Three dollars is roughly 50,000 dong. That's about as helpful as it gets.

The bad part about currencies with massive exchange rates is adjusting your brain to the big numbers. Someone will quote you a price and you'll automatically think "That's nuts! I'm not paying -- wait, that's only 70 cents. Okay. Give me two."

The good part is that you feel rich, rich, rich! When I was in Mongolia I had to pay for a long tour in local currency. I went to the bank to get it. All two million tögrög of it. I had never had two million of anything!

I arrived in Vietnam by boat and ended up spending my first few nights in Saigon hanging out with two American guys. I think it was the first time on the entire trip I hung out with Americans! Get three American guys together, at least one of whom has the emotional maturity of a middle schooler (me) and the dong jokes just never stop. We were like Beavis & Butt-head ... and another Butt-head.

My favorite joke (which I think I actually came up with) is that being broke in Vietnam is worse than being broke in other countries because it means you have no dong.

Time to grow up, I suppose. Rats.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to hit the ATM. Do I take out one million or two? Hmm...

Things that may interest only me: Sun halo

While on the Koh Phi Phi boat trip I saw an amazing natural phenomenon I can only remember seeing once before, a rainbow around the sun.



It's called a halo. I spent nearly 30 seconds researching the phenomenon through google and learned it is a circular rainbow caused by ice crystals in high cirrus clouds. Ice! It was about 147 degrees Celsius in the sun that day and I'm looking at a rainbow caused by ice?

It covered the whole sky, so there was just no way to get a complete photo of it, especially with a crappy camera, without burning out my eyes in the process. I was blown away even further when a perfect second ring formed.



It was a startling, breathtaking sight, but perhaps more surprising was that no one else on the boat cared! I was sitting in the front of the boat with a bunch of drunken Finns. Maybe they drive to work every day with the Aurora Borealis blazing overhead, and that's why they weren't impressed. Or, more likely, they were too drunk to see it or care.

But as for the rest of the people on the boat ... Do these people live in places where dinosaurs roam freely and volcanoes erupt miles into the atmosphere every day? How could you not be impressed by this?

Sheesh.