Vietnam

Vietnam was great. I left for my conference on Valentines Day. 7 teachers from our school went to the conference; we flew Korean Air and stayed at the Renaissance Riverside Hotel. It was a lovely hotel in the upmarket, tourist area of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon). Brad joined me on Friday and we stayed at the Metropole Hotel which is close to the Backpackers District. We have so many stories to tell so it will take a few blog entries to get through it all.

The first thing you notice,when you leave the airport, is the overwhelming number of motorbikes and scooters on the roads. People warned us about the number of motorbikes but you truley cannot imagine it until you've seen it. Even scarier than the sheer number of bikes is the fact that helmets are not a necessity and thus you will rarely see anyone (other than the odd foreigner) wearing a helmet. Driving there is quite scary since people just drive - there are some traffic lights but at many intersections there aren't any and you just have to go. As a result of this, the honking of horns is the norm. If you need people to know you're coming through - you just honk; if you need someone to move out of your way fast - you just honk; if someone fails to move out your way and you need to swerve suddenly you need to ensure you continue to honk because the people/cars/motorbiles you're swerving towards need to know you're coming. You also have to keep in mind that this is a heaving city with 3 million scooters on the roads so driving (even as a passenger) becomes an 'exciting' experience.

Mixed in with the scooters are taxis (of course), bicycles and cyclos (The dreadful picture on the left is of Brad and I on our Cyclo ride and the picture below is of the actual Cyclos). A cyclo is a kind of bicycle for tourists. There is a comfortable chair in the front of the bike and the cyclo drivers ride you around the city and explain some of sites to you. The 'Lonely Planet' says that the Cyclo drivers are educated men who sided with the Americans during the war and some were thrown in jail for a number of years. They have been stipped of their rights as citizens and are not able to work or own property and are illegally in city. These men are very poor and live on the streets and the only way they can make a living is by trying to get tourists to ride on their Cyclos. The city is apparently trying to phase out the Cyclos and some Tourist Guides recommend that tourists avoid going on the Cyclos . Brad and I did go on one of the Cyclos (I only read the warnings afterwards) and it was a good experience. The driver cycled us around a bit of the city and he pointed out some of the popular restaurants (we went to two that he recommended and they were good). We did get ripped off though; the initial price he quoted us was the fee the city guides recommend for a half day trip (we only figured this out later). Our trip was only about 20 minutes and we felt bad for him because he had to cycle two of us around so we gave him a big tip. All in all, we don't regret it because it was still cheap and it was fun - but at moments I had to shut my eyes because I wasn't sure if a scooter or two were going to swerve to avoid us in time. The other means of transport for tourists is on the back of a motorbike. There are a lot of 'motorbike' taxi drivers - you just hop on and off you go. We didn't go on the bikes because it's just as easy for two people to take a cab.
So that's the traffic, now onto the masses of people. Since we've been living in Seoul we are getting used to densely populated places but going to Vietnam during Tet took us to a whole new level of congestion. It was Lunar New Year across Asia; in Vietnam they call it Tet and it's the time of year when people are required to visit their families for the holidays. There were vast numbers of people migrating across Asia and flights etc were fully booked and very expensive. The good part about Tet was that the city was all done up for the New Year. It is the year of the Golden Pig and everything had a pig theme. Many parts of the city were decorated with pigs, lanterns and dragons and it looked very pretty. After our cyclo ride (on Friday), we walked through the streets, together with millions of other people and looked at the decorations and then we went to dinner at one of the restaurants that the cyclo driver recommended. The restaurant was an up-market place that catered for the expat crowd, so we didn't eat Vietnamese food that night but we did have a good meal.