Vietnam at last

Longtime, no blog, I know. After I got back from Vietnam I was pretty ill for a couple of days. There's a bit of disease going around on the ship, lot's of sick stomachs, pink eye, sniffles etc. There's a couple of people under quarantine as a matter of fact (a rumor of dengue fever that I think is just that [rumor]). I'm was feeling better today; the crew had another barbeque for us and I ate a lot more than I should have and that's got me feeling a little upset again. I'm going to take it easy at dinner. This would be a good week to hole up in my room and rest in the evenings, but there's something going on every night this week. They're having mixers in the faculty/staff lounge for all of the "seas" (residence halls) and we're pretty much expected to at least put in an appearance. Then there's some sort of "Malacca Straits" party tomorrow.

The ship is sailing through pirate infested waters right now, and they've enlisted passengers for a "pirate watch" where they're training volunteer look-outs and issuing certificates. I'm not sure how much of that is the crew pulling our leg and how much of that is genuine. But at any rate Kelly is up on deck right now having his turn on duty.

There's no class today, and the students are pretty much head down over their studies. The library has been packed today, and pretty busy with students doing more than borrowing travel guides. Which is good to see.

I'm not going to write a long blog on Vietnam, I've decided. If I keep waiting until I have the time and inclination to write a long blog it'll be December before I get it done. I have a lot of great photos that I'll post when the internet is running quickly, and I'll give you a wrap up on it now.

The first day in Vietnam I went on the SAS sponsored city orientation. They drove us around Saigon (the locals call the old part of Ho Chi Minh Saigon) and we saw a nice Buddhist Temple, had a killer lunch at a swanky place, went on a rush tour through the history museum (which was sort of odd, but in a gorgeous building), and saw the Reunification Palace. This is the place where tanks crashed through the gate in 1975. It's still mostly the same as it was on that day and is now and eerily abandoned monument to.... communism? maybe? The basement is a bunker with a war room and tiny stainless steel offices with typewriters. It was almost like a movie set.

The next day was my Mekong Delta Overnight trip. We drove about 4 hours south of Saigon where they loaded us in kind of junky flat bottom boats and sputtered us up the river. We stopped at a few places: a family home/business where the entire clan makes puffed rice bread, a really nice garden where they served us snake wine and fresh fruit and a brick factory. It was really quite amazing to see how people live their lives on the river. We spent the night in a really nice hotel in Can Tho that had the deepest and most luxurious bathtub. Dinner was at the fanciest place in Can Tho and we had this great Vietnamese-French fusion dinner. There was a good tomato soup and some creamy pork dish. So good. We set out first thing in the morning to see the nearby floating market. I was imagining canoes filled with fruit and fish in a congested noisy knot, but the boats all had outboard motors and were fairly large with a wide variety of food including cokes and pringles. (For some reason pringles seem to be the ubiquitous choice for potato chips in South East Asia. You can find Lays and Cheetos occasionally, but by far the most common chip is pringles. There's almost nowhere you CAN'T find pringles). After that we went to a farm where the family was growing herbs and rice and watched them working and preparing for market. Then we hiked for about a mile through slippery mud and rice patties, I was completely covered with mud from my knees down. The boat captains cleaned our feet and then tried to sell us bottles of water that had obviously been filled up from a well somewhere. We passed.

It was another busy day the next day with a trip to the Cao Dai temple and Cu Chi Tunnels. Cao Dai is a local religion which was revealed to it's founder through the ouija board. It's Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism with a sprinkling of Christianity, Islam and Bahai. Also Victor Hugo is involved as some sort of reincarnated guru. It's kind of bizarre. The temple we saw is the holy see of the religion, the vatican of Cao Dai and we observed a portion of their midday service, which involved music and chanting. It was colorful and peaceful. After another great lunch, we headed for the Cu Chi tunnels. This is an expansive tunnel system just outside Saigon where the VC would launch attacks on the US and South Vietnamese and then disappear seemingly into thin air. It was raining and muddy and the tunnels were sort of creepy and upsetting. There's an opportunity to go down into the tunnels in a portion that's been widened for fat Western tourists. You can bend completely at the waist and stay on your feet, but my legs got so tired I had to crawl along on hands and knees. It's completely dark in the tunnel except for one point where a tiny Vietnamese park ranger was scrunched into a hole with a flash light. I slipped in the mud outside the bathroom and had to ride back to Saigon in wet muddy pants.

Except for the bathrooms at Cu Chi tunnels and at the ferry station at Can Tho the bathrooms in Vietnam are very nice. Almost all of them are western, clean and have lovely hand soap. The bathrooms at the Rex Hotel are particularly nice, and conveniently located. While you're enjoying they're excellent toilet facilities you can also have an asian daiquiri, which is fruity and minty and has a lychee in the bottom of the glass.

Everyone rides a motorcycle or motorscooter and stoplights, signs, and road stripes are treated as suggestions. You can get a pedicure or dentistry done on the street. Coffee is awesome, they brew it directly into your mug. If you don't like/aren't good at haggling don't go to the market because you'll get ripped off BIG time. There's plenty of department stores with merchandise that has fixed price, and you can get that 10 times cheaper than you could ever haggle and price at the market. But you should go check out the market just for the experience.

Vietnam is about to take off in a big way, one of my tour guides told us that he had tried to escape from Vietnam three times and had been captured and put in jail. Today, Vietnam is "like a miracle" to him. His brother went to Thailand and learned a way to drain soccer fields, now he's rich. If you can think of something to get rich in Vietnam, now's the time to make your move.