Category: Travel Stories

Turned out, Saigon was not so easy to say good bye to. As luck would have it, our last memories of it were going to be not the drinks with a view, but a completely unexpected oompah band that started playing outside of our hotel at 5:30 the next morning. Judging by their sound, the band could use a bit of practice, but preferably not at our expense.  We were not planned to leave before 9, so this loud and out-of-tune wake-up call was not very welcome, to put it mildly.

Our first reaction on hearing the first loud brass accords of the band at full pitch, was “What the fuck???…” But so is Asia – annoyed as we were to lose our morning sleep, we could not help but be amused at this totally out of place happening. No idea what it was – an after-wake party, a morning rehearsal for a wedding, a Wednesday morning special, but the band was going at it in full swing for the next two hours with half hour breaks in between.

The sounds were, again, coming from the next alley, and my curiosity made me run down in an attempt to check out the band. Unfortunately, the hotel door was locked up and barricaded with a dozen scooters brought into the lobby for the night. The hotel manager was sleeping peacefully on chairs behind the reception desk with a T-shirt over his face, and I simply did not have the heart to wake him up. The mystery of the oompah band remained unsolved…

It was that same hotel manager – an extremely likable and helpful guy – who a day earlier volunteered to give us a hand with our travel arrangements. Everything seemed to work perfectly: we had the confirmation receipt (in Vietnamese) in our hands, and we were picked up from the hotel at 9 in the morning, as promised. Then the adventure started.

I have to say here, that in our experience, everything in Vietnam runs on time. If you were promised to be picked up at 7, it would be 7 sharp. If the bus is scheduled to leave at 10:15, it leaves on the dot. The Thai “ten minutes” that mean anything and can stretch from the actual ten to half a day, apparently did not make it as far as Vietnam.

A guy who picked us up walked us from the hotel to the nearby travel agency, where two girls with telephones glued to their ears gave us tickets (all in Vietnamese), and ushered us into a taxi. The taxi took us to the downtown bus depot, where we were very quickly re-potted into a mini-van together with 5 or 6 Vietnamese passengers. The mini-van delivered us to the big inter-city bus depot with a couple dozen big red buses, surrounded by a big crowd of people, waiting to board them. This relay bus transfer sounds quite complicated and elaborate, but to our amazement everything worked like clock-work, and without much effort on our part we were gently herded off into the right direction at every place of transfer.

We must have looked lost at the big bus depot, for the official-looking guy walking around the area, came up to us, asked to see our tickets, and reassuringly pointed out to a nearby bus, repeating “fifteen minutes” several times in broken English. Even though all signs on the bus were in Vietnamese, none of them resembled Dalat, and we started getting slightly worried.

Next time the official guy was passing by, we gently tugged at his sleeve, and made an attempt to communicate.

– This bus,” we said, pointing out to the one he identified to us earlier, “is it going to Dalat?”

The guy’s face registered surprise, he double-checked our tickets, and said:

– “No, no – Can Tho! But is good. Good bus!”

He kept pointing at the bus, though, and the numbers on the ticket matched those on the bus, so we figured this Can Tho must be another name for Dalat in Vietnamese. After all, it used to be a French city, so maybe there were two names to the place.

In exactly 15 minutes the bus pulled over at the depot entrance, we presented our tickets to another uniformed official, our luggage was thrown in, and we took our assigned seats inside. The bus started at 10 sharp, just as was indicated on the tickets. It also had free Wi-Fi! For the first fifteen minutes of the trip we were busy logging in and admiring this technological advance, so when the conductor came to check our tickets, we were already well on the way. Yes, the Vietnamese long-haul buses have conductors, travelling with them! They announce the pit stops and destinations, distribute the complementary water (each ticket comes with a small bottle of water and a disinfection towel), and make sure the TV plays the best of Vietnamese shlagers for passengers’ pleasure throughout the trip.

The conductor was the second person who did not share our belief in Dalat being the destination of the day. He kept saying Can Tho, Can Tho, and after about ten repeats our story about it being the Vietnamese pronunciation of Dalat started to wear quite thin. We finally decided to solve the mystery, fished out the map, and pushed it in the conductor’s face, pointing at Dalat, located about 300 km North of Saigon. The conductor shook his head, looking at us as if we were a bunch of retarded children, and pointed out to a place on a map about 300 km South of HCMC, which, was, indeed, called Can Tho. That caused the second big collective “What the fuck?!…” of the day.

Ok, we had to accept it: we were on a wrong bus. And we were going in a wrong direction.  All we could do was make the best of it.

We quickly regrouped and decided to spend the 5 hours on the bus reading up on our unintended destination. We were going down South into the Mekong Delta and were intent to enjoy it.

Can Tho, our unexpected destination, seemed tiny, but according to all guide books it had a population of a million and a half, which technically made it bigger than Munich.  It definitely did not look it.  We ended up there in early afternoon, and the place had a slow sleepy feel to it.  Sitting on the banks of the Mekong river, it could boast a big lazy promenade with a huge leninesque statue of Ho Chi Ming in the center.  We landed in the first open bar, enjoyed a well-deserved beer, and the boys went scouting around for accommodation.

After a half an hour duty round, we became proud residents of a hotel with an unpronounceable name (Ngan Ha Hotel).  Can Tho was not overrun by tourists, and accommodation was not really in abundance.  Our room smelled of wet mop, but was clean, had a bed, hot water and air conditioner, which helped eliminate the mop odor when switched on.  We weren’t planning on lodging there long, anyway.

When walking around downtown, we could not help but notice, that most local teenagers were wearing a rather peculiar and distinct hairstyle.  It can best be described as “Kung-Fu Elvis” – with hair on the sides and the back of the head cropped quite short, and the hair-sprayed long quiff proudly standing up.

Since we ended up in the area, we allowed a tour agent, who miraculously materialised in the hotel lobby, to talk us into a half-day boat tour of the Mekong Delta the next day. Planned to start at a scary hour of 5 in the morning, it included two floating markets, rice noodle factory, shitloads of water and scenery, an English-speaking guide and a boat.

The Mekong is one of the great world rivers, that starts as a little stream in Tibetan mountains, flowing through China, Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, gaining weight and power the further it goes, floats into the South China Sea.  But not before splitting into 9 big arms and innumerable little rivers, canals and streams that form the Mekong Delta.  The Delta is a true water world, where people, boats, houses, restaurants and markets float on the water and live on and off it.

We started off still in the dark, in an attempt to make it to the market right after sunrise, before the main hordes of tourists arrive.  Even in twilight you could see that both banks of the river we were on were densely covered with shaky huts on tall wooden stilts, little river gardens growing some sort of floating greens for pig food.  With the sunrise more and more boats carrying food, goods, and construction materials started appearing from every nook and cranny of the river.

The floating market was an extraordinary sight.  Hundreds of boats from all over the area sail in to trade.  Most were selling all sorts of fruit and vegetable, but there was also rice, meat and other foods on offer.  Every boat advertised their products by tying a sample on a mast or a tall pole, visible from afar.  Some had turnips, lettuce, watermelons, and everything imaginable on their “advertising pole”, others specialized in just one product.  All boats were free-floating and moving constantly, busy with an ongoing sale and barter.  We saw boats filled to the brim with pineapples, boats with chickens and little gardens on decks, boats driven by tiny ambidextrous women handling them with surprising ease, and kids jumping from boat to boat delivering purchases.  It was chaos on water, but smooth and easy chaos, very well-orchestrated and organized.

Most boats come from nearby for their morning weekly shopping, but some arrive from other provinces, and dock in on the banks, or sometimes in a wider part of the river for several nights.  The market was definitely a worthy sight!

As part of our half-day tour, we stopped at a rice noodle factory – a small family business, producing (mostly by-hand) an amazing amount of rice noodles that they sell not only to shops and restaurants in the area, but also to whole-sellers.  Having seen how much work goes into the process, I will never look at my rice noodles bought in the Asian shop at home in quite the same way.  If anything, the visit to the factory will make me respect them even more.

By about 9 o’clock there were visibly more tourist boats on the river, all following roughly the same routes, so we soon started recognizing fellow travelers, and our boat driver was staging fake races with other captains.  One of the boats had a big Vietnamese Mama for a captain, who had 4 young and serious-looking German guys from Hamburg as passengers.  All four were sleepy, chain-smoking, and wearing typical Vietnamese cone straw hats, which, as our guide explained to us, were worn normally only by women.  The Big Mama obviously forgot to mention this to her passengers.  It was not clear if she spoke any other language than Vietnamese, but she smiled and giggled all the way, driving the boat with one hand and both feet, all the while making nice roses and crowns out of palm leaves and waving to other boats.  When we caught up with her at the next river turn, all four German guys were wearing palm tree crowns in addition to their women’s hats, and started looking quite bizarre.

By means of a break from water, we walked along the banks of one of the side canals for about half an hour, past the local farmers’ houses with rice fields and fruit orchards.  There was papaya, Jack fruit, durian and God know what, growing in abundance on both sides of the stream, ducks and chickens were running around, and the area made a relaxed and quite well-to-do impression.  To add to our education in Confucianism, many places had tomb-stones of relatives integrated into the landscape of their gardens.

Chickens in Vietnam is a whole separate story. Cock-fighting is one of the most popular national sports/pastimes/whatever you call it, and fit-looking roosters ready for the fight are running around in abundance. The long-legged muscular prize winners are a valuable commodity. They are kept in straw or metal coops on the lawns, and fed separately from their envious harems. The losers, I guess, end up in a soup.

On the way back, we caught up with the Big Mamma and her serious passengers once again.  And just in time: the propeller of her motor, sitting on a long pole in the back of the boat that doubled up as a rudder, got caught in a wire, hanging from the nearby lamp/telephone/whatever pole.  A skinny guy in a telecom company uniform, working the wires on a nearby pole, tried telling Mamma off, when hearing her wailings, but got such a mouthful bank, that immediately shrunk in size even more, and hid behind his telephone pole.  Together with our guide and driver, we disentangled Mamma’s boat from the wire, that luckily was not live, and accompanied by her cheerful giggles and thanks moved on back to where we started from.  It was only 14:00 when we docked at Can Tho, but after our early start it felt much later.

Happily exhausted after all the sights and impressions, we slept for the rest of the day, and woke up briefly to walk across the road to the local travel agency, where two cheerful girls booked us transportation to our next destination – the island of Phu Quoc.