Crossing over into Vietnam on the bus from Cambodia was like entering a place where I had no idea where I was or what was happening. All the signs were in Vietnamese. Also, the people who work in tourism, at least in Southern Vietnam, who we interacted with didn't really speak English. It was sort of awesome and reminded me of being in the security line at the Philadelphia Airport where there are folks stuck in a long line and they look to the TSA agents for help and they just sort of look at you like, "yeah, ok." Good luck with that. I found Vietnamese people to be very nice, they just don’t speak English and don’t really care to. I respect that.
My Google Translate App got a lot of use in Vietnam. Just another reason Google is very helpful. We spent about a half hour using hand gestures and Google Translate to complete the purchase of two SIM cards for our cell phones in Ha Tien. Our international T-Mobile plans worked pretty well for us during the entire trip. Other than Fiji, Vietnam was the one country we visited that wasn't covered by our plan.
The woman at the phone counter was very patient with us and helped to install and activate the cards. To be honest, the Internet service was a lot faster on our phones with the new Vietnamese SIM cards than our 3G service had been. We paid about $5.00 for 7GB of data and we didn't purchase phone service.
Near the food market in Ha Tien. We ordered some dinner here late in the evening and decided against eating the rubber chicken legs we were served with rice.
It was a little more challenging for us to find a place to eat in Ha Tien. There were a lot of people out, sitting down drinking tea and beer by the time we checked into our place and were ready to explore the town. We visited a few places with people eating but they just sort of looked at us and hand signaled they had no food. A lot of places looked like food being served out of metal carts in front of someone's house, near the garage area with small plastic stools on the sidewalk.
Eventually a really nice woman near the food market waved us into her soup stall. She and Ryan waved and pointed at various bowls of things and I played the audio for “I’m a vegetarian” from a Vietnamese app on my phone. The woman smiled and nodded and we were served two large bowls of veggie noodle Pho. We are always pretty mindful of refrigeration when it comes to eating out and we were unsure of how long the prepped meat stuffs had been sitting around. The soup was delicious and later Ryan crossed the street to purchase a giant crab shaped piece of bread from a baker across the street. That too was delicious!
Banana lady at the food market in Ha Tien. No monkeys or elephants here, just piles and piles of bananas.
Later that night after we walked around, we visited an expat bar owned by an older Brit and his much younger wife. He introduced us to a few different Vietnamese beers like 333 (pronounced Ba Ba Ba) and gave us some good tips on hiring cabs in the country. Apparently there a couple reputable companies and a lot of others that mess with the meters and tourists can get ripped off. Luckily we never had such an experience.
Most businesses in Vietnam seemed to have a gathering of folks staring at the their cell phones in a circle outside of the place. Looking for a good Karaoke spot we approached a circle of phones and when we got close enough to the door, one of the guys looked up and asked, "Karaoke?". We nodded and he led us upstairs past giant framed images of Vietnamese women in their underwear to a rather large Karaoke Room. You could probably fit 25 people in there and it had it's own separate bathroom. Ryan signaled again with his hands to figure out how to get songs in English and how the giant touch screen console worked. He also mimed questions about the price of the room for an hour and accomplished ordering two beers. (They were served on ice.)
Karaoke was fun I guess.
More than terrible singing, I liked the adventure of trying to communicate with guys in Vietnamese and English and two different phones running different versions of Google Translate. I'm sure we provided a lot of entertainment for them. I wonder if they were impressed with Ryan's rendition of George Michael's Faith...
View of Ha Tien from the roof of our hotel. It was immediately noticeable crossing over to Vietnam, the upgrade of color selections for building exteriors. Very nice!
The sun sets on our one evening in Ha Tien. Later this sidewalk would be filled with plastic chairs and people sitting, eating and drinking along the river.
After we stayed in Ha Tien for the night, we caught a bus up to Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnam is a rather large country and their windy, messed up roads down south mean the buses rarely exceed 40 MPH. Our trip to HCMC took about eight hours and included two stops to places I didn't know where. At one point the bus got onto a ferry to cross one of the tributaries for the Mekong Delta and a woman from one of the road stalls got on the bus and walked up and down the isle with a tray of rice things wrapped in banana leaves and large rice crackers. Ryan asked me if I wanted anything and the woman heard him, handed both of us some stuffed rice wraps and asked him for money. They were tasty coconut things that came off a tray on the side of the road on a ferry somewhere. Thankfully neither one of us got sick; in fact they were delicious!
Cambodia brought us a lot of experience riding on buses and vans with people barfing into bags after eating at rest stops. People also say it could be they are just car sick since most of the people travel on motorbikes, not inside of vehicles.
Bus stop fish tank contents. We did not eat any of these.
We arrived at the HCMC bus station after dark and had to collect our bags and shoes (bus rides are shoeless), and found the Mai Linh cab drivers with the green shirts and white ties. Mai Linh was one of the companies recommended to us while we were in Ha Tien. After a brief cab ride we arrived at our hotel located down the street from the Saigon Train Station. The staff were very nice and did not speak English well. They could tell us where our room was but that was about all the conversation we had.
As we do in most places, we walked around looking for food. We found HCMC not to be a walker friendly place. Like Bali and Cambodia, most people in cities don't walk anywhere. They ride a motorbike and when they're done with them they park them in piles on the middle of the sidewalk.
View from the dirty window of a bar at the Bitexco Financial Tower in HCMC. The dirty window matches the dirty air of the city.
We rode an elevator time machine to get to the bar.
Walking around HCMC there is one place where motorbikes are not allowed to park; the road leading to HCMC Hall.
Looking from HCMC Hall from the other direction in the evening. There were a lot of people out and about and it was nice to spend some time and space away from all the traffic.
The wiring appeared to be somewhat improved over Cambodia but that isn't really saying much.
Ryan thought it was weird that the Rambo video game was in HCMC since Rambo is an American Vietnam War Veteran and he fights against the Vietnamese. No one was playing the game while we were in there.
A beer festival was happening in HCMC so we decided to stop by and see what the Vietnamese craft beer scene was all about. As soon as we walked into the place it was immediately apparent this was the greatest number of non-Vietnamese people we'd ever seen in Vietnam. Maybe they are the only ones who can afford $7.00 for a small beer in a country that normally charges somewhere between $.50 - $1.50.
The place was put together with mural covered, stacked shipping containers that were converted into seating areas, a bar, a shop to sell skate boards and an office for the rock climbing wall. Yes, there was a climbing wall and I got to listen to Ryan argue with himself as he was also drinking beer, if he should try to climb the wall or not because he likes climbing things but he also likes drinking. He decided to stick with drinking.
There were legit climbers at the beer fest.
Fun, games and delicious, expensive beer was had at the Saigon Beer Festival.
After a couple days in HCMC we took another bus to Mui Ne for two nights by the beach, away from the motorbike city. Did I mention how hot it was in Vietnam? It was really, really hot. And we got to ride on a bus that was really hot, even with AC because it was 100 degrees outside before you added in the other factors of large city, cars, motorbikes and terrible air quality. Thankfully the bus ride was only six hours, not eight.
The beach was nice-ish. There was a lovely breeze and also some piles of plastic trash. We spent most of our time reading, doing laundry and watching a monkey chained to a palm tree. We did not swim in the ocean because there were small piles of garbage on the beach.
Duh.
Someone forgot their shorts.
We chilled out here for two days before getting on another bus back to HCMC to catch a plane to check out more of the country.
Seeing three different places in Vietnam in six days was a little quicker than how we prefer to travel. It was nice to give ourselves a day or so at the beach before busing it again. In a few days we learned we loved iced Vietnamese Coffee, Bahn Mi sandwiches and disliked small Vietnamese buses. We looked forward to our next adventures as we traveled further north and got to take a plane instead. Yay!