A Basic White Bitch Travels to Vietnam (Part I)
By: Emma Betty
Tags: Traveling, Adventure, Vietnam, Humor, Beyourself

We arrive in Saigon for one night, before jetting off to Hanoi where our tour began. Upon my feet hitting the tarmac, my long and painful history with humidity came rushing back to me. We decided to go to the rooftop bar for one drink, which turned into multiple drinks which I justified by the fact that I was sweating out more liquid then I could intake and I was trying to keep hydrated #health. The bar was also a rude reminder that smokers exist and in some places they are allowed to smoke wherever they want instead of being confined to their pens or whatever usually happens in Australia (I’m not entirely sure). In the morning my husband purchases a tea from Starbucks. He is unimpressed. This will be the beginning of his two week journey to try and obtain a ‘decent English breakfast tea’ in a country that very obviously has very little care for English breakfast tea.

Day 2

Our two hour flight to Hanoi is delayed by three hours — a whole hour longer then the flight time. Booking discount airlines is always a risky move. Not only was the plane delayed, but we were given multiple different reasons for the delay which is concerning of itself (running behind schedule, plane needed repairs etc.). A sensible person might take that as a sign and book another flight where there is less danger of the plane disintegrating midair, but I am a tightwad through and through so we waited it out. The pain of being delayed is compounded by the fact that by the time we board the plane everyone smells of BO and salami. The mouth breathing teenager in the window seat next to me appeared to want to get into his spot without climbing over me or moving out of the way so I can get into the aisle and he can take his assigned seat. A standoff with no common language ensues.

The Vietnamese aren’t into queuing at all, which I find out first waiting for the water fountain then trying to queue for the toilet. If you’re going to try to wait in line you’re liable to either dehydrate or soil yourself. But that’s ok; it allowed me to become my best shovy-pushy self that I knew I could be. And shoving is popular over there. Someone in your way? Just slam through them like a Mack truck having break issues. This doesn’t seem to lead to fights — it’s just an accepted part of life.

Once we were settled in Hanoi, we hurried to tick all the tourist boxes. We saw the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. It was hot. We went to the One Pillar Pagoda. It was humid. We went to the Imperial Citadel. We were dripping in sweat. Eventually we decided we had done enough touristing and hit the bars. We met some other Australians at the bar and decided we needed to toast this miraculous coincidence of meeting people from the country we live in a popular tourist destination with many a drink.

The Vietnamese don’t believe in OH&S

Day 3

The next night our tour officially begins and we meet our effervescent Cambodian tour guide. We had a main tour guide who would accompany us the whole way and whose main objective seemed to be to prevent us from dying or doing anything illegal, supplemented by local tour guides at each destination to give us the low down on the hood. Along with his many catchphrases he imparted some wisdom to us ‘This is Asia, you need to your lower your expectations. If your expectations are low, you’re gonna have a good time!’ Unfairly we had been worried that we would end up on tour with a bunch of geriatrics wielding zimmer frames, though considering that we routinely eat dinner at six and go to bed at nine pm, we would have fit right in. However, the tour was made up of a range of people with a range of ages and countries represented, mostly couples, and by the end we were all choosing to hang out together even in our designated ‘free time’ (which is just code for ‘the tour guide needs a break from dealing with 13 adult children’).

In Hanoi crossing the road feels like a life or death sport. Our guide warned us to ‘never hesitate, just walk very slowly into incoming traffic’. It was sound advice, but following it was no less terrifying. Often, much to the amusement of locals we would try to stick close to them as they navigated the traffic with practiced confidence. Traffic lights and indicating are rarely seen, while honking seems to be the preferred way of communicating. In Vietnam a vehicle honks just to let you know it’s in your general vicinity, unlike a honk in Melbourne whose meaning is closer to ‘F*%$ YOU MOTHERF*%$ER’. Other than fear, the traffic also inspired another emotion — awe. I could only look on in admiration at the skills of people on mopeds, amazing feats of balance involving whole families, moving large amounts of boxes and one time even a fridge. All of it without feeling the need to wear a helmet.

Day 4

Our tour then left Hanoi for Ha Long bay, a popular tourist destination of hundreds of islands where we were to spend the night on a junk boat. Our local tour guide told us his personal conspiracy theory that the official number of islands is given as 1969 because that is the year popular leader Ho Chi-Minh died. From our junk boat we were carted around to various tourist activities — kayaking (surely more relationships have ended in a kayak than any other mode of transport), a steep hill top walk (which everyone heroically managed without heart attacks) and paddling on secluded beaches. At one point when we stopped at a serene beach I spent five minutes gathering a huge pile of rubbish. Everyone seemed suitably impressed by my collection of trash, but not at all bothered by the fact that they’d been wading around in it mere minutes beforehand. Ha Long bay was a bit of a Picasso like that — stunningly beautiful from afar, but if you inspected it closely you could understand why the government has previously shut down the whole bay to try and clean it up.

Usually I don’t eat first thing in the day, but there’s something about ‘free’ food that just flips a switch in my brain. All of the breakfast meals on the tour were included and involved impressive buffet breakfasts at the hotels we were staying at. To me buffets are an extreme sport. I am a grown ass adult who needs full supervision; around unlimited food I have the self-control of a cop at a donut shop. The meals on the boat were exceptional — multiple courses for every meal. I fell upon them all like a bear coming out of hibernation.

View from the boat was OK I guess

Not only did we have the entire boat just for our tour group, but the boat had a karaoke machine, meaning an entirely captive audience for me to serenade. Although the majority of the songbook was in Vietnamese, there was a select few 80’s and 90’s bangers in English to choose from. I opted to regale my fellow travelers with Africa by Toto, changing the word Africa to Vietnam every so often to really get the crowd going.

Day 5

Don’t lie on the tracks. Or do. I’m not the boss of you.

Returning to Hanoi we had an afternoon to kill before we took the overnight train to Hue. We wandered around the ‘train street’ where the houses are built literally right up to the train line, and subsequently lots of cafes have sprung up to cater to foreigners who come to gawk at this massive overcrowding. (On the overnight train we discovered that the toilet empties directly onto the tracks. I thanked Oprah that I had literally been too lazy to lie down on the tracks on train street to take selfies, unlike many others). We succumbed to the temptation of the cheap massage. To be honest the appeal was more to do with being in air conditioning for an hour then the thought of a stranger grasping at my pale flaccid body. There’s nothing that creates paranoia quite like having your masseuse talk in a foreign language (I mean, they could only be talking about me, definitely not about the weather or the politics). And then for some reason my husband hardly got hit at all while I copped a pounding. Someone else on our tour had gleefully informed us that the masseuse will do that if their male client has an erection, to de-activate it, but I was neither male nor sporting an erection, so I found the whole situation very concerning.

Back on the street, the lure of a half-submerged 1000 dong note on the street was too much for me to resist. The tight-arse within me pounced on it, only to realise afterwards that it had been in stinking raw sewerage, which was now all over my hands. I probably became patient zero for some exotic new disease, all for the equivalent of AU0.06c. I wondered if it would be very traumatic for everyone else on the overnight train when I died dramatically in front of them. My husband had had reservations about the overnight train, but it turned out to be very uneventful. He subdued his fears with multiple beers, while for me this was the only night of the holiday I didn’t drink, just because the thought of having to climb down from the top bunk to go to the toilet seemed like a lot of effort. We were sharing a four bed cabin with another couple from the tour and had a lively debate about what flavor the complimentary chips were supposed to be.

Day 6

Ice cream was an essential part of keeping cool. Somehow one of my fellow travelers managed to buy a corn ice-cream. A few days later he got landed with one that was wasabi flavor. You have to wonder if this is something the Vietnamese even eat, or is it an elaborate joke played on unsuspecting tourists? Although I like to try the local food as much as possible (barring the aforementioned ice-creams), food poisoning doesn’t seem to haunt me the way it does other travelers. Maybe it’s because I’m veggo, or maybe it’s because I routinely eat food I drop on the floor so I have a cast iron stomach. However it was around the half way point when we were in Huế that I developed a gloriously itchy sweat rash. My tour guide takes me to a chemist where I horrify the pharmacist by showing them my rash, as well as several other poor souls who happened to be shopping there as well and probably had to cauterize their eyes afterwards. In return I’m given mystery cream to apply. The most brilliant part is that most of the tops I brought with me are somewhat low cut so all of Vietnam get front row seats to my monstrosity of a skin condition.

F I S H

In Huế we go to look at another Imperial Citadel. I decide this one is infinitely more exciting than the one in Hanoi because it has a MOAT with FISH. The local guide went into a lot of detail about the concubines of the emperors (giving me the impression it’s something he spends a lot of time thinking about). One emperor had 500 concubines, which the guide seemed very concerned would be ‘too many’. After some discussion the tour group decided 10–20 concubines is a much more manageable number. Usually the emperor’s mother would choose which concubine would spend the night with him, but if she was indisposed a goat would make the decision instead. Seems fair.

Later that night as I was stumbling home from a bar 100m away from the hotel in Huế, I was robbed whilst making a pit stop at a street food cart. I can only suppose that it was divine intervention from the dieting gods for drunkenly stopping for a bánh mì my waistline didn’t need. Down a few hundred thousand dong, all I had was my tasty street food to console me as I lay in bed munching on it and showering myself in crumbs of shame. You always get warned about thieves operating in heavily touristed areas, but I had just assumed I would handle it with awesome ninja like reflexes, and not just be left standing there like some slack jawed idiot that was stupid enough to let someone get right into my personal space in the first place.

Link to part deux — https://byrslf.co/a-basic-white-bitch-travels-to-vietnam-part-ii-56dcfee1694a