Using Sticker as Currency, Family Escapes Vietnam

It’s our last day at sea, and we all slept in after our dusty, long, high-pressure day in Ho Chi Minh City (the locals still call it Sai Gon – you see the space more often than not). Sai Gon was only 20 miles from our desolate industrial port at Phu My (pronounced Fu Me), but the trip took 2.5 hours along a choked road filled with milling oxen, chickens, motorbikes (some carrying cargo as large as refrigerators (!!) on the back), trucks, busses, grandmothers, toddlers, etc. Commercial signage was amusing to westerners: Hung Dung, Thank Dung. Rice paddies, orderly rubber plantations, small industrial operations and markets lined the road, as did cafes under thatched roofs where the only “seating” was hammocks. It seems that after sitting on motorbikes for hours (there are almost as many motorbikes as people in Vietnam), drivers don’t care to sit during a rest break. In every town, at least one enormous, ornate home with gleaming tiled walls and a high iron fence loomed over the landscape.

We had a “guide” whose only job was to make sure that the entire busload returned to the ship safely (we paid only for the ride to and from the city), but he talked to us en route about Vietnam history, culture and lifestyle. He was quite open about the widespread corruption – every one of those beautiful homes, in fact almost anything of any true value – belongs to government officials and their families. Our 50-year-old guide had tried to escape from Vietnam when he was 24, but the police caught him and sent him to camp to be “reeducated” for 3 years (he only knew his sentence length when they released him). He says they worked at least 10 hours a day 7 days a week at hard manual labor on a diet of mostly rice. Though he is slim today, he says he weighed half that when he was freed. Vietnamese military service is compulsory for 2 years (it was unclear if that was so for women as well; we only saw male soldiers) and the leaders believe hunger develops fighting spirit. “When you are hungry, you are angry, but when you are starving, you will kill somebody to get food,” he said. “Before battles, officers starved their soldiers for a month beforehand, then told them, ‘the enemy has food and if you kill them, you can eat it.”

Sai Gon was…interesting. Though we hid our stickers identifying us as part of a tour (ugh), hawkers still descended upon us en masse – children demanding that we buy or just donate, people asking us “why not?” when we said no thank you. We escaped for about 45 minutes by eating at Pho 24, a chain offering the ubiquitous Vietnamese beef noodle soup.

In just the few blocks it took to walk from Pho 24 to the market, at least 50 persistent people followed us – though one scored when we purchased an absurdly expensive but delectable bag of freshly baked cookies. Our “guide” had told us that Vietnam receives a low number of tourists and has widespread poverty, so I can understand the motivation. Still, we felt under siege. We bargained for a few souvenirs at the market, though as always, our space is very limited due to our carry-on-only-no-checked-bags policy. After exiting the market, we struck a deal with 4 rickshaw drivers (one-person rickshaws) to take us to the Vietnam War museum – 400,000. Lovely ride past memorials, nice parks, though much of Saigon is rundown (should you visit, be very careful crossing the streets – no crossing signals and continuous traffic both large and small.) But oh darn!!! The museum was closed for lunch! Our drivers’ reactions were pretty easy to read: they knew it was closed before we hopped aboard. For the same price, they instead wanted to show us a few sights, then drop us back at the bus station. Okay, sounds good, though we made very sure of the terms before agreeing to the extended tour. The extended tour combined delight with terror – delight over the many sights, terror over how close we came to speeding busses, zippy motorbikes, meandering motorized food carts, etc. It was the Sai Gon version of our petrifying Beijing bike adventure. “Oh, NO. THAT BUS IS GOING TO RUN ME OVER! Thank God it missed by inches, but WHAT’S THAT COMING TOWARD US NOW??” Laura’s driver did, in fact, have a little fender bender, tapping the motorbike of a woman ahead of him who gave him what for after she inspected the slight ding. Geez lady, it blends in with all the other dents and scratches already decorating your ride! Cool your jets!

Everybody reading this knows the end to this story: when the ride concluded, they immediately demanded 4 times the agreed upon price, saying that the cost had been for one person only (though we had taken care to ask if that was for all of us)!!!! We countered with 2 times the price, due to the round trip, but absolutely no more. Immediate shouting, refusal to take the money, outrageous lying on everyone’s parts (“I have a dozen children to feed!!” “This is all the money we have!!” and so on), my tucking the dong into the cushions of one of the rickshaws (just realized that sounds a little risqué, but we’re talking currency), one driver plucking them out again and throwing them at our feet, the four of us walking away, etc. Jeff finally paid a few hundred thousand more and they gave up. Jeff felt terrible, but I reminded him that we hadn’t even bargained the price down for the rides, so they were making a relative fortune to begin with. Suffice to say, we were glad to resurrect our stickers, climb aboard our bus and leave. Our day in Sai Gon ranks among the top in all of our travels for bald profiteering, scheming to defraud, plotting to loot, attempting to pickpocket, sheer annoyance, etc. No offense to those Vietnam fans out there, but I’m not hurrying back.

For a complete about face, I then proceeded to win a bottle of champagne for my swing dancing skills at the ship’s ballroom dancing class. Talk about cultural whiplash.

Later…not sure how much later, because I can’t even keep track of the day of the week anymore, not that I’m complaining: We are now lounging in a beautiful Thai resort tucked away on an undeveloped stretch of Phuket, having debarked in Laem Chagang near Bangkok. But I’ll have to write about that –and our final cruise stop in Cambodia -tomorrow on our much cheaper internet time. It’s been a long day and I’m pretty bushed after our lovely dinner on the beach eating delicious Thai food and watching the sun set over the water. Ahhh. What a nice change. When we walked across the road to our dinner location in bare feet, one smiling Thai cab driver reclining on the hood of his car asked if we needed a taxi, but when we politely declined, he wished us a good evening. And it was.