After the buffet breakfast mentioned at the end of my last post, we caught a #4 bus and rode it back and forth on its entire route, for a cheap orientation tour. There's a #2 that we might repeat the experiment with in coming days. We saw the world's longest cable car, that carries people over to Vinpearl, a popular amusement park on a nearby island. That's one of the special things we considered doing on Deborah's birthday - it would be a day's outing, and we'd get a 30% break on the normal adult price if we take our passports to prove that we're over 55.
For a meal, we considered the "Street Food all-you-can-eat buffet" - Vietnamese specialties that you'd normally find offered by small food vendors on the sidewalks, but prepared in a fancier restaurant kitchen. An interesting concept. We'd already eaten many, if not most of them, but we were game to have a look at it, at least. I don't think there were any crickets, tarantulas or roast dog on the menu.
We weren't yet been able to connect with the two people we thought would be the most helpful upon our return. Michael, who owns a language school, left for his honeymoon the day before we arrived; Bits was away for a week in Hong Kong on a business trip. But the weather was soft and pleasant, we were back in our shirtsleeves. We could bicycle about the town - no hills to climb on the bikes. We could take buses because they don't go too far and the town isn't complicated on a map. We liked Nha Trang, which has clear, relatively clean streets and cheerful people, and lots to see and do - including just strolling the beach, which is extremely long; with a concrete path all the way along the shore, we could ride our bikes there as well. With fresh sea breezes and fewer vehicles, the air isn't as polluted as in other cities, and the people were gearing up for their Tet Lunar New Year holiday, which is the biggest festival of the year, corresponding to Christmas and New Year combined. We hoped we'd connect with English students and Vietnamese people who join Couchsurfing with the goal of connecting with English speakers, to satisfy our social needs and their linguistic ambitions.
There was an airport just south of us with direct flights from Russia, so the Russian presence was simply enormous - at one restaurant we couldn't read a sign or a menu in English, and the Vietnamese tout at the door couldn't speak to us in anything but Russian. Some of the Russians were oilfield workers who were based off-shore here. Obesity seems to be as big a problem in Russian as it is in the U.S. A great proportion of them are beefy, "overly marbled", or as portly as an old English country squire, much more than me. Some were a bit boorish, but many came with their wives and children and seemed friendly enough in their own way. It's hard to get a fresh open smile from a Russian;. It's just something they don't seem to do unless they're drunk. But we'd try to connect with some of the younger ones who leave messages on Couchsurfing wanting to meet people, and who speak some English.
Jan 22nd: Deborah's birthday. We began by meeting our new friend Sophie at her hostel and went to a bistro for coffee, where Anh Nguyen joined us. We spent the day eating delicious things we hadn't previously tried in Vietnam: a sort of rice-burger - no meat, but sticky rice with peanuts, coconut and sweet beans inside a bun. We ate Ban Can, which are small rice batter pancakes with a quail egg in the middle of each, dipped in sauce with green onion and slivers of green mango. We had a "hot dog", which turned out to be a sweet pancake but with savoury cheese and meats inside. For dinner we had two heaping plates of mantis shrimp, and smoked oysters with a tangy cheese sauce.
We visited a lovely island called Hon Do just barely offshore, but we had to get there by boat. It was free but there was a donation box on board for the Buddhist temple on the island.
We checked out an alternate hotel that Anh showed us, a little cheaper than this one but not quite to my liking. Then Anh talked us into renting a motorbike so we could ride up the coastal highway a distance to enjoy the scenery. He took Sophie on the back of his bike.
In a previous post I described Hanoi's Old Quarter at rush hour as being like a high school hallway between classes, but where the students get to ride their motorbikes in all directions; this time we got to be the students. It was okay - we had a automatic scooter with quite a bit of power, and had fun with the wind in our faces. We ran past the time when we should have returned our scooter for a half-day charge, so we rode it home and returned it in the morning, when we joined Anh and Sophie for breakfast before Sophie left for Da Lat. We also considered another possible housing solution, a Vietnamese "homestay".
All in all, Deborah felt she'd had a marvelous birthday. Anh, who freelanced graphic design and website building, took the whole day off and spent it with us.
Jan 23rd: We spent the day eating inexpensive food and drinking coffee north of the tourist zone. We visited one very scenic spot, and checked out a "homestay" we found online. The homestay was cheap but was actually more like an extremely budget hotel, more like a flophouse than anything better, unless we were willing to 20% pay more than we'd been paying for our hotel, in order to stay in the main part of the house. The room in the main house would have been basically the same as the hotel, and we'd have access to a kitchen with pots and dishes, but I wasn't impressed by the housekeeping. Anh was very keen to have us rent it, so he could shop in the local market and cook with us in the kitchen, and bring his mother to visit. I was sorry to disappoint him.
Anh spent the day with us, and Sophie was with us for breakfast and morning coffee before Anh took her to the bus station for her trip to Da Lat. After she left, we had more conversation with Anh, and then he led us to see the Cau Go, a locally famous wooden bridge. It's a very long, privately built and maintained wooden bridge barely wide enough to two motorcycles to pass each other, which they did frequently and skillfully, and rather speedily. There was a toll both at one end. We rode across and back, and took photos. It was a little hairy. When we ride a scooter, I wear my backpack on my chest with the straps back over my shoulders for Deb to hang onto. Sometimes she can't suppress the urge to steer me with the handles of my backpack, and can't easily bring herself to lean into the corners with me. We had one awkward moment worrying about someone who was coming toward us, but we recovered quickly, and on the return bridge we had the boards to ourselves for most of the length. The boards make quite a racket under your tires.
For lunch we had smoked oysters with onion and a kind of wasabe sauce, and some regular shrimp, but Anh slipped in a little "appetizer surprise": Teu'ng Vit Lon. "Half-hatched duck". We weren't sure we could rise to the occasion, but with a slow nibble at first, we managed. It seems odd, but there were no bones or feathers, it was salty, had a variety of tastes within the same shell, and wasn't essentially different, in a philosophical sense, than eating a whole roast fully hatched duck, or a whole fish on a platter, for that matter. If the concept makes you squeamish, prepare yourself for the photo at the end of the album.
We returned our motorbike a day late, but we assumed that Anh had communicated with the owner. He seemed a little upset about something, so we weren't sure why, and we left him with a lot more gas in the tank than he'd given us, so I just left it up to Anh to sort out with him, and paid him what he asked for - a bit more than he'd quoted the day before. He might have been annoyed that we didn't want to rent his room, but I had valid reasons for refusing it, and one reason, perfectly valid in my own mind, apart from a mattress that was too hard for my 61 year old hip bones, is that I couldn't get the feeling he was completely trustworthy.
All in all, Deborah felt she'd had a marvelous birthday. Anh, who freelanced graphic design and website building, took the whole day off and spent it with us.
Jan 23rd: We spent the day eating inexpensive food and drinking coffee north of the tourist zone. We visited one very scenic spot, and checked out a "homestay" we found online. The homestay was cheap but was actually more like an extremely budget hotel, more like a flophouse than anything better, unless we were willing to 20% pay more than we'd been paying for our hotel, in order to stay in the main part of the house. The room in the main house would have been basically the same as the hotel, and we'd have access to a kitchen with pots and dishes, but I wasn't impressed by the housekeeping. Anh was very keen to have us rent it, so he could shop in the local market and cook with us in the kitchen, and bring his mother to visit. I was sorry to disappoint him.
Anh spent the day with us, and Sophie was with us for breakfast and morning coffee before Anh took her to the bus station for her trip to Da Lat. After she left, we had more conversation with Anh, and then he led us to see the Cau Go, a locally famous wooden bridge. It's a very long, privately built and maintained wooden bridge barely wide enough to two motorcycles to pass each other, which they did frequently and skillfully, and rather speedily. There was a toll both at one end. We rode across and back, and took photos. It was a little hairy. When we ride a scooter, I wear my backpack on my chest with the straps back over my shoulders for Deb to hang onto. Sometimes she can't suppress the urge to steer me with the handles of my backpack, and can't easily bring herself to lean into the corners with me. We had one awkward moment worrying about someone who was coming toward us, but we recovered quickly, and on the return bridge we had the boards to ourselves for most of the length. The boards make quite a racket under your tires.
For lunch we had smoked oysters with onion and a kind of wasabe sauce, and some regular shrimp, but Anh slipped in a little "appetizer surprise": Teu'ng Vit Lon. "Half-hatched duck". We weren't sure we could rise to the occasion, but with a slow nibble at first, we managed. It seems odd, but there were no bones or feathers, it was salty, had a variety of tastes within the same shell, and wasn't essentially different, in a philosophical sense, than eating a whole roast fully hatched duck, or a whole fish on a platter, for that matter. If the concept makes you squeamish, prepare yourself for the photo at the end of the album.
We returned our motorbike a day late, but we assumed that Anh had communicated with the owner. He seemed a little upset about something, so we weren't sure why, and we left him with a lot more gas in the tank than he'd given us, so I just left it up to Anh to sort out with him, and paid him what he asked for - a bit more than he'd quoted the day before. He might have been annoyed that we didn't want to rent his room, but I had valid reasons for refusing it, and one reason, perfectly valid in my own mind, apart from a mattress that was too hard for my 61 year old hip bones, is that I couldn't get the feeling he was completely trustworthy.
He took our money, and I saw him slip something surreptitiously to Anh but I paid no mind to it; but later outside the hotel Anh pulled four bills from his pocket, a quarter of what we'd paid, and declared that the owner had given him a commission that he hadn't asked for and didn't want. He told us it was actually our money, not his. He seemed embarrassed, and a little upset with his exchange with the owner. We accepted it back from him. We are grateful to Anh for the time he has spent with us. He always pays his own share of everything we do, even though we try to treat him a little at meals as the day goes by. He saves us money taking us to local eateries and by paying Vietnamese prices. He describes himself as a painfully shy and introverted person, and is even reading a book in English about how to turn introversion traits to advantage, but we enjoyed his company, and all the food adventures and Nha Trang discoveries he led us on in the past two days.
Later Anh confirmed that the guy had been really shifty with him, and had tried to insist that we pay for "two and a half days", counting the hours from 3 until 6 as a half day on the first day, and the next two twelve hour periods each as a "day" of twelve hours - so even though we wouldn't use the bike at night when it was parked and we were asleep, the vendor wanted us to pay a full day's rate from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. as well. That's the sort of bait-and-switch creative charge we'd come to anticipate in Vietnam if you pay at the end of a service instead of up front, but this was one of the more weird and extreme examples.
Jan 24th was a "downtime" day. We had buffet breakfast at a hotel that serves a mostly Russian occupancy, and took in our laundry. Apart from that, we just strolled in the neighbourhood, looked at another little apartment hotel, read "Understanding Vietnam", worked on the diary and photos, and rested. Deborah had been fighting a cold for two days, and I had a little scratch in my throat as well.
On Jan 25th we were back in the saddle. Vicki O'Brien from Quadra Island drove in from her village six kilometres south of town and met with us in the morning. We spent all day together, met an old friend of hers who lives in the market, Bich ("Bik"), who is probably approaching 80,. We introduced Anh to Vicki as well. Vicki was astonished to learn that we are staying in her favourite hotel, of all the hotels in the town - probably hundreds. Vicki introduced us to a favourite Banh Mi lady around the corner from the hotel, who also makes a generous glass of tasty Vietnamese coffee. The lady knew Bich and told her we were there, so she joined us just after Vicki had told us of her intention to find Bich and have a visit. We invited Bich to join us for breakfast Banh Mi and coffee, and saw her later in the day minding the egg counter at the stall where she gets to sleep at night. Later Vicki and Anh had lunch with us at one of Vicki's favourite restaurants, where we ate a tasty noodle dish and some Nem - roll-your-own spring rolls, basically.
Bich spoke English quite well, although she didn't get to keep it up by practicing on a regular basis, and certainly not daily. She worked for the American air base as a translator, typist and stenographer when she was a young woman. Sadly, her husband left with an American woman and she was left behind when Vietnam fell, and was put in a North Vietnamese "Re-education Camp" for seven years. Upon her release, as with all who supported the south (and their children and grandchildren), in spite of her skills and education she was shut out of any kind of meaningful employment, so she'll never receive any care or any pension. She was a street cleaner who collected recycling materials from the trash, but says her take was small because there awee so many others, more each day, who were moving in on her turf.
For the previous fifteen years she'd slept on the floor just inside the closed gate of a market stall, being a sort of night watchperson. She was smart and friendly, and prided herself on being especially honest and dignified with everyone she meets, with the result that she had many friends in the market and a few she'd met on the streets throughout the years - Vicki for one. Another was "Susan", a woman who she said came from the U.S. once or twice a year and would hand out a bit of largesse to a collection of individuals in need. She valued her friendship with Vicki and was at pains to explain to others that "it's not about money".
Later Anh confirmed that the guy had been really shifty with him, and had tried to insist that we pay for "two and a half days", counting the hours from 3 until 6 as a half day on the first day, and the next two twelve hour periods each as a "day" of twelve hours - so even though we wouldn't use the bike at night when it was parked and we were asleep, the vendor wanted us to pay a full day's rate from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. as well. That's the sort of bait-and-switch creative charge we'd come to anticipate in Vietnam if you pay at the end of a service instead of up front, but this was one of the more weird and extreme examples.
Jan 24th was a "downtime" day. We had buffet breakfast at a hotel that serves a mostly Russian occupancy, and took in our laundry. Apart from that, we just strolled in the neighbourhood, looked at another little apartment hotel, read "Understanding Vietnam", worked on the diary and photos, and rested. Deborah had been fighting a cold for two days, and I had a little scratch in my throat as well.
On Jan 25th we were back in the saddle. Vicki O'Brien from Quadra Island drove in from her village six kilometres south of town and met with us in the morning. We spent all day together, met an old friend of hers who lives in the market, Bich ("Bik"), who is probably approaching 80,. We introduced Anh to Vicki as well. Vicki was astonished to learn that we are staying in her favourite hotel, of all the hotels in the town - probably hundreds. Vicki introduced us to a favourite Banh Mi lady around the corner from the hotel, who also makes a generous glass of tasty Vietnamese coffee. The lady knew Bich and told her we were there, so she joined us just after Vicki had told us of her intention to find Bich and have a visit. We invited Bich to join us for breakfast Banh Mi and coffee, and saw her later in the day minding the egg counter at the stall where she gets to sleep at night. Later Vicki and Anh had lunch with us at one of Vicki's favourite restaurants, where we ate a tasty noodle dish and some Nem - roll-your-own spring rolls, basically.
Bich spoke English quite well, although she didn't get to keep it up by practicing on a regular basis, and certainly not daily. She worked for the American air base as a translator, typist and stenographer when she was a young woman. Sadly, her husband left with an American woman and she was left behind when Vietnam fell, and was put in a North Vietnamese "Re-education Camp" for seven years. Upon her release, as with all who supported the south (and their children and grandchildren), in spite of her skills and education she was shut out of any kind of meaningful employment, so she'll never receive any care or any pension. She was a street cleaner who collected recycling materials from the trash, but says her take was small because there awee so many others, more each day, who were moving in on her turf.
For the previous fifteen years she'd slept on the floor just inside the closed gate of a market stall, being a sort of night watchperson. She was smart and friendly, and prided herself on being especially honest and dignified with everyone she meets, with the result that she had many friends in the market and a few she'd met on the streets throughout the years - Vicki for one. Another was "Susan", a woman who she said came from the U.S. once or twice a year and would hand out a bit of largesse to a collection of individuals in need. She valued her friendship with Vicki and was at pains to explain to others that "it's not about money".
In describing her handouts from Susan, she pointed out, "It's not Susan's money, I'm not taking Susan's money; it's money from people in American who gave it to Susan to bring here and give to people in Vietnam". In other words, she tried to ensure that everyone she met realized that she hadn't descended to the status of a beggar. She had no income, sometimes didn't eat for a few days, was sometimes ill, and if she gots tired and fell asleep on the beach someone would steal the recycling she'd collected, or her tiny stash of cash along with her (cheap) cigarettes; but she was no charity case. Vicki had offered her money and heard her say, in effect, "No thanks, I'm loaded, I have enough for the next five days." Which would be an amount that for us, wouldn't begin to suffice for a day, but she could get by on very little.
During Tet, everyone celebrated by doing a massive spring cleaning, buying new clothing, giving presents of money to the youngest and the oldest, and to old people like Bich who had no-one but their community to rely on. Vicki told us that young Vietnamese people are pretty good about doing charitable work for homeless people, orphans, etc. Deb remembered that Tam had mentioned doing that in Saigon. Vicki would give Bich a red envelope of cash and buy her a new hat, shoes and some clothing for Tet. We might get in on that action as well.
Vicki had warned us that Nha Trang is a major destination for Vietnamese wanting a place to vacation and celebrate Tet. Prices for hotels, restaurants, food and even things like cans of spray paint in the local hardware store would skyrocket. The population of Nha Trang would quadruple, and we were warned to carry nothing with us except a bit of pocket change when we went outside our rooms, because thieves from out of town and from the delta would descend on the town. Guys on motorbikes would grab (one driving, one grabbing) bags right off your shoulder, and drag you along the pavement if you wouldn't let go - it happened to Vicki once right here in Nha Trang (this was her fifth year returning to Vietnam), and to others we've read about in Saigon. She's lost her purse twice to purse snatchers.
Apparently no-one goes to Da Lat, which is a college town that, rather, empties out during Tet, so hotel rooms remain cheap and restaurants and food remains cheap. If we stayed in Nha Trang there was still some question in our minds about whether our hotel would try to force our daily rate higher during Tet, possibly even triple it. They told us they wouldn't, but Vicki said they've done it to previous guests, friends of hers that she had installed at this hotel. Even if our room rate stayed the same, we might find it difficult to eat at the prices we'd been used to. We were staying put, but keeping our eyes and ears open for options if and when we needed them. Tet is normally five days long, with one day being the actual day of the Lunar New Year, but this year those five days fell between two weekends, so the gov't had determined that this year Tet would be ten days long - a "Super-Tet", if you will. One of our options might be just to stock up on snacks, fruit and water for the main day when everything would be closed, and for the few days at a stretch when the prices might be astronomical.
We were in room 301, and we met the man who owns the hotel, a 4-stars-on-his-epaulets Navy guy who teaches at the Naval Academy (North Vietnamese Navy, of course). I never knew what he teaches, but he didn't have to put in long days. He looked pretty spiffy in his uniform. He was not well-liked in the cul-de-sac because he got his land given to him to build his hotel, while the rest of the hotels butted up against each other cheek by jowl were owned by people who'd owned their properties here forever. So he was a Johnny-come-lately and they didn't feel that he'd earned what he has. The land may have been confiscated from a friend of theirs too, I suppose. He seemed like a kindly man, though, and Vicki told us that he and his wife treated their staff well compared to the staff at other hotels.
Vicki gave us a real education, talking about many things she'd learned over the years of returning to Vietnam. We decided on getting monthly bus passes rather than buying second-hand bicycles. Buying them would be cheaper than we could rent them for seven weeks. We could buy them and give them away at the end of our stay cheaper than we could rent them. Vicki confirmed that there's a major price fixing racket going on here for rental bikes, and that rental prices have doubled and even tripled in a couple of years. There were tons of unrented bikes lined up on the sidewalks, but the vendors wouldn't budge on their prices...very odd. In Hoi An they rent for a dollar a day and all the tourists use them; here they tripled the prices and no-one used them, but they don't see a connection. If you bring up Hoi An they cry out, "Don't compare us to Hoi An!", even though it is a rather obvious fact that bicycles cost the same all over Vietnam. A new one was about $75, and a used one could be bought for $35 or less.
We decided to walk up and talk to Danny from California, a Vietnamese guy who returned to care for his mother and who has five food stalls in the Nha Trang Center. We were going to ask him whether food and restaurant prices will skyrocket there, or whether the center would be closed during Tet, and if so, for how many days. It's like a regular western food court in a regular western mall, so all the food prices are posted on the walls, and I couldn't quite see how they'd double or triple those prices for just a few days.
Jan 26th: another relatively quiet day. We rested a lot because we were still suffering from colds, but Anh had fun introducing us to some north Vietnamese dishes that he found at a pleasant restaurant not far from our hotel. We learned that the Nha Trang Center would only close for one day, Jan 31st, so we should be able to stock up with snack food for the day: roast peanuts, bananas, water, cans of beer, cookies, crackers, that sort of thing. We believe that there still might be other restaurants open in the tourist area, but of course the fewer there are, the more expensive they'll be. There are two hotels nearby that put on a good buffet breakfast at a fixed price for the tour groups that stay with them, and sell tickets to people from off the street as well, so I'm guessing those will still be operating.
We decided to go to the bus station with our passports to try to buy monthly passes. With those, we'd began mapping out the six bus routes. No-one knew of a map of the bus routes in existence, although there are specified stops with signs for them all. We'd check at the station while were buying the passes. And we had more local Couchsurfers to meet, one who was working on his IELTS and another who had invited us to a conversation class run by a western guy in a wheelchair who was a retired consultant from the U.K.
Jan 27th: we had breakfast with Anh at "Hanoi Corner" restaurant, then embarked on a wild goose chase looking for the place to buy monthly bus passes. After a bus ride in one direction and a taxi ride in the other, we finally ended up deciding not to buy them, but to just walk short distances and "pay-as-you-go" on those occasions when we feel it necessary to ride. While deliberating, we went into the nearby Long Son Pagoda, quite famous as a memorial to seven Buddhist monks who committed suicide by self-immolation, to call the world's attention to American military atrocities and to bring U.S. citizens to a sense of shame and anger over their foreign policies. I was going to write "who practiced self-immolation", but quickly realized that it isn't something you need to practice; they all got it right the very first time.
We walked over and met Mac, and had a chat. We stepped out for lunch, and then went back for the afternoon to join in on Mac's conversational English class, which we quite enjoyed. There were four Vietnamese students, and a young French teacher who was here on a two year teaching contract at a French school. We spent three hours presenting and then fielding questions about Canada, winter, winter sports, etc. We used google images to illustrate our answers to their questions. Mac and his friend John were also there conversing. We left feeling that we'd had a pleasant time and that the hours had passed very quickly. We decided to return frequently. Mac had an evening group three times a week as well, so on some days we thought we might go in the evenings instead, but it would be a long walk back to our hotel, and the buses, so we'd been told, stopped running at six. Maybe we'd limit ourselves to the afternoon group, but it would be good to meet the evening students as well.
We began stocking up on snack food in case restaurants and stores closee for Tet, or the restaurant prices climb. We decided to stockpile some peanuts, oranges, green bananas, cookies, instant noodles, water, that sort of thing. Tet is a really big deal for Vietnamese and at its core is essentially a three day event: the first day is to reunite with family and ancestors, the second to visit relatives, and the third to visit friends, teachers and other important people in your life. It is Christmas, New Year, Easter, Thanksgiving, Canada Day and all of our festivals rolled into one. The fireworks would be awesome, but we'd have to nap and then get up to see them - they happen at the stroke of midnight on first day of the Lunar New Year, which would be January 31st, this year.
Jan 28th: After a decent $4 buffet in a hotel north of the bridge on the beach road, we shopped for items in the market with Anh's help that would tide us over if/when our food options dried up for a day or two, and also for some gifts that it seemed appropriate to give the hotel staff and Anh's mother, who was arriving from Hanoi that evening to visit her son. Anh invited us to join them for supper the next evening.
We had another pleasant afternoon at Mac's, and met a grade 7 student who is bright as a button, seems to have an encyclopedic mind and speaks English remarkably well. Her mother drops her off to participate in Mac's afternoon conversation sessions. We met Lloyd from Missouri, who had decided to stay here long term with his wife Esther, and we'd met Penny and Graham from England the day before. I had a tennis invitation early the next morning - they'd have to lend me shoes and racquet, but they'd rotate me in. There would be six of us, including Mac, who played in his wheelchair.
Jan 29th. Tennis went well; lunch with Anh's mother went well. Both events are in the second photo album. We rode a #2 bus to the terminus where we found a large sign listing all the streets that each of the six bus routes consist of, so now all we have to do is find a decent street map of the city, and a small pack of coloured highlighters. For Jan 31st, we planned a restful day and late day nap before getting out onto the beach for a stage show followed by fireworks right at midnight.
During Tet, everyone celebrated by doing a massive spring cleaning, buying new clothing, giving presents of money to the youngest and the oldest, and to old people like Bich who had no-one but their community to rely on. Vicki told us that young Vietnamese people are pretty good about doing charitable work for homeless people, orphans, etc. Deb remembered that Tam had mentioned doing that in Saigon. Vicki would give Bich a red envelope of cash and buy her a new hat, shoes and some clothing for Tet. We might get in on that action as well.
Vicki had warned us that Nha Trang is a major destination for Vietnamese wanting a place to vacation and celebrate Tet. Prices for hotels, restaurants, food and even things like cans of spray paint in the local hardware store would skyrocket. The population of Nha Trang would quadruple, and we were warned to carry nothing with us except a bit of pocket change when we went outside our rooms, because thieves from out of town and from the delta would descend on the town. Guys on motorbikes would grab (one driving, one grabbing) bags right off your shoulder, and drag you along the pavement if you wouldn't let go - it happened to Vicki once right here in Nha Trang (this was her fifth year returning to Vietnam), and to others we've read about in Saigon. She's lost her purse twice to purse snatchers.
Apparently no-one goes to Da Lat, which is a college town that, rather, empties out during Tet, so hotel rooms remain cheap and restaurants and food remains cheap. If we stayed in Nha Trang there was still some question in our minds about whether our hotel would try to force our daily rate higher during Tet, possibly even triple it. They told us they wouldn't, but Vicki said they've done it to previous guests, friends of hers that she had installed at this hotel. Even if our room rate stayed the same, we might find it difficult to eat at the prices we'd been used to. We were staying put, but keeping our eyes and ears open for options if and when we needed them. Tet is normally five days long, with one day being the actual day of the Lunar New Year, but this year those five days fell between two weekends, so the gov't had determined that this year Tet would be ten days long - a "Super-Tet", if you will. One of our options might be just to stock up on snacks, fruit and water for the main day when everything would be closed, and for the few days at a stretch when the prices might be astronomical.
We were in room 301, and we met the man who owns the hotel, a 4-stars-on-his-epaulets Navy guy who teaches at the Naval Academy (North Vietnamese Navy, of course). I never knew what he teaches, but he didn't have to put in long days. He looked pretty spiffy in his uniform. He was not well-liked in the cul-de-sac because he got his land given to him to build his hotel, while the rest of the hotels butted up against each other cheek by jowl were owned by people who'd owned their properties here forever. So he was a Johnny-come-lately and they didn't feel that he'd earned what he has. The land may have been confiscated from a friend of theirs too, I suppose. He seemed like a kindly man, though, and Vicki told us that he and his wife treated their staff well compared to the staff at other hotels.
Vicki gave us a real education, talking about many things she'd learned over the years of returning to Vietnam. We decided on getting monthly bus passes rather than buying second-hand bicycles. Buying them would be cheaper than we could rent them for seven weeks. We could buy them and give them away at the end of our stay cheaper than we could rent them. Vicki confirmed that there's a major price fixing racket going on here for rental bikes, and that rental prices have doubled and even tripled in a couple of years. There were tons of unrented bikes lined up on the sidewalks, but the vendors wouldn't budge on their prices...very odd. In Hoi An they rent for a dollar a day and all the tourists use them; here they tripled the prices and no-one used them, but they don't see a connection. If you bring up Hoi An they cry out, "Don't compare us to Hoi An!", even though it is a rather obvious fact that bicycles cost the same all over Vietnam. A new one was about $75, and a used one could be bought for $35 or less.
We decided to walk up and talk to Danny from California, a Vietnamese guy who returned to care for his mother and who has five food stalls in the Nha Trang Center. We were going to ask him whether food and restaurant prices will skyrocket there, or whether the center would be closed during Tet, and if so, for how many days. It's like a regular western food court in a regular western mall, so all the food prices are posted on the walls, and I couldn't quite see how they'd double or triple those prices for just a few days.
Jan 26th: another relatively quiet day. We rested a lot because we were still suffering from colds, but Anh had fun introducing us to some north Vietnamese dishes that he found at a pleasant restaurant not far from our hotel. We learned that the Nha Trang Center would only close for one day, Jan 31st, so we should be able to stock up with snack food for the day: roast peanuts, bananas, water, cans of beer, cookies, crackers, that sort of thing. We believe that there still might be other restaurants open in the tourist area, but of course the fewer there are, the more expensive they'll be. There are two hotels nearby that put on a good buffet breakfast at a fixed price for the tour groups that stay with them, and sell tickets to people from off the street as well, so I'm guessing those will still be operating.
We decided to go to the bus station with our passports to try to buy monthly passes. With those, we'd began mapping out the six bus routes. No-one knew of a map of the bus routes in existence, although there are specified stops with signs for them all. We'd check at the station while were buying the passes. And we had more local Couchsurfers to meet, one who was working on his IELTS and another who had invited us to a conversation class run by a western guy in a wheelchair who was a retired consultant from the U.K.
Jan 27th: we had breakfast with Anh at "Hanoi Corner" restaurant, then embarked on a wild goose chase looking for the place to buy monthly bus passes. After a bus ride in one direction and a taxi ride in the other, we finally ended up deciding not to buy them, but to just walk short distances and "pay-as-you-go" on those occasions when we feel it necessary to ride. While deliberating, we went into the nearby Long Son Pagoda, quite famous as a memorial to seven Buddhist monks who committed suicide by self-immolation, to call the world's attention to American military atrocities and to bring U.S. citizens to a sense of shame and anger over their foreign policies. I was going to write "who practiced self-immolation", but quickly realized that it isn't something you need to practice; they all got it right the very first time.
We walked over and met Mac, and had a chat. We stepped out for lunch, and then went back for the afternoon to join in on Mac's conversational English class, which we quite enjoyed. There were four Vietnamese students, and a young French teacher who was here on a two year teaching contract at a French school. We spent three hours presenting and then fielding questions about Canada, winter, winter sports, etc. We used google images to illustrate our answers to their questions. Mac and his friend John were also there conversing. We left feeling that we'd had a pleasant time and that the hours had passed very quickly. We decided to return frequently. Mac had an evening group three times a week as well, so on some days we thought we might go in the evenings instead, but it would be a long walk back to our hotel, and the buses, so we'd been told, stopped running at six. Maybe we'd limit ourselves to the afternoon group, but it would be good to meet the evening students as well.
We began stocking up on snack food in case restaurants and stores closee for Tet, or the restaurant prices climb. We decided to stockpile some peanuts, oranges, green bananas, cookies, instant noodles, water, that sort of thing. Tet is a really big deal for Vietnamese and at its core is essentially a three day event: the first day is to reunite with family and ancestors, the second to visit relatives, and the third to visit friends, teachers and other important people in your life. It is Christmas, New Year, Easter, Thanksgiving, Canada Day and all of our festivals rolled into one. The fireworks would be awesome, but we'd have to nap and then get up to see them - they happen at the stroke of midnight on first day of the Lunar New Year, which would be January 31st, this year.
Jan 28th: After a decent $4 buffet in a hotel north of the bridge on the beach road, we shopped for items in the market with Anh's help that would tide us over if/when our food options dried up for a day or two, and also for some gifts that it seemed appropriate to give the hotel staff and Anh's mother, who was arriving from Hanoi that evening to visit her son. Anh invited us to join them for supper the next evening.
We had another pleasant afternoon at Mac's, and met a grade 7 student who is bright as a button, seems to have an encyclopedic mind and speaks English remarkably well. Her mother drops her off to participate in Mac's afternoon conversation sessions. We met Lloyd from Missouri, who had decided to stay here long term with his wife Esther, and we'd met Penny and Graham from England the day before. I had a tennis invitation early the next morning - they'd have to lend me shoes and racquet, but they'd rotate me in. There would be six of us, including Mac, who played in his wheelchair.
Jan 29th. Tennis went well; lunch with Anh's mother went well. Both events are in the second photo album. We rode a #2 bus to the terminus where we found a large sign listing all the streets that each of the six bus routes consist of, so now all we have to do is find a decent street map of the city, and a small pack of coloured highlighters. For Jan 31st, we planned a restful day and late day nap before getting out onto the beach for a stage show followed by fireworks right at midnight.
Next diary entry: Tet
Catching up on your blog. Happy Belated Birthday to Deb! Loving your adventures. Was thinking about retiring in Panama, but Vietnam is suddenly looking very attractive.
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