Koreans work a brutal amount of hours in a week, and a brutal amount of days in a year, and unfortunately that means that so do I. On my blink-and-it's-gone vacation time in July, I jetted off to Viet Nam with my co-worker-friend Shawna looking for a little adventure.
We spent the first 18 hours of our trip in Ho Chi Minh City, also known as Saigon. "Which do you like better- Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon?" asked one of our friendly cab drivers. "Saigon," Shawna and I both chimed. "Me too!" exclaimed the driver. So Saigon it is.
After dropping our bags at a hotel, we rushed to the War Remnants Museum to make it there before it closed. The Museum of American and Chinese War Crimes was recently renamed the War Remnants Museum after some worry about the old name offending some people. Of course, what is really offensive are the American and Chinese war crimes- which are, despite the name change, still vividly showcased within the museum walls. Visitors view photograph after photograph depicting revolting scenes of the war and of the people caught in the crossfire and aftermath. In the Agent Orange section of the museum, there are jars of formaldehyde containing deformed human fetuses. Some of the photographs were hard to stomach. The rest were impossible to stomach, which is why I barely looked at many of them. It's an uneasy feeling to know what horrors a human being is capable of performing when put into a certain position. Relief comes during a tour of the last exhibit, a collection of children's paintings, most of which are blissful scenes of peace.
Shawna and I decided to walk back to our hotel using only our instincts for a compass. We were feeling especially intuitive that day, I guess, but also, really, what else were we gonna do? We had arrived too late in the day to check out any more of the tourist attractions and it was too early for the night life to begin. Might as well walk the streets and try to get a sense of daily life in Saigon. We walked by one place frequented by tourists that was just closing up. I’m not sure what it was exactly. We were sans guidebook. I think it may have been the Reunification Palace. All I know for certain was that I wanted to walk around the grounds for a bit to get a closer look at the gnarly trees. So, while Shawna was being hawked by one of the street vendors and the guards at the gate were busy conversing with some unruly guests, I very slowly moseyed on in… I got pretty far too, almost all the way to the trees, when I heard an approaching man calling, “Madam, Madam” behind me, to which I replied, “Oh, oh, sorry, what? I can’t be in here? Oh, sorry, Okay, Well, can I just take a picture of the tree? No? Oh, okay then.” A few seconds later I was escorted from the premises. So close, yet so far. Half a day is not enough time to see Saigon… but we were already painfully aware of this.
Our instincts never did lead us back to our hotel. For that, we had to look on a map which we picked up from the famous Majestic Hotel, which was one thing to which our instincts did lead us.
We spent most of the evening in a bar called “Lost in Saigon”, which Shawna decided could not possibly be THE “Lost in Saigon” bar that the Lonely Planet deems to be THE happenin’ place in Saigon, because happenin’, it was not. We met a very peculiar man who entertained us with his lame jokes for quite some time (which incidentally became funnier the longer we sat at the bar). Eventually, we made our way to the Bodhi Tree, a vegetarian restaurant with what may be the most extensive menu in the world. I had become a bit jaded about the lack of (actual) vegetarian food options in Korea (once, after asking the pizza delivery boy which was the vegetarian pizza, he pointed and said, ‘the pepperoni one’) and so when we went into this place, I went a little wild, ordering three entrees to myself. While we chowed down, a group of street performers parked their act in front of us and we watched as one of them swallowed fire, another fed an unfortunate snake down his nose and out through his mouth, and another put a sword down his throat.
The next morning, we were on a plane again. This time to a small beach city between Saigon and Hanoi, called Nha Trang. Wild times ensued. Our ultimate goal in Viet Nam was to get PADI Open Water certified. We went straight away to Rainbow Divers and signed up to start our course the following day. We spent the first two days in the classroom and in the pool. Training was nerve-racking. I didn’t realize how intense it actually is to breathe underwater. Plus, there are all the things you have to remember so that you don’t destroy your eardrums, or give yourself the Bends, or rupture your lungs. It’s a bit frightening. The image of a balloon over-expanding and bursting, like your lungs would do if you held your breath while ascending, kept running through my head, thanks to the PADI video that Shawna and I watched during training.
All my fears floated away the minute I got into the ocean, however. Hovering in the water with fish darting all around me, coral beneath me, and the surface 18 meters above me was one of the most amazing sensations I’ve ever felt. Although the Vietnamese have fished out all of the big things living in the waters around it, the remaining tropical fish are wonderfully colorful and strange. Trumpet fish, parrot fish, clown fish, lion fish, sea moths, honeycomb moray eels, groupers, and many, many others. I pet an old broken-jawed eel. I was kissed by cleaner fish. I was attacked by clown fish (not so funny, after all). One of the most incredible things about the dives we made was that time seemed to move at a completely different pace. What feels like ten short minutes underwater, is 45 minutes above the surface. Surreal.
We made four ocean dives in total. The rest of our time in Nha Trang was spent laying on the beach, drinking with our new diving friends, dancing at the indescribably beautiful Sailing Club, a restaurant/lounge/club/garden on the beach, dodging sketchy ladyboys, dodging motorcycles, saying ‘no, no, no’ to street vendors, eating cheap and delicious food, and wishing we could stay longer.
Our last day in Nha Trang was spent on stand-by at the airport. We missed our flight out of there in the morning, due to my inability to read an itinerary and the airplane’s ability to leave earlier than it is supposed to. When Shawna, who can read itineraries, discovered that our plane was actually departing at 9:40 a.m. (I had told her that it was at 4:00 p.m.--don’t ask!), it was 8:50 a.m. I had just woken up and she was pounding on the door saying ‘Uh, Erin… I think this says 9:40’. It takes an hour to get from our hotel to the airport. In three minutes, we packed up all of our stuff, paid for our hotel, and jumped into a cab. We told our driver to go faster and faster as we offered larger and larger sums of money to him. We ended up making it to the terminal at 9:32, and I really thought we’d make it seeing as how the Nha Trang airport is microscopic as far as airports go. But as we ran into the building, it became evident that it was futile. The place was deserted except for one lone check-in attendant who looked at us like we were insane as we breathlessly ran to him. “It left twenty minutes ago,” he told us. Ah, defeat.
We had no choice but to remain at the airport all day, looking pitiful and like we might have nervous breakdowns. The problem was not so much that we had missed our flight, but it was that we needed to get to Hanoi by the following night so that we could catch our flight back to Korea and keep our jobs. And, the geography of Viet Nam being what it is, the only way to traverse that distance in that amount of time is to fly. A bus, a train, or a car could only get us to the airport in Hanoi several hours late for our flight. So… we were stuck. When trying to explain our plight to an airline employee, we were told, “Well, I think that you can hope to get on a plane.” Not very reassuring! We began to toy with the idea of abandoning our lives in Korea and staying in Viet Nam for a couple months, diving and drinking, until the money runs out. Then what? Become rice farmers, possibly…
Luckily, we scored the last two seats on the last plane of the day out of Nha Trang. Rice farming may be in the cards for me one day, but not yet…
After one day spent in the Old Quarter in Hanoi (shopping, walking, watching a water puppet theatre show), we were back in an airport again and on our way ‘home’.
