Vietnam

All the students, family, lifelong learners, and myself are back aboard the MV Explore after leaving Vietnam for a stay from Tuesday February 12 through 6am this morning Monday February 18. Along the way, we’ve had some crew members leave along the way at the end of their assignments, some new crew come aboard, and some new family and lifelong learners join us. It’s a fairly big shipboard community of about 1000 total, but we all seem to at least recognize each other if not know most everyone by name. It’s fun to see SAS folks out in the country miles and miles from port: I saw my cabin steward John at one of the local bars, and we ran into multiple students in the Mekong Delta about 125 miles from the ship.

Port in Vietnam has been a little different from other ports. We sailed up the river and inland toward Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), and the river got progressively smaller and shallower as we reached our dock. Beyond the dock, smaller boats are able to travel further inland, depending on the tide. Much of Vietnam is based around the water, with the Mekong Delta having lots of tributaries and access points that allow small boats that can carry a family and their belongings (crops, animals, supplies, and market goods) into very shallow waters as we saw during our homestay later in the trip.

Small boats on the way into Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, and still called Saigon by many of the locals.

Since we’ve left China about a week and a half ago, the temperatures have been rising, and it’s been a bit of a shock to go from weather similar to Virginia’s in February to Vietnam’s hot and humid climate, similar to Virginia’s oppressive heat in July. Our first day, the ship began heading upriver around daybreak and docked at 1230, with the captain timing arrival at high tide and the peak of the heat and intense sunshine. Beautiful but hot. We walked around HCMC and saw some of the sights of a large urban city that reflects some of the recent changes in modern Vietnam: growth of business in a busy commercial port area, explosion of population and ensuing chaos in traffic (more about that later), areas of new affluence side by side with older neighborhoods where the majority of the population is poor by our standards (per capita average is around $1500) but richer now in the post war decades.

The Vietnamese Lunar New Year, or Tet, was also in full swing, and many people were traveling, so on various times of the days there would be sparser or bigger crowds on the street. On that first day, we saw a flower market set up on one of the main streets, and this street was closed to traffic with displays and sculptures drawing throngs of HCMC natives, visiting family members, and tourists from US, UK, and other parts of Europe. Oh, yeah, it was also hot. The next day, the flower displays were removed and the brick flowerbeds dismantled.

Lion dance performed on the street.

Sandy in the flower garden at Vietnamese Lunar New Year, or Tet.

Semester at Sea organizes trips within countries and also allows folks to set up their own travels and adventures independently within each country we visit, so many of the students took buses and taxis to the beach or war-era tunnels or other sights. Ellen, Jasper, and I took a SAS-organized trip while Ellen’s dad took a SAS trip into Cambodia, which is the one way you can travel outside the country without going awry of the rules. I think Sandy’s trip was great but I haven’t really had much chance yet to catch up with him now that we’re back, so I’ll detail what we did on our trip.

Our SAS trip was pretty decent and it was great to turn over the planning and logistics to someone else other than tour-guide Julie (inside joke that we call Ellen because she usually gets stuck planning our trips, and it’s a reference to the character Julie from tv’s The Love Boat). Wednesday morning we boarded a bus along with a few other faculty and lifelong learners and about 35 students to visit the Mekong Delta south of HCMC for a 2-night homestay. The term “homestay” to us meant visiting one family and staying in their home and participating in the activities of the host country and family. With this large a group, it worked out slightly differently, but in my view better, since we stayed the first night in a bed & breakfast-type cottage setting run by one family; we helped them prepare our evening meal and spent some time with them but had our own time to explore and had privacy since we were spread out into perhaps 15 rooms. On the way to our first-night homestay, the bus took us about 200 kilometers into the Mekong Delta to a series of ferry rides and small boats with a few stops along the way to visit tea houses and rice-candy vendors.

Our homestay family waves goodbye to us. They were very gracious and treated us to music and song that evening.

One of the most surreal and coolest events I can recently remember is a couple hours into our boat ride on the Delta having the boat driver cut the engines and us floating along in quietude for a few minutes. Then, around the next bend in the tributary, a group of about a dozen smaller oar-powered boats sailed toward us, each driven by a straw-hatted elderly Vietnamese woman (well, a few were steered by men). Each boat held three or four passengers, so we boarded and rode the small boats for about 15 minutes just mere inches above the murky delta water. Ellen and Jasper were in one of the first boats, and I boarded the last boat with a few other students and a male driver. Either he was trying to prevent our slightly leaky boat from taking on too much water or else he had to take a whiz, but we progressively moved past all the other boats, sometimes bumping them, to reach our teahouse destination first. I’ll have to remember that gentle-nudge method of working through traffic on the first mountain bike race I’m in once I’m back.

A woman paddles through the floating market. We rode in boats exactly like this one.

 

The homestay was quite nice with the family opening their cottages to us and all us SAS folks wandering around the small canals and fruit trees of the property. Despite some advice from the ship doctor not to swim, a few of the students dove in along with a couple local boys, and I waffled on going in and took a pass. After the evening meal, a few of us hung out on the deck and viewed the brightest stars I’ve seen thus far on the trip.

Our next day, we traveled a shorter distance via boat ferry to our bus and headed to the capital city within the Mekong Delta province of Can Tho, much smaller than HCMC but full of motorbikes and vendors. Our guide steered us through a serpentine market with bracelets, lacquer ware, and all sorts of fresh seafood and poultry, most of it live and squirming. It had to be a bit difficult for the vegans on our trip to see the rows of cut meats, eyeballs, frogs, slithering eels, and squawking chickens in the market. We got back on the bus and drove a bit further to reach our next destination, the Kim Tho hotel in Can Tho, about a block from the water. The hotel was quite nice with European-style furnishings, a large bathroom, and three beds in our room, plus to Jasper’s delight there was a flat-screen tv with Cartoon Network. I have to admit I also watched a few episodes of Regular Show with J. We also had time to walk around and scope out the town on our own in the mid-day heat, and I found a few small markets and bought a sixer of sodas and some snacks for later.

We had a nice lunch in the hotel with seafood in various soups and dishes. I ate pretty much everything but picked out the organ meats (liver, tripe, and some others) from the soup, although I did take a nibble of each. I just still haven’t gotten into sweetmeats and organs and may not ever. Jasper at each meal had some nibbles of most dishes but really didn’t consume much, especially after swearing off shrimp since they’ve been served at the meals with the heads intact and he doesn’t like food that looks back at him. Oh, well, more shrimps for me.

Elephant Ear Fish, standing vertically before we ate it. The students and I took lots of shots of our food.

We did a bit more sightseeing that afternoon, including an ancient house (not quite a mansion but very ornate for a dwelling) and a stork park. We kept thinking our guide was telling us it was an historic park, but no, we departed the bus, dashed across the two-lane traffic of taxis and motos, and walked down a 2-meter-wide concrete strip about three kilometers through rice fields. Yep, this was a stork park where white storks and the occasional black stork nest in a bamboo reserve on someone’s farm. Along the way, we saw what we saw in many parts of Vietnam: trash strewn alongside the walkway, floating in the canals, and piled beside houses made of corrugated metal and scrap wood. In some ways, it reminds me of houses I’ve seen in Appalachia back home where folks tend to worry more about basic needs and sustenance rather than the raw beauty of the place where they live.

We got back to HCMC that evening a couple hours later than expected because the Tet holiday traffic was heavy and there was evidently a traffic accident that caused some of the traffic snarls. Our guide noted that Vietnam traffic is generally safe to walk through if you do it purposefully since the motos can steer around you on the city streets, but out on the open highways where the speeds are higher, motorbikes crashing leads to about 50 deaths each day, given the number of scooters and the number of riders on each scooter. Our guide had also told me that he prefers to call the city by its prewar name of Saigon, too, so I tried to remember than when asking him questions about his experiences.

 Scooter traffic. This moto carried a full-size fridge. I have a truck for this kind of errand-running.

Here's somewhat light traffic in a circle not far from the ship. Traffic gets even heavier at nightfall. Notice the scooter with four in the middle.

Friday we didn’t do much in Saigon other than find a grocery store on the second floor of a Macy’s-type store and stock up on snacks, sodas, and the prize of my trip so far: a couple bottles of Chimay and Duvel, Belgian beers I won’t see until we finish the spring voyage and stay onship another couple weeks for the enrichment voyage that ventures into Europe. Sorry for gushing, but beer is a big hobby of mine, and I’m either making it, drinking it, or hunting it down, and so far I’ve had a handful of light yellow lagers, all okay but not what I typically have at home where there’s a great selection of Virginian, American, Belgian, and international styles. Having a couple Belgian ales in my stash onboard is a comfort, and I’m saving these for a special occasion, perhaps our anniversary or Jasper’s birthday. Or a Thursday.

Saturday we spent a bit of the morning in Saigon checking out some markets that were back open after the holiday but losing interest in the heat and seeing the same type of tourist baubles. We’d been looking for a place to get a haircut, and Ellen saw a sign outside of a jewelry shop that looked like a salon. We walked in past the counters to the back where a middle-aged man was snoozing and two middle-aged women were watching tv. No common language other than our saying “xin chao” hello, but we confirmed that, yes, they were open and would cut Ellen’s hair and my hair for a quite reasonable cost of about 220,000 dong or $10. Ellen looked through a catalog of hairstyles while I motioned to the gentleman to take about a half-inch off. He gave me an excellent short haircut, similar to what I got in Mexico but with a little more skillful tapering of the sides. Ellen found a shot of a layered style that kept her curls, and she motioned for about two inches to be cut, which was countered by a suggestion of more, so she went with it. While Ellen and I had our hair cut, the ladies were fawning over Jasper’s long yellow hair, first gently stroking it then combing it. If you know J-man, you know he shies away from attention, but we asked him to chill and told him that it would be very adventurous of him to also get a cut. Plus, I offered him a bribe, which although sizeable was overdue since I haven’t kept up with his allowance. He still has long curly hair, but it’s now out of his eyes and looks nice, and we had a great time with this small cultural experience off the tourist track.

We're flashing our new haircuts in front of Pho 2000. Dingy decor and fabulous pho soup and spring rolls. There are pictures inside of President Bill Clinton's 2000 visit. All of us got haircuts, but Jasper kept the most on.

On Sunday, we needed to be back onship by 1800 (6pm), so Ellen and her dad went for a nice long lunch and then one of the two museums they wanted to visit. Jasper and I joined two other dependent children and two of the librarian assistants on a session of ice skating and bowling. The rink wasn’t actually ice, but the skates were hockey skates that glided on white plastic sheeting material about a centimeter thick and coated with a waxy film. The resistance was much higher than ice, but dang if you couldn’t skate on it, and it was enjoyable skating with the Vietnamese teens and kids with western top-40 rink music. The other SAS kids hadn’t skated before and fell a few times, ending up covered in crayon-like shavings but did a great job with their first skate session. Afterwards, we went bowling on the 5th floor of the next-door office building and then hit up the food court for a couple pizzas at Pizza Hut. Normally, you’d think bowling and PH would be not that exciting, but the bowling alley was classy with neon, a central liquor and smoothie bar, plus a KFC. Evidently, Kentucky Fried Chicken is a splurge in Saigon, and the Pizza Hut had a very nice bistro décor. The pizzas were smaller than we expected, but the presentation and quality were excellent, and the staff were very polite and the server asked if he could serve me the first slice; I was taken aback but said thank you: “cam on”. 

Backwards skating with Jasper, Keani, and Amanda. 

There was also a trampoline in the skating rink.

I could have been a contender. Or a goaltender.

We saw lots of Vietnamese flags along with several of the communist party's sickle. I think the gist of this mural is you should be a good child for the good of the country. 

We’re back on the ocean after sailing away from Saigon Monday morning February 18, headed toward Singapore in two days. Thanks for bearing with me if you made it through this long journal entry. Vietnam was a fantastic experience for me, and thanks for sharing in my thoughts.