My final day in Hanoi was spent at a leisurely pace with some people who I’d met sitting in front of the Backpacker’s Hostel after their night train, waiting for it to open. I saw the Temple of Literature, since I’d heard it is something to see, but it didn’t hold much allure after an entire winter of temple-gazing. After happy hour at Backpacker’s – happy hours are big in Asia – we went to an Irish pub to drink expensive pints before wandering farther afield to a streetside Bia Hoi (cheap, local draught, 3000 dong a glass) joint. We’d accumulated quite a crowd of us by that point, and it was with minor regret that I cut out early to catch a few hours of sleep before my flight to Bangkok.

Having missed the excitement of flaming buses careening into M16-wielding soldiers, the streets of Bangkok were much as I remembered them. I did very little my first day, read ‘On the Road’ by Kerouac, and tried to get to bed early, but had an atrocious time of it in my sweaty little Soi Rambuttri cell – I’d forgotten just how much of a dump my guesthouse was.

The next day I grabbed a taxi to Siam Square. The Siam Center is a mega-mall in the Western vein, and distracted me only until I could find the entrance to the BTS Skytrain that would carry me north to the Jatujak Weekend Market (JJ Market to the locals). I had known that the JJ market was huge, but I was unprepared for just how huge. While I couldn’t get a solid fix on how large it really is, it must span several city blocks, with thousands upon thousands of stalls crammed together with claustrophobic density, selling everything under the sun. I spent almost five hours of constant walking, bemusedly trying to take it all in, and I would be shocked if I saw even a quarter of what the market has to offer. Early on in my wanderings (before I realized that there was any method to the market’s mad layout, or had a real grasp of its unbelievable immensity) I came across a little stall that had some incense chimneys; a wooden tube sits over the incense, and the smoke is breathed out of the mouth of an elaborately sculpted animal coiled around it. It struck me as being absolutely perfect for the cottage, and I made a mental note to come back.

I promptly forgot all the landmarks I had set for myself to remember it by, and lost myself utterly in the market for a few hours, at which point I was just about ready to leave. By this time I had seen one of the maps of the market, and so figured that my chimney must be somewhere in either the housewares or handicrafts section. After a few more, increasingly frustrating, hours I still hadn’t rediscovered it – nor, amazingly, anyone else selling the same thing – and decided, with some finality, that I hated everything. I had basically resigned myself to leaving empty-handed, but on my way out through the market I caught the scent and managed to stumble upon the stall, just as they were packing up. Given how quickly the woman accepted my bid, I probably overpaid, but at that point I was mostly just thrilled at having found the only thing in the whole market that I’d really coveted.

So yeah, the plan had been to spend the day accumulating cheesy knick-knacks and gew-gaws at the market as gifts for all you folks back at home, but between being completely overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the JJ, my general hatred of shopping, and my mad lust for incense chimneys, I didn’t actually come away with anything else. My other excuses are that there is no room in my backpack anyway, and that I’m not big on knick-knack collecting, anyway. (It’s true! I only got a handful of things from Africa, and only one wood carving for myself).

My flight was out of Bangkok at 7:45 am, so after a sweaty, sleepless night of anticipation, I caught a minibus to the airport at 4:00 in the morning, and that was the end of Asia.

As it turns out, I’m not so sure that I’ve been sick of travel; I think I was just sick of the pervasive, infernal heat. Climbing into the mountains of Sapa, the air carries a damp, refreshing chill on its gusty breezes, and despite my snatched hours of sleep on the overnight train, I was positively invigorated. The morning I arrived, the mountains were shrouded in the dense, moist grayness of fog.

I spent the first day trekking to the Thac Bac waterfall outside of town. I had thought the hike was a mere 16 km round trip, and while it seemed like my pace was awfully slow, it was nice enough walking (I later learned I had walked twice that distance, justifying the ache in my shins a bit more). In taking the main road rather than hiring a guide, I suspect I took not only the least scenic route – the roar of dump trucks struggling up the hill, gravel, mud, and construction equipment were my walking companions – but also the longest one. That said, I still preferred striking out on my own; my newfound solitude had awoken in me a slightly rebellious urge for complete independence (though not quite so rebellious as to risk losing myself utterly in the forests of northern Vietnam with scarce food, water, shelter, or direction).

I am going to embrace the chill of spring in British Columbia wholeheartedly. Mountains, beware.

My plans of going out the first night were foiled by dog-tiredness, so as a compromise I decided I would try and set out in the wee hours the next morning. That plan was defeated by a herd of well-lubricated sots who set up shop on the balcony outside my window, playing guitar and singing poorly, and drunkenly carrying on about being cockblocked until half past three in the morning. My beauty sleep came in fits and starts.

The well-manicured paths and rising tide of middle-aged Europeans beating their way up the hill as I walked down to Cat Cat village led me to believe that finding a moment’s peace may not be in the cards on this day’s hike, but I was pleasantly surprised. Through the Hmong village, past women in black robes and cylindrical caps, brightly embroidered; past children wearing thick woolen tops against the noon heat, but no bottoms to speak of; past water driven mortars-and-pestles, terraced rice paddies on impossibly steep hills, pigs wallowing uncomfortably with ropes tautly tied around their fat midriffs, and scattered water buffaloes, grass-chomping and tail-swishing. Birds chirped gaily as I crossed the suspension bridges over streams, newly roaring from the past weeks rains – it seems the wet season may have come early to Vietnam this year.

I kept walking with no real goal in mind, and decided to take the eventual trail to Sinchai village a few kilometers, but I never made it there. After the previous day’s exertions, and the growing heat of the afternoon, I no longer had walking for walking’s sake in my heart. Sidetracked by a particularly nice view, I staked out a spot on a grassy knoll, overlooking green hills and mountain mists, bathed in the brilliant afternoon sun. I finished reading Steinbeck’s “The Winter of Our Discontent,” relishing the humanity and mastery of the words. Between the book’s strangely affecting ending, the steep walk back up to Sapa, (and perhaps a bit of peevishness at sleep deprivation), my travel weariness came back to me, and I probably gave some of the hawkers more of a stone face than they deserved.

Sapa itself is a pleasant mountain community, if somewhat spoiled by the glut of its tourism. I didn’t find the locals too irritatingly persistent, however – though it seems no man is offered as many moto-rides and rentals as one who has his will set on walking.

To be perfectly honest with myself, I did very little in my two days sopping up Sapa. But I did it very well. Two days of passive, individual calm – just what I needed – and I can think of few better places to simply soak up the views than in these mountains.

Our one night in a real hotel had given us a trifle of real sleep, but our arrival in Hanoi saw us yet again wearily rubbing red-rimmed eyes and massaging crooked necks following another sleeper bus. We were promptly taken in by a criminal of a taxi driver with a fast meter, extorting us terribly on our ride into the Old Quarter where most tourists stay; welcome to northern Vietnam!

Hanoi is like a smaller, dirtier, much more expensive version of Saigon, with a maze-like plan of streets that remained nearly as confusing as ever, even after three long days and nights of pounding the pavement around town. Street hawkers, xe om (moto-taxi) and cyclo drivers also tend to be more annoying and persistent than in the south. Perhaps it was the gloomy weather that refIlected ill on the city, but my initial impressions were not positive. They developed some nuance after my time there, and occasionally I was able to catch an urgent, vital vibe in the atmosphere, Hanoi’s own. It is occasionally quite picturesque, and with its abundance of cafes (pricey, though!) and the fresh air around its lakes, it may prove to be the better city to let a subdued afternoon pass you by, but I still rate Saigon’s skin-deep charisma higher.

We took in some more of the omnipresent war memorabilia – a memorial displaying the twisted hulk of a downed B-52 bomber, and another military history museum – but for the most part spent the first day getting lost amid the not-quite parallel streets, all of which seem to have identical sounding names, and none of which are compass oriented.

With time as our enemy, we decided once more to indulge in the dreaded package tour, this time for a 2-day, 1-night boat trip on Halong Bay, apparently one of the natural wonders of the world (or so claims one of the signs). Thousands of dramatically sheer limestone islands – to which tenaciously cling a carpet of lush vegetation – jut from the ocean here, strikingly beautiful, enhanced by the gentle atmosphere of light mist to provide perspective.

The boat of choice for these trips is styled after ancient imperial junks, for ye olde authentic charm (ignoring, of course, the fact that many have masts with no sails, and air conditioners dangling from the windows of all the cabins). Seeing the harbour for the first time was something of a shock, crowded as far as the eye can see by literally hundreds of tourist faux junks. I hadn’t realized we were underway even when we were well into the bay, because the view out my window – filled with other boats – had scarcely changed.

After lunch on the boat, our first stop was at a stunning limestone cave. The enormity of the cavern and the depth and variety of formations were breathtakingly beautiful, but the entire affair was spoiled somewhat by the choice of lighting the caves in an array of ghoulish colours. While the effect was neat at times, it did a lot to detract from the sense of natural awe, replacing it with artificial, carnival wonder. The slow, busy procession of tourists did little to help the effect.

We drifted through a floating village in the bay, spent a brief stint kayaking (there’s that tour schedule disgruntlement, again), and finally were allowed to swim, just as the sun was dipping in the horizon. The water was refreshingly cool, and would have been downright blissful in the heat of the afternoon, but so it goes.

After dinner we caroused with our boatmates, drinking egregious amounts of cheap (and surprisingly not-awful) local spirits we’d smuggled aboard to avoid buying too many of the exorbitantly priced cruise beers. The following day’s time on the boat was brief and, for the most part, overcast; most of us spent it quietly, reading or thinking on the sundeck. Our boatmates were shuffled around between tours in a most inexplicable fashion, and a mediocre lunch was served at a big restaurant in Halong City before driving back to Hanoi.

That evening was Andy’s last day in Vietnam before a flight back to embattled Bangkok (he could barely contain his excitement), hence the time urgency surrounding Halong Bay, but it was spent with relatively little fanfare. We got lost looking for dinner, just as we had the first night, before ending up at the same restaurant because it was tasty and cheap, at least by Hanoi’s decadent pricing schemes.

With his early morning flight we parted ways, and with the travel fatigue of five months wearing on me, I spent a lazy, but somehow satisfying day in Hanoi, reading Steinbeck by the lake and writing postcards in an outdoor cafe. While most of the time Andy and I traveled together we’d been content to pay the minor surcharges associated with the convenience of travel agents, feeling the press on my wallet and a nostalgic urge to rough it a little (travel agents are hard to come by in Africa), I decided to DIY my night-train to Sapa, saving myself a quarter of the price (which, at 300,000 dong - $18 USD or so – for a soft-sleeper to the gateway city of Lao Cai, is still no pauper’s rate).

And here, for no reason in particular, is a bizarre Britney Spears obituary tablet spied on the streets of Hanoi, along with a (Communist Jesus?) banner hung up at a cathedral near our hotel.

As it turned out, our next destination was not Hoi An, but Nha Trang. We had not planned on spending any time in Nha Trang, dismissing it as a tourist-y, paradise-hell of sorts, but the bus stops there for a day, and the agent at our hotel convinced us to sign on to a package tour on an island-hopping boat to spend our day.

While I shouldn’t have expected much for the money we paid (only $10), I was soon reminded of why I have been skipping package tours. The boat was packed to the gills, and we soon embarked on a strictly timed visit to an aquarium, island-hopping, and snorkeling (with terrible equipment at a largely dead reef, where I was also reminded of why I wear shirts while snorkeling – I now resemble something like a shark, with a dark back and light belly to evidence the nasty burn I received). Things began to look up at the lunchtime feast, followed by an interactive entertainment show (though everything ended up sounding sort of like sludgy punk covers), and a “Happy Hour” at portable swim-up bar, where all the drinks were free (albeit very, very weak). The last stop was sunbathing at a terrible public beach which you needed to pay admission to (I refused on principle, read and swam instead). I’d say it was worth the admittedly small admission price, but I really do dislike regiment in my vacationing. We then took yet another overnight bus to Hoi An, though a minor fiasco over ticket confirmation saw us paying more, but ending up with an upgrade to a mediocre sleeper instead of the seats we’d originally booked.

Hoi An is ostensibly on the tourist trail for its neatly preserved old-world colonial architecture and small-town charm, but the real reason is because it has earned a reputation for churning out cheap, custom-tailored clothes. Indeed, it is home to more than 300 different tailors; the storefronts – and beseeching calls from wishful suit-hawkers – sprawl out along every avenue in the city. Despite my somewhat militantly ascetic ideology surrounding fashion, even I was taken in by the prospect of hand-tailored garments made for a fraction of the cost of off-the-rack items in Canada. The ultimate tally of my consumer whoring – $171 USD – makes my eyes water a little bit, though for the price, the checklist of accrued articles below verges on ridiculous:

One suit (to replace my bulky Value Village get-up)
One wool, double-breasted winter coat
Two dress shirts
Two casual shirts
One (brilliantly ostentatious) red silk shirt
Silk tie, handkerchief and cuff links (the latter are cheap plastic, however, so they don’t really count)

(So yes, I may have utterly betrayed my principles, but I prefer to think of it – read: rationalize it – as taking advantage of my location to make a pragmatic investment in useful, formal clothing – assuming it lasts more than a few wearings, that is)

We spent only one night in Hoi An, and in that time we were able to get all our items tailored and in the mail, bound for Canada, before catching another overnight bus to Hanoi at two o’clock the next evening. Our unplanned shopping spree and the unexpectedly tight timeline meant that we needed to eschew seeing the sights in earnest, but from our cursory wanderings, I don’t think we missed out on too much.

Despite that, we did have a memorable encounter that I doubt many foreign shoppers witness while in Hoi An. Upon getting lost going back to our hotel and wandering out of town, we decided to take a shortcut down a side road and ended up stumbling upon a firing range with a row of Vietnamese training the sights of their assault rifles on a line of targets. They stopped shooting when they spotted us, eying us warily – their silent gaze telling us to ‘go back to your suit shopping’ – and we retreated, a little bit nervously, back to the main road. Getting lost may well be the best way to see a city for real.

Since our time in Vietnam was so short, we decided to take a short haul flight from Phu Quoc to Ho Chi Minh City (henceforth referred to as Saigon). Joyful surprises abound at small airports; I’d forgotten my Swiss Army knife in my carry-on bag and, amazingly, they boxed it up, gave me a receipt, and gave it back to me on the other side!

Saigon lived up to none of the evil preconceptions that surround it. While it is a frenetic hive of activity – intersections are an insane, gridlocked confusion of rapidly moving motorbike gridlock – it is a shockingly clean, modern city, with broad boulevards, dotted with public green space sprouting beautiful old trees. It is not extortionately priced, and people are friendly, helpful, and fair. I never felt like my wallet, camera, or backpack was threatened by the notorious moto-snatchers, and our accommodation was comfortable and secure (albeit up a flight of a million stairs – minihotels here are narrow, and make the absolute most they can out of their plots). Navigating the absurd traffic – somewhat akin to parting the sea, as motorbikes glide around you – is even exhilarating at first (though once you get used to it, it tends to become mundane and inconveniencing).

Our first evening was spent eating a delicious meal in an open-air street cafe, drinking and haggling good-naturedly with street merchants; by the time we’d accumulated a shocking number of beer bottles on the table, we also counted among our spoils two large bunches of bananas, two hammocks (and hanging string), rice crackers, dried squid, a pack of cigarettes, and a street weighing on a mobile scale (confirming my suspicions of my travel paunch and the evils of Asia’s liberal use of the Holy Trinity of salt, sugar, and fat). They were joined the following morning by a pair of sunglasses for Andy; you can call us suckers, but our complete lack of driving interest in any of the items makes for a keen bargaining strategy on the streets of Saigon, and all were scored for a song.

The first day was spent at the Revolutionary Museum and the War Remnants Museum. The former was interesting enough, though has little to recommend it, really. All the museums in Vietnam have a brilliantly stilted, colourfully propagandist reading into the history that makes visiting them so much more fun than just a dry presentation of facts (though sometimes my contrarian mind recoils from spin, and I end up inwardly resenting those whose side I would otherwise support). The War Remnants Museum was the better of the two, with a truly captivating hall of photographs, a sort of pictorial memorial to war journalists who lost their lives. The American war (as it’s called here) clearly remains a large part of the Vietnamese cultural psyche. Military hardware of all sorts – including fighter jets, helicopters, tanks, guns of all sorts, and a massively intimidating 175 mm mobile howitzer – are found in abundance at museums around the country.

We had planned on seeing the Vietnamese History Museum the next day, but apparently it is closed on Mondays, so we instead wandered through the zoo and botanical gardens. I’d heard that conditions were somewhat abominable, as is common in zoos throughout the developing world, but I was pleasantly surprised. I was only really put off by seeing the sad intelligence in the eyes of caged primates (especially the big orangutan who discontentedly threw fruit peels at us), but I expect that’s to be found anywhere. The laxity of zoo-keeping standards also means that there’s the opportunity for a shocking degree of interactivity; while standing on a feeding platform, I was nearly bowled over twice by powerful sweeps of a giraffe’s neck.

Our last day was spent at the Cu Chi tunnels complex, 70 km outside of Saigon, an enormous network – more than 200 km! – tunnels that served to spearhead some significant resistance efforts in the south. As we meandered through the jungle with out tour, inspecting hidden tunnel entrances and nasty pit traps for careless GIs, the damp air filled with the echoing reports of machine gun fire from a nearby shooting range (where they charge almost $1.50 for a bullet!) added to the ambiance. While it’s possible to intellectually conceive of the conditions of tunnel life, it doesn’t truly sink in until you’ve had a chance to duck-walk through a section of them. Even enlarged and lit for fat American tourists (the original diameter was 80 x 60 cm!), the tunnels are close, stuffy, and claustrophobic. I was sweating like a dog (where did that nonsensical cliché come from, anyway?) from exertion and the stale humidity of the tunnels after only 100 m.

The rest of Saigon was largely rounded out with laziness in the De Tham tourist center, before an overnight bus to our next stop, Hoi An.

The majority of my time on Phu Quoc was spent acquiring an SSI Open Water Diver certification (essentially the same as PADI, but $50 USD cheaper since they don’t require that you buy their book), meaning the oceans of the world are now my oyster. I said after snorkelling in Zanzibar that I would do it, and it has thus become the first of my many (slightly nebulous) travel promises to myself that I’ve actually managed to keep.

While the diving instruction standards here don’t seem exceptionally rigorous (at least not in comparison to Andy’s intensive 3-week course in BC), my instructor Guy, a portly French Canadian at the Coco Dive Center, was as good a teacher as I could have hoped for. Knowledgeable, affable, plainspoken, good-humoured, and a treasure trove of interesting anecdotes, he definitely made learning comfortable. Diving in the late season, on the northern islands of Phu Quoc – warm, clear, water, where depths barely exceed 10 m – also helped with the comfort factor.

My first two dives were with Guy and Andy (who was taking a refresher lesson before his PADI Advanced Open Water training), and in our morning rush I completely neglected to bring my contacts. As a result, while visibility was better the first day than the second, my personal visibility was decidedly worse. The Coco programme doesn’t bother with pool training before the open water dives, since sandy bottoms and warm, 2-3 m water are just as good. We did all the necessary preparatory drills before diving in earnest, but the majority of the dives were still spent exploring the reefs. One of the benefits of diving in such shallow water is that we spent a long time in the water without worrying about nitrogen buildup and air consumption – both dives were nearly an hour long. I had a bit of difficulty equalizing pressure in my ears at first (feeling the ’squeeze’), and since my vision was somewhat blurred, I felt like I spent the majority of my first dives focusing on breathing and getting used to the equipment, so they were slightly stressful.

Whether it was the tentative confidence of having two dives under my belt, or just having contacts that let me actually take in the reef, day two was far better. Having something to look at likely distracted me from any underlying anxieties, and my buoyancy control and oxygen consumption improved immeasurably, to say nothing of my overall enjoyment. While the reefs here pale utterly in comparison the atoll off Zanzibar, there are still some beautiful corals, fish, and various echinoderms, worms, and slugs to attract the eye. The highlight of the second day was seeing a large jellyfish being slowly picked at by a handful of fish. We did some more drill work, but because there was a full house of other divers on board that day, we put off some of the training until the last day.

One disadvantage of the shallow waters is that you don’t get quite as much of a sense of the water as a three-dimensional playground, since depth changes at this level tend to affect your buoyancy much more, making it more a handful. There is definitely something to be said for flippers and neutral buoyancy, however – long swims can be dispatched almost effortless, even with form as poor as my own. It’s also really satisfying to control one’s buoyancy solely through breathing – the volume of air in your lungs is enough to make you rise or sink, depending on how deeply you breath.

While Coco seemed like one of the tightest run operations on the island, they earn high marks in my books for the on-board lunch. While it’s the same every day, it’s hard to complain about – bountiful portions of squid and vegetables, mackerel steaks with tomato, fried tofu, fried egg, and rice. (Andy, who is doing his advanced course with another shop because Coco doesn’t dive the deeper southern waters, laments the loss of Coco lunches.)

The night after the 2nd diving day I wrote the written exam based on the bookwork and the DVD I watched before my first dives. The test had a couple red herrings (har har), but was largely common sense, and after briefly correcting the test, we concluded the necessary paperwork for my certification.

The last day took us back to the same two dive sites as the first (Nail Island and Ong Khoi), where I concluded all the necessary drills, including an emergency swimming ascent, sans air. Guy, an enthusiastic underwater photographer, also brought the shop’s camera with him, and snapped a few photos of me in the aquatic realm, which I’m glad to have. On the last dive, I also did a basic navigation exercise with the compass, though we still relied a fair bit on Guy’s intuitive environmental navigation skills, since he knows the reefs like the back of his hand. I suspect I could have made the dive no-problem based on dead reckoning, but we wouldn’t have seen nearly as much interesting stuff as we did on our more meandering route.

Once all was said and done, after my six dives I had logged 6 hours and 7 minutes of bottom time, apparently a new record for a trainee at the shop. I still have a bit of a stuffy left ear, but I suspect it will work itself out. I’m not sure when or where my next opportunity to dive will arise, Andy has strongly recommended that I try to find a kelp forest in BC to dive. Four degree water will certainly make for a different experience, to say the least, so my curiosity has been piqued…

The easiest way to cross into Vietnam from Cambodia involves a bus-and-boat combination, with the actual border posts being set up along a stretch of the Mekong. Given that Vietnam requires visas to be issued in advance, it was the most painless crossing yet – we simply pulled up, filled out the necessary paperwork, and set off again. On the Vietnam side, our captain even collected everyone’s passports en masse to ease the bureaucracy while we ate pho (rice noodle soup, ubiquitous in Vietnam) for lunch.

After our arrival in Chau Doc in the afternoon, we scarcely had time to gather our bearings before we allowed ourselves to be whisked off by a pair of trailer-towing bicycle taxis called cyclos (sadly, the government is phasing them out, because they slow down traffic). From there, our transit route down to Rach Gia – where we would catch the ferry* to Phu Quoc island – was arranged, and we were passed along via motorbikes and two minibuses in rapid succession before we, dazedly, reached our final destination for that evening. In a somewhat intangible way, Vietnam is definitely different from the rest of SE Asia – you play much more on their terms, rather than the other way around.

While Phu Quoc is something of a tropical paradise, making it well worth a stop while in Vietnam (though it will be Phuket in ten years, so see it quick), our primary motivation for visiting was so that we could acquire cheap diving certifications; a basic Open Water for me, and an Advanced Open Water for Andy, prior to his planned adventures diving the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. I’ll get to all that in a separate post, methinks…

Phu Quoc is the first place I’ve visited in Asia on the ocean, and the marine culture is really interesting to witness. Salt breeze and the pungency of fish is constantly on your nostrils, and the crowded boat harbours teem with brightly painted fishing trawlers and sailors at work. The vivid skies, sapphire oceans, and fishing ships popping with baby blue, orange, and turquoise create a brilliant mid-morning collage of colour. Fresh seafood is de rigeur for night market meals, and may well be the best I’ve ever eaten.

While the profound lack of ecological awareness (for example, street meals often come double-plastic-bagged, in a styrofoam container, with bagged sauces and disposable utensils) throughout SE Asia has been rough, Vietnam has been the worst so far. On our second day in Phu Quoc, we rode bikes up to the Suoi Da Ban waterfall, where a guide led us to an idyllic little watering hole, full of tiny nibbling fish. The waterfall is a popular picnic spot among the locals, so while the crowds obviously appreciate the natural beauty on some level or another, at the same time, they feel zero responsibility to maintain that beauty. Plastic bags, food packaging, bones and fruit rinds, water bottles, beer cases and cans were strewn everywhere. (That said, the most common clean-up method here is simply to collect trash and burn it, so while solid-state garbage is an eyesore, it may end up being preferable…)

Transport in Vietnam is an eclectic mix. More affluent than Cambodia or Laos, in Vietnam bicycles have almost completely been replaced by motorscooters, though trailer-towing bicycle taxis called ‘cyclos’ remain a common sight . People deride North Americans for their lazy reliance on cars, but believe me, the flexibility of motorbikes means that riding here often replaces walking for even the shortest errands – some restaurants even have bike ramps leading right through the middle of the restaurant up to the kitchen! More encouragingly, I’ve also seen more electric bicycles here than anywhere else I’ve ever been (though that’s not saying an awful lot, as they remain a rarity). Given the complete lack of environmental conscience in Vietnam, I expect that e-bikes have been adopted for their simplicity and improved handling over motorbikes for city riding, demonstrating once again that sustainable designs will only be adopted if – surprise, surprise – they are actually superior products compared to their dirty competition.

Vehicle owners here seem to take great delight in using kitschy synthesizer sounds for signals and horns, turning basic driving into a chorus of primitive video game noises. One delivery man on a motorbike has a never-ending loop of ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ rendered in high-pitched beeps, like one of those electronic birthday cards that everyone hates.

The money in Vietnam is called ‘dong,’ and is worth almost nothing. Given how (im)mature Andy and I are, this remains a source of endless glee. All but the smallest notes are printed on plastic film (complete with transparent windows!), a la Australia and New Zealand; I was tempted to take some bills with me while diving just to see how well they would hold up.

For once, this post is nearly up-to-date, so future posts may be (almost) in real time. Though given my well-documented laziness…

*The ferry we rode was called the Superdong. And you thought the money was a joke…

OK, I know I’m skipping Cambodia entirely, and I’ll get back to it in the next few days. However, after spending almost a week in Vietnam, I have fallen for this country so badly that I really want to write about it. I spent one night in the Mekong River delta, 6 nights on Phu Quoc island (SCUBA diving), and just two days here in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), but my first impressions of Vietnam are incredibly favourable. I can say without a doubt in my mind this is my favourite place I’ve so far visited, and Saigon definately rivals Toronto for the best city I have experienced.

Phu Quoc was pretty great. Widely regarded as the next SE Asian Phuket, you get the eerie feeling being there these days that you’re witnessing the birth of a monster. Huge stretches of gorgeous beaches lined with nothing but palm trees surround the island, but these have quitely been carved up, evidenced by the survey crews and property markers that dot the coasts, and await massive resort development. Infrastructure work is happening at breakneck pace - dirt paths are being turned into 4 lane streets, huge sewer networks are beginning to crisscross the island, and an international airport is well underway. A substantial proportion of traffic is comprised of monster dump trucks moving gravel from barges in port to the airport runway. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m really happy I was there this year, because there probably aren’t many years left until Phu Quoc is well out of my price range. Anyway, I went diving through two SCUBA companies, CoCo Divers and Vietnam Explorer. Andrew did his basic open water with CoCo, and so I joined him for a couple days and did a refresher course and three fun dives - saw some pretty great stuff too, including some wonderful angelfish and a big ol’ pufferfish.

My main goal was to take the advanced SCUBA course though, to give me the depth allowance to dive some of the deep walls on the Great Barrier Reef while paying Vietnamese rather than Australian prices for the training. I did this with Vietnam Explorer, and they didn’t disappoint. The first day was the hard stuff, a performance buoyancy and a navigation dive, both of which really challenged me and showed me how much more I have to learn. I’m definately taking a performance buoyancy specialty course the first chance I get. The next day I did a deep dive (33m) and a photo dive - it was cool to see how different life is at depth (the most striking thing is nothing has pigmentation anymore - it’s all white), but the photo dive was pretty frustrating. There wasn’t enough dessicant in the camera case, and the lens fogged up after a few minutes. Oh well, I still think I managed some decent shots.

The highlight of my diving was definately my last dive, a night dive in pitch blackness. Armed only with flashlights, we quickly spotted an octopus that was willing to play for a good 15 minutes - I got him to grab my hand and crawl all over me, and the thing seemed every bit as curious as I was. After checking out some crabs, flatfish, jellies, and cuttlefish, we shut off our lights and relaxed. Bioluminescence has to be one of the most beautiful phenomena in the whole world. Sitting on the bottom at 8 metres, the ocean was lit up with twinkling blue lights - in the water column, on the sand, and being projected upwards from clam and oyster tunnels. Most of the light emitting organisms in the water column are pressure sensitive plankton, and moving a hand through the water sets them off, allowing you to draw glowing blue patterns in every dimension. It’s kind of like waving a sparkler around on a dark night, only multiply the beauty by 1000. Absolutely phenomenal!

We hopped a flight from Phu Quoc to Saigon (50 mins and 50 bucks, compared to 9 hours and 30 bucks for a ferry and bus), and as soon as I got off the airport shuttle bus in downtown Saigon I was hooked. Honestly, I was expecting to hate Vietnam - the guidebooks and other travellers have painted it as a scummy place full of hookers, beggars, criminals, and garbage. Instead, I have encountered the friendliest people anywhere in SE Asia, the cleanest, safest, most modern city yet (the only place I have visited so far where I could see myself living), and just all around a great vibe. Whereas touts in other countries have resorted to any tactic to sell their garbage, here they laugh and smile and take your “nos” with the same joking attitude as you give them. I was expecting crazily busy roads that I could barely cross, and while this is by far the busiest place I have ever seen (makes Hong Kong look like North York), it’s not intimidating at all. This is actually the first place I have been in all of Asia where people obey traffic lights, for example. Maybe it’s bad that my favourite city is the one that most resembles North American cities, but I don’t think so. All the good parts of Asian cities are here (night markets, crowds, relatively few cars and lots of bikes and pedestrians), but the best parts of North America are also here (infrastructure - for example, I hadn’t seen an Asian garbage truck until I got here, hospitality, customer service, STANDARDS). Maybe I haven’t quite put my finger on the greatness of Saigon yet - I’ll keep trying.

Today we got to a couple of the museums - got to see a bunch of American weaponry that was abandoned here, saw the gruesome effects Agent Orange is having to this day, including some grotesque fetuses in formaldehyde - 10,000 disfigured babies or more are still being born every year - and really was just left once again with an utter revulsion for war. I use the word revulsion carefully - before I left Toronto I was certainly a pacifist already, only then war just seemed stupid and made me angry at those who perpetrate it. The feeling is completely different now - I can no longer be angry, just devasted, confused, and utterly sick. It’s just the most fucking disgusting thing that can happen. I just don’t understand, and am left knowing that I never will.

On the bright side, there are way more Americans here than there were anywhere else, and there seems to be no lingering animosity either way. They all just seem utterly ashamed, embarassed, and sick to their stomachs. The war seems to be a remnant of the past though, and everyone’s moving on… well, I guess except for all those remaining Agent Orange victims (still $0 of compensation from the US, Australia, or New Zealand, the three invading countries, despite what they have acknowledged and offered their own soldiers), and all the amputees, and all the people still being hit by mines and UXO… healing from war is a long, long, long road…

I can’t wait to see more of Vietnam, and keep soaking up the experience. I love this place.