Fallin' into Saigon

So there are a few different options for transit between Siem Reap and Ho Chi Minh. We're still trying to overland as much as possible, so flying's right out. You can hire a cab for an amount that would be amazingly small in the states, but since we're here because we're too poor to live in America all summer, that one was also rejected. This left us with buses. Specifically, night bus or day bus. And while this sounds like little difference to the western ear, google searching Cambodian night bus (Mom- don't google search Cambodian night bus) highlights certain discrepancies in the experience. Specifically, apparently everyone who's ever taken a night bus died immediately.

The net is just full of people strongly cautioning against taking a night bus. A lot of the reasons sound pretty, well, racist to be frank- many many sites warned that, since they all get up so early, Cambodians fall asleep as soon as the sun goes down, like when you put the cover on a bird cage. There are also, in fairness, a grip of articles on horrific night bus crashes where everyone died. In the end, Chris and I opted to go with a night bus in spite of everything because, well, we wanted to. There are approximately forty five thousand bus companies running that route, so we could at least shop around. We immediately discounted the four bus companies which had recently been censured by the government for killing to many people, and the ranked the remaining ones inversely by amount of hits returned on the google news search for the phrase “X bus company fatal crash”. After carefully drinking about it for a few hours, we purchased our tickets and settled into our bunk for the trip.

That's right, bunk. The bus has bunk beds

Suck it, American mass transit. You don't have bunk *anything*

On what is referred to as a hotel bus such as this, you are assigned to a bed with another person. If you are traveling with another person, the two of you are paired. If you are traveling with an odd number of people (such as one), you get to make friends.

The trip was uneventful. It is hard to sleep well on a vinyl mattress, especially with the particularly swervy style of driving favored by the Cambodians, but otherwise it was largely without hardship. We arrived in Phnom Phen, the capitol of Cambodia, in the morning and switched to a more orthodox bus, i.e. one with chairs, for the remainder of the trip.

*sigh* orthodoxy

The border crossing was much like the first, with the exception that the bus attendant collected the passports of all the passengers. After we disembarked and, in observance of ancient mysterious ritual, walked across the border, our passports were returned stamped and visa'd, which on the scale of “result of handing your passports in a stack to a stranger”, which starts at “get your passport back” and goes to “become a victim of human trafficking”, is the best possible result.

A few hours later we came to port in scenic downtown Ho Chi Minh City, which Imma keep calling Saigon because I want to. After elbowing our way through the pack of feral taxi drivers who were dead set on convincing us that two kilometers is way too far to walk, we strolled through Bui Vien, the backpackers' district, to our first hostel.

Bui Vien, natural habitat of people who are convinced you want a shoe shine

The place is called 3 La, and is primarily a moderately upscale vegetarian restaurant. Two floors above the restaurant they had decided to install a hostel, which consists in its entirety of a large room with six double mattresses and an adjacent bathroom. The beds are separated by about two feet of walking space, which leads to the unsettling experience of waking up looking into the face of a complete stranger one bed over.

Mid range hostel or high class cult quarters?

After getting settled, I set off to meet an old college friend of mine, who has become a semi-professional DJ in Saigon because life is weird. Chris took a nap. After dinner and a couple drinks, my friend dropped me back off at the hostel at about eleven, where the wi-fi (we don't buy sim cards, just to make it sporting) informed me that Chris had, in fact, found an expat bar in Bui Vien and was drinking on the sidewalk out front of a little store owned by an intimidating middle aged Vietnamese lady.

This is what good choices look like

After a certain amount of local networking, we came back to 3 La and discovered that, should you return to this particular hostel after the restaurant closes (I'm not sure when that is, but it is definitely before four am), to gain entry you are required to wake the young man who sleeps on a cot just inside the door, have him unchain the security gate, and then walk through his makeshift bedroom. We switched hostels after that.

Saigon is, as is the rule with South Asian major cities, enormous (twelve million people), loud, polluted, and operating under a driving system which seems to mimic Darwinian selection. It is also incredibly beautiful. It's the only place I've been on this continent that has so many trees flourishing in it. There are also little parks everywhere, block or half block green spaces scattered across the city, with public use exercise equipment.

Told ya

There's a river that runs through the southern portion, with a waterfront market and a vegetarian district. While it lacks Bangkok's incredible street food culture (which I'm pretty sure is unrivaled in this universe), the eats in Saigon are taaasty, and goddam cheap. A plate is a dollar or two, a banh mi from a cart is about fifty cents. We found this outstanding vegan joint that has seventy five cents fake pulled pork banh mis (called floss here, because translation is funny) that are basically all I ever want to eat. I once ordered seven of them.

Once we didn't show up for three days. The waitress got worried

As with every other stop on our madcap whirlwind tour, Vietnam has a signature economy beer, here called Saigon. It comes in two varieties, Red or Export Quality, and Green or We Know You're Broke quality. Red's a little better, but Green's about eight ounces bigger, so that choice was easy. Saigon Green's fifty or seventy five cents in a bar (or on the sidewalk out front a bottle shop), or over a dollar from the corner store, and there's a reason for that. All across south Asia, beer bottles are reused by breweries. To insure the bottles make it back, there's a deposit on them. This deposit changes between countries, but in Vietnam it's about fifty cents, or roughly the cost of the beer inside. As a result, bars can charge less since they get the deposit. This is an awesome system that I wish was way more widespread- the only downside was the one time I got a bottle that was missing a chunk and had a few glass shards in the beer. Otherwise, great system.

So we kicked around Saigon for a few days, taking in the sights. My friend invited us to a show of his at one of the many many rooftop clubs downtown Saigon brags, which was pretty cool. There are so many of the clubs that, on a friday night from the roof of our hostel (the new one where nobody lives in the foyer), you can see and usually hear a half dozen different dance parties. The laser lights from the clubs travel the entirety of downtown, and are really confusing when you're walking around and haven't figured out the source yet.

Saigon's nightlife appears to be primarily rooftop centric

After being inducted to the Saigon club scene, we decided to get out of the city for a bit and caught a bus to Mui Ne, a coastal resort town a few hours to the east. Several people had told us how scenic and relaxing it was, and it cost eight bucks, so we thought we'd give it a try. In its quest to never let us experience the same kind of bus twice, South Asia provided for this trip a bus that has three rows of bunks, left right and center, that are built much like beach chairs- the back reclines to about forty five degrees, and your legs go straight forward under the seat back of the chair in front of you.

These were also in bunks

A short bus later, we arrived in Muy Ne. It is literally right along the beach, and consists of a long, single road parallel to the ocean, lined on both sides with board shops, travel companies, restaurants, bars, hostels and hotels and scooter rentals.

The beach itself was accessed primarily through whatever place of business you were at- since everything was built right up to the water, you went down to the piece of beach your hostel owned, or the bar you were at owned. There is a public beach, but it s at the end of the strip a solid few miles down.

Still purdy though

This being the off season, there were more hotels than tourists which gave the whole place kind of a ghost town vibe. To add to the general twilight zone sensation, a lot of signage was in russian. Like, most things were vietnamese, english, and russian, but if there were only two languages, it was vietnamese and russian. Eventually, we got a bar tender to explain that, after the war (you know, that one), the only country that Vietnam had open trade and travel with was Russia, so the coast became a popular Russian tourist destination. Apparently, starting at Mui Ne, the further north one travels the more Russian the coast gets.

On the brightside, I'm pretty sure I can order a banh mi and beer in russian now

After spending a day orienting ourselves and purchasing sandals, we came back around to that scooter rental shop because they are the best thing that's ever happened ever.

WWWEEEEEEEHHHEEEEEEehheheheheeeheeheeeeee

There are three things in Mui Ne that are billed as major tourist attractions off the beach, and those are the Fairy Stream, the White Sand Dunes and the Red Sand Dunes. We rode to the stream, which to be frank seemed much more stream than fairy, and which was experienced by walking down the center of for a couple miles.

Like, 90% stream

Afterwards, we headed out to the park where the sand dunes are, and decided that driving past them was all the dunage we required. We spent the rest of the day tooling around on the bikes, getting lost and driving through peoples' yards and finding enormous buddhist statues in the middle of no where. Also, we learned that vietnamese gas is about four dollars a gallon, so there's that.

It, uh, it looks a lot more impressive closer up

After spending one extra night in Mui Ne because Eco Hostel, the second place we stayed in Saigon and which I shall carry forever in my heart, didn't have two open beds, we bussed back to the big city. We had originally intended to overland all the way through Asia, but after sitting down figuring that a) it would take a solid three weeks to work through indonesia, laos, etc. and b) we had in fact been going east the whole time, we resigned ourselves to flying from Saigon to Kathmandu. In the couple days we had left until our flight, we buckled down and did something I had been avoiding the entire trip. We hit the Vietnam War Museum, originally called the Exhibition House for the War Crimes of the American and Puppet Governments. So, that's fun.

The Elephant in the Room.

So here's the things about spending time in South East Asia. America's left a pretty large boot print over here. Like, Thailand seems pretty neutral on us, but you go a little further east and you realize how recent the seventies were. In the states, we tend to think of the Vietnam war as history- someone who was eighteen and in the war in 1975 when it ended would be fifty eight now, and most of the American vets are old enough that we feel we can safely ignore them. In Vietnam though, everyone was a veteran due to our policy of liberally bombing the entire country and several of its neighbors. So people in their forties have clear memories of American military actions. People are nice enough about it- there doesn't seem to be any residual bitterness or anger, but more than once when I said the word America some one saluted me with the stump of where a hand used to be.

So it was this as context that Chris and I walked into the four story building housing the record of all the horrible shit our country did (to this one specific area during a discreet time period).

The first floor is mainly a demonstration of world outrage at the war- letters from governments across the globe condemning it at the time, pictures and write ups of protests on five continents. There's also a case for letters from American veterans and medals and war memorabilia they've sent to Vietnam as reconciliation. After that, things went down hill some. The second floor starts with panels taken from various pertinent treatise, including the Geneva convention, which the US broke during the war, and then heads into a detailed, illustrated history of the war, the damage done by it, the equipment used, and the lasting effects.

On the bright side, the Vietnamese have mastered situational irony

 A good part of the last floor was just Agent Orange legacy, which to summarize is millions of birth defects a year still. There are videos of children suffering from severe mental and physical disabilities, pictures of cancers and deformities, and even tanks full of fetuses stillborn from the chemical effects. Also, a few more pertinent passages from international law outlining the illegality of chemical warfare.

Not an uplifting room

The most surreal part of the entire experience? This at a shop just outside the building

Just...like...who?

After that, we headed to the much more easily digestible, but much smaller, natural history museum. It was an informative day.

Finally, we caught a flight over to Kathmandu. Our original plan was to overland it across asia, but after reassessing we determined that busing through laos, indonesia, et al would be prohibitively expensive in time. Also, we'd been going the wrong way the whole time. So we got the cheapest flight to Nepal we could on Asia Air, which is *not* the line that keeps losing planes, but *is* owned by the same company, and for the first time crossed borders heading west.