We’ve completed our time in Vietnam, maxing out our visas at the 30-day limit. And we loved it. Just as a general summary of our time there, we thought we should share some of the good with the bad—the highlights and lowlights of our month in this wonderful country.
Highlights:
Hoi An…
This might have been our favorite city in Vietnam. Hoi An is a charming town on the coast known for its authentic Vietnamese cuisine and custom tailor shops. This place is a tourist machine to be sure, but not in an obnoxious way at all. We loved the short time we spent here. At night we would roam the tiny crowded streets beneath festively strung colorful paper lanterns. We ate the local fare and did some shopping (more browsing for us) and generally just soaked up the atmosphere.
Women with baskets of fruit or other fare can be found everywhere in Vietnam. I got to try carrying one of these loads–they are heavy!
The colorful streets of Hoi An by night.
We also took a cooking class in Hoi An! What a great experience. It was definitely a splurge on a cyclist’s budget, but completely worth it. The class kicked off with a short cruise down the river to the restaurant/school where we would learn from the best. We were welcomed with fruity drinks and ushered into our outdoor cooking classroom. We learned to make spring rolls (including our own rice paper!), Hoi An crispy pancakes, Vietnamese eggplant in a clay pot, and seafood salad. Oh, and we learned how to carve up veggies to decorate the plates! Just the kind of frivolous thing you need to know on a bike trip. We loved every minute, but, like every cyclist, we especially liked the parts where we got to indulge in our creations.
Our cooking class instructor… he made everything look so easy!
Dave, working the Asian cooking utensil of choice: chopsticks.
Rolling over 25K…
Another milestone reached! We rolled over 25,000 kilometers on this journey about one day before riding into Hue. We shared a tasty dessert in Hue to celebrate our victory. We’re at the point now where we realize we have done a lot more than what we have left to do, at least for this particular trip. It’s bittersweet—feeling like you’ve really accomplished something, but also realizing that the end is not too far away.
Another milestone reached!
Beautiful scenery…
We weaved off and on the coast of Vietnam, enjoying a few beach campsites, sleeping to the sound of the waves. When we were inland, we ventured onto the Ho Chi Minh Highway, where we enjoyed significantly less traffic, mountain scenery and numerous camping options.
Riding along a more mountainous part of the coast on a misty morning.
Lowlights:
Horns…
I hadn’t ever realized what a blessing it is to live in a country where we monitor noise pollution. So far, Asia in general has been, quite simply, LOUD. And Vietnam in particular. Apparently in the US we have regulated the volume to which you can have the horn on your vehicle. In Vietnam there is no such regulation. Trucks, buses and even normal cars would boast the absolute loudest horns we have ever heard. It would come out of nowhere, too. They don’t just honk at you if you’re in their way. They honk for everything, and then some, just to let you know they are around.
One day, in an effort to reduce our irritation with the constant honking, we decided to make a game of it. We each placed our bids on how many honks we thought we would hear over the course of the day. Then, we would count as we got honked at, and whoever was closest at the end of the day (without overbidding, as we use “Price is Right” rules) would be the winner.
I guessed what I thought might be somewhat conservative, not wanting to go over—117. Dave went a little bolder with a guess of 155. I kid you not, within ONE HOUR of riding, we had heard more than 200 horns. So we stopped counting. This game was going to be too disheartening.
Aggressive hellos…
You might have read in our previous post about the consistent “hellos” we got in Vietnam. And for the most part, we believed these people were genuinely friendly so we would respond with the heartiest hello we could muster (depending on the conditions) and smile and wave. But frequently, it was obvious that the person giving the hello didn’t understand that when we responded, that should be the end of the friendly exchange (unless, of course, they actually spoke English). On many occasions, said person was a young child, who seemed to take certain delight in not just yelling a hello, but picking up steam as they repeated it, over and over, louder and louder. We would say hello back, and they would just get stronger. Sometimes this could be quite annoying, mixed in with the other noises like the constant honking (see above) and the buzz of motorcycles (see previous blog post).
Lack of Intuition…
There are some hand motions which we thought would be somewhat intuitive when trying to communicate in the world at large. We showed up in Vietnam, and though we don’t expect everyone in the world to speak English, we hope they would “work with us” the way we try to work with them.
Surprisingly, the most confusing point in communications with people was often the “how much?” question. So we would roam into a restaurant, where often there was not a printed menu, and even if there was, we wouldn’t be able to read it. We would ask about a few of the dishes we were familiar with, and they would give us a yes or no head nod if they had that one. Then we would try the typical “money” symbol, by rubbing the thumb with the index and middle finger, while asking “how much?” That usually didn’t work, so then we’d pull a few bills out of our wallet and show them, trying to communicate “how many of these?” On one occasion, Dave showed a woman a 20,000 dong bill (equal to about one dollar) to ask how much for the meal. She started to reach into his wallet as if to show him how much more it would be. “No, no, no,” Dave said… no way were we going to let a random street vendor reach in the wallet to get out the money! He pointed to the 20,000 bill again and asked how much. The lady thought he was trying to negotiate the price of the meal to 20,000 and got mad at him. “Pfff,” she seemed to say. “That’s ridiculous! I’m not doing it for 20!” Well of course that’s not what we were trying to do, but she actually never understood that we wanted her to tell us the price. We finally just had to order. This kind of interaction was not unusual at all. Mind you, we had also tried to learn to say “How much?” in the language, but the tonal language is just not forgiving for the foreigner English tongue. No one ever had a clue what we were saying.
But of course, we’ve learned to take the bad with the good. So altogether, we’d call Vietnam a hit! And we’d definitely recommend it for any type of travel—relaxing vacation, backpacking journey, or of course, a bike tour.
