The Good, The Bad and The Early

Vietnam has been a strange place, where the ratio of mentals to lovelies is almost completely proportionate. That is to say that when you have a good experience with one local (share a joke in a local store) almost immediately something pretty vile occurs to redress the balance (guesthouse owner walking into your room at 6am to show people round). This post aims to reflect this Vietnamese phenomenon of ensuring a status quo is maintained - don't get too joyful or carefree because there's something terrible around the corner to even things up. That's Vietnam.

Let's start with the good because they're the most boring to read - we'll get to the bad (great) stuff later. Mui Ne is a small and well-stocked beach resort on the southern coast of the country. Arriving by bus, you hurtle down the main 'strip' on your way into town where neon lights throb out of wooden shacks - some with glitzy fairy lights in straight lines to entice people in like a human runway. The theme here is fish, which invariably meant a lot of normals banging on about how I have to try a scaly mouthful. I didn't. They feigned outrage to make their tired and dull lives more interesting. (Being self-referential makes me feel powerful) Anyway, because of the sea's proximity, the outsides of restaurants have a veritable smorgasbord of animal rights travesties woefully glugging at you from their shabbily constructed fishy shanty towns. Dogfish Beaker at their glass prison walls dejectedly and huge crustaceans tune into Cruelty FM with intertwining antennas. From a beautiful sea-view apartment to a luckless grief-hole faster than you can say, 'I can't eat it all.'

I spent three sand-filled days in Mui Ne; swimming, gazing at the perilous kite-surfers (one girl died doing it while we were there - isn't this meant to be the 'good' section?) and avoiding seafood. We took motorbikes - now becoming a staple of the SE Asian experience - to the beautiful white sand dunes and arranged to be there at sundown for optimum cliché. It really was stunning though and the picture that makes this post finally, after three weeks of none. Apologies. The colours and the spectacle more than made up for the propensity of sand to whip and fondle its way into your crevices and watching the sun melt into the nearby lake from our sandy vantage point will be something I remember for a long time.

Just before we left for the dunes, our rusty-toothed guesthouse owner, Mr Ho, insisted that we make it to a local wedding reception taking place at the digs later that night. This was just about kicking off by the time we got back and after spading the sand out of the aforementioned crevices, we settled into the hedonistic hootenanny. The locals were kind, generous and unbelievably drunk and seemed to make it their mission to get us there with them - well, it would be rude not to. We had all kinds of food poured onto our table, from an entirely tasteless pink and green rice 'cake', to a decimated duck dish and every time our glasses were half empty, we had to down it, '100%!', with an accompanying cry of, 'yo!' - which I'm sure means cheers. Or hello. Or yeay. Something. The music was completely deafening, musically illogical and brutally tuneless, but when we were fished up onto stage we gave it our all in the 'sing literally anything' part of the evening. One song. One and a half hours.

So that was the good. Now for the bad:

Happily cruising down the road on our way to the dunes, drinking in the sights and warm tropical air, a squishy pug-nosed man in uniform suddenly appeared in the middle of the road waving us over with his authority stick - and who were we to question the authority of a stick? I had heard about this from many travellers - about the corrupt police who pull you over and extort money from you, but, as the saying goes, you never think it's gonna be you. I was furious about it though and when he started to draw his filthy little rat claw over the well-worn document declaring, 'you pay fine of 160,000 dong', I kind of lost it a bit.

You do have a little more gumption in these circumstances, knowing full well they don't understand a word you're saying, so I let him know how I felt about him and his sickening scam, pretty much calling him every name under the sun. I also told them I worked for the BBC and would write a report on them, which seemed to be about as useful as threatening someone in a language they don't understand, but in the end they let us go; giving us a 60,000 dong reduction, I think mainly for our staying power. You cannot imagine how hard it was to resist giving them the finger as we left - it took every morsel of self-restraint I had and resulted in extra off-colour jokes later on in the evening to make up for it. Must... offend...

Think of the Mekong Delta and you can't help but picture a highly romanticised image of boat people, gorgeous scenery and craggy peninsulas. That's what I saw in my mind's eye as well when I booked the three-day trip a few days ago. The guidebook said good things and I had some time to kill, so I thought, why not? Here's why not:

The first day was OK. The journey wasn't the most comfortable, but was mercifully short and had a well-informed guide (who spoke like he had a mouth full of water) meaning we arrived fresh and ready to take it all in. This was the first organised trip I've been on, if you don't count treks, which are a bit different - more trekky - and straightaway it seemed odd. The people were OK, apart from an incredibly ugly Russian duo who spent half the afternoon trying to get a monkey high through the bars of his enclosure, but it was strange to be led from one buying opportunity to the next. Lots to see and do though and some great photo opps. Watch coconut candy being made, listen to locals sing (awkward) try the tropical fruits of the region, wear a snake - you know the drill. In the evening I shared dinner with some Aussies and went to bed early.

The next morning I was woken by the phone in the room going off just before 6am. 'What?' I demanded. 'God moning.' 'What?' I repeated. Click. We had to get up for 7am, so a call at 6am was completely unnecessary. Already vexed by this, I made my way downstairs for a piece of bread and some water - 'breakfast' was included, you see - and sat about for an hour thinking about how I could have still been asleep. We then travelled to the floating market, which was all right. Not particularly life-changing though and certainly not worth getting up so early for. It basically consisted of people throwing fruit into each other's boats and kids looking bored. They weren't the only ones. Then we went to watch rice noodles being made (whoop) and jack fruit being grown (cheer) The day would've been rounded off beautifully by a trip to the paint-drying factory, but I guess we didn't have time.

After the day's activities (which finished at midday - pisstake) we were driven for 'two' (three) hours to the arsehole of the earth and after waiting for everyone else to get their room, I was told there were no rooms left for me. The owners walked me over to another guesthouse, which was without doubt the worst I have ever seen in SE Asia. Wires sticking out of the walls, stains and filth caking the room and a moving floor of all types of insects - I wasn't pleased. The men next door kept me awake all night by phleming up and coughing as though they were shouting while watching teeny pop videos at full volume until I knocked at their door and told them to shutthefuckup. Exhausted and now unwell because of my lack of rest, I decided to forego the last day's agenda and asked to be put on the next bus back to Saigon, a local bus apparently and that's when it got interesting.

Saigon is separated into many districts - 2-many are for locals and the tourists almost exclusively only frequent district 1. When we got to Saigon, the bus pulled over and, while I tried to ask where we were, I was shouted at and physically thrown off the bus, with onlookers laughing and staring. Eventually, after wandering around in a bit of a terrified daze, I noticed that one of the shop's signs indicated we were in district 5. The people on the street then tried to get a crazy amount of money out of me to get to the one address I fortunately had on a hostel card in my pocket. Every time they quoted me about 10 times as much as it should be, knowing full well I was miles away and had no other way of getting there, they smiled and laughed about it. I suddenly felt very intimidated, alone and lost.

I started to get angry and shouted at them (very sweary - which they enjoyed enormously) until I finally relented and got on the back of one of their bikes (I literally had no other choice) for a 15-minute death ride through the choking smog. I got bike boy (finger missing, sweaty smell) to pull up at the travel agents and stormed in, demanding they pay for the bike, which, surprisingly, they did. I then spent about 30 minutes detailing my misadventures in the Delta and finally got a quarter of my money back. For SE Asia that's unheard of, so I'm quite pleased with myself. Think it was the cold talking.

So that's the bad - now the early:

As you've read, if you've got this far. This is, admittedly, a very long post. But then I haven't really written anything about Vietnam, so stop your bleedin' moaning. I got no sleep on the Delta trip, but before this, I stayed a couple of nights in Saigon. The guesthouse owner curled us into his beautiful room for three and, I have to admit, it was the quietest I've ever been in while staying in such a crazy city. At around 3am this all changed though. I was dreaming about teaching, I think, and being subjugated by the monsters, when they all started making this perculiar noise - like a high-pitched screeching. One, then two, then eventually all of them, making this same three-tone noise. It was bizarre until I finally woke to the sound of a cockerel giving it the morning big one. But how? I was four storeys up a building in the middle of Saigon - and it sounded like it was right outside the room.

Imagine my surprise when, once I'd been lying awake for around four hours because of the constant, relentless, merciless crowing, the sun came up and I could now see, right outside the window, almost on the ledge, a tiny wooden box with a cockerel in it. The gravity of my argument at 6am in reception was diluted considerably by my trifle hair, squashed up fatigue face and furious chicken impression and I knew while performing I would laugh about it eventually. Just not yet. Cockerels became a theme for the next few days, being woken by one three days later in exactly the same circumstances and then sharing a bus with a bag full of them a day after that. I hate them. (insert cock joke here - is 'insert cock' good enough?)

Right, that'll bloody do. Thanks to a record four comments on the last post. Victoria, you can be a part-time fussy eater if you want, but it's just not as much fun; Simon, a thoughtful response which informs as well as enlightens about your stance on the issue; Rob, you are right about the mayonnaise thing, but it wasn't cos it was foreign, it's cos it's made out of eggs, which are chicken periods; and Nabila - I only try things to make you proud. Happy now? I'm off to Indonesia tomorrow to begin my trek to Bali for Christmas time. It is Christmas soon, isn't it? Someone tell the sun that. Laters.