Getting there
The adventure began before we even took off! The flight from Harare to Dubai was running three hours late. So I missed the connection to Saigon and had an unscheduled whole day in Dubai! Emirates put me up in a hotel fancy enough to make me glad I had missed my connection! Furthermore, the break no doubt saved me a measure of jet lag.
Food and drink
During Zimbabwe's time within the British Empire, Indian style spices found their way into our cultural bedrock. The colonial authorities disseminated curry powder deeper into remote colonial outposts than they did Shakespeare. So I'm very comfortable with Indian style spices. However, Chinese style spices remain alien to me.
For the first week I really struggled with the spicy Vietnamese food. Even breakfast offerings at the hotel were full of spices! In desperation I decided to fill up on something safe: white bread and butter. To my horror even the white bread was laden with spices! Dinners were even worse. Most of the evenings we went out to restaurants for dinner. There were occasions when I left the hotel to go out for dinner hungry and came back still hungry. I'm bound to have lost weight in that first week.
At one restaurant the local tour guide went to great lengths to assure us that the spare ribs on offer were from a pig not a dog. Apparently dog meat is popular with the locals.
The tour guide also said, "That's why in the city you see not many dogs. Vietnamese eating everything can move. "( sic) Sick! That just added an extra dimension to my gastronomic plight!
Every now and then something familiar popped up.
I still put on 3kg overall across the whole holiday. I must have got used to oriental food in the end, rather like bugs developing resistance with time and eventually thriving on pesticides. In fact I have actually bought soy sauce for my use since my return.
I have also tried out a few Vietnamese culinary ideas at home. In a moment of weakness, I bought a Vietnamese cookbook. So there are more culinary adventures in the pipeline.
With a population of nearly 100 million and no meaningful social security safety net, the pressure to survive in Vietnam is intense. That could partly explain why they eat everything that moves. Even domestic cats are fair game. They are served in restaurants called Tiger Restaurants.
To their credit the Vietnamese put a lot of effort and skill into their food preparation and presentation.
There is only one kind of carrot, but Vietnamese ingenuity has conquered this limitation by devising a million ways of carving it. The only problem is that nobody ever seems to eat it. There is plenty of carrot everywhere but it seems to be for garnishing only. The same applies to pumpkin.
In all fairness we did have pumpkin soup. The soup was probably made with sweepings from the carving studio.
I concluded that Vietnamese cuisine is geared more for entertainment than sustenance, in much the same way as prostitution is geared more for recreation than procreation. Why else would one stretch a meal into ten tiny courses
when all the ten courses could easily fit on one plate? It is not a train smash when you're not hungry but a major frustration when you're ravenous!
I suspect prolonged sustenance deprivation could partly explain why the average height in Vietnam is short.
There is anecdotal evidence to support that theory. When the Golden Arches arrived in Japan, the average height of teenagers across Japan is said to have increased. The Big Mac may be junk food to us but it is awesome sustenance when compared to sushi!
At the Mekong River delta we feasted on locally produced fruits.
I never realized there were so many fruits I didn't even know existed! The dragon fruit particularly stood out. Outside it looks like a deformed giant radish
while inside it looks like a bleached out kiwi fruit.
We also sampled locally caught fish.
Fortunately it didn't taste muddy, in fact it was very good! I had read in a David Attenborough book that all river delta flora and fauna thrive on the mud in the delta waters directly or indirectly. So at least for that one afternoon I too thrived on mud(albeit indirectly).
No one in the group appeared keen on rice wine after we were told that sometimes they "pickle" cobras in it to improve its "bite."
According to the local guide, your throat burns for two hours when you drink one of those venom laced wines!
Ever since I gave up alcoholic beverages one drink I miss is pina colada. In Vietnam I discovered an alcohol free version of it that easily exceeds the real thing! Maybe it is the freshly squeezed pineapple and coconut juices that do the trick.
Vietnam is the world's largest producer of cashew nuts. So you can get plenty of cashews for little cash. I ate them until they nearly came out of my ears.
Transport
There are 39 million scooters in Vietnam. The swarms of scooters are like a fluid, they flow into all available space on the road and beyond.
Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu-hMd_Ck00
I don't know why they continue to build pavements. Pedestrians still have to walk on the road anyway.
Remarkably the traffic always flows and the scooters seem to co-exist happily with motor cars. Scooters are surprisingly capable carrying everything from whole families through whole pig stys to full lengths of channel irons. Thankfully scooters are not allowed on motorways.
However some Vietnamese motorways are a bit of a misnomer. They have traffic lights and pass through centres of villages. So it took us almost four hours to do just 160km on one of them.
Wifi
Wifi is no big deal there. Some establishments don't even bother securing it with passwords.
Even this tuck shop offers free WiFi.
In that respect Vietnam is ahead of all countries I've ever been to. They only need to tidy up the wiring.
As I considered the Wifi cultures of different countries, a comparable development came to mind. In the nineties when email first came in, some companies kept it under lock and key! I guess twenty years from now, rationing Wifi will look just as ridiculous.
Enterprise
With more than 3000km of coastline, Vietnam is bound to have some awesome beaches. And she does.
The only fly in the ointment are the vendors. They are as persistent as desert flies. They make Zimbabwean vendors look like a picnic.
My theory is that the vendors are a side effect of an otherwise positive attribute: The average Vietnamese is very enterprising.
Formal shopping malls seem to be the exception rather than the rule, at least in the areas I explored. The vibrant semi-formal bazaar encroaching onto the pavement is the workhorse of the Vietnamese shopping experience.
That natural enterprising aptitude was no doubt suppressed by decades of communism. It is blossoming now as communism retreats. I say retreats because the vestiges of communism are still very much in evidence. From billboards to public loudspeakers belting out communist propaganda, sometimes at 2:00am! I hear some residents have gone out and shot the loudspeakers. I would too if I had such a nuisance installed near my home. It was bad enough from a hotel some distance away!
The transition phase from communism to a market economy has spawned some interesting paradoxes. For example toll gates on the motorways of a communist state.
There is no doubt that the market economy already has the upper hand. This trend has not been lost on foreign investors either. Samsung now employs 65000 in Vietnam making, among other things, Galaxy smartphones. As labour costs rise in China, Vietnam looks well positioned to be a major beneficiary.
By far the most profound irony of all is that mere market forces are succeeding in dismantling communism in Vietnam where the US Army, with all its might, failed.
While manufacturing is probably the highest growth sector in Vietnam, the scale of their tourism sector is also awesome.
I had expected to be one of a handful of trailblazers slashing a path through unspoilt jungle with machetes. Needless to say I was in for a surprise. Instead, it felt like the whole world had already been there and I was a late arrival.
Apparently Aussies and Kiwis discovered Vietnam as an agreeable destination long before the rest of us.
The hotel rates are less than half the cost of comparable rooms in Harare hotels. On the metered taxis one US$ goes on and on and on and on. Wifi is everywhere, often without any restrictions. Personal security is great, at no time during the entire trip did I ever feel any threat to my personal security. In a nutshell we had a great tour.
Well designed and maintained public conveniences are a crucial facet of tourism development that many African countries including Zimbabwe seem to miss. The Vietnamese have already figured that out. In my book Vietnam ranks second only to Israel on that front.
The truth
Contrary to popular belief, the average Vietnamese alive today is not warlike at all. The Vietnam war still looms large in many foreigner's memories. I guess that is where the misconception comes from. In fact 60% of people in Vietnam today were not even born when the Vietnam war ended in 1975.
The Rhodesian war only ended in 1979. So by that measure I should be more warlike than the average Vietnamese!
Architecture
Colonialism is bad but it always has a silver lining. In Zimbabwe, among other things, we got curry powder without having to find passage to India ourselves. In Vietnam they got a rich heritage of architectural styles. Vietnamese architecture conflates legacies from a succession of former colonial masters. Styles from ancient China, Japan, France and America are all represented. A motif that reverberates through them all is that in Vietnam they build very thin houses, even when they are multistorey.
I never got to find out why but I think it could be to do with the demand for agricultural land.
A prominent exception is the city of Da Nang with its gleaming new glass and steel buildings. It looks like a juvenile version of Singapore.
In fact it has been deliberately modeled on Singapore.
A short drive out of metropolitan areas and the inevitable paddy fields dominate the landscape again.
Just like in rural Africa, decedent architectures(aka graves) are scattered haphazardly all over the place, especially in paddy fields.
Many paddy fields are waterlogged. How they manage to dig and let down a coffin in a such conditions remains a mystery to me!
Curiosity
Curiosity drives the bulk of tourism. Accordingly, curiosity on the part of the tourist is a given. However it can be odd when the hosts can't contain their curiosity, as happened to me in a shop in Vietnam. A man came to me and asked whether my hair was natural or a toupee. When I told him it was natural he asked to feel it. In hindsight I should have charged him!
At the Ho Chi Minh Complex a couple of girls asked me to pose with them in a photograph. In a moment of rash decision I agreed.
Before I knew it there were two more groups wanting the same thing! In hindsight I should have charged them too. I could have easily flown back home first class! I still can't think why they would want a total stranger in their photo. My guess is that it could be the pheromones in my aftershave. So I've stuck to the same brand since.
At the Imperial Palace in Hue we encountered a bizarre intruder who insisted on joining our group photo shoot.
He is the one on the extreme right in a cap. Our guide tried in vain to evict him!
The South China Sea rim is reputed to be blessed with more beauties per capita than anywhere else in the world.
That encompasses Vietnam, The Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia. Unfortunately I wasn't there long enough to find a bride. I'll have to start saving for a second trip.
Geography
From a physical geography viewpoint this holiday was a real feast. It brought my school geography to life.
Within a short space of two weeks, I had the privilege of sampling six geographical regions namely:
Tropical rain forest
Major river estuary/delta
Mountains
Sandy shore
Limestone karst with monolithic islands
Sandy desert
Needless to say the sandy desert was not in Vietnam. To unwind from my Vietnamese tour I took a three night stopover in Dubai.
Among other treats, my hosts Trevor and Sandy took me to a sandy desert. Hahaha sounds very poetic: Sandy desert with Sandy!
We also saw, the tallest building in the world
Dancing fountains
a ski slope in the desert
Arab dhows
a gold souk
and museums
Not to mention desert fog
This was the effect of the fog
Unfortunately the fog did not last long enough to trigger another bout of Emirates largesse!
Spices will never leave me alone! In Dubai I bought some dates to take home that turned out to be contaminated with spices! They probably knew I would be 6000km away by the time I discover!
Notable moments gallery
Canoe trip on the Mekong delta
Houseboat trip on the Ha Long Bay
Cookery lesson
Agriculture lesson
The longest badza I've ever seen
Veronika, the life and soul of the party
Rachel, our superb mother hen for the tour
Trevor and Sandy, my wonderful hosts in Dubai
Overall impression
Apart from the spices, my experience of Vietnam was seamlessly pleasant. Either Oak Hall are a fantastic tour organizer or the Vietnamese try harder than most or both. This was easily one of the best holidays I've ever had. I would go back again.
