Guided tours have never appealed to me, as I hate being told what to do and the thought of schlepping around foreign countries as part of a clump of fat white tourists doesn’t quite fit in with my romantic notions of myself as a traveler. Hitchhiking through East Germany, working the breakfast shift at a beach bar in Puerto Angel, speaking just enough of whatever language to get by… at least in my twenties, this was the way I rolled.
Nonetheless, I just got back a guided tour of Vietnam. And it was amazing.
As weird as it may sound, as a child during the years of the Vietnam War, I learned the names of its towns and cities in somewhat the same way I learned the vocabulary of golf. Birdie, eagle, double bogey. Danang, Khe Sanh, Hanoi. The language of the grownups around me, the words that blared from the television. Over time, this early immersion created a kind of tenderness toward both golf (theoretical — I don’t play or even watch) and Vietnam.
Hue. Gulf of Tonkin. Mekong Delta. My Lai.
I was nine years old in March 1968, the time of the My Lai massacre. I was acutely aware and deeply horrified by its details, and I was inspired as only a nine-year-old can be by the passion and grooviness of the anti-war movement. In the decades since, I learned to love Vietnamese food, and got some idea of the particular beauty of Southeast Asia. Ultimately all this coalesced into a strong feeling that I had to go to Vietnam myself. I had to see the places, meet the people, eat the food, spend money — a tiny, possibly silly, one-woman mission of reparation.
But I didn’t want to go alone, so I told my daughter Jane, who finished college this past June, that I would take her to Vietnam for a graduation present. When I started trying to plan the trip, I quickly got overwhelmed. Research indicated that we should travel from Hanoi to Saigon, and that we should stop at several places along the way, and clearly a truly mind-boggling number of arrangements would need to be made using the internet because at 64, I am not hitchhiking in East Germany anymore. But ever since I booked a rental car for the wrong month of 2009, causing me to be stranded indefinitely outside Boise, Idaho, I have been edgy about internet arrangements. So what about, um, a guided tour?
I landed on Intrepid Travel, a company based in Australia, which offered a 12-day “Vietnam Real Food Adventure.” The itinerary was just what I had been beginning to figure out on my own, except a lot more detailed and better. And as the comments on the site made clear, having a native guide would make all the difference. So we booked the trip, then Jane got a summer job so we rescheduled the trip, then my neighbor Pam decided to come too, and then, to my surprise, she talked my sister Nancy into joining us, and then because of Nancy’s tax deadlines, we rescheduled it again, and then finally, e-visas and passports and vax cards in hand, we went.
Short version: it was great. The food was delicious, the people were lovely, the scenery often stunning, and our guide was nothing short of perfect.
Long version: I wrote it all down in way more detail than you could possibly want to know, especially considering everything went so smoothly that there’s no interesting drama to report.
The medium version follows, illustrated by photographs we shared on the WhatsApp group we made for the trip, the Intrepid Motorcycle Club. Photo credits to Jane Sartwell, Ross Barnard, Pam Stein, Nancy Seeback, and Jen Rollins.
Day 1: Hanoi, Sunday
The first meeting of the tour group was Sunday night, but we had to leave Baltimore at 3 am on Friday morning to get there for it. We flew Dulles to Dallas, then Dallas to Tokyo. The food on Japan Air Lines was mildly disgusting — a weird pasta salad, a blob of smoked salmon, corn pudding, can’t believe they eat any of this in Japan — but the free brandy on ice, which I learned about from the guy sitting next to me, was the highlight. Jane had vowed to sleep through most of our 24-plus hour trip. It took Klonopin, Flexoril, Xanax, Ambien, ibuprofen, brandy and beer, but by God she did it. And survived.
Intrepid had booked us into a sweet hotel called the May de Ville, where I had my first encounter with the wonder that is Vietnamese hotel breakfast, seemingly included with the room everywhere and often pretty extravagant. Thick, chocolatey Vietnamese coffee, which you can have with sweetened condensed milk, regular milk, or black, French rolls (“banh mi” actually just means baguette), omelettes, gratin potatoes, bacon, yogurt, plates of dragonfruit, mango and pineapple, and, always, pho. Pho is the standard way to start your day in Vietnam and if you’ve never thought of noodle soup as breakfast, you soon learn it goes down easy.
The minute we walked out the door of the hotel, we we were initiated into the extreme sport of street-crossing in Vietnam. There are rushing hordes of motorscooters everywhere at all times and very few traffic signals, even fewer that are obeyed. In fact, crossing streets was the scariest aspect of the whole trip. Later we would learn to cling to our tour guide like a family of terrified ducklings, trying hard to obey his orders not to run, but proceed in a stately manner, with one arm outstretched, palm flat, as the phalanx bears down.
We spent the day wandering the Old Quarter of Hanoi, dazedly window-shopping. In the afternoon I fulfilled my dream of getting a mani-pedi, which I suspected might be a good thing to do in Vietnam and I was not wrong. My manicurist, Uyen, managed to be very funny without having a single word of English except “No.” She spoke into her Google translator app and the robot voice spoke to me, and then we did it the other way. “Do not arbitrarily move your hands from my lamp.”
That evening we met our guide, Bon Can, and the two other members of our group, an Australian couple named Jen and Ross. Only six people on the tour and four of them are us, what luck. Bon is a cheerful, down-to-earth, well-spoken and (as we would learn) virtually imperturbable man in his late 40s who radiates good vibrations and savior-faire. He told us how he grew up with nothing in the country outside Hanoi, carrying his flipflops under his arm to school so they wouldn’t wear out too quickly, having only one suit of clothes for a whole school year, and being very cold all winter long.
He also filled us in on all kinds of basics, like the street-crossing, and not confusing the 1,000 and 10,000, and 100,000 dong notes, (100,000 is just under 5 bucks; you see 1,000s lying in the street and no one picks them up.) Don’t cross your fingers for luck because here it means fuck you and don’t say “yum” because it means “I’m horny.” About the Vietnamese War, he said, we don’t worry about that anymore. You cannot change the past.
This seemed unlikely if not all-out impossible, but eventually the welcome and kindness we received from all the people we met, including many who were born or grew up during the war, made me feel that amazingly, it must be true.
Then we all put in $38.40 or 870,000 dongs each, for a tipping kitty, and headed back to the Old Quarter for our first dinner. Hanoi Food Culture was a sweet, simple spot with staircases that smelled of cinnamon, and our dinner a family-style tasting menu. Highlights were the appetizer courses — fresh and fried spring rolls, and green mango salad. Also the giant heads-on shrimp.
We got to know each other a little better — Jen and Ross are both widowed, friends set them up four years ago, and they’ve both recently retired, she from speech pathology and he from cinema management. Jen’s brother is the author David Rollins, the Tom Clancy of Australia, well-known in the States. We had a good conversation about books, maybe the first of many.
Day 2: Hanoi, Monday
A full day of Real Food Adventures kicked off our week, many of them enjoyed while seated on the brightly-colored plastic kiddie dining sets that are ubiquitous here.
R.F.A. #1 was the official breakfast of Vietnam, served in a pho restaurant near the hotel — classic Northern style, which apparently involves fewer herbs, bean sprouts and other toppings than you get in the South. Afterwards, we visited a covered food market where meat, fish, grains and vegetables are sold. We tasted banana flowers and dragonfruit and longans (these are nothing new to the Australians.) It was dim, smelly, and to me, rather nauseating, with water pooling on the rough cement floor and the occasional escaped fish or eel flopping around in it. There were butchered animal parts all over the place and frogs in bags. Jane and I were thrilled to leave. Jen, who makes her own cheese, said she loved it.
We continued along, visiting stalls on the street that sold all manner of things, then got in an airconditioned mini-bus and headed over to a coffee shop for R.F.A. #2: a sample of “egg coffee” which apparently went viral when Kim Jong-un was here for a summit. The barista gave us a demo of whipping the hell out of a couple of yolks, adding coconut syrup, honey and a shot of espresso — basically a very rich coffee-flavored eggnog. Meh.
R.F.A. #3, rice-flour crepes, was a favorite. The crepes are made on a flat round skillet like regular crepes except with steam underneath, then they sprinkle on fried shallots, shrimp, pork, chicken, or some combination, and roll them up, and serve with nuoc cham. A couple came in — apparently mobsters or movie stars, plenty of bling and fancy clothes — the first visibly rich people we’ve spotted, despite much talk of wealth accumulated via real estate ownership. (Bon very into providing economic info, such as price of cars, and operation of half-socialist, half-capitalist economy.)
R.F.A. #4 was out in the suburbs, a tea house in what was described as a Soviet-funded apartment complex, a dusty, paint-peeling row of five-story buildings, some with extravagant bowers of plants pouring off the balconies. The tea room had low tables with cushions on the floor and a gentle young woman named Giang made us two types of tea. She poured hot water over each tea seven separate times, and we drank each infusion out of tiny cups, the flavor surprisingly getting stronger each time.
R.F.A. #5 would prove to be my least favorite of the whole trip. It is known simply as Sweet Drink, and it involves choosing from an array of mixin’s: jellied beans and cubes of gelatin and weird puddings and other colorful but nasty ingredients which are layered in in a glass, then topped with very sweet coconut milk and ice cubes. It almost seems like something you would have to eat on a dare.
R.F.A. #6 was outside of town, far off the beaten track. The venue was a wooden structure built over a swamp — including a floating dock, and a cement-floored room with three walls, low table and cushions on the floor. A rather ethereal young man served us glasses of craft beer made from some thick-skinned pink berry. He told us the recipe was based on the life of his ex-girlfriend. He makes a different variety each week, he says, each with a different story.
That evening we four Americans went off-tour to see the traditional Water Puppet show in the Old Quarter by the lake, recommended by Jane’s dad’s girlfriend who is a Vietnam maven. This was a good example of how Bon was happy to integrate non-itinerary items into the itinerary from time to time. It was magical, seen from our $8 third-row center seats, with a band playing traditional instruments and singing, and a pagoda backdrop over a deep blue pool.
Adorable brightly painted puppets swam out and performed water dances. In one part, incandescent red dragons spat fireworks and streams of water. Four boys frolicked, a couple of phoenix birds made a baby, fish flopped and flew. At the end about 10 puppeteers came out from behind the curtain, standing hip deep in water.
Day 3: Halong Bay, Tuesday
Today I began to appreciate the joy of having little idea of what is coming next, then having it be something wonderful you never would have been able to imagine or picture.
We left after breakfast on a mini-bus for the four-hour trip to Halong Bay. The ride was broken up by a stop at a ceramics cooperative, where we saw the process of making giant urns, the slip poured into molds, dried, refined on wheels, then painted by hand with breathtaking dexterity and speed, one person turning out 45 – 52 giant urns per day (!?!) with practiced whisks of a feathery brush.
We arrived on the dock for our cruise on Halong Bay, where over 2000 limestone islands rise from the emerald green waters of Bac Bo Gulf, dotted with beaches and grottos created over thousands of years by waves and wind. We boarded a charming wooden boat, the Bien Ngoc 10 (Sea Pearl), written in pink cursive on the prow of the top deck. On the main floor is the dining room and bar, and nine compact staterooms are spread over that floor and the one below, each with large windows on the view. I thought the very firm beds were great but Pam and Jen later disagreed with me heartily. On the top deck are chaise lounges, potted plants and an awning, plus arching pole-lamps for evening.
We were served a fine multi-course lunch by a very nice man again named Thang. He was lanky and cadaverous, quite witty and a great bartender. A table was set with linens on the main floor. There were little dishes with salt, pepper and lime — you mix it together to make a dipping sauce. The local Halong beer became our favorite so far. We had shrimp and crawfish, both of which were cooked in savory, buttery sauces. There were fried spring rolls, rice, curried vegetables, morning glory greens, cucumbers with peanuts in a light sauce, carved apples for dessert.
After lunch we visited a cave, Sung Sot or Cave of Surprises, which was like a tour of Mars, really quite spectacular. Steps led up and down through giant caverns and corridors with stalagmites and stalactites, ceilings that looked like meringue made of stone.Â
Next stop was Titop Beach, named for a Russian astronaut. Ships of various sizes anchored out in the bay and lots of people of numerous nationalities were enjoying the sandy beach and perfect body-temperature of the bay. The water felt so good after being hot and sticky most of the time for the past few days. We soaked off the heat and grit of the city for a good long time, approaching sunset.
It seemed that there might not be a pretty sunset because the sky was cloudy, but as we took cocktails up to the top deck we were surrounded by a gorgeous silvery light — sky shaded lavender and pink, the rock formations that poke up from the bay shadowy blue-gray. We played Scrabble and Jane had a Halong Dream, a tasty blue drink in a martini glass.
Dinner was another Halong Dream — more shrimp, an oyster Rockefeller wrapped in foil for each of us, squid cakes and delicious fish… for Jane the vegetarian, sweet potato tempura that she loved.
Day 4: Overnight train, Halong to Hue, Wednesday
There were karaoke parties on boats anchored nearby, there was a huge storm after that, but I only know because they told me — I was sleeping the sleep of the rocking boat. In the morning, Nancy and I went up on the top deck and watched groups on the neighboring vessels doing slow exercises to Asian music. After coffee at 6:45, we went kayaking in a stunning lagoon that we entered through a tunnel in one of the rocks. Jane and I had a tad of trouble coordinating our paddling, and even more difficulty communicating civilly, resulting in our crashing into the rock wall more than once. Well, we have to act like mother and daughter every once in a while.
After breakfast we took the bus back to Hanoi, with the afternoon off before we boarded the overnight train to Hue. The ladies of the trip were planning another off-itinerary activity: foot massages. There were about four places advertising foot massage on our hotel block alone. At the one we chose, Thuong Y Spa, the sweet owner greeted us with delight, snapping pictures and asking our names. “Okay staff blinders?” she asked. Nancy said, “No, thank you, no blinders.” She smiled, and tried again. “My staff is blind,” she said, and it took us a minute to grasp that she meant her staff was actually blind.
They were skinny, awkward looking young kids, no more than teenagers probably, and despite their frail appearance, had strong hands and a good technique. Mine was a tiny girl in a pinafore with uneven black ponytails on the sides of her head. The whole experience was relaxing and dreamy. I felt like years of trauma accumulated in my shins and ankles was breaking up and washing away.
On the train, a bottle of Jameson and and a bag of banh mi sandwiches led to a fun evening, with the six of us crammed into a compartment.
Great conviviality prevailed as we drank half the bottle and polished off our sandwiches before the train pulled out of the station. We tried, and quickly discarded, some awful snacks Pam had loaded up on at the WinMart, including chicken jerky and jackfruit puffs. We played Scrabble and cards and at one jolly point in the evening Ross said, “I’m so glad we’ve ended up with you, it’s so much fun,” and Jen told us how we were so different than what they had expected Americans to be like — because we read books and watch movies! She said she’d been so relieved to learn we weren’t Trumpers when we began discussing politics at the tea house — she says sometimes she thinks she spends more time reading about American politics than her own; we agreed that its sideshow/train wreck aspect makes it irresistible.
At some point in the evening Jane was nearly abducted by a garrulous bald man with a yellow bandana who seemed to be spiriting her off to do cocaine with him and his sixteen-year-old “daughter”… or something … we barrelled down through the carriages to rescue her.
Day 5: Hue, Thursday
We pulled into Hue Thursday morning at 9 where a bus was waiting for us to take us to a noodle place and a coffee place and then to the imposing and lovely Park View Hotel, where we had a half-hour in our rooms to shower and change. At 10:30 we were picked up by a crew on motorbikes, each of us paired with a driver — mine had crinkly eyes and was missing a few teeth and I felt I innately trusted him. They took us around town all day.
First stop was a dragon boat, which cruised up the Fragrant River to a major Buddhist temple, Thien Miu Pagoda. By the time we were there it was pouring, so our drivers pulled out ponchos for all of us. As we stood in the downpour, Bon gave us informative lectures about Buddhism (the Bon version) and the start of the Vietnam War (the Bon version), a domino chain from Harry Truman to Dwight Eisenhower to the monk who burned himself up in Saigon. We saw the monk’s car, a snazzy Austin Healey, and a picture of someone holding his charred heart, which didn’t burn.
After that, we took a long tour around town, which was not at all ruined by the rain — somehow still very fun as we sluiced through the puddled alleys in our seven-bike formation. We went through a wealthy suburb where we saw walled mansions and temple after temple after temple – properties almost the same size as those of the smaller houses, but devoted to a shrine to that family’s ancestors. Every family has one of these shrines, which is why there are so many, but it seems a fairly incredible way to use up a lot of space. They gather there once a year, on the great grandfather’s birthday. All have the same layout, with a triptych pagoda and a low, decorated rectangular wall in front of it. There are also miniature ones, on poles like Little Free Libraries.
We rode out to lunch at a Buddhist temple in the countryside — it was delicious and light, including a salad of green figs and mushrooms served with a Funyun-ish puffed cracker.
Afterwards, we visited the Tomb of Tu Duc, a sad emperor who had 103 wives but no children and the longest and most embattled reign of the thirteen rulers. Here I was inspired to ask Jen about how her husband died, and Nancy and I told her how our first husbands died, because why not trade sad stories when you’re at the Tomb of Tu Duc.
“In a nutshell,” says Bon, and then tells you the main points you need to remember for the test, only there is no test.
For dinner we went back into the countryside and visited the Anh family, whose home was situated alongside their rice paddy. They had an adorable little girl who wandered around as her mother and grandmother and grandfather (he was my age and had glasses like Malcolm X) served us their homemade banana rice wine and uncountable delicious courses. The spring rolls were crunchy, with a shell that almost seemed to be made from noodles. A salad that seemed like crab but was jackfruit. Glass noodle salad. Chicken and fish were served in a starfruit broth. On the walls of the room where we ate were large, framed wedding portraits of the parents and the children — weddings are big here. Small Vietnamese wedding about 200, says Bon.
Bon got incredibly jolly at this dinner and kept making toasts to things — to anything that was praised or even mentioned throughout the evening. Here’s to the host family! Here’s to the spring rolls! He was in a great mood because some distant cousin of his had turned up in town and later he went out drinking with him til 1 am.
I have been thinking about how we will hardly be able to function after this trip without Bon to help us cross the street and tell us when to eat lunch and what to buy. A tour guide is very much in loco parentis. It’s been a long time since I have been in this situation, at least where I am not the parentis, and I can’t say I mind it at all.
Day 6-8: Hoi An, Thursday – Sunday
Another sumptuous buffet on our first and last morning in Hue — we all wished for more time here — served on the ninth floor of the Park View, with a terrace overlooking the town. I had a rice crepe with cucumber, tomato and nuoc cham, and made Jane a cheese sandwich for the road. (Sliced American and Laughing Cow are the only options I’ve seen; the French don’t seem to have made much headway in this regard.)
At 7:15 am we got on the bus and visited the #1 attraction of Hue — the Imperial City, aka the Citadel, including the Forbidden Purple City, which was the home of the king. It is a very large compound that is gradually undergoing restoration after decades of depredations. We learned more about the Nguyen dynasty that united the country in 1802 and continued through thirteen monarchs until the last one abdicated in 1945, including one gay emperor whose main contribution was changing the royal outfit. Several posters elucidated the proofreading marks used by the emperor on the various reports and briefs he received.
Then we were on the way to Hoi An, stopping for cappucinos and iced coffees at a misty lakeside town of Lang Co, near the mountain pass of Hai Van… Pam and Nancy went off for a walk and got caught in a downpour. Bon: “They didn’t even ask me!” Continued through Da Nang, where there are major seaside resorts a la Miami.
Stopped for lunch at a home in Tra Que village — this family makes the giant rice crackers that are crumbled over the local noodle dish, and grow basil, mint, and other vegetables in a community garden. Mi Quang is a noodle salad tossed with herbs, lettuce, shrimp and pork, moistened with a little broth, the most famous dish of Quang province — basically a drier pho.
Bon continued chili-shaming me at lunch. Yes I do like hot food but some of these little red fellas are way too much for me. “But I thought you love chilis.”
We arrived at Palmy Villas, our home for three days, a small hotel that Bon says has been struggling since COVID. It is an enclave of whitewashed three-story buildings encircling a blue-grey pool, hanging greenery and lush landscaping everywhere. Tropical paradise feel. We cooled off in the pool, then went into the touristy center of Hoi An, the Gatlinburg, Tennessee of Vietnam, for a walking tour, including the Japanese covered bridge, the Tan Key old house, and an assembly hall where we saw altars to the twelve spiritual midwives and to the god of businessmen, a guy with a red face, long beard and huge machete.
On walls everywhere there are plates and markers showing the flood line from various years. This place has been underwater many, many times. Flagging, we asked Bon if we could go back to the hotel for a break before dinner — he quickly agreed — and we picked up a bottle of Jamesons on the way out of town, now the official drink of the tour.
The six of us had dinner at the Hoi An Inn while Bon celebrated the 17th anniversary of Intrepid in Vietnam with a group of seven other guides. We tried the seafood cao lau, a local noodle dish. The noodles are soaked in lye water and wood ash, giving them a different taste and texture than the plain ones. I liked it, Jen thought it was too heavy.
This town is known for handmade fabric lanterns and it’s quite magical at night with lit-up lanterns everywhere: rows of market stalls, hanging from trees, on bridges and in clusters on the many boats floating down the Hoai River that runs through the center of town. Hai Nguyen, a local chef with a restaurant in the Old Quarter of Hoi An called Green Mango, came to the Palmy pick us up for cooking class Friday morning at 8:15. We started by walking to the market so he could pick up ingredients for our recipes — there, we had a lesson in how to cut pineapple, which involves determining whether your pineapple is right or left-handed, then slicing it in a spiral accordingly. I bought three kinds of hot sauce, which I was very happy about. Jane almost fainted in the fish section of the market, which was filled with tray after tray of silvery fish of all sizes, and bowls of clams and other shellfish — I saw the mantises, crawfish-type creatures, I enjoyed so much on the boat. We stopped at a stall for another round of the dreaded Sweet Drink that we had the other day in Hanoi, but when Hai saw my face he got me a salty limeade instead, which really would have been great with some tequila. Made by soaking limes in saltwater for three months.
Hai’s cooking class, held in an outdoor kitchen beside his home, was excellent. We made eight dishes: a spiralized noodle salad (made with simple mandolin tool), lettuce wraps with chicken, summer rolls, tomato tamarind soup, sea bass steamed in banana leaves, tofu and eggplant, mi quang, and mango sticky rice. We put on black chef hats and aprons and each got a towel, a knife and a tasting spoon. Everyone got to do lots of prep and cooking, and he had us taste each dish at each phase so we could understand the effect of various ingredients. A herb tray included two kinds each of cilantro, basil and mint, plus spring onions and an herb called “rice paddy” that tastes like cumin and curry. What a great time we had! And what a great lunch.
Nancy, Jen and I walked the mile and a half back to the Palmy Villas where we had a break til 5 for swimming and napping and journal-writing and tea-drinking … and now we are heading out for more R.F.A’s.
We took a car to Reaching Out Teahouse, a peaceful, pleasant place run by hearing- and speaking- impaired people. Elegant tea and coffee service with cookies and sweetened dried coconut and green tea strips. I bought a little suit for Teddy in their gift shop.
This respite was followed by a trip through night market hell. I take back everything I was thinking earlier about the low-key sales pitch of Vietnam — true of Hanoi, but definitely not touristy Hoi An. Bon gave us 40 minutes to split up and shop… a nightmare! After Jane was paid $6.50 for a little pot of Tiger Balm — we were literally chased down the street by a guy whom I asked about the price of incense. It was way too high, $20, but he wouldn’t let us go, and accosted us several more times shouting “What you pay? What you pay?” and “Good for you, good for me!” We almost couldn’t get away from him. Finally Jane gave him the finger, Vietnamese style, second and third fingers crossed, as Bon had showed us. He considered returning the gesture, shook his head, and gave up.
Pam meanwhile was having an equally difficult time with some maniac trying to force her to go to the ATM and get out hundreds of dollars for a box of lighters and other crap.
Desperate to escape from the vendors and the clamor — if you even so much as LOOKED at anything, they were on you immediately — Jane and I escaped into a riverside bar and had a shot of tequila and a beer on the second floor balcony until it was time to rejoin the group.
I had been curious about a taco-looking street food called something like Binh Trang Luong — a flat round rice crepe that was filled with potato, scallion, dried shrimp, and a quail egg, then folded and grilled. Good, but overpowered by the shrimp. Pam and Nancy tried banana sticky rice, gave it thumbs up. We took sandwiches home for dinner from a Bourdain-approved spot, Banh Mi Phuong, which is busy day and night just because of that and also because it’s great and cheap. The tofu and avocado version was 30,000 dongs — like $1.30 — and delicious. Jen and Ross got the traditional pork and pate.
On Sunday, our free day, Jane, Pam, Nancy and I signed up for a lantern-making workshop in the Old Quarter with a woman called Pineapple who Bon hooked us up with. He said she needs the money because she’s got a little kid and one on the way. Bon is always guiding us to patronize the businesses of people who particularly need the money — also the case with the Palmy Villas, which apparently barely made it through recent challenges. We “share the love,” as he puts it. He loved it when we found the blind foot massage place.
The class was held in a handsome venue, a kind of railroad arrangement of courtyards and high-ceilinged rooms between two streets, its first floor also home to a chili sauce vendor, a tailor (dressmaking is big in Hoi An), and a drinks cafe. Pineapple explained that the murals and carvings in the stone walls were over 200 years old.
We each picked our fabrics, then gathered at a table while she patiently instructed us on how to put together the frame, glue the fabric, add the trim. If you messed up any step, she would just reach over and fix it for you so by the end they all came out perfect. Well worth the $17 for the class. She was such a patient teacher, demonstrating each aspect and then telling us “Carry on.”
We walked over to the taxi stand and took a cab to An Bang beach — Bon had recommended a spot called the Deckhouse. It was beautiful, like a little beach club with tables and couches and double-size loungers and palm-frond roofs, overlooking the beach and the blue South China Sea. They normally also have chairs right on the sand, they said, but they had pulled them all in in preparation for a storm that’s expected soon.
Our lunch at the Deckhouse was excellent — we all had salads of various kinds and Pam and Nancy also got a passionfruit panna cotta. The swimming and bodysurfing was dreamy, water as warm and delicious as the Caribbean, but with better waves. We saw a few real surfers as well, and a Dalmatian puppy. Eventually, we came back up to the deck for cocktails and a pizza (blue cheese and mushroom — surprisingly good.) Such an exquisite beach, we were wondering why the tour doesn’t make more of a thing of it, but then realized you don’t really need a guided tour to go lie in the sun and drink cocktails. Free day works.
Finally we tore ourselves away and got back to the hotel around 5; per my request, Jen got me a mandolin and two more bottles of the green hot sauce at the market (they skipped the beach.) For dinner, we all walked to a nearby restaurant called Red Dragon. I had a gin and tonic with lemongrass and chili in it, and seared tuna. Also a steamed bun type thing, kind of like a bao but folded.
Walked back to hotel and though it was only about 8 pm, all went straight to bed. We have to downstairs and ready to move on at 5:20 am.
Day 9, Ho Chi Minh City, Monday
It turns out are leaving Hoi An just as Typhoon Noru closes in on North and Central Vietnam. Bon says a million people are being evacuated from the area around Hue, including his wife’s parents. The flight we are on today will likely be cancelled tomorrow. At Palmy Villas, they are quickly trimming trees and hauling things inside. Bon is very anxious for his “mom-in-law,” as he calls her. Who will trim their branches?
The ladies of Palmy served us breakfast at five a.m., then we rode back up the coast to Da Nang airport, where we caught a one-hour Air Vietnam flight to Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon. Planes, trains, and automobiles definitely the theme of this trip.
Straight from the airport to a cooking class. On the bus, Bon explains the difference between Southern and North Vietnamese — not just accents, which are strong, but apparently the livin’ is much easier down here, which creates a different character. “The Southern girls want to marry Northern guy, as long he doesn’t want to move back north. The Northern guys are hard-working, thrifty, and they always have a plan. After living through typhoons and cold winters, they always save something for a rainy day.” Southerners more laidback, easier to find work and get by, so don’t plan ahead as much. The term “Saigon brother” means generous.
Our second cooking class is “in the countryside” (a favorite expression here), with a Buddhist chef named Mac at his organic farm, called Spice Garden. We are greeted by two extremely friendly dogs, one of whom we are told comes from Iceland. After serving us purple lemongrass tea with longans (a small brown globe-shaped fruit you peel — there’s grape-like flesh with a large pit inside), he takes us on a tour of the gardens where we pick pandam leaf, jackfruit, morning glory and chocho, and other things for the lunch we will prepare. First we sit down to a fruit-tasting with passionfruit and honey and pineapple and pomelo and jackfruit (ick for the jackfruit). There is an adorable, skinny kitten with a stumpy tail, he doesn’t yet have a name. His purr is bigger than he is.
We cook in a glass-walled room at stations where ingredients are measured out and set up for us, including individual charcoal stoves. We prepare a basic dressing for calamari and vegetable salad, and also make tilapia with lemongrass, tumeric and garlic, and a light tomato egg-drop soup. This class is less in-depth than Hai’s but I know I will use the fish recipe, so easy and delicious. What a peaceful, elegant place Mac has created, all built from scratch from a dream. He tells us about his Buddhist master, whom he is soon to visit in Nepal — when he met him, the master already knew everything about him.
Our next destination is the War Remnants Museum, a devastating and heartbreaking experience. The first room provides historical facts, the second a tribute to the many photojournalists who recorded the war and were killed there, then there were rooms about Agent Orange and War Crimes. It was gutting, brutal, insane, and I started crying somewhere in the second room and couldn’t stop. We would have stayed much longer but the museum closed at 5. Jane was completely absorbed in the photojournalism exhibit, so many last rolls of film, last shots, lost lives, but such a testimony to the power of photography and the courage of photographers.
A disgusting Eisenhower quote sticks in my mind, something like “if we don’t intervene in Vietnam, we’ll lose access to tin and tungsten and the riches of Southeast Asia.” Three million Vietnamese and fifty-eight thousand American lives later, the pirates come home in defeat…
After the museum, we checked in to the Huong Sen hotel, which is located in downtown HCMC, a more elegant and high-powered downtown than wgat we saw in Hanoi, but it seems that’s just because we didn’t go to that part of the city. Had drinks in Ross and Jen’s room before dinner at a food court restaurant that was much, much more elaborate than something you would call by that name in the U.S. A huge place, with table service, soaring ceilings, and lots of greenery, and food stations around the perimeter. There was a quieter second floor with lounge furniture on a terrace overlooking the street. I managed to order the worst thing, probably, in the whole place — a folded vegetarian rice pancake filled with bean sprouts, served with lettuce and herbs in a pool of grease. Other people’s food was fine… the fresh spring rolls weren’t bad… oh well.
Day 10, Mekong Delta, Tuesday
Today is Pam’s birthday and it started with the delivery of an arrangement of roses and sunflowers to our breakfast table while Happy Birthday played over the P.A. system. Oh, that Bon. The Huong Sen breakfast buffet was probably the most extravagant of all – including congee and dim sum and Singapore noodles along with the usual stuff – a veritable Asian Epcot Center of breakfast. Still, something about the May de Ville version makes it my favorite. It may have been the smiling staff, actually.
At 8:45 we boarded a mini-bus to the Mekong Delta — stopped at a funny rest stop with lagoons and bridges, and later the Ben Tre market, where we bought incense for 18000 VD, yay! Less than a dollar. I took many pictures of the women in their stalls.
The nine branches of the Mekong River are called the nine dragons, and we took a boat ride down one of them. It was a long pontoon boat with wicker chairs and benches, loud motor, nothing fancy. The river is a silky-looking silty brown, bordered by palm trees and other lush vegetation — reminiscent of Apocalypse Now or Heart of Darkness — seems like Martin Sheen or Kurtz must be somewhere in there. We stopped for a visit at a funny little tourist venue where they peformed folk songs and got everyone dancing around — served tea and fruit — showed coconut candymaking process and had a shop full of coconut-themed souvenirs. We tried coconut wine and snake wine — the latter is a giant cobra marinating in a bottle, supposedly people drink it twice a day for good health. I had some. Meh.
Leaving the river we stopped in to visit bamboo weavers. They were weaving mats from long, slim stalks on a large loom. The place was filled with that familiar bamboo mat smell, the mats hold that smell for years. Ross and Jen bought more gifts, very nice of them to spend money everywhere we go. Sharing the love. Ross looks good in his dark green VIETNAM cap with red star.
From there, we were picked up by a couple of tuktuks, a motorcycle attached to a truck bed. These are used to haul coconuts or can be equipped with a pair of benches and a bunch of padded helmets for a wild ride through the palm fronds for the tourists. The tuktuks dropped us off at the edge of a jungly neighborhood and we walked down a residential lane to a restaurant. The tables were arranged on concrete platforms over the water, covered by thatched roofs held up with bamboo poles, the various dining areas connected by slippery, narrow concrete walks.
The meal was a deep-fried whole carp, served standing on a wooden rack. You pulled off chunks with chopsticks and there was rice paper, noodles, cucumber and pineapple to roll up with it. Also a light river shrimp soup and large prawns. Pouring rain on and off through the meal. Throughout the day we kept running into a couple of other Intrepid tours, which changed the feel a bit… the illusion of adventure less powerful when other Westerners, family groups with kids, fat white people (not unlike oneself), on the same track.
After lunch we were taken in two sampans, long wooden canoes, for an African Queen style trip down a narrow tributary of the river. A girl with a long, black braid from the top of her head paddled our boat. I wasn’t as charmed by this boat ride as others were — maybe it was the tv tube and other random garbage floating along on the opaque brown water. Maybe I was just tired. Our final transport of this many-powered day was back on the mini bus to Mai’s Homestay near Ben Tre. After we got off the bus and started walking down the road, Jane realized she no longer had her bag of souvenirs from the coconut “factory” — I was sure she left it in the sampan — a wooden toothpick holder, a compact mirror, and a bracelet of rose-colored beads that was supposed to be Pam’s birthday present. Bon made some calls to no avail.
Mai’s homestay is a lush tropical setting with open-air buildings, no AC, no hot water, gorgeous flowers growing everywhere. We sleep in dorms on wooden bunks with small pillows and light blankets under mosquito netting — experiencing “the life of the people in the countryside.” Mai and her family very welcoming. There is a big verandah over the river which gets a great breeze, where we had drinks and later dinner, played Scrabble and cards (Ross played me twice, both games very very close), drank whiskey and wine, and from which I thought I would watch the sunrise in the morning.
Dinner was omelet with mushrooms, spring rolls (Jen went in the kitchen and helped roll them), spiralized veggie salad and simple soup. The main dish was slow-cooked pork with coconut milk, a tofu dish for me and Jane. A beautiful cake for Pam had been procured and thus the birthday festivities continued. Pam said she has never had a more celebrated birthday than this 53rd.
And since I slept about one wink — it wasn’t that it was unbearably hot, actually the fans moved the air nicely, but I just couldn’t sleep so read the new Rebecca Makkai by the light of the iPad on and off all night. I was out on the deck by 4 or so to await the beautiful sunrise. Coffee and other people showed up around 6 and our last breakfast together was dragonfruit, eggs, baguettes, and banana fritters that Jen again helped make.
And after we hiked back out to the minibus — the souvenirs were found! My firm belief that the bag was in the sampan — wrong! My memory of a pink plastic bag – also wrong! Bag right here! Hooray!
Day 11-12 HCMC, Wed, Thurs
We left the homestay at 8:45 and took a fairly quiet ride back to Saigon. Jen comments on how lovely Mai’s was, how all the most basic accommodations — the homestay, the overnight train, the boat — have been “quite different to what I imagined,” very pleasant and comfortable.
We stopped at a rest stop where we could buy coffee and beans to take home. Bon stalled off getting back to the hotel, where our rooms would not yet be ready, by giving us a bus tour of Saigon.
After we checked in, showered and had lunch, we joined up with Ross and Jen at 2 to walk, Bon-less, to the Fine Arts Museum — surely the most decrepit museum I’ve ever seen. Lots of paintings hung without climate control, only what seems to be the most illustrious work segregated in a small number of air-conditioned rooms. Loved war-era illustrations, including like the work of what seemed to be an embedded front-line artist. Also some French influences, Renoir, Degas, etc., but probably would have been better to have a docent or an audio tour but this museum is nowhere near offering that. Some lovely ceramics in the ancient art building — and then most of the “special collections” taken up by a big art sale of amateur canvases. Some okay. Mostly not. Then we had coffee and tea in the cafe.
Split up from Ross and Jen, who were heading back to the Huong Sen, with plans to follow Nancy, who was eager to stay out and about, to the Reunification/Independence Palace. But we got caught in a freezing windy downpour and ended up instead at the Caravelle Hotel, an iconic place with an iconic bar on the roof. But the top floor was all shut down for the storm so we sat in the elegant Opera bar in the lobby. I ordered a martini with Vietnamese “Flowerbomb” gin, Jane had a gin and matcha drink, Pam and Nancy ordered asparagus and fried potatoes. It was lovely, over a million dongs worth of lovely, but that’s actually only $50.
For our last meal, Bon took us to a place called Hoa Tuc, where we sat on a leafy terrace. He asked for the lowlights and highlights of the trip and we talked about how we wished we’d had longer in Hue, and how we hated the night market, and how we loved Vietnam — the boat and motorcycle rides, the cooking classes, and also our tourmates (a visit to Sydney is on my mind) — how nobody got sick and of course we love Bon. Jen presented him with the tip we’d put together. I slipped in a note of praises, with a whole thesauraus of words for how he managed our trip: perceptively, calmly, humbly, brilliantly, graciously, carefully, and so on. Bon loves vocabulary. As do I.
I was feeling quiet that night but if I had spoken, would have said how glad I am to have “met” Vietnam as something other than a character in my nightmares. The War Remnants museum confirmed that it was as bad as I remember, really even worse. But this tour has shown me a vibrant, resourceful, kind, and endlessly resilient people. (Even while we were there, they were having to add a new floodline to the walls in Hoi An. It never stops.)
Literally no one we met seemed to hold any kind of resentment or grudge, even people who were born in the middle of the war, people who lost relatives, like Bon. His attitude, or at least the one he expresses to us, almost seems too forgiving and forgetting. But as the victim, he has that right. We are the ones who need to remember. And I really do feel that going to Vietnam to learn and appreciate and enjoy the people and their culture is something of a mitzvah, a good thing to do during High Holy Week, which this was — Rosh Hashanah a couple of days ago.
We were in bed at 9 for a 4 am alarm, off to the airport, through all the lines, the many people checking huge shipping boxes of God knows what to places like Silver Spring, Maryland and Edinburg Texas. Came home on All-Nippon Airways through Tokyo to Dulles, a Vietnamese-born Oklahoman named Tan, or Kathy, seated beside me on the first leg. She is a nail artist who just spent 35 days visiting her family back in Vietnam. She was truly surprised and delighted to hear we took a holiday in her country.
