Vietnam intrigues and exhausts in equal measure. Its wealth of history and sophisticated culture and untouchable cuisine have been endlessly rewarding. As a tourist, however and unfortunately, I have too often over the past two weeks experienced the people of Vietnam as a drone of voices clamoring for every conceivable way of separating me from my money. The dollar sign syndrome. I came here with good intentions and I have no regrets, but I've grown increasingly frustrated with the rough behavior of the Vietnamese, especially now that I finished my tour and I'm traveling solo. I'm sick of getting ripped off and barked at. And last night I finally lost it over this shit.
After a while, the usual scams become obvious and predictable. The taxi driver who changes the price at the last minute for some bullshit reason (to be fair, taxi/ rikshaw/ tut-tut drivers the world over basically suck). The dude at the train station who leads you over to somebody else driving to the hotel and then demands 50,000 dong. Some scams are more subtle. For instance, I spent the last few days in Sapa, a mountaineous town in Northern Vietnam near the border with China. There is no airport up there, so people arrive via overnight train. I booked a hotel room at the Cat Cat Hotel, Lonely Planet's midrange pick, and they assured me that they could book a train for me. Booking a train is a bit strange in Vietnam, I believe you are only allowed to book trains the day of the trip, so it's tricky. A local operator in Hanoi delivered what appeared to be a train ticket to my hotel, after much confusion and waiting around. So far, so good. I got to the train station and when I tried boarding the train, they insisted that I go to the restaurant mentioned on my ticket and collect my ticket there. This despite the fact that the train was boarding. It turns out that I didn't have a proper ticket, but rather a "receipt" which I was supposed to present at the restaurant identified on the piece of paper and there I was to collect my ticket. In other words, a way to force you to eat at this restaurant before you get on the train.
I should first tell you a bit about sleeper trains. They usually leave around 9 or 10 in the evening and arrive at some horrendous hour, like 4 or 5 a.m. Aside from being uncomfortable -- and some are worse than others, the train from Hue to Hanoi just about jarred my teeth loose, it was so bumpy -- this creates problems with hotels because you have to check out late and check in obscenely early. Or you just end up waiting around in the early morning marinating in your stink, which is what I'm doing as I write this, in a deserted hotel lobby in Hanoi at 5:30 a.m. The soft sleeper trains are 4 to a room, 2 bunks on ground level and 2 up high. The last two times have been okay, except for the drunken, stinking Chinese dude on the way to Sapa who reeked of cigarettes and snored like a freight train. The older, French-speaking Vietnamese dude in the cabin last night/ this morning had an even harsher snore, that would occasionally end in this protracted gasp-hiccup-wet gulping monstrosity that I had to block out with music from my iPod and earplugs jammed way up into my ear canal. He slept so hard that his French compatriots had to wake him up when we arrived at the train station.
So naturally, the idea of taking a sleeper train is unpleasant enough without having to chase after my ticket. In Hanoi, just after the dude had told me to go to the restaurant, this woman appeared magically out of nowhere and produced an envelope from which she extracted my ticket. Savvy to the scam on the way back, I knew that I would have to appear at the restaurant identified on my train receipt prior to departing Sapa for Hanoi. The van provided by my hotel dropped everyone off at the restaurant, so apparently this scam is embedded in the system. I decided to eat something with the Dutch couple I had met on the train there and then collect my tickets. The Vietnamese waiter who doubled as ticket procurer immediately reassured us when we got to the restaurant that he would have our tickets in five minutes. 30 minutes passed, nothing, and at this point, my temper flared and I basically lost it. I went over to the guy and demanded my ticket. "5 minutes." I paid for my bill and then demanded my ticket again. He told me to meet him at the train station, a 2 minute walk. I went over there with an American guy Bob who I had met a few minutes before. When we got to the station, the restaurant guy tried to pass off another receipt as an actual ticket, and it took around 10 minutes of freaking out and demanding my ticket again and again and again and then 20 minutes of waiting around to get the ticket. The Vietnamese people working at the station were taken aback by my anger, but I was fed up and didn't give a shit. I literally sat in front of the dude from the restaurant and said "where's my ticket where's my ticket where's my ticket" until he finally figured his shit out. I think the Dutch couple were a bit taken aback by my temper and obvious aggravation. Normally I would've cared a bit more, but I'll never see them again.
It's difficult to describe the feeling of vulnerability and exposure you feel when you are in a foreign country with unfriendly people who are constantly trying to rip you off. It's unnerving. Bob compared the behavior of the Vietnamese to Prague right after the wall went down, when people felt no real compunction to be nice to you in order to get your money. Maybe it's one of the last vestiges of Communism in Vietnam, I don't know, but in every other way Vietnam buzzes with the money-making capitalist instinct.
I was not pleased that I became so angry. I like to think of myself as tolerant of cultural differences. Opinionated for sure, but also open-minded. But the fact of the matter is that when you actually settle into a new country, even for a short time, there is a honeymoon period when everything is new and amazing and if you stick around longer that honeymoon period ends and you are confronted with otherness and the experience can be disconcerting and even repulsive. The negative aspects of my culture, which I assume are readily apparent to most foreigners, require little enumeration and ironically my disenchantment with my own culture was on the principal instigators of my trip and this exploration of otherness. To state it succinctly: Sometimes you just hit a wall. ("Every man has his breaking point. You and I have one. Walt Kurtz has reached his...") There is another layer of irony here, because despite my disenchantment with some aspects of my country, when traveling abroad in Vietnam and other places in Asia, there is an instant "us v. them" bond that develops between Westerners, even those who have only just met. And for me, this is especially so with Americans that I meet. The further you go, the closer you get. I'm more of an American than I realized. I had to travel to Southeast Asia to figure that out.
A couple hours after I wrote this blog, I had breakfast at this Vietnamese chain restaurant that serves delicious Pho (Vietnamese beef noodle soup) and cafe sur da (Vietnamese iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk). Perhaps the most perfect breakfast. And later that night I wandered around Hanoi and marveled at all its little side streets and its sizzling urban energy... I fly to Ho Chi Minh City tomorrow morning and will probably go on a 2-day bike tour of the Mekong Delta on the 23rd. So life is good....
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