I'm Guessing Maybe They Won

In a previous post I mentioned stepping off a bus in the backpacker district of Saigon and being swept up in a torrent of raucous, scooter riding, flag waving humanity. I found out later it was all due to a soccer game that Vietnam had won in the SEA (southeast Asia) games that are still going on in the region. Last night I saw there was another game on, Vietnam vs. Singapore, and thought to myself 'Maybe there'll be another little street free-for-all tonight after it's over. Well, if they win the game, that is.'

It started rather quietly like a gathering storm. A few pots and pans banging, some yells, a few scooter engines revving at their upper limits of 4 or 5 thousand RPM's. And then it gathered momentum like an unstoppable tornado spinning through the streets of Saigon. So of course I had to abandon the safety of my hotel room and, like one of those storm chasers of questionable sanity on Discovery channel, allow myself to once again be swept into the maelstrom. And this time I brought my camera!

Crossing the street in front of the Ben Thanh market was actually physically impossible unless one was OK with literally climbing over stationary scooters jammed wheel-to-wheel and seat-to-seat that were packed from curb to curb, no curb to sidewalk to park lawn, and that seemed to be going nowhere until they could somehow be forced forward like a cloth lodged in the neck of wine bottle. I take it this eventually happened because today they're gone.

I ventured up to the heart of District 1, Dong Khoi street in front of the opera house, and it was non-stop mayhem the whole way up, close to a mile. Little pockets of amplified cheering would periodically erupt when an (overly? no!) enthusiastic individual would achieve a new plateau of fanaticism by gaining a high tree branch or the upper reaches of a lamp post or the top of a mail box amidst an explosion of camera flashes and pumping fists. I came a little too close to being mowed down by a scooter whose driver felt it was appropriate to adopt an s-shaped path down the street at a high rate of speed. Police were out and did what little they could to keep the chaos somewhat contained.




Video of the area in front of the Ben Thanh market. I did not cross here!






I liked these little guys. After I took the photo, they made sure I understood that they felt Vietnam was #1. I sort of had that impression already!










Though a little dark, this captures a lot of present-day Saigon. The street celebration, the august Saigon Continental Hotel (The Quiet American, etc.), and the cranes in the background working non-stop through the celebration and the night on yet another new high rise building in the central business district.

Nha Trang and Back Again

Spent a few days up the coast in the laid back little town of Nha Trang and found my first nice beaches in Vietnam. I was pleasantly surprised by the lack of litter and the overall clean condition of the main Nha Trang beach, which is a white band of sand extending for a few miles along the South China Sea. I later discovered a big reason for the clean condition is the raker that gets employed in the early morning hours on a daily basis to scoop up the vast majority of litter that may find its way onto the sand, i.e., this is a special effort made purely for the sake of tourism. But I don't mind and the desired effect is achieved. I have to add that I visited other beaches not far from the main Nha Trang beach and they were fairly clean without the use of the tourist sand raker, so the beach conditions are not all bad here even left to the locals. There are a lot of tourists in Nha Trang, the majority seeming to hail from the land of Oz (Australia), and many of them are there to party, so there are a lot of bars and other diversions for short-term tourists there.

Another popular pasttime in Nha Trang is diving. I'm a certified scuba diver, but haven't done it in many years and so chose to stick to snorkeling. I like snorkeling because it's simple and easy, doesn't require all the heavy scuba equipment, and you can see probably 75% of what a scuba diver can see if the depth is 25 feet or less. I did a half day trip on a dive boat out to Hon Mun (Moon Island to the rest of us) and had a good time checking out the reefs and aquatic life around the island's edge. I didn't see anything breathtaking (good since I was underwater), but the submarine scenery matched that of the Caribbean and Indonesia where I've dived before.

I also took the opportunity while in Nha Trang to rent a bicycle and do the first riding I've done since I arrived in Vietnam. I have to say it felt pretty good to feel the wind as I cruised down Nha Trang's main street. I got adventurous and visited one of Nha Trang's main attractions, the Po Nagar Cham towers, by bicycle. Like elsewhere in Vietnam, the motorbike is the main mode of transport here, and my bike was the only one in the parking area at the towers. Made it easy to tell the attendant which one was mine when I returned! The towers were built between the 7th and 12th centuries and have been through a few different incarnations, owners, and uses and are still used today for religious purposes by Buddhists and others. They're constructed primarily of very small red bricks.







This is the main tower. There are 4 towers in total, all grouped together on a raised flat area. I removed my shoes and ventured inside this one where I found a Buddhist shrine and a couple of worshippers and smoky air tinged with incense.















This, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook, is a dancing Shiva goddess with her foot on the head of a bull, apparently letting eveyone know who's boss around here!



















There is an abundance of intricate detail on all the towers. This is an inscription in the doorway of one of them in some sort of ancient script I've never seen before, so sorry, I can't translate, but I doubt you'll find any website URL's.









I left the towers which are just north of main Nha Trang town, and proceeded further north up the coast since it was a nice day and I felt good and the road was good and the traffic low (by Saigon standards!) and the air clean and wanted to take advantage of this confluence of good circumstances and get some biking in. As I proceeded, I even encountered a few small hills to give me a little aerobic challenge as I made my way. I finally reached a junction where I could see a long row of thatched roof huts lined up along a half mile stretch of coast and went down towards them just to investigate. I was astonished to encounter another foreigner on a bike on the access road! He was from the Netherlands and was doing the same as I, just out biking up the coast. We chatted a bit as I'm sure he was just as surprised to see me. It was apparent the huts were part of some planned resort that was never completed and the area looked to have been abandoned for at least a couple of years. There are numerous other resorts in various states of completion around Nha Trang and it seems to be becoming a destination for tourists and expats who like the area. There's now an airport at Cam Ranh, south of Nha Trang, and I imagine the area will be seeing an influx of m more well-heeled visitors in the near future. So maybe this resort will be resurrected. The road I was biking must have been built to serve these new resorts.




This is a very nice bit of coastline and I doubt this resort will remain in its unfinished state.







I enjoyed by bike ride so much I rented another a couple of days later and went even further (can you believe it?!) up the coast road until it merged back with the main north-south highway (1A) that runs most of the length of Vietnam, about 15 km north of Nha Trang.



I stopped and enjoyed the view a few times. There are many islands right off the coast and the sea is plied by the old wooden Vietnamese fishing boats. Very peaceful. That's my rented bike. Not bad for $1 US/day, but it's not exactly a high-end state of the art racing machine either!






One thing I didn't so in Nha Trang was surf, but I found out there is allegedly some decent surfing near Cam Ranh, so I want to go back and check it out. Nha Trang is almost a full day's bus ride from Saigon, but that's good in that it keeps the teeming throngs away. The beaches nearer to Saigon are all perpetually crowded.












On the bus ride to Nha Trang, one of the staff decided to get in a little downtime by slinging a hammock between the seat rows! We passengers were generally amused and a little impressed.






When I returned to Saigon, I stepped off the bus into a swirling melee of boisterous Vietnamese clogging the streets and sidewalks and circling the area on motorbikes and waving Vietnamese flags in the air. It was absolute pandemonium and I had no idea what was going on. Turns out that Vietnam had defeated Malaysia in soccer and this was cause for celebration on a grand scale! It was a refreshing display of good clean safe public fun, which is something I've seen a few times in my stay here.