Vung Tao Beach Adventures

5AUG07 Return to Civilization from Vung Tau

All good things must come to an end, so without the sun for 3 days at the beach at Vung Tao, we have decided to come back to HoChiMinh City a day early to see Philippe, Xuan, Mr. Chien and hopefully to learn more about the training program the Orphanage has for the blind, which is the one part of my initial purpose that has not been fulfilled. The sun actually breaks through for 15 minutes about 8am after my workout – so I head to the pool for a cold swim and to “catch some rays!” However, the sun is long gone by the time Aly awakes, and today we’re on a bit of a timetable in order to leave and catch the hydrofoil for our 12:30 tickets. We return to Highland Coffee for our usual breakfast and Internet morning routine. There must be 7 young women who faun over us – they run to open the door when we come and leave (breakfast as well as after dinner when we stop there again) and give us a big smile. They look 14 – 18 to me but could be 25 – 30 says Aly. I really love the friendliness of the people generally but particularly the staff in every establishment. It is amazing how many there are, like the Ritz, they generally outnumber the customers!

In addition to Highland Coffee, we also found a fabulous Vietnamese restaurant on the fourth floor roof “garden” with a panoramic view of the beach. The elegance of the setting (white linen chairs, tables, table clothes – everything except the chairs in the outdoor section where we ate), the staff (women in pale blue silk traditional suits) and the cuisine would be a match or probably exceed anything Nashville has to offer, at one-quarter the price!

Glad to visit this place – quite a contrast from Destin or Gulf Shores!

4AUG07 – Vung Tao Beach Resort

Like everything else we’ve experienced, Vung Tao, the beach “resort” to which we have gone, is “uniquely Vietnamese,” which is to say everything is just a bit different than what you would expect in the West, which leads to a continuing stream of surprises, pleasant and not so pleasant.

Aly asked me how the thatched roof on our bungalow kept out the rain, and I answered that there must be some sort of “membrane” between the “thatch” you can see from the outside of the hut and the thatch you can see from inside. Well, perhaps there is, but more likely there isn’t. We should have anticipated that there was a reason for the plastic tarp on the bed! It turned out that the main functionality of the tarp was not to keep the rain out. Instead we observed 1 or 2 dime-sized spots at the head of the bed, suspiciously looking like bird droppings. So we were careful to keep the tarp on the head of the bed whenever we weren’t asleep! Aly wasn’t so lucky with her favorite Tri-Sig sorority t-shirt, which now has an auspicious yellow stain – another unexpected Vietnam souvenir!
While the Japanese boys/teens wear Western bathing suits, 99.9% of the females wear everyday clothes into the ocean and pool, i.e., the older women wear their full-length “pajama pantsuits” and the teens where their shorts and t-shirts, underwear included. I’m sure it’s modesty rather than not being able to afford a Western bathing suit. It just occurred to me that I have no idea how they get their clothes dry – the humidity is 95% all the time, nothing dries even though there is a constant 10 – 20 mph breeze – and it’s not like there is a guest laundry with lots of washers and dryers in the hotel.
The beach starts filling up as soon as the sun rises, well for all I know people are there before the sun rises since I never actually go out to look until the sun rises around 5:45AM and at that point there are dozens of people up and down the beach frolicking in the waves as you would expect at mid-day. While the hotels are far from full, it’s clear that the clouds and rain are no deterrent to going to the beach since getting a tan is the furthest thing from the social goal of the local women. Light skin is beautiful! We haven’t seen a single person laying out – of course we haven’t seen the sun either!
In addition to the people staying at the hotel, every day there are between 10 and 20 buses of all sizes from 15 or 20 person up to full size coaches that show up in the hotel parking lot. The folks unpack their coolers, cases of beer, food and beach gear and head to the umbrellas on the beach. It’s not clear how the hotel makes money, maybe there is a parking charge plus they own the umbrella concession! At the end of the day, they all board up again in their wet clothes and head home from a fun-filled day at the beach.
I talked Aly into riding a tandem bike yesterday – actually she was very willing to give it a go, as she has been on every activity and adventure the whole trip. Our goal was to ride up the mountain to see the “Christo” – which looks to be about 40 feet tall and the mountain also pretty imposing – I’d guess 1,000 feet. Suffice it to say that the tandem bike experience was a great illustration of Murphy’s Law applied to Vietnam:
The cab driver drove past a nice looking bike rental spot on the “strip” [i.e., the store fronts facing the beach a mile or so down the beach from us] and let us out to get a bike from a nice OLD woman. Must have been his mother or a relative!
After looking at the rusty clunker bike, I motioned that we needed to raise the seat – no dice! After paying her and riding off, the seat was so low our knees were hitting the handlebars and with a single speed (despite 21 gears – nothing shifted), I decided to return it, without refund, and look for a better bike.
About 10 yards down the street, we then found a better looking bike from a guy who looked like he might actually know something about bikes. Again, I illustrated that I wouldn’t take the bike unless he could raise the seat. That required a metric socket wrench, which he didn’t have, so I had to ride the bike down the street to a friend’s place who had a wrench. In about 5 minutes, we were fixed up and ready to go – this 21 speed was not even rusty so I thought we were in business!
Starting off amid even a few motorbikes and taxis is a little intimidating – we could have used a bobsled start to get up some speed!
When we finally got going, Aly started to feel a little less wobbly – however once I determined that the gears didn’t work, so going up the mountain was out, plus I didn’t not want to scare Aly to death coming down the mountain, even assuming we could make it up!
Turning away from the beach we road on the little commercial/residential streets with almost no cars and not too many motor bikes. Within about 5 minutes I noticed a black cloud directly in front of us, from which you could see the rain pouring. I hoped out loud it was going the other direction – no such luck! Within another 2 minutes, there was a gale of 25 – 30 mph winds and pelting rain – the worst storm we have experienced the entire time in Vietnam, and we are out on a bike in the middle of the city somewhere! Looking for shelter, and already soaked to the skin within about a minute, we found and awning big enough to get ourselves and the bike under – had to laugh at our luck. After about 10 minutes of whipping rain, which was cascading off the awning right in front of us, the storm slowed to a relative trickle, so we decided to venture out. Within a few yards, as the rain started to pick up again, the chain fell off! I fumbled in the rain to get it back on while Aly held up the back of the bike (so I could turn the pedal backwards) – one thing for sure, this rental place did not spare on the chain grease – my fingers were black. We decided to head back – of course I thought it would be faster to continue the direction we were going having gone about 60% of the way around a big rectangle (or so I thought!) However, after another 5 minutes, a second gale kicked up and we were forced to look for shelter again. This time we found a bigger open air “café” – and a longer rainstorm. Of course the restaurant folks tried to sell us some food, but that was out of the question. Finally it let up enough for us to start back, and then actually stopped raining!
Now we had two problems – first we were lost, well not really lost, we just couldn’t figure out which way was back to the beach, and once away from the strip no one speaks enough English to communicate with. It turned out Aly’s instincts on the direction were better than mine – after riding around and making a few turns, we found a large (60-foot tall) war memorial that we had walked to that same morning so we then knew how to get back.
That left the second problem – the chain. It was clearly too loose by a ½ inch or so – and was starting to come off every block or two. I wasn’t getting that much faster getting it back on, and Aly was at the point where she thought we should just walk the bike back – but that wasn’t an option for me so she relented and after 5 or 6 “chain stops” we finally made it back.
The guy who had rented us the bike (for which we had already paid and given him a 50% tip for fixing the seat for us), laughed and pointed at the sky as we rode up – quite a sense of humor!
In the cab back, we had to laugh at the timing of the storm, it hadn’t rained since early that morning – we had waited (and wasted) 2 hours of good conditions before going out in the storm, so all and all, it was a pretty funny outing and we escaped with just a little grease under the fingernails and wet clothes so not too bad!
If you like to sweat, this is the place to exercise – in 30 to 40 minutes on the exercise bike, my shoes are literally filled with sweat as if I had walked through 4 inch puddles or ridden a tandem bike in a mini-typhoon! After spending an hour or so running the hairdryer inside and outside the shoes to dry them the first time, I figured out I could wear “flip-flops” with socks to avoid the problem. However, the wet shoes issue remains whenever we get caught in the rain – which has been twice – and there is no way to get my exercise socks dry (and they have to be washed every other day) without the hairdryer routine! However, since I’m an exercise addict and the more adverse conditions the better, I like my exercise routine of getting to the “gym” by 6:30 or so, working out for as long as I can take it, almost made an hour today, and observing from the seat position on the bike that it’s unlikely that anyone has used it during my stay.

2AUG07 – Buddhist Theme Park Field Trip

Just when you think you’ve seen everything HoChiMinh City has to offer, another amazing surprise is delivered up: a Buddhist Theme Park. This mini-Disney World rises out of the surrounding urban squalor with its golden 50-ft long dragons, ornate gold and red Buddhas and an beautifully ornate “Electric Pagoda” shrine. Mr. Chien had told us we were going to a “waterfall” – so we dressed in our bathing suits under shorts and t-shirts, only to find out it was a “theme park” – with a few little waterfalls as part of the scenery. We were also under the impression that we were taking the 4 to 6 year olds – I was envisioning a wild time trying to keep up with them at a waterfall and lake. Instead, we had 8 boys age 7 to about 13. The two youngest ones, 7 and 9, were already novice monks dressed in gray robes. They warmed up to us immediately and were holding hands with me as well as Aly.

Similarly to a theme park in the U.S., they had a “parade” with dancers and “floats” – mostly Vietnamese fruits with beautifully dressed “beauty queens” waving to the crowds. They also had some cheesy little rides that the monk permitted them to ride on – a boat ride through a “mountain” with various “scenes of dragons, cavemen and mythical animals; and a horrible Halloweenish “House of Horrors” with cheaply done “torture” scenes at every turn.

There were a few notable differences from U.S. theme parks. First, there was a gorgeous Pagoda or perhaps a “shrine” or temple since a pagoda is a place of worship and the location in a theme park would seem to limit the opportunity for any services. The paintings including the rotunda ceilings, as well as the central Buddha and other worship figures were incredibly ornate. The incongruous thing was a series of pastel colored fluorescent circle lights surrounding the Buddha’s head, which lit up in a 20 or 30-second pattern, I guess signifying his enlightenment. The electronic display was so inconsistent with the rest of the worship space but apparently that was the “style” of all the pagodas built in the 1970’s.

Second was the alligator farm – hundreds of alligators from adolescents to adults (the babies were out of view somewhere) and opportunities to buy bait to “fish for gators” – which the boys insisted that Aly try! Very cool.