Vietnam, part 2: and then there's two

Well, that's almost two years without updating this blog. However, I'll continue where I left off, as I did start this blog entry more than a year ago but just never finished it. The rest of the things to be updated later.

So even before arriving in Vietnam, I contacted a vegan girl in VeggieConnection and asked about veg food and interpreters for doing user studies in the country side. It turned out she was an interpreter, and all-around super nice, so we ended up talking a lot on the phone during part one of this trip. Part two, then, is where I took the bus to her village to do the user studies. The girl is called Isabel, and I even stayed in their house, enjoying the wonderful vegan cooking of her mother.

This meant a five-hour bus ride from Ho Chi Minh city to a city called Long Xuyen in the Mekong river delta. The minibus ride included a half-an-hour lunch stop in a place with no vegan food, and a ferry-crossing where one could see these funny boats with eyes painted on them. She came by motorbike to pick me up from Long Xuyen. Now I'm not crazy about motorbikes, so a girl wearing a mask arriving by motorbike isn't the greatest turn-on for me, but I hopped on and we chased the sun on to her... town, perhaps, she called it a village but I was almost inclined to call it a city due to the apparently large population. I still don't know what the population is, but at one or two main streets I guess it doesn't really constitute a city.

I was lucky enough to come in time for dinner, and her mother was cooking. I was asked to carry the food to the living room, fine, but after I set the plates on the table they pointed out that this wasn't the Vietnamese way. They eat from the floor. Ok, fine, when in Rome... The food was delicious though, and everything served in the house is vegan! Awesome. The mother and one elder sister are vegans also, the rest vegetarian. Unfortunately Isabel was the only one speaking any language other than Vietnamese, so my communication was limited, but the whole family, including the husbands and children of her elder sisters, all live in the house. I was given a bedroom upstairs complete with a huge balcony. Before you go thinking it was immense luxury, let me point out that there was no bed. Just a bamboo-mat on the floor.

No deep sleep then.

Whatever light sleep there was got interrupted at 5 AM as a loud radio broadcast came on. At first I thought it was someone in the house, maybe using the radio as an alarm clock and accidentally turned it too high that morning, but then I noticed the noise came from the outside. It's a broadcast that's heard all over town, every morning from 5 AM to 6 AM, to get people up with the sun, apparently. This would set the pace then. Given that I wouldn't be able to sleep, I got up, and since Isabel was sleeping and I couldn't communicate with others, I decided to go for a run. On to my shorts then and off with everything else and running around the small town certainly did turn a lot of heads. I guess foreigners are a rare sight, and crazy ones even more so.

After a nice run it was time for breakfast and then to work. I set out heading to what seemed more like countryside with Isabel, after we printed out the forms she had translated. After the first interview it was already lunchtime, and given how long it seemed to take to get these done, I figured we should give some gifts to the people we interview. So after lunch we bought some small stuff and started to give those to all the interviewees. Just small things like drinks and snacks, but they were well-received. To my surprise Isabel had to do most of the writing on the forms as a large proportion of the people were actually illiterate! That I hadn't expected.

Anyway, we picked up pace in the interviews and got quite a lot of them done in the coming days. And it was just a lot of fun spending time together too, whether it was at the interviews, meals, going around by bicycle, or hanging out on the balcony at night. Some days later I was due to go to a workshop in Hanoi, so we celebrated getting the interviews done, and somehow the whole thing started turning romantic all of a sudden. Odd.

So we went for a hike up a small mountain called Núi Cấm near the town of Châu Đốc, close to the Cambodian border. Along the way there were lots of beautiful flowers, a small water-fall, and the above heart-shaped splash of water. Up on the mountain there is a big Buddha statue and a pagoda (Chua Phật Lớn), where we were lucky enough to arrive at dinner time and they offered us free food. All vegan of course. Unfortunately it was already getting dark and there wasn't really any way of getting back so we just stayed in a little hotel on the mountain.

Then there was a quick train trip to Hanoi and back... it takes 29 hours one way but is quite alright. You can get rice from the train but not vegan food otherwise, so bring something along to have with rice or bread that you can buy from stations the train passes by. It stops for 5 minutes or so, enough for quick purchases. After a quick and uneventful conference in Hanoi I returned south and joined up with Isabel again to go to Đà Lạt, a nice city of flowers that's considerably higher than much of Vietnam and hence has cooler temperatures. We had a lovely few days there, rented a tandem bike (that we decorated well) and went around. There are a couple of veggie restaurants in Da Lat also, but I don't have their details on me just now... message me if you need those!

After Da Lat it was time for Isabel's graduation from the university. And for that I needed something formal to wear. We went around looking for a sizable suit to rent in Ho Chi Minh city, and eventually found one at a wedding photography shop. Isabel wanted to try on a beautiful wedding dress she saw, the shop staff thought we were getting married, and on an impulse we decided to take wedding photos! That proved to be heaps of fun, not only at the moment but also later when sharing the photos with friends and relatives, some of whom really thought we got married, and also going through the photos just between us. That always put us to a good mood.

The graduation itself was a simple party with shows that seemed like primary school performances to me. Either way, I had been called by my boss to get back to China, and with that looming we went to a beach for a couple of days. One of the easiest to reach beaches from Sai Gon is an island called Vung Tau. There's a fast ferry service that takes you there in about an hour, and the town of Vung Tau does have a veggie restaurant so don't worry too much about food. The beaches are passable only though, yet, with Isabel that was lots of fun.

Almost forgot to mention, also during the stay Isabel's sister had a baby. And funnily enough my sister in Finland had a baby a few days later. We did visit the hospital. Christmas in Sai Gon seems to involve getting on motorbikes and sitting in a traffic jam for a few hours, then returning home. Supposedly they're going to see the Christmas lights in District 1, but no-one seemed to be getting anywhere. Nothing else going on really. One of Isabel's friends helped me convince her to come to China with me, so we got on a train north together. Alarmingly she was feeling cold as early as Hanoi, but we pressed on nonetheless.

The price of the international train tickets had doubled during the couple of months, so we decided to find an alternative. This turned out to be a bus from Hanoi to Nanning in southern China, and a train from there to Beijing. This drops the price to a third of the international train: it costs over 2000 CNY while the bus is 150 CNY and the train from Nanning around 500 CNY. Unfortunately with the timings one has to overnight in Nanning, but the cheap hotels around the railway station only charge 80 CNY a night. That is where we spent New Year Eve then. Oh well. By the way, there is a veggie restaurant in Nanning also, I'll put the address here later.

Vietnam, part 1: North to south

Hanoi seemed even more polluted and noisier than Beijing, which is quite a lot to say. Beside that, the wireless networks didn't really seem to work, or at least were super slow. But one day the amazing massage kitty knocked on my door. Or rather, meowed behind it. So I let him in, he explored the room for a moment and jumped on my lap. And that's when he started showing his amazing talent. He went on for at least 15 minutes, massaging non-stop! I figured no-one would believe me without a video, so here is one.



Beside talented kitties, there was a lot of rain in Hanoi. Soon the city was flooded, which at first was just a curiosity to me as I had never been in a flood before. It was kind of interesting to go knee-deep in water to the veggie restaurants. But later I heard dozens of people died in the floods, which gave it a much more serious tune. Nonetheless, I went of hiking in Sapa, hoping that the rain would cease.

As luck would have it, it indeed didn't rain constantly in Sapa, but it was pretty cloudy with occasional showers. This made it rather nice hiking weather, but these organised tours have very light hiking. The scenes were pretty great, albeit the place is very touristy and a lot of locals always follow around wherever you go and soon try to sell you stuff. They do it pretty effectively too, managed to even sell me a shirt and two bandettas! Otherwise it's worth the trip. Veggie restaurants I didn't find, nor really look for as food was included in the tour and they did make it vegan for me. Actually the tofu in tomato sauce was really tasty.

After returning from Sapa I just wanted to continue down south. Hanoi and surroundings were still mildly flooded and not too interesting anyway. I bought one of the open bus tickets that allow you to go from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh city or the other way around and stop in key places along the way. This was in a sleeper bus, unfortunately one might say as the buses are slow, too small to really sleep in, and too small to sit in, just like the Chinese sleeper buses. The sales people convinced me these would be different, saying they're German buses, but whether they are or not they're just the same as the Chinese ones, don't believe them!

After a long and unpleasant journey I arrived in the city of Hue, just to be surrounded by hoteliers and motorbike drivers. After a short bidding competition I agreed to follow the first guy offering me a hotel in town, as it sounded about right. They drove me there by motorbike, and this was in fact the first time I've ever been on a motorbike. To my surprise the big luggage wasn't a problem. The hotel was good, but another motorbike driver who I at first thought was involved with the hotel kept on asking me to take his tour. Instead I wanted food, but as he was so persistant, I asked him if he knew vegetarian restaurants in town. He did and drove me to a very nice one, and kept on marketing himself. After the long sales pitch, I agreed to let him drive me around for half a day. Big mistake! The tour was ok but he didn't say a price, I overpaid, and thereafter he wouldn't leave me alone. Stalking outside the hotel constantly and asking to drive me wherever I was going. Had to leave town quick to get rid of him. Note to all: stay well clear of pushy motorbike drivers!

Fortunately the next city, Hoi An, was also nice. The hotel the bus dropped us in front of didn't have wireless so I walked a while and found one that did, and they had a swimming pool as well! With free drinks in the evening. So that and my Vietnamese book provided solid entertainment after dark. Before dark there's the beach, and on the way to the beach, there's a vegan restaurant in the most amazing location: a bamboo house with a pier on top of a lovely tropical river. The food might not be the finest in the world, but it's vegan and completely adequate, and the location is a killer! There's a couple of vegetarian restaurants in town also, but I wasn't too crazy even about the old town.

Next up was Nha Trang which seems like a big city, whether it is or not. They have beaches, supposedly nice ones, but I preferred the beach in Hoi An. No amazing restaurants either. So, onwards to Mui Ne then, there the beaches are awesome! I ended up in a beach resort that had absolutely nothing else, but the beach was enough for a weekend. Just swimming, sunlight, running on the beach, didn't really ask for anything more. Except some fruit juice, and they do have that. Note that if you get the open bus ticket that doesn't include Mui Ne nor Da Lat, you can still stop in one if you pay them a few dollars extra. But it's better to get a ticket that includes the stop in the first place, they're both really nice.

And then to conclude this first part of the Vietnam tale, I arrived in Ho Chi Minh city, also known as Saigon. Or actually Saigon refers only to Ho Chi Minh city districts 1 and 3, but that's only for the smartasses. Anyway, the initial reaction to the city was to run away, and it never really changed. As told by a local, the only good thing about the city is food, as ascertained by an American who had spent 4 months there and announced you can't find anything good here no matter which way you go as I was looking at the map on the street. I started by walking to a park, and had to literally run away from the "massage girls" that even grap your arms and try to cut you up with their motorbikes. But yes, the food is good, and the best of it is at Thien Tam, which is located on 443 Su Van Hanh noi dai, district 10. Tel: 08. 8630798. But more about that and other things in the next part. I also went to tango, they rarely have milongas but they do have regular classes so I joined one. Quite fun.

Good Eating Vietnam!

It's pretty cold in Beijing these days so a conference trip to Hanoi was definitely welcome, and I reserved the weekends for exploring. The early December temperatures in northern Vietnam seemed to be around 20 degrees during the day, but a bit chilly for a t-shirt at night. Just like the Finnish summer weather really, only less rain, much shorter days and far more pollution. The conference people were nice enough to book a hotel, a tour to Halong Bay and even an airport pickup for us. The hotel in Hanoi was the Government Guest House, which at US$35 a night is rather expensive for Vietnam, but it was central and comfortable.

We started up by going to a tour of Halong Bay. It's a scenic seaside area about 170 km east from Hanoi, known in China as Guilin on water -- the readers outside China (Blogger is blocked in China so I suppose most readers would be elsewhere) may not know Guilin so I'll point you to the pictures I took there in 2005 for reference, here and here. The tour group consisted of me, one of my colleagues and two professors from Beijing, and our Vietnamese guide who spoke good English. Generally language skills seemed to be at a shortage in Vietnam, but people catering for a lot of tourists speak some English and most people in Halong Bay speak good Chinese, as it's pretty close to the border. Halong itself is a small city at the seaside and with the foggy weather that seems to be a common feature in the winter time the scenes weren't overly impressive, for the proper scenes you have to take a boat to see the thousands of islands.

The houses in Vietnam are quite interesting, they make relatively high and narrow buildings and paint the front... but not the sides that are a little less visible from the main street. In Hanoi these would be right next to one another, outside the city there's plenty of space between houses but they still make them quite narrow. We had a relaxing start for the tour, staying overnight in Halong before heading to see the islands. So we had dinner (food was rather similar to Chinese, and nothing extraordinary) and went to see the night market. It was quite lively, and prices are low. They also readily accepted the Chinese yuan in Halong, but not in Hanoi where they'd only take Vietnamese dong or US dollars... actually it bothered me quite a bit when people would tell me prices in US dollars when I don't have any and don't want any either! Vietnamese dong is one of those currencies that force you to learn even the big numbers in the local language and where you have to count the zeros in the bills to make sure you don't give them 100,000 rather than 10,000 dong. (1 CNY was a bit over 2,000 VND, therefore 1 EUR would be around 22,000 VND).

We got our own private boat, a big boat, to tour the islands. We started by seeing some limestone caves on one island, quite large caves although I've seen several bigger ones in China. Just like in China they were lighted with colourful lights to make them more impressive, but seemed to have less of a tendency of naming all the formations, or perhaps I just wasn't paying attention. Afterwards we continued on the boat to see quite a few islands pass by, the rock formations were indeed similar to the little mountains in Guilin, but perhaps due to the fog it didn't really look as impressive. Very nice nonetheless. The also made us a lunch on the boat, a pretty good one, too. The guide told us that Vietnam is one of these weird "socialist" countries just like China where people have to pay for the education, healthcare and so on. And they're actually really expensive, for example a year in the university (including living costs) apparently costs about 10,000 USD, and even in the highschool level it's around 1,000 USD a year! This is a lot of money in a country where the average salary in Hanoi is less than 250 USD per month, with a lot of people making a lot less. Apparently the government does offer free education to the poorest families though.

The three hour drive back to Hanoi was interrupted by a stopover at a place selling touristy things at very high prices, probably due to a deal with the tour company. But at least it was fun chatting with the staff who after my greeting thought I'd speak good Vietnamese, which, unfortunately, isn't the case. My Vietnamese seemed to be lacking at least as badly as my Korean, especially as people didn't seem to understand even my "Tôi là người ăn chay" (I'm vegetarian). I probably got my tones wrong, or then it's just so rare to be vegetarian that people look confused even if you do say it right.

In Hanoi even crossing the street is an adventure. There's heavy traffic in Beijing also, and drivers don't care much of the rules, but it's a lot worse in Hanoi... well, a lot different at least. The main difference is that rather than cars, the streets of Hanoi are filled with motorbikes. Unlike cars the motorbikes can navigate around people crossing the street, assuming they don't change pace suddenly. So that's what you do, forget your fears and just walk at a steady pace and watch the traffic magically go all around you. Worked amazingly well. We went off for a walk on the market streets nearby, filled with little shops selling all sorts of tourist crap and tours and people walking and selling fruits and French bread and asking you if you want to go somewhere by motorbike and of course swarms of tourists... it's very crowded and loud. We went for dinner at the Tamarind Cafe, which is a vegetarian restaurant right in the middle of this area. It seems almost all of the clientèle are foreigners, even the prices are only listed in USD. The food was pretty good, but unfortunately the vegan options were few and not clearly marked. They had a marking for foods that contain egg but no markings of the dairy that seemed to be infested in most of the dishes here, unlike the regular Vietnamese cuisine.

The next few days went with the conference... but a mention of the food. They had arranged lunches and dinners at a restaurant near the conference venue, and had a vegetarian table for me, 3 Indian and 2 Taiwanese people. The first lunch looked quite scary, it seemed they were serving us chicken and who knows what. Around came a rumour that those were mock meats and not real ones, but we shied away from them nonetheless. As we pointed out that we'd feel more comfortable with "regular vegetables", we did get those on the following meals. Ah, and breakfasts were at the hotel, the only vegetarian option without egg was French bread with jam and butter, which I always asked without butter but they only did so on the first morning. The butter was separate though, and in a tiny jar that I didn't open so hopefully they gave that to the next person rather than throwing it away. They also brought a yogurt to everyone despite it not being mentioned in the menu but hopefully they also gave my unopened one to the next person.

The conference organisers had also arranged for us a city tour, funnily enough in the evening, but the Ho Chi Minh square was a very interesting sight even in the dark. It seemed like a smaller version of Tian'anmen, with similar texts and a mausoleum for Ho Chi Minh. The main part of the square were smaller patches of grass, 79 of them, to celebrate the 79 years that Ho Chi Minh lived. Seemed a popular place for locals to take the kids to play also, safe from the traffic. After that we went to see a Vietnamese water puppet show, which apparently is a local tradition over 1,000 years old. It was really cute, much recommended when you visit Vietnam.


Originally I was planning hiking at Sapa after the conference, but Christmas shopping is a pain that must be dealt with every year, and it made more sense to do that in Hanoi than Beijing. Actually the couple of days there wasn't enough to find gifts for everyone as I did want to see some of the sights in Hanoi also. And that meant I could test the other vegetarian restaurants! While the food in those was similar to the Chinese vegetarian, there were enough differences to make it feel exciting, and a great idea that the Chinese vegetarian places don't have is the menu idea where you can order a meal for one consisting of a little bit of several dishes, at a price only a little bit above that of one dish. The sharing idea that they have in China is great when you have several people, but if you eat alone it gets really dull and you don't get to taste many things. These Vietnamese ones had both as you could order either way. Perfect.

I used the list of restaurants from Happycow. Dakshin would supposedly have been the nearest one but I couldn't find it, either it's been replaced by a regular Vietnamese restaurant or I'm blind or stupid or the address is wrong. I didn't go to the faraway places at all but rather visited Nang Tam twice, it was good enough to justify that. Adida was very nice also, with very good service, which I'm not saying just because the waitress called me handsome, honestly! :-P And one thing to note is that it is quite possible and easy to get vegan food from the regular restaurants as well, ok, I'm not saying I'd know with absolute certainty they don't use animal oils but at least the food tasted good. And while these vegetarian places (with the possible exception of Tamarind Cafe) are very reasonably priced also, eating in random places costs next to nothing. During a long walk from shop to shop and sight to sight it's quite relaxing to just stop at a corner bar, sit outside on the terrace and have a couple of beers and perfectly good tofu for 23,000 dong or less than 1.5 USD.

Enough about food and on the the disturbing part of the country. One evening I was walking around the beautiful Sword Lake (Hoan Kiem Lake) when a student in his early 20s came to talk to me. He told me he gets some food and study money by helping tourists find what they're looking for. Sounds nice, until you hear what they tend to look for. That's ladies, or even more disturbingly, boys. This was reaffirmed a few days later alongside another lake (there are tons of lovely lakes in Hanoi!) when a group of boys with ages ranging from 12 to 28 came to talk to me, speaking barely understandable English. One of the older ones was asking if I liked boys, and pointing to the younger ones in the group. Sheesh! I just don't know what would be the best way of helping these kids, just giving some money to the few you happen to meet doesn't really seem that much. Ideas welcome.

Overall Vietnam was a positive experience though, it's a beautiful country with very friendly people and plenty of historical sights, as well as good food. Next up, Shaolin and then Finland... Happy travelling to everyone! The pictures (a lot of them since they include photos taken by a colleague) are here.

Luckily enough I arrived in Beijing just in time to witness the first snowfall of the year the first morning here! Don't know how much of it there will be later either, it's a very dry climate, but it did bring a nice contrast to the summer weather (well, Finnish summer weather :-P) of Vietnam.