South Vietnam

Visited: October 1999

Duration of stay: 11 days

Capital city: Hanoi

Population: 78.50 million (1999)

South Vietnam travel blog reading time: 9 minutes

• Walking through the narrow Vinh Moc tunnels in the Demilitarized Zone.
• Travelling off the beaten track to avoid cheap package tourism.
• Saigon – Ho Chi Minh City: modern, booming, and noisy.
• Learning about the atrocities of Vietnam War in The Museum of American Horrors from the War.
• Bargaining to pay the same price as locals.

As I traveled through Vietnam, I noticed a contrast between north and south. If the north is cooler and more traditional, I found the South Vietnam marked by wide rivers of the Mekong. People in the h south seem to be more open, relaxed, and easygoing, influenced by warmer weather and a more cosmopolitan past.

In this article I describe my trip to South Vietnam:

• Walking through Vinh Moc tunnels
• Off the popular route to Pleiku
• Cow’s tongue with caterpillars
• Why would a foreigner pay three times more?
• Saigon, the busy and modern capital
• The atrocities of Vietnam War

More articles about Vietnam are available here:

Night driving in Vietnam is a real nightmare. Even though it was an exclusive bus for foreigners, the seats had terrible head support. I kept shifting all night, trying to find a comfortable position but never succeeding. The constant honking, bright lights, and numerous rundown coaches overtaking us at high speed made any real rest impossible.

The central part of the Vietnam was completely flooded due to heavy rain: entire villages, fields, roads and parts of houses were covered with water. But at first glance, this did not affect the locals, who are already used to floods during the rainy season. Seasonal activities simply shift from working in the fields to fishing with nets or hooks.

The city of Hue has many interesting places to visit, including the Imperial City, pagodas, and royal tombs. But the biggest attraction in central Vietnam is the Vinh Moc tunnels. This is where local people hid from American attacks during the Vietnam War.

Fortunately, no other tourists were present during my visit of the tunnels, so the guide could devote her time to me. She explained in detail the story of the people who huddled in small underground rooms made of clay.

I didn’t find many noteworthy places to visit or things to do in Hoi An either. The only exception was the Ong Pagoda, founded in 1653 by Chinese immigrants. After three months of traveling in China, I wasn’t very interested in seeing Chinese cultural landmarks again in Vietnam.

I was meeting the same tourists traveling from north to south. The restaurants along the way all seemed to offer almost identical dishes.

It seems there are only two ways to travel in Vietnam along a set route with well-known points of interest: north to south or south to north.

Some travelers make this journey by land, while others with less time or a bigger budget simply fly between Saigon and Hanoi, skipping the central region.

To break away from the classic route, I decided to leave the popular path and head west to the town of Pleiku. Since Pleiku has no major highlights or tourist attractions, it wasn’t included in any travel itineraries. Out of curiosity, and wanting to see how Vietnamese people live in a larger city, I boarded a bus heading toward Saigon. I arranged with the driver to drop me off in An Nhon, where I could easily catch a connection to my final destination.

I bought the tickets directly from the bus company, and they were three times cheaper than the already inexpensive tourist-bus tickets to Saigon. The comfort felt the same to me, but the ride was much slower.

For the rest of the trip from Au Nhon to Pleiku, I used a small van with a capacity of 12 passengers. Twenty-six passengers crammed in the van, along with all the luggage. The driver raced ahead, overtaking most vehicles on the road.

Pleiku turned out to be a bigger town than I expected. The driver dropped me off in front of a one-star hotel, suggesting I should stay there for the night:

“Stay here. This is good for you!”

I didn’t follow the recommendation, because I had never paid as much as 10.00US$ a night in Vietnam. I started looking for more economic alternatives in the area. As if some sort of cartel agreement existed, every hotel I checked had exactly the same price for foreigners.

Pleiku turned out to be an unusually strange city, offering no real highlights or activities. The hotels were surprisingly expensive and completely empty of foreigners. Most restaurants were either closed or reluctant to serve me food.

At last, a shabby little place let me in. The owner welcomed me into the kitchen to show me what was on the menu. She opened a big box packed with various types of meat.

She pulled out a long cow’s tongue covered with caterpillars, shook it slightly so that the caterpillars fell to the ground and offered it to me as a local specialty.

I ran out of the restaurant and bought an instant noodle soup at a nearby store, which I later prepared back at the hotel.

The next morning, I left for Saigon early, still feeling disappointed by what I’d discovered in this city outside the usual tourist route.

When I wanted to purchase a bus ticket for a ride to Saigon, I found out that the price for foreigners was three times higher than for the locals: VND 20,000.

I was very upset, complaining to the employee about the unfairness:

“What kind of nonsense is this? Each passenger occupies one seat. Why should I pay three times as much?”

He didn’t understand me.

I boarded the bus without a ticket, hoping to negotiate a fair price with the driver. When the conductor came by, I offered him 20,000 VND, and he issued me a ticket without comment.

I couldn’t stop watching the endless stretches of rubber plantations along the road. The bus sped toward Saigon like a rocket, but we still reached the city safely in the evening.

The bus ride was nothing compared to the trip from the Saigon bus station to the city center, where my hotel was located. I didn’t have many options, and I assumed that an old, tiny driver would be the most experienced and calm. I was wrong.

The elderly gentleman was speeding his moto rickshaw through the streets like a madman. I’m not sure whether he wasn’t using the brakes or they simply didn’t work.

When he entered into a chaotic junction, he only reduced his speed and elegantly dodged the vehicles that were coming from other sides. Several times, I just held on tightly and closed my eyes, hoping that we would avoid the accident.

He was laughing when I didn’t want to tip him at the end, complaining about daring Mad Max-style driving.

Although the capital of a united Vietnam is Hanoi in the north, Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) remains Vietnam’s main economic and financial center. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975, the name of the city officially changed to Ho Chi Minh City. However, the old name Saigon is still widely used, especially when referring to the most central part of the city to which most tourists flock.

The Museum of American Horrors from the War is an excellent, albeit horrific, display of the terror that the occupiers from the USA inflicted on the innocent population during the war in Vietnam. Many pictures, facts and data exhibited in the museum are shocking.

The museum is not my favorite place to visit, but the one that I remember most. The impact of a cruel exhibition, reflecting the reality of the brutal war, left me speechless, shocked and impacted for some time.

Approximately three million Vietnamese were killed during the war, two million of them civilians.

Two million were injured, 300,000 were unaccounted for; and many hundreds of thousands were and continue to be affected by the deadly remnants of war – unexploded land mines or contamination. If we add 58,000 American military personnel, the total number doesn’t change drastically, but it shows how important this war was on the international scale.

The brutality of the war has been well documented, especially the My Lai massacre in 1968. American soldiers raped, mutilated and tortured innocent villagers in South Vietnam, before killing them. Families were dragged from their homes, thrown into ditches and executed. An estimated 500 Vietnamese, mostly women, children, and the elderly, died in the massacre.

The cruelty of the My Lai massacre and the official cover-up fueled anti-war sentiment and further divided the United States over the Vietnam War. More and more internal opposition and questioning about the meaning of American soldiers fighting on the other side of the world finally led to the withdrawal of foreign troops from the territory of Vietnam.

I have a feeling that nowadays Americans as visitors are not at all hated or marginalized. Especially considering the fact that most of them are ashamed of the actions of their patriots in the past.

Although I liked Vietnam as a travel destination with its landmarks, historical places to visit, and various things to do, the pushy people started to bother me more and more. At certain point I wrote into my diary.

I am really frustrated with many of the Vietnamese people I met. They keep bothering me, and they almost never honor our agreements.

For example, in Saigon, I agreed to rent a motorbike and a helmet for a certain price. When I arrived at the agency the next morning, they offered me a motorbike with broken speedometer and fuel gauge. As an alternative they wanted to charge me 50% more for another bike, that seemed to be in perfect conditions, but without a helmet.

Later, I finally found an agency that would supply me with a working motorcycle along with proper protective gear. We agreed on all details. When I arrived to the office the next morning, the agency was closed.

At the end of the day, I’d had enough of the negative experiences and canceled my trip to the Mekong Delta. I decided to move on to Cambodia and leave Vietnam, as I was completely disappointed by people’s attitudes, the way tourism was organized, and the general communication.