Vietnam: It’s an acquired taste

When we were first mapping out our RTW itinerary, there was no question that Vietnam would be on it.  We made regular expeditions to Vietnamese restaurants on Atlanta’s Buford Highway, add in the love the country got from Bourdain and the Top Gear guys, and we had to go.  Then we started doing our research.  Turns out that Vietnam is like Vegimite — you either love it or hate it.  Many, many people on travel blogs and forums blasted Vietnam for disappointing food, dull attractions, blatant rip-offs, and most of all, rude and callous people.

So, did we like Vietnam?

For us, forewarned was forearmed.  We liked Vietnam, but it is a challenging country.  The Vietnamese are aggressive, direct, a bit sour.   Very, very different from the smiling Thais or the sweet, friendly Cambodians.  In addition, English signs and spoken English are more rare here than in other parts of Southeast Asia, making day-to-day communication more difficult.

It is 100 percent true that we were ripped off on account of our Western appearance and were constantly hassled to buy everything from doughnuts to weed.

 

The streets are a honking, hectic mass of motorbikes — every man for himself.  Plenty of shopkeepers and street food vendors don’t exactly give service with a smile.  These are people with places to be and money to make.  They’re hard-asses and proud of it.  Kind of like New Yorkers, come to think of it.  When we started thinking of their culture in these terms, dealing with it got much easier.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom for us!  We got lucky and avoided some of the truly awful experiences we’ve heard about.  We also met some really lovely Vietnamese people.  For the grandma that shoved me out of the way in a Hanoi alleyway, there’s effusive Mr. Hung, or the sweet teenager who would try to practice his English over cups of strong Vietnamese coffee.  Yes, we found restaurants that had two menus with two sets of prices (guess who paid more?), but there was also the woman in Hanoi who quietly corrected us when we accidentally paid her 500,000 dong instead of 50,000.

 

Also, good food can cover any number of sins in our book.  While we still prefer Thai food, the eats in Vietnam were pretty dynamite.

But what about the war?

A couple of people have asked us if we experienced any anti-Americanism over here.  Hard to know for certain, but we are pretty sure that any ill treatment we got was from our Western appearance, and not our American accents.  Vietnam is a very young country — 70 percent of the population here was, like us, born after the war.  It’s history.

 

But we did notice something that could offend or infuriate American tourists here:  The war-related sites we did visit are not even close to even-handed in their treatment of that period of history.

 

At the Cu Chi tunnels, for example, the government mandates viewing of a 1967 propaganda film that glorifies “killers of the American imperialists.”   At the Hoa Lo prison, better known as the Hanoi Hilton, the exhibits eviscerate the French for their poor treatment of Vietnamese “martyrs and revolutionaries,” while the photos of American POWs could have been taken at a Boy Scout camp — they’re smiling, eating, playing basketball and celebrating Christmas.  We somehow doubt that’s how John McCain remembers his time there.

 

We actually found all of this really interesting (how two different countries can view the same event; how blatantly propogandist the information is; the irony of multiple gift shops in a memorial to fallen Communist comrades) but we are too young to have memories of the war and, given the recent Amazing Race dust-up, we could see how this might upset some people.

The Verdict

In the end, we found Vietnam to be a truly beautiful, interesting, complicated place.  Not as easy or likable as Thailand, but that made our victories here seem sweeter.  Given the vastly different viewpoints on this, our best advice would be:  Go and find out for yourself!