Rolo on Tour

I already mentioned the bus ride into Vietnam in the last entry. It really was no fun: 36 hours in a bus with a vietnamese crew who spoke zero words of english, who were screaming around all the time and who switched on the air conditioning above your heads against your protest. If you protected yourself against the cold with an extra blanket it was pulled away by the crew as you had only the right for one blanket. But it may have been better like that because it turned out that the bus was infested with bedbugs.
So after 2 sleepless nights we arrived in the morning in Hanoi. We asked our helpful crew on which bus terminal we were and they showed us on the map the one right in the center. Great, so we can walk to the hostel! After 45 minutes of walking while asking people without success (as nobody spoke english or understood what we wanted) for directions finally we found a cab driver who revealed the secret: The place where we got out of the bus was not even on the main city map. Welcome to Vietnam!

We had already caught a glimpse of the traffic situation. And if you are not used to it it will appear to you like total madness. There are motobikes everywhere you look and it seems as everybody drives as he pleases. A red traffic light can for example usually be ignored. So all that causes a problem for somebody who wants to cross the street. The foreigner on his first day may use the strategy „to wait until there is no traffic and then cross the street“. Well, good luck with that!
The more experienced visitor (in which I of course converted myself after some days) will just start to walk and rely on the motobikes to find a way around him. And it works. I think you could even do it with your eyes closed. I haven’t tried though.

In Hanoi an amazing thing happened:
It was 10.30 pm and I was walking around the city looking for something to eat or drink. In a quite dark alley a vietnamese motobike driver stops nearby and shouts something to me. I come closer and wonder which of the three possible options it is: „Motobike?“ – him offering me a ride somewhere I want to go, „Massage, Bum-Bum?“ – him offering me a ride to a place which offers a ‚Massage for Men‘ or of course the Around-the-World-Classic „Wheed?“. But when I finally understand what he says I feel like I am struck by a lightning. It was none of those 3 options. He said „Bist du aus Karlsruhe??“ (engl.: Are you from Karlsruhe?). When he pulls off his helmet I finally recognize him and can only laugh about the absurd situation. It was a student I had met a couple of times in my home town, but we never spoke to each other before, so I am quite amazed that he recognized me in a dark street in Hanoi from behind.
The world is small!

From Hanoi you can join an estimated trillion tourist per year and visit nearby Halong Bay. I joined them. The biggest difficulty is finding a boat which really has all the things promised to you in the tour agency. Well ours was allright, just the food was a little scarce and the guide was upset all the time. That was no singularity and I have to say that many people in Vietnam who work in tourism are not very nice. You have to fight for everything, especially that you get what you paid for.
Impressions from the trip to Halong Bay:

Just feed garbage to the penguin!

Halong Bay

One night we slept on one of the islands in the bay called Cat Ba Island:

On Cat Ba Island (and no, they did not put me in prison!)

Continuing to the south the next stop was the city of Hue. There is a very large citadel where the king used to live and which can be visited. Sadly much of it has been destroyed in the wars.
After a bicycle tour the first day

School’s out

it was time to put on a little bit more power: Of course in a country where it is the main means of transport I had to rent a scooter. The first tries were not free of accidents but luckily without bigger consequences.

Faster, Harder, Scooter!

Practice for the show

The so called ‚Open-Bus-Ticket‘ got me then to Hoi An. It is famous for its tailors, so many people go there to buy some custom-tailored clothes. As I still had one month to go, I rejected that and postponed it to Bangkok. That way I did not have to carry around anything unnecessarily.

How many countries do you recognize/have you been to?

Would you rescue those cats?

What was next? Ah right, I went to Nha Trang. There I had maybe the worst day of this trip. The bedbug bites still visible and haunted by food poisoning I opted for a short swim on the beach. Some hours after I got back my hole body started to itch and I wondered what it was, as I did not see any mosquitos. When I got rid of my clothes I discovered that 80% of my body between the knees and my head were red and itching like crazy. (Yes, I have fotos and no, I won’t upload them.) Any treatment I knew of against mosquito bites did not help at all. And moreover I did not know what was going on. I could not get any sleep until 4am but when I woke up the next afternoon everything was gone.
Apparently I had contact in the sea with something called ‚Sea Lice‘. In retrospect it is quite funny that when you are travelling you are catching all these diseases which before you did not even know existed.

Well to sum up, that was the day when I most wanted to go home. But it had something positive, as I thought that it could hardly get worse. And it did not 🙂

The black pearl? No, it is an aquarium!!

A short trip to the mountains gets you to Dalat. What do I remember most about it?

The Valley of Love?

The crazyhouse?

No and no. In Dalat I spent the days mainly playing chinese chess with the ‚Easy Riders‘. That is a group of motobike drivers who drive tourists across the country. I did not want to spend that much money for that, but I did like to learn the game, as I have seen people play all over Vietnam. So one of them taught me the rules and we played a lot of games. After that I used to just walk into any Vietnamese Coffee Shop, buy a Cafe Su Da (Sweet Vietnamese Ice Coffee) and play with somebody who liked to play. That is namely what many vietnamese men do all day. Of course you won’t find women there, as somebody has to do the work in Vietnam!

My Chinese Chess Teacher

A stopover in Mui Ne (which seems to be one of the russian’s favorite holiday places) later to see the sanddunes nearby I arrived in Saigon, nowadays known as Ho Chi Minh City.
Interestingly enough it was the first time I found a couch via couchsurfing, so that way I could escape the backpacker ghetto in the centre at times.

6pm: Time for Aerobic

On the roof with my hosts and some guests

Let’s close this article with a few words about the Vietnam war. First thing to note is that you hardly see anything reminding you of the war, if you just drive around the country. You have to know where certain places are and look for them. Well it should be no wonder as 35 years is plenty of time to rebuild a country.
The other thing I want to add is that in the Vietnamese museums the Vietnam war is heavily used for propaganda or at least regarded only from one perspective. For example you can find a lot of pictures of people listed with the amount of american soldiers they have killed or tanks and airplanes they have destroyed or shot. I would have liked a little less excitement about these facts.

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