January 8-9th, 2015

A photo journey through 24 chaotic and emotional hours in HCMC, sandwiched between the majesty of the Burmese countryside and tropical vacation.

1. Survived long layover in Bangkok on AirAsia flight from Yangon, mere weeks after the Indonesia crash. Apocalypse Now as part of my Vietnam War history refresher course was not the right movie to watch on this flight. Pretty post-turbulence clouds tho.

2. Arrive at HCMC airport, where despite having secured visa online ahead of time, wait in line to give a man in an intimidating military uniform your passport, cash, spare photo, dignity, and watch him toss it arbitrarily onto a stack nearby. Then wait your turn. Consider bribes, as other groups are doing. Realize you don’t have much cash for bribe and cab. Should have packed more dong (heyo!). Mistakenly think they announce a strange pronunciation of your name 3 previous times. Allow anywhere between 20 minutes and 4 hours for this process.  The early estimate being how long it took me to get mine back with visa, the latter being how long it took for Brittany’s. Why? No stated reason. Maybe she’s an international wanted woman. Only Vietnam immigration will know.

3. Check into hotel, venture out for a beer to recover from previous airport experience. Collect fellow American traveler meeting us there fresh from LAX with a matching bizarre visa story, Lauren Aldrich!

4. Find 3 spare plastic chairs, and camp out for prime people watching and street beer drinking called Bia Hoi!.

5. Wander down any given alley filled with shops and restaurants and homes, each a brightly lit mini universe of people going about their nightly life. Stop in one for a midnight manicure when they hand you a beer! Why not. Decline wig services. Hay gurls

6. Sleep, wake, get first of many Vietnamese iced coffees 🙂 Only place where it is acceptable and seems surprisingly tasty to put condensed milk in your coffee.

7. And more spicy noodles. Always more noodles.

8. Walk by this place, Independence Palace (f.k.a. Reunification Palace). Apparently there are really cool preserved rooms and tours to visit inside, but we didn’t have time.

9. Instead, we just peered in the gates and pictured the scene of this, when North Vietnam tanks stormed through and finally ended the war:

10. Arrive at the one touristy thing not to be missed. The War Remnants Museum, or as it used to be called, Exhibition House for War Crimes and Aggression. It’s intense, thorough, impeccably curated, and gut-wrenching. The Agent Orange aftermath section will absolutely tear your heart out. I don’t think any of us spoke for the 2+ hours we spent inside. But it’s a tiny step closer to better understanding what happened, why it all went so terribly wrong, and how we can learn from it.

11. Speaking of not letting things happen again, what came next was one of the more intense moments I’ve had in all my travels. Leaving the museum, we were still glowing in the hospitality of Myanmar and let someone flag us a taxi from down the street. Bogus cabs are a common scam in HCMC, and we were warned ahead of time via Lonely Planet, but I think we were a little dazed from the museum not to realize this one wasn’t any of the 4 official company names we were supposed to stick to.

About 5 mins into the ride, I realized the meter is already past what it cost to get us here, and rapidly increasing. Brittany calmly begins questioning why this fare is more, and the driver is immediately irate. Realizing we’re very quickly running out of cash to pay the inflated fare, we request he pulled over immediately, which causes him to flip out, hammer the steering wheel shouting, “No! No! No! More Money!!” interspersed with Vietnamese yelling. Trying to negotiate a lower price, and insisting we do not have any more money incites him to finally stop. We all immediately jump out.

And as he starts to get out too, still screaming at us, Brittany tosses the remainder of our funds she has in her wallet through the passenger side window, we all take off running, and I yell the strongest insult I can think of in my panicked state, “You are a BAD MAN!!!”. Thankfully, he does not chase after us, and all in all we were only out about $40 USD and safe. Everything could have been far worse. A stressful reminder to put our guard back up and be smart about being tourists in mainstream Asia. And stick to trusted rides.

Sing it with me… Oh what phở it is to ride in a cabbie with a juiced up meter!

No photo because… danger.

12. Leave (in a hotel-summoned cab) to the airport, have time for one delicious bowl of phở and Tiger beer with a view and a quick Jetstar over to idyllic Phú Quốc Island. Which, we have just learned at the museum, housed a horrific Viet Kong enemy prisoner camp during the war. Awesome.