2013 Viet Nam – Hue
In Hue, I booked an excellent hotel at the amazing price of £18 a night including breakfast. I had read that Vietnamese people were not very friendly but in our experience that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Everyone was so kind and seemed to be happy in their work. If anything, it was a bit over the top at times. When we wanted to help ourselves to some fruit at breakfast, five girls would rush over to help us before we made it to the bowl. They were so eager to help despite it being a country that didn’t expect tips. Quite often when I tipped a waitress she looked confused and told me I had given her too much.
At night we went to the market (surprise surprise) that stretches along the riverbank. We met a small and very sweet Vietnamese girl called Nye who approached us saying she was a medical student and wanted to improve her English so would we mind if she walked with us for a while. With so many scams around I was immediately on guard but Federika had read this happens quite a lot in Vietnam. Nye was a lovely girl and after studying for six years was now a qualified ophthalmologist but needed practical experience in hospitals. If she was able to get a job her starting salary would be $100 a month which would rise to $130 after three years. Knowing English would greatly improve her chances of getting a job which was why she was so keen to learn.
Next morning we hired a Cyclo to take us around the old town and our driver was such a happy and colourful character. He was six years old when the Americans were bombing his city and he showed us where he and his family used to shelter from the fierce fighting. He must have lived through so much horror and yet there wasn’t an ounce of bitterness in his voice. Like everyone else we met on our travels, he loved working and wanted us to enjoy our time with him. 
He dropped us off at the Citadel which for many centuries was the king’s walled city and we spent a while walking around the large area. After that he took us through a large open area where they proudly displayed all the burnt-out remains of American army vehicles and planes.
During our coffee break, I had a go at driving the Cyclo with Federika in the front and even with just her it wasn’t easy. He had driven both of us for hours without breaking a sweat but I suppose you can get used to anything.
All along the riverbank, there were very impressive boats for hire which had a variety of colourful figureheads, mainly of dragons. Most of them were owned by families who lived on the boat and made a living by taking tourists up and down the river. We hired one for an hour-long trip up the river which was very pleasant but made us sitting ducks for high-pressure salesmanship. The boat was run by a husband and wife and the first thing the woman did when we left shore was to produce a little card telling us she had two children and would we please buy things from her so she could support her family. This happened constantly in markets and the streets but there you could just walk away. On the boat, we were captive customers although she was so persistent that at one point I was tempted to jump ship. When Federika did buy something it just encouraged the woman to sell more. Half the boat journey was taken up with her selling although they always target the women so Federika bore the brunt of it and she was much more patient than me.
My stomach had not fully recovered from the food poisoning in Luang Prabang so I went to a small, hole-in-the-wall chemist and asked the woman for some Imodium. I got quite a shock when the conversation went like this,
“Do you have any Imodium?”
“You die here” she replied
“I’m sorry I don’t understand,” I said, wondering how long I had left to live,
“You die here.”
It went on like this for a few minutes and even Federika started to get concerned. She was a qualified pharmacist so had she seen something in me that led her to make such an alarming prophecy? Suddenly I realised what was going on. Like most local people we had met on our travels, she couldn’t pronounce the letter “R” and the word she was trying to say was Diarrhoea. Take away the two r’s and phonetically you have the word die here. She was asking if I had diarrhoea. Panic over. She asked me if I wanted to pay $26 for imported Imodium or $1 for a Vietnamese brand so I took a chance on the cheap ones which worked a treat.
When we first arrived in Thailand we saw someone eating a pizza and we both looked down on them from a great height for travelling to these countries and eating the same food as at home but we were starting to crave home-cooked food and I would have killed for a bacon and tomato sandwich. We finally succumbed and ordered a pizza but it was so bad there was no chance of us repeating that mistake. One irritation of eating out in Vietnam was that they served one of us as soon as the dish was ready, not at the same time. Sometimes one of us would finish our meal before the other had been served. This was a particular problem with French fries as it was universally accepted that French fries were fair game for anyone who had not yet been served. As it was usually only me that ordered fries I rarely had a portion to myself.
At the night market we saw Nye again who brought a fellow student with her, a boy in his second year at medical school who spoke much better English than she did. We walked with them and they helped us barter with the ruthless traders and despite earning so little Nye insisted on buying Federika a little dragonfly toy that balanced on the tip of her finger. We felt embarrassed that she had spent money on us but it meant a lot to her so Federika had no choice but to accept. We invited them for a drink but they only wanted coke. We were surprised to learn that most youngsters weren’t interested in drinking alcohol. In Nye’s case, she had lost her father in a motorcycle accident when she was four years old and he had been drinking. Now there was just her and her mother.
I was interested to learn what they thought about the war with the USA and how people felt about Americans and was surprised to hear there was no resentment. She told us that America has formed many organisations and provided a lot of financial help to the Vietnamese people. We gave Nye and her friend our email addresses and told them to keep in contact with us before saying a surprisingly emotional farewell.
2013 South East Asia
