This is a two-part post about my impressions of Vietnam so far. Let’s start with….
The bad:
The Vietnamese’s taste in Western music - this was revealed as early as in my first taxi from the airport to my Hanoi downtown hotel when I was subjected to a thematic disco medley of 80’s and 90s covers (not even the originals, mind you!) Including, offensively, Coco Jambo - I mean, who in their right mind would even consider this a disco banger!? At best, it’s post-disco nuisance!
While we’re on the topic of music - Vietnamese music sucks also. It’s as if Karlovy Vary estrada got frozen in 1982 and then fell and hit its head hard. That doesn’t prevent people from blasting karaoke sessions for hours, spraying angelic tunes throughout the whole neighborhood. It was my honor and my privilege to find myself next to the house with the Loudest Speaker System in the Mekong Delta™ in Ben Tre and to have my thoughts replaced by the mooing of care- and boundary-free locals for seemingly-endless weekend afternoons. The highlight of these stress-relief sessions are weddings, where you can bear witness to 15 daily hours of mind-numbing, skull-fucking karaoke for three days straight, interrupted only by applaudable respect for the 10 pm to 7 am quiet hours. But rest assured, at 7.01 am, DJ Avietnamicii is back on the mic. I was told this is the way locals purge all stress and negativity and offset hard work. It certainly works for them, and it certainly doesn’t work for me as an undesired participant.
Too many white people. When I go somewhere exotic, I like to at least have the illusion that I’m the only gringo who’s been divinely enlightened to discover said paradise. Presumably - and visually - most of the white people are Aussies. You’ll easily recognize them, as they all look like they just stepped off a beach, and those under 30 sport either a ridiculous mullet, a ridiculous moustache, or both. Imagine Rudi Völler if someone blowtorched the hair around his ears. Some French too - you can also tell them apart, though I can’t articulate how, exactly, except that they seem completely oblivious to traffic and lean on the elderly side. Having said all that, white tourists in Vietnam are tolerable, easy to circumvent and, with the exception of the occasional over-excited bunch of American youngsters, entering the world of their Instagram for real, more a part of the background than main actors.
White people may be too numerous for my liking, but they’re nowhere as numerous, nor as terrible (tourist-behavior-wise) as the Chinese tourists! OK, I will admit it’s not always possible for me to single them out - the way to do it is to monitor for large groups of obvious tourists, interacting in sort-of-English with locals. They are inevitably and consistently too loud, too obsessive with all available vistas, props, photography tools, attractions and spots and generally obnoxious. They will completely ignore you, nor will they interact with you - they will just step into your shot, crowd you out at ticket lines and entry points, and do their best to ruin any fleeting notions of romanticism, connection with nature, relaxation or self-detachment that visit you by popping your bubble just to peer inside to see what’s happening, without even looking at you, and moving on. At some point I just decided that everyone Asian who looked like they might be a tourist and acted like a peasant was Chinese.
The beef, wine and craft beer. Vietnamese beef is sort of like Bulgarian beef - generally tough, not too tasty, only suitable for long-time-simmering stews and such. So to get a decent steak in Vietnam you’d have to pick out an Aussie or Japanese cut which will set you back a LOT of money, by local standards (comparing to what you’d pay for another local meal). The wine is strangely expensive and a bad value - local ones seem centered around Da Lat but it was telling that in several bars in Da Lat I couldn’t find any local wine on offer - when I tried it, I understood why (avoid!). So you’re stuck with European or Aus/NZ choices which seem extremely pricey (EUR 6-10 per glass) vs the price of local beer or cocktails (furthermore, beer and cocktails are subject to typical 5-7 pm 1+1 free happy hours while wine is not!). Speaking of beer, local brands are cheap (I had a beer for as low as EUR 0.25, but typically you pay EUR 1.50) but are unexciting lagers, and the craft beer options (I sought out tasting flights in self-proclaimed craft brewery joints in all towns I visited) were nothing to shout from the rooftops about. So if you’re thirsting for booze in Nam, just resign yourself to a diet of boring, plain lagers.
“No English”. It’s bad enough that only touristy restaurants (the ones you don’t want!) have English translations of their menu items, leaving you to show stall proprietors photos from Google Maps of what you want to eat. But what was worse for me was that I couldn’t find anyone able to carry a seamless-enough conversation - to chat about Vietnamese norms, history, values, views and to really learn. Besides a street food tour guide in Hanoi and a journalist in Ben Tre, with whom I sort of managed to have some sort of strained chats. That’s part of the reason I booked myself on another street food tour in Ho Chi Minh City in a few days.