Shampoos and Floating Islands

In the last year, Vietnam has allowed certain nationalities to apply for e-visas online so that they no longer only have the options of entering the country via plane or having to mail their passports to an embassy months in advance and hope it doesn’t get lost in the post on its return trip. As a result, Em and I were able to take a bus on a nine hour jaunt from Phnom Penh to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly called Saigon). Our trek was slightly elongated due to having to wait for the Mekong Express bus (the alternative bus line to ours, Giant Ibis) be searched top to bottom at the border between Cambodia and Vietnam; after drugs were found on it. We arrived in HCMC around five and instantly fell in love with the vibe.

Ho Chi Minh City is the new name given to Saigon, the former capitol city of South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam), back when the country was split in two. 

Our aunt and uncle have been to Vietnam many times and one of the things that they told us to try while we’re here is to go to a beauty shop and ask for a “shampoo”. This may sound pretty random, but I think now, after I tried this, I may not wash my own hair the entire time I am visiting this country. 

A shampoo in Vietnam is a 45-60 minute production where the stylist scratches, massages, and scrubs your scalp, all while making sure it’s sparkling clean. In addition, you get a mini facial massage and they’ll work a tad bit on the neck, shoulders, back, and arms. Each place charges differently and also changes the massage a bit, so you may have to shop around a few times to find the perfect “shampoo” for you. We walked into a small hole in the wall joint near our hotel and weren’t disappointed.

Having clean hair and clean clothes (our hotel offered a free washer and dryer to use), we set off for some nourishment. Walking through the small alleyways near our hotel, we happened upon a local restaurant filled with residents from the quarter and no tourists in sight. We didn’t really know what anything was, but we could see that it was a seafood restaurant. 

Em saw something delicious looking cooking on the grill and pointed at it and said “I want that.” The staff smiled and nodded their heads and we ended up with food that was not “that”, but still pretty tasty. We had a few types of grilled oysters or clams (they said it was squid, but it came in a shell so that was a dubious claim) and a coconut broth soup with snails. It was all pretty good, except the coconut broth was a little too sweet and got too rich after a while. The snails themselves didn’t really have any flavor and it was more a slimy texture thing.

People Make Trips, Not Itineraries 

One of the main attractions that Em and I had wanted to see around HCMC were the floating markets. What we didn’t realize was that you couldn’t get to them on a single day outing; you needed at least two days. So we booked a two day, super touristy, sheep tour and set out around 8am our first actual day in HCMC.

Our tour was a medium group (which meant 20 people) and lead by a super friendly girl named Ngoc (she told us to call her Ruby). Ruby was about 4 ft tall in her combat boots and spent the whole trip probably wondering how she got staddled with such a group as ours. By the time the bus left the first rest stop (two hours from the start), Em and I had made friends with Sven from Belgium, and Paul and Joe from England. Later in the day we added Douda from Tunisia to our group of rabble rousers and totally made poor Ruby work for her money as the group minder.

Most of the stops on the trip were to incredibly touristy places that gave you a taste of what life could be like in this part of the world, but had zero authenticity to them. While they were interesting and nice to see, it was the jokes and the camaraderie that developed in our little clique that made this trip amazing and not the selling heavy sites. Our group kept leaving the herd and wandering away in hopes of finding some adventure or the more real aspects to each place and poor Ruby would have to hunt us down and remind us that the bus or boat was leaving for the next location and that we needed to be on it.

The itinerary had us stop first for a short visit at a small Buddhist Wat, Vinh Trang Pagoda, where we had 20 minutes to photograph a giant standing Buddha, a giant smiling sitting Buddha, and a giant sleeping Buddha. Ruby’s introduction to the temple basically went: “...at Vinh Trang Pagoda you’re getting to see a giant sleeping Buddha. He looks like he’s sleeping, but he’s really dead.” Now how can you pass up a look around with an introduction like that?

About an hour drive further onward from the temple, we came to the rural district of Trang Luong. There we boarded a small motorboat in My Tho that took us around a few of the islands located on the Tien River. Our first island was called Tortoise Island (Qui) and is known for its coconut candy. We got a brief demonstration of how the candy is made, were allowed to try and then buy some (which we did), sample some snake liqueur (literally fermented within a jar containing dead snakes)(tastes like ethanol and is probably supposed to be a vodka variant), and meander for a bit. Sven, Em, and I realized that just beyond the coconut candy factory was an actual village and headed that way for a little real life experience. We made it about five minutes before getting tracked down and receiving the first of many exasperated looks for the day from Ruby.

Back on the boat and off we headed to our second island, I believe it was called Turtle Island (but could have been Dragon or Phoenix). Here we had a small lunch and then were left to explore this incredibly weird place. The island is used as a resort or day stop for cruise ships during parts of the year and as such it has these odd MXC type games set up all over the place. There are ropes to climb, an inflated pyramid in a small lake, obstacle courses, and a series of structures that look like a combination of abandoned amusement park and deranged, tetanus shot needing, nightmare inducing theatrical production set pieces. 

Sven, Em and I broke away from the group again and attempted to get to the top of the largest rusty structure, but while we could hop the small fence and climb around the missing stair platforms, the gaps of missing floor put a halt to our adventure half way up the tower. Realizing we were going to be late again, we started back. Somewhere around the crocodile pit (actual live crocodiles that you can order to eat at the restaurant) we took a wrong turn and ended up getting lost and then found again with a mild scolding by Ruby.

We left the land of forgotten toys and headed to our third and last island, Unicorn Island. This island is known for its bees and all the products that they make. We were were treated to a lessen on honey, bee pollen, and various other products for purchase while sipping some delicious kumquat, bee pollen, and honey tea. We extracted ourselves without purchasing souvenirs, got to walk through the “village” (aka souvenir shops) and were guided to another set of stools for fresh fruit, terrible tea (Douda started calling it massage tea because it tasted like massage oil in water....it’s probably coconut oil in water), and some beautiful Vietnamese traditional music (Đàn Ca Tài Tử - A folk art form from Southern Vietnam accredited by UNESCO in 2013 as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity).

After the song, we boarded some wooden sampan (small traditional boats) that are rowed by local villagers down a small creek surrounded by coconut trees. This was one of the pictures in the brochure that made the trip look so appealing, but turned out to be a little depressing instead. The pictures shows happy tourists wearing the local style weaved conical hat, sitting in small wooden boats being gently rowed through trees on a small idiotic river. While the reality is that while that is all true, it also has a different side: the locals sell you the conical hats even as they’re considered an offense thing to wear, the “river” is about 6 feet wide and a foot deep and there are boats everywhere so that your boat is constantly being bumped into or pushed away from all the other boats (or gets stuck in the mud), the locals that row seem super depressed about their jobs, and you can’t see anything except muddy water. I really wanted to love this part of the trip, but I kept thinking I was visiting one of those Elephant parks where they abuse the elephants, except it was the rowers that were poorly treated.

Our small boat journey brought us back to the bigger motorboat, which in turn brought us back to the bus. We were supposed to go to visit a snake sanctuary, but they’re apparently in molting season so too aggressive for visiting. We were thus detoured to a bamboo QVC infomercial. They told us we were going to watch a documentary, but they gave us more massage tea and trapped us in a room with a woman that talks a mile a minute and told us about all the amazing benefits of products made from bamboo. It was hilariously, tortuously, bad and we walked out half through and enjoyed an overly sweet coffee in the heat with Paul and Joe while waiting for it to be over. A two and a half hour bus ride later and we arrived in Can Tho. 

Can Tho is the fourth largest city in Vietnam and known as the “western capitol”. It is noted for its floating markets, rice paper-making villages, and picturesque rural canals.

Being around seven at night when we arrived, we had the options of either sticking around the hotel or hopping back on the bus to be dropped in the center of town (about three miles from where we were staying). Douda, Sven, Em, and I decided to head to town for an adventure, while Paul and Joe decided to check out the pub scene around the hotel.

Douda and Sven turned out to have the same kind of travel adventure style as us and it was a fun evening of zero plans. We started by sampling some of the foods at the local night market. This city is known for enjoying a lot of parts of animals that Em and I are not fans of (liver, feet, spleen, stomach, etc..) so we didn’t sample as much as the boys. We got to try some octopus balls (puffy dough with octopus...get your minds out of the gutter), milk tea, bbq’d okra, and fried chicken skin. 

Having had some appetizers, we grabbed some beers and headed off wandering the random alleyways. We got lost and every time we saw locals drinking, Douda would shout random things that sounded like Vietnamese, but were gibberish. The locals would raise glasses, everyone would toast, smile, hug, and then we’d move on. We got invited by some very drunk karaoke singers to join a party of some sort that appeared to be winding down, but hugged, toasted, and moved on. We also joined a street soccer game for a hot minute, where Douda got schooled by an eight year old and Em thought she could play but really looked like a crazy woman screaming as she chased the children.

Eventually we popped out back at the Main Street and wandered in search of some more food. A veggie Bahn Mi and some gross sweet potato fries abated everyone’s hunger. A little more wandering and then we grabbed a Grab (local version of Uber) back to the hotel. We meet back up with Paul, Joe, and Ruby back at the hotel, shared a beer, and headed to bed.

Hawking Wares on the Water at the Floating Markets

Everyone was up early (if not bright eyed and bushy tailed) to head to the boat dock back in the center of Can Tho (next to where the night market we’d visited the night before was located). This was the start of a wonderful four hour tour of the Cai Rang Floating Market and surrounding areas along this portion of the Mekong Delta. 

The Cai Rang Floating Market is the largest of the floating markets in this area and the most colorful. The market really starts getting going around 4 am, but the tour companies like to let the foreigners sleep a little longer. Therefore Em and my attempts at persuading the whole group to leave at 4 am for the best photos and least tourists were shut down.

From around 4 am until 9 am, the river in this area becomes a busy commercial site where hundreds of boats packed with fruits, vegetables, plants and foods fill the river; ready for trading. Sellers will hang samples of what they are selling on the top of a long pole on their boats so that buyers can see from a distance what sellers are selling. Or in the case of tourist boats, they’ll dock beside you so that they can peddle their wares. 

After an hour or so, our boat left the market and headed down one of the other tributaries to visit a local fruit farm. At the farm, we got a chance to walk across and take an “Instagram” photo on a “Monkey Bridge”. This is a small bridge made from bamboo with one rod at the bottom for your feet to walk on and two rods at waist level to help steady you as you walk across.

Our boat adventure stopped in one other port of call. We visited a rice noodle making factory. I got to attempt to make one flat rice pancake thing while Em film me. She mainly was filming the woman yelling at me the whole time because I wasn’t doing anything properly.

At this little village we were able to break away from the group on last time and sneak away from the tourist attraction to visit the actual town’s morning market. Douda, Em, and I snagged a refreshing kumquat and sugar cane drink and we headed back to the group only 5 minutes behind schedule.

After the boat tour concluded, we all had a quick lunch back in Can Tho and then said goodbye to Paul and Joe. They had a date with a speed boat to Phnom Penh, while the rest of us had a five hour bus ride back to HCMC.