"Nha Trang and Hoi An, 1996" a Vietnam Travel Page by travelmad478

Send Photo to a Friend

My friend Kathy and I went to Vietnam in 1996, for eight days. During this time we visited Saigon (see my Ho Chi Minh City page), Nha Trang, and Hoi An. I would have really liked to stay longer in Vietnam and get to Hanoi and Halong Bay, but flight times and other travel difficulties limited our stay. Vietnam is definitely "on the list" to return to someday, because I didn't see as much as I would have liked and because I am very interested to see how the country has changed since my last visit.

In 1996, Vietnam had not yet hit most travelers' radar screens, and was relatively off the beaten path. We saw a number of tour groups--mostly French--but not many independent travelers like ourselves. Americans in particular were few and far between, and the Vietnamese people were generally quite interested in talking to us and finding out about our lives at home and our impressions of their country. Dozens of people engaged us in conversation, and many of them helped us out a lot in our attempts to get around the country and navigate Vietnam's bureaucracy. Our Saigon hotelier, who was very helpful to us, asked us one favor in return--to give him our guidebooks when we left the country. We were happy to do that, but now I can't remember a lot of the places we went to! Sorry!

I had a great and fascinating time in Vietnam, but it was not an unalloyed pleasure all the time. First, as in any Asian country, the non-Asian visitor is instantly recognizable as a foreigner--which in Vietnam tends to mean a source of income. This is understandable given the level of poverty in the country, but it doesn't always make for a pleasant vacation. Traveling in this country (especially in the more tourist-heavy places), you will get approached dozens of times an hour to buy postcards, chewing gum, cyclo rides, food, and innumerable other unwanted items. Vietnam's bureaucracy also proved quite daunting, even to someone like me who has lived and worked in Communist/former Communist countries and seen this sort of thing before. That bureaucracy, combined with a severe lack of infrastructure like roads, public transit, and telephone service, made Vietnam fairly difficult to navigate. But perseverance did pay off--it just took a long time.

As Americans, we were happily surprised by the positive feelings that Vietnamese people seemed to have for our country, given the historical record. We were also surprised by the depth of the contempt they felt for Russia and the Soviet Union (Vietnam's most recent patron state). Since Kathy and I were living in Russia at the time we made this trip, we got an earful of complaints as soon as people discovered where we had come from. They were utterly mystified as to why two people who had perfectly good lives in America would actually choose to live in Moscow! Thinking back, it's not a strange question to ask...