Day 1 -- Arrive in Saigon
We arrive in Saigon -- four words that contain a genuinely atrocious number of hours spent on airplanes. But we will not dwell on that, nor on the profound divide that surfaced in our group regarding the quality of Kingsman: The Golden Circle as inflight entertainment. Mary, Holly, Glenn, Dave and I had been planning our Southeast Asian tour for well over a year and despite unexpected foot surgery for Mary and any number of other possible roadblocks, we were on the ground in Vietnam.
Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh City depending on who you’re talking to) looks exciting even from an airplane window. We landed at not quite 10 p.m. on Saturday night and were scooped up the vivacious An and a silent driver whose name we never did learn. An let us know that she was only with us for the trip to our hotel because she was still relatively new and not ready for “VIP American” clients. We asked the obvious question -- she usually guides Australians.
We learned three things on our half hour drive to Villa Song, our first gorgeous hotel:
In Vietnam, you take your wedding pictures well in advance of the actual wedding so you can put them at the entrance to your reception. That way, your guests don’t give their gifts of cash to the wrong couple. The big wedding reception venues -- we passed seven or eight just on the way to Villa Song -- can host half a dozen events at once. Since the average Vietnamese wedding can include hundreds of guests, it’s apparently very easy to end up at the wrong reception. An has romantic notions of not being seen in her dress until she’s walking down the aisle. She doesn’t even have a boyfriend, but is already fighting with her mother about this.
If you’re going to pick up a second pet cat on your motor scooter, go ahead and bring your first cat along for the ride, because that makes sense, right? And besides, An told us, it was only 30 kilometers each way. (We also learned that if you have more roommates than you want, acquiring obnoxious cats is a good way to get rid of them diplomatically.)
Traffic in Saigon is the most astonishing phenomenon imaginable. It’s a river, a flood plain, a tsunami of scooters. It never stops moving. It hangs on the ragged edge of absolute catastrophe, but tips over that edge only rarely (we only saw one tumped over scooter in 16 days). It is part ballet, part rugby, part Blade Runner and entirely, endlessly fascinating.
Having now been awake for approximately 36 hours, we split up for the night and enjoyed outstanding showers and free beers from the mini-fridge at the wonderful, wonderful Villa Song before collapsing. (Fun side note -- every hotel we stayed in on this trip provided shampoo, conditioner, bath gel, a disposable razor and a toothbrush with a teeny tiny tube of toothpaste. Very useful if you ever find yourself suddenly on the run.)
