Enormous amount of motorbikes. Our guide said: no motorbike, no girlfriend. In the cities on every street there is a continuous flow of bikers. As a friend of ours pointed out they behave as one organism, like a shoal of fish: if there is an obstacle on the road, e.g. a car stopping or a pedestrian crossing the road, the bikers just flow around it without slowing down, god forbid stopping. Most of them have 2 passengers, but the whole family (2 adults and 2 kids) travelling on one bike is very common too. Helmet is obligatory (only for locals - foreigners do not even need a license we were told, as police would not stop them), but the trendy ones most people are wearing, that look like a baseball hat, are probably not of much use in the case of an accident.

Due to the high number of bikers, they usually take up the whole road, driving in several parallel rows. Of course the consequence is a terrible amount of honking by the car and bus drivers and a slow pace traffic (max 50-60 km/h) everywhere. Honking is most horrible in the big cities where the streets are narrow. Usually even if there is a pedestrian area next to the road it is blocked by vendors or parked motorbikes, so one has to walk on the road, very close to the moving vehicles. The worst thing is when a bus drives by and blows the horn... It does not only make you jump, but causes temporal deafness as well.


Women crazy about white skin. They are very afraid of getting a tan. It would make them look like peasants who work in the fields all day. Funny enough even peasants who work in the field all day do everything to avoid a tan. In the middle of the biggest heat and most humid environment they all wear long sleeved clothes, wide brim hats (the typical conical hats are everywhere in the cities and in the fields), gloves, face masks that are usually large enough to cover their neck. They even invented the two toed socks that one can wear comfortably with a flip flop. In the stores the skin moisturizers have bleach in them. On the beaches we have seen locals only around sunrise or sunset. In Na Thrang the beach was full at 6 am (people participating in aerobic classes, doing exercise on the shore, sitting around in the water), but almost completely empty around 8 am. Women usually swim in their clothes, t-shirts and below knee pants.


Women in pants. Quite interesting that women always wear pants. I do not remember seeing anybody in skirts. The typical female outfit is the pijama like dress, consisting of a light long-sleeved jacket with buttons and with large patterns and a matching pair of pants without pockets.


Unfriendly people. People are quite unfriendly and rude compared to their welcoming neighbors. It seemed that people, foreigner or local are treated like a piece of meat, they are pushed around on the streets, dragged into buses against their wills, stuffed into buses even if there is no space left and shouted at in restaurants. In the southern parts the Vietnamese get much friendlier though.


Food is not that special in most parts of the country (Hoi An is an exception), as similar food is found in the neighboring countries as well. We had the most horrible meal of our entire journey here, right on the first day. We found it hard to find acceptable restaurants, because the food stalls on the streets and most of the small local eateries did not look appetizing and many were stinky. We had no such problem in Thailand, Laos or Malaysia and ate street food with the locals. Vietnam was the only country where we threw away the food we bought on the street. It does not have to be mentioned that the term vegetarian is unknown, even if you say in Vietnamese: “an chay” confuses the locals and they keep offering you and putting meat into your food. In the cities there are fancy restaurants and cafes, but these were clearly over our budget (making you pay 25,000 dong for a 500 cc water when it costs less than 5000 even in the tourist shops). In our low budget restaurants (around 40 000 dong for a dish: equals about 2 USD) food was not memorable. It has to be added however that I had the best vegi spring rolls in Hue and Kaarel the best Zurcher Geschnetzeltes with rosti in Can Tho (in our experience Italian and other Western food is not a good choice in South America and Asia).


Lack of grocery stores. It was our other food related problem. There are only small shops run by families selling cookies, drinks, chips and toiletries, but all at arbitrary prices. We found grocery stores only in Na Thrang and in Saigon and there we have realized that the prices are actually low, only the local vendors want to make big money by selling even water for the double price. Our favorite cookies cost 28 000 dong in the store and everywhere up to 60 000 at the local shops.


Architecture is quite interesting. Surprisingly there are many many huge villa-like very fancy houses everywhere, even on the countryside (I thought Vietnam was still a poor country). If the space is small then the houses are slim and they build the houses tall, like in Holland. There are not so many colonial buildings. Dalat was particularly disappointing, because the Lonely Planet is raving about this city as being full of colonial houses, but to us it looked like any other city and we had difficulties spotting those French houses. In Saigon in the narrow alleys we could peek into the homes of the locals as they keep the doors to their ground floor facilities wide open during the day. It seemed that most of the daily activities take place on that floor. It is usually just one room with tiles on the floor and on the walls. They cook here, they eat here, they nap here during the day (on the floor or in hammocks), they raise the kids here and watch TV here too.


Sanitation is similar to the other South East Asian countries: garbage everywhere, locals throwing trash on the streets or on the floor of the restaurants even if there are trash cans next to them, sewage water flowing on the street in semi-covered tubes and emptied in to the creeks and rivers, probably without much treatment. In the Mekong Delta and Halong Bay garbage floating on the water is a common sight. In the former there are huge garbage piles on the shore and under the houses built on stilts. Still people are washing the dishes, the clothes, their bodies and their teeth in the Mekong, next to the garbage. I do not even want to know what happens with the household sewage. I doubt there is a proper canalization system tough... We were told that the locals are used to these hygienic standards, so they do not get diarrhea very often. For drinking they collect rain water though.


English skills. On the gringo trail almost every local can say at least 2 sentences in English: ”Only one dollar” and “very cheap ...”. Usually their vocabulary ends here and one cannot communicate with most of the people beyond this. Even people in the tourist industry, including many guides, tour agents, hotel receptionists and waiters whose English sounds very impressive first can often not answer even a simple question. As if they had memorized a few complex phrases, but it appeared to us that their listening comprehension is often poor.


The gringo trail


Hanoi:


Halong Bay: nature is very impressive with the limestone formations in the sea and the caves, but very very touristy with about 50 boats in a bay where the boats spend the night, Cat Ba town is also very crowded as we were told, with only standing places on the beaches.


Hue:


Hoi An:


Na Thrang:


Mui Ne:


Dalat


Saigon


Mekong Delta