I’ve lost track of the days. But I’ll try and recount the events that happened. This post recounts the time I spent in Mui Ne(besides the last day which happens tomorrow), and the stories within. We learn about local culture, learn about our food, learn lots of kite surfing, spend time chilin’ and learn stories from people we meet.
Here’s where I’m typing from. I’m in a hostel(that only costs $5 a room for the “mid” teir room!). I picked up my smoking habit again:
Here’s a pic of the room:
The story starts were the last post left off. The bus we are from Sappa on makes it to Hanoi.
We make it to Hanoi, and go to our hotel. Sean booked a fancy-ass hotel($50 a night, wow!), so we were greated with TANGY/ORANGY soda-water. Sean tells me this is the standard greeting at high-end east-asia hotels.
We get into our room, and they have only one King bed :O. We’re like, “hey, this isn’t what we ordered, we need 2 beds”. Turns out, it IS just two beds, just squished together. So one of the hotel attendants spends the next 30 minutes undoing the beds and putting separate sheets on them while we sit there awkwardly.
We then go out for food. Sean wants to go to a “place that’s rated well”. TBH though, I’ve just been using a list of resturants in Hanoi recommended by Lonely Planet, so any place we go to will be filled with white people. But we go anyways, and alas, it’s filled with white people. Food is good though.
We then walk back home(its about 10 pm by this time), and I try and stop at a very very local-looking shop. It has no english writing, and it looks like a whole in the wall. I thought they sold boba. As I’m trying to translate some of the words the menu has on my phone, some buff Vietnamese guy comes up. “Can I help you?” he says. “Yeah, we’re trying to buy food here. It’s boba right?” “Sorry”, he says, “locals only”. “It is sweet soup here”. This was the most polite xenophobia I had ever heard. It basically translates to: ‘White people not allowed here’. We’re like, oh okay, and just quickly go on our way. I’m not going to argue with this guy, he looks like an Asian Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I’m a bit disheartening the rest of the night, as I’ve never been turned down by my race. I guess this is how minorities must feel when they’re turned down for some shit-ass reason.
Here’s breakfast the next morning. I was disappointed the pink thing wasn’t filled with meat(I’m forgetting the name for it):
The next day, we make a trip to the “Hanoi Hilton”. This is a place that was used by the Vietnamese to hold American prisoners during the Vietnam war, primarily American pilots that were shot down over Hanoi.
What I DIDNT know, however, is that it was originally built by the french in the 1800s to hold Vietnamese political prisoners. Vietnam had a war against the french (the first indochina war), which the VIetnamese successfully defeated the french. The french treated the Vietnamese like SHIT this whole time, often torturing them and holding them in solidarity and wahtnot. According to Sean, at some point before WWII, the french released control of Vietnam. But then after WWII, they were like, “hey, we want Vietnam back”. So they tried again to take control of Vietnam. They started losing(see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_in_the_Vietnam_War). During this time, Communism was making big waves in the world, and as we all know America was like “fuck communism!”. So seeing the french losing, the US gave more and more help to the french to win this war. Because we didn’t want North Vietnam to become communist! Eventually, we started our own war, and started trying to kick the Vietnam’s ass. As you know, we lost, and were eventually pushed out of Vietnam. But during our time trying to fight them, they used the “Hanoi Hilton” as a place for captured soldiers.
So the vietnamese seriously got the bad end of the stick. The whole time, they were just trying to have independence from colonialism. And to their defense, they fought off the french twice, and the americans as well.
The funniest part of all this, which Sean pointed out, is if we had just let them be after the first french occupation, they probably would have been a republic!(And I think they were breifly between the 1st and second french occupation). But because the french/americans tried to take them over, and other external factors during the time, they turned to communism as a form of governance.
Now obviously some of this is oversimplified and might be incorrect, but I think it’s important to understand our past, and how the world came to be what it is today. And most importantly, understand that sometimes you arn’t right, and your country isn’t right. In this case, and I’m sure most Americans would agree, the Vietnam war was a mistake(by the way, they call it the “American war”).
Speaking of not being right, I’d like to point out that the Vietnamese like to down-play the conditions Americans faced in the prison. They pretended(according to all the videos they had on display), that american were constantly playing basketball, and drinking, and celebrating Christmas, etc etc. I doubt this is true. But it’s always fun to see a government downplay the atrocities it committed.
Sorry for the long rant. Lets get to the fun stuff. Here’s some pics from the prison.
These would be used to hold the feet of prisoners:
Here is the alleged bag and shoes they’d give to american prisoners during their time in the prision. I doubt this very much though:
Fun story, that at one point on Christmas eve(when the french occupied Vietnam), over 100 Vietnamese escaped through the sewers. Here’s the sewers they crawled through. Even at my thinnest, I could NEVER fit through this:
We also saw a real-life gillotine which was used to kill political prisoners during the French occupation:
Some holding cells with all the Vietnamese people’s legs shackled:
Morbid stuff.
Anyways, after that we got some ice cream, and then hopped on our plane to Mue Ni. Pretty uneventful flight, we got some food in the airport, I got a shotglass for my collection, called Molly, then we hopped on our bus. Again, it was a LUXURY bus, so all leather everything, just like Sean liked it.
We finally get to Mue Ni at around 10 pm. We roll up to our hostel. Here’s a picture of the sign:
We walk in, and it’s got a nice garden area in the center, and a little bar. There are russians EVERYWHERE. More on this later.
When we go to the bar, we see a few americans drinking with some of the locals. We join them for a bit of fun. It turns out they had all been drinking since around 3pm, so they were pretty drunk. We join them in their shenanigans. Also, since all the food was closed at this point, they cook some ramen for us. So nice! They just put all our food on a tab(or rather, we put it on our tab; they trust us to write the correct stuff). We talk with the other Americans; one of them just moved to SF 6 months ago, and lived in Nob Hill. What a coincidence! So many San Franciscans(and nobody from NY, sorry Sean!).
They say they’re going to wake up at 6 to go to the market to buy some fresh fish. So we decide to join them.
Next morning, 6 am, ring ring ring, we wake our tired-asses up, and head to the market. Since we don’t have enough scooters(there’s 5 of us including me and Sean), its decided that they’d take a cab and we’d take a scooter.
So we ride me and Sean on a scooter. Sean being a bit shy holds be by the shoulders. It’s actually really hard to control a scooter with two people on it and I struggle a bit to not drive us into a ditch. I eventually get the hang of it, and Sean starts to get intimate with me and hold me by my love handles. Finally the intimacy I had been hoping for the whole trip!
We get to the market at 6:30. It looks like this:
Each of those “boats” is a circular. I had never seen boats like that. It was the tea cups in Disneyland. Very strange. A couple days later I saw some “use” those boats; basically they just paddle around in oars. They’re not really meant for going fast.
We walk around, a bit. Btw, if I didn’t mention, one of the ladies running the guest house(Lien) had come with us. So she was helping translate for us of us and bargin for us. Everyone at the fish Market knew here(they would be like “Lien! Lien!” which I thought was really cool).
Sean ended up buying some crabs and some Shrimp. I don’t eat sea food, but I had a grand time going around and being like, “how about these? how about those?” Every time we bought something, 2-3 Vietnamese people would come up to us with fish hoping we’d buy something.
Here’s some of the items we saw(note the ice means it’s not fresh):
Here’s Sean with his takeaway:
Shit was SUPER cheap. Like maybe 10$ for all of that.
At one point, our other American friends went off to buy some fish on their own. They almost ended up buying some old fish(which I learned you could tell it was old/dead/not fresh by the fact that it had ice in the container), but luckily Lien stopped them before they made the mistake 😛
Next up: get me some chicken! Lien said we were going to go somewhere local to buy fish, and I didn’t realize what this would truly mean. This next part is not for the faint of heart, and would be one of the most memorable parts of my trip.
So we drive over to a local farmer, and are presented with this: a collection of LIVE chickens to choose from:
They wanted me to pick a LIVE chicken, then they would kill it, de-feather it, and sell it to me. I told them to pick the smallest one, (about 1.6 kilos), which cost about $10.
They kinda treated the chickens like shit TBH. All the chickens feet were bound, so they couldn’t fly/hop around. And when picking them up, they’d pick them up by one wing, which would cause the chicken to cry/sequel/whatever chickens do.
After I picked the chicken, they weighed it(while it was alive)he took it out back to kill. I asked if I could watch, and Sean filled them.
WARNING: THIS IS NOT FOR THE FEINT OF HEART. IF YOU DON’T WANT TO WATCH A CHICKEN BLEED OUT, DO. NOT. WATCH:
To summarize the video, he basically slits the chickens throat, and lets it bleed out. It definitely squirms and flaps its wings and cries out. But its all over in a minute.
Even Lien, we eats chicken a lot and lives in Vietnam, did not want to watch this process. I thought it was horrific and horrible animal cruelty. Later on, I did some research, and it turns out this is a pretty standard way to kill chickens(we do this a lot in the US). It seems it only lasts about 15-30 seconds for the chicken and then they become unconscious. Doesn’t seem *that horrible*, but if you’re a vegetarian maybe you disagree.
After that, he like greased the chicken up with something. Not sure what it was. Then, he put the chicken in this defeathering machine. I didn’t really get a picture of it, but it looked like a container with a bunch of jets in it that’d spray the chicken. After about 30 seconds of spraying the chicken(with really, really hard water I’d guess), the chicken was completely defeathered!! Absolutely amazing. Then he washed off the chicken:
Next, he cut open the chicken. He cut out it’s stomach and some other organs. When he cut open the stomach, we could see some of the food the chicken had recently eaten. The stomach was like a yellow hard sack with what I assumed was bird-feed the chicken had recently eaten inside of it.
He also took out the intestines and some other stuff. I don’t know what it was, I’m not good at anatomy.
They it gave us the chicken in a bag, and we took it back with us.
Pretty freaking surreal that this chicken was alive not 5 minutes before, and now it looked like something you’d buy in a super market.
We went home, then took a nap. After napping, we woke up, an asked Lien to cook our chicken. She had offered to cook the chicken and sea food for us, which was really nice.
She basically just boiled the chicken for us for 15 minutes, and gave us the whole chicken(on a plate), along with 2 plates of rice.
Sean had gone off to get some money at an ATM at this point, and had left my high-and-dry to deal with this chicken situtation. I rarely cook, and have NO FUCKING IDEA how to cut a whole chicken into edible pieces. So I grab a kinfe, and try my best to cut the chicken into pieces that I recognize/are edible. I do an awful fucking job. At some point, I think the Dad of the two sisters running the place comes buy and says something in Vietnamese, all the way laughing at my white-boy-ways.
Here’s a pic of the chicken after I had cut it up and had a bit to eat:
Note you might not be able to see it, but the chickens head and everything are still attached to the left.
Again, it was fucking surreal to eat a chicken that had just been alive like an hour before. I picked it out, watch it get slaughtered, de-feathered, and then the end result cooked. All the mystery of where my food comes from had been removed.
I’ll be quite honest, I definitely lost my appetite a bit through this whole process. It felt fucking weird eating a chicken that had just been alive. Completely surreal. I’m sure this is normal for you(the reader) or many people throughout the world who do this all the time, but I wasn’t used to it.
This whole experience will definetly stick with me for a long time. It makes me question if I really need to eat as much meat as I do; it makes me not really want to eat all different types of meat, and makes me want to respect the food that we DO eat.
I’ll be honest, me and Sean didn’t eat like 50% of the chicken(we ended up throwing it away), and I felt AWFUL for letting the animal suffer for basically what was my “enjoyment”. We didn’t know how to eat many parks of the chicken(neck, head, feet, etc), and weren’t hungry enough to eat some of the meat. I want to make sure that if I do ever eat an animal live again, I know how to properly utilize all the parts.
Okay, enough about the chicken.
Next, time to Kite surf! Sean and I headed off to a Kite surfing school on the scooters we had just rented after our chicken-eating incident.
Here’s Sean on his scooter:
A bit about kite surfing: its a sport where you use the wind and a giant kite to propel you along the water. It requires somewhat windy days, and is really, really fun. And relatively safe compared to other sports(snowboarding/skiing, rock climbing, etc).
It takes about 17 hours to get confident enough to kite board on your own. We didn’t have that kind of time, so we decided to just take lessons and see where it went.
We showed up to the place, went in the back, and were greeted with this sight:
As you can see, the kitesurfing shop as seen better days. Apparently it was high by a typhoon/giant wave a few weeks ago, and it was a bit of a wreck. But it didn’t deter them from running their lessons!
We ended up booking 7 hours worth of lessons with a guy named Hong. Cost us $260 USD each. Typically things like adventure sports costs the same amount of $ no matter what country you’re in. Which is really a good thing, because it means they don’t lower the bar on the training for these types of classes.
Anyways we go out the first day. They first show us how to use a small kite on the beach two handed; then one handed; then he moves us onto a bigger kite. He teaches us how to fill up the kite with air, how to attach the lines from the bar to the kite. He teaches us how to safely escape/detach from the kite if it were to get dangerous/pull us down/ect. Then, he takes us into the breakers, and makes us control the kite from there. It’s hard to control a kite when the waves are constantly bashing you all over and trying to knock you off your feet!
Finally we get fully into the water, and do what he calls “body surfing”, were we use the kite to accelerate our body while swimming. Pretty tough stuff to do!
Here’s a pic of Sean practicing on the beach:
Kite surfing is interesting. You were a belt, kind of what you would wear in the gym when lifting heavy weights. The kite attaches to this belt, and all the “power” from the kite is transferred to the belt. Because of this, you feel all the power of the kite in your back.
Here’s a picture of the bar:
The kite has 4 lines running from it: two “power lines”(the center ones”, and tow “steering” lines(the left and the right). All the power/pulling goes through the center lines, and into your back. When you steer, you use the left and right lines. To steer, you kinda pull it like a steering wheel. Note you DO NOT USE A LOT OF POWER to do this. You can steer with your pinkies if you want to, because all the power of the kite is going through the center lines. This was a really hard lesson for Sean and I to learn; when the kite is going out of control, your instinct is to pull hard on the bar and try and force it to turn. When in reality, you don’t have to use much power to turn the kite, which is what causes it to go up/down.
Anyways, he showed us a lot of kite surfing techniques. This guy was a GREAT teacher. He had actually won 2nd place in an international kite-surfing competition, as I later found out. Great guy.
After a long day of kite surfing, we headed back to the guest house. We got dinner, and I promptly went to bed at 8 pm. I was FUCKING. TIRED.
The next day we woke up at around 10 pm. I had slept for 14 hours. Lol. We didn’t have kite surfing lessons until 1 pm, so I was bored without much to do, so I didn’t wake up. If I don’t have anything to do in the morning, why wake up?
Btw, the night before I had a “vanilla milkshake” as part of my dinner:
This shit was FUCKING DELICIOUS. I ended up having 4 over the course of my stay here. It was basically condensed milk with vanilla in it. Soooo gooood.
Also another note, Mui Ne is FILLED with Russians. Like, it’s even known as “little Moscow”. A lot of restaurants are in Russian, and the menus at most restaurants have Vietnamese, English, and Russian. After a bit of googling, I find out there’s direct flights from much of Russia and Russian-block countries to Nhan Trang and Siagon. And a lot of tour companies have packages to stay at Mui Ne. Plus, this is winter for Russia, which is FUCKING COLD, so obviously they’d want to go somewhere warm. And since the flights are only 5-6 hours, then why wouldn’t they come here?
Anyways, back to the story. Next morning we wake up, eat breakfast(Sean falls on the bike a little bit on the way to the restaurant and gets a scrape), and we go to the kite surfing place. The wind was bad, so there was to be no kite surfing that day.
No problem. We decide to do one of my vietnam bucket-list items: JET SKI!
For $30 for 30 minutes, YOU can get on a jet ski! They bring two of them out, and we go to town.
Unfortuntely I don’t have any pictures of this because I hadn’t planned on doing Jet Skiing on this day and didn’t bring my go pro.
But let me tell you, Jet Skiing is AS EVERY BIT OF FUN AS YOU THINK IT WOULD BE.
Basically you just have a control that you pull for throttle, a wrist bad that’s attached to the ski for automatic shutoff should you be thrown off, a start button, and thats IT.
We fucking cruise around, going this way and that. I try going “full throttle” a few times, but get scared because it’s really fucking fast, and you get quite a bit of air, which means you get slammed back down on the waves pretty hard.
Me and Sean do a little bit of racing(I win of course), we spin around and stuff, just a grand old time.
Seriously, jet skiing is better than sex. Actually, it kind reminds me of sex. For some strange reason. Maybe just all the power between your legs, the exhilaration, the total absorption in the moment. It’s amazing.
At that moment, I really wish I had a girl with me riding on the back. The only thing that would have made it better. I’m looking at you Molly.
As one point I use the bouys as markers and make a game of weaving in and out of the bouys. Pretty fun stuff.
Eventually the guy waves us down with a life jacket to let us know our time is over. We return the skiis. Then something really embarrassing happens:
When I went to get on the jet ski, there was a key on the table; I picked it up assuming it was for the jet ski, put it in my pocket, and promptly forgot about it.
Turns out it was one of the Vietnamese guy’s keys to his motor bike. It had come out of my pocket at some point during my Jet skiing, lost to the ocean. And this guy didn’t have a spare.
I felt AWFUL. And like an idot. I had lost this guy’s key! Why he hadn’t stopped me from picking it up in the first place I don’t know, but I was still responsible.
I talked to Hong(our Kitesurfing instructor), and he told me that it cost 250 to replace the locks on his bike. 250 DOLLARS??? No, 250k Dong(about $10). Whew. I felt horrible, so I learned how to say “I’m sorry” in Vietnamese, and then gave the guy 400k and apologized to him. I felt super bad.
He came back up to me 5 minutes later and gave me 200k back. Apparently he only needed 200. That really restored my fate in the Vietnamese people. Left and right on this trip, people had been taking advantage of me, ripping me off. But this guy had enough honestly in him to say, “hey this is too much”. Which I thought was cool.
Anyways after that we went to some bar, got a bunch of sushi(yes cucumber sushi *IS* sush*), and headed back to our guesthouse.
There I took a FAT nap, while Sean wandered around and did whatever. He got a “massage” ;D
I woke up, and got a chance to really talk to Diem and Liem. Remember the name of the place we were staying? Diem and Liem Guest house? Well apparently that was the names of the sisters that ran the place! Here they are:
And with Sean:
They ran this guesthouse and lived here with their family. The one on the left is married, the one on the right was not.
They originally used to be waiters at a restaurant a couple years ago. After doing that for a couple of years, their family decided to sell “fish sauce” to local Vietnamese people. After making enough money doing that, their father decided to sell some land, and then build some guest houses. They built 5 houses about 4 years ago. They took out a loan with the bank, paid it off, then built another guest house. Then then took out another loan, built another 5 about 2 years ago, and then built another 6 about 3-4 months ago.
They run this house with a third sister(who’s name is not part of the place LOL). Apparently it’s standard to have 2 names for a hotel, but 3 is “not good”. The third sister also doesn’t speak english(Lien said she was “lazy”), so she’s the one who ends up cleaning a lof the rooms/preparing food.
Lien(the one on the left, who I talked to the most) studied tourism in college. That’s also how she learned to speak English.
She mentioned that they didn’t have any more land to expand any bigger, and even if they did, they would need to hire more help, but they wouldn’t trust anyone else to clean/help run the place(because of stealing).
It was really cool to be able to hear their life story. They were super friendly, and if anyone ever has to stay in Mui Ne, I would *HIGHLY* recommend this place.
Also, that evening we got to talk to a Russian guy. He worked for a guitar manufacturer, and lived in Syberia? I think it was. He had travelled to Corona(near LA, which I had never heard of), as well as SF and other places. He was there with his family. He had paid $500 all inclusive(including room + flight) to be there in Muni. I told him I paid $1600 just for the flight, and he started at me blankly lol. #Privilege I guess. But he was very friendly! In a reserved Russian sort of way. His wife and daughter were fucking gorgeous. Sean is right, Russian woman are on another level…
So anyways, that closes out that night. We went to bed, because at 4:30 AM the next morning we had a jeep tour the to sand dunes. We were originally going to ride our motorcycles to the dunes, but there were apparently police traps along the way that would stop you and make you pay 1-2 million dong(about $100) for not having a license(note that you need an international license to drive a scooter over 50cc, and we didn’t have that license. Most of the Vietnamese government doesn’t give a fuck about this, but here they like to milk the tourists for all they got). A lot of time, they wouldn’t even be “real” police, but entrepreneurial Vietnamese dressing up as policing, and creating road blocks to slow you down. People online said if they didn’t look like real police to just keep driving past them(even if they are following you). Sounded sketch AF if you ran away from real police.
Lien said if we went early enough in the morning the police(and fake police) wouldn’t be there, but Sean and I didn’t want to deal with that stressful situation, so we decided to get a jeep hire for $20 instead.
We wanted to see the sunrise on the dunes, so that’s why we had to wake up at 4:15 AM.
But before we woke up, I posed for a shot behind the bar:
So. wake up, make it out to the dunes, and I get some sick shots:
This was my favorite shot of the day. I’ll probably do more processing on the raw file when I get home. Breaking bad style:
I’ll probably frame that one.
We had to pay a guy 400k to take us on an ATV to the top of the dune to watch the sunset. I talked him down from 500k, which I was proud of. Though it was still a super-rip off, because 400k is about $20, for about 5 minutes of riding to the top(we could have probably walked it in 20 minutes).
Anyways, here’s more shots:
And here are some of the red sand dunes. Sean was so sleepy, he kept falling asleep in the jeep. I don’t know how you sleep like that!
Here are the sand dunes:
After that, we went to the “fairy stream”. This place was beautiful, and only 4 minutes walking from our hotel!
Absoultely beautiful. Some of these are going on the wall.
After that, we went back for more kite surfing lessons. But not before stopping at Joe’s Cafe and getting some food!
Then we go back for some Kite surfing lessons. Since the lessons started at 1, and we had a bus back at 4, we could only stay 2 hours for the lessons. Seeing as that wasn’t a lot of time, and the wind was supposed to be really good the next day, I opted to stay in Mue Ni another day while Sean went back to Siagon. I really wanted to complete my (kite board) training (unlike Anakin), so Sean and I split up. I would stay in Mue Ni another night, do my kite surfing lessons the next day, and take the bus back that night. Sean would go back today, and I’d meet up with him the next day in Siagon.
So that’s where we’re at! I’m typing this from a backpacking hostel right now. I’ll meet up with him tomorrow, enjoy my infinity pool, and fly back Wednesday. My flight is late on Wednesday, so instead of doing the Chi-chi tunnels, I’ll probably go on a food tour in Saigon(because I want to be *properly* introduced to Vietnamese food. It’s my last chance!).
So if you read all this, thanks. This was a Looooong blog and probably took me 2-3 hours to write. I’ll probably try and make them a bit shorter(maybe 2 days combined max), as this was a fucking marathon to type out.
Thanks for reading!