Getting street-smarter or just cynical?
Vietnam, Halong Bay - 1-6/10-2011
This was the first jarring experience of my journey. I took a 3 hour bus to Halong City, which is the main port to Halong Bay - one of the famed 7 Wonders. The City felt like it was asleep....or, perchance, just uncomfortably numb from the unexpected, unprecedented cold that befell the Northern Vietnam this year. A few pale, shivering tourists wandering between the open-air restaurants run by the shivering locals with the steely-gray still ocean and sky watching. I felt like I was dunked into a black-and-white photograph. More like gray-and-gray, actually.
With the ratio of locals-in-tourism to the actual tourists being higher than 5:1, it turned out that the locals were bent on desperate measures - such as absurd scamming of the tourists. Wherever and whenever they could. I ended up booking a tour [my first on this trip, as I tend to avoid group tours like the plague, but there seemed to be no other way in this case] for a 2 day boat trip around the Halong Bay with the final stop in Cat Ba Island in the middle of the Bay[where I was intending to go anyways].
After a quick comparison with my boatmates, I've quickly learned that I've been overcharged by a factor of 2 [a substantial chunk of cash for a backpacker]. In addition to that, it turned out that even though I paid for the supposedly more comfortable kind of accommodations, I would be in the same standard, dirty accomodations that the "standard" class has presumed. All that was laid out for me by the boat operator, who got the tourists "downstream" of all the tour "mafia" and could not help anyone's case, as much as he wanted to. It felt unfair all around. The boat operator said it was a classic Halong City tour case - that the folks who booked from Hanoi got the exact thing they paid for. That was a quick brush with a different reality than the one I've been experienceing up to this point, and I'd lie if I'd say that it did not make the already gray colour scheme of Halong Bay more than a smidgen grayer. I have never felt so objectified in my life - I felt like the touts and the locals in the tour business perceived me and the other westerners as walking wallets with no soul. I don't remember ever saying "no" so many times to so many people in one day....I suppose, that's a useful skill. Some ancient Disney cartoon that involved ducks with their eyes turning into $$ signs [Scrudge, was it?] came to mind. I found myself struggling in keeping my humanity in the face of it in some way. The juxtaposition of all that with the beauty of the background was jarring to the core. My diary grew a picture of an overall feel of the situation - the magical waves on one side faced by the barbed wire/jagged chaotic lines right next to them.
Dry residue: if you are going for a tour of Halong Bay, buy the tickets from Hanoi and don't trust any hotel-sold tours in Halong City. Especially - in the low season. Everyone is desperate to squeeze out every squeezable dollar.
However, rocking gently in the midst of the dark silouettes of the mystical mounts rising out of the water and cozy lights of the boats floating nearby for the night was magical. And then it turned out that the boat had a decent Karaoke system [which seems to be a big hit around Vietnam and Asia in general], and that in our group I was not the only one with the love for Elton John, The Beatles and ABBA tunes.... a mellow French guy with a kind baritone sang duo with me for 3 hours straight....while the rest of the folks were rocking to the tunes and establishing a proper alcohol concentration for singing - you know, that tipping point where alcohol outweighs any residual timidity. Then we gave over the mics to the American girls that reached the requisite "state" and crewned some uber-mellow-sweet-melt-me-into-a-puddle songs for the rest of the evening.
The next day, we landed at Cat Ba island, where I wanted to spend a few days [before I got there and felt the temperature]. On a whim, me and a group of "Frenchies" as my karaoke-partner called them, rented a few scooters and headed around the island amidst the rice fields and the water buffalo fertilizing them. That was one of the coldest and funnest rides ever - the would-be-romantic-if-it-were-warmer beauty of Cat Ba mesmerized me even at the current temperature. The almost luminescent green of the rice patches, the roads that grace a sand path through the ocean, the seasoned rice farmers in their emerald rubber suits and classical cones of straw hats...the cartoon-like cool blue and turquoise colours of boats in the port... the pearl-strings of floating fishing villages of the same colour gracing the horizon. I love the feeling of flying through the unearthly scenery on a scooter....it's like this beauty is moving through my transparent shell and embracing it from the outside and the inside.
Many of the locals recommended that I visit the nearby Lan Ha bay, which was supposed to be even more striking than Halong Bay. So, like a fool who doesn't learn from the first time....I went on another boat tour [this one - for a day, though] through Lan Ha. It was striking indeed - the karsts even more vertical, and many of them with "anuses" of the cave entrances, some of which we explored. However, the catch was that the boat did not have a solid enclosure to hide from the penetrating cold. Once I saw the configuration, I mentally cursed my critical judgement and trusting the guidebooks/local advice....It was a bona fide 9 hour fridge-sitting. The good news was that some folks on the tour shared with me the sub-zero Sapa temperatures [the mountanous rice terrace wonder of Vietnam - near the Chinese border in the north], which was my tentative next destination. So, that has reversed my course by 180 degrees. The tales of the warm and delicious Hoi An near the ocean have flooded my mind, and I've resolved to go south the very next morning.
Before I went to Hanoi to catch my train to Danang, I had a couple hours stop in the Halong City where I bought the unfortunate tour. I figured, why not go for a little adventure and learn a bit about how the tourist mafia actually worked. So, I've resolved to get the $$ back [it wasn't so much about the $ as about restoring integrity and making things right - the feeling of being taken advantage of is genuinely an unplesant one and is, as I found out, a personal pet peeve].
First, I went back to the hotel, where the hotel owner lied to me that the guy who sold the tour didn't actually work for him [even though it was the same guy that checked me into the hotel]. He tried to send me away to the police station [in reality - trying to simply get the trouble off his hands].
So, that's exactly where I went [not having many hopes for the outcome, given the infamous corruption level here]. The police station turned out to be a huge empty building with a room in the back where two guys slept near a working TV and a tea table. I awoke one of them, who proceeded to make some calls and knew the tour fellows in question. After a while [during which I was invited to drink hearty herbal tea with policemen], police got a hold of the hotel owner, who admitted his fault and told me to come back to the hotel to get the refund. I was amazed at such an outcome. However, when I showed up at the hotel, the owner was not there and no one knew about any $. I called back to the police station, at which point the police asked me for money [who knows why - since I was the one who has been scammed - which, when I asked, they hung up]. Then, out of the blue, the brother of the tour scammer has showed up and gave me 1/2 of the promised money back. At that point, it was all just really amusing, and I went back with a feeling of completion and learning something about the strange workings of the "tourist mafia" in Vietnam.
I caught a sleeper train from Hanoi and began to warm up on the cozy 3rd berth - that's the one close to the ceiling. The beauty of that position is that warm air tends to rise..... In the coziness of my train "nest," I reflected that in some way, I'm becoming street-smart [a quality I was almost completely devoid of until recently]....and REALLY watching my back. I don't know whether that is a good thing, as my trust in the general goodness of people has been tainted...[I know the incident seems minuscle, yet, it has impacted me]. I have never been lied to in so many [very obvious] forms....and that discounts the value of every word heard from that point on. I notice myself taking everything with a large grain of salt. I am watching this trend, for it is far from my intent to become a hardened cynic.
Perchance, the balance is somewhere in the middle, as usual - balancing trust in humanity with a healthy "bullshit detector." Perchance, this is just my own mirror as to just how much I have been [out of laziness and habit] using the words of others [nothing more than puffs of air, in fact] almost structurally as support - as a floor, as something solid. Naturally, when they show their aetherial nature, I let that sinking feeling of "the floor is not there" a [picture an infant walking onto a staircase thinking the thing is a flat surface]. Experiences such as this help a great deal to break that habit. Now I simply look at words as that - words....that may or may not have substance behind them [and I assume - not, until have evidence to the contrary].
I recognize that in my ordinary habitat, this habit would be harder to break, since my world there was mostly inhabited by people who are their word and who hold integrity as one of the highest values. So, in a way, their words behave like solid objects. And only once in a while would I bump against this incongruency between word and deed. However, here in a wold NOT hand-picked by me to support my illusions and habits, this kind of discoveries are easier to make, it seems.
This was the first jarring experience of my journey. I took a 3 hour bus to Halong City, which is the main port to Halong Bay - one of the famed 7 Wonders. The City felt like it was asleep....or, perchance, just uncomfortably numb from the unexpected, unprecedented cold that befell the Northern Vietnam this year. A few pale, shivering tourists wandering between the open-air restaurants run by the shivering locals with the steely-gray still ocean and sky watching. I felt like I was dunked into a black-and-white photograph. More like gray-and-gray, actually.
With the ratio of locals-in-tourism to the actual tourists being higher than 5:1, it turned out that the locals were bent on desperate measures - such as absurd scamming of the tourists. Wherever and whenever they could. I ended up booking a tour [my first on this trip, as I tend to avoid group tours like the plague, but there seemed to be no other way in this case] for a 2 day boat trip around the Halong Bay with the final stop in Cat Ba Island in the middle of the Bay[where I was intending to go anyways].
After a quick comparison with my boatmates, I've quickly learned that I've been overcharged by a factor of 2 [a substantial chunk of cash for a backpacker]. In addition to that, it turned out that even though I paid for the supposedly more comfortable kind of accommodations, I would be in the same standard, dirty accomodations that the "standard" class has presumed. All that was laid out for me by the boat operator, who got the tourists "downstream" of all the tour "mafia" and could not help anyone's case, as much as he wanted to. It felt unfair all around. The boat operator said it was a classic Halong City tour case - that the folks who booked from Hanoi got the exact thing they paid for. That was a quick brush with a different reality than the one I've been experienceing up to this point, and I'd lie if I'd say that it did not make the already gray colour scheme of Halong Bay more than a smidgen grayer. I have never felt so objectified in my life - I felt like the touts and the locals in the tour business perceived me and the other westerners as walking wallets with no soul. I don't remember ever saying "no" so many times to so many people in one day....I suppose, that's a useful skill. Some ancient Disney cartoon that involved ducks with their eyes turning into $$ signs [Scrudge, was it?] came to mind. I found myself struggling in keeping my humanity in the face of it in some way. The juxtaposition of all that with the beauty of the background was jarring to the core. My diary grew a picture of an overall feel of the situation - the magical waves on one side faced by the barbed wire/jagged chaotic lines right next to them.
Dry residue: if you are going for a tour of Halong Bay, buy the tickets from Hanoi and don't trust any hotel-sold tours in Halong City. Especially - in the low season. Everyone is desperate to squeeze out every squeezable dollar.
However, rocking gently in the midst of the dark silouettes of the mystical mounts rising out of the water and cozy lights of the boats floating nearby for the night was magical. And then it turned out that the boat had a decent Karaoke system [which seems to be a big hit around Vietnam and Asia in general], and that in our group I was not the only one with the love for Elton John, The Beatles and ABBA tunes.... a mellow French guy with a kind baritone sang duo with me for 3 hours straight....while the rest of the folks were rocking to the tunes and establishing a proper alcohol concentration for singing - you know, that tipping point where alcohol outweighs any residual timidity. Then we gave over the mics to the American girls that reached the requisite "state" and crewned some uber-mellow-sweet-melt-me-into-a-puddle songs for the rest of the evening.
The next day, we landed at Cat Ba island, where I wanted to spend a few days [before I got there and felt the temperature]. On a whim, me and a group of "Frenchies" as my karaoke-partner called them, rented a few scooters and headed around the island amidst the rice fields and the water buffalo fertilizing them. That was one of the coldest and funnest rides ever - the would-be-romantic-if-it-were-warmer beauty of Cat Ba mesmerized me even at the current temperature. The almost luminescent green of the rice patches, the roads that grace a sand path through the ocean, the seasoned rice farmers in their emerald rubber suits and classical cones of straw hats...the cartoon-like cool blue and turquoise colours of boats in the port... the pearl-strings of floating fishing villages of the same colour gracing the horizon. I love the feeling of flying through the unearthly scenery on a scooter....it's like this beauty is moving through my transparent shell and embracing it from the outside and the inside.
Many of the locals recommended that I visit the nearby Lan Ha bay, which was supposed to be even more striking than Halong Bay. So, like a fool who doesn't learn from the first time....I went on another boat tour [this one - for a day, though] through Lan Ha. It was striking indeed - the karsts even more vertical, and many of them with "anuses" of the cave entrances, some of which we explored. However, the catch was that the boat did not have a solid enclosure to hide from the penetrating cold. Once I saw the configuration, I mentally cursed my critical judgement and trusting the guidebooks/local advice....It was a bona fide 9 hour fridge-sitting. The good news was that some folks on the tour shared with me the sub-zero Sapa temperatures [the mountanous rice terrace wonder of Vietnam - near the Chinese border in the north], which was my tentative next destination. So, that has reversed my course by 180 degrees. The tales of the warm and delicious Hoi An near the ocean have flooded my mind, and I've resolved to go south the very next morning.
Before I went to Hanoi to catch my train to Danang, I had a couple hours stop in the Halong City where I bought the unfortunate tour. I figured, why not go for a little adventure and learn a bit about how the tourist mafia actually worked. So, I've resolved to get the $$ back [it wasn't so much about the $ as about restoring integrity and making things right - the feeling of being taken advantage of is genuinely an unplesant one and is, as I found out, a personal pet peeve].
First, I went back to the hotel, where the hotel owner lied to me that the guy who sold the tour didn't actually work for him [even though it was the same guy that checked me into the hotel]. He tried to send me away to the police station [in reality - trying to simply get the trouble off his hands].
So, that's exactly where I went [not having many hopes for the outcome, given the infamous corruption level here]. The police station turned out to be a huge empty building with a room in the back where two guys slept near a working TV and a tea table. I awoke one of them, who proceeded to make some calls and knew the tour fellows in question. After a while [during which I was invited to drink hearty herbal tea with policemen], police got a hold of the hotel owner, who admitted his fault and told me to come back to the hotel to get the refund. I was amazed at such an outcome. However, when I showed up at the hotel, the owner was not there and no one knew about any $. I called back to the police station, at which point the police asked me for money [who knows why - since I was the one who has been scammed - which, when I asked, they hung up]. Then, out of the blue, the brother of the tour scammer has showed up and gave me 1/2 of the promised money back. At that point, it was all just really amusing, and I went back with a feeling of completion and learning something about the strange workings of the "tourist mafia" in Vietnam.
I caught a sleeper train from Hanoi and began to warm up on the cozy 3rd berth - that's the one close to the ceiling. The beauty of that position is that warm air tends to rise..... In the coziness of my train "nest," I reflected that in some way, I'm becoming street-smart [a quality I was almost completely devoid of until recently]....and REALLY watching my back. I don't know whether that is a good thing, as my trust in the general goodness of people has been tainted...[I know the incident seems minuscle, yet, it has impacted me]. I have never been lied to in so many [very obvious] forms....and that discounts the value of every word heard from that point on. I notice myself taking everything with a large grain of salt. I am watching this trend, for it is far from my intent to become a hardened cynic.
Perchance, the balance is somewhere in the middle, as usual - balancing trust in humanity with a healthy "bullshit detector." Perchance, this is just my own mirror as to just how much I have been [out of laziness and habit] using the words of others [nothing more than puffs of air, in fact] almost structurally as support - as a floor, as something solid. Naturally, when they show their aetherial nature, I let that sinking feeling of "the floor is not there" a [picture an infant walking onto a staircase thinking the thing is a flat surface]. Experiences such as this help a great deal to break that habit. Now I simply look at words as that - words....that may or may not have substance behind them [and I assume - not, until have evidence to the contrary].
I recognize that in my ordinary habitat, this habit would be harder to break, since my world there was mostly inhabited by people who are their word and who hold integrity as one of the highest values. So, in a way, their words behave like solid objects. And only once in a while would I bump against this incongruency between word and deed. However, here in a wold NOT hand-picked by me to support my illusions and habits, this kind of discoveries are easier to make, it seems.
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