A Hotel in Ho Chi Minh

My meandering thoughts, as the taxi worked its way through a seemingly aimless stream of over-laden mopeds, hovered around the people on the streets outside and how they all seemed to be waiting for something to happen!

I was in Ho Chi Minh, a result of a Typhoon in Kaohsiung and an unplanned event in an otherwise well organized journey! I had that afternoon driven up from Vung Tau were I had been working for the last month and the idea was to catch the plane direct from Ho Chi Minh Airport to Kaohsiung and hence my family! Whilst bemoaning the fact that this particular airport does not sell any English newspapers or books and that the only available sandwiches resembled a blindfolded five-year olds first attempt at pleasing mummy, the announcement came stuttering out that Typhoon Bilis had hit Taiwan and that my prospective flight would thus remain on the tarmac for the foreseeable future!

It took an immense amount of patience on mine and the 49 other miserable 'groundees' as the Vietnamese Immigration took away our passports and 1 hour later returned them to us with an officious nod to say that we could re-enter their country! Once safely across the border I opted to bypass and steam ahead of the crowd of ex-potential passengers who were milling around outside like headless chickens and approached one of those guys one always finds outside airports from Lagos to Bangkok! I cornered this particular guy (or did he accost me?) with his official blue-shirt and ID to prove that he was "honestly official' and asked him to take me to a good hotel!

Once seated in his near three-wheeled candidate for a scrap yard I realized a couple of things, that he didn't speak as much English as the initial conversation suggested and that this trip into the city was not going to be as straight forward as first imagined!

Not knowing Ho Chi Minh at all, I said "can you take me to a big hotel please"!

He said, "ah hotel good; I take you friend, three dollar"!

This reply could of course be interpreted in a variety of colorful ways but I'm not a first tripper! Certainly the taxi fare was not going to be three dollars and neither would the room be that cheap! I was not his friend or did he mean that we were going to a hotel that belonged to his friend? I suppose an immediate interpretation could have been "ah, another foreign devil lets see what pickings you have to offer"!

A typical street scene in Ho Chi Minh
Photo Copyright © Ieuan Dolby, 2006

I spent half an hour in his cab on a tour of Ho Chi Minh; I think we passed the same building three times, and we conversed endlessly about hotels and their prices! I tried to influence him into seeing that I wanted a big and not cheap hotel whilst he insisted that "hotel good, long, four dollar"!

My driver took me to his friends' hotel; from the outside it resembled a bombed-out cattle-shed filled with a variety of loiterers requiring a dentist but as it was late and because I liked the odd adventure I got out of the taxi (paying the driver well over the odds as had no spare change) and entered this picture of blatant seediness!

I approached the rickety reception desk and after allowing two Chinese Businessmen with a couple of look-a-like prostitutes dangling from their arms to book a single room for an hour (they must have been tired) I asked the receptionist if they had a room for one night! She handed me a list, sniffed loudly as if to say "an alien has landed" and disappeared behind a screen! I searched that list from top to bottom, I even checked the reverse side to see if I was missing anything but that previously mentioned 4-dollar room must have been booked! I could get a standard room for 35 us dollars, a superior room for 39 or a deluxe for 45! Wow, I suppose I could splash out for one night!

Sniffing her way back the receptionist/waitress/door girl/owner informed me that they only had one superior room available. All the others were fully booked. I'm not sure why she mentioned it, maybe because she didn't want me storming back down and causing a fuss in the lobby in front of her other revered and toothless guests but just as I was about to whip out my passport she casually informed me that this particular superior room came without a window!

I'm all for adventure but ………. I grabbed my suitcase declined her services as a door girl and broke the last remaining flagstone on the pavement outside as I thumped my weary suitcase onto it!

As these situations would have it; my taxi driver had not yet departed! There he was grinning like an ape whilst draped over his cobblestone camouflaged taxi and as there happened to be no other cab insight, in fact there was no other visible form of human life in miles except the disgruntled multi-purpose drone at the reception desk, I opted to give this tour guide another shot!

I stood by his taxi and in very clear and descriptive English, with liberal resort to sign language, I explained what I meant by a big hotel! I threw in words like five-star, plenty money, 100 dollars and 'biiiiiig' and after a while he started to nod his head wildly and repeating "sorry, sorry, sorry" over and over again! And I for some silly reason assumed that he had grasped the big picture and that we were in fact on our way towards a comfortable bed!

We ended up ten minutes later at what could have been the exact imitation of the last hotel that we had just come from except this one had managed to get a lamp going and the receptionist was wearing a uniform, although it looked like a ten-year old well used combination of an airline stewardesses skirt and a monks habit! I chose not to even open the taxi door and in a harsher tone told my grinning driver to take me to the Sheraton! He informed me whilst shaking his head wildly from side-to-side that "Ho Chi Minh no Sheraton, only hotel same same before"!

The third hotel was really pushing the limits on plausibility but just as I was planning on getting him to drive me back to the airport so that I could start the circle again with what hopefully would be a more amenable driver I spotted out of the rear window a large neon sign that read "Sheraton Saigon"! Wow how lucky I was and there, they had gone and built this large and imposing structure without telling any of the taxi-drivers! I pointed this large building out to my driver and he said "ah, okay, I take there" but then he turned left instead of right!

To cut the tour of Ho Chi Minh short I opted to speed up the end to this saga and at the next traffic lights I flung open my door and with my suitcase clasped in my hands fell onto the curb outside! I ended up with my luggage on my stomach and a crowd of curious Vietnamese on bicycles gawking at me. From there I just scampered! I could here shouts of anger (laughter) behind me but the Sheraton was in my view and no man or beast was going to stop me from getting there! The doorman at the Sheraton stopped me; I think he wandered if I was fully at home but let me through on the condition that I took things more slowly and that I did not upset the clientele in the lobby!

The Sheraton Hotel - not hard to miss!
Photo Copyright © Ieuan Dolby, 2006

Wow, I never fully appreciated what a good room costs in Ho Chi Minh! If I had known I might have ended up staring blankly at a wall downtown, trying to shut out the banging and creaking bed next-door as the Chinese Businessmen got down to business, too scared to leave the room incase I came back to find that my camera and computer had done a vanishing trick and that my clothes were being worn by the decaying decrepit patients in the lobby downstairs!

I got the deluxe room; the seemingly only available room at this hotel! For the window that this room boasted I had to pay 250US dollars - wow, so that's what one pays for a view of Ho Chi Minh!

A View from the room through the rain
Photo Copyright © Ieuan Dolby, 2006

I had an excellent stay at this hotel! They even gave me a free bottle of South African wine and I spent hours of fun playing with the remote operated curtains and a shower unit that boasted three heads (I even fixed one of the heads as it refused to go on pulse mode)! The next morning I took in some of the sites of the City, filled my camera up with shots of blurred Vietnamese zooming past on various forms of two-wheeled transports before working my way back to the airport to catch that evenings flight to Kaohsiung!

I was pulled aside by the Immigration officials at Ho Chi Minh airport. By chance the same guy that questioned the stamps in my passport was the one that had dealt with me upon my re-entry the previous day! He told me that I should not have been in the country, that I had no stamp in passport and that they should fine me for illegal entry! I could not quite work that one out, I struggled to fathom out the workings of this particular circumstance but the pieces of this jigsaw were not matching, not by a long shot!

I was taken to a back room, one that might have been used to interrogate Garry Glitter or to strip search suspected drug-smugglers and told to sit down! An hour or so later and after I had decided to confess to anything that they asked me five immigration officials came into the room and sat down around me. They had my passport and kept on looking at it in-turn but without saying a word to me! Eventually, the one that had let me back into his country in the first place gave me back my passport and told me that I could go, with a very stern warning that next time I visit I must have a Visa!

Who am I to argue!

And so I departed Vietnam! I am though still scratching my arm as it seems that even the Sheraton in Ho Chi Minh comes equipped with the token mosquito and I am still wandering what all those people were waiting for but when faced with a windowless room or a expensive one I'm not sure when I'll return to find out!

Ieuan Dolby
Author and Webmaster of SeaDolby.com
18th July 2006