Back to the Motherland!

I’m flying on Vietnam Airlines to Hanoi at 6pm today. Nick stays behind in Cambodia before going to Thailand for the last couple of days of his vacation. My ride over to the airport is uneventful, but here's a kid that has a sweet red bike which I want.

The flight over Vietnam is full of beautiful clouds. I can watch clouds like these for hours (preferably on a picnic blanket on the side of a hill). I even saw a rainbow. As you can see, some small patch of Vietnam is getting rain.

Less than two hours later I am in Hanoi.

My guide book makes Hanoi seem like a place where tourists can easily get scammed. I have my radar on paranoid setting, but I guess it’s not high enough, because I still get taken for a ride – literally. A taxi scam. At one point during the taxi ride to a hotel, my taxi veers off to this little building next to a toll both, some woman comes out in uniform and hands my driver a ticket. The driver tells me that I have to pay a $18 USD tourist fee to enter Hanoi and he’ll have to show that I paid my fee at the toll. I don’t notice the other airport taxis coming over here and I refuse to pay. I didn’t hear anything about this fee from anyone nor did I read it in my lonely planet guide. As I am causing a delay, he seems exasperated and says “okay, I pay for you now and you pay me when we get to the hotel.” I’m not sure what to do. My senses tell me that this seems like a scam, but there’s a part of me that wonders if I’m wrong and just being an asshole tourist. At one point he says “relax, I a good guy.” Paro radar on overload! At the hotel he shows me this very official, and laminated ticket saying that there’s a ($18) tourist fee. I reluctantly give it to him, but then withhold the entirety of my cab fare as I decide to talk to the hotel manager to see if this tourist fee thing was legit. The taxi driver shouts at me to pay but I insist on talking to the manager first. The driver eventually realizes that I’m not going to pay him and quickly drives off.

The hotel manager also sets off my scam radar, but the room is clean and affordable. I ask the other tourists what they’re paying, and I’m not getting charged any different. He tries to hard sell me a package tour to Halong Bay and pretends he doesn’t understand my English when I tell him I don’t want one. I even suspect he might have been a part of the taxi scam somehow since the taxi driver took me to this hotel first (often taxis get commissions from hotels if they can get a tourist to use that hotel).

Bah…see…this is how racism can start. Even though I’m half Viet, I’m getting a distaste in my mouth for the Vietnamese. I know these scams exist everywhere in developing nations, and they specifically target tourists (especially traveling on their own) but bah, I’m just in a bad mood now…I'll get over it.

The manager asks me what I’m doing in Hanoi and I tell him. I ask him to help me make a phone call to Minh, my mother’s friend in Hanoi. Minh has been given the task of tracking down my father and getting me in contact with him. My mom and Minh were best friends in Vietnam. The manager talks to her in Vietnamese and then gives me an abrupt and irritated response. “She will be here at 9am to meet you tomorrow.” Whaa? This rapid progression in the subplot makes me a bit nervous.

My hotel is in Hanoi's old quarter. That's in the orange section of this map near Hoan Kiem Lake. Evidently, even though the taxi guy scammed me, he also took me to a hotel that is less than five minutes away from Minh's house. What are the chances?

As I wait for an internet terminal, two Italian guys traveling through Vietnam begin talking to me. One knows English and the other doesn’t but he speaks some Spanish. I feel my mood lift as I am able to recount my scam and get some fellow tourist sympathy. They also got caught in a taxi scam as well – but going to a restaurant. I am also buoyed to know that the Spanish speaker can understand me and that I can still speak some Spanish. They tell me that Italy is also full of scams like these so I should be careful if I ever visit there. The Spanish speaker begins trying to romance me a bit and his friend gives him a signal to cut it out and go back to their room – they have to get up really early tomorrow. Ciao!

I sleep like the dead.