Let’s talk about Hoi An, and through Hoi An let’s talk about how we talk about countries as backpackers. The first thing that I notice about Hoi An is that is beautiful, the second is that there are a lot of tourists, the third is that is expensive. The first thing causes the other things, but our perception does as well. Hoi An’s beauty is definite, it’s tourist load seasonal, and it’s costs relative. It also had disappointing pho.

Hoi An was the second place we didn’t book in advance. This time a disagreement over accommodation lead to a stalemate that did not resolve itself before the bus arrived. So we arrived and began trudging through town at full pack. The first stop wouldn’t give us the deal we saw online and wouldn’t give us the wifi to simply book online. The next place was out of privates and we were looking for a dorm break. The third place was the first place. Finally we sat for coffee and booked a place online, guaranteeing our great deal. All the while Hoi An lay around us. Charming is the word the guidebooks use to describe it, I might substitute quaint but said with a hint of derision. It’s all 18th Century trade shops and fisherman’s houses, an intricately crafted Japanese bridge, floating lanterns on the river, hanging lanterns on the street, souvenir shops as far as the eye can see.

Hoi An avoided the worst of the war, which is to say it still saw too much but most of the town stayed standing. The city was heavily influenced by the Chinese from it’s days as center of trade. One Vietnamese man described the city as an overgrown China town with no small amount of disdain. It is authentic to it’s past, but that makes it less Vietnamese. It does have charm, and if you find the right alley, just enough rough edges to reassure that it is a real city.
The same Vietnamese man also described Hoi An as Vietnam’s premier tourist trap, a statement too harsh to be entirely accurate but too accurate to be overly harsh. It is full of tourists, a complaint that tourists such as myself love to levy against any place they visit that they didn’t love. I recognize my hypocrisy but allow me a long digression to explain myself.

I do not know the origin of backpacking other than to speculate that the first human to pack all their possessions into a bag and set out on the open road probably did so before there were open roads. Modern backpacking is about traveling the world for less, not necessarily cheap because plane tickets are plane tickets, but for less.1 It strips out the luxury of a vacation and gets to soul of travel. If you want to see places and experience cultures without first making millions off an app that reinvents the library but for profit, then backpacking might be for you. If you don’t want to travel 12 hours by bus or carry 25 lbs of luggage on your back for 45 minutes on a 90 degree Manila day, maybe stick to cruises. Because backpackers don’t travel in comfort, they often frequent places that don’t yet have comfort. There are more backpackers than vacationers in Nicaragua and Myanmar, and the backpackers like that.

In most places the backpacker infrastructure and vacation infrastructure coexist, one beneath the other, but overlapping only rarely. One group wakes up in their hotel, eats the continental breakfast, hops in the tour bus, and gets escorted around Bangkok and told spooky stories about Bangkok nightlife by their tour guide while they walk through an over policed and regulated red light district. The second group gets woken up by a hostel mate packing for their 6 AM flight, skips breakfast to save money, takes the local bus to the royal palace after discussing the route with the driver mainly via hand gesture, eats a bowl of rice and chicken purchased on the side of the street, then drinks cheap beer at corner bars with no AC or windows while smoking the weed they purchased from a sunglasses merchant.

Then there is Hoi An.2 In Hoi An there is no backpacking layer. There are a smattering of hostels, a cheap bus into and out of town, but the rest of infrastructure has been annexed to support the still expanding vacation infrastructure. Restaurants are numerous and expensive and all offer burgers and Hoegaarden, the primary shop street shuts down to all vehicle traffic,3 and shopping itself is listed as one of Hoi An’s top activities. White people outnumber locals, and now you can’t get within view of the river without 14 people trying to get you to take a boat ride. All I wanted to do was see some interesting architecture.

If all of this sounds OK or even good to you than you are a vacationer, and that is fine. Time off and disposable income are rare in America and you should spend them exactly how you want to. Go to Hoi An. I will not be joining you, unless you are paying. We did meet up with Jess and Alex from Da Nang, because if you are forced to live luxuriously you should do it with friends.

Fittingly, from the most touristy stop of our trip we proceeded to the least touristy, Quy Nhon. A beach city about two thirds of the way down the West Coast, Quy Nhon isn’t even in the guidebook we brought with us. It’s not that it’s tiny, the city is about the size of Tulsa, and has hotels and guesthouses. But those hotels are taken up by Vietnamese people on vacation from further North. Recommended by our friends Vanessa and Shawn, we knew we were getting off the tourist circuit when there was no comfortable option to get to the city. The first night saw us order street food from a vendor who for the first time in our trip spoke absolutely zero English. Our 16 bed dorm room had zero other people. The next day we found an abandoned beach, not because we had ventured into the wilds, but because it was in the middle of the day and its normal denizens were at work. We took a ride in the world’s first Ferris wheel, drink 50 cent beers, and still had great pizza because pizza is for everyone. The perfect Antidote to Hoi An and needed rest before our final stop of Vietnam; into the chaos of Ho Chi Minh City.

As you likely know, Ho Chi Minh City was once called Saigon. Unlike it’s renamed brethren New York and Istanbul, Ho Chi Minh City is still regularly Saigon. It was renamed after the former North Vietnamese leader after the South Vietnam fell to the North in 1975. In a testament to the resilience of its people, in addition to the persistence of the original name it also remains the heart of capitalism and economic activity in Vietnam. The streets of HCMC are either certifiable nightmares our glorious works of art depending on how much you appreciate standstill traffic existing side by side with never still motorbikes, neither of which acknowledge the existence of lanes, traffic lights, or sidewalks. To cross the street you wait until there are no cars (because there are never no motorbikes) then simply hold up your hand, close your eyes, and start walking. While sitting on the famous walking street you may notice that people physically do not move, because there are too many of them to make progress. This all changes of course when a patrol sweeps the area, because actually blocking the street is legal so every couple hours or so the fiftyish restaurants and bars gather all their chairs and tables and stack them on the sidewalk and everyone pretends the street was never impeded, the patrol included.

The thing you have to do in HCMC and the thing you don’t want to do in HCMC and the first thing we did in HCMC is visit the War Remnants museum. A testament to the horrors of war in general, though focused much more on the American, French, and South Vietnamese committed horrors, the museum features exhibits on war crimes such as murdering of children, the lasting effects of agent orange which has caused a crisis of hereditary deformities, and replicas of prison facilities from the South’s largest and most infamous prison. I will avoid politicizing and preaching too much or getting deep into what is justified in war, but as with the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US’s refusal to grapple with or even acknowledge the multi-generational after effects of its weapons of war remains a stain on our nation. Agent Orange continues to cause untold health problems in the country, including the aforementioned hereditary deformities which have been shown to pass down at least four generations. If you leave the museum feeling anything but guilt and shame you are a bad human.

We followed with museum with excellent food and beer and a rendezvous with Jess and Alex. We compared notes and feeling from the day as they had also visited the museum. We apologized to no one, but felt the need to. The people of Vietnam and are amazing and gracious and I have no idea why.

Not having had our fill of depressing reminders of the atrocity of war, the next day we visit the Cu Chi Tunnels. Located a couple hours drive outside of HCMC, the Cu Chi Tunnels were an expansive complex of underground tunnels connecting underground hospitals, bunkers, barracks, and storerooms. Used by the Viet Cong to carry out their guerrilla war against the South Vietnamese and the Americans, it is easy to forget while crouching through tunnels two feet shorter than myself and trying tapioca root that it was from these tunnels war was fought and people were killed. The experience of walking through the tunnels at 6 foot 3 was as intense a workout as I had all trip, claustrophobes be very wary. A demonstration of various booby traps designed often to kill but sometimes just to maim and trap the enemy help remind us why the tunnels are here. And while I can understand the local point of view, it was always in the back of my mind the “enemy” was often American soldiers.

In need of another pick me we spent our last afternoon at the Cafe Apartment. During the Saigon days it held American and South Vietnamese government officials, following the fall of Saigon it was handed over by the former North, but now all, Vietnamese to shipyard workers. As the area of town recovered following the opening up of Vietnam these workers began leasing the apartments to tenants who in turn fashioned the spaces into individual cafes, shops, and restaurants. Now something akin to a themed mall that features only local merchants, the Cafe Apartment is one of the most unique visits we made in Vietnam. For how long is uncertain, as the whole enterprise is illegal and the government has taken to threatening the tenants with eviction over the last couple years. When unregulated enterprise meets highly regulated government there are bound to be conflicts. But for our time we got to enjoy great coffee and a donut decorated as a unicorn, and that is a good time.

We returned to our hostel for one last rooftop beer or four. The next day we would leave for our last country of the trip: Cambodia.