Out of the city and into the Delta…first stop My Tho. In order to get there, we first had to brave the adventure of the local bus. The ATPF created a minor stir walking onto the bus. With the language barrier, we just smiled a lot and pretended everyone was laughing with us. Eventually we began to wonder if we had the plague. First John’s seatmate deserted him, and then mine deserted me. Naturally that bus wasn’t going anywhere until it was completely full, so someone was eventually forced to sit next to me just to get the show on the road. That was no easy feat as we first had to endure vendor after vendor pushing through the aisle in an attempt to sell their wares. Mostly the offerings were bread, bread and more bread. Then, in case you didn’t like the short and fat bread, another vendor boarded the bus with baguettes for sale. As I sat sweating in a sunbeam, I was tempted to buy the entire lot just to get on the road and generate a little airflow. Our first stop – just 30 seconds down the road – lasted another 10 minutes. Foster just gave me a weathered look that clearly said, “Remind me again why we are doing this.”
We endured the two hour ride and finally bumped into the bus station parking lot in My Tho where we once again created a stir. A mob of taxi drivers elbowed each other out of the way in their enthusiasm to help the ATPF. The winner was the guy who spoke English. Sadly he wasn’t a winner. We haggled a bit over the price for a ride into town, and we agreed on 50,000 dong and told him the name of the hotel where we would like to be dropped off. He popped us into a cab with another driver, gave him some instructions and sent us away. When we pulled into another hotel (the cab driver’s choice, not ours), the adventure began. John and I kicked into backpacker mode – the “we’ve been here, we know what you’re doing, don’t take advantage of us” personalities came out. It was an education for the kids.
Typically we’re pretty reasonable people – flexible and easy-going, but these situations are just annoying. Hopefully there was some kind of life lesson involved in the conversation that followed. We insisted that we did not want to stay at this hotel although we were sure it was perfectly nice. It took multiple requests to leave and be delivered to the agreed upon hotel. The owner came outside and told us how wrong we were to go to the hotel we were requesting. We insisted again that we knew where we wanted to go (although “insisting” in Vietnamese when you can’t even correctly pronounce the name of the hotel you want to go to is an exercise in embarrassed assertiveness). Eventually the now-cranky driver backed up and pulled out of the hotel to head to our preferred hotel …we thought. He delivered us to another hotel with the same name as the one we were seeking and quickly hopped out of the car and ran into the lobby (no doubt to negotiate his commission for delivering us). In the meantime we hopped out and realized the hotel did not match the physical description in our guidebook, and, rather ironically, we could see the hotel we were seeking just down the street. We decided to take our bags and just walk the distance rather than negotiating yet again with the driver.
We indicated with our best pantomime that we were heading out on our own to the hotel down the street. We took out the 50,000 dong we had agreed upon, and he flew into a tizzy. Pointing at his meter, which read 60,000 dong, he danced around trying to explain that we owed him another 10,000 dong. At this point it was a matter of principal. Our kids were shocked and confused. We held firm and continued to offer the agreed upon money, which he refused to take. In the end John just put the money on the seat of the cab, and we started walking with him shouting at us and then following us in his car. The kids were not impressed. John and I were more annoyed than threatened. I kept Nolan close, and we just kept walking. Once we reached the hotel, the kids were scared. “Why was that man shouting at us? Is he still following us?” We reassured them that all was well with the world, and that this was a not an unusual situation in a bargaining culture. “What did the man want that made him so mad?” Well…fifty cents, actually. Seems a little silly now.
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