Our time in Vietnam was a learning experience for me as much as it was for the kids, and I have many travel reflections related to this leg of our journey. There were many things I came to realize about Vietnam that I didn’t previously know, and many feelings I now have about Vietnam that I didn’t previously have. A big part of this grew out of my lack of knowledge about the Vietnam war and also the longer history of Vietnam.

Tourism Or Guilt Trip

Learning About The War

I learned about the Vietnam war and America’s involvement in depth for the first time on this trip. In Vietnam they refer to the war as the American war, and I understand why. The end result in 1975 was the communist north taking power, and if America had stayed out of it, the same result would have been achieved a couple decades earlier. That would have saved 20 years and about 1.3M lives. Agent orange also would have never been used, and Vietnam’s land would not be poisoned like it is to this day.

The war was never popular in the US for good reason. We were sending Americans to die because US politicians were freaking out about something “different”. That something was the rise of communism in one more spot on the other side of earth. Vilifying something and blowing it way out of proportion is an American pastime. It’s the same each time, just a different thing everyone is focused on. It was communism in that era, it was satanism a decade later, it’s nukes sometimes, and it’s woke ideology now. It really all boils down to politicians leveraging peoples insecurities and fears about something “different” to stoke outrage in order to promote an agenda.

Treatment Of Americans

My most profound observation in Vietnam was how good the people were to us despite the history between our countries. It almost defies understanding that we would be received so well when America can rightly be fingered as the cause of so much death, pain, and suffering which is still echoing in Vietnam today. Sure there are reasons for the Vietnamese to play nice, such as tourism income, product sales, etc. I don’t believe that sums up their motivation though, and forgiveness must play a part.

They do however point out very clearly where they lay the blame for the war, and the atrocities of the war. In our trip to the war remnants museum, we spent the entire time feeling guilty about America’s role in the war. They have an entire area dedicated to American war crimes, and another entire area on the fallout of agent orange.

Food

On a less tense topic, the food in Vietnam was really good. I think we enjoyed it more than we normally would have after coming from Manila. In the Philippines, the food was not good. This goes beyond our personal preference, and is objectively not good. The way you can tell the majority of the world agrees is because you don’t find Filipino restaurants everywhere like you do Mexican, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, etc.

We ate at various Pho places and other local restaurants and almost universally enjoyed them. Our favorite restaurant serving local food was called Tho, but we tried a wide variety of food from a wide variety of places. I really enjoyed getting Bánh mì from local street food stands.

Vietnamese coffee was a favorite of ours as well. We drank a lot of it until we decided we should stop consuming all of the sugar that was in it. Drinking it black after the sugary version wasn’t something we were going to take the time to get used to.

Our favorite place was right at the base of our condo and was called Artisan. We ate this bakery’s food more than any other single place.

Location and Airbnb

Ho Chi Minh City

We were located in district 2 of Ho Chi Minh City in a condo complex called Novaland The Sun Avenue. This location turned out to be ideal, and it was really just pure luck rather than a smart move on our part. We were about a 10 minute Grab ride away from the main tourist area of district 1. That allowed us to go over there any time we wanted to, and kept all of that chaos away from our day to day life. In district 1 you run into all sorts of weird crap. I was approached at least five separate times by alleged college students raising money for the homeless. I gave them money the first time, but then told them no thanks from there on out. In reality I think they are just pocketing the money, but I can’t be sure.

Our Airbnb was ridiculously nice in my opinion. Once again our view of this is seen through the lens of having lived in the tightest condo ever in Manila. Our place in Vietnam was spacious with three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, a large living/dining room, and a spacious kitchen. It was great to spread out after being tightly contained in Manila.

In addition to the condo itself, the complex had a gym. This came at the perfect time in the year after getting almost zero exercise in Manila, and half way into our gap year where strength training has been hard to come by. The gym was perfect, with dumbbells, barbells, benches, machines, treadmills, and an elliptical. I put together a strength program for JC and I and we made pretty good gains over our time there.

Vung Tao

We also spent time in Vung Tao which I’m not going into detail about. Our condo there was fine, nothing special. The beach was surprisingly nice with a wide stretch of really nice sand. The lack of traffic there was a nice change of pace as well.

Transportation

Grab

We used Grab for almost all of our transportation needs. Available cars were plentiful, quick to get, and cheap. We also never ran into the situation we had in Manila where we couldn’t get a ride. If I lived in Vietnam full time I would rely entirely on Grab.

Ferry

The one alternative mode of transportation we took was to Vung Tao from Ho Chi Minh. For that we took a ferry down the Saigon river, and it cost about $100 round trip. This would have otherwise been a nauseating 2-3 hours in a car. Instead we had smooth sailing at a constant speed.

People

The Vietnamese people treated us great as mentioned in first section. I do however have observations about the men and the women separately. Like any observation you can throw these into categories of positive, negative, and neutral. However, no matter how you interpret these observations, I could live amongst the Vietnamese people any day.

Men

Starting with the men, I found a strong similarity between the Vietnamese men and the Costa Rican men. They are similar in a lot of ways such as their size, disposition, and one other notable way. That being that they have no problem pissing in plain view in public. In both Costa Rica and Vietnam we saw men just pissing without even trying to hide from view.

From a personality standpoint I thought the men were generally confident, often friendly, and quiet. We had some great experiences with the men, such as the first purchase we made at Circle K where the checker went out of his way to speak english to us and treat us kindly. There was also a guy sweeping the sidewalk in front of our building who warmly greeted us every time we passed. The men on our motorbike tour were also nice and great to talk to.

Women

The women of Vietnam were my favorite women of the Asian countries we’ve visited. I’ll lead off with the vain observation first. The women here are in my opinion, the most beautiful women in Asia. It’s really multiple factors, some natural and some obtained. They have beautiful face structure and body proportions, and then they also care about fitness. In the gym at our complex you could walk in at any time and see this in action, with pretty women working out with heavy weights. I don’t believe this was isolated just to our area either as I saw the same thing throughout Ho Chi Minh City.

The less vain observations of the women were more personality related. Even through a language barrier, we caught moments revealing attitude, forwardness, kindness, and humor amongst other attributes. Taking a moment at Artisan for example when I was checking out and doing the back and forth with the lady ringing me up. I see a second pair of hands slowly appear out of nowhere through the arms of the woman helping me, then gently use her apron to dry off. The mystery hands were those of a lady behind her squatted down working on something. We all just started laughing, and this isn’t the type of thing we saw in other Asian countries. I appreciate seeing personality showing through, whatever that personality might be.

Affordability

While we managed to make Vietnam less affordable than it should have been, Vietnam is a very affordable location. I will be covering this topic in more detail in an upcoming post on expat cost of living in Vietnam. This would be a good location to target if you wanted to FIRE and had modest investments to work with.

The food could really be cut down as far as your taste will allow. We bought carrots and a pineapple at a roadside stand for $.50. I bought Bahn Mi and other street food meals for around $1 per meal. If you were to focus on these types of meals a single person could easily eat for less than $150. Even without targeting these cheapest foods, if we had just eaten every meal from grocery store items, our family of four would have eaten for about $600/month.

Rent affordability is still a bit of an unknown for me. We went with a rather expensive Airbnb for the month, and I know there are far cheaper options. How much cheaper though and in what area? I’m not sure and will research that further for the expat post.

Transportation and discretionary are the other location-specific variables, and they are controllable and affordable. If you budgeted $20/month for transportation, you could take 4-5 round-trip Grab rides in a 10-15 minute radius. Discretionary spending is also highly controllable, and that will really depend on what you’re into for fun.

Favorite Thing

Everything we did in Vietnam was pretty cool in one way or another, but I feel like our favorite thing in Ho Chi Minh City was the Landmark 81 area. The Landmark 81 building was awesome to look at, and the surrounding area was a relaxing place to be. It has a large open field area with soft grass and lined by palm trees. Past that is the Saigon River with a very nice walkway where you can stroll and watch the activity on the river. There were also a couple viewing platforms. It was just a great place to spend time.

Freedom Or Lack Thereof

The one aspect of Vietnam I truly did not enjoy and bothered me was being in a place without many of the freedoms I’m used to as an American. The ones that concerned me the most were the lack of freedom of speech and due process. I even told AC to avoid saying and writing things critical of the Vietnam government while we were there. Being restricted in this manner is not something I could tolerate over the long haul.

On the global freedom index Vietnam scores a 20 which is worse than Rwanda and the West Bank, and should be taken seriously. The US still scores an 84 even with the current regime wishing to limit freedom of speech and press. Even with ICE rounding up or even killing US citizens as part of the immigration crackdown.

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed Vietnam almost as much as I enjoyed my favorite place, Japan. If you set aside the negatives which are rarely encountered in day to day life (e.g. lack of freedom), in many ways I would prefer Vietnam over Japan for a long term living situation. I would love to make more trips to Vietnam in the future to see what else it has to offer. There are many regions that are diverse in food, culture, and geography waiting to be explored.