There are two great things about traveling in Vietnam:

1) I can now begin stories with “Back in ‘Nam”

2) The local currency is the Dong. And it’s 16,000 Dong to the dollar. So it’s not unreasonable to be walking around with a few million Dongs in your pocket.

I suppose there’s some other cool stuff too. Like the absolutely amazing, fresh, delicious food. The fact that people take such pride in everything they do. Locals smiling at you and actually being friendly. A culture with a sense of humor. Granted, not always with any sense of real urgency, like waiting half an hour for our luggage that was sitting just on the other “restricted” side of the baggage carousel.

Another bonus – things are incredibly cheap here. Like, really cheap. The 20 minute cab ride from the airport was $2 and our lunch came to $3. Granted, we got taken for a ride (pun intended) by our cyclo driver today. We’re pretty sure we paid about 5 times what we were supposed to – $30 to have two people pedal us around the city and take us anywhere we wanted to go for an entire day. It certainly seemed reasonable…

Let’s talk about “the cyclo” for a sec. A dying breed of public transportation (and for rather obvious reasons) it consists of a driver, three wheels, and a seat on the front. Very similar to a wheelbarrow. This may seem like a good idea except that they share the same congested, motorcycle filled "roads" that everyone else uses - and go at about 1/10th the speed, making them deadly icebergs in a chaotically flowing river of traffic.  I'll let the video speak for itself.

Speaking of cheap, we also had an amazing day of beauty on our first day here. I’ve never been a guy who needs to be talked into a day of back rubs and foot massages, and why not throw in a facial for good measure. L'apothequaire, recommended by the esteemed Jenathan, gave us a 4 hour day of spa goodness, including lunch, for $75 a person. And this would be considered really overpaying, since we went to a very high end place.

If you’re thinking about coming to Vietnam, come now. While you can already see signs of how the indigenous local culture is changing by the influx of tourist dollars and rapidly growing economy, it’s still quite wonderful. But in a few very short years this will clearly be wiped away and turned into another generic cultural Disneyland.