Pauline Frommer and Frommers.com's Editor in Chief Jason Cochran discussed Pauline's second trip to Vietnam, which was just completed.

Takeaways:

1. The host emphasizes the importance of thorough preparation, particularly regarding visa applications, as a critical aspect of international travel.
2. The episode highlights the cultural richness of Vietnam, including indigenous tribes and their fascinating customs, which the host explored during the trip.
3. The discussion includes reflections on the modern tourism industry in Vietnam, noting both advancements and the potential for inauthentic tourist experiences.
4. The host's experience at a dark restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City serves as a metaphor for broader themes of accessibility and culinary expectations in travel.

Foreign.

Welcome to the Fromer Travel Show.

I'm your host, Pauline Fromer, and I have been on the road.

So to help me discuss my recent trip to Vietnam, I have fromers.com's editor in chief, Jason Cochran, on the line.

Hey, Jason, thank you so much for coming on to grill me about this.

Happy New Year.

It'll be a light grilling, because I really want to know about what you did, what you saw.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it was my second time in Vietnam, and I had very, very different feelings about it.

It was interesting.

I left the first visit to Vietnam absolutely in love with the country.

And the second visit, I think I'm on the fence about it.

Not on the fence, but I see the problems with traveling there.

Okay, you became more of a realist.

You became more an observer rather than strictly in love with it.

Yes.

I think the first time I went, what I did to prepare was I watched the entire Ken Burns series about the Vietnam War.

And at the end of that series, it's a country that is totally in rubble.

And so with that framework, seeing a country that was thriving and where Americans were warmly welcomed, it was such a surprise to me.

And I found it so moving that I think that very much colored how I felt about travel to Vietnam.

And I didn't have those surprises this time.

And so I was.

It was a very, very different trip.

It was a good trip.

You know, I'm incredibly blessed that I get to go halfway around the world and explore this ancient, fascinating culture that is so intimately entwined with American history.

So that's all good stuff.

But there wasn't the elation that I had on the first trip, and I think it's because I'd been before.

But it also might have to do with who I was traveling with, how I traveled this time.

It just was a very different experience.

Yes, well, that's always an important consideration.

Did you go to many of the same places that you went to the first time?

I did, partially because it was my daughter, my younger daughter, who planned the itinerary.

She wanted to see all the classic sites.

And so, of course, I said yes.

So it's her first time?

It was her first time.

It was my husband's first time.

It was my other daughter's first time.

And we made a huge rookie mistake at the very, very beginning of the trip.

I don't know why.

I had it in my mind that the last time I went to Vietnam, I had gotten my visa at the airport.

And so I knew you could apply in advance online, but I didn't do it until a day before I left.

And I had told my daughters this.

So one hadn't applied at other had applied two days before.

And my husband and I applied the day before.

And when we showed up at the airport, we were checking in and they said, show us your visa.

And I said breezily, oh, it's in process still.

And they said, well, we're sorry we can't check you in then.

And my stomach fell through the floor.

I often say that it's my job to make all of the stupidest mistakes so that our listeners and readers don't.

And boy, oh boy, was this a stupid mistake.

Luckily, you know, sort of like you thought you knew, but you didn't know.

And it always bears to double check these things.

I think this goes down to more to your experience.

You just, you travel so much, right, that I just assumed your memory was the correct version of things.

So always double check.

Yeah, always double check is the, is what you need to do.

If I had applied three days in advance, it would have been fine, but one day in advance was a problem.

And so it was about 7 in the morning, 7:30.

I'd gotten to the airport very early, the flight was at 11.

And we had engaged the tour guide who had accompanied the group I led last time to Vietnam.

Last time I went to Vietnam, it was in the company of the listeners to our radio show, back when we had a radio show.

And so I called him and I said, oh my God, what do we do?

And he said, I have a friend.

And his friend was Katie.

And Katie worked for Aurora Travel, which is one of these companies that does all of the on the ground staffing and planning for big tour companies that aren't in Vietnam.

So last time I was there, I was there with a company called World Spree.

I had wrongly assumed that they had made all the preparations for the trip.

It actually was Aurora Travel, they had.

Your details ready to go, so.

Well, no, they didn't have my details, so I had to give them my passport.

I had to give them my daughter's passport.

One kid was sick and she wasn't answering her phone.

We finally got through to her and within 40 minutes she had gotten us an expedited visa.

It was amazing.

I had gone up 30 minutes into this process desperately on the phone.

Actually, we were on WhatsApp, texting one another back and forth.

And I'd gone up to the desk again and said, I'm going to get a letter that will allow us to board.

And the manager Said, there's no such letter.

That's not going to happen.

And then amazingly enough, when I got the letter, he looked at it and we boarded.

What a terrible feeling that was though.

It was sort of sinking.

Dreadful feeling.

You're lucky that congratulation when I got.

And I'm glad you left on a weekday and not a weekend because that probably wouldn't have been possible.

They were all at their desks when you needed them to be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it was I think 8 o' clock at night there.

Basically Vietnam is 12 hours.

Oh, they're based there.

Oh my goodness.

So 8pm but she works till 9pm Because I think this happens quite a bit to people going to Vietnam.

So that was the crazy.

I don't want to pry too much, but did that cost you a lot of money to fix last minute?

Like that cost US$70 per person.

Well, that's great service.

They could have charged you more.

I think that they didn't charge us.

I think they just.

That was what it cost for the government to expedite it.

All right, let's say the name of this travel company one more time so people know who they should turn to.

Then they did you a solid.

Do them a solid.

Yeah.

Aurora Travel.

Thank God.

They were angels.

They were miracle workers.

It was really an incredible thing.

So we flew there.

We flew economy.

It was basically a 15 hour flight to Seoul and then we were in the Seoul airport for a couple of hours and then a five hour flight to Vietnam.

Apologies, our neighbor is doing some work so you may hear a little banging.

And then we were there.

It's such a fascinating city.

We first went to Hanoi and I have a lovely friend named David Farley.

You know David, he's traveler.

Great writer, great writer.

And he wrote a book or he wrote an article recently about the best Phoenix in Hanoi.

Pho is noodle soup.

It's spelled P H O and people have it for breakfast.

I dropped him an email after I saw this article and I said, can we do this later in the day?

I don't know if I want to do it for breakfast.

He said it often sells out before noon so you really need to do it first thing in the day.

And it was this rich broth that was just incredible.

And we were the only westerners in the place so that was a great start to the trip.

Then we just kind of toodled around Hanoi.

We don't have a Fromers guide currently to Vietnam.

So I had looked at other guides and all said that you should stay in the Old Quarter.

I now know, having stayed in different parts of Hanoi, because we kept going back to Hanoi.

We would go do a couple of days here, then back to Hanoi, couple of days, another place, back to Hanoi.

And I put us in different hotels each night.

The Old Quarter is kind of like Times Square.

It was incredibly busy, incredibly touristy.

I found it a little too frenetic.

And the last part of our visit, we stayed in this lovely lakeside.

Well, actually wasn't a lovely hotel.

It was a little dingy.

But the area was like the Greenwich Village of Hanoi.

It was just more chill, it was more artsy.

And I realized we had been staying in the wrong place in Hanoi.

The thing about Hanoi is every time you have to cross the street, it becomes a game of Frogger.

You remember that video game?

I sure do.

I hated that game.

Just because there are no stoplights on most corners and there are just these battalions of men and women on motorbikes.

And the pedestrian does not have the right of way.

You have to gather your courage and look them.

Look like, I'm strong, I know what I'm doing.

And walk in a way that shows them where you're going to be because they don't stop for you.

They keep going.

When I'm in Egypt, in Cairo, it's much the same.

There's this giant swirl of vehicular traffic.

And if you just sort of walk into it with the faith that they're not gonna hit you and are assertive, somehow, they work around you.

That seems to be the law of the road there.

Is it like that there?

You just sort of have to have faith and step off Indiana Jones style.

Yeah, one time I did get spooked in the middle of the street and I started to run and that's when I almost got hit because they didn't know I was gonna do that.

Just like a deer in the headlights.

Yeah.

So we went all around Hanoi.

Probably the best thing I did there was the ethnographic museum, which is.

I hadn't realized this about Southeast Asia, but there are indigenous tribes not only in Vietnam, but in Cambodia, in Thailand, in Laos, in all of the different countries.

And they are spread out in such a way that you may have the one tribe in one part of Vietnam and also in Thailand and also in Laos and also in other places.

And so the museum kind of showed you the way each tribe lived.

They took actual structures from all over Vietnam and moved them into this park like area so you can walk into the homes of these people and see how they Live, which was absolutely fascinating because, you know, some were matriarchal societies, some were patriarchal societies.

There was one kind of long house where the grandmother lives right next to the kitchen and she's the one who controls how much each person gets to eat.

And then there was a patriarchal society where the grain and all the foods were kept on the second floor and daughter in laws were not allowed to go up there because they weren't trusted.

It was absolutely fascinating.

Have mentioned the past tense on these tribes.

Are they still active?

They are still active.

I shouldn't have stopped.

They were at the museum.

Right, okay, right.

And in fact, our first stop after Hanoi, we went to a region called Mai Chau, which is up in the hills about two hours outside of Hanoi.

And it's a region that is known as being a place where the Thai people live.

And yes, this is as in Thailand, but in Vietnam they're an indigenous tribe.

So they live in these stilt buildings and they have a very interesting way of looking at life and death.

When you are 40 years old, people are buried in hollowed out logs.

And because death is always.

Wait, when they're 40 years old they bury you?

No, when you're 40 years old you get your coffin and you keep it at your house.

I get AARP in the mail.

It's similar.

Right.

So in front of these stilt houses are these hollowed out logs that are their coffins.

And so you can see how many people over 40 live in a house by how many hollowed out logs are in front of the house.

Because they feel death is always unexpected.

And by their traditions you have to be buried the same day you die.

And so you need to have a coffin handy.

Some of the Thai people don't live in stilt houses.

They live in houses that are on the ground.

And we went into one of the outside cooking areas and we saw these carved penises because the young girls, there's no.

Nobody wants to be a virgin.

There's no positivity around that.

Instead, young girls before they marry are supposed to try out a lot of guys to figure out who they want to marry.

And when they try out a guy, they carve a penis and they put it in an area that everybody can see because it's kind of like having a lot of followers on social media.

It shows you're popular.

And so we went.

Unfortunately, we know some people who don't need to hear that idea.

So any Americans don't get any wise ideas out of this.

Yeah.

So you know, we went into this other house where there was a very popular girl.

She had a lot of penises in the corner.

So that was interesting.

So Mai Chau is this area with these incredible karst mountains.

They seem to rise up vertically from the land.

They look a little bit like.

Have you ever seen those Chinese, ancient Chinese landscape paintings where they're just these very, very vertical mountains.

So it was lovely being in the midst of that landscape.

And we stayed in a homestay, which really is a word for hotel there.

I thought it would be more like a homestay, but it really wasn't like.

A guest house type of thing.

Like a guest house, but a very chi chi one.

And that's good and bad.

It's good in that things are slicker.

There are more eating options and more high end eating options.

But they also sometimes put the tourists into very not conventional, but very touristy experiences, more so than they did in the past.

Like when I was in Mai Chau, we took a boat ride.

It was a very traditional looking boat.

And there was a guy with a long pole, and he was pushing the pole into the water to take us down this river.

But he was on his cell phone the whole time.

As he's pushing us down the river, he's wearing a T shirt that says Gucci on it.

And there's not really anything to see on either side of the river.

So it just felt like a thing that was created for tourists.

Yeah, it sounds a little canned.

It totally canned.

And then we did an oxcart ride as people, kind of smirking, rode by us on motorbikes.

I just felt like a jerk.

This is.

Yeah, well, like the.

Like the handsome cab rides in Central park to a degree.

Mostly tourists get into those.

Yeah.

So I was doing this Mai Chau experience just with my husband and with our guide.

And at the same time, our daughters decided to do something called the Cao Bang Loop, which was a.

An area, a very rural area of Vietnam where people have set up these motorcycle tours, actually motorbike tours, and you zip around the country countryside, and at night you do karaoke in small villages.

And it's supposed to be a big party time.

The girls did it with a tour, and they didn't really like any of the other people on the tour.

They thought they were kind of dull.

And the guides didn't really guide.

I mean they were driving the motorbikes and the girls were on the back.

And then they'd get to a site like there was one, they went to the Marks Mountain which has Lennon Spring because you know, Vietnam was founded as a communist country in the 70s.

And then the guide would say to them, oh, I hope you have cell phone service so you can hear what, this is why you're here.

So they didn't really have anything to say about the places they were taking them.

And sometimes they'd have service, sometimes they didn't.

But it was interesting because this was a well reviewed online experience.

You know, you can't trust reviews online.

You know.

Yeah, this is why maybe from us we should think about making a Vietnam Vietnam guide because then we can do all these tours and tell people what's what.

Right.

I mean they enjoyed being on the motorcycles, they enjoyed seeing the countryside, but overall I think it was very, very disappointing.

Why do you think the information that you found online about Vietnam was not really that reliable ultimately in practice?

Well, I've heard rumors that Google has changed its algorithm to put front and center, smaller kind of influencer based material.

And I definitely saw that in Vietnam for example, when I was looking at, we were in a place called Hoi an where the thing to do is get clothing tailored.

And so I was looking for what tailor shops are most recommended.

And, and the sites that emerged first, the articles that emerged first were clearly written by folks who were getting kickbacks from tailor shops.

You know, they were all of these local hotels or local travel agencies and it wasn't, I couldn't find journalistic sources for this material.

That's what was on the first two, three pages of Google.

So I think we're living in a time where it's getting harder to find decent travel information online.

Maybe because Google and the rest want you to not be doing the traditional searches anymore.

They want you to be relying on AI where you don't know what the source of the information is.

That's my cynical guess.

I don't know.

What do you think, Jason?

I think it's possible.

I think, yeah, I think that Google has taken so much from the legitimate sources to create their ARA responses and there's very, there have been fewer and fewer people creating original research to begin with.

If that happens because no one's clicking over to their websites, right.

And you need to, you need to click over to the original website for the information in order for them to make ad money or whatever it is to continue making that information, if you.

Influencers, you know, their only income is often either coming from views from the platform or, or payback kickbacks from the, the vendor.

And it's not honest information.

So, yeah, you're right.

The.

The.

The system is skewing away from impartial and towards partial.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it was so clear to me.

I could, I could see it.

I mean, I don't know if anybody else could have, but I knew just the way it was written and the way things were linked.

And I've been around long enough to know these are all kickback.

You know, companies that they're.

They're pushing you towards the ones that, that give them money.

It's frustrating because, you know, for many years you would take a, let's say a coach tour, and we get frustrated when they'd stop off at a store that you knew we were only stopping at for the group because there were kickbacks being given to the tour guide.

And that was one thing you could manage on your vacation because you just knew it would probably be coming at one point.

Now travel information itself is being compromised, and that makes planning much more harder, much more difficult from the very beginning.

And it could affect the quality of your trip.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

So that was frustrating.

Although I had good guidebooks from Lonely Planet, from Rough Guides, from Fotor's, I carried four with me and also the dk.

So I wasn't fully reliant on what I found online.

And our competitors gave good advice.

They.

They steered me right many times and, and helped me understand what I was seeing.

Well, since we don't have a Vietnam guide, they're not technically competitors on that in that area.

True, true.

But just competitors in general.

But, you know, they did a good job.

So after Mai Chao, we did do the classic thing, which is going to see Ho Chi Minh's body in the mausoleum against his wishes.

He was.

What's the word?

He was filled with chemicals to keep his body.

Embalmed.

Yes, yes, Embalmed.

That's very Lenin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a very odd sight to see.

And he really just looks like he's sleeping.

And then after Hanoi, we went to Halong City.

Ha Long City is the Las Vegas of Vietnam.

It is the fastest growing city in the country because it's right on the doorstep for this natural wonder, which is Ha Long Bay, which is this beautiful kind of aqua green bay with these karst formations coming up out of it looks like something out of Avatar, that movie.

It's just extraordinary looking.

And Halong Bay has skyscraper after skyscraper after skyscraper, each of which is covered with LED lights flashing these different patterns.

And there's a beach area where there's stage after stage blaring rock music as people dance.

There are amusement park rides there.

It's just so over the top, really a fascinating place to see.

Wasn't my thing.

And it's.

To me, it reminded me a little bit of Niagara Falls.

You have this great natural wonder, and on its doorstep is the honkiest of honky tonk stuff, you know, which is.

It is what it is.

But it was fascinating to see.

Probably more fascinating for locals than it is for people who have seen plenty of honky tonk in their own countries already.

Yeah, yeah.

So after Ha Long Bay, we went back to Hanoi for one last night and toodled around some more.

I took the girls back to the Ethnographic museum just because I thought it was so fascinating.

And then we were off towards Central Vietnam.

We went to Hu first, which is.

Was this city that was the seat of imperial Vietnam.

And actually, because the main palace in Hue had been under renovation when I was last there, I got to see a lot of new things.

So that was wonderful.

I actually really loved Hu.

It's really the most interesting in terms of Vietnamese history that isn't involved with the Vietnamese War.

You really get to understand what it meant to be a crowned prince.

I mean, we went to the tomb of Taduk, who had a hundred wives but no offspring.

You wonder how that happens.

He could have used one of those fertility things.

Right, right.

And then we went to the palace of the guy who decided to get rid of the concubine system.

The concubine system had been this really interesting strategic system because to keep generals loyal to whoever the emperor was, he would take their daughters as concubines so that they would be, in a way, family.

And so that the.

Because often the emperors would have multiple siblings because there were so many damn concubines.

And whoever the favorite child was of the previous emperor would become the emperor.

But that left a lot of angry and jealous siblings who would often try and get the generals to stand behind them.

So there was a lot of palace intrigue that we learned about.

It was quite, quite fascinating.

It sounds like the bachelor pretty much.

You know, the runner up gets to be the bachelor next time or the bachelorette next time.

I can see why that would be a messy system.

Yeah.

And I think Quay had Some of my favorite food of really, really delicious noodle soups.

Really delicious coffee.

That's the thing that Vietnam does, right?

Coffee.

It's now this world's second biggest exporter of coffee.

And they really do it like without any punches pulled.

It's really like this bitter, deeply flavored coffee.

And then they slather it in coconut milk or condensed milk.

This really sweet contrast to it.

Yeah, that's the one I like.

So delicious.

Oh my God.

And strong.

I mean, it looks like, like a milkshake.

But it will keep you awake until Wednesday.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So hu was fascinating.

Then we went to Hoi An.

Hoi An.

We spent three days there because my kids wanted to get a lot of clothing tailored and to do that, right, you need to spend a couple of nights.

But it is a very, very touristy place.

You go to the old city and it's just store after store after store.

There are probably, I don't know, a hundred tailor shops there and a hundred shoemakers.

And, you know, it's fun, but it felt, you know, very, I don't know, not authentic.

In the end though, did your daughters find a tailor that they liked?

We found two tailors we liked and I wasn't going to do it, but I ended up getting a suit made that I think is good.

I don't know, it's funny, it's a lovely shade of green that my younger daughter kept saying, are you sure you want that color?

Are you sure?

So I think it looks lovely.

But her skeptics, I would never laugh at that.

I get my suits made from a tailor in Hong Kong.

Oh, really?

I visited in person on one of my trips there, but now has my measurement details.

And a couple years ago I needed a new tuxedo and based on a just a brush up on zoom.

Now I have, you know, a new tuxedo that the Hong Kong tailor made me.

So I know that these tailors can be very useful, very accurate, have interesting fabrics and you know, they're professionals, you know, they will, some of them will mail things to you and keep your information on file so you can continue a relationship with them if you like.

Yeah, no, not only were they professional, they were lovely.

They made.

And they're affordable.

They were affordable.

Made the experience so much fun.

The girls got a lot of different pieces.

I got this new suit which I think will be good for TV appearances.

So that was, that was great.

And I also did goofy things.

I took a cooking class and I think this may be the first cooking class I've ever been to that has been a total disappointment.

I usually find something because I cook four or five times a week.

That's, you know, what I do.

It's my hobby.

And I always learn a new technique or I learned something about ingredients I didn't know before this one.

I just felt like I was the sous chef to the teacher who mostly did the cooking without really explaining it.

It just was bad teacher, bad teacher, bad activity.

I should have known it was called Grandma's Cooking Class.

That should have been my.

My warning.

So another experience where I felt like it was so geared towards tourists that the point of it was gone.

Yeah, they've done it a million times.

They're no longer thinking about what the tourist is asking and needing and feeling and seeing.

They're just.

They just know how to go through the motions of the thing they did yesterday.

I understand that's not just Vietnam.

Of course.

We've seen that happen in.

In tourist destinations around the world world once they become popular.

And then there's going to be a new phase after that where they sort of have to rediscover themselves and reintegrate themselves into the authenticity of what they were supposed to be about.

Yeah, yeah.

So, you know, it was up and down.

Any interesting restaurants in Hoi An?

Yes, there's a woman named V Y who has several restaurants there and did a pretty good job showing.

One of them was the first kind of food court in Vietnam where they do all of the specialties from different regions.

And so you get small plates and you can taste all of Vietnam in one place.

And that actually was quite well done.

It's called V's Market if you ever go.

So that was good.

When we were chatting before this, you also mentioned something about a dark restaurant.

Oh, my goodness.

We did that in Ho Chi Minh City.

Our last stop was Ho Chi Minh City.

And at one point the girls were arguing.

At one point I was arguing with my husband.

And I think maybe that also played into me not enjoying things as much because even though my daughter did the overall itinerary, I was responsible for a lot of the aspects of it.

And I think if I'm going to travel with the three of them again, I'm going to force them to do some of the planning because there's something about feeling responsible for others enjoyment that can really put a damper on your own enjoyment, especially when things don't go right.

And they.

They always don't go right when you travel.

That's part of traveling.

But when you're the one who bears all the responsibility.

And during the first week, when we were mostly with our.

Our guide, who's a lovely guide, I just having to be social for that many hours a day, I found it very tiring.

I don't know.

Does that happen to you too?

Well, without getting too much into psychology, it happens to me all the time.

The older I get too, I'm more aware of social performance being something I want to do less of when I travel.

Right.

And so, you know, that just might be because now I'm more interested in history and reading and culture.

And when I was younger, I was more interested in finding people and partying.

And maybe that's a natural process progression.

But I do believe that, yes, I will choose the option in all cases on vacation, when I don't necessarily have to perform politely for hours on end.

Absolutely.

And so I felt like I wanted to make sure he was fine and enjoying his job.

And it just got exhausting.

It just is not.

I find when I travel alone, the relationship I'm making is with the destination.

And I really get into learning about it and experiencing things and having a guide and frankly, having my family along.

It was so much of the social stuff and small talk.

Small talk.

What's interesting is, you know, your first trip was about sort of discovering the real Vietnam after mostly knowing it for the cataclysm that happened from the 50s to the 70s.

This trip, the things you keep mentioning as your favorite ones are the historical things, the ethnographic museum.

Hui Hui.

Did I get that right?

You know, these are the things you liked the most.

That's interesting.

And it says a lot about the connection level that you are now seeking at the age you are.

You'd rather not have the small talk and the nonsense and the canned stuff, and you'd rather have the authenticity and the meaningfulness and the one on ones and the connection.

Yeah.

And frankly, I mean, having a guide who could talk to people, he would often, just when we were in my chow, he would walk up to private homes and say, can I show my guests around?

And then we would talk to people.

And that was fascinating.

I loved that.

And with the language barrier, there's no way I could have done that on my own.

So that was a blessing.

It was just all the other stuff, all the other chit chat, all the sitting at meals together and being in the van together, and it just got exhausting.

All right.

So we ended up in Ho Chi Minh, where there's the remarkable War Remnants Museum, which is hard to take as An American, because, you know, what we did with Agent Orange and with other things that happened during the war, we acted in inexcusable ways.

And so a lot of that museum is about war crimes.

And so I think that was a shocker for my daughters, who hadn't really known much about the war before going there.

And we also took a wonderful tour by motorbike around the city.

It was a food tour, and so we tried a lot of interesting foods.

But she also took us around and showed us, in Ho Chi Minh City, entire blocks were turned to rubble.

And so everybody cooks on their balconies outdoors.

They had to add stoves in the outdoor areas.

And people still live in these apartment blocks that were built in the, I guess the 70s.

And at one point they said to us, what do you think is most popular?

The first floor, the second floor or the third floor?

We said, oh, it must be the third floor.

Why would you want to be right on the street?

Turns out everybody wants to be on the first floor because heat rises and Ho Chi Minh City is hot year round and really hot in the summer.

But also, I hadn't realized this.

You know, there are motorbikes everywhere.

You feel like they're parked willy nilly on the sidewalk.

But no, to park your motorbike, you have to pay rent to the person in the apartment on the first floor.

And so it's interesting, when you go into someone's house, you take off your shoes.

But often they'll take those motorbikes into the apartment so they don't have to pay a street rent on them.

In fact, we saw.

Our guide showed us a video of somebody riding a motorbike up a stairway to put the motorbike in a second floor apartment.

So that was fascinating.

We went to a.

Don't try that in your own apartment, listeners.

Your landlord may not approve.

We went to a monument to that monk who set himself on fire during the Vietnam War.

And that was horrifying, but also fascinating.

And then we decided to go to this dark restaurant for our last night in Vietnam.

This we did on New Year's Eve.

It's a restaurant that was entirely.

Well, they have two restaurants.

The restaurant on the ground floor is entirely staffed by blind people.

And you have to hold onto their shoulders as you walk into the restaurant because it's pitch black.

And then they serve you food that you can't see.

If the food had been better, it would have been a better experience.

It was interesting, but the food kind of tasted like airline food to me.

I did not think the food was that good.

And then when I got out of the first floor restaurant, there was one on the second floor, and I said, oh, what's that restaurant?

And I kid you not, they said, oh, you can see in that restaurant, but all the servers are deaf and dumb.

I thought, oh, well, that's interesting.

Okay.

You know, there's a restaurant in Japan that is staffed with elderly people with dementia.

And the agreement is if they bring you the wrong dish or if they forget your order, you just don't say anything.

You smile, and you take what they give you in order to be supportive of your elders.

So there's something kind of lovely happening throughout Asia, it sounds like, societally speaking.

Yeah, it was very.

Even if the food's not that good.

Right.

And then we went to the main kind of walking street for New Year's Eve, where there were thousands upon thousands of people and Asian pop stars on stage, Vietnamese pop stars who actually I liked, who were really good, giving a great performance.

And there were fireworks.

We were walking home during part of the fireworks, and what I loved was there were thousands of motorbike riders, but everybody stood stock still in the street and watched the fireworks together.

Some people on their motorbikes, some people on F. But it was like there was this unspoken agreement to just stand and enjoy it together.

And that I thought was really, really a beautiful way to ring in the new year.

It does sound lovely and unusual.

A society united in peace.

Tell me more.

Yeah, so that was my experience of Vietnam in a nutshell.

You know, it sounds a little more, let's just say, down to earth than your first visit.

But ultimately, you had a really interesting time and you learned a lot.

Yeah, I learned a lot.

I think this time I learned more about the culture and history of Vietnam itself, and that's always a blessing.

So if you'd ever return to Vietnam a third time, sometime soon, what changes would you make to your itinerary?

What might you do the next time?

I'd like to go to some of the other indigenous areas that have different tribes.

Sapa in up in a different set of mountains is supposed to be fascinating.

So I'd like to go this time to places I haven't been before.

And I'd like to add on Cambodia I'd really, really like.

Yeah.

And Laos, I'm dying to go.

I haven't been allowed yet.

And I really want to go there, the food for just one of the many reasons, but I didn't.

It's a fascinating area of the world.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's it.

So thank you, Jason.

Sounds terrific.

Appreciate the conversation.

And.

And to those who are traveling, get out there.

It's a new year.

There's a lot of opportunity to see the world.

So let's.

Let's make sure we don't just stay at home.

And if you are traveling, may I wish you a hearty bon voyage?

I'll see you next week.

Sour candy on the table Lazy afternoons in your sweatpants watching table well, it feels so warm.