Vung Tau

Any city can drive you crazy sometimes, but sometimes HCMC really really gives you that ‘I’ve got to get away from here’ feeling and you need to act upon it without haste.

The quickest and easiest weekend getaway is Vung Tau. It’s definitely not the most popular place with foreigners though. There are no long stretches of white sand or backpacker friendly bungalows. It’s closeness to Saigon means that it’s more like a city beach. But sometimes a beach is a beach. Waves make the same sound wherever you go. And Vung Tau has a lively local flavour, so it’s a good place for people watching.

The other big attraction of Vung Tau is that you can avoid road travel by catching a boat there. If you’re feeling a bit strung out by Saigon, spending a few hours negotiating your way out of this city and the surrounding built up areas isn’t going to help you much. But for this trip you step on the hydrofoil in the centre of Saigon and step off at Vung Tau’s cresent shaped bay, which is hemmed by modest sized green hills. This is the front beach.

Our hotel is on the back beach, near Vung Tau’s famous landmark, the big Jesus statue. Jesus looks out on a pagoda, which has been built on a small island just offshore. At low tide you can walk to the island along a strip of shell encrusted rocks. Women in conical hats and long sleeved shirts tap away at these rocks to fill their buckets with teaspoon size pieces of pieces of slippery grey flesh.

After walking out to the Pagoda, we hire a couple of deckchairs in the shade of one of the many multicoloured umbrellas that fill the beach. A woman with skin on her face like a sultana approaches. She’s collecting empty cans and drinking a 333 beer herself. She squats down and chats with us for a while, tells us we’re beautiful. Finally she asks for 10,000 dong to buy some rice for lunch and is on her way. While she sits with us another two woman pass, one offering lottery tickets and the other with a big basket of fruit. There’s also a woman selling trinkets. I buy a cowrie shell, which is engraved with a beach scene and with a few other embellishments has been fashioned into a turtle.

We hear the familiar tune of the ice cream man, and a shiny metal wagon selling fried fish balls wheels past us. These are very common vendors on the streets of Saigon, but in Vung Tau they’ve made their way to the beach. All around people are cracking and sucking their way through freshly cooked crabs. The broken shells pile up while their more fortunate younger cousins keep busy digging up the beach. They scurry out of their holes with balls of sand, then toss them away with disdain.

For lunch we eat Canh Chua. And after the best bowl of this sweet sour fish soup that I’ve ever eaten, I resolve that I must learn how to make it. I’ve heard that it’s a staple of a southern Vietnamese woman’s cooking repertoire so I may see if I can get someone to teach me the secrets of this very satisfying broth. The key ingredients for the sweet sour flavour are pineapple and tamarind. The fish they’ve used today is mackerel, cut in steaks. It always has bean sprouts and okra and you eat it with steamed rice, no noodles in this soup.

Many people wisely avoid the heat of the day, so it’s from about 4 pm onwards that the back beach really starts to get the crowds. There’s a lot of people splashing around in the water, most following the Vietnamese fashion of staying fully clothed while swimming at the beach. Groups of men play soccer and there’s now food stands lining the beach where you can buy freshly grilled seafood and beer.

The next day we visit Vung Tau’s latest tourist attraction, a cable car to the peak of one of the hills on the front beach side. Our ticket gives us not only a return trip but entry to the Eco-park at the top. The brochure tells us of the wonders that await us, Ho Chi Minh statue and garden, peacocks, a big Buddha, retaurants and a lake. You can even camp there. We chug the 5 minutes up the hill with anticipation.

Well, of course, Uncle Ho’s already in a prime position, but it looks like they’ve got a way to go with the other attractions. There’s lots of paved footpaths and expanses of green grass and speakers blasting out announcements of how great everything is, but not so much to see and few visitors, maybe because the price is quite steep for the average local holiday maker. The place has an abandoned feel before it’s even really begun.

What’s probably most interesting about our excursion is checking out the scale model showing the plans for expanding the cable car system all over Vung Tau. There will be a cable car across the bay and lines to the other peaks. And they are going to build a monorail, basically making a loop from the big Buddha to the big Jesus.

As we walk around the front beach back to the ferry I notice how many big cafes there are, the multi-level kind that pump out techno music and offer every kind of coffee, juice and fruit shake you could think of. In comparison with the eco-park, these places are buzzing with people and activity. With the plans for more cable cars and monorail, it’s like they’re going to turn Vung Tau into a big fun park, but will it take off? Are there enough people that can afford the entry tickets, when it’s free to go to the beach, or only costs a dollar to buy a drink and sit in a café for a few hours.

Yet another bold and somewhat risky plan for development in Vietnam. It will be interesting to see what happens.