No Mayonnaise, No Love

Wow, this is a first. 

I actually walked into a hotel, past the clerk-less front desk, and all the way up to the second floor before I realized that I was in the wrong one. Please don’t tell my Myanmar sayadaw, who tirelessly reminded me that I should maintain awareness from the moment I wake up until I fall asleep at night. And it was not, I assure you, a senior moment.

No, it happened on Vuon Dao Road in Bai Chay, which is where most visitors to Ha Long City stay. Ha Long Bay is the top tourist attraction in Vietnam—“world class,” as visitors are constantly reminded. “United Nations recognized,” “World Heritage designated.” And way overdeveloped.

One section of Vuon Dao Road has 13 hotels lined up next to each other. Each one is 7 stories tall and maybe 20 feet wide. I read somewhere that the reason why Vietnam has so many buildings with those dimensions is that some long-forgotten royal bureaucrat came up with the idea of taxing buildings according to their widths. The furniture in the hotel I wrongly entered was essentially the same as in my hotel. But the stairway being on the opposite side of the lobby should have been a clue.

It’s low season in Ha Long. Most of us Euro-American tourists are gone, and the Vietnamese only come on weekends, if at all, so all of these cookie-cutter hotels are empty. A nice room with a/c, hot water, and a veranda overlooking Ha Long Bay goes for $8-$10.

That sameness is the reason for my admitted ambivalence toward Vietnam during my first two weeks here. I know that attitude won’t last. So far I’ve only done the Old Quarter in Hanoi, Ha Long, and Cat Ba Island—three of the country’s most heavily touristed sites. What I’m feeling is a touch of the blues one gets as a constant target for tourism workers who are understandably desperate for some off-season cash.

No thank you, I don’t want a package tour. Please, really, I don’t wear pearls, and I don’t have a spouse, so I don’t want them. Sorry, no, I just ate, I don’t need more food. No thanks, I don’t need a guide today. Uh-uh, really, I don’t need a motorcycle taxi, I’m fine walking the last 150 feet to my hotel. And no, I don’t want any boom-boom, I’m not buying today.

Who am I kidding? I’d love to have some boom-boom. I’m male, I’m not dead, and the Vietnamese population is young, vibrant, and beautiful. I’m not that kind of Southeast Asian tourist, but the pimps don’t know that, they just see a solo male who might be looking for some.

Bangkok is famous for that stuff, but its sex tourism system has been in place so long that you can easily avoid it. There’s a hotel in Bangkok that I would love to stay at, The Atlanta. The price is not that much more than a guest house, but it has two swimming pools, a good restaurant, and a beautifully remodeled interior that is often used as a film set. The owners forcefully give the positive message, “No Sex Tourists Welcomed At This Hotel.” (Check out the website, where they explain why.)

The problem is, it’s in the district that has the most sex tourism stuff going on. (It was built long before American soldiers from Vietnam arrived en masse for some RnR.) I went there in the middle of the day to check it out; it was easy to imagine what the neighborhood looked like at night, all lit up with hostess bars. For someone who loves taking late evening strolls to check out street life in an Asian city, it’s the wrong ‘hood.

I was never approached to buy sex in Myanmar, where 90% of the women demurely wear ankle-length longyi. And by staying in a quiet guest house on a quiet lane next to the quiet Chao Phraya River, I was never a target in Bangkok.

Then I flew to Vietnam, where the locals have trouble pronouncing “ge” as in “scrooge,” so I was offered several “mas-SAH boom-booms” within the first few hours of my arrival. The typical pimp is a motorcycle taxi driver.

OK, it’s part of the scenery in Hanoi, bright lights, big city stuff. But I wasn’t expecting come-ons in Cat Ba, the main town on an island that is promoting itself as an ecotourism destination, with kayaking and hiking in a national park.

Wanting a late-evening snack, I stopped at a street vendor selling bahn mi, those little Vietnamese sandwiches on baguettes that represent one of the country’s greatest contributions to humankind, another being Vietnamese-style coffee. She was dressed like a farmworker, with thick clothes to protect her from the chilly humid air and a scarf wrapped around her chin and head, on top of which sat a conical hat.

She looked happy to have a customer. She carefully put on her plastic gloves, cut open a baguette with a pair of scissors, and lined the pocket with some pork and parsley. Pointing to some cut cucumbers she asked, “You want sa-la?” Sure. Then she picked up a plastic squeeze bottle of chilli sauce and looked at me, and I shook my head yes. Before she laid on the sauce she leaned toward me and said, sotto voce, “You want boom-boom me?”

I wasn’t expecting that, and my reaction was to laugh, not so much because of the offer, but because she felt it was necessary to lower her voice when the nearest person was a good 50 feet away.

I said no, and she just kept going on with her bread-and-butter business, making my bahn mi. Then she picked up another squeeze bottle that contained some white stuff that I assumed to be mayonnaise. She showed it to me to see if I wanted any, then leaned toward me and asked again, “You want boom-boom me?”

I waved my hand in rejection, shook my head, and said, “Hold the mayo, no boom-boom.”

She saw two potential foreign customers walking by, so she took my 20,000 Vietnamese dong and focused all her attention on them: “You want bahn mi? It taste very good.” It wasn’t until a few minutes later that I realized she had charged me double the going price of a street vendor bahn mi (about 90 cents versus the normal 45).

As the 70s disco hit constantly recommended, “Do the hustle.”

Today I’m in a fog-enshrouded fishing village named Cai Rong, killing time until tomorrow morning’s 90-minute ferry ride to Quan Lan. The island is at the northern end of the long line of limestone karsts that start near Han La Bay, southeast of Cat Ba Island. Quan Lan is just starting to feel large-scale development pressure. I’ll spend a few days there, working on starting a good daily writing habit (heard that one before, eh?), taking some beach walks, and practicing my Vietnamese phrases. Here’s one:

Tôi muốn thay dầu: “I want to change the oil.”

Useful should you ever take a motorcycle ride around Vietnam.