Weird and wonderful Vietnam, thank you!

I am back from Vietnam and what an experience it was!

Life in Vietnam is outrageous and we certainly got the culture shock we were asking for.
To act effectively in that unfamiliar culture and to survive I had to take a good look at my own strengths and weaknesses.
Letting go of being mum and letting go of feeling solely responsible for making it happen eventually saved the day and made this an extra ordinary holiday.
In learning to play team with my daughter she got the role of negotiator and the respect she deserved as I definitely was out of my depth in dealing with Vietnam’s sales techniques.
Without her negotiating skills we would have blown the budget in the first week!
And that is why I thank Vietnam and its weird and wonderful ways.

So what unfolded in those three weeks in Vietnam?

Willing to honor my daughter’s request to take her on an adventure in a different culture for her 21st birthday, we decided that Vietnam was the place to go.
Feeling responsible to give her that trip of a life time I researched the Lonely Planet and Travel Forums.
But reading about Vietnam’s unpredictable ways and their talk about ‘tourists getting ripped off big time’ made me a bit nervous and determined not to have that happen to us with our travel budget.
I read stories about airport taxies charging the unaware 70 USD instead of 9 USD and people being grossly overcharged for trips and accommodation, even in hotels.

So you can imagine I was a bit tense when arriving in Hanoi and it didn’t help that as the parent I felt solely responsible for sorting it all out.

As expected as soon as we got through Customs we got swamped with taxi drivers touting for business.
Bravely but nervously resisting their insistence I tensely told daughter we were to hunt down a mini bus which would only cost 2 USD.
So in the tropical noon heat we picked up our backpacks and wandered outside looking for a mini bus with all the touting taxi drivers in tow.
With the help of a policeman we eventually did find a mini bus and ‘yes’ for 2 USD we did get a ride into town.

You can imagine my feeling of triumph of having successfully taken the first hurdle and avoiding the frequently mentioned taxi ride ‘rip off’ into Hanoi city.
However the triumph didn’t last.
Although the mini bus did bring us into town, we were dropped off in a totally unknown area of Hanoi.
And as soon as the minibus opened its doors we again were swamped; this time by people touting lodgings.
Once disembarked from the mini bus we stood bewildered and tired in the tropical heat surrounded by those persistent sales people who simply wouldn’t leave us alone.
Worn down by their persistence and my own tiredness I decided to let one of them call us a taxi, and with a prearranged taxi fare to take us to an address he recommended.
In the meantime I was fearing the worst and predicting a battle about a horrendous room price and I felt my responsibility weighing more heavily by the minute.

But when the young man took us to a cheap guesthouse, telling us we were not to pay more than 10 USD a night, he got my trust and we took his room for 10 USD.
And although our guest house room wasn’t the Ritz, it offered an interesting insight into life in Vietnam.
As the owner and his family too lived in the guesthouse, family life openly happened in front of our eyes and that was really fascinating and fun.

But the guest house had another side to it.
It also sells travel and uses the exact Vietnamese’s sales techniques which are so confusing for unaware foreigners.
And it is really unfortunate that this unawareness and misunderstanding is giving this country the reputation that it badly rips tourists off and that it is making people like me quite anxious.
And even after all the warnings I still fell into the Vietnamese sales trap beautifully.
As you kind of live with the family and they do their utmost to relate to you, you trust them.
So when they say it is a busy season or the weather is just right and you better book your sight seeing trips right now with them, people like me naturally book with them without question. So I booked our first two trips with them.
And this is their mode of operandi, which they try on everybody and is successful or not depending on people’s level of cleverness.
First they establish a relationship. In this case we became family as we lived in their house.
Then they quote a very high starting price for every service and trip and see if you are naive enough to pay that. They actually don’t expect you to pay that price and expect you to negotiate a rate you think is fair.
But as most of us foreigners are not used to doing business that way and I like most tourist was still coming to grips with what goes on, I paid the asking price, trusting they would quote a fair price.
Later it turns out that I paid the stiff price of 72USD for our first trip, where others just paid 40 USD.
But the real whack came when I booked our second trip. They then quoted ‘their family’, me, a price that was a whopping 250USD higher than what more clued on people paid.
But as I still wasn’t wizened up to their game, I again foolishly paid the asking price without negotiating it down.
If I would have continued to naively keep paying the initially mentioned price I would have blown our budget in the first week.
But luckily my daughter came to the rescue.

In my hurry and with all my anxiety to sort things out without being taken for a ride I was easy game for them.
But luckily my daughter cottoned on a lot quicker than I did.
So while she warned me not to book that second trip and look around first, I wasn’t ready to let go of my sole responsibility; I ignored her contribution and went ahead with the booking anyway.
Only when I did find out how much I overpaid them and how dangerously close we were to blowing the budget, I was ready to let go of wanting to be solely responsible.
I happily gave up my mother role in favor of my daughter’s strength in finding out what a fair price was and her negotiating skills.
This eventual letting go prevented me from having them book our transport for 65USD while we booked transport ourselves to the same place for 8USD, just to give you an idea of the scale of the money we could have lost in this game.

So once we established how the Vietnamese operated, how I was a push over and how she was capable of being firm and getting the price right, we worked as an awesome team.
I let the Vietnamese build the relationship with me by laughing and joking with them while daughter was the negotiating genius, quietly establishing what a fair deal was and firmly negotiating the price, showing them that she certainly wasn’t a push over.
We skillfully played the Vietnamese at their own game.
From then on we paid a fair price which was usually at least half of the original asking price.
We were having a lot of fun with it and became very proud of ourselves.

As a result of the team play we had a great holiday, stayed within budget and had the time of our lives with increasing respect for our unique skills and contributions.

Playing to each other’s strength, letting go of ‘mother has to do it all’ and giving her the authority to deal with the price and the money was the best thing that happened on that trip and it has opened a new phase in our relationship.

So, thank you Vietnam and your weird and wonderful ways.