Taken Good

On to Wednesday and Perfume Pagoda. All started out well enough. Our bus arrived at a nice stream after a bumpy two hour ride. We were rowed by a 40-something Vietnamese woman who promptly after our getting in the boat informed us that she had "two babies".

After about 15 minutes of rowing, she gave our friend Davina a go at the rowing because of a blister she showed us on her hand. Davina failed miserably at getting us anywhere, rather pivoting us in place. The rows went back to the woman being paid for the job.

Our rower was quite social with us even though we really could not understand each other. We grew to like her a lot and felt bad about the blister on her hand. She rowed much quicker than any of the other rowers and we arrived at the bottom of the mountain which we were to hike in record time. We had a coffee while we awaited the other boats and happily agreed when the cafe owner asked if we wanted to buy a drink for our rower.

When the other boats and our "English speaking" guide whom we paid extra for arrived, she asked us to pay more money (was supposed to be an all-inclusive trip) to take the gondolas up the mountain instead of hiking. A few of us were resistant and up for a hike, but she insisted until all of us agreed (I think because she didn't want to hike up).

Up top, we hiked a few sets of stairs up and down until we got to a beautiful temple built inside a cave (they sure like their caves here). The guide left us alone as we made our own way through the cave, catching snippets of what other guides were telling their tours. When we got out of the cave, our guide pointed out a carving of an old man carrying a baby on the outer cave wall. From memory that's the only thing she pointed out to us (other than a temple map at a later temple) the entire day.

We began our hike down the mountain and someone in the group realized the guide was not with us. Someone else said, "Oh, yeah, she took the gondola down with my dad". So we had no guide to let us know what we were meant to stop and see on the way down.

Lunch was the best part of the day. I love the springrolls here, and the fried noodles and beef ain't half bad either.

Before getting back on our boats, our tour guide let us know that our rower was very lowly paid, so we should tip her $2 (which was supposed to be about 1 1/2 times her daily wage). We were very happy to do so...

... About 20 minutes before arriving back at shore our guide herself started asking for a tip. Although that was a little off-putting, it didn't bother us that much. All we had on us was a 50,000 dong note, just over 1 1/2 times the tip our tour guide had told us to give. We decided to just give that to her as we were very grateful for her rowing and we did feel bad about her blister. (Did anyone ever tell you that if you give someone an inch, they'll take a mile?)

We were going to hand her the money when we got to shore, but she kept asking and asking for it so we finally just gave it to her about 10 minutes before landing. Her academy award winning reaction was "Whoa! That's much too little. I have two babies. Viatnamese people are stingy and give no tip. You must give me more." In much more broken English of course.

We felt horrible. We figured we must have misunderstood the tour guide and that we were supposed to give $2 EACH (and there were four of us). Here we thought we were being generous and it turned out we were being super stingy. Problem was, we actually had no more money as I had left my ATM card in an ATM a few days earlier and had yet to recover it from the bank. I gave her the $2 Australian I had and Eliza and Davina emptied their wallets of the 50 or 60 cents each they had in Viatnamese dong.

Still our guide begged and begged and told us that was much too little. She looked very sad, as if the whole day had been for nothing. She seemed not to believe our story about having no more money even as we showed her our empty wallets. She asked us to give money to our tour guide once we got back to Hanoi (two hour bus trip) to take back to her. By this time we were not liking our rower much anymore. Davina said, "Just tell her we'll send money back even though we won't." But I couldn't make her hope money was coming back and have her hopes be dashed (Keep in mind, I still thought we had misunderstood and were tipping slightly too little).

Back on shore, she got angry at Len when he so "rudely" hopped straight out of the boat while she was still begging. The rest of us quickly followed (including our rower). Up on the street, she seemed to finally be believing our story about not having any more money, so she told us to borrow some from the other tourists on our bus (whom we did not know other than the bus ride in and lunch). We refused, of course, and I still felt a bit bad even though the blatant begging had been offputting.

I felt bad no more when our rower no longer thought we were watching and she was laughing and showing the other rowers how much we stupid tourists had given her. We looked down at her and she looked up and laughed heartily. We had been taken. Taken good.

I guess we should have read the guidebook before we left for the day. When we read it on our arrival back in Hanoi, it warned us about EVERY single thing that had happened, including the lazy tour guide, the begging rower (and apparently the going rate for tips is 5000 dong, about 15% of what our tour guide even suggested we give), the ask for the drink (which apparently the rowers never drink, but just split what we pay for it with the vendor) and the fact that the guide would be so lazy as to neglect to even take us to our paid destination, the Perfume Pagoda! We had assumed one of the two temples we'd been to had been it, but apparently it was a further hike up the mountain after the cave temple!