Tourers and some WAGs do Vietnam

Updated with some words from Jim Drummond (28/05/2007)

Here is some prose from our favourite rotund member, Mr Robert Hart on his sojourn to Vietnam with some former tourers for Magoo's "wedding" - Please note, this is a direct cut and paste, so if there are any spelling, grammar or other errors, they can be directly attributed to the author:

Three RGC members, two of them foundation members, Jim Drummond and Jim 'Magoo' Roberts, now located in Darwin and Saigon ( once in you are never out of this club), joined with the Darwin WAGS ( Wednesday Afternoon GolferS) for a trip to celebrate Jim Robert's wedding. The wedding never took place but the mock wedding which replaced it was probably a better party anyway.

The entourage of nine trained it three hundred kilometres north to alight at Mui Ne ( pronounced Moonee as in Moonee Valley) to a resounding greeting of nothing and no transport with the golf resort 17 km away, despite the assurances of Saigon Jimmy who said 'don't worry - there'll be taxis everywhere.

Overcoming this hurdle we went onto the resort at Pham ( pronounced fam) Teit to play on the Nick Faldo designed track. If you didn't like Smutty before you would hate him now. Drummo's caddy seemed to only know two words of english 'water' and 'sand'. Fortunately the score cards were lost when Brogo had his bag snatched back in Saigon. We nearly didn't get out of Saigon as the taxi driver kept nodding his head to the words 'train station' and then motioned an aeroplane taking off with his hand!

Nevertheless a great time was had by all and the WAGS proved themselves
more than capable of joining in a Northern Tour.

Saigon, what can you say about it? Hot, humid, and no one calls it Ho Chi Minh City. One WAG wore shoes resulting in every shoeshine boy for miles continually harassing him for a shine. He gave up and bought sandals.

Early and later attempts to buy acceptable coffee were not rewarded. Got close when a real coffee establishment was found only to have the power off in our district for the day. This scribe thought himself lucky to have a big room with a huge balcony overlooking much of the city on the 7 Floor of our Hotel. The same power outage made him request a lower room.

District 1 in Pham Ngu Lao is a world unto itself with nightclubs, bars, cafes, restaurants, hotels and hawkers of every age flogging items ranging from rolex watches and designer labelled sunglasses to weight measurements. Yep, paid my 5,000 dong and the weight machine ( which was moved along on a trolley) rumbled a bit and produced a ticket saying I was 114 Kilograms and that my right weight should be 45 Kilograms! The activity in this area has to be seen to be believed.

The travelling entourage spent a couple of days on a Mekong delta tour - they haven't quite perfected this yet as we got caught up in a boat jam suffering black bilious smoke from neighbouring engines before it was untangled. Did wonders for Drummo's asthma. Got stuck into some mead and watched some traditional music. Took us a while to learn that the more dong we gave just encouraged the musos so we soon cut that out. Was a nice break from the frenzy of Saigon but.

Our group regularly filled up the tiny restaurants and bars and cafes in our little street which became our sanctuary late at night for a few drinks for those a bit underdone, which seemed to be nearly everyone every night.

Overdid it one night with very few putting their heads above the trenches the next day. You wouldn't have put any of our heads in your rock garden that day! From the whole group there were only four victims of theft ( two pick pocket, one mugging and one bag snatching). Given the hours and our friendly disposition, we are to be applauded that we were able to achieve such a low tally.

We soon learnt that the best way to cross the road is to follow a local, but crossing roads was the only way to get to Ben Tanh market. It too is a world within a world. Aside from the hustle and bustle, the change rooms are so small that I had to try on new pants in the middle of an aisle which itself wasn't that big. This is a great place to practise your haggling, though you really only find out the right price if you don't want the item and are happy to walk away. A vendor started giving Brogo change when he hadn't bought anything, only to then see Leroy. She threw her hands in the air uttering 'same, same' as she could not tell the difference between them. (Brogo is a lightly built Aboriginal Australian and Leroy a massively built Tongan-Australian).

Even to this untrained eye, a walk around the city centre was inspiring with French colonial architecture and wide streets. The central park was impressive too, with walking pavement doubling as a training track,a bit like the Tan - even though we walked down the up direction. We experienced a great view from the REX hotel rooftop beer garden, played pool in some sports bar where the airconditioning was far too cold in contrast to the heat, humidity and dust outside where I sweated more than an italian glassblowers armpit. Too many crazy sights to mention in this brief memoir like the floating markets; what is carried on their 100cc motor bikes ( the
craziest load being a motorbike pushing a trailer with a dozen huge gas cylinders which looked like rockets all pointed to the front waiting to go off at the first nose-tail disagreement); what the locals were now wearing; and the hospitality meted out to us at the local cafe just up and across the street from our hotel.

A memorable trip was had with a commitment to return. Would be a good place for a Northern Tour, perhaps we could call it the Far Northern Tour.