No photos

How do I even begin to describe what happened to us last night...?

We went on a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels yesterday near SaiGon with a small tour group. After many deeply disturbing pro-war anti-american comments in a video about the American War, we were lead through some of the very tiny tunnels and shown the booby traps and secret entrances. We crawled along underground for 100 meters or so and had some really funny photos of me sliding into one of the entrances and crawling on our hands and knees - but, alas, we managed to leave our camera in the bus when we got back to SaiGon. We realized this about 5 minutes after getting off of the bus and ran as quickly as we were able to the tour company. They called their driver and he assured us that there was no camera on the bus. Luckily we had uploaded our photos the previous day so we didn't lose more than 20 or 30 pictures. Either way, our camera is probably being sold on some street corner this morning and, if the rest of our story hadn't taken place, we might have had the energy to look for it.

Back at the tour office we ran into an Aussie who was on our tour having a beer with our tour guide, a Vietnamese man named "Joey." The story of this nickname is long and uninteresting, but suffice to say that he was an early 40's man who managed to weave random American sayings (Tomorrow never come, die another day...) and homophobic comments (Michael Jackson is three dollar bill...) into most sentences. After joining Joey and a half dozen of his friends for 3 or 4 or 5 beers and Peking duck, we were invited to go to Karaoke with them all. We had a few more beers, sang Abba songs and a drunk Vietnamese man tried to grope Audrey as he very aggressively danced with her.

Up to his point we were drunk and happy, but as people left the club Joey took the three of us along to what sounded like another dance club. What we thought was a club ended up being a brothel. Yes, we were led through a locked gate, up a dark flight of stairs into a large room with a huge wrap around couch. The lights dimmed and we couldn't believe our eyes as 15-20 scantily clad girls walked into the room and poured our beers. We'd been hearing about Joey's wife and eleven year old son all day! Auds and I couldn't just leave - we wanted to watch out for our new friend Richard who seemed just as uncomfortable as we did. Joey picked out a girl for Richard and kept telling Audrey to let me have a girl. He chose two for himself and two for another friend of his. Would they leave the room at some point? Were people about to start getting down as we sipped on our beers? We had no idea what was happening now, but Joey kept telling us to "be cool." Audrey was asked to chat with one of Joey's girls as he groped her chest (she is 28, born 4 hours from SaiGon, doesn't like her job, is trying to learn better English, etc...). Things went on like this for an hour. We drank our beers, talked, asked if we should leave, felt really really uncomfortable and, thankfully, no one did anything. We just wanted out of there, but as we got up to leave Joey told us to wait for the bill. We were expected to pay for... something. Apparently Joey expected Richard, Audrey, and I to pay about eighty bucks for the pleasure of sitting and drinking beers in the company of these women. We hadn't really expected to be paying prostitutes and only had eight or ten dollars on us. I can't emphasize enough how out of our element we were. We didn't want to leave Richard alone; he was much more drunk that us and we doubted that he'd be able to make it to his hotel. We weren't exactly sober, had no idea where in the city we were, wanted desperately to get out of there, but felt like we couldn't. We ended up giving Richard the money that we had with the promise to pay back to him anything more that we owed. I guess that he ended up staying with Joey and the girls. As we left, I told him to meet us at a nearby coffee shop at 11 this morning - which is right now. I'd better head over there to get the rest of the story. Updates to follow...

It was definitely the strangest night we spent in Viet Nam, and the most uncomfortable. Anyway, it was by far the most memorable night of our trip... so far. I don't think that I can come close to accurately conveying all of it through my wicked hangover.