Nha Trang

Nha Trang is basically the Cancun of Vietnam, or so I was led to believe. In a country so thin, the travelers’ journey from one end to another invariably touches down at all the “requisite” stops. It’s hard to get off that beaten tourist track.

The built up beachfront of Nha Trang looks like Tel Aviv with palm trees. High rise hotels with recognizable commercial names like Sheraton and Hilton loom over the stretch of Duong Tran Phu Road that jets along the contours of the sandy beach. Their steel and concrete shadows darken the stretch in the afternoon, announcing their prominence and prestige in a city where the new Vietnamese middle class comes to vacation.

The local partiers generally stick to the north side of town, around the bend of the Cai River where it flows into the South China Sea.

The white people end up collecting in a small pool of streets that have cropped up around the magnum opus of foreigner party spots: The Sailing Club, an institution that has held gravitational sway in Nha Trang ever since Vietnam opened its doors to the outside world in 1993.

In the nearby 3 x 3 grid of neon-lit streets, promoters stand outside their clubs, offering pamphlets listing happy hour specials from 4 p.m. to 1 a.m. Restaurants with menus all in English serve pizza and chicken cordon bleu. Bars seem single-mindedly dedicated to plying white people with enough hard liquor to start small orgies gyrating to the beat of the Billboard Top 40.

I hate this scene, surrounded by Europeans as far from their home as I am from mine. This is not why I travel. This is the first in my three weeks in Vietnam that I have found myself so cut off from any pulse of local life and flavor. Every woman tries to sell you something and every motobike driver tries to rip you off in a drug deal.

The tourist industry has Nha Trang by the balls, and has clearly brought the city a lot of money. Growing up in a beachy tourist town, I have a natural aversion and understanding towards this culture of impermanent dwellers and spenders.

But here I’ve found it hardest to connect with the locals. It feels like I’m being squeezed by economy and geography to spend the night at foreign bars surrounded by people that speak English. It’s reminded me just how weird some travelers are. 

Case # 1: The sexpat.

Lars is a 42-year-old Los Angeles native. He left the States on, “…a trip around the world,” before settling in Finland, where he’s spent the last twelve years doing internet marketing for an extreme sports company called Fuktor.

“How does anyone end up anywhere,” he explained, “a beautiful blond woman with big tits and green eyes.”

Lars is spending his euro-style five week paid vacation to drink his way across Southeast Asia. “I’m kind of stuck back in Finland. I’ve got a daughter now,” he shrugs. This trip, for him, is a kind of self-medication.

He is tall and tan and his permanently shaved head is a bleached desert of UV inflicted coloration. His middle aged body holds the physique of someone with half his years, a T-shirt is pulled tight over his broad chest and rounded shoulders. A life of extremes: sports, partying traveling, hating, has both built him up and broken him down.

Behind his rimless Ray Bans, Lars’s eyes are glazed and furtive, darting faster than his words can catch up. His voice is tinged with the twangy slur of a seasoned alcoholic. One of his nostrils is partly collapsed – the result of years of cocaine erosion. He is a model of why not to party hardy through your thirties.

But for his off-putting physical presence, Lars is really fun to hang out with. He’s an extremely personably asshole, simultaneously supportive and derisive of people all around him. But funny, and with stories from a lifetime of travel. He’s also very good at pool, and hours skirt by while we drink beers and knock spherical stone balls across the table.

He, like me, is reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Unlike me, Lars can afford to stay in all the famous hotels listed in the book. He spent his week in Saigon hopping between The Majestic, The Grand, The Continental, buying bottle service and a new Vietnamese girl each night. This is how the wealthy white sexpat spends his money.

As long as I steer the conversation, we are OK. We can talk about life in Scandinavia, about our mutual love of books. But when I ask him about his T-shirt, which reads “FUKTOR,” it gets weird again.

“It’s the name of the extreme sports company I work for,” he explains, before veering off again.

“I love this shirt because it looks like ‘Fucked her’. In Finnish it’s pronounced ‘fook-tour’, but, you know…” his eyes glaze as he trails off.

With Lars you can’t get away from sex and fucking and drinking and if you mention America you’ve touched on a very sensitive nerve.

When the conversation turns semi-political later at night, he erupts into the back room from his perch at the music computer to announce in an aggressive slur that he’s “….heard enough about America tonight! Every thirty seconds I hear that word, and that shows where your head is. We need to get beyond that.” His comments are clearly directed towards Zane and myself, the only other Americans in the bar. Everyone stares at him, clearly shocked and annoyed by his oblique harassment of his fellow countrymen.

Silence, before he turns to exit the room saying, “As we say in Finland, ‘Let the flowers bloom,’ or in American: ‘Live and let live’”.