Vung Tau is a beautiful place that's being violated in every conceivable way. It was established as a weekend beach getaway for the French who lived in Sai Gon during the colonial period. In the French days it was named Cap St. Jacques after the patron saint of the sea. Now, weekenders from Ho Chi Minh City come here and crowd the beaches with bodies and beer bottles and then swim in the ocean with the little plastic bags they left out the night before. The beach is lined with these god-awful 6-7 story narrow rectangular boxes. The mafia has bought up most of the prime real estate in Vung Tau, and now require tenants to pay exorbitant "protection" fees (in addition to the state controlled rental prices). They've also flooded the place with heroin. The Russians have a joint venture oil drill and refinery with the Vietnamese in Vung Tau. From the beach you can make out a small fleet of oil tankers on the horizon. Perhaps the women, particularly the poor women, of Vung Tau are the most exploited. Most hotels here have cut rates for "short" stays and there are more places that offer "massage" than food. I went on a walk on the main boulevard at night and I must have been offered to be taken to massage / "boom boom" (slang here for prostitutes) at least 10 times. It's disheartening. Even Sai Gon seems to be making improvements in terms of gender relations, but Vung Tau. . .for christ-sake. The tourism, expats, and mafia have made it really difficult. . .particularly for the poor women to make a living in Vung Tau without entering the sex-trade. There's also a disturbing trend of foreigner's who go to Vung Tau to meet their wife (who is generally half their age). Vung Tau has several services for marrying vietnamese women to foreigners.

I met a couple of these expats in Vung Tau.

The first was named Curt. He’s an Aussie, maybe 45, been in Vung Tau for over a year. Not a bad guy, but rather simple-minded, and certainly not doing good things for the country. He doesn’t speak A WORD of Vietnamese. He allegedly came to Viet Nam over a year ago to do some scuba-diving. Less than a week into the trip, he took a weekend trip from Sai Gon to Vung Tau and met a 21 year old girl at a café (The age difference means that when he was my age, she was an infant). The girl was evidently making eyes at him (“mmm, mm, look at that over-weight, balding 40 something guy”). They started talking. . .evidently she speaks some English, and the next day she invited him to her family’s house in the county-side. Without going into all the details of their courtship and subsequent marriage, they eventually got married and now he’s applying for a visa for his wife. When I asked him if she’d get in, he replied (to my surprise) that Australia actually refuses a number of applicants in his position and that he wasn’t sure if his wife would be accepted for a visa. Evidently, the Australian government has to be careful because many times, the wife gets her green card and then gets a divorce from her husband after six months and starts bringing her family over and living off the welfare. He added, “I can’t blame them”. . .he was of course talking about the government for being careful, but I immediately thought of these beautiful young Vietnamese girls marrying aging foreigners (and most of them aren’t a particularly good catch). I can’t blame them.

I went around with Curt a bit. He mentioned wanting to open a bar but because of the complications involved and having to pay off the police and the mafia, he decided against it. Then he talked to me about the nightlife a bit, and offered to take me to a bar where “the girls would be all over me”, and explained that they get you to buy them drinks and the bartender fills their drink with fake (non-alcoholic) vodka and coke and splits the profits with the girls . . . a rather bizarre trade, but it seems to work. I decided to forgo the bar for an Indian restaurant.

It was at the Indian restaurant that I met my second Vung Tau expat. I believe his name was Jeff. . .we’ll call him Jeff. I’m about ¾ of the way finished with my dinner and he walks into the restaurant like he owns the place and asks what I think about the food. At first I mistake him for a really rude and commandeering owner checking on his staff. I tell him it’s quite good and then he goes to the bathroom and washes his hands. He’s the kind of American who makes me ashamed to claim my nationality: very confident, loud, obnoxious, ungrateful, and completely full of shit. His appearance was similarly offensive. He was also mid-40s, had thinning, frizzy, shoulder length hair and left his shirt unbuttoned to his navel. He was a wreck. When he returned from the bathroom, he immediately launches into a diatribe about “these people” and the government . . . he delivers a sermon of unconcealed contempt for the Vietnamese people that lasts for nearly half an hour while I try to finish my meal. When he finds out that I’m in PiA, and assumes that I went to Princeton (I didn’t get a chance to get in a word edgewise, so I let him believe I was Princeton graduate) he treated me like an accomplice. He claimed to have studied at Columbia and Berkely, but I’m rather skeptical . . . the guy’s a fucking nut.

Needless to say, I don't have the highest opinion of Vung Tau. It's a prime example, in my mind of some of the malevolent forces behind so-called development. So far, I think Can Tho is heading in a relatively stable direction, and for the most part, developing in a positive way . . .