Dad in a Foreign Land

Like a lot of places, Vietnam is currently experiencing huge inflation. Prices on everything from bus tickets to food are rising month by month. We talked to a friendly taxi driver that voiced his uneasiness over increasing food and oil prices, and how they affect his livelihood.

We also experienced some artificial inflation between two of our nights in Hanoi. The first night we sat on low stools on a street corner where a middle-aged woman prepared spring rolls and a meat salad, for five and ten thousand dong, respectively. The food was good and we like the atmosphere of eating at a popular street spot surrounded by locals, so we went back the next night while waiting for the water puppet (yawn) show. Foolish trusting folk that we were, we didn’t inquire about the prices the second night. The woman was the same and she clearly recognized us. When I offered the total for our food the woman motioned that it wasn’t enough, explaining with a calculator that the salad was 20,000 Dong, not 10,000 (as we remembered it the night before).

She insisted that it had always been 20,000 Dong and refused to acknowledge that we had paid 10,000 for it the night before. We stubbornly refused, repeating that we clearly remembered the price from the night before. We asked another customer sitting near us that seemed to know some English, and after the shopkeeper said something to him in Vietnamese, repeated that it was 20,000. We demanded to watch him pay that amount for the salad he was eating, and after some discussion in Vietnamese, did. We had no real choice but to pay the inflated amount and leave, assuming she was slipping the man back his change as we left.

We found this sort of cooperation (or conspiracy) between vendors and random Vietnamese people to be common throughout Vietnam. For example when hiring a boat for a short one hour ride in Can Tho in the Mekong Delta a boatman asked a couple sitting nearby for the time before we boarded the boat. She said it was three o’clock, so our one hour would be up at exactly four o’clock. We didn’t have a watch, so I went over to look at the man’s watch that she had just checked. He tried to hide it when he noticed what I was doing, but was too late. It was 3:20.

I expect vendors and salesmen of all sorts to try to squeeze as much profit out of any transaction as possible, but the way unrelated people often cooperated, affirming the validity of elevated prices surprised me.

In Vietnam we weren’t followed around by people trying to sell things like happened often in India and Thailand. But when we went to buy goods and services, we were constantly quoted ridiculous figures, sometimes as much as 10 times the going rate. (With 16,800 Dong for $1, the numbers are so large they hope you won’t notice an extra “0″ sometimes.) They often wouldn’t come down from their ridiculous prices even if you walked away. In India they’d rather sell something for a modest profit than not sell at all. Not so in Vietnam. The most irritating example of this was at the Bach Dang jetty in Ho Chi Minh City. We’d been back and forth between Bui Vienh and the jetty a few times, and knew the taxi fare was always 30,000 Dong. But when we arrived at the jetty during a squall after our boat ride back from Can Tho, all the taxis demanded 50,000. Taxis that were clearly labeled as meter taxis refused to use their meters, insisting on a flat 50,000. This resulted in a lot of door-slamming and some bad language from us. (The boy later reenacted this scene with his toy cars. He has quite taken to bargaining.) We did eventually find a taxi that would take us for 30,000, but it was probably the 8th one we asked. The drivers must have figured we’d be desperate because of the pouring rain, but we were wearing rain coats.

Of course up until the 1990s there were officially different prices for Vietnamese and foreigners. It’s been a while since this was abolished, but the mindset lingers.