Escaping to Ninh Binh
Trip Start
Nov 08, 2006
1
185
260
Trip End
Ongoing
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Where I stayed
Ninh Binh, Vietnam
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
We were welcomed in late at night and showed a room that he said was $25, about 250% of the price in our guidebook. We told him we were looking for something cheaper. He walked us to a room next door that was identical and said it was $15. No problem, a hotel owner seeing if he could double up the price on us. Not a big deal. We took the room. It was actually pretty nice. So I was quite disappointed the next night when we returned from a long day of travel (which we set up through our guest house) to find that none of our stuff was in our lovely room. It had all been moved, while we were gone, without our permission or knowledge, after we had taken our key to avoid even a room cleaning because we had a laptop in the room. The owner said he needed the room for someone else, seemingly more important or willing to pay more. He acted like it was no big deal. I entered the room with our stuff and immediately discovered our laptop in several pieces on the bed. I was livid. When I confronted the owner, he freaked out and said that he personally moved all of our stuff and that the laptop was broken when he entered our room. I assured him it wasn't and he couldn't even tell me where I had hidden it. Obviously the maids dropped it while cleaning, but he wouldn't hear of it. He accused me of bringing a broken laptop to Vietnam in order to hustle some money out of him. Yeah, he caught me. That's my move. I stay in low budget hotels with my broken laptop to try to get owners to give me their daughters as compensation. When he decided his honor had been questioned, he pushed me and started yelling close enough to my face to splatter me with saliva and tiny pieces of rice. I thought about picking up the 4 1/2 foot prick and throwing him through a window, but I hear Vietnamese prison is unpleasant. So after a couple hours of discussions, it was clear he was both crazy and unwilling to do anything to fix the laptop or compensate us. He had our passports, so we had to pay for our room in full before leaving to another hotel, which he followed us to so he could talk trash about us to those owners (it turns out they were his cousins). But they were nice enough and we blew it off and enjoyed the sights. The guy is a useless and dishonest bastard, but we focused on all the cool people we met and the unparalleled beauty surrounding Ninh Binh. So that's where I'll pick up in the next blog. And it also helped that the guy we had met from Denmark, Felix, left the hotel in support of our dispute and came with us. So we had a couple of beers, recounted the evenings events in disbelief, and laughed it off.
