Hue, Vietnam: Dragon Boat ride and bribe on the Perfume River

Our intrepid grandma Dragon Boat captain.

The captain didn't step aside for any of the pictures.
She loved getting her picture taken. And, she was impatient for me to
get on board because all Vietnamese are impatient to go, go go!

Captain grandma pushing me away so I wouldn't get her in trouble for taking pictures of the police bribe boat. And, she pushed our family into the covered part of the boat for some reason.

The blue boat is the bribe boat.

Another female Dragon Boat captain boards the police bribe boat in order to deliver her bribe envelope to the police who always stayed hidden inside the boat cabin. We never saw them.

January 4, 2011

We flew south from Hanoi to Hue, a city in central Vietnam. Hue has a famous river called the "Perfume River" which is supposedly dubbed perfume because beautiful smelling flowers float down it every spring, after their first bloom. And, the women are said to be the most beautiful women in Vietnam, somehow related to their living next to this so-called fragrant river.

Honestly, it's hard for us to judge beauty in Asia, many of the women seem beautiful to us, but there seems to be some cultural norm to beauty. For instance, our guide said that people ride motorbikes with masks over the faces, not so much to keep out the exhaust, but to keep their skin from getting dark. White, light skin is prized in Asia, especially among Vietnamese women.

But, back to the Perfume River. Dragon boats line the Perfume River in downtown Hue. We rode a dragon boat down to a temple. You can see the Dragon boat captain and owner above, a proud grandma-to-be who had her pregnant daughter with her on the boat; the pregnant daughter's job was to try to aggressively sell us captive boat riders some Vietnamese souvenirs. The grandma captain has a serious look on her face in the pictures, but she sure liked to get her picture taken.

That is, she liked to get her picture taken until she had to pay a bribe to the police on the police boat. Then, she pushed all of us back inside the covered part of the boat and angrily waved me away when I went out to take a picture of her in bribing action. In the picture above you can see her waving me away and using her pole to gently nudge her boat against the police boat that is ONLY anchored there to take bribes. If you look hard at the picture above you can see a woman captain entering the door of the boat with a manilla envelope in her hand filled with a bribe, allowing her to take her tourist boat past the police boat.

Now, let's back up for a second. In Cambodia and Vietnam everyone has to pay bribes to the police. Just to cross from one province into another on a Cambodian Highway, police stop every car for a "tax" that everyone knows is a bribe that goes into the policeman's pocket.

We were a bit surprised at the ingenuity of the police to set up a police bribe stop in the middle of the Perfume River. The boat captain didn't grumble about it, because she was ALL business. But, our guide grumbled about it. He's from South Vietnam, which sided with the U.S. during the war. He resents the police. Our guide from North Vietnam didn't resent the police, and he, in fact, white washed much of his description of the military government rule, saying loudly at the government required tourist stop at Ho Chi Minh memorial that "Everyone feels safe and is very happy with the government rule here."

No so, according to our South Vietnam guide. He grumbled that no one in his family can get a government job, or, for that matter, no one from his village or who were South Vietnamese can get government jobs. Those coveted government posts only go to Northern Vietnamese, who've always been loyal to the military, communist government. And, the police represent a much-resented government group in Southern Vietnam. Our South Vietnamese guide looked at the police bribe boat as we passed, saying through gritted teeth that Southern Vietnamese call the police "Yellow Dogs," as in cowardly dogs who take bribes and bite.