FINAL THOUGHTS
The only warning I have for future travelers of Vietnam is to avoid their bureaucracy at all costs when possible. While it is somewhat expected from a socialist country whose economy isn't yet services-based, it still caught me a little by surprise. The government officials that we dealt with at the airport were downright rude. I think they enjoyed flexing their power within their sphere of influence which unfortunately were the tourists at the airports - the big fish in a small pond mentality. I have two examples which left me shaking my head. While we were waiting our turn on the immigration line heading into Vietnam, the immigration officer in the front after half-heartedly trying several times to get the tourists to line up stopped what he was doing, stood up and made everyone get into one single file. Like a teacher scolding a group of kindergarten children, he just eyed all of us until he was satisfied with the line we made. He was a real jerk! We encountered the other jerk (Jerk #2) when we were getting our re-entry visas into Vietnam. We thought our local travel agent had taken care of everything and all we had to do was pick up our re-entry visas once we arrived in Vietnam. Much to our chagrin, we had to fill out redundant paperwork once we arrived into Vietnam. And, Jerk #2 purposely processed the paperwork of tourists who were using American or European passports after the tourists using Asian passports even though many of us were ahead of the Asian visitors. A process that took some less than 10 minutes, took us an hour to complete.
All in all, I found the Vietnamese to be a quite friendly bunch of people to even Americans if you generally steer clear of talking to them about politics which can be really said about any place. And, the times when I did venture a dialogue with them about politics or the American War, I found the conversation to be interesting and very informative.