mahdnc

Some other views on and off the ship today:

Our last major stop was at Po Nargar, an ancient temple built many centuries ago. The architecture was pretty amazing. Going inside the temple required you to remove your shoes. @Torfamm, if your knees or shoulders were uncovered, over clothing of many different sizes was provided (they reminded me of lab coats).

We took a refreshing 30 minute private cruise on the Cai River.

We visited an "ancient" house to see the architecture. We had a chance to sit down and enjoy some sliced fruit.

The next stop was to watch a local family produce conical hats. My wife found watching the production process to be fascinating. You could buy a conical hat for $3 USD.

We took a private tour today to Nha Trang. Our time ashore was limited because we got a one hour late start and because, as a group, we wanted to the tender station at 2 pm to ensure we got back to the ship on time. The tour was very good although not as spectacular as our time yesterday in Ho Chi Minh City. One thing to note is that our guide, Xuan, needs a minimum group size of 8 for him to personally do the Nha Trang (today) and Danang (tomorrow) tours in order for him to recover his travel expenses since he lives in HCMC. If the group size is smaller than that, Xuan has a good network of local guides that he has built that he subcontracts out the work to. Our group today was 7 so our guide in Nha Trang was Hoi. Hoi was pretty good, but in my opinion not as good as Xuan himself. The tour van/bus and driver was of the same quality as yesterday. The tour van/bus was air conditioned and nicely furnished. It sat approximately 12 passengers. The seats were arranged as 2 seats on one side of the aisle and one seat on the other side of the aisle. There were three rows of seats with the last row being able to seat 4 since there was no aisle to split the seats up. There was an extra row of seats for two behind the driver. For our group of 7, this was ample space. Here is a quick rundown of what we did today: It was about an hour ride before we made our first stop to see a family make rice paper. It was interesting to see the process by which the rice paper was manually produced by the one woman who was working in a small room. We got to sample some of the product. There was one other private tour that showed up while we were there.

While we were waiting to get on the tender this morning, @Bloss20 gave us more information about yesterday’s delayed departure from HCMC. From their balcony, they observed some 20 Celebrity shorex buses showing up to the pier late! So apparently it was not due to any one shorex bus like i had speculated yesterday. She talked to a passenger who was on one of the buses and that passenger said it appeared that there was some type of miscommunication on when the buses needed to return to the pier. It sounded like several passengers pointed out to their guides that they were going to be late to the pier based on the schedule, but their warnings went unheeded.

We are never going to meet, are we? Btw, we call on Chan May tomorrow, so I will have to look to see how our ports of call are different. I’ve had a good time so far. Ship and crew are excellent. Btw, I shared your story to another passenger today about how your tender and Solstice bumped into each other (and the broken glass) during the 2018 GBR sailing.

Today's tendering was a bit of a fiasco for reasons that I cannot fully explain. So I am targeting this post for other members who will be taking this itinerary (or the reverse one) this season. A few days ago, I was trying to figure out what specific instructions to send out to our group of 7 that were sharing a private tour in Nha Trang which involved tendering. I was told that tender tickets would be handed out starting at 7 am at the Martini Bar (Deck 4 above Guest Relations) on the day we arrived at Nha Trang. We were scheduled to arrive Nha Trang at 8 am and Guest Relations told me to expect tendering to begin around 8:30 am. Here were the written instructions for tendering that was issued to our stateroom: link. Those written instructions as well as what was printed in the Celebrity Today made no mention of when the tender tickets would begin to be handed out. So I thought I had some inside information. I was wrong. Our tour guide wrote instructions for us to meet him at the port gate at 8:30 am although he was well aware that it was a tender port and that we would make it to the gate as fast as we could. My instructions to our group was that I would get the tender tickets for all 7 of us at 7 am and that we should meet at Guest Relations at 8 am to be ready to take the tender when it was out turn. Out of our group of seven, four were not Elite members and I chose not to go the route of asking if we all could get off together using Elite privileges which gives us priority. At 7:03 am I showed up to the Martini Bar to get tender tickets. There was already a small line in front of me (photo below). By the time I got my 7 tender tickets, we were assigned Tender Group 6 which surprised me. In retrospect, I wish I had gotten there at 6:30 am (easier said than done because you have to wake up a half hour earlier!). When riding the elevator back to our cabin, I could see the fences already set up for crowd control and line management on Deck 3 that would lead out to the stairs to Deck 2 to get to the tenders. I didn't realize it, but this was the calm before the storm. When my wife and I arrived at Guest Relations at 8 am, everyone else in our group was there. But so were a ton of other people. At about 8:30 am, tender groups 1 & 2 were called. We sit patiently at Guest Relations waiting for group 6 to be called. One of our members in our group was standing near the Celebrity employee who was serving as gate keeper for the line queue. She reports back to me that some passengers are pleading their case that they have to get off the ship now or they will be late to their tour and that the gate keeper was allowing them to enter the tender line. So I went to talk to the gatekeeper. She was difficult to get to because of the crush of passengers surrounding her. When I finally met her, I noticed that her badge said that she worked in the kids club--I chuckled thinking that her job gave her the exact skill set needed to manage the mob in the Grand Foyer. She confirmed that she would let my group through if I could show documentation that we needed to be urgently ashore. I showed her my email and she was satisfied with that. During that time there were dozens of other passengers also trying to get an exception to get into the line early. As we were waiting for her to admit our group into the line, a man was berating the gate keeper about the tendering lines. He yelled if this was the first time that Celebrity ever did a tender, how it has been over an hour now and that this is unacceptable. My wife defended the gate keeper and asked the man what is it that he expects the gate keeper to do (good question). By the way, this guy was very large and from my assessment, if this thing escalated between my wife and him, I determined that it would end very badly for me. At 9:02 am, we were finally admitted into the tender line on Deck 3. We waited quite a while as other groups with higher priority were being led down the stairs to Deck 2. By 9:20 am we were among the last people to get on the tender which was nice because it meant we did not have to wait much longer for the tender to fill up. The tender pulled away from Solstice at 9:24 am. By 9:45 am we finally got off the tender. It took us a while to find our guide and we finally found him at 9:55 am and our tour of Nha Trang began. In hind sight, I wished I had gotten to get tender tickets earlier than 7 am. And perhaps I should have taken the initiative to inquire if something could be done about our needs to be on shore early for our tour. I actually hate doing that because this has to be a common situation but I decided to do it once I discovered that it was happening all around us. When we were sailing away from the ship in our tender, I noticed that Solstice only had two tender stations operating. When we were on her at the Great Barrier Reef in 2018, she operated four tender stations (2 on each side). However I concluded that doubling the amount of tenders that could leave Solstice would shift the bottleneck to the shore area where there was space for only two tenders to dock. Also the Great Barrier Reef involved a lot of commercial tenders and commercial shorex boats whereas Celebrity was only using her own tenders today. I welcome any constructive comments or questions.

There are so many small observations from each day, that it’s hard to remember them all, much less write them down in this thread. A couple of things that occurred to me this morning while shaving…. As we were presenting our SeaPass card to get on the gangway and off the ship at Phu My, a passenger was being advised, “you cannot get off the ship today” by a Solstice security officer. No doubt there was a problem with her Vietnamese visa. I am guessing that she had applied for one through the ship after being on board. It took us about 3-4 business days for ours to get approved when I applied from home. That leaves little time to apply after getting on board if you want to make it to the first Vietnam port of call. Hopefully she can get off the ship today at Nha Trang. Our guide, Xuan, advised that the rickshaw drivers would greatly appreciate a tip of around $5. Xuan offered to offer smaller bills of any of us didn’t have bills that small. We found that most of merchants in Ho Chi Minh City took American currency (and would give it back and many took credit cards as well. Yesterday’s Vietnamese coffee and pho lunch was covered by the tour price.

I have found the WiFi problem to be ship wide and not concentrated in any one location.

we were not warned of any requirements.

Wow--that sounds pretty interesting. No, we did not see anything that close to happening during this trip so far!

Our tour dropped us off at the pier at exactly 4:00 pm which was one hour before Solstice was scheduled to leave although she ended up leaving later. We thoroughly enjoyed the day. I hope you liked today's posts and photos. Time to go to bed. We are headed to Nha Trang tomorrow. It is a tender port and our guide told us that it is a port that is often cancelled because of weather. So we will see. David

On the way back to the ship, we stopped off at the old Saigon Central Post Office. On the way back we also crossed this bridge.

One of our stops after lunch was a visit to the War Remnants Museum which is a retrospective on the Vietnam War. Yeah, it was a bit somber.

Our tour included a pho lunch. It was nice that we had our own private room (with air conditioning). This picture was taken by our guide, Xuan. I like it except for the fact that it looks like my wife is poking my eye out with her straw.....

We then went to the Ben Thanh Market where we got to experience first hand the Vietnamese way of gently coaxing an unsuspecting victim into making a sale. None of our group of eight emerged from the market unscathed. That included me who stood there with arms folded refusing to buy anything until they separated me from my wife and then broke me. We did not stand a chance.

Sorry, I am not done yet.

The street and traffic scenery during the ride was mind blowing (as good as the boat ride we took through the floating market in Bangkok). In some ways I felt like I was in a Disney ride (where authenticity is artificially replicated on a world class scale) or in a Jason Bourne movie. Watching the rickshaw drivers weave in and out of traffic (cars, buses, scooters) was pretty impressive. And the street scenes, oh my, it was amazing to see all the shops and small businesses. Let's just say that I put my camera to great use (took so many photos that it was like being back at the Galapagos). Here are a ton of photos to give you an idea of what we saw--I hope you don't find them too repetitive. I very much enjoyed watching the people and taking their candid photos. The next 3 photos were taken on a street where all the shops repaired scooters:

The highlight of the trip was the 30 minute rickshaw rides through the streets of Saigon. I read about these rides on some of the tours mentioned in Cruise Critic, but the actual experience was amazing. Here we are--of different size and weights--sitting in our own rickshaw manually propelled by people we felt very sorry and grateful for.

At 11 am we stopped off at a coffee shop on Le Thanh Ton Street near the Ben Thanh Market. When we arrived the employees set up small stools and a wooden table to seat all of us. We were all sitting at the street corner right by the curb. It might sound kind of awful, but it was a very cool and authentic feeling experience. Here is a photo of our group of eight. We only met each other briefly at the sail away party on embarkation day--but we got to know each other fairly well at the conclusion of today's tour. @grizzlyt, from Arizona, are seated at the extreme left and right in this photo: We were served a Vietnamese coffee (iced) which was pretty good. We were told that Justin Trudeau had coffee at this shop several years ago. Our guide, Xuan, is seated at the right in this photo below. His English is pretty good and he is quite articulate. Best of all, Xuan has a warm and friendly personality. Our guide took this photo of my wife and me: Here is @Bloss20's family. They hail from the UK. Their son is seated to the left and will be graduating in a year with his aeronautical engineering degree (aka rocket scientist!).

Here we are watching other Vietnamese people at the pagoda.