Many Vietnamese are poor; it is easy to see that. I can see that from the number of people still riding bicycles in the big cities. I see the women carrying the baskets with the shoulder poles, hawking fruit or pastries on the street. They work hard, and from the price they get, its just barely a living. I see the booksellers in the tourist ghettos like Pham Ngu Lao in HCMC with a huge column of books skillfully tied in one vertical column, often as tall as they are, and they go from store to store peddling their products. Often these sellers are young women, barely out of their teenage years. I remarked to a friend that it must be hard not only to carry these things, but to face rejection time after time: in the whole time I was there, I never saw one person buy a book from these women.

(Note: now I do recall one sale they made. Guess who the customer was? That’s right, me, yours truly. I paid ten dollars for an obviously counterfeit LP guidebook, and then I got mad when I found it selling for six dollars in a bookstore down the street. But, looking back on how I came to feel for these people and their plight, I don’t feel so bad. I only wish the woman who got the money from me had spread it around to the other sellers. When I saw her on the street, just ten minutes after I had made the purchase, and five minutes after I had discovered the real street price, she called out to me, with a big smile, and gave me a hearty thumbs up. What could I do but smile back? I guess I really made her day.)

Shoeshine boys, ever present, offered to shine by suede and canvas hiking boots (which, by the way, I should never have worn to a tropical country). They offered to shine my Vans – all cloth. They would have done anything to make a sale. Guys were selling hammocks, and I saw quite a few Vietnamese using these – outside shops, in the country, lots of places. But I never knew of a tourist who bought a hammock. The boys with the cigarette lighters, the touts outside restaurants, the xe om (motorbike) and xyclo drivers (with their secondary offers of drugs and ‘lady massage’) are all straining to get our dollars.

And why not? Like I said, the country is generally poor, and we who have enough money to come to the place they live and work just to have fun – well, we must have tons of money to spend. “Please help me, I not have a good day, I sell no book today,” more than one of the book ladies said to me.

We all give what we feel comfortable giving. A few tourists are generous, and give money to the beggars – many of them deformed or with missing limbs. “These guys are likely the victims of Agent Orange,” one traveler told me as he put some coins in the hat of a man on crutches. I passed by a western woman just as she was saying to one of the ladies with the shoulder poles, “I don’t need anything but why don’t I just give you a dollar?” Who could deny the noble sentiment behind these acts?

Yet, the truth is, we can’t just go on giving, and giving in to everyone who approaches us. For one thing, there are too many of them. You’d be out of cash every hour. For another thing, it becomes a nuisance, as much as you try to be sympathetic. You start to feel like, well, like the way I feel back home when I get unsolicited phone calls and letters asking for my contribution for this or that cause. It’s not that I find fault with any of the causes, it’s just the delivery method I disagree with. I’d like to be left alone when I’m at home, or when I am sitting in a restaurant talking to someone.

Where to draw the line between awareness of others and self-preservation is each individual’s choice. But the astute traveler wants something besides a visit to all the sights listed in the guidebooks. He wants respect. She knows she’s going to pay more for things than the locals do, and that’s okay, as long as the markup is reasonable. He expects people will try to sell him this or that, and that there is a difference between the wealth of his society and the one he is visiting. But no one likes being made a fool of, or treated like a moneybags. The really cool traveler wants to make contact with the locals, in a transaction that reflects goodwill and friendship from both sides, one that is proportionate and respectful.

I remember on my Halong Bay tour (a very worthwhile trip, I might add) overhearing one of the other tourists on our boat complaining to our group leader, and it was pretty obvious what had been said just before. She was European, not a native English speaker, and she was struggling for the right words to make her point. “It is not good manners to remind someone before the trip is over that they should give a tip,” she was saying. “We give a tip if we like the service.”

I am willing to give our guide the benefit of the doubt: this is one of the finer social points that anybody in our own society would understand, but perhaps to someone from another culture, the concept is strange. I don’t know. The guide was a nice person, but I understood the lady’s point, too. Being reminded to give a tip is generally not considered polite; it comes across as overreaching.

When I flew into HCMC from Hue, it was late (about 7:30 pm) and I couldn’t find any buses (I had figured out how to take a city bus to the airport from Ben Thanh market for only 3000 Dong). No information stand was available, so I settled on a taxi. He wanted to name a price, I think 200,000 Dong, but I just told him to run it on the meter. I remembered something from the guidebook about six dollars being a fair price to get to the Pham Ngu Lao area.

Okay, he said, you want it on the meter, I’ll do whatever you want. I didn’t know the streets, but when the meter began to exceed 100,000, I began to suspect something was up. “I tell you before, usual trip about 300,000,” he said cheerfully. “Very busy now, rush hour.”

The meter climbed to 160,000, which is ten dollars. That was already too much, according to my information (and my first taxi ride from the airport, if I recall, had been around 120,000). I was upset, and frustrated: how could I have spent all those years living in Thailand, and traveling around, and still fall into this trap?

I began to complain, but I had very little to base my complaint. I didn’t know the streets. But I have a good sense of direction, and I began to work out the number of left turns and right turns, and as the meter climbed to 200,000, I was more and more certain he was taking me the long way. And I got angry.

It’s not about the money. Of course I have the money. Like I said earlier, it’s about respect. We don’t want to nickel and dime people in poor countries when we visit, but anyone who says that they don’t care when they are being grossly overcharged is a fool. It is condescending to act more ignorant than you are. Where is your self-respect (and your respect for the other person) when you do that?

I began fuming and looking out the window. I even shouted out to a westerner on a motorbike, “Which way to Pham Ngu Lao?” but he didn’t hear me. We finally arrived, and the meter read about 260,000, about double the price the guidebook recommended, double what I had paid before, and eighty-six times the price I would have paid if I had been able to find the bus. I am a hearty soul, and I don’t mind schlepping my backpack onto a city bus and traveling the way the locals do.

Anyway, I complained, not raising my voice, but saying that this fare was too much. I kept in mind the Asian model I had learned about not getting angry or losing face. But I was planning to go inside my hotel to verify what a typical fare should be to or from the airport. They were honest people and I trusted their opinion.

But my fuming and my dissatisfaction showed through just enough. Before I made any demands, the taxi driver said, “Okay, you want, I charge you just ten dollars.” Of course, that was still too much, but it was clearly a way out for both of us, as long as I accepted gracefully. I paid him in Dong (160,000), smiled, and even shook his hand. In the end, we both saved face, and like I said, it’s not about the money anyway.

Whether or not this encounter changed either of our attitudes towards the other is hard to say. Hopefully, I learned a little bit more about how to deal with taxi drivers. Maybe he came to a similar realization about tourists. You add each experience to your memory bank, and hopefully, you end up a little bit wiser. I was trying to walk the line between being a respectful visitor and being a mark. It's often difficult, and sometimes that line gets awfully thin. But we who travel are thrown into the fire, and it is up to us to respond gracefully and humanely, but also wisely. I did my best, and I hope that I left some good feelings behind me.

Tune in next time for more of John's journals.