Palm-lined roads

Palm-lined roads
Originally uploaded by bastchild.

This was the stretch of road to the beach from Hoi An. We rented the motorbike for less than $3, but it came with hardly any gas as we soon found out. On our way back from the beach, we ran out of fuel. We pushed it to the first gas station (a old fashion handpumped tank) being manned by a young girl who said it was a standard 10,000 dong per Liter. As she approached the bike to fill it, her father yelled out something in Vietnamese. She looked at us embarrassingly, and said it was 12,000 dong/L. No way! We pushed on to another gas station (only 50 feet away) where we were told the same story. Someone even said it we would have to walk for 5 km until we found a large gas station for 10,000/L, but it was the fourth place that actually gave us the honest price of 10,000/L without question. We thanked them and bought a bottle of water from them in return. Robert and I are all for capitalism and profiteering, but we also have no problem in teaching folks that we can walk away at an unfair price.