The road to Vung Toa was surprisingly well maintained and smooth, and the communities that we drove through seemed a little bit more impoverished than what one would find on a drive through the United States. The people in those towns seemed happy and content, and they were selling food to people passing through. The communities that we passed through seemed better off economically than I expected. At the US Consulate, the economic advisor emphasized the inequality which is still prevalent in Vietnam and I expected a steeper economic decline as we left the city. The economy seems to be trending up as well because there were many places on the road where construction was happening.

The resort town of Vung Tau, especially the resort we were at, was just like any other beach resort in the United States. I was expecting the beach resort to be similar to the US because I had heard about the resort from previous years students. However the resort we were at was not indicative of the entire town of Vung Tau, just a small section of it. I saw many hotels of much lower quality on the drive through the town before reaching our resort. I believe that our resort was one of the nicest in the town of Vung Tau and it was targeted towards foreign tourists, since most of the people there were white. Targeting a resort primarily towards tourists from other countries shows that the Vietnamese still have a ways to go developing their nations domestic economy because they are still extremely reliant on foreigners.