Ha Tien - Mui Ne

First stop in Vietnam was Ha Tien, just after the border crossing with a psycho taxi driver from hell. To be fair he got us there in one piece - but what was quoted as a 2 hour drive was one hour of swerving down a dirt track short cut with a bust speedometer texting on 2 phones one in each hand (though I didn't find some of this out til we'd arrived as Tom felt my nerves weren't up to it at the time, and he was right). We stayed in Ha Tien for a night and got our first taste of Vietnamese coffee made with sweet condensed milk, YUM. Not too much to see in Ha Tien but we did visit the pagoda which had a beautiful lotus lily pond and we watched
the nuns pruning the garden. Travelled the next day to Chau Doc through the Mekong Delta and
got our first glimpses of the Vietnam I was expecting - women in conical hats tending the rice fields, water buffalo with cheeky herons in tow, the obligatory mopeds of course, and lush green fields and rivers around every corner, beautiful. The boats are lovely too, all different colours and each with its own unique purpose. Whilst in Chau Doc we took an early morning boat trip out to a floating market and visited a Cham village on the other side of the main river there. Cham people are an ethnic minority in Vietnam and descend from the ancient Cham people of long ago (I couldn't tell you when). Above one of the silk shops there we saw a sign saying "Don't buy the cakes from the children here as they have gone past their expiry date and may give you colic", the cheeky devils. We were grateful for the free advice!
We also met a very old man (95) there who was looked after by the people who ran the shop as all his family had left the village. You'll see him in one of our photos sat chilling, We fell in love with him and Tom offered him a bit of money for allowing him to take his picture. I like to think he treated himself to an iced bun (or Vietnam equivalent). Our guide Luc invited us for a coffee after, he spoke fluent English so we were able to ask him lots of questions and find out about Vietnamese people and culture. One interesting fact nugget he told us was that some rich people (Dong billionaires) like to eat living monkey brain, as in the monkey is kept alive at the table while they scoop out the brain (!) ...nice. Good job we won't be mixing in any
of those circles, give me noodles any day.

Anyway onwards to Can Tho which is apparently the place to see the traditional floating markets up close and personal, though we'd read that it's proper touristy. Anyway we booked a boat trip from our hotel and were picked up at dawn the next day. Our driver created several
things out of palm leaves along the way, origami style, including some fetching rings and bracelets, and a windmill that Tom played with most of the way. The market was great (luckily we were taken to a different not so toursisty one), a real mish mash of boats
with not an inch to spare, selling everything from fruit to fish sauce, the photos say much more thanI can write here....A trip in the evening to Sam Mountain for sunrise over the delta, gorgeous.

Next stop was the Capital city Saigon aka Ho Chi Minh city. Once again the roads here are MENTAL with the guide book telling us "dont trust pedestrian crossings as they are just another place to get run over" and that was sage advice. There are hundreds of thousands of mopeds here all weaving between each other, if the road is blocked then they just go on the pavement and you might as well pretend that traffic lights dont exist. The basic rules for crossing the roads on foot are 1) Look in the direction traffic SHOULD be coming from. 2) Hope that no one decides to drive the wrong way up the road behind you 3) Step into oncoming traffic with your testicles somewhere in your throat and maintain a slow, steady pace NEVER STOPPING till you either get to the other side or get run over. Amazingly we haven't come close to being in an accident anywhere throughout Vietnam, as crazy as the roads are its organised chaos and the traffic just flows round you. The War remnants museum was a good way to learn about the Vietnam war. the most i knew about this period was from Apocalypse now and Full metal Jacket and I was pretty ignorant to why it all started. For those that don't know either north Vietnam was embracing Communism and America decided that if Vietnam fell to communism, then
it wouldnt be long before the rest of Asia followed. With Russia and America facing off it was a case of drawing a line in the sand and halting the red tide. The museum was obviously biased towards Vietnam but not too badly and some of the photos were harrowingly beautiful. I enjoyed checking out all the tanks, bombs and choppers but struggled to stomach the gruesome photos of the havoc they caused. Basically the US broke loads of international laws with the indiscriminate way they waged war. That night we spent a couple of hours in a public square talking to locals and learning a bit about life in Vietnam and telling eager english students about life in the UK. These guys LOVE football and know more about it than I do, there are loads of Chelsea and Man U fans here but no Spurs fans, sorry Mouse.

Next stop was Mui Ne which was our first taste of a Vietnam beach town. It was one long road lined with swanky restaurants and poncy resorts. We got a room at a nice looking place and hit the sand. The sea was proper rough and the sky was filled with massive kites for loads of gnarly and radical kite surfers, Mui Ne is supposed to be one of the best places in the world for this sport but it was too expensive for our budget. I bobbed about in the surf for a while and then we went for dinner at our hotel. We ordered ribs and baked potatoes and when they turned up we had to laugh as the 'baked potatoes' were about the size of a ping-pong ball and didn't even have the skin on and Im not sure what sort of pig provided the ribs but it must have been the swine equivelant of Kate Moss. We spent 175,000 dong on that meal then went to a cheap place on the beach and filled our boots for 135,000. I will point out that that meal was the only dissapointing one we have had in our month in Vietnam. Food here is incredible but
more on that later.