Vietnam! We are finally in the Asia we were dreaming of visiting. We got to Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City (HCMH)) and ventured out for a whole day of sightseeing into the craziness that is motorbikes and bicycles everywhere! Crossing the street is an art that we seem to have mastered (neither of us has been hit yet anyway).... all you have to do is walk and the motorbikes will simly weave around you. We went around the city for the day, haggling with the market owners and being royally ripped off, visited the War Remnants museum which presented an amazingly biased view of the American-Vietnam war, though I guess that is their perogative. Pretty gruesome stuff any which way you look at it.
We also tried Pho - basically the national dish - which is a noodle soup with beef in it. Delicious and cheap. The hostel we were in was pretty expensive (a whole $16 per night for the room) but it included breakfast, pretty much unlimited drinks and dinner... plus the room was pretty good with an en suite. And this is where our new found love for iced coffee has developed from. The day just isnt whole if we havent had an iced coffee and boy oh boy is it gooood. We are working out how to make it this good at home and will be dining on this forever!
The next day we went on a day trip to the CuChi tunnels on an organised day trip which involved a trip to a Cao Dai temple - a weird religion combining Christianity, Buddism, Taoism and a couple of others. The temple was really colourful and decorative and the visit was timed with their noon service so we were able to watch them sing/chant etc. The CuChi tunnels were really interesting. Before/during the Vietnam/American war the Vietnamese constructed kilometers of tunnels stretching across the Saigon/Cambodian border area which allowed them to appear as if from nowhere and attack the Americans without warning and escape from them when necessary. We also saw the homemade contraptions designed to take off a leg/foot or some more gruesome areas. We have also both read The Vets whilst being in Vietnam which follows some American vietnam war veterans as they return to Vietnam in the 1990s which helped give a suprising amount of detail from the American point of view. It would seem that topical book reading is the way forward, fiction or non-fiction. Luckily there are whole bookshops and people wandering the streets selling fake books that getting reading material is not a problem, and not expensive. Plus the books they are choosing to sell are either topical for Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia or are designed to make you contemplate your life/journey, etc. I have seen endless copies of Sophies World, Catch 22, Paulo Coeho and Gabriel Garcia Marquez books!
The day after the Cu Chi tunnels we went on another organised tour, this time for two days to the Mekong Delta. A bus load of us trundled down to the Delta and had a ram packed couple of days - rice paper factory, coconut candy factory, cycling, tiny boats through the canals, traditional food, rice wine, not forgetting the famous floating markets; the list is endless! The boys in the group also managed to get our tour guide very drunk by 10am on 3 beers by playing foosball! However this just led to increasing Vietnamese singing on his behalf... not my favourite genre I have decided. One of the tour guides even decided to sing the day's itinerary, something along the lines of: 'this morning we get up at 6 am and then we have breakfast at 6.30 am.....' sung badly and in immense detail.
We had one last evening in Saigon before getting on a bus to Mui Ne, a beach town, for what was essentially the only allocated beach time of the whole trip (the whole 7 months for me! what are we thinking?). And what a disaster the beach day was. It was only when I stripped down into my bikini that I realised how much it looks like I have some form of skin disease due to the horrendous amounts of mossie bites. Alex managed to turn himself an extremely impressive shade of pink, despite sitting in the shade ALL DAY, and I was attacked by a jelly fish and boy oh boy does that hurt! We threw in the towel after about three hours on the beach and retreated back to the safety of our very nice hostel room ($7) and watched the National Geographic channel. Ironically we watched one of the Lonely Planey authors as he traveresed the globe in search of amazing locations and things for us the watchers to do and not once did he touch upon the amount of time spent in hostel rooms needing sleep/too hot to do anything/broke/sunburnt/etc.
I must just finish this blog with a mention of the beer prices. If you avoid the 'western' places it is perfectly possible to get a glass of beer for 3000-5000 dong. 27,500 dong to the pound means up to 8 or 9 glasses of beer to the pound. Wow! Its pretty drinkable too! So amend the above sentence to when we get home we will be working out how to make amazing iced coffee and drinking only that and cheap beer!
(The food is pretty cheap too....). Until next time.