Southern Vietnam

Welll....I have a lot to catch up on! I suppose I should start from the beginning...

Hue
Another big city, but delightfully laid back compared to Hanoi. Much less honking, a pretty river running through the middle and a nice backpacker area with delicious restaurants. We only spent one day and night there, but enjoyed it. We walked around old Hue across the river and then hired a little "cyclo" (little cart towed by a bicycle) to drive us around and show us some temples and ruins and things, since it was soooo hot. We saw the citadel, which is a walled in area of temples and ruins. The ruins were due to American bombing. Wandered around some markets too.

Hoi An
Probably my favourite place in Vietnam, this was a very cute little old town with streets lined with tailors (TONS - this is THE place to get custom-made clothes, and there are about 200 tailors...don't know how they all make money!), restaurants, art and lantern shops. It had a very relaxed feel, which was much needed for us. We stayed in a nice hotel with a pool and spent much time relaxing by it during the very hot afternoons. We ate some amazing "Hoi An specialty" food too. My favourite was Cau Lao, a dish with home made noodles, pork, fresh spices and crunchy chip things. I ate it for almost every meal, and unfortunately never saw it again outside of Hoi An! There were also delicious Vietnamese savoury pancakes with meat and sprouts and other veggies, which you wrapped in lettuce and then rice paper, and dipped in a fish sauce.

Mike and I both got clothes made, of course. Mike got a suit made, which turned out to be a bit of a nightmare because at first they made it much too small. Fortunately we had a full other day and a half so we had time to demand changes, and in the end it was pretty decent. I tended to just try on clothes the tailors had on display, and ended up getting a few dresses and skirts and shorts. We spent two nights and three days there, or was it three nights and 4 days? I can't remember. It was really nice though.

I forgot to mention, we caught a few overnight buses along the way down South and they were insanely futuristic. They had three rows of narrow bunk bed type things, but one person's feet were in a little pocket under the other person's nearly fully reclined bed. It was a bit cramped (especially for Mike) but we actually slept quite well on them. I did, at least :). Mike spent his first night on one spooning with two other Canadian guys haha. (Usually there is an aisle between each row, but not at the very back!)

Mui Ne
We skipped Nha Trang, which seemed to us to be like a big touristy Honolulu, and headed straight for quieter Mui Ne. We splurged on a nice beach front room and spent a few days relaxing on the beach, eating and drinking cheap beer. We had wanted to go kite surfing or seadooing, but it was surprisingly expensive ($50/hour for kite surfing, and $60/hr for seadoo).

Ho Chi Minh City a.k.a Saigon
Saigon was quite awesome. A more relaxed, neon, less honking version of Hanoi. We stayed in a very narrow guesthouse down a very narrow alley/road thing (only wide enough for a motorbike). At night we stopped at a local beer place, which was basically a bunch of tables set up on a sidewalk, and drank "bia hoi" (fresh beer, verry low percentage but tasty) with a cool American who had been living in Saigon for 9 months and a bunch of his Vietnamese friends. Bia hoi was 12000 D per litre...i.e. Mike and I drank 5L for about $3!

Next day we went to the War Remnants Museum, which was a museum with lots of pictures and things from the war between Vietnam and the states. Very very disturbing, with very graphic pictures, especially of incredibly deformed kids who were born after the US sprayed toxic gases to kill all Vietnam crops. Definitely an eye opener. We walked back to the hotel and stopped at various local (cheap!) bakeries, electronic stores and markets. We really enjoyed the day.

Mekong Delta
Had a great two day tour of the Mekong Delta, despite a few hiccups which will discuss later. The Mekong Delta basically is a giant network of rivers and deltas/islands/the land near the river banks. It obviously has very fertile soil, so there's lots of agriculture. A lot of the people there are very poor though, and live in little stilt houses along the river bank and bathe/dump trash/swim/transport their goods via the river. The first day we took a boat to an island and stopped at a few cool places there. The first was a bee keeper/honey harvesting place, and we got to sit down and try a few honey candies (such as ginger (gross), peanut brittle (delicious) and some other little round thing I am not sure of...) and honey and lemon tea. Mike tried a snak shot too, which he says was "NOT GOOD". Apparently it had a very long lasting after taste that was even worse, and he actually ate ginger candies (which he also didn't like) to get rid of it. By the way, the snake shot was a snake preserved in some sort of alcohol. They also had scorpion liquor too. Gross.

Then we went to a fruit selling place and got to try several different fruits such as jack fruit, which is one of the largest fruits in the world, and looks like a large, roundish green bumpy thing from the outside. The inside has little orange sections with pits inside. I decided it tasted similar to juicy fruit gum, somehow. While we ate we got to listen to a Vietnamese band play traditional music with all sorts of crazy stringed instruments. Mike discovered that country music is no longer his least favourite. There were lots of clashing notes and the singing was a bit strange, but it was still cool to experience once. Then we got paddled in a little row boat for half an hour through some of the small waterways between the islands, which was very pretty. We also went to a coconut candy making place and got to see how it was made and taste it - quite delicious! That night we stayed in a hotel in Can Tao, which was actually a very large city. We spent the night wandering and found a crazy multi-floored grocery store - the third floor was an arcade! It was packed with people too. Also found some of the cheapest internet ever...3000 dong per hour (i.e. about 15 cents).

Next day we hopped on a boat and went on a tour of the floating market at Can Tao. Tons of farmers pile their boat full of one type of fruit and sell it for wholesale prices. They display what they are selling but hanging one fruit from a very tall upright rod. Then we stopped by a vermicelli noodle making factory, which was a family run business using very traditional methods. First they mix crushed rice with tapioca and boil it over a fire, then spread it like a crepe to create a rice paper type thing, then let the paper dry in the sun on bamboo mats, and then slice it into thin noodles. Very little went to waste - rice husks were burned to fuel the fire, and could then be sold to farmers (in their blackened form) to make food for livestock and possibly fertilizer. We also stopped at a rice husking/grinding factory.

Unfortunately a few things didn't go according to plan as our travel agent had told us it would, and the tour guide told us he wouldn't drop us off at the bus station as we were promised (we wanted to catch a bus down to Rach Gia to get to Phu Quoc) since it was too far from the tour bus route (8km). But he helped us get a more expensive bus to the hotel at least, and we ended up sharing an air con'd van with a broken bench to Rach Gia with some other cool travelers (who we later hung out with at Phu Quoc). We were a little worried since some things already weren't going as our travel agent promised, especially since we also booked ferries to and from Phu Quoc with her and a bus to Siem Riep (some of which we didn't have tickets for yet), but everything ended up working out very smoothly.

We didn't do much in Rach Gia except use it as a port to Phu Quoc. It was very un-touristy and no one spoke English, our hotel included. But we managed to find a post office and mail some things (although mailing stuff in Communist countries is apparently a huge pain in the ass...they check everything you are sending very carefully and make you document it all in great detail...and they didn't speak a word of English!) and we had some tasty vermicelli from a roadside vendor.

Phu Quoc
Phu Quoc was really nice - an undeveloped gorgeous beach island. We stayed in a great little place on the beach with really excellent staff. Our favourite, Hao (sp?), served us beers on the beach in our lawn chairs and got us to teach him some English phrases. And there were tons of dogs running around, including 3 cute puppies, which I loved. The bungalow we stayed in was really nice, and the resort had a beachfront restaurant which served great food.

We spent the first two days exploring the island along its undeveloped dirt roads via motorbike. Day 1 we went to Sao Beach, which is a gorgeous beach with pristine, calm turquoise waters, white sand and palm trees. We stopped at a fishing village in the south (the least touristy place in Vietnam thus far), which smelled pretty bad. (I think due to all the dried seafood sold along the road?) Day 2 we road up North along some slightly crazier, bumpy roads. We spent some time at a secluded beach where we saw not one other person. It was very nice, except I stepped on a sea urchin (I think, it left a bit of a whitish spine in my foot at first) which was fairly unpleasant. Fortunately it didn't bleed/sting much after I got out of the water. Then, as we drove up to the Northern most fishing village, we found out our bike's tires were flat. We had managed to pull over right in front of a motorbike mechanic so he fixed our tire. However, shortly after we left, our other tire blew, so we had to drive back and get that one fixed. Then again about 5 minutes down the road, the back tire blew again (this time the valve patch just blew straight off...perhaps a crappy tube or they overfilled the tire?) It was a VERY frustrating experience (although the locals, who were very difficult to communicate with because of the language barrier, thought it was hilarious) and we ended up not getting home until 6pm, but we had a very nice dinner/drinks with the friends we met previously afterward, which made up for it. The next day we abstained from the motorbike and spent the whole day relaxing on the beach. It was great.

The next morning we caught a ferry to Ha Tien and then a bus to Cambodia...more on that later!