Nha Trang

We arrived in Nha Trang by bus around supper time. Didn't really see too much of the city that night, just walked around a bit looking for supper. It's actually hard to find cheap eats here because the place is FULL of Russians that come here on holiday and drive the price up. The signs are even in Vietnamese and Russian (English if you're lucky).

The next morning we did all the boring travel things that don't get mentioned in blogs like walking across the city in sweltering heat with our big packs on (we were switching to a cheaper hostel) and madly searching for a bus that wasn't full (Tet screwing us over repeatedly). In the end we would stay one night longer in Nha Trang than originally planned because busses are jam packed around the Tet holiday.

That afternoon we rented some bikes and headed out to Po Nagar Cham towers. These were built between the 7th and 12th centuries and 4 of the original 9 towers still stand.

The towers are set on a hillside and give some great views of the Nha Trang harbour full of fishing boats.

Worth mentioning: Jared and I stumbled upon a great spot for lunch- we had bun thit nuong (vermicelli noodles, bbq pork, fresh herbs, fish sauce) and nem phan (roll your own fresh spring rolls with pork). Also ran into an Englishman that told us about a nice beach to check out called Bai Xai.

Delicious food comes out of these metal boxes

After lunch we headed to Thap Ba Mineral and Mud Spa. It was great fun, and a bargain at $15 for the both of us. Had a sit in the mud pool (that smelt like evergreen) and then a long soak in the hot pools. Sorry we don't have pictures, took them with the camera because it's waterproof and those will be in limbo until we get home to the camera cord :s

The next day we took the advice of our English friend and headed to the beach. For $25 we got a cabbie to take us out 30km to the beach, wait 4 hours while we beached and dined on seafood and then drove us back! This place has totally screwed me up for what price to expect out of pretty much everything. Food, transport, hotels, it's all so cheap compared to back home. We lounged on the beach, and had some yummy fresh crab on a little mini BBQ.

Garbage is a real thing here in SE Asia

Day 3 in Nha Trang was spent on a cycling/kayaking tour. In the morning we cycled through some countryside- think rice fields, small villages, and the largest standing Buddha statue in Vietnam. We stopped and had some lovely Vietnamese coffee (epic sugar fest!!) and then after a wee bit more cycling we stopped for lunch. They kept bringing us different courses of food, it was excellent.

Too legit to quit

Rice field on our cycle

 

The afternoon was spent kayaking down the river to where it meets with the sea. Saw the Cham towers again but from a different angle.

The Austrian on our tour that kept insulting the Chinese (also on our tour) to their faces. Made for some hilarious moments, Jared and I just kept smirking at each other. I don't think he was even trying to be mean, just one of those people that lack a filter.

Selfie attempt from the kayak

When we got back into the city we caught a quick bite to eat before getting onto the night bus headed for Hoi An.

 

 

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Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City

So after exploring the Mekong Delta for a couple of days, we ended up in Ho Chi Minh City. It was originally called Saigon, but after the Vietnam War the name was changed to the founder of the Viet Cong. We checked into our hostel and met some weird guys. One was a Vietamese guy who kept talking about Muslim bombs which was weird. The other was a rather stank Dutch guy that was complaining that the beer prices had gone from 5000 - 8000 dong (Yes that's the name of the currency) because of Lunar New Year aka Tet aka Chinese New Year. 21000 dong = 1 US $ so it's so cheap that complaining about it is ridiculous. Later on we talked with an Italian girl who told us a story about being stuck in the aisle of a bus for a 20 hour trip. Most people would be upset, but she thought it was all quite fun and was laughing about it. I've tried to remember this when I get a little annoyed with things. You definitely meet all different kinds of people while traveling.

The next day we just kind of chilled out and walked around to try and secure a bus ticket out. This proved to be rather difficult as most buses were full. Vietamese don't really celebrate any other holiday or their birthday during the rest of the year, so Tet is a huge celebration. Apparently Ho Chi Minh was like a ghost town compared to the rest of the year because most people were out in the countryside celebrating with their families. It still looked pretty busy to me. After a bit we found an overnight bus in two days to take us to Nha Trang.

2015 - The Year of the Goat

That night was like New Year's Eve for us, so we headed down to the river to watch the fireworks that were set to go off at midnight. The streets were lit up with all kinds of different lights and there were flowers everywhere. It was quite pretty.

 

Getting close to the river posed a bit of a problem as the crowds were absolutely huge. Think New Year's Eve in Manhattan on a bit of a smaller scale. We kept following people who were pushing their way through and made it to a decent spot that we could at least breathe in. The fireworks were great, but only lasted around 20 minutes or so.

 

 

Lots of the people there didn't even look at the fireworks except through the video screens on their phones. It was quite ridiculous. I thought it would take us hours to get out of there, but within another 20 minutes most people were gone. It was quite amazing how that many people can get out of one place that fast on scooters.

The next afternoon we decided to check out a couple of the tourist stops. First we went to the War Remnants Museum which was all about the Vietnam War. We definitely learned a lot of what happened over here. Quite disturbing actually. It was the first time that I had really read things that talked about the U.S. being an enemy. It was South Vietnam and the Americans vs North Vietnam (the Viet Cong who were Communists.) The amount of bombs dropped was just crazy. Many of these bombs never detonated, so they are still live and posing a huge risk.

There was a whole section on Agent Orange which was eye opening and quite horrific at the same time. The US and the South used it to kill all the vegetation, so they could see the Viet Cong coming. But it had other very severe consequences. It killed many people from both sides and disfigured many others. It is genotoxic meaning it causes deformations of babies within the womb that can be passed on from generation to generation. We saw the effects of it on people on the street and even in some small children, so it is still occurring some 40 years later. Terrible stuff.

What Agent Orange does to plants.

There was all kinds of guns, tanks, airplanes, bombs, pictures, and stories. It was another one of those eye opening experiences that made me feel very privileged to grow up where I did.

Next, we went to the Reunification Palace. It used to be the home base of the South/Americans. The Viet Cong stormed the gates in April of 1975 which essentially ended the war. It was quite a large place surrounded by a fence with many floors and bunkers. We learned a bit more about the war and decided that was enough of that for the day.

That evening we heard a commotion outside our hostel and went over to the window to where a bunch of backpackers were peering out. They told us that there had just been a knife fight between two Vietamese guys out on the street! One guys had throw a knife, but it hit the other guy handle first in the head. Could have been very bad. It caused a huge back up in traffic. We were just happy to be inside!

The next morning we jumped on the bus to Nha Trang for our next adventure.

 

Bike stand selling squid

Street food eating

Comfortable sleeper bus seats to Nha Trang

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The Mighty Mekong Delta

Hey Guys,

So Jared has filled you in on everything up to and including Phnom Penh, the capital city of Cambodia. Early on our last morning there we boarded a boat bound for Vietnam by river crossing. We probably could have taken a bus for cheaper but wanted the experience of cruising over an international border by water. Which brings us to the first part of the day. After a couple hours we were at the Cambodian border office, so we climbed out of the boat, got our passports stamped and back in the boat. 5 minutes later we're at the Vietnamese border office. Remember when we crossed into Cambodia from Thailand? Well, new border, same scams. Our tour guide ( and I use this term lightly) was collecting passports, Jared looked at me- suspicious of a scam. When he came to us I just asked "what is this for?" He hurriedly just said, 'go in there' motioning towards the sitting room and stopped trying to take our passports. Basically just wanted to get us out of the way so he could keep collecting all the other tourists passports on our boat. Jared had read that this is one of their tricks; they take your passport, run it to the stamping office themselves (although you could totally do this yourself as it's literally the next door over) and then when you want your passport back you have to pay $5. Now $5 doesn't seem like much to us but in this part of the world it is the daily wage for many. So as a result the quasi-legal jobs as tour guides over the borders are very coveted. We ended up waiting in the sitting room for a bit watching really bad Asian tv and then he came back asking us why we hadn't got our passports stamped in yet. Umm, I don't know maybe because you motioned us into the sitting room, because your skills as a guide are severely lacking, or you are trying to prove a point because we wouldn't let you scam us......all of the above? So he gruffly pointed us to the stamping room where this little Vietnamese guy was on autopilot stamping passports like crazy. He stamped ours, scanned them, and off we went. No hiccups with the Visa either, yippee! What's really crazy about this system is that he would be stamping all day, hardly seeing any of the people he's letting into the country. Also, there were nationalities of passports on the desk that weren't on our boat- who do these orphan passports belong to?!? One of the best rules you can live by while traveling is to keep your passport with you...ALWAYS! Seems like common sense but it's funny how you forget this stuff, especially when your tour guide you are supposed to trust tells you something else. Basically I've come to the realization you can be friendly to everyone here while simultaneously trusting no one. Except Jared. I mostly trust him.

Ok so we're back on the boat and all goes smooth all the way to Chau Doc- our first travel stop in Vietnam! This is the first part of our 2 day exploration of the Mekong Delta- 'The Rice Basket of Vietnam.' This is a rather aquatic kind of place, I think the Mekong River branches into 9 rivers that feed out into the sea, so it's full of people making their livelihood off the river, flooded rice paddies, floating markets, etc. Plus all the settlements on dry land- so lots going on. We are learning there is really no such thing as South East Asian countryside in the way we think about it, there are just smaller towns with rice fields squeezed between. That night we went seeking some cheap, authentic food as we pretty much do every night. I had written a list of Vietnamese dishes with translations and I was trying to feverishly make sense of all the food stalls with their dish names written on the front glass. I recognized 'hu tieu' which is basically a thicker type of rice noodle, so we sat down. The people here were super nice, didn't speak a lick of English but after some finger pointing I thought we had ordered two bowls of noodles with beef dumplings. A lady even gave up her seat so we could sit down! We get our food and there is a hunk of meat with the bone still one, I think it was chicken? Some slices of pork, the beef dumplings and to top it off a nice slice of liver on top, all in a soup. No, we didn't eat the liver, but ate everything else until we were stuffed. The lady that gave up her seat was even trying to teach us how to properly eat the noodle soup, there is actually a protocol with the spoon, chopsticks, a small bowl of soy sauce, etc. I think we failed miserably. So we will just chalk that one up to an adventure.

We boarded a bus the next morning for Can Tho, seeing a few things on the way. A fish farm- that basically consists of a floating house with a net underneath and a hole in the floor to get at the fish. We visited a Cham village and watched the ladies weave silk on the loom. The bus took us to Sam Mountanside, a temple built on a hill and when you went inside the temple you could enter into man made caves and wind through to see more shrines. The views over the countryside were pretty.

"Rice Field Green"

 

After all this we took a bus to Can Tho, where our home stay was. Home stays are basically where you stay with a local family and have supper with them. We had to ride on the backs of scooters out there, I was shit scared.

All this on the back of a scooter?!? In the end it was all good, made it there rather uneventfully.

Spring rolls frying for supper that night at the homestay

The next morning we took an early morning boat cruise to the Cai Raing floating market. We ate breakfast on the boat as the sun was rising- just magic.

The floating market is a really cool concept, people live on large boats on a wide part of the river, each one full of one item- garlic, cassava, melon, etc. They live out on the river permanently, even though there is dry land and city right there. Then smaller boats come to buy all the goods they need and bring them back to sell their wares in their home villages.

That afternoon we saw how rice noodles are made. Basically they grind up rice, add tapioca flour and water and then spread that paste on a hot, flat circular pan kind of like cooking a crepe. That is dried out in the sun and then sliced like paper through a shredder. It was sooooo neat!

Rice heading out

Off to dry in the sun

The shredder of rice noodles

We took a walk through the land market, lots of fish, frogs, vegetables, hunks of meat. I just love the craziness of Asian markets. However, it's hard for us Westerners to see the chopped up hunks of meat just basking in the sun, the frogs tied up by elastics, etc. It's a bit of a culture shock.

We arrived that night by bus to Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City. Tet or "Lunar New Year" is coming up and it's the party of the year for the Vietnamese. It's a combination of Christmas, New Years, and everyone's birthdays all rolled into one party. The dates change every year but the zenith this year is February 18th. As we learned travelling through Vietnam- "Tet" basically continues on for a while after that yet. Stores close, buses are full and the locals get day drunk for days straight. Fun times!

 

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