Vietnam

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Hanoi
I arrived in Sapa in the Northwest of Vietnam on the 21st December and spent a day there while waiting to catch the night train to Hanoi which I duly did. Hanoi was a bit of a shock to the system when compared with China given the volume of mopeds flying around all over the place and the fact that there were a huge amount of Westerners wandering about - I was no longer a novelty. The mausoleum containing Ho Chi Minh's remains was my first port of call and after seeing both him and Lenin (I missed out on Mao in Beijing) I've decided against introducing Communism to Ireland lest I end up being stuffed and displayed in O'Connell St. - the "stiff in the skiff"??? I spent Christmas day in Hanoi which turned out to be great as I went to a Vietnamese restaurant with a couple of Israeli's i'd met in Sapa (who don't actually celebrate Christmas) - the food was fantastic and half the cost of the cold chicken and ham that most of the people in my hostel had signed up to. A day or so later I went to Halong Bay for a few days, the weather unfortunately wasn't great but the scenery as well as seeing fishernen going about their daily business was still amazing. After that it was back to Hanoi for New Years Eve.

Hue
I had hoped to go back up north to Sapa to do some trekking and to visit the minority villages but the weather was getting worse rather than better so I jumped on the train for Hue which is about half way down the Vietnam coastline and very near the 17th parrallel where Vietnam was divided prior to the Vietnam war. Hue was the capital from 1802 until 1945 and as a result contains impressive emperor tombs as well as the citadel where they resided. Unfortunately, the weather was no better than Hanoi's so while the tombs and so on were very atmospheric in the rain it was nigh on impossible to capture them in a photograph. It was from here that I also did a tour of the demilitarised zone (DMZ) which was a strip of land 5km wide on each side of the Ben Hai river where Vietnam was split in 1954. Despite the name. this so called DMZ zone was where a lot of the actual fighting took place although even being at the main sites such as the Vinh Moc tunnels which were buit up to 23 metres underground it was still difficult to imagine what it must have been like a little over 40 years ago.

Danang
I left Hue early in the morning with the intention of stopping off in Danang to visit the Champa museum and than continuing my journey to Hoi An but the railway service had other ideas as a carriage became derailed and we were stuck for 6 hours while it was repaired. I arrived in Danang late that evening in the pouring rain trying to find some accomodation and wondering why on earth I'd decided to come here in the first place as the town wasn't very appealing. The answer came the following morning when I finally got to the Champa museum which contains artefacts from the Hindu orientated Champa people that date from the 7th to the 15th centuries. It was relatively small but contained some amazing exhibits and as soon as I entered the difficulties from the day before all but vanished.

Hoi An
Despite being very much on the tourist trail Hoi An is a very pleasant place to spend a few days. It is also a shoppers paradise with tailor made suits and dresses being done up in as little as 24 hours for an average cost of 50 euros (I've decided to wait until I go to Bangkok to get mine ..... a suit that is!). The food here is also amazing and there are cookery classes in abundance, one of which I attended with great gusto. From Hoi An I did a day trip to the Champa site of My Son which is a UNESCO world listed heritage site and where many of the artefacts in the Champa museum in Danang were found. It was also a VC base during the Vietnam war so many of the temples were unfortunately damaged and/or destroyed by American bombing.

Quang Ngai
Not many tourists visit Quang Ngai which was partly why I came here and it showed almost immediately as the people smiled and waved "hello" as I walked up the street. 15km away, the site of the infamous My Lai massacre is located. Why are places that have seen such horror always so pretty? Here, on March 16th 1968, 504 civilians, mostly women and children, were slaughtered by revenge seeking American GI's on the pretext that the village was VC. Not a single shot was fired against the Americans during this time.

Nha Trang
Famous for its seafront and scuba diving, Nha Trang was my next port of call. The weather had improved considerably but it was still very windy and not suitable for swimming etc. Just spent a couple of days here visiting the Po Nagar Cham towers (a much smaller version of My Son) and the Long Thanh photography gallery which has some amazing black & white shots of some of the minority peoples in the area.

Buon Ma Thout and Buon Jun
It was time to head back to the hills and so I went inland to Buon Ma Thout and immediately caught a bus to the Mnong minority village of Buon Jun. Full of longhouses on stilts with pigs, chickens and dogs sleeping underneath I was the only westerner in the area so ended up with a longhouse all to myself which was very pleasant if a little surreal. Random walks down country roads were amazing and gave a real taste of Vietnamese country life as farmers were very busy ploughing and sowing rice for the next harvest and the people especially the children were very friendly waving and shouting hello all the time. One night here was plenty however and the following day I caught a bus back to Buon Ma Thout and boarded another one to the town of Buon Don.

Buon Don and a walk on the wild side
My reason for going to Buon Don was to visit another minority village as well as using the town as a gateway to Yok Don National park which is famous for the amount of wildlife there including elephants, tigers, leopards and bears. Every few houses seemed to have a monkey chained outside or in a cage for what purpose I don't know and there were clusters of elephants chained in small groups for the use of tourists. It was very weird in the morning when as I was tucking into my noodles in an outdoor eaterie an elephant with its guide sitting just behind it's head ambled by. I was trying to get a guide to take me trekking through the park (it is a legal as well as a sensible requirement to do so) but the tourist office guide who said she spoke English didn't have a word of it so I went further inland as I had heard that there was another tourist office there. I ended up in what seemed to be a resort that had gone out of business - weeds grew everywhere, there were dead leaves in the pool and the place was deserted except for the dozen or so staff who were very pleased to see me. The place was a great location all the same and there being no guided tours or anything of the sort to speak of I gave up on that idea and went for a cycle around the area making sure that I stuck to the main roads which was the safe thing to do or so it seemed .........

Going downhill very rapidly and with my bike making a tremendous racket I spotted an elephant eating about 10 yards in from the side of the road. It had clearly heard me but carried on munching away. On closer inspection the beast was huge with magnificent tusks and I assumed it was chained like all the other ones that I'd already seen. Naturally, I stopped about 20 yards away for a photo and just as I was taking the picture it suddenly turned around raising its trunk in a sort of defiant gesture but didn't let out a roar (thanks be to God). Despite my racket on the bike it hadn't heard me after all and when I saw it moving a few feet to the side I knew that it was no chained elephant! For whatever reason my heart never missed a beat as we stared at each other for for a minute or so while I gingerly put my camera away. Than it took one step backwards and I did the same whilst keeping my eyes fixed on him. Then he moved to the side and "hid" behind a very small bush that was no bigger than myself. It was an hilarious sight and I knew than that it was more afraid of me than I of him (must be the tiger in me!) so turning my bike slowly around while continuing to look I peddled back whence I came. After that episode I decided it was best to head back to the resort and take my chances in the leaf infested swimming pool. Not even the small lizards in my bathroom or the probabble monkey running over my forest bungalow bothered me that night ....... .

Buon Ma Thout to Dalat
The next day I made my way back to Buon Ma Thout, which I didn't mind in the least as I'd found a place that did amazing spring rolls which I seemed to be eating for breakfast, dinner and tea. Once there, I booked a motorbike tour with a tour group called easyriders. I had heard about them from one of my Israeli friends I'd met in Hanoi and although fairly expensive at $75 per day I trusted my pals judgemnet and took the plunge. It didn't dissapoint in the slightest, I spent 3 days touring through minority villages and saw plenty of the hidden Vietnam that I could not have possibly seen on my own. On my first day we went to Dray Sap waterfalls and stopped at a coffee farm on the way to our accomodation. I had thought that Bang (my guide) would have pre-arranged all the places that we were visiting but practically everywhere we went he just simply pulled in, said a couple of words to whoever was there and let me walk around and take a couple of pics. The coffee farm in question ceased all work when I came in as it was the first time the owner had ever spoken to a westerner. First came the tea, than the beers and when the farmer invited me to stay the night with his family I tried to fire Bang! It was much the same for the next couple of days as we visited tea, banana and silk farms as well as other villages along the route. Definately one of the highlights of my time in Vietnam.

Dalat
We arrived in Dalat a couple of days before Tet (Vietnamese New year), and the easyrider group were having their party the day after we arrived to which Bang invited me. I was expecting there to be other westerners there as well as the easyriders but I was the only one so I felt very privelaged at having been invited. The festivities kicked off at 11.30am and less than 3 hours later it was all over as all the Vietnamese were legless. I wasn't too far off it myself as being the only westerner I was "encouraged" to give a toast at each of the 6 tables there which basically consisted of downing a jug of beer at each one.

Ca Tien National park
Having learned from my mistakes at Yok Don I booked a tour with a guy from Dalat to Ca Tien National park which is just north of Saigon/Ho Chi Minh city. It took 5 hours to get there by motorbike but the place was amazing as we did a five mile trek to an area called crocodile swamp which contains the indigineous siamese crocodiles. We did manage to see one in the evening but having being told that the best time to see them in the morning was 6am we arose to discover that we were too late as we had missed the early dawn. A couple of us took one of the boats and went for a spin around the lake looking at the multitudes of bird life etc. which was very nice. Afterwards, we trekked back to the main centre and saw a couple of wild monkeys in the trees which was great. On the way to our accomodation we noticed another one near our lodging and I approached taking pics as I went. The monkey turned and actually came closer and than made a run for me which I scared off by stepping forward and swinging my small pack at him much to the delight of my guide - I'm going to have to stop going to these wild areas ............ . We went for another hike later on and went to an enclosure containing indigineous bears that had been freed from captivity. It was the official New Year that night and the local community invited us for beer and food which was very nice. It was during a converstaion there with one of the English rangers that I discovered that there are 4,500 bears still in captivity and that this was the first camp of its kind in Vietnam. From the sounds of it though they are doing a really marvellous job and you could see from the mannerisms of the ranger the amount of job satisfaction he gets from doing work such as this. The following day was Tet so I had to leave very early to catch the bus to Saigon.

Saigon
I thought it would be interesting to see what Tet would be like in Saigon. Unfortunately for me it was more crowded (albeit colourful) because all of Vietnam was on holiday and most of the markets and large shopping centres were closed. The one saving grace was that all the museums were open so I went to the War Remnants museum which as well as having a gruesome display of pictures from the effects of agent orange has a fascinating montage of photographs taken by journalists who were killed in the war. After a few days I left to go travelling along the mekong delta.

Mekong Delta
I booked a day trip from Saigon (without doing the return leg) and this brought me to the heart of the mekong. Spent a few days there travelling along the myriad of inland waterways and staying in homestays on route. The highlight of any trip to the mekong are the floating markets where people literally buy and sell from boats. Tet wasn't quite over so while the markets were still interesting they weren't as busy as they might have been. Moral of the story: If you're travelling to Vietnam don't come here during Tet!

Phu Quoc
With all of this travelling a few days R&R by the beach was in order so my final destination in Vietnam was the island of Phu Quoc which is off the west coast of the country and very close to Cambodia. I met a couple of Aussies and an American on the bus on the way there and so they became my companions for the four days. The island is still relatively underdeveloped and it hasn't as a result been overwhelmed by tourists. We had a ball the day we hired scooters and went travelling around, visiting a pearl factory and taking a boat trip. As well as that I finally got back under the water again and did a day's Scuba diving which was great. Thoroughly refreshed, actually not really as we did the dog on it on our last night so I was dying as I boarded the boat back to the mainland, I headed to the border town of Chau Duc where I boarded a slow boat that would take me up the Mekong and into Pnomh Penh, the capital of Cambodia.

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Photos

Sapa Market
This is what happens to tourists who take an interest in some of the fabrics

Sapa
Drink made from dead bumble bees and their nest - tasted a bit like poitin.

Hanoi - wreckage of a downed B52
The wreckage has now been classified as a monument in memory of the victims of the 1972 Christmas bombing campaign