Easy Rider!

Asia
March 29th 2010

Published: April 23rd 2010

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Party in Na Trang

here you can see some of the people i was traveling with at the time plus one randomer that i met on the night

We arrived at Na trang after a rather grueling night bus, due to windy roads and beds too short for even me we were all a little lacking in sleep. After settling down in our hotel we headed to the beach with the guys from Halong. I made the mistake of sunbathing a little and got extremely burnt. After using almost an entire bottle of aftersun we all headed out for dinner and drinks, we ate at the green apple bar where you got a free cocktail bucket with dinner, this meant that due to the long wait for our food we were all fairly drunk before dinner got started!

Floating Bar

The next day we went on a boat tour of the islands around Na trang , snorkeling, visiting the most tacky aquarium in the history of aquariums, karaoke, and a floating bar where everyone jumped into the water with rubber rings and amassed around a little man sat in his floating bar handing out free shots. The major surprise of the day was that the band which consisted of most of the crew members was actually brilliant. Had a lovely day but had to stay completely covered up

Not quite mermaids

haha more from the tackiest aquarium!

due to the sunburn and even then i managed to burn my forearms quite badly. It didn't matter a few unknown shots from the floating bar and i felt as merry as anyone else. Although i was asked by a fellow passenger if I'd been pushed in, that made me laugh!
Two days later and our last day in Na Trang and we all went to VinPearl, an amusement park on an island, getting a cable car over we arrived at a sort of fairground/ arcade center/water park that was almost entirely empty. Yes i know this was not an overly cultural thing to be doing but Na Trang is not an overly cultural place and the water park was brilliant 😊. That evening we had the 'last supper' with the guys from Ha-long bay 😞 as they all needed to leave much earlier than us to catch flights.

Easy Rider

Kiwi and I had organized to go on an easy rider tour the day after they left, comprising of three days on the back of bikes, traveling up to the central highlands, along a little bit of the Ho Chi Minh trail and then down to Dalat.
The motorbike

End of school

During the easy rider tour we had breaks to stretch our legs this was the result when we walked past a school which was finished for the day!

trip was a brilliant experience, we visited everything from places making bricks, to rubber farms. Coffee farms where hundreds and hundreds of butterfly's swarmed around, another farm where we got to hold a giant python, drink scorpion wine and pick up scorpions ( i didn't touch the scorpions) and silk factory's and mushroom farms.
We also rode an elephant and stopped at the biggest waterfall in Vietnam where we came across a bunch of Vietnamese teachers having a barbeque who insisted we join and proceeded to get us drunk on terrible tasting shots whilst offering us delicious food. They were such friendly lovely people that it really made our day!
Finishing in Dalat on the third day we were all exhausted i have no idea why as all we had to do was sit on the back of the bike but there you go. Dalat is a very strange city, nothing like most of the places we have visited so far its know locally as honeymoon city because of it's pretty flowers and cooler climate. There was very little to see other than the crazy house (which was pretty intriguing) and a waterfall both of which i saw the second

elephants

Me and Kiwi off on our elephant trip

day.

Mu ne

Moving on from Dalat and saying goodbye to our easy rider friend Tom we headed South to Mu ne we didn't realize this was more of a strip of resorts but we did get to stay at a place with a swimming pool which was utter luxury! 😊 We did a jeep tour with a Canadian and his Vietnamese girlfriend the second day. He's a Customs officer which i suppose was helpful as i now know what not to do to avoid getting picked for 'random' strip searches, funny day. We walked up this little river called fairy river and about halfway up were told by our little child guides that there was very little point going any further as it was all the same i think usually the waterfalls a little more impressive but it is the dry season. These little guides proceeded to get angry when there very generous tip wasn't enough! ha. We carried onto the white dunes which were so much effort to get up too but so much fun to slide down on plastic sheets we'd rented from the kids at the bottom.

Ho Chi Minh and the Mekong Delta

Eddie Murphy

This was our crazy guide! i couldn't bring myself to hold these they were just too nasty i tried the scorpion wine though.

had to go via Ho Chi Minh city to head to the Mekong even though we'd been hoping to skirt round it. We stayed for just one night the first time popping to the cinema to watch Alice in Wonderland with Jonney Depp and his flutterwagging.

The Mekong Delta

We headed down to the Mekong on a nice air-conditioned bus the next day and proceeded to be dumped at MY Tho in the middle of a rounder bout. After a fairly sharpish assessment of our surroundings we decided we might as well move on to Can Tho where the floating markets were and as a result got ripped of and ended up sitting on those little red plastic chairs at the front of a locals bus ridiculous but funny. At least the people on that one were really rather nice. Then halfway through we got pushed of that bus and herded to another where we had to climb over what appeared to be huge bags of rice or god knows what to the back where we sweltered for the remaining few hours. I have to admit it was an interesting journey and largely my own fault as i'd wanted

Sunrise on the mekong

Of on our way to the floating markets at the crack of dawn

to avoid an organized tour.
In Can Tho we visited the floating markets and went on a beautiful tour round some of the deltas waterways, getting to watch how the locals live as we slowly meandered past was lovely. We moved on back to Ho Chi Minh the next day as there was little else to do in Can tho, this time though we got a nice comfortable air conditioned bus for half the price 😊.
In Ho Chi Minh the second time we got to do all the cultural stuff we'd had no time for previously such as the Cu Chi Tunnels where we learnt a little more about the Gorilla warfare and try out the absurdly small tunnels. It was amazing how the Cu Chi Gorillas lived and the War museum which we visited later brought home the brutality of the war with the atrocities committed making both sides seem far removed from Human beings. That museum is the most visually disturbing i have ever seen due to journalists being able to enter the country one of the most disturbing i saw was an American soldier literally holding up half a corpse with one hand. Despite the tear

Sidestreams of the Mekong

This was the most beautiful part of the day watching huge dragonfly's skim the water and gently floating between the overhanging branches.

jerking pictures there was a lot of information to be gleamed about the chemical weapons used during the war.
Whilst staying in Ho Chi I also got the chance to visit independence palace the site of the surrender of the democratic party. An intriguing building the basement was where all the interesting stuff lay, with massive amounts of machinery for radio broadcast, deciphering and so many phones that it resembled an old fashioned call center!
So having had a wonderful time in Vietnam it was off to Cambodia for the next stretch of my journey.

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