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Published: November 10th 2015
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When it's pitch black and you wake up and hear a noise but can't tell where it's coming from. It's the middle of the night and you reach out to make sure your sleeping partner is still there and not prowling round the room. And you realise that something is prowling on the roof making scrunchy sounds....and it's only a few feet above your head.... May as well go back to sleep. It's probably only a monkey. Hopefully.
And after that we were still up at 6am to go out and take pictures and upload yesterday's blog. Someone had told us how to work the shower so we actually had hot showers before a lovely breakfast of pancakes, baguettes and fruit.
And then we were off on a bike ride through groves of fruit growing such as durian, bananas, papaya, rose apples, guava, dragon fruit and best of all, rambutan. You can't beat fresh rambutan off a tree so when we saw two it took an English/Scottish combo to hold one while the other leant precariously over a drop. Of course I let the Scot do the dangerous bit!
I think it was the most pleasant bike ride
of my life as we went past smiling people and even got invited into a lemon 'factory' where smiling workers posed for photos. Then I ruined everything by trying to take a picture of a small child. I did ask the mother first but the kid screamed and screamed and I felt so incredibly guilty. Andy felt guilty for me too so he gave the child some money which we later realised was only about 3p....
Later we stopped and walked around a market where we bought some rambutans and jackfruit for everybody to try. The food stalls had all sorts of creatures both dead and alive to buy including squid, frogs, huge shrimps, geese, ducks, chickens as well as rats....yes...rats...yummy?
The nice thing was that people were smiling and not minding us taking pictures. The Vietnamese we salute you. I also had some fresh coconut milk from a young coconut before having it halved to scoop out the flesh. We are now heading for lunch somewhere two hours away but I'm a bit stuffed with fruit; I left the rats....
The market also enabled us to finally change some money and buy some more clothes to
keep us going until our luggage finally turns up.... And it should
be with us tomorrow!! Hopefully.... We are now at another home stay and it's near a river and I've had some delicious eel and soon we're going back out on bikes again!
The garden here goes on for miles and is broken up by small waterways which have rickety bridges to cross. Being as I weigh more than the average Vietnamese myself, we went across one at a time....
We both think this may be our favourite country so far....but I still have one more new country to go to on this holiday.....Claire has two.
Later now. Well that bike ride was an experience! Two million mopeds (well it seemed like it) and various other vehicles in the dark and some crazy Westerners riding bicycles. Hair-raising even with no hair but we somehow made it to the night market. Just be confident we were told and it works....well we all made it back alive anyway! It's now time for yet another meal which looks and smells good....especially compared to me!
It's a 5 am start tomorrow morning to see the floating market at its best; can't wait! If you haven't been to Vietnam yet, put it at the top of your list. You won't regret it.
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