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Ok... I know I am not doing very well with this blog updating thing, but we have been too busy having fun and going around all over the place.
Believe it or not, we have now left Vietnam and are now in Laos, and I am only now getting around to writing something about Vietnam.
Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) The bus journey from Phnom Penh was an easy 7 hour ride, with the border crossing taken care of completely be the bus people, so no hassles! We got to Saigon at about 6:30pm right in the middle of the cheap tourist hotel area, on Pham Ngu Lao road and went straight to the Blue River Hotel, a nice clean and relatively cheap place with really nice people running it, so no hassle with any moto drivers or cyclos. In Vietnam the tuk tuk seems to have dissapeared, and the moto drivers are everywhere... in fact motorcycles are everywhere!!! about 4million of them in Saigon apparently.
Our first meal in Vietnam was Pho, it had to be... it is a noodle soup, generally with beef, and herbs and spices, really nice, alhtough after a while it starts getting boring... the fresh
spring rolls are excellent!
We also noticed the great variety of fruits and fruit juices (more Durian!... the horrible smelling fruit that everyone seems to love around here, including Derek), and I could not resist to have a Guanabana juice (soursop) just like the ones you can have in Colombia.
In Saigon we met up with Tuna (Phungs cousin) for a few drinks and a nice chat, and we visited the Independance Palace, as well as the War Museum, where they had lots of american tanks and airplanes, as well as an exhibition of the horrible bombs and destruction caused during the war with all the experiments the US seemed to carry out on this country. I still don't quite understand that war, and don't think I will.
We did not really see much more of Saigon, and instead we went on a really nice tour along the Meking Delta.
Mekong Delta We left by bus through the crazy Saigon traffic early in the morning. You just can't imagine how these people drive their bikes, swirling and dodging other bikes, and they never even look at their mirrors, or back to see who is coming.... and somehow, they don't crash
too often either.
We got to a little riverside village called Cai Be to go for aboat ride along the Mekong and the river village. They took us to the usual tourist places of coconut sweets, rice paper making, and here we had our first meeting with the powerfull snake wine!!! The bottles are decorated with a cobra, a scorpion and some ginseng root inside, and when the man asked if some wanted to try it, I was stright up there.
A little shot glass with some amber liquid and some tiny little ants swimming drunk inside (they were the least of my worries!)... I took it stright down, and it was just like a strong spirit (rum, vodka or aguardiente, not too different), but when I looked into the jar where the glass came from, there was a also a big black bird with feathers and all... disgusting! but it was too late by then.
We continued on the boat to have lunch by the river in a more quiet and natural area, and then went on to Vinh Long, where we got the bus to go to Can Tho, a fairly large and ugly town by the Mekong.
We stayed the night in Can Tho, and went for a nice walk along the river and had some good food, but the town was nothing special... a lot of motorbikes again!
The next day we woke up early and went on another small boat to visit a floating market on the river. This was a lot nicer, with people buying and selling stuff from fruit, rice, breakfast, beer and bread... pretty much everything.
After that we followed the river into some small branches where the vegetation got a lot thicker and it was beatiful, with a few houses scatered along in some places, and some people fishing here and there... it felt more like what we imagined the Mekong Delta to be.
We returned to Saigon be boat and bus... and arrived just at rush hour, where the motorbikes just covered all the road and most of the sidewalks too.
The next day after sleeping lots at our Blue River Hotel, we organised our route to the north of Vietnam, and did not do much, since it was raining all day, it was a good time to have a relaxing day with not a lot to do. The next
day we got the bus to Nha Trang for a long 11 hour journey.
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Sergio
non-member comment
Nice pics
Hey guys, Looks like you are having a really nice time. The traffic is out of this world isn't it? Can you cross the street by yourselves now???? The war was really strange and destroyed a lot of the country. You can see when you are traveling north by bus, there are bomb craters all over the place. Many of them are being used for shrimp and rice production. If you can don't miss the small city of Hoi-An in the center. It is amazing. Have fun guys. sergio