A Journey to Well Known Places

First of all, I hate tours. I started this trip four months ago with an open mind ‘oh, tours have their place too’… and they do, but so does the dentist. Tours drop you at bad restaurants and take you to handicap art factories. You spend almost as much time on a bus as you do seeing anything worthwhile and you pay extra for the luxury of being herded from place to place. So why do I keep doing it? Well, the fact of the matter is sometimes tours provide a bundle of experiences that would be difficult or impossible for your average traveller (me) to put together on their own. We hit rock bottom in Mui Ne. We went on a half day $9 a piece (a freakin’ fortune here) tour of the local sights…..mostly out of boredom. The tour did not help with that. We were chauffered to white sand dunesand red sand dunes. We walked down the ‘fairy stream’, which was pretty but the only fairies we saw were the kids skipping school so they could be our ‘guides’ and beg for money afterwards. And the coup de gras, the Red Canyon. Bum, bum bum bum. Yep 10 foot canyons of red dirt. We paid $18 for this? UGH. After Saigon we thought it would be nice to spend some time in the Mekong Delta before hopping into Cambodia. We consulted the guide books and the internet forums. All roads point to another tour. Yeck. Well, OK. This time we won’t go budget. This time we will go with a good organization and a small group. And we did. We layed out $60 a piece for two nights and three days in the Mekong. Our expectations were high to say the least. The group turned out to be very small….just the two of us and a guide. The first day we took a local bus from Saigon to Mytho. We took a local bus so ‘we could experience first hand how the average Vietnamese travels.’ Well, I have been on public buses before and I can tell you that what I was experiencing first hand the most was the fact that most Vietnamese are about 6 inches shorter than me and the buses are designed with that in mind. So with my knees jammed (JAMMED RIGHT IN THERE TIGHT) into the seat in front of me we set on honking and weaving in and out of traffic on a two lane highway for about three hours. Since we started at 6AM we still had plenty of morning left to be taken to the coconut candy factory, the rice husking factory, and a two hour bike tour (actually pretty nice) of a local island. All this ‘off the beaten track’ activity culminated with us taken to a restaurant frequented only by other suckers on tours. If locals ate there they certainly got a different menu. Food was WAY over priced and was bad to boot. Satisfaction rating–very low. OK, so back on the boat to a cab to another mini bus for three hours to get let off at a gas station in the middle of no where for our home stay. Now it starts to get interesting. We hop into the waiting tuktuk (a motor bike with three wheels and covered benches in the back) go go speeding down a bumpy dirt road. Better. Then we taken not one, but two ferries to some island. For the life of me I could not find it again on the map. Another good sign. We were met after the second ferry by our homestay family and escorted by flash light through a banana grove, down a dirt path to the house. It was a nice house. And by nice I mean comfortable. They had two fish ponds, some fruit trees, a vegetable garden and dragon fruit vines. They also had wooden walls and half the floor was made of packed dirt. Our bed was a low thick table with a straw mat and a two blankets. Now THIS is more of a local experience. The fish hot pot we had for supper was fantastic and even though the room we stayed in could not be considered ‘energy effecient’ we slept under a mosquito net and got very few bites (somewhat of a rarity these days..hello dengue). The next morning we toured the local floating market, went to a brick factory and a buddist pagoda. Back to the brick factory. That looked like really really hard work. Not quite as hard as those poor people I saw carrying big rocks in Emei Shan China, but tiring none the less. They work 7 days a week cutting clay out of the ground, throwing it into a molding machine and baking it for 15 days. All for the princely sum of $2 a day. I wondered what kind of local tour we would have gotten if we had just given our $60 a piece to one of them??? Anyway, cool stuff, but pretty touristy again. We ate a great lunch back at our homestay. It was an activities lunch were the foriegners had to roll and fry their own spring rolls, much to the amusement of everyone. That afternoon we took the slow boat for an hour and half in the pouring rain down the Mekong to Can Tho. This morning it was the rice paper factory, another floating market (this one huge), and another bus to Chou Doc. The floating markets are neat to see, but really once the initial thrill is gone it is just fruit and boats. All in all not a bad tour. It is one that I will remember for some time, even if it was a bit pricey.

Chou Doc is not a bad little town. The internet is slow, it is hot and it rains everyday. But is it also walkable and loaded with good food. They have a pretty big covered market here with fish, animals, vegetables, and fruit. They keep some of the fish in little tubs with two inches of water. When you buy one they lop off part of its face with a knife and gut it with scissors while it squirls. Sometimes though, they just club it and hand it to you. The rats are the most suspect looking while I think the frogs get the worst deal. The market girls have whole buckets of them. They pull one out, alive, cut most of its head off with scissors, and expertly pull all of its skin off before throwing it on what looks like a pizza tray. The skinned bodies kick and some of them sit like you would expect a frog to sit. You can see their little diaphrams pumping air into skinless headless bodies. Not bad in a curry sauce with veggies and rice though.

Through a series of complex calculations (dividing and counting) we came up with a route and a monthly budget that will help us meet our goals. With the extravagent sum of $52 a day for the both of us (actually a little above what Lonely Planet suggests) we wil be able to continue travelling until most of you forget what we look like in person. We have alot of ground we would like to cover and we are not in a particular hurry to cover it. This does not mean that I will not be back for the cat, though, Mom. In a couple days we are going to cross into Cambodia. Crossing borders is very exciting. All new money, language, food, and culture just a few hours away. Neat.

In Hoi An Marc got 2 suites made at Yaly’s. They look great, defiantly worth the extra cost. I got a dress made that I hated and didn’t bother to pick up, but Marc and I did pick up some winter coats for Portland winters. Marc, being a life-long Texan, will really need it. Having lived in Texas the last 5 years, I will need it too. I freeze now if it gets below 70 degrees. My advice on Hoi An - know what you want before you go looking around. Also, you always get what you pay for. A $30 suite is a $30 suite. Vietnam is not a particularly fashionable nation, as I have learned, buy they will make you a copy of anything you want.

We took a miserable bus ride to Nha Trang from Hoi An. We were the last on the bus, got the back seats that didn’t recline, and spent the next 12 hours in utter discomfort. I slept on the guy next to me for a while, who was really quite nice about being drooled on, while Marc didn’t sleep at all. Again, the usually Asian bus experience applies. People puking, vehicles honking, terrible. We got off, found a hotel, went to napping. Nha Trang was less than memorable other than the glorious lobster dinner Marc and I shared on the beach. You just pick out your lobster and they put it on a little grill set up right on the sand. Glorious! We got pick-pocketed by we think 6 women in a group, sucks, but we were drunk and should have known better. Happens. The beach here was not great so we took off for Paradise Resort at Doc Let beach for a week. Spent the whole time doing nothing on a beautiful, relatively isolated beach where the water was fantastically clean. And we got fed 3 times a day. You only had to put up with a crazy old Russian with whom I actaully got into a bit of a tiff with. All was forgiven by the next day. We swam around in the ocean at night and experenced bioilluminesence. You can see stars in the sky and the sea. Amazing.

Back to Nha Trang and on to Dalat. Mountain town, pretty, cheesy. That’s pretty coma cheesy. Not pretty cheesy but it’s that too. Vietnamese come here to honeymoon and Marc and I were repeatedly asked if we had plans to wed there. Have I mentioned that? The first thing anyone asks us is OK, where are you from, how old are you, and then are you married. Of course we are not. Then they ask us when the wedding is. We have started saying “not today.” They look at both of us and ask how old we are again. Sometimes we even get “next time you bring baby.” Or “I hope you to marry soon.” Hmm. I am a bit appreciative of the bluntness of these comments, but it can be a little unsettling - at least at first. I have grown used to being asked personal questions in the first 2 minutes of meeting.

So from DaLat to Muine. Again, puking on the bus. This time bags get handed up the bus and are thrown out of the door. Muine is a resort town, beaches are very nice, meals are expensive. At this point Marc and I ready to get out. Two days later we head to Saigon. We are staying in district 1 and are planning a trip on the Mekong and into Cambodia. Saigon is huge with so many people. I actually really like it - more than any other city in Vietnam. Yesterday we walked a couple of miles outside the backpacker district and into the Chinese one. We stopped at a beer place where we were the only westerners as far as the eye could see. Many people joined us and wanted us to try whatever was on their plate. One thing we have learned is to never say no to food or a toast, which there were many. We have not really had the chance to stray far from the tourist trail as we bought a very cheap open bus ticket, and I would not recommend it. Our time is wrapping here and we are anxious to get on to Cambodia.

Tops of Vietnam:
Sapa’s minority villages
Halong Bay - don’t miss it
Hue Imperial Palace and pancakes
Paradise Beach Resort
Drinking on the cheap in Saigon

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After Hanoi we went on a cruise of famous Halong Bay. It was touristy and great. The tour started with lunch on the boat; which I envisioned as a sea food lunch as the boat rocked gently with the wave ... [Continue reading this entry]