Round the World ’06-’07

Its been a while since I added to the blog, but the internet in Cambodia is really slow! Saigon was great, I really liked the city, even with the crazy traffic! I visited the war remnants museum which was very interesting, if not a little depressing. I was staying in a tiny little room at the top of someones house, down a side alley! They were really nice people though and the room was OK really, and cheap!

I also went on a day trip to the Cu Chi tunnel system where the comunist guerrillas fought in the war. The tunnels were tiny! There is no way I could have got into the tunnels that they used in the war! Fortunately for me though there is a 150m section that has been widened for fat tourists! Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t stand more than 30m of that even! It was really horrible, I don’t think a job in mining would suit me at all. There is a shooting range where you can fire a lot of weapons, 2 americans paid $60 for 50 rounds on a machine gun, but I made do with 10 shots on an AK-47. It was much more fun than crawling in the dirt!

I left Saigon on a 2 day boat trip up the Mekong to Phnom Penh. The trip was really good, we saw a coconut candy factory, fish farms and lots of floating markets. The final trip from the border to Phnom Penh was on a long thin boat, that was more like an oven!!! Everybody was just sitting on the roof, or hanging on to the sides because it was too hot inside!

 

I arrived in Dalat with a huge hangover, as a result of my last night out with the people from Scuba zone in Nha Trang! We went to a kind of Vietnamese street pub called bia hoi, where you sit on tiny plastic chairs in the street and drink their home brew beer with a big glass of ice to keep it cool. A big jug of Bia Hoi is 50p! Scuba diving was excelent, and I am now a fully qualified advanced open water scuba diver!

Dalat is up in the mountains quite close to the Cambodian border. The weather here is a lot cooler than on the coast or in Saigon. The scenery around is lovely.

Today I went on a minibus tour of the surrounding area. The first place we went was to an ethnic minority village of the Lat people. We spoke to the head tribesman, and even drank some rice wine which was fermenting in a big pot.

Ater that we went to a coffee plantation, and a mushroom farm, and a really interesting silk factory. We were taken to a waterfall where you could climb down behind the water, It was really good.

We were taken for lunch in the market in the middle of Dalat. The food was nice, and really cheap. I had beef noodle soup, for 12000 dong which is about 50p!  

This afternoon we visited the ‘crazy house’ which was like something from Alice in Wonderland. Very strange, and very out of place in Vietnam! After that we went to a pagoda which was nothing special.

I am leaving for Saigon tomorrow morning at 7:30 am, so I will just get something to eat and then get an early night. I have posted more photos, so check the other website.

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