Where’s Megan?

What do you get when I put off blogging for 2 weeks? One big post about Vietnam! So here we go…

I started in Ho Chi Minh City (sometimes known as Saigon), and worked my way north. HCMC is a fairly big city, jam-packed with motorbikes.

Did a little sightseeing around town, went to a big market and checked out the War Remnants museum, basically just a big photo exhibition of the horrors of the “American War”. After leaving there thoroughly disgusted and depressed, I visited the Reunification Palace, which is pretty boring unless you’re into old communist-era buildings and their vintage furnishings.
(…which I’m not, so no pictures)

Leaving HCMC, I stopped by Nha Trang, a definitive beach town with… oh, look.. Snorkeling! Yay! I spent a couple days there, checking out the snorkeling scene. The visibility wasn’t as good as other places I’ve been, but the habitat was more rocky so everything was different, something like this:

(How did I get this picture? Secret revealed below.)

I saw some several pufferfish (no puffing, though), 3 little pipefish (imagine seahorses stretched out), and a beautiful moray eel! No pics, but it was about 3ft long, purple, and swimming between rocks… very cool! It looked nothing like this one, thankfully:

The other popular thing to do in Nha Trang is the “Boat Trip”, a cheap day tour that takes you (along with about 400 others) around to a few islands, where you’re offered cheesy activities, like snorkeling surrounded by hoards of people and toy snorkels,

a “floating bar”,

an “entertainment program” (i.e. karaoke by the boat crew)

and a visit to a small but decent aquarium (where I got the above pictures from their coral reef exhibit). But hey, the trip was only $5!

I continued north from the beach town to Hoi An, an old historic-ey city with slightly less hassle from street vendors and tons, like around 400, tailor shops, where you can get custom suits made in 24 hrs! I never got around to seeing many of the historic sights, mainly because it was extremely hot when I was there, with the sun really intense.

A random street scene:

Some noodles I ate:

Along the river at night:

A fishing boat further down the river:

I visited a place called “My Son”, an important site sort of like Angkor Wat, but made of brick and significantly more ruined (thanks to all those wars and all). There were some headless statues, too.

From Hoi An I took a sleeper bus up to Hanoi, the capitol of Vietnam. The city is still big but feels a little more “quaint” than HCMC.. there’s a big lake in the center, lots of shady trees and interesting streets.

Also, early in the morning, people go outside to exercise on the sidewalk, or by the lake like this guy. It’s quite funny to watch the variety of improvised aerobic styles.

I visited the Ho Chi Minh Museum to get my dose of propaganda.

The exhibits were fairly well done, but unfortunately they were often too abstract for me to get the symbolism. HCM himself is well-preserved and on display nearby, but he was closed when I tried to visit him. Oh well, hopefully I can view another dead guy when I get to Beijing (what is it about wanting to look at dead Communists?)

I also visited an interesting Women’s Museum, and went to a Vietnamese Water Puppetry Show, which was actually quite cool! The floating puppets are maneuvered by people standing in the water behind the screen. My pictures are crap, of course, but they did some impressive stuff with the puppets, like dancing dragons shooting fireworks from their mouths, and all accompanied by an orchestra of instruments I’ve never seen before.

A random street scene from Hanoi:

I took a 2-day trip to nearby Halong Bay, where I stayed on a boat and sailed between the hundreds of karst mountains scattered in the bay.

We did kayak a bit, but the main draw is just laying on the roof of the boat looking at these mountains.

Traveling in Vietnam is interesting because it’s long and narrow, so half of the people you meet are traveling in the same direction you are. I ended up seeing the same people all the time, which was fun, but I also wanted to get off the main tourist path a bit. So I went to a small city about 2 hours south of Hanoi, where I took a daytrip to nearby Tam Coc caves. Basically you’re rowed in a little boat along a canal and under 3 caves. The caves themselves weren’t all that exciting, but the canal trip was beautiful, with karst formations like Halong Bay among rice paddies.

These people are collecting something from the river. Ten points if you can guess what it is.

I took a motorbike with driver to visit the caves, about 20km outside of town, and we passed some great scenery along the way.

Water buffalo:

My driver modeling a lily pad hat:

And then I headed out of Vietnam and into Laos, on a nightmare journey that took 26 hours, 7 different vehicles, 1 night in a truck stop, and a long list of harsh words for the travel agency that “arranged” it (but apparently just put us on the first bus and left us to figure out the rest). Thankfully, I was with a group of other travelers, so we kept each other sane and made it to Vientiane, Laos, relatively intact. Here’s my final lodging in Vietnam. This lady was very glad to see us leave, perhaps almost as glad as we were.

Tags: Hanoi, Saigon, Travel, Vietnam

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 5:39 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.