We touched down in Ho Chi Minh City after the three flights it took us
to get there from Goa. Despite having slept on the floor in Bangkok airport we
were still feeling excited to be somewhere new. Unlike our arrival in India, we
were successfully collected from the airport by a man holding a card with Lucy’s
name (which we were very excited by). We had arranged to meet up with Chad and
Matt (our Canadian friends) who were also spending the night in Ho Chi
Minh/Saigon. It was so nice to see some familiar faces, although we definitely
missed not having working mobile phones when we were waiting around for them
for about an hour unsure as to what was going on. We were extremely tired and
didn’t end up having the big night out that we had planned but went for a
little look round Ho Chi Minh and got our first taste of Vietnamese style food
in an American bar. After this we bought some cans of beer for about 20p and
went back to our hostel to catch up.
The next day we were seeing another familiar face- Katy who we had met
in Indonesia and seen again in Thailand. It was really good to see her and her
two friends, Sandra and Jill. We decided to go together to visit the war museum
in the city. This was a pretty harrowing experience because there were a lot of
pictures and information depicting the cruelty of the Vietnam War. The mood was
a bit low when we came out so we spent the remainder of the day booking a trip
to the Chu Chi Tunnels and going out for a meal.
We had to get up at 7.00am for our trip so on the bus I slept through
most of the talk on the tunnels, but I do know that the Vietnamese used them
during the war, they are very small and people lived in them. I also had a
picture in one that has been widened for Europeans. We had quite a good day at
the tunnels and our guide was very entertaining. Despite this, the tour had
been somewhat over commercialised and we all felt slightly surprised that you
had the opportunity to shoot a gun at the end of the experience. This seemed a
little ironic considering we had spent the day being shown all the damage done
through this brutal and violent war.
That evening was our last in Saigon so we went out with Katy and her
friends and drank buckets of alcohol on the street for £1.20. We also got
thrown out of a club for not buying a drink so ended up going back to where we
started and dancing in what I think was a cafe all night. I did leave at about
4.00am because someone jumped on my toe and (I think) broke it.
The next morning was not fun because we had to be up at 6.00am for our
trip to the Mekong Delta. Later on an Irish lad from our bus admitted that we
had looked a little worse for wear when first getting on.
The first part of our trip was to go on a motorboat across the Mekong River to a 'honey bee farm'. When we got there our guide pointed at a tree that had a couple of bees near it and took us for a cup of honey tea. Not exactly your typical bee farm. On the way back to our boat he showed us a couple of interesting things, including a gigantic lychee fruit. As well as this we went on a tiny wooden boat along a small side river which was really pretty. We looked the picture of Vietnam while doing this; all wearing rice hats. We had opted to stay at a homestay as part of our trip which we took another boat to get to. I’m really glad that we had chosen to stay here instead of a hotel; we were staying in cosy little cabins that you crossed a small bridge to get to. In addition this we were given an introduction to Vietnamese cooking through the opportunity to stuff and fry our own spring rolls. After eating these we were served the main course of fresh spring rolls; this involved making our own wraps from the Elephant Ear Fish in the middle of the table and adding rice noodles and vegetables from the other bowls. It was an interesting new novelty because we were eating the whole thing with chopsticks, including picking away pieces of fish.
The next morning was
another early start as we met at 6.00am to go to the local market. This was
really interesting because it wasn’t a tourist market, but a place where the
locals went to barter in the early hours. While here we saw a live duck in a
carrier bag. This was obviously quite a novelty for us and while we were
staring a little boy thought he'd give us a bit of a show by jumping on the
poor duck. We left the market and went on to a school where we saw little
children arriving from boats to school with lifejackets attached to their bags-
all part of living life along the Mekong River. Later that morning, we visited a
floating market used by the locals which was extremely interesting; each boat
sold something different, for example, pineapples, vegetables and they
demonstrated what they were selling by tying it to a long wooden pole sticking up
from the boat. This meant that we saw boats with poles sticking up that had
onions, carrots and fruit on the end. It was a different experience entirely
from the floating market in Thailand which mostly does a tourist trade, this
market had local shop owners arriving in boats to buy produce in bulk. As well
as this, while on the water, other boats sped up to us trying to sell us
coffee, soft drinks and pineapple. Later on, we went to a rice factory, rice
noodle factory and heard some Vietnamese music. We got back to Saigon at 6.00pm
and waited for our bus to Muine at 8.00pm. We were very excited to get on our first
sleeper bus, complete with beds. We got to Muine at 1.00am and luckily they dropped us right outside the accommodation we had booked. The next morning we woke, excited to go and see the beach that we had heard wonderful reports of. Unfortunately Muine was a wash out, literally. It was so wet that we sat inside most of the day, eating and drinking Vietnamese coffee. The most exciting thing we did here was to take a local bus where I gave the Vietnamese a laugh by wearing my rice hat.
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