Mekong Delta

We have learned a bit on our past adventures with crossing the borders (remember our crossing to Nepal and horse carriage?) and decided to buy two day tour from Saigon to Phnom Pehn through the Mekong Delta. It cost next to nothing and we assumed it will save us a lot of hassle.

The first day of our trip was relatively easy going - we were on the bus most of the time but also visited a floating market where you can buy wholesale and retail quantities of fruits and vegetables straight from the boats...in other words you are on a boat in the middle of the river and trade with other boats also floating in the middle of the river. We have also seen how all kinds of coconut candies are made, sort of popcorn from rice in local villages etc.

We spent the night in a rather grim town next to the Cambodian border, Chou Doc - the next day we had a very early wake-up and right after a light breakfast were taken to a boat as we were to arrive to Phnom Pehn by boat. Obviously not on a luxurious Caribbean line cruiser but on something but floats. On the way we visited very interesting floating fish farms - houses under which fish are being held so to say and a Cham minority village where Muslim population lives. Almost each of those houses had a satellite TV although otherwise they were very poor. As we have learned the satellite TV's are being subsidized by the Vietnamese government as a contraceptive. There are two reasons for it - people watch TV instead of having sex and the second that TV takes space so on small boats there is less space for kids...Supposedly it is effective.

Now, the trip was supposed to be quite smooth and fast - it did prove smooth but definitely not fast. We spend four hours on the first boat cruising pleasurably through the Mekong Delta - it was great although the sun was really strong. We then arrived on the boarder in a middle of nowhere, had lunch and crossed it on foot. On the Cambodian side another boat was waiting for us - we assumed that it will be a quick ride but it took another 3 hours plus around two hours with a bus to our final destination in Phnom Pehn. During the second boat trip at some point the air stopped moving and it became so hot we could barely stand it - of course right the movement we were to disembark it started to rain...

Phnom Pehn was a shock to us with lots of nice buildings, clean streets and a western look - we did not have expectations as we knew that they started from zero in the beginning of nineties. We went to the tourist ghetto for budget travellers called Lake Side were we found nice accommodation right next to lake for 4 USD (for one or two USD more you can have a room with TV). Of course, if you wish you can have a room for 200 USD as lots of new hotels have been lately constructed.

For the rest of Cambodia we decided to follow the steps of Tomek's father who was stationed in Cambodia with the United Nations in the beginning of the nineties.

Ho Chi Minh City - Saigon

Saigon is definitely the most modern and biggest city of Vietnam - it has a much more metropolitan feeling than Hanoi. From time to time it is nice to be in a big city. We have arrived to the city right in the middle of the afternoon rain showers that now became very frequent. They basically start always around 3pm and last for 1-2 hours. Of course we have arrived directly to the tourist ghetto since almost every South East Asian city has one. There you can feel a bit like at home (whether you like it or not).

In the city we decided to make our lives easier and rented one scooter to go around the city. It is kind of liberating experience but on the other hand also a bit stressful. The good thing is that once you get into the traffic it becomes much less intimidating than what it seems when you are a bystander - perhaps something like jumping into the river and let the current take you with it... To make it simple we choose a full automatic scooter :)

We were set to see a couple of landmarks in the city - though to be honest there are not too many. Saigon has nice parks, Notre Dam Cathedral (French legacy as in most bigger cities of the former French colonies) some nice pagodas especially in the China town and all the modern buildings etc. which you would expect in a 21st century city. We decided to take it easy and go to botanical gardens which turned out to be more of a zoo than the botanical garden. Nevertheless, the animals were kept in captivity under what we would call good conditions (if you can say anything like that about keeping anybody in captivity) and there was a nice variety of them. The thing that shocked me thought the most was a little rabbit sitting undisturbed in a relatively big aquarium. It would not have been anything special except that in the other corner of the aquarium there was a huge snake chilling and I guess waiting for a good moment to eat the poor black rabbit for dinner...


Anyway we have also found the best dinning experience in Vietnam so far. Perhaps even during our trip - at least from the culinary side. It was a very nice restaurant in an old villa, with cooks all around the compound preparing traditional Vietnamese dishes. Then we would be helped by the staff to get to know how to make wraps etc. Excellent service and great food and very reasonable prices. Absolutely a MUST for everyone visiting the city. This was the first place we got to know how to eat things that are sold on the street but you have no idea what to do with them. No wonder the restaurant is always full...(Quan An Ngon Restaurant- 138 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia street in District)

This would be our last destination in Vietnam - we would only see the Mekong Delta and head to Phnom Pehn.

Dalat

Another stretch on the North-South coast of Vietnam was completed by our bus ride from Nha Trang to Dalat, the place of eternal spring, as locals call it. And it is really very much different from the rest of the country we have seen; it is 1475 m above the sea level with a cool climate, beautiful mountains and lakes and a highly organized agriculture full of greenhouses. It is a famous honeymoon spot for locals, and in general seems like the former French hill station made itself a famous local tourist attraction. The city of Dalat itself did not especially impress us with its hundreds of hotels mushrooming next to each other with very little creativity other than copying the neighbor's business, but the surrounding countryside is really worth the effort.

We decided to rent a scooter and drive to Lang Bien Mountain for a trek and climb to the 2170 m peak. We had a lovely spring day with small fat clouds floating in the blue sky, beautiful evergreen forest, red soil, 4 bananas and a bottle of water in our bag, wild horses gazing at us on an ideally 3-4 hours return trek. All was like in a fairy tale - though a bit more sweaty - until the macadam road ended and changed into a narrow path leading into the depth of the rain forest. The familiar pine tree forest changed into a full jungle so dense, that you had to make your way with your arms to get through the diverse fauna of a totally unknown forest for a European eye. We had 4 km behind us and another 2 to get to the peak, when we realized that our almost invisible path has been swallowed by the jungle and simply turning back to leave the mountain unmounted led us into a labyrinth of thin traces leading to other thinner paths. We finished our bananas and most of our water, had no watch with us to calculate how much time we have till sunset, when we heard human voices. After a not especially relaxed 1 hour rush to the direction of voices hoping to bump into other than jungle living creatures or at least a signed trek we found a reasonable path with a red arrow pointing uphill. By that time we were ready to leave the place and surely uphill was not a guarantee, but since the voices came from the same direction we started climbing up basically on all four. You cannot imagine my relief when the voices manifested themselves in the form of two little Vietnamese boys, and then another two and finally a big group of boys with one single of them speaking English. As it turned out they also lost their way after 5 hours of climbing, but just before finding us they reached the peak, which was 5 minutes uphill from us. Miracles truly do happen; they turned out to be almost on their way down and offered us help downhill. So we finally mounted the monster and a breathtaking panorama and threatening storm clouds greeted us - not that we could catch our breath anyway. Why would life be simple? Our descend was a good two hours struggle in the tropical rain, but accompanied with Vietnamese songs and all kinds of fruits offered by our little friends, who by the way turned out to be all catholic novices :)))

Of course by the time we reached the village the rain disappeared and the "eternal spring" was in full swing for one more hour, before the moon came up... We were becoming a little bit bored if I can say so, hence our little adventure made us feel alive again. Especially when we found a big bloody bruise on Tomek's foot, without doubt caused by a leech. Luckily I did not have to perform an operation, because it had sucked itself full andw fell by the time we realized the damage. After all I am glad this was the biggest price for our experiment to find out is we are still alive :)

Nha Trang

There was one highlight of our visit to the Vietnamese Riviera - our day trip to neighbouring islands. We did not expect much of it since we were hoarded on a boat together with 30 other tourists early in the morning (also locals - Vietnam seems to have developed local tourism quite well). The visit to the first island with an aquarium full of weird fish generally made us feel quite depressed as the trip seem not to develop in any way that would seem like fun. Our next stop where we went snorkling did not improve our mood. Since there were several boats like ours docked around the sea life moved further and we could not see too much. It was good though to be in the water for a while. Lunch on the boat was the time when the first brakethrough took place - the food was good. Then after lunch something extraordinary happend. The whole vietnamese crew stood up and performed - one guy playing drums (or to be more precise something that resembled a drum plus two buckets), another playing guitar that remembers probably the sixties and our "captain" singing in Viet-English and Viet-Spanish. Their performance was great! Then the crew gave an ultimatum to all passengers. Basically everyone had to jump to the water. I had no idea what was going on since I have some trouble with understanding Viet-English and forgot to read the leaflet describing our trip before we got onto it. So we jumped in and found out that a floating bar with a crate of Vietnamese has "opened" right next to our boat. We had to "dock" around it with our feet on the bar while floating in the water and basically got flooded with literes of Vietnamese blueberry wine by the "floating bar tender". Saying "No" was forbidden and every offence of such type was punishable with wine poured straight from the bottle into you.

The next hour we chilled on the beach nearby to recover...Whole thing was very entertaining...

Our stay in Nha Trang coincided with the Name Day of Rita. We have celebrated it on the beach in a very nice restaurant with a pool while playing chess and drinking Mojito. Rita had shown her mastery and won for the second time. This time however in a very sophisticated, fast and smooth way. Respect! - I think I should not let her read the advanced chess book which we have bought somewhere on the way otherwise I will have to get used to the feeling of getting swiftly beaten...

Nha Trang as such has a nice beach, lots of hotels for very good money ($7 gets you a very nice room with AC, minibar, hot shower etc.) and nice restaurants. In general if you are looking for peace this is not a place to be. If you are after some action like diving or to some extent partying you have found the place.

Hoi An

Hoi An, the former imperial capital - another of the numerous former capitals and another UNESCO World Heritage Site :) - looks like the imagined dream of Asia, or rather Indochina in the mid twenties. Or 200 years ago.

We arrived with our spaceship bus from Hue on the 19th of May in the evening and got drifted by the charm of the Old Town with its lovely little houses, the river and the number of tailor shops beyond imagination. Tailoring anything which goes, ready within a couple of hours is one of the local attractions with very inviting prices, quality fabrics and a temptation to get a dress made here which you would otherwise never think about. OK, I did resist the devil to get a full length silk evening gown and also a red hand made pair of shoes with a little flower embroidery, but I gave in for a thick cotton coat :) You can choose any model from most recent catalogues (how about made to order Puma sneakers?!) and have them ready next morning. In addition Hoi An is full of bookstores with only photocopied books...look "same same but different" but we thought it is a disgrace to books to have them sold like this :)

Other than indulging in such vanities we tried Hoi An culinary specialities, like White Rose and Wonton, which I do not even try explaining, but they were delicious! We bought a combined ticket allowing us to visit five historical locations from a greater choice, including the former Assembly Hall, local traders' houses, temples and even a singing-dancing folklore performance. My ever favorite, most beautiful instrument is the Vietnamese "violin", which has only one string, otherwise quite similar to the violin in concept, but the sound it makes is sooo wonderful, that young girls were forbidden to listen to it in order to prevent falling in love with the musician. We could have spent more time in this miraculous place, where Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Hoi An-ese cultures used to live next to each other in peace, but decided to continue our stroll down the coast of the South Chinese Sea.

By the way, today we learned that Viet Nam in Chinese means "More South", implying that Vietnam is actually the Southern part of China :)

Hue

We finished our visit to Cat Ba island by taking a 5.45 am boat - kind of to punish ourselves for getting up late during a couple of last days and to catch the best light for photos in the morning. Once on the boat around 6.00 am the national anthem was played on TV. No-one though paid any attention nor bothered to stand-up - then in the middle of it a little girl stood up and switched the channel to early morning aerobics which we have seen live on the streets in Hanoi - no one protested. This is in great contrast to Thailand where even in cinemas before a movie is played everyone stands up while the anthem is being aired...

The research which we have made on finding the right travel agency for our Halong Bay trip payed off in a very handsome way. Although we ended up doing the Halong Bay and Cat Ba island trip on our own we did use the travel agent services - we bought ourselves an open bus ticket down South to Saygon. Basically, we can travel any day and stop anytime along the route. We have also decided to buy a sleeper bus since it was only marginally more expensive. We did not expect much considering our previous experiences with sleeper buses in India and with travel agents in general. The moment of truth came yesterday. We got picked up by a nice taxi to an unknown location for the departure of the bus - nice taxi's do happen...but this time a nice vehicle arrived which considering all what we have seen so far resembled more a plane than a bus - we boarded and felt almost like flying in business class. At least this time we have not gotten screwed :) Newertheless lately Rita has been slightly disappointed with my general unwillingness to bargain - in general it was my job to get the prices right but somehow I run out of steam. Since our adventure with the Cat Ba 'mafia' I have however regained my willingness and it is quite tough to take advantage of us or even get slightly more than what it should be. Hotel rooms feel now like real bargain and pineapple like it would come for free. My confidence came back and it is as easy as before. Our ususal initiati0n period has been completed, though it costed a bit more than in the previous countries...

We have arrived to Hue early in the morning, checked in, took shower and set off to discover the town. We also had an excellent breakfast (Rita nowadays already eats local breakfast - I cannot in-take additional noodles for breakfast - eating noodles or rice twice per day is the maximum I have achieved so far.) After breakfast we rented bicycles as this is our favourite mode of discovering new places.

Hue served as the political capital from 1802 to 1945, when the 13th emperor of the Nguyen dynasty surrendered to the communists, opening up the Imperial Enclosure with the Forbidden Purple City to the public. The sights in town, especially the Forbidden Purple City which in the past was reserved only for the private life of the emperor have seen greated times than today, but being listed amongst the UNESCO World Heritage Sites it is now under renovation. We did not emabark on discovering the Demilitarized Zone which served as the dividing line between South and North Vietnam during the last war, nor the Royal Tombs, which can be visited in the frame of organized trips, instead visited the Thien Mu Pagoda which was quite different from what we have seen in any other country we have visited so far. Chinese seem to have much more influence here so the pagodas here have 'courtyards' which you have to cross before you get to the most important place.

Hue during our visit was preparing for celebrating the The fifth United Nations Day of Vesak - a Buddhist festival - both locals and foreigners see it as a prove that religious freedom is being restored in Vietnam. Before I guess communism was the official religion - I think earlier religions had to be banned because communism is as vague as a religion - you just have to believe in it since you will never see any benefit of it during your mortal life :) Anyway in the evening we saw a huge parade of portable shrines - something a bit similiar to Songkran celebrations in Thailand but without splashing the water.

Halong Bay

After a Sherlock Holmes like investigation to find THE Sinh Cafe - which mushroomed to an incredible number of copy-cats after being mentioned by Lonely Planet as the most reliable travel agent, we took a bus to discover Halong Bay on the 15th of May without the "help" of a travel agent.

Taking a bus to Halong city from Hanoi is not a big deal and if you arrive before noon you have a good chance to hop on one of the thousands tourits boats for a tour around the bay or to Cat Ba Island. Of course we did not arrive before 2 pm, so we could choose between a private boat trip for 1 million VND and upwards, or spend a night in Halong city, which is described by our guide as an option to avoid. We did not have to consider the first option and the second was not so bad after all; it is an oversupplied tourist town for the local crowds with an OK beach and overpriced restaurants - which is not much different from the establishments we found later on Cat Ba Island. Hence the following day we took a toursit boat for less than half the price the agents started selling it (do not fall for the compulsory insurance without which you are not allowed to enter the boat, nor the tax or the Red Little Riding Hood they will come up next to lure you into further expenses). The bay is truly wondeful; as if God played dice with rocks and threw hunreds of islands to the sea, which accidentally landed on their sides (most of them are greater in height than latitude).

Arriving to the island we soon understood that we are the only ones making the effort on our own putting ourselves into a not too favourable negotiation poition with the local bus and motorbike maffia. I will waste some of my thoughts on this very educative event in order to possibly save fellow travellers from similar excercises: as an individual traveller your first option is to agree with the tour group to give you a lift to the city still on the boat (matter of fact 18 km from the harbor, but you will hear everything up to 60 km if you listen to the local mob). Your second option is to take the local bus, which is the cheapest and most reasonable solution unless you let yourself bullied and not allowed to enter the public bus by the same mob. You third option is really miserable - get a lift on a scooter or a minibus for double the price of the roughly 300 km return trip between Hanoi and Halong city. Well, you can imagine that our two men little commando voted for the most extreme action after being forcefully deprived from all options and followed by the scooter drivers to threaten all possible by-passers willing to give us a lift for less than their price when we walked out on them. Our solution was far from elegant, but served all of us right: I stopped the last passing minibus, agreed their outrageous price, declined to pay them in advance and upon arrival Tomek told them we were not paying unless they call the police to clear things up. He also took photos of the driver and the bus which flipped them out so much thet they would have rather left without any payment then get into further trouble. We collected a pretty audiance and interpreters for the scene...at some point it looked like they will pay us to get lost and not make any more trouble with police. At the end we payed them some money just to clear things up which they were reluctant to take :)

We spent the following day in perfectly opposite mood - on the remote and peaceful Cat Co 2 beach, which was apparently our "private" beach for the whole day, reading, swimming and chilling the whole day. However attractive would have been to stay one more day for a trek in the national park, we decided to leave and spare time for other parts of Vietnam.

Though we are still in the awakening stage to get a grip on the magnitude of the phenomena of cheating and lying in every single possible interaction. Hard to swallow, but probably one should just think beyond the worst intention whenever someone approaches you. For instance it is quite possible that a bus pushes another off the road and then the driver threatens the passengers with a hammer to disembark and get on his bus. This is not science-fiction, it happened today on our way back to Hanoi! Fortunately we were on the bigger bus.

Hanoi

It was precisely 24 hours sitting on a bus from Laos to Hanoi in Vietnam which made my bum hurt so much, that I am not willing to torture myself in a similar fashion in the closest future. Arriving 5.30 am to a suburban bus station in Hanoi after all does not seem to be the best apetizer to fall in love with the place; 20 motorbike riders and twice as many taxi drivers were more than willing to give us a ride for 10 USD, which was quite a contrast to the peace we enjoyed in Laos an more or less also in Thailand. Our Indian experiences flashed back and made us wake up which was enhanced by a morning rain, too. Miraculously I found the way to the center with a local bus (lately my greatest achievement according to Tomek, but not too flattering). Though we could have enjoyed Hanoi waking up with the street sellers and the group of ladies excercising on the lake side, but our wearyness made us crawl into bed after a shower (these showers after a 20 plus hours travelling are revelative experiences; even the filthiest bathroom makes you feel like in heaven, especially if you know that a clean bed is waiting for you. :)

So after a good 6 hours sleep and a bit of a jet leg we walked around the Old Town and soon found out, that the thing here is more the charm than a great historical or cultural heritage. Unless you get a kick from the Uncle Ho and communist stuff, which is plenty and is not especially our cup of tea. Though it is fascinating to see a place which is happily communist in its ideology and bureaucracy and seemingly comletely capitalist in its economy. There are a few things to visit though, like the Hoan Kiem Lake with a small island and the Ngoc Son Temple on it. You will find a lot of veteran Vietnamese men playing games under the pagoda's shelter, which appears to be quite an exciting competition supported by an audiance giving constant advices for the two players and big aplauses for a good move. Van Mieu, the Temple of Literature is a bit prettier attcation, even if more so due to its historical importance, being the fist royal university in Vietnam from as early as 1070, than its actual shape. However, the Vietnamese Communist Party declares itself open for religion, the shape in which you find temples seem to prove quite the opposite. To be on the fair side I should mention that the French and Americans probably took their part in destroying a lot of Vietnam's architecture during the unnumerable wars this country suffered from. On the contraty the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum complex is in its full grace and tip top shape with similarly endless que as in front of the Lenin mummy in Moscow. For some strange reason the museum closes at 11 am and we never made it there so eary in the morning :))), so I can narrate only about the exterior, which is competing with the Red Square (but this is grey).

For a change we enrolled to an organized one day trip to the Perfume Pagoda outside Hanoi just to make sure we will not do it again; we started to feel outcasts already on the bus among very neatly dressed senior tourists from the part of the globe, where paying five times the normal price goes without notice. Though the landscape was beautiful with a lovely boatride and a 1 hour climb to the cave, which used to be the center temple of Buddhism in Vietnam, it was more of a disappointment. The trek was full of trash with sellers offering all the same shameful plastic kitch and you'd better be on the watch if you do not want to enter into a bargaining about how much you should tip on top of the "tourist" price.

But not to sound so grim I should mention also the fun part: we treated ourselves with a performance in the Water Puppet Theatre, which is a traditional music and puppet show just on the lakeside, really nice! But the biggest fun for us in Hanoi was roaming the streets on foot or on a bicycle, which is a guarantee to get lost and drifted by the river of traffic made of a constant flow of scooters and bicycles. For culinary delights we had two inspiring experiences: Highway 4, which is famous of its choice of traditional spirits made of all sorts of things alive and its menu listing similarly incredulous specimens, just to mention a few: cricket salad, crocodile filet and smoked dog meat. KOTO is another favorite, being extreme on the other side of the scale: it is not only a gorgeous restaurant and bar, but a fascinating concept how to create future for street kids with an immediate evidence, that it works. Check it out!