As told by me

This morning I had planned to join Denise and Nilson a tour of the Mekong Delta.  I got up nice an early and headed around to the travel office where they’d booked their tickets last night, only to find that the tour they were on was already full.  I therefore booked the alternative tour and headed back to my hotel for a quick breakfast.

After breakfast I tracked them down as I’d agreed to buy some of their excess Malarone off them.  Malarone is a fancy new anti-malarial treatment that lacks most of the side-effects of the other drugs and only needs to be taken for one week after you leave a high-risk area.  The only downside is the cost, which is pretty excessive.  I was keen to avoid the possible hypersensitivity to sunlight and the fact that it is supposed to be taken for four weeks after leaving, that my Doxycycline promised me, so I decided to spend the money and get the good stuff.  With a bit of luck, I may be able to sell some of my UK-taxpayer-subsidised Doxycycline tablets in Thailand.

The trip around the Delta was pleasant enough.  It was a two-hour bus ride there and back which allowed for some catch-up sleep.  Then we got on a boat and headed out on the river, past various fishing villages, and headed for one of the four islands in this part of the delta (Phoenix island, Dragon island, Tortoise island and Unicorn island).  First stop was a place where they made handicrafts out of coconut wood, then we proceeded on by boat to another stop for a bite of lunch.  Over the meal, I met an old Vietnamese guy who’d moved to LA in the 70s and two German girls (possibly a couple) who were all quite friendly.  Lunch was a pretty ordinary watery soup followed by barbecued pork and rice and some fruit.

The rest of the tour consisted of a walk through the jungle to a place that made rice paper, a boat ride though a palm-lined canal (very peaceful) to a place where they kept honey bees (we had tea with honey which was very nice) and a horse cart ride along the road to our last stop where they make candy out of coconut milk (pretty good, actually).  Though this was clearly a very well-worn tourist path, it was pretty interesting to see how people live in this extremely fertile environment.

Back in Saigon, I popped out for a pre-dinner Bia Hoi, where I met a wasted old American veteran who struggled to tell me about a story from his tour of duty in Saigon, when he was rescued from being overdue back to base by a group of Aussie soldiers.  He was an interesting guy but clearly not well and I excused myself and went off for a bowl of (you guessed it) Beef noodles…

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Vietnam Nov-Dec 2008

Sunday was another rest day (it was a late night).  No real highlights to speak of, other than the following:

- lots of sleep

- the new Transformers movie (first half was decent then it got a bit crap)

- Robin Williams movie – Man of the Year which was pretty good

- Pho Bo

- lots of fanta

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Vietnam Nov-Dec 2008

This morrning we set off for the Cu Chi tunnels, a network of tunnels used by the Viet Cong as a base from which to attack American forces. The bus trip was about 90 minutes each way, and while it was kind of interesting, it did feel a bit contrived and possibly even a little triumphal.

Perhaps I would have appreciated it better if I had gone down into the tunnels themselves, however confined spaces really aren’t my idea of fun, and I was physically incapable of doing it anyway.

When we got back into Saigon, we went straight to Quan An Ngon, a restaurant that had been recommended to me by a couple I met in Hanoi. They offer a variety of local dishes from all over Vietnam and it was really rather good.  After lunch, I went back to the hotel for a bit of a snooze and some more cricket (bloody saffas!) before heading out with the group for one last meal together at a Mexican (wtf?) restaurant called La Cantina.  I was pretty dubious about this as I hadn’t come to Vietnam to eat Mexican food, but it turned out to do some pretty good Vietnamese stuff as well, along with some excellent 3-4-2 mojitos…

After dinner, I was cajoled into making a thank you speech for Phuong, who had given us a truly excellent three weeks (though he still owes us a big night of Karaoke).  The speech went down well and we moved across the road for a last night of pool and drinking…

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Vietnam Nov-Dec 2008

So much for 4am. We alighted from the train a few minutes after 3am, which is a ridiculous time of the morning to do anything except sleep or drink. Thankfully, our bus to the hotel was waiting for us and it was a mercifully short journey.

Just as Phuong was saying “watch the step”, I stepped off the bus onto a weirdly sloping bit of kerb and went down very hard on my ankle, yelling relevant expletives. For a few moments I thought I’d actually broken something and would be heading home in time for christmas, but after a few minutes, it was fairly clear that it was just a very bad sprain.

We checked into our day rooms (four guys, one double bed – oh well I had a good excuse for taking one side at least) and dozed/watched a movie (likely to be mostly dozing as I can’t remember what the movie was), while I iced my now very swollen ankle.

At 8.30am, Phuong took us out for breakfast and a walk around some of the major sights, well more of a hobble for one of us. Breakfast was at Pho 2000, famous beause Bill Clinton ate there on 17th November 2000 (which would have been while Gore & Bush were fighting over the Florida result), a fact they were only too eager to remind everyone of. My Pho Bo was actually a little disappointing so I won’t be going back.

Next stop was the War Remnants museum which, along with an interesting collection of American tanks, helicopters, aircraft, field artillery and bombs contained some very confronting photographs of victims of Agent Orange and napalm, among other atrocities. Ria and I were accosted by a bookseller with no hands who guilted us into buying a book each. I got “The girl in the picture” about a fanous photograph of a small naked girl running away from a napalm bomb, a book that I’ve wanted to read for some time. Ria got a book about the war written by a Vietnamese author. Of course, these are nothing more than careful photocopies, and they weren’t all that cheap (£4 isn’t that cheap for a paperback in the post-Amazon world) but we didn’t feel bad about it.

We then walked past the Reunification Palace, where the South Vietnamese regime finally fell in 1975, and through the cool, tree-lined park to the Catholic cathedral (Notre Dame, of course) and the rather impressive Post Office (designed by Gustav Eifell), before heading back to the hotel.

Later on I went out again and after a quick bite of spring rolls for lunch, I shuffled down the road to the Ben Thanh market wherer I bought one last Vietnamese t-shirt (I think this one might be my favourite though). After getting away from the grabby hands of the t-shirt stall holders, I made my way out onto the street with a vague notion of finding a park to go and lie down in for a while. I was starting to feel almost dizzy now (I’d been up, more or less, since 3am remember) and fell prey to the inevitable cyclo driver standing on the corner. He took me on a pretty relaxing trip around the posh end of town for about half an hour before overcharging me by about $5. I was in no state to argue the point so I took it on the chin. I hobbled back to the hotel, with a quick ice cream on the way, then discovered that for some reason a South African sports channel was available on my TV, so I proceded to watch the action from the Australia versus South Africa cricket test from the WACA in Perth. Naturally, as with any cricket watching session, there was a good deal of snoozing also involved. At stumps on day 4, things were pretty closely balanced with both sides having a good chance of a win.

Dinner was at one of the BBQ restaurants that appears around Ben Thanh market in the evenings and was pretty good. The Red Saigon beer was certainly going down a treat. After dinner we went for a wander and came across the most extreme traffic I think any of us has ever seen – the fact that it was Friday night might have contributed, but this was an amazing sight..

More Saigon photos here

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Vietnam Nov-Dec 2008

Thursday was another lazy day (for all the same reasons). The highlights were a spot of relaxing on the beach, including an expensive plate of fried rice and possibly the most expensive can of fanta in Vietnam (well I was being waited on at the beach so I wasn’t complaining, though some sun would have been nice). At 5pm we headed off to the train station for our ride to Saigon. This was a really lovely train that I would have gladly stayed aboard a lot longer than we were going to. As this train originated in Nha Trang and terminated in Saigon, it is difficult to understand why it left at 6pm, and was scheduled to arrive at about 4am. A 9pm departure perhaps?

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Vietnam Nov-Dec 2008

After quite a late night, Wednesday was quite a lazy day. There was no real sun but a visit was made to the beach regardless in the afternoon, after I’d bought a cool new (but rather expensive, at least by Vietnamese standards) t-shirt. In the evening, Phuong took us up the beach by taxi away from the tourist area to a great streetside seafood restaurant where we proceeded to feast on the local delights, including barbecued prawns, squid, seasnails and fish. There had been some initial discussions about the quality of the local lobster (high) and the cost (low), so part way through the meal a couple of these were weighed (not easy with live lobsters!) and priced. Simon and Ria were keen and I couldn’t find a reason to decline a £5 lobster, so these were dispatched to the barbecue, where I suspect they suffered a rather unnecessarily painful death. Oh well, they tasted fantastic.

Once back in town, I took the group around the corner to Guava, a very cool western-oriented bar whose manager (from Nottingham) I’d met at the little streetside stall where we’d had our last beer in the early hours of the previous morning. She was very pleased to see us and we all partook of the local speciality (2-4-1 during happy hour on wednesdays only), which was a frozen mix of various liquids including peach juice that met with universal acclaim. As happy hour had ended once we’d got through our drinks, we headed off to Why Not bar again (where happy hour runs till midnight), where we finally managed to get the two groups together for a couple of drinks. Most of my group only hung around for one drink but Simon and I proceeded to get quite drunk on the local ‘bucket’, an orangey concoction served in a large plastic jam jar that was very good value for the amount of grog in it.

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Vietnam Nov-Dec 2008

It was another wet morning but there was hope for sunny days ahead. Got a bus to Danang train station where we met an American who was kind of interesting though he clearly hadn’t spoken to many people lately and was a little too keen to continue on the conversation. Luckily, he was seated down the other end of the coach when we boarded the train. The train itself was reasonably comfortable, though the airconditioning didn’t really touch the sides so it was pretty muggy for the whole journey. After we finally left Danang, we proceeded for about half an hour before stopping in the middle of nowhere. This stop lasted about half an hour and was apparently due to the engine packing it in, so we had to wait for a new one to arrive. I’m pretty sure a new one didn’t arrrive and we moved on again for about another half an hour before again stopping for a solid 20 minutes at least. It was by now becoming clear why the trains here are so slow – it’s not that they’re that slow as such (they seem to cruise along at about 80km/h easily enough), it’s just that they keep stopping, for excruciatingly long periods of time. The second stop turned out to be a small station and we since then stopped again for at least 20 minutes at another station. I’m beginning to have an idea about how to speed these journeys up…

While we were actually moving, things were pleasant enough. The landscape changed slightly as we progressed south and many fields have new rice crops planted, giving a welcome green tinge to the view.

The conductors also finally cranked up the audio-visual entertainment (there’s a couple of TV screens in each carriage), initally with the local news, a fairly dull affair including lots of stuff about the president meeting people, always sitting in front of the same enormous bunch of flowers. We were then forced to endure one of the George of the Jungle movies, complete with Vietnamese voice-over (it’s not really dubbing as they just talk over the original voices), followed by some weird Macaulay Culkin christmas thingy.

We finally arrived at 11pm, about an hour after the other group that had caught the later train (they left about 2 hours after us). Had a quick meal and then headed around the corner to the Why Not bar to play with the other group.

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Vietnam Nov-Dec 2008

Another wet morning but it stopped raining just in time for our bike adventure. Phuong took us around the outlying villages and fish farms of Hoi An.

We went back to the streetcorner cafe for lunch – I had Spring rolls, Lau Cau (the local noodles – not my favourite) and Spinach with prawns. This was followed by a tiny spot of shopping (I finally gave in).

After lunch, we retired back to the hotel for some more pool and couple of beers before Phuong took us off on a slightly dangerous bike ride across town, to his friend’s restaurant, where we had an awesome barbecue dinner. Back into town, where we popped into the Before & Now bar, a pretty standard tourist bar where we snuck in just before the end of happy hour, in time to buy 2-4-1 vodka and 7-ups which had basically zero alcohol in them. Needless to say, we didn’t hang around but instead returned to the hotel for one more pool & beer session.

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Vietnam Nov-Dec 2008

The morning started wet but had dried up by the time our cooking course started at 11am. Only four of us attended the course – Simon, Ria, Niels and myself. We started with a very informative trip to the market, then returned to the restaurant to prepare five courses:
- sweet & sour chicken soup
- fried spring rolls
- green papaya salad
- fish in banana leaf
- eggplant in claypot

Han, our teacher, was very good (and very funny) and I’ll be making most of these dishes again (assuming I don’t lose the recipes).

After lunch, I grabbed a bike from the lady out the front of the hotel and joined Hannah on the 10 minute ride down to the beach where we were ripped off by the bike parking guy (oh well, only another dollar) before going for a long walk along the windy beach, admiring the stupidity of the new beachfront developments that were already being eroded away by the waves.

We went back into the old town for dinner at the streetcorner cafe which involves a number of different operations, all in the same place. This was great cheap food so I had three courses and some fresh beer for the king’s ransom of 80,000 dong (£3).

Later on, I enjoyed some pool and some beers at the hotel garden bar with some of the folks from the other Intrepid group that were staying at the same hotel.

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Vietnam Nov-Dec 2008

We headed off for Hoi An by bus at 9am. This was a relatively short journey (about four hours, including stops) so was pretty painless. We had a couple of stops, including at China Beach (big R&R beach for American soldiers during the war), where I had a very quick swim.

Phuong took us for a quick walk around the old town, then we had a quick lunch at Banana Leaf, by the river (food wasn’t as good as the restaurant of the same name in Clapham, sadly). After lunch everyone headed off to check out the tailors and see what clothes they needed making. I have no interest in buying a new suit at the moment so I headed back to the hotel for sleep. Annoyingly, the map the hotel had given us was so misleading that I spent a solid half an hour walking around looking for it.

I then overslept and missed the rendesvous for our group dinner. I had a walk around the old town instead before heading back for an early night.

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Vietnam Nov-Dec 2008