From Amanda's blog:
After a visit to the Cu Chi tunnels (where the Vietcon guerillas lived and fought during the war, which in the end was a great factor in defeating the Americans) and the War Remnant Museum (which made me glad to be in Vietnam on my Canadian passport), we escaped the dirt, smog, and traffic of Saigon and took a night train to the quieter, cleaner beachtown of Nah Trang.
Highlights included a trip on a bike-cart (picture a short, skinny, Vietnamese dude huffing us big Westerners up and down the hills of the town, though don't feel too bad, he was paid well by both us and the owner of the sea-food restaurant he took us to); a giant Buddha statue at a monestary (where we were guilted into buying some postcards from some monks-in-training and where we found a group of young boys of various ages who were well-experienced in begging and one of whom carried an expensive looking camera I am sure he did not get for his birthday, and where I was felt up by a 2-foot-tall four-year-old who was, it seems, being instructed by an older boy to either find hidden pockets or search for something little four-year-olds shouldn't even know about...); and a group of Hindu temples from the 7th century, darkened on the inside from hundreds of years of inscence and prayers.
The most interesting experience was the boat tour, the highlight of which was our crazy guide who kept making and laughing at his own jokes that no one understood; at one point he pulled out a styrofoam slab, on which was stuck a plastic basket with several bottels of what he, to the amusement of some and the shock of others, repeatedly called "fucking-mingen-Vietnam wine", which we all figured out really means "really really bad wine". This was our floating bar, around which we floated in our tubes, wine in hand.
Our next stop was Da Lat, a city in the mountains. This place has a bit of a French Alp resort feel to it, only tropical and littered with garbage. Apparently Vietnam royalty used to spend vacations there, and we can understand why. The mountains are beautiful and the temperatures are much more bearable. We took a tour with the Easy Riders (dudes on motorcycles); we each sat on the back of a bike and followed out guides through the mountains to surrounding villages where we saw how silk is taken from the cocoons and turned into the thread and then into cloth; then how "happy water" is made from fermented rice (it is some of the nastiest drink I have ever tried), and how mushrooms are grown out of fermented tapioca and sweet potatoes ("same same, but different", as they say). And of course we took many pictures of the layered farms where families grow all sorts of fruits and vegetables sold in the rest of the country. The day we left Da Lat we took golfing lessons at the incredible golf course on top of a hill, the view being green and mountains; then we flew back to Saigon in a propeller airplane.
Our final adventure was a tour through the Mekong Delta, the highlights of which included the boat ride through a palm tree and bamboo sided canal and the Jewish Israeli guy with a somewhat French accent we met whose greatest joy on this trip was not the food, culture, or scenery, but rather bargaining.
The strongest impression of the whole trip was how similar Vietnam was to Central America and Mexico. Different food, different language, but similar colours, buildings, people, professions/methods of survival, fruit, dirt, treatment of environment, poverty/wealth dichotomy, friendliness. Same same but different, I guess.
(Hmm...I was going to post some pictures but can't find our adapter...That's not good.)
P.S.: Interesting food we tried while in Nam included frog legs, crocodile, pigeon, and snails. Luuk will have to remind me if I missed any interesting ones...
EDIT: goat!
The old boxer
14 years ago