Good evening Vietnam

We’re now in Hoi An in Vietnam and have spent the last few days exploring a new, and very different, country. Our first introduction to Vietnam wasn’t brilliant. It took us nearly two hours waiting in a very stuffy and crowded room to cross the border. Not what you need in the middle of a 10 hour bus journey… but we made it, and immediately over the border you knew you were in a different country – the evidence of more money is quite prominent and the shops seemed more like proper shops rather than people’s belonging spilling onto the street as it seems in Cambodia.
We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) and immediately realised that crossing the road would involve risking your life every single time. For a city of 6 million, there are 2 million registered scooters/ motorbikes. Craziness. And they come at you a lot faster than they do in Phnom Penh! We had 3 full days in HCMC and had to say goodbye to two of our Cambodian group, and our guide L But we’ve picked up 4 new people and a guide who speaks Vietnamese which comes in pretty useful.
We visited the War Remnants museum in the city – a lot of photos from the American War and guns and bombs etc used. Some very graphic images and it was interesting to hear the stories from a Vietnamese side, as opposed to all the American-centric movie versions. That afternoon we headed out of the city to the Cu Chi tunnels – a massive underground network of tunnels that the villagers of Cu Chi used to hide from the Americans. It’s all a bit ‘theme park’ but trying to crawl through the tunnels (which have been slightly widened for us porky westerners) was really hard work and I can’t imagine how people used to spend the majority of their time down there. They had pretty ingenious systems to prevent against damage from flooding, and special protective caverns for women and children and methods of dispersing the smoke from the kitchens.

The following day, we took a boat trip on the Mekong Delta, about 2 hours from HCMC. We hopped on a boat and headed to an island where they make practically everything from Coconuts or coconut palms – we tried juice from a fresh coconut (yuk), coconut candy (yum), could have bought coconut carved souvenirs, saw coconut palm leaf roofs etc etc. Strangely it wasn’t called coconut island….

That evening, we caught our first night train and we were spoiled with a recently refurbished carriage. It didn’t bode well for the next trains that our guide said he’d never seen one so nice… We were 4 to a cabin and our room turned into ‘party room’ and we had 10 people in at one point with their beers, snacks and music - great fun till we had to wake up at 5am to get off… yawn…

We arrived at our hotel at Nha Trang and went straight back to sleep for a couple of hours before heading to the beach. Nha Trang is the main seaside resort in Vietnam, and was surprisingly quiet even though the weather wasn’t great and there were some mega offshore winds creating some big fat waves. Chris attempted to swim but mostly got smacked in the face with waves, and got a lot of sand in his shorts :-) We lounged on the beach till lunchtime and then 10 of us went to the local mud baths. We spent a blissful afternoon moving from mud pool to hot mineral showers to mineral hydrospray things to a hot mineral bath and then finished up in the pool – also filled with hot mineral water. So relaxing and we all felt cleaner than we had done for a long time, although I think I still have some mud in my ears….
The following day the weather wasn’t so nice, so we had a bimble round the shops in the morning and then decided to have a massage. Mine, and the other girls, massages were ok but Chris got a lot of hassle from the masseurs trying to get him to pay for ‘special extras’! Not such a relaxing experience :-)
We got our second sleeper train that night, and if the first train was hotel train, this one was prison train. The cabins were basic and the toilets even more so, but the worst was an evil rotten cabbage smell that didn’t go away all night. I had to fall asleep pinching my nose as I couldn’t bring myself to breathe it in. This time I wasn’t so bothered about getting off at 5am!
We arrived in Hoi An yesterday morning and again got a couple more hours sleep and then woke up to torrential rain that didn’t stop till 4.30 and then started again at 5.30. Just walking to lunch got me completely soaked and my trainers are still wet today! So we didn’t do much yesterday and rescheduled the walking tour to today. Hoi An is a UNESCO world heritage site, and preserves a lot of old Chinese and Japanese architecture with a bit of French colonial stuff thrown in for good measure. The place is teeming with tailor shops offering to make you any garment in 24 hours. A few people have bought things, and I definitely would have done if it wasn’t going to be squished in my backpack for the foreseeable future!