Vietnam Pt. 1

Getting from Egypt to Vietnam was a pretty epic journey. Beginning on Tuesday afternoon, we took an hour long taxi from Dahab to Sharm el Sheikh, an hour long flight to Alexandria in the north where we had a three hour stopover. Unfortunately, none of our flights would connect, so we had to pick up our luggage, go through passport control and check in again at each place we got to, which ate into valuable stopover time.  From Alexandria, we had a 3 hour flight into Dubai, on which we got a couple of hours sleep. 

In Dubai, we had to change terminals which we thought would be pretty straightforward, but due to the size of the airport, we had to take a taxi there which took us almost half an hour. I was very happy however because I got to see the Burj Khalifa; the tallest building in the world which stands at a whopping 829m tall. I’m a bit of a geek for large scale engineering.

We got to our flight on time for our final leg of the trip into Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), where we flew with Emirates on a big Boeing 777, replete with huge screens in the back of every seat, a library of 100s of movies and TV shows and most importantly for me; lots of leg room! This was a very welcome change to all the budget flights we had been getting used to.

6 hours and a few movies later, we touched down in HCMC, sorted our visas and haggled down the price of a taxi to our hostel. Our first impressions of HCMC were very overwhelming. There were a million and one motorbikes clogging the streets, horns constantly blaring, music thundering out of every shop and what seemed like every LED and neon sign known to man were flashing in our faces. It also happened to be Halloween night, so there were lots of costumed people on the backs of motorbikes to look at. We checked into our hostel, grabbed some dinner and fell into bed, absolutely spent.

An example of a relatively tame intersection in Ho Chi Minh City

One big difference between Egypt and Vietnam was the humidity. It was pretty much the same temperature in both places, but in Vietnam it is much more humid, so we were both sweating buckets by midday. We were both suffering from a little bit of jetlag, so had a slow day. We went for a walk and took in the Reunification Palace, which was the scene of some pretty important events in the history of Vietnam, hence its name, however it was incredibly boring and had no architectural flair whatsoever.  We also had a quick look in Ben Thanh market, which is the city’s main marketplace where I bought some of the almost obligatory Vietnam beer singlets.

Over the following days in HCMC we ate lots of pho (rice noodle soup) and drunk lots of Vietnamese iced coffee (a nutty flavoured coffee sweetened with a bit of condensed milk) which is quite nice and very welcome on such hot days. We also dabbled in a bit of the local beers, which works out at about 30p/60c per bottle.

One of the downstairs displays in the War Remnants Museum

We visited the War Remnants museum on our second day, which, in parts, was very grisly. Photos depicted the shocking massacres of the Vietnam War, forms of torture, misplaced children & families and the brutal effects of Agent Orange. There were even preserved foetuses that had been deformed through their parents’ exposure to defoliants. We left the museum a bit shaken up.

The next day we took a trip out to Tay Ninh, where we visited the most important Cao Dai temple of Vietnam. Cao Dai is an interesting religion which borrows facets from Catholicism, Hinduism and Buddhism, using all sorts of familiar and contrasting iconography. The temple has a vibrant, almost psychedelic colour scheme and is filled with the smell of incense. We watched the beginning of their midday prayers and then headed off towards the Cu Chi tunnels; a site where one of the most extensive tunnel networks of the Vietnam War were once buried. Now it’s mostly just mock-ups that remain and we were shown round by our very camp and enthusiastic guide Kong.

The bizarre Cao Dai temple in Tay Ninh

After HCMC we travelled south to the Mekong Delta and its largest town Can Tho. There are lots of well-known floating markets on the Mekong and our hotel offered some very cheap private tours. We got up at the crack of dawn and were whisked away by motorbike to the river and our waiting guide. We jumped in a little boat that had a scooter engine with a propeller attached to it hanging off the back and off we went. The markets were quite a way down the river, so while our guide drove the boat, she also made us some amazing little trinkets out of reeds. Throughout the trip we received a diorama with a rose, two little crickets and a big heart in it, 2 big crickets, 3 bracelets, a ring each and some earrings for Ilona.

The markets themselves were quite cool. Dozens of boats of all sized anchor around each other, selling their wares, examples of which are displayed on the ends of long bamboo poles. Our driver picked us up a pineapple, which Ilona ate despite her allergies (she felt rude to refuse it) and proclaimed it to be the best pineapple she had ever tasted! Our tour also took us to a rice paper factory, which was very interesting, some small delta villages and some rice fields. Tired and sunburnt, we made it back to our hostel just after midday, convinced that it was mid-afternoon.

Our chill river cruise.

We didn’t stay in Can Tho or the Mekong for very long, instead we headed back up to HCMC for a couple of days to see some things we didn’t get round to seeing the first time round. On our first night back, we were at a roadside cafe having a beer when I saw a familiar face walking down the street towards us with a very shocked expression. The face belonged to Jenny, a high school friend of mine. What a small world! She had been travelling throughout south-east Asia and happened to be staying just around the corner from us. We briefly chatted and planned to catch up the next night over dinner and beers, where we learned that she and her two friends Scott and Ashley were heading north to Hanoi along nearly the same route and in pretty much the same time frame as us, so we may have found some travelling buddies!

On our last day back in HCMC we visited a couple of interesting pagodas, getting there by both cyclo (a bike rickshaw) and xe om (motorbike) which was a fun, but in parts frustrating experience, as our drivers took us to the wrong place twice and we had to walk for ages to try and find the last pagoda.

Driving Miss Daisy 2.

After HCMC we headed north to the beachside town of Mui Ne. Mui Ne basically consists of one road following a 12km stretch of beach, with hotels and resorts on the beach side of the road and restaurants and shops on the other. Our hotel was near one end, so to tackle this we hired a motorbike and spent the next couple of days riding up and down the beach, visiting centuries old Cham towers, sneaking into a resort’s private beach via a half-hidden bush track down a side road, exploring some of the surrounding fishing villages and the huge red sand dunes down one end of the beach. We saw some pretty amazing stuff that we never would have been able to see without the motorbike, which was one hell of a lot of fun to ride. 

One of the little petrol pumps for motorbikes on the main road.

On the day we left, we walked up what was called the ‘Fairy Stream’, just up from our hotel. It was a shallow sand based stream that went past some pretty cool rock formations, forest, sand dunes and hidden cafes. After that we headed back to our hotel and got picked up by a little cramped bus for a very bumpy trip into the highlands and the town of Da Lat, where we planned on spending the next few days.