Ludwig's Odyssey: June 2015

We arrived in Nha Trang quite early in the morning, so early that even the receptionist hadn’t turned up for her 6am shift so we took the opportunity to walk around and see what the place had to offer. Amazingly, the beach was really busy with locals going in for their early morning swims (they also returned around 4pm when it wasn’t so hot for their evening swim). After not seeing much of the sea in the past 10 weeks, I was keen to get some beach time and we ended up staying for ten days which was initially going be three.

Nha Trang is very popular with Russian holiday makers for some reason with a few Americans thrown in for good measure, as EU citizens, we were quite the novelty..

The food was very mixed and catered to the holiday makers, it was either expensive and meagre portions or cheap but copious if uninspiring although we did have a surprisingly good and cheap home made sausage and mash one night, (you can’t eat rice and noodles everyday!). It was difficult to find cheap local food although we eventually did at a roadside eatery towards the end of our stay and wished we had found it sooner as it was delicious.

The beach is surprisingly nice for a town beach, the water clean and with a nice breeze coming in to the bay, it was really comfortable relaxing on the sun beds which we did for the majority of the our stay here.

On a couple of days, we did manage to pry ourselves off the sun beds and do some fun stuff.

It was Wendy’s birthday whilst we were here, so to celebrate, we went off to Vinpearl Land, a Disney style theme park but very much Vietnamese.

To get there, as the park is on an island, we had to travel on the longest cable car over water in the world.

Once we arrived, we headed straight for the water park and spent the morning going down all the slides, great fun. After a slap-up lunch of burger and chips, we visited the Aquarium and saw some amazing fish including a mermaid ;-) We then went on a Mountain Coaster which was good fun but not as good as the one we had previously been on in Todtnau when we were in Germany in 2011, if you ever are in the area (Black Forest), we would really recommend going there. We went on a roller coaster which wasn’t really amazing but our main memory of the ride will be the Vietnamese girls in front of us screaming so loud that it really made us laugh, we played some space hockey, drank a few beers and then were entertained by the water and light show after dark.

It was a great fun, £18 each for twelve hours to enjoy all the attractions, in fact it was a bargain and it’s not something we normally do, but what other way is there for a self respecting 49 year old to celebrate her birthday!

A couple of days later, we went off on a snorkelling day or 'snorking' as our receptionist called it :-). We went out on a boat for around seven hours and enjoyed three 'snorks', two before lunch and one after a huge feast that tested our buoyancy somewhat! We saw so many beautiful fish of different shapes, sizes and colours around the coral reefs and also plenty of harmless jelly fish, it was a real treat and gave us the bug to do more of it when the opportunity arises.

After ten days, it was time to move on and so we made the four hour bus journey inland to Dalat.

Dalat was a place the French went to during colonial times to escape the heat of the summer as it’s up in the mountains. The temperature was noticeably cooler in the evening and it was the first time for months that we could sleep without the need of a fan or air con. We stayed a couple of days to visit the sites, which included an old Summer House which belonged to last Emperor of Vietnam, a pretty flower garden which included a walk by a very big lake (in between the showers, a taste of things to come for the next few weeks), the old railway station which is no longer used and the busy night market. The second day we rented a scooter and visited the Elephant waterfalls which were spectacularly noisy and we got there just at the right time before loads of tourists turned up, so managed to have the place to ourselves for a little while (always a bonus), the ride around the countryside was picturesque and it was just pleasant to do just that without having to visit anywhere in particular. We also treated ourselves to some yummy sweet and savoury cakes and pies at a very busy bakery in the town for our lunch on the two days we were there, another nice treat that we hadn’t experienced much of since leaving home. Wendy I think enjoyed Dalat more than I, she certainly had good memories of visiting the place back in 1999, I found the tourist sites a bit kitsch and there wasn’t any outstanding architecture to my mind although the surrounding country side was very picturesque. After two days, we were ready to move on.

We made our way to Cat Tien National Park, a four hour bus journey in which the the bus journey was just as expensive as the motorbike taxis (xe om) we had to take from the main road where the bus dropped us off, to get to the guest house next to the national park some 25km away! Scammers..

It was worth it though, we really enjoyed staying at our guest house, which offered bungalows with river views and very peaceful surroundings.

The National Park itself is vast and you can only explore a portion of it. We went there on the premise that we would see lots of bird life but we didn’t see quite as much as we hoped, however the sighing of lots of Hornbills was a real highlight (sorry no pictures this time). Most people come to this park to see Crocodiles and Gibbons. We did see some Crocs but no Gibbons, although we met people who did on organised early morning guided treks. If the treks had been cheap we probably would have gone as well but they weren’t so we didn’t!

We spent four days in our bungalow and visited the park on two of those days.

The first visit, we walked along and saw many Hornbills and a huge amount of butterflies, never seen so many in one day, there must have been well over 1000 that we saw and there were many different species that we can’t name. It was a nice walk in the jungle if nothing else and of course as with any jungle walk in high humidity, we got attacked by leeches. We each had three on our legs starting to munch their way into us and we quickly got rid of them but one did fall off Wendy’s leg after it had feasted to saturity. They were only small land leeches so it wasn’t much of an irritation and we laughed it off although we did keep our wits about us a bit more during the walk back.

The second visit, we hired some bikes and cycled 10km to the start of a 10km round walk to the crocodile lake, again the walk was nice and we did see some Douc Monkees in the trees along with a few birds and lots more butterflies but when we got to the lake there wasn’t much to see save a few crocodiles that would pop their heads out of the water now and again. We cycled back the 10km to where we first started and then cycled another 12km loop in a different direction so that we could get to a rickety watchtower to see what we could spot with our binoculars. We did spot some birds that we hadn’t seen before so that was a good but no mammals. No leeches this time :-), so all in all we got lots of exercise and fresh air but didn’t spot as much wildlife as we thought we would although the Black and Red Broadbill has become one of our favourites, too cute!

So we left one jungle and headed to another, this time made of concrete and named Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon as we prefer to call it.

It’s a busy city, very cosmopolitan with broad avenues and French style boulevards that has some fantastic architecture old and new. We stayed in a very nice place in the backpacker area with cheap eats and beer to be found almost everywhere. There are many museums and a few historic buildings to visit but we only visited the War Remnants museum which shows quite graphic pictures of the conflict and how it affected Vietnamese people both North and South. Although Saigon is a bigger, cleaner and a more affluent city than Hanoi, it doesn’t have that certain thing that makes Hanoi so appealing, perhaps it’s because it’s been westernised too much.

We did visit the Bitexco tower on a couple of occasions, one time to see a movie at the cineplex located there. We enjoyed watching Jurassic World and treated ourselves to VIP seats for the costly sum of 90,000 Dong each, about £2.60 :-)

From our Hotel in Saigon, we hired a scooter and went on a four day 450km round trip Mekong Delta adventure traversing countless bridges big and small. Most people go on an organised trip for two days but we wanted to explore the delta on our own and we’re so glad we did, it was one of the best adventures we had in Vietnam and during our travels so far.

Our first stop was Ben Tre, we checked in to our hotel then drove around the back lanes to get a feel for how the locals live. On the way back into town, we nearly had a coconut tree on our heads as one was felled about 20 metres in front of us and we had to wait whilst they sawed the trunk to make space for the traffic to get past again! if this was in Europe, the road would have been closed and diversions in place but this is Vietnam!

Back in Ben Tre we organised a boat trip for the following morning through the mangroves which was really beautiful. As part of our trip, we visited a small family run brick kiln factory where the bricks are made by hand out of local clay, Ludwig was kidnapped by a little boy but our guide managed to get him back!, then stopped at a small coconut sweets making factory and we bought some of the local produce which were very tasty, much to my surprise as I’m not a fan of coconut sweets (well Bounty bars) normally, our last visit was to a place where an old couple weave sleeping mats from reeds, they were great fun and we had some good laughs having a go at weaving ourselves.

We then cycled for about 30 minutes through some pretty back lanes to then get a small rowing boat to take us back to the motorised boat and back into town. This was a very interesting tour and even better there wasn’t another tourist in sight, perfect!

After our boat tour, we checked out and made our way to Tra Vinh.

We were particularly keen to go there as we read that the journey was meant to be one of the prettiest, we weren’t disappointed and we saw some beautiful countryside and went over some huge bridges, unfortunately it could have been a better journey were it not for the rain. We had our water proofs so it wasn’t that bad but even so as most bikers will tell you, it’s the least fun time to be on a motorbike.

By the time we got to Tra Vinh, the rain had stopped a little while before thankfully, we checked in to a hotel and quickly went back out to see what was around the town. There are many temples in this particular town due to the Khmer influence (Cambodian) as there is a small community that stayed in Vietnam. We instantly could tell that we were a bit of an oddity and that not many tourists come to visit the place, we were stared at quite a bit and it reminded us of being in India. The market by the river was chaotic but fun to ride through but Tra Vinh didn’t have that much going for it.

The following morning, we stopped at a couple of Temples, one we read had storks nesting in the trees around it. Well they weren’t storks but there were 100s of birds around, mostly Egrets and Herons of various flavours and a few Darters. Perhaps the storks had moved on but in any case it was quite a sight to see all the birds perched around the temple, don’t think the pictures we took did it justice though.

We then made our way to Can Tho by way of two ferries to get us over the river, again the locals gave us lots of stares but all friendly.

The ride to Can Tho was mostly dry unlike the ride the previous day but not as picturesque. We were quite tired and hungry by the time we got there, but went out for an early dinner and organised a boat trip for the following morning to the floating market before turning in for an early night.

We woke up at 5am the next day to go on our little boat tour to Cai Rang floating market. I think I had something else in mind and it wasn’t quite what we expected but it was still interesting to see people selling pineapples and watermelons off their boats. Our affable lady boat driver then took us to the back waters but they were not anything like the ones around Ben Tre, very dirty and polluted sadly as local residents throw their rubbish into the tributary. The locals have built houses on the side of a road that is so small that half the house is on stilts in the river, the Mudskippers didn’t seem to mind though. We then went on to see how rice noodles (which we’ve eaten so many of) are made which was an interesting process to learn about.

On the way back into Can Tho, it rained hard and we got wet bottoms again!

Our last destination was Sa Dec. We checked out of our hotel after the boat ride and made our way via some small country roads which again did not disappoint and were very scenic. We made the most of this journey and took our time as we knew the next’s day journey back to Saigon would be busy with traffic and noise.

Sa Dec is quite a small place and there isn’t much on offer but we wanted to go there to visit a house which was the setting for a French book and film called The Lover. The house itself is in the Chinese Style and is small so it din’t take us long to walk around. We drove about the town seeing the place and visited a temple where we got chatting to a local girl who guided us around and then invited us to see the kitchens, we said “ok why not” and walked into a huge but unimpressive room where about a dozen volunteer ladies were busy making food for the monks of the temple. We were offered a strange looking pudding to eat which was really tasty and we caused much hilarity, we laughed loads and it’s the kind of experience you just can’t buy. It was worth coming to Sa Dec just for those 10 minutes we were with them.

Our Mekong Delta Trip over, we made our way back to Saigon and arrived safe and sound.

Vietnam is the perfect place to drive a motorbike, everyone has got one and the big main roads have special lanes just for motorbikes so it is actually pretty safe once you get the hang of how the traffic moves, although a certain amount of weaving in and out of pot holes is required.

Sorry Naomi we know you might feel differently!

So back in Saigon for a couple of days and off to Cambodia on the 30th, a seven hour bus journey to Phnom Penh.

Our Lasting Memories of Vietnam:

Motorbikes, Motorbikes, Motorbikes! These are ubiquitous, you can’t be Vietnamese and not own a Motorbike of some kind, never have we seen so many.

Crazy things on motorbikes: Anything from families of five, a truck load of bananas (yes they should be on a truck not a motorbike), animals dead or alive and doors in either a vertical or horizontal position, you name it they’ll haul it!

Huge cemeteries everywhere and graves in front gardens and Paddy fields.

People sleeping anywhere they possibly can, even on climbing frames.

Hammocks strung up everywhere.

Bonsais and Topiary.

Bird in cages, much to our distress.

Cheap cheap beer, if you are paying more than 40p for a bottle, you’re being ripped off.

Women in hats, face masks, even gloves to cover themselves from the sun so they can stay as white as possible.

Men with their shirts pulled up above the belly to keep themselves cool in the heat.

Roadworks, most of the major trunk roads are being rebuilt all at the same time which makes for bumpy bus journeys.

Soy Sauce and Chilli Sauce, we can’t get enough of it.

Loud music and bad karaoke, the Viets do like to make a noise.

Early risers, half the country is up and running before sunrise.