Take Two - Vietnamish

I only ask because i think he's opened an English Language school in Vietnam. I haven't seen him in the flesh, but I've recently met locals who seem to have picked up his accent. If you close your eyes and imagine being guided around ancient wonders of the world by Pee Wee Herman, it all adds a new and slightly surreal twist to the tour. His show got cancelled in 1991 because he was caught masturbating to the film Nancy Nurse in a porno theatre, so maybe the shame drove him out here...who knows.

As i write this i am in an internet cafe in Phnom Penh, Cambodia sat next to a Buddhist Monk, who seems to find whatever website he's browsing very amusing. So much for a simple, humble way of life. Even the Monks can't resist the might of Facebook.

Sadly looking at the first entry in the blog we seem to be way behind...again. But we will step back in time anyway and i'll try and recap the last few weeks in as much detail as i can.

So where did we leave off? Ah yes we were in Nha Trang going to head up to Dalat in the Central Highlands.

We took a bus up to Dalat from Nha Trang, which cut across the country from the coast up to the highlands (for the journey we bought some Doritos, Cookies and shortbread to eat, which in total cost the same as two nights accomodation). The views as we wound are way up on narrow roads to the second highest peak in Vietnam (after Sapa in the north) were pretty good. Which was lucky because it distracted most of the passengers from the weird noises and copius amounts of steam coming from the bus engine. This bus was damn slow. It's a pretty bum clenching sight to see a bus overtaking your bus on a blind bend with a good 200ft drop on the other side of the road. As the buses passed i swear i saw the Grim Reaper on one, looking at me, shaking his head and tapping his watch.
About half way up our bus decided it didn't want to go any further and finally collapsed at the side of the road. If it was a horse it would of been Pritt Stick by now, but the determined (or demented depending on the light) driver was not about to give up on it and attempted to, well, flog a dead horse. Whatever he did it seemed to work (i think it involved pouring water over the engine and giving it a good kick) as after about half an hour the bus jumped back in to life and dragged us up the last few hours in to Dalat. We all piled off the bus as another bunch of unsuspecting passengers were ferried on and sent off down the hill to Saigon.

Time for some tourist office rubbish about Dalat now. It's a charming french designed town, built high up in the central highlands of Vietnam. Surrounded by forests and vegetable fields and frequented by friendly locals and with the cooling breeze it all adds up to a relaxing and mediterranean syle town...blah, blah, blah. The Vietnam Paris it's been called with its own 'eiffel tower' (a rather smaller version that you can't climb up). It's a pretty lame tower actually, but it's been given this tag and now has to live with it. It just stands there looking slightly embarrased, knowing that everyone who looks up just feels rather dissapointed. Anyway, Dalat has a big lake (Xuan Huong Lake) in the middle which is rather Riviera-like (although i've never actually been to the Riviera, so don't really know what it's supposed to look like), but more excitingly has Pedalo Swans for hire. If i ever wrote a book on the 10 best lakes in the world I would demand they all had Pedalo Swans on them. During our short time in Vietnam we haven't seen any real swans though, so these might be Pedalo Geese, which in my book would put it 'top 5' easy.

It was still Tet new year, which as I've mentioned before is a time when all of Vietnam is on holiday. This meant Dalat was heaving with Vietmanese families. This not only meant we found it a little bit difficult to find decent accomodation (if you've seen the film 'The Beach' you can imagine what our room was like) it also meant the prices of everything went up. Hotel rooms, bus and train tickets, Oreo's, everything was double the price. The standard reply when you ask the price was "well it is Tet so..." accompanied with a Gallic shrug. This went on for about two weeks around the actual new year's day. A cynic would say it just seems like a good excuse to put prices up for a couple of weeks a year, but maybe that's just being a bit 'bah humbug' about it, after all there was a decent fireworks display in Nha Trang and all the flowers in bloom and kumquat trees look lovely. In our Guesthouse there was a guy staying there who had been born in Yorkshire, had Irish parents and lived for half his life in Australia. This guys accent was the best i have ever heard, even better than Pee Wee's. I swear if i had hung around listening long enough he would of said "alrite our kid, u wan t' throw another shrimp on t' barbie, to be sure to be sure". I thought it was brilliant and he has inspired me to mash some other accents up. At the moment i'm trying a Geordie/German mix. I'll let you know how it goes.

While in Dalat we hired a couple of 'Easy Riders' (old guys with motorbikes) to drive us around the sights for a day. The 'Easy Riders' are supposedly a group of former South Vietnamese Soldiers who fought alongside the Americans in the Vietnam War. After the war ended they found themselves unemployable so they set up this group to use their local knowledge and act not only as drivers, but tour guides for the tourists who came to Dalat. It became quite successful and now (this being Vietnam with no copyright laws) any old Tom Dick or Pee Wee with a moped call's himself an 'Easy Rider'. We chose a city tour and happily drove off in to the sunrise to see the sights of Dalat. Happily drove off for about 20 minutes that is, then Rachel felt ill (sun stroke from our marathon walk around the lake and flower garden the day before) and we had to go back to the hotel. Not the best start to the Tet New Year. After a day's rest in bed we ventured off again, this time seeing the sights just outside the city centre. The guides (Mr Hien and Ba) knew where to stop for the views and tell stories from the war and point out the devastation caused to the surrounding countryside by the Agent Orange dropped to flush out the VC (Mr Hien was an ex-helicopter pilot of the South Veitnamese army). They also guided us around to a Pagoda, the Elephant Falls (with a hazardous dice-with-death path to the bottom), all the Coffee and Tea Plantations and the Silk Weaving factory. Vietnam is the second largest exporter of Coffee in the world after Brazil and you can see it as you travel through the small hamlets. There are large impressive houses (in complete contrast to the neighbours shack's) whos owners have literally grown fat off the land. Vietnam is also the fifth largest Tea Exporter and, as i've said previously, the 2nd largest rice exporter in the world. So nobody can accuse them of not working hard. The tea they grow is split three ways, with the last cheapo crappy part of the leaf, (the end of the stalk) used in Lipton Ice Tea. So remember that when you next buy a packet. We also stopped off at the Hang Nga Crazy House. It was designed by Mrs Dang Viet Nga (now 80 years old but still living there), who's dad was a big cheese in Ho Chi Minh's government back in the day. Have a look at the photo's, but imagine a concrete Disney themed guesthouse, designed by Blackpool council and built by Frank Spencer. I haven't seen building work that shoddy since school when we tried to make a bird table in woodwork class.

With our visa coming to an end, we headed down the hill for our last couple of stops in Vietnam...Saigon and the mighty Mekong Delta.

Saigon is like the bigger brother of Hanoi who has travelled the world and got rich on Wall Street. In contrast to Hanoi it's a hell of alot more globalised (A massive Louis Vuitton store was just the tip of the iceberg). Although we didn't venture too far out of the tourist area of the city, it had a completely different, cosmopolitan feel to it compared to the rest of the country. Lonely Planet described it as the most crime ridden part of Vietnam, but we found it all quite plesant. Not too unlike many cities around the world, maybe just like a Vietnamified Paris.
We took the usual route to all the museums and other touristy things. The trip to the Museum Of War Remnants (formerly called Museum of American War crimes) being probably the best of the bunch. It houses some amazing photo's taken during the war by American and Japanese photographers (including the last photo they took before they were killed). The photo's taken at the massacre of 'My Lai' and the after-effects of agent orange were particularly disturbing and heart wrenching.

As Rachel thought it would be a little too clastrophobic for her, I took a trip out to the Chu Chi Tunnels on my own (type 'Chu Chi tunnels' into wikipedia if you want to know about them). The guide on the trip was an ex River Boat Captain for the U.S army and worked with the Commando's. His first hand account of the war and emotional connection made the whole trip come alive. As these guys are getting old now, in a few years most of them will be retired and the tours may feel slighly cold and detached. Anyway, these tunnels are bloody small, and that's after they've been widened for fat arsed westeners. Even though you only crawl through a few metres of one of the tunnels (there were about 250km of them) it's a sweaty and back breaking experience.

Back in Saigon we booked a 3 day cycle tour of the Mekong delta. The trip took us to MyTho, Vinhlong, CaiBe, CanTho and CaiRang floating market. We saw villages of brick, terracotta and pottery kilns, cycled through riverside villages and Rice fields and along some pretty hair-raising highways during rush hour. This is a beautiful part of the country (even more beautiful-er than the other beautiful parts that i said were beautiful earlier). We cycled alot (up to 60km in one day), saw some lovely scenery, ate some lovely food, drank some lovely beer, conversed with some lovely (and sometimes weird) locals and it was all bloody knackering. We wore some proper cycling shirts and even had a back-up support van, which drove behind us carrying water and supplies. This made us look like a bunch of bewlidered competitors from the Tour De France who had taken a wrong turn somewhere around the Alps. Sadly only our clown-like cycling gave us away as amatures. Even so, it was one of those days that you would be quite content for it to be Groundhog day.

After the Tour de Delta and a day of rest, we crossed the border in to Cambodia by bus...and this is where we are now.

Over the last month we have met many people that have made the trip even better than we thought our first foray in to Asia could be. Now after just settling and adjusting in to one countries way of life, customs, money and food we move on to another and have to start over again. But i guess that's what this travelling lark is all about.

The weirdest thing we seen so far on our journey (and which i would say is up there as one of the weirdest things i have ever seen in my entire life) was a small dog dressed up in kids clothes, wearing a hat and riding a tricycle in the town of CanTho. I am not kidding, look at the photo in the Mekong Delta folder! At first i thought it was a stuffed toy untill it started moving and slowly turning its head a la Exorcist, to intently stare at us. It was pretty scary stuff. I can see it Chuckie-like, murdering a whole town while it sleeps, then casually cycling off to the next town laughing to itself. We don't know why it was there or what it was doing. It wasn't outside a pet shop or anything remotely linked with animals. I think its owner must of just been a bit mental.

Our top 4 'must see's' in Vietnam:
Hanoi old Quarter (there is nothing like it anywhere else in the country)
Halong Bay
Hoi An
Mekong Delta

We have noticed over the last few weeks or so that large sections of the Lonely Planet guide books are complete rubbish. Most of it is at least a year if not two years old and some of the maps aren't even to the correct scale. It's a bit frustrating, but maybe we sould see this as a sign and free ourselves from the shackles of the Lonely Planet Sat Nav and venture out in our own way. But maybe not. So if you would like to know where we go next and what we'll probably see and do, please turn to pages 123-145 of your Lonely Planet Cambodia travel book. There will be a test later.

I'm definately no Adrian Mole, but i will try and keep this diary a little more up to date and a bit more frequent from now on (although saying that it's already behind because we have been in Cambodia for 9 days)

One fact before we go: Did you know one person a year dies in the good ol' U.S of A from the Plague! I'll have to look up to make sure our travel insurance covers that one for when we get to California.

Rachel has uploaded a load more photo's in to the folder for you to look at if you like. Here's the link again: http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii40/rachelandjoseph/?albumview=grid

See you soon.

Joe and Rachel.x

Stats:
Most people seen riding on one moped: 5 (five!)
Amount of Laughing Cow Cheese eaten: 223 triangles
Snakes seen: 0