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3: Dalat 26 February 2005
Hi! I'm going to attempt to use paragraphs in this one...
From Chau Doc we did a 2 day tour around the Mekong Delta with about 13
other tourists who really irritated Brad, but it was nice that someone
else was organising what we were doing for 2 full days. We took rowing
boats through floating villages, saw how the locals catch fish
underneath their houses, went to an ethnic minority village where they
showed us how they weave silk, and then climbed a 900m hill (called Sam
Mountain which should have given us an idea that it was going to be hard
work). We were in direct sunlight the whole way up, and it wasn't just
up a steep slope but up thousands of steps which were the height of at
least two steps each. From the top, we could see a house in the distance
which was supposed to be where the Cambodian border was. Not very
exciting considering the state we were in by the tiem we got to the top.
Anyway, all of this was before lunch so we had quite a full day. We
spent the night in Cantho, a town on the river with a huge tin statue of
Ho Chi Minh since it's the beginning of the Ho Chi Minh trail.
The next morning we were up at 6 and took a rowing boat to the biggest
floating market in the area, then to see how vermicelli noodles are
made, and then to someone's house where we were given some strange fruit
to try. He also had big bottles of rice wine with snakes preserved
inside, and poured out shots of the snake wine for the men to "make them
good husbands tonight". We looked in the bottles afterwards and saw
chicken feet and other delicious looking things floating around in the
wine - glad to be a girl! We stopped at a bonsai park with lots of caged
monkeys, but a baby had managed to squeeze through the bars and was
climbing up people. It sat on my shoulder but when it stuck it's fist in
my ear I got such a shock that I threw it on the ground, whoops. Brad
has it all on video.
We got to Ho Chi Minh city that evening and spent 2 more days, going
to the Cu Chi tunnels on the last day (where the Viet Cong had lived
underground during the war). We crawled through one of the larger
tunnels and even in those it was impossible to imagine actually living
in there for years. Matt had just got to Ho Chi Minh City (he's teaching
English there for 5 months) so we met up with him that evening. Brad
said maybe he'd meet someone from Saskatchewan and I laughed at him, but
half an hour later an old man from Regina came and sat down at our
table!
The next day Brad and I left for Mui Ne, leaving
Greg behind in pursuit of a Vietnamese girl (the Lonely Planet said that
the only Vietnamese girls who would talk to you were prostitutes, but he
was determined to prove them wrong). Mui Ne is on the coast and is
famous for the fish sauce they make there, so it smells terrible but we
got used to it after a while. The first afternoon a herd of cows walked
right past our deck chairs on the beach. We rented a moped and went to
the sanddunes, driving between the desert and the beach for a while. We
also walked up a red stream called the Fairy Stream, but there wasn't
much of a waterfall at the end since it's the dry season. On our last
night, after we'd booked our bus tickets for the next day, 2 Vietnamese
men asked Brad if we were interested in travelling with the Easyriders.
Brad had heard of them - they are almost a cult, all coming from around
Dalat (in the Central Highlands of Vietnam) and taking tourists around
Vietnam on their motorbikes, going off the beaten tracks and showing you
"the real Vietnam", where no other tourists go. They gave us a good
price since they had to go back to Dalat anyway and would go alone if we
didn't go with them.
We left early the next morning with a couple from Exmoor, each on an
Easyrider's bike with our bags strapped onto the back so we even had a
cushion to lean back on. We took the mountain trail past real ethnic
minority groups (not ones still there only to attract tourists and sell
souvenirs) and crops of just about everything, stopping every 20 minutes
or so for them to explain or show us something. We spent the night in
the jungle next to a waterfall and the Easyriders cooked us the best
meal we'd had so far.
The next day my Easyrider's bike broke down (there was something stuck
in a valve) so he unscrewed it and tried sucking and blowing it out,
petrol rolling down his chin. The other Easyrider, Trung, who had
stopped with us, took a tire pump out of his backpack and pumped the
twig out. We caught up with the other 2 and went to a restuarant for
breakfast where they ordered steak and chips for all of us, and it only
came to a dollar. We've been ripped off everywhere we've been so far. We
went to a silk factory, tea and coffee factories, another hill tribe
village, Buddhist monastry, and then got into Dalat. We'd taken 2 days
to do a 4 hour trip, and had seen a thousand times more than we would
have seen on the bus. They almost convinced us to do another 2 day trip
but we'd already blown our budget so had to opt to take the bus instead.
We're still in Dalat now, a town in the mountains that gets down to 10
degrees at night. It's pretty but there's not much here so we're going
to Na Trang tomorrow, another beach town, and Greg might catch us up at
some point but it sounds like he'll be in Ho Chi Minh City for a while.
Love Emily xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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