Hannah and Jase's World Tour

Hello guys,

Hannah and I took our night sleeper bus down to Nh Trang, arriving there for about 6.30 am. As it seemed like just another big noisy city with a beach, still on the bus we made the decision to continue on our trails straight away and hop on to another bus to take us further south by 4 hours to the so called vietnamese honeymoon spot up in the highlands, being Dalat in the central highlands.

Dalat was alot bigger than Hannah and I expected but the scenery was great up in the hills. As I fell ill for a while we ended up staying there for 5 nights and on our last full day (20th March) we rented some easy riders to take us on the back of their bikes and give us a day tour of the surrounding area, which was great. The highlight was certainly visiting a local silk worm factory where they bred silk worm in a factory and whilst the worm is dreaming of becoming a butterfly, they take the cocoons and boil them alive whilst this machine unweaves their silk, apparently 100 metres worth usually. Impressive.

Dalat had a great lively market where you could see all the fish jumping out of their market bowls bouncing to the roundabout for freedom, I guess. I was very intrigued as I watched these vietnamese woman selling live frogs to a customer in the local market and then kill them by cutting their heads off with a pair of scissors and then slit them open and skin them completely as the headless bodies were jumping up and down. Trying to follow the fish I guess.

Hannah spent this time taking some great photographs of vietnamese life and doing some great minature art work - a new niche for her it seems.

Finishing off the 'Quiet American' and starting the book 'Chickenhawk', on 21st March Hannah and I took another bus to Mui Ne beach, renowned for its spectacular sand dunes. We stayed there for 2 nights, allowing us to rent some bikers and bikes on the 22nd to take us on a tour of the sand dunes and the canyons in the local areas. The sights were impressive. Literally, 20 km in land from the sea you were transported to an area of miles and miles of sand dunes - in the middle we could honestly beliveve that we were lost in a desert. The photos look great. We hired some sand sledging boards from some local kids. We climbed some bigs sand dunes and whizzed down them, great fun. One of the local kids was getting a bit trigger happy with our camera so there are some great in action shots of hannah and I crashing down this sand dune, a certain highlight so far.

On 23rd we took another bus and headed further south to Saigon, where we have now been for 1 day. We have already hired some cyclos (bycycle with a seat on the front) to take us through the crazy street of Saigon for the day whilst we visited the attractions, such as the War Museum. Although the coverage of the museum was very one-sided, its photographs of the vietnam war victims was certainly very powerful. Tomorrow we are off to visit the Cu Chi tunnnels used by the north vietnamese against the amercians and the french in their respective wars and then on the 26th we hope to take a 3 day boat trip into Cambodia through the Mekong delta, which should be a great end to our Vietnam chapter and a start to 2/3 weeks in Cambodia.

Cheers my dears

Jason and Hannah