Ben and Angie Wanderings

After four days of cross-highlands motorbike travel we decided to take a couple of days chilling out in the relaxed 22 km stretch of sand at Mui Ne Beach.

As it was tipping it down with rain and the resort we arrived in was quiet we managed to haggle a great bungalow at a resort with a pool and a stretch of beach for around our normal budget. The spot of luxury was a welcome one and the sky cleared of rain shortly after arriving.

What followed was mainly relaxing and eating fresh seafood (yes even Ben has been nibbling on unidentified smelly swimming creatures) and we really enjoyed the easy going atmosphere.

On the last day we took our rusty motor along the coast to the sand dunes around 20 km away. Vietnam is such a varied landscape and it’s really weird to drive down from the lush green mountains to find the world turning red as the moisture is sucked from the land. From the tops of the dunes at the very west of the desert you can see the sea, with hundreds of small fishing boats huddled together in search of more smelly swimming creatures.

An added bonus here is that the ever entrepreneurial Vietnamese children have created a business in hiring out ‘sleds’ of a fashion, essentially a bit of bendy plastic with rope on the end. Good fun sliding down dunes but the reality of ‘what goes down must have to trek back up a big old sand dune in scorching temperatures’ meant that we didn’t last long before heading for shade.

So, feeling refreshed and ready to move on we set of for Ho Chi Minh City, or as everybody still calls it here, Saigon.

We’ve tended to find that we’re not really into big cities during our travels, which is a bit odd given where we live back home. But anyway, Saigon is somehow different. A big, sprawling mental metropolis of madness it maybe (apparently there are around 5 million motorbikes in Saigon), but it’s got a charm all of its own. I can’t really describe it so I won’t bother, but we met a very interesting bloke who seemed to sum it up when we asked him for recommendations for things to see. He said something along the lines of ‘you don’t come to see things at Saigon, Saigon is life, you come to soak up its vitality’.

A bit over the top you might think but then this guy was a larger than life character and pulled off this sort of flowery conversation with a strangely dark English suaveness. He looked around late forties, a tall, thin, wraith like character with hair shaved back and sides but crowned with long blond hair bundled into a pony tail, giving him an appearance not unlike a bleached blond rat gripping to a ten inch nail.

Brought up in England, he came to study Vietnamese as a university student and never left. Now he’s CEO of a large investment company and owns a swish eco-resort on Phu Quock Island. Angie got talking to him first and when we noticed he’d left his lady on another table (a 28ish year old Vietnamese beauty) we asked her to join us too. It turned out that she owned the bar that we were sat in, perhaps a wedding gift.. Anyway, while we were sat talking a street seller turned up with a stack of precariously balanced books and Dominic asked if we’ve ever read ‘The Sorrow of War’. It turns out he owns the movie rights to the book and, hearing that Ben was an editor and had an interest in films, he bought the book for us to read, left his business card, jumped into a waiting car and disappeared into the throng of motorbikes.

We tend to attract odd characters it seems, but it makes for a varied trip.

While we spent most of our time just lapping up the atmosphere and wandering around alleys and the like, we did make some time to visit the War Remnants Museum and the Reunification Palace. Walking into the War Remnants Museum you’re surrounded by tanks, helicopters and various implements of destruction, but inside the building is more like a photo exhibition. The most harrowing collection of pictures we’ve ever seen (now with the exception of the S-21 Khymer Rouge Prison exhibition in Cambodia), these were pictures I doubt they’d display in public back in England and we both had to finish when we got to the chemical warfare section, it was all getting a bit much.

We really enjoyed Saigon, and strangely it was one of the few cities we could imagine living in for a few years. Or maybe a few months anyway.