After a tiring day on the bus we arrived in Hoi An around 6:30pm and were pleasantly surprised to find a very quaint, French styled village filled with little restaurants and bars and hundreds of tailors, shoe makers and clothes shops. That night we had a great night catching up with the English couple we had met from the Halong Bay Boat cruise for dinner and were then literally picked up off the street and taken to a local bar on the back of a staff member’s scooter – after too many cheap rum, vodka, red bull and sprite buckets (honestly who comes up with these drinks!!) we gradually took over the bar – choosing the tracklist for the night on the bar’s laptop, writing our names all over the walls (and some of the other patrons), singing at the top of our lungs and dancing on the pool table far too many times to “Sexy Back.”
Needless to say the next morning we were a little delicate so decided to do very little (or couldn’t move for fear of vomiting), walking around town and getting our bearings. By the afternoon and some greasy food, we felt a little better so we jumped onto the back of a scooter with a small, sweaty old local guy to go to the beach – while he didn’t speak much English he understood we were on our honeymoon based by his responses of “boom boom in bed!” Always our luck, we chose to go to the beach when the heat eased off and the rain came but still were happy to get our beach fix since missing it through Laos and Vietnam thus far.
The next day we ventured to the My Son ruins about an hour and a half from Hoi Ann – the ruins were very good though had been significantly damaged by bombs during the war. Returning in the afternoon we visited some of the local temples and the Japanese covered bridge.
Though we really enjoyed Hoi Ann and could have stayed later we were running out of time on our visa so decided to skip Na Trang and fly direct to Ho Chi Minh City.
We landed in Ho Chi Minh early evening and had a crazy cab ride with a guy who spoke little to no English and actually didn’t know where he was, constantly stopping to ask for directions – after going in circles one too many times we decided to get out and walk to where we wanted to stay – with the light rain it was actually really refreshing after the heat we’d had so far. Eventually we found a great little guesthouse with a fantastic restaurant underneath in the main backpacker area.
The next day, after another of Sarah’s “small lie ins” (till 11:30am...) we ventured out in the heat and walked to the war remnants museum. It really was amazing to see all the photos, weapons and hear a lot of stories about the war –even though they were all extremely one sided the majority of the time. It was quite confronting seeing pictures of victims of Agent Orange, and the continued effects on the generations since the war. After the museum we visited a local hindu temple and Sarah got ripped off on a pair of shorts after a wander through one of the large markets.
The following day we took a day trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels used by the Vietcong during the war, which were amazing. Honestly, the size of the tunnels and their entries was tiny and a lot of the tunnels ran for hundreds of metres intertwining with one another – they really were crafty little bastards! There were also some exhibits of traps they used against the American soldiers on the jungle which were surprising to see also. In the afternoon I went bar hopping and fought off local prostitutes (male and female) while Sarah spent three hours+ having her hair permanently straightened again for only $28 (can’t be too permanent since this is the third time she’s done it!).
The next day we refer to as “Oxfam trailwalker day” as we walked for hours attempting to find a temple which was incorrectly addressed in the lonely planet, after finally finding it we visited a few more temples and got a cab back to our area as we could walk no more. Dropped off near our guesthouse, we sat in the park and laughed at the group of 50-60 women doing “lazy aerobics” together to really bad techno music. We had an early start the next morning for our two day Mekong delta boat trip to cross the border to Cambodia.
While being advertised as a two day boat trip to cross the border to Cambodia – three quarters of the journey was via a very old mini bus with a vegemite smear of brake pads left and near to no rear suspension, but hey this “is part of the experience.” Along the way we visited a local coconut candy manufacturing “plant”/room and a rice paper, rice wine and rice whiskey makers “plant.” Here they sold bottles of whiskey with snakes, scorpions etc the bottles – one bottle even had a snake and a snake eating bird – which looked disgusting! We then went further down the river for lunch where the local delicacy is the Elephant ear fish!
Back on the bus we eventually hit some traffic for no apparent reason, as we got further along we came across a man who had fallen off his scooter and died from massive head injuries – it was quite confronting, particularly since dozens of people just stood around him watching the thick, bright red blood gush run from his partially caved in skull.
Later we made it to our floating hotel for the night and met some more nice English tourists that we had a few drinks with. The next day we had an extremely hot boat journey, on and off the boat to obtain our Cambodian visas and to cross the border to Phnom Pehn.
