My Tho is very interesting. When taken with students that
is. Our trip there from Saigon took about an hour and a half and the road
surface was much more forgiving than the previous outing to Cu Chi. I could
even read. For a short while. Until some gappy mouthed Vietnamese granddad started
freaking out next to me. Apparently his kid had never seen white skin before
and thought we were out to reap his soul, which I was willing to do had the journey
lasted longer.
Then we arrived at our hotel sans passport. This was a big
problem. The police in Vietnam call round the hotels checking whether whites
are being holed up there and if so whether it is against their will. Our
situation was a little like that. The 7am wakeup call was enough torture.
Couple that with my Vietnamese roommate’s unhealthy obsession with fashion TV
and playing gash music as loud as possible. Needless to say sleeping was tough.
The day was good however. We got a neat little boat down the
putrid smelling river into the refines of Conrad land. There I snapped a good
little piccy of Shutty with Mr. Dental Problems 2008 and even got to pet a
snake. A two eyed one however. I didn’t check that thoroughly though. Then we
went to see some buzzy bees, and they were actually going quite mental. To add
insult to injury we sipped on their fine honey.
Later on we went to some other cool island. This island had
all sorts of mad stuff. We tasted loads of exotic fruit, but I over refreshed
myself on too much pineapple and had neither the energy or the temperament to
row down the river canal. Not too much of a problem, some poor little woman did
this all for me and for a moment I felt like a big fat CEO being chauffeured into
hell. On my journey to Hades I couldn’t
help but notice the size of the rats climbing up the river bed. Thankfully I
had my own little rat sat right in front of me.
After that we were seated quite contently on a stilted
restaurant high in the canopy of the jungle. Here we were served Elephant Ear
Fish and King prawns and a thoroughly decent meal. The waiters had to make my
wraps however as I was completely inept at using chopsticks. The day followed a
similar trend before we returned to My Tho and strolled around town. I’m amazed at how often Vietnamese people
want to eat. Every couple of hours they want to force fried eggs, rice or
canary fetuses down your gaping mouths. The night then took an eerie tone when
we went down to the central lake and hitched a ride on a massive swan that’d
definitely seen better days. Mr.
Esterhammer didn’t like walking that night and for a large part of it we had to
find out where the creepy xe-om guy had taken him to.
All was well in the end though as the group was reunited and
enjoyed the sumptuous delights of compressed squid as the midnight hour drew
near. The next day we were taken to
Greenpeace’s nightmare at a local snake farm that would win awards for
depravity and cruelty to animals. Mr. Tam kept antagonizing a monkey by yanking
its tail which consequently provoked it into an Eric Cantona like assault on
the oblivious Mr. Esterhammer. Not that he was too shaken up as he enjoyed the
albino tortoise like no other man.
