Tomorrow, March 18th, Amy and I leave for Bhutan, the real honeymoon part of our trip. Because of the amount of time it takes to write these posts, as well as our limited access to computers (we’re not travelling with one), we’ve gotten a bit behind where we’d like to be in keeping you updated. In an attempt to remedy that, here’s a quick overview of how we spent our time in Vietnam (hopefully with another post on Laos and Northern Thailand to come).

Feb. 17 – 20; The Mekong Delta

We started out in Vietnam by taking a boat from just outside of Phnom Phen, Cambodia to the Vietnam border at Chau Doc. There we saw a fish farm (quite sad actually) and had a good time walking through the town at night and drank shots of rice wine with green mango, offered to us by a group of very sweet, and very drunk, locals.

The next day we embarked on a 3 day Mekong Delta trip, mostly by boat. We stayed in Cantho, where we ate snake, had amazing Vietnamese coffee, saw an incredible floating market, and met a nice teenager who helped us buy water and practiced his English with us before ditching us to play online games (which are huge here!).

Then we were off to Mytho which was quite nice.

We ate durian which we had been wanting to try but were afraid. It’s a fruit that’s both sweet an incredibly pungent. The smell reminds one a bit of raw sewage, but the taste is, well, sorta good.

I have to admit it’s a bit hard to get past the smell. On bus trips, they don’t allow you to bring durian into the passenger area with you. Because of the incredibly strong smell, you must stow it with the luggage.

In Mytho we met this guy who took us on a fantastic nighttime boat trip through these small canals in the delta to a restaurant where we ate a super tasty and beautiful mudfish.

It was incredible to go through here at night, and reminded us of a thousand Vietnam war (there they call it the American war) movies.

It was during this time we met Gunna and Ann.

We became friends and spent a bunch of the next few days in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) together. The first thing you notice in HCMC is the 1 zillion motorcycles zipping around. The streets are chaotic, and it’s pretty scary to cross them even, because traffic rules are really treated more as suggestions here and not actual rules, so a moto can come at you from anywhere when you’re not expecting it. We stayed in a guest house on this fantastic little alley that was really alive. The city is full of alleyways and people just spill out on to them, hanging out, cooking and selling food and other products, and just generally being very vibrant. It reminded me of some bits of Europe actually, except the architecture’s not as old.

HCMC is really beautiful and alive. While there, we went to the park (of course) hoping to see people getting down with the public exercise, but instead found this.

We then checked out the American War Museum which is, well, a war museum, so it’s full with propaganda, as well as being genuinely moving and painful. We also took a day trip to see a Cao Dai temple.

Cao Dai is this strange religion that is kind of a halfway mix between Christianity and Buddhism. One of their patron saints is french poet Victor Hugo,

and their decor is very colorful. It only exists in the south of Vietnam, where there about 3 million practicing Cao Dai, and they allow non-practitioners to come to the service and hang out and take pictures.

Later that day, we went to the Cu Chi tunnels which is a system of underground tunnels built by the Viet Cong to hide from the South Vietnamese Army and American forces. Overall they built over 200 miles worth of tunnels, and had meeting rooms, kitchens, and hospitals underground. The tunnels were so small that American GI’s could not fit in them, and so they provided a safe hiding place for the VC. They have doubled the size of a 100 meter stretch of the tunnel so that Westerners can fit in and go through them. Even this is incredibly hard to get through and makes one very claustrophobic. These tunnels were clearly the work of a very determined group of people.

The pictures are of Amy and I getting into one of the original tunnel entrances, this one hasn’t been made bigger.

The next day we headed north towards Dalat. It’s very mountainous there and again, quite European. There’s cafes everywhere, and the smell of pine trees reminded me of home in a way that hadn’t happened before on the trip. We visited a crazy hotel called, the crazy house, and I played a muddy soccer game with a bunch of Vietnamese guys who didn’t speak much English but did manage to get out something to the effect of “you are white like American, but short like Vietnamese” That was good fun, but the real reason we went to Dalat was for the Easy Riders.

The Easy Riders have been getting quite a fine reputation around Vietnam as motorcycle tour guides and they’re based in Dalat. We hooked up with a couple of guys, Lee and An, who turned out to be fake Easy Riders.

They took us on a 2 day tour of the central highlands, these are some pics from the bike.

On this trip is where we visited a silk factory and ate those silkworms (you may remember Amy’s post…), and visited some coffee farms, the happy Buddha temples, a beautiful waterfall called Elephant waterfall and an incredible rock called Elephant Stone.

We rode through the pouring rain, saw the effects of Agent Orange on a hillside, stayed in a stilt house, had a good time with a lady who made sesame ricepaper, and met a 2 day old buffalo.

Unfortunately, on the 2nd day of the trip, we got accosted at 11 AM in the morning by a local plainclothes cop who was incredibly drunk and who tried to kiss Amy. Amy and I both pushed him at that moment (not knowing he was a cop) and things nearly got uglier. Our guides were fairly afraid to step in and do something, but luckily he was so drunk that we were able to just get on the motorcycles and ride away. It turns out that in a lot of villages, people are assigned to positions of authority solely on family history and not merit. The likely reason this person was even a cop was that his parents and grandparents fought for Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese Army. He is very important in his town, and wanted to throw his weight around with the foreigners. We were lucky though, in that there is no real structured hierarchy beyond the village police officer, so we were in no further danger after running away.

Well, after this experience, and a combined 12 hours each on the back of the motorcycle in 2 days (and a case of serious monkey butt), we were ready to relax a bit and went to the beach at Doc Let. This was to be our last stay in Vietnam before heading into Laos but unfortunately, our 2 days there where filled with rain, wind, and cold. We had a nice time meeting some other travelers while we were there, but didn’t get any of the quality beach time we had hoped for.

Overall, Vietnam was fantastic, and we both really wish we could have stayed a bit longer. The people were very warm and inviting. We had been led to believe by other travelers that this wouldn’t be the case, that folks in Vietnam would be out to hustle us but that wasn’t our experience at all. We never made it to the north and Hanoi, where we would have really liked to spend some time. Apparently it is a more laid back, and arty place than HCMC, but it wasn’t to be. I guess we’ll just have to put it on the agenda for next time.

Oh yes, and a parting gift from the Vietnamese to us, this donation jar at the airport. Thanks Vietnam!