Venue: Islands round Mekong River and Saigon
Date: 17 Aug evening to 19 Aug 2009
After our beautiful days in Mui Ne, we headed back to Saigon, by bus. This time, no more Germans. Saigon probably isn’t all that attractive for tourists, hm, not for us for sure!
It was fairly easy for us to find our way to the travel-agencies’-street in Saigon, we nearly walked there every day! To find food, to check flights, to check daily trips. So we booked our trip to Cu Chi for 18 Aug. So everything was settled and we had our dinner in one of the “Tai Pai Dong” - it wasn’t very Vietnamese I suppose. The local beer was nice and cheap. Spring rolls were not bad. Well, don’t forget we’re always food-craving… so Po and Yan in the end got us some mid-night snacks. (Oh yeah, Vietnamese are really good at playing featherballs! Many guys play!)
Anyway… here comes the best part. We arrived at the travel agency at 8.35am on 18 Aug for the daily trip to Cu Chi, just as Po told us to… surprise, the bus was already off! The bus to Cu Chi left at 8.15am, Po got the time wrong!!! Yan and I wanted to kill her literally, I thought we would have to spend a boring day in Saigon… however, the bus to Mekong River was still there so immediately we paid extra money and joined this other day tour to Meking River! What a twist of fate. So… boys and girls, never say never :)
First time ever to join a local tour. There was a Belgian couple sat in front of us, and we kept saying “ik ben mooi” which means “I am beautiful” in Dutch (our Belgian friend, Kristof, taught us. OK, we made him teaching us). Well, either they didn’t understand or they simply chose to ignore us. I guess the French newspaper the guy was reading explained it all.
Right in front of the Mekong River. Do you know that it’s the 7th longest river in Asia? Neither did I. The figure doesn’t mean anything to me, however long this river is has nothing to do with me, I wasn’t going to travel all along it… The yellow colour of the river made me wonder how Yellow River (Huang He) was like. Oh wait. I was at Yellow River once, when I was in Zhengzhou! Oh well. I wasn’t thinking then :p
This is a map of the boat trip. We haven’t been to all islands, we’ve only been to 5 of them.
:D Did you see that he was staring at me? Does it make you wonder how that hammock didn’t fell? Obvious it was one of the questions that I asked myself quite frequently when I was in Vietnam. We probably couldn’t make any use of the hammocks here in Hong Kong.
My beautiful friends and I were finally on a speedmotor boat. :) Very nice picture :D
Wah. Can anyone explain to me why a cargo ship like this couldn’t sink?
Another poster picture? If only the colours were more vivid…
As you can probably imagine from the picture on the left that the Vietnamese probably are leading a not-so-easy life. The view was rather nice though.
I never say we aren’t silly! We were really lively as you can see :) I think we were very cute :D
While our tour guide (who was really nice, he taught us so many Vietnamese and was always very funny!) was telling us the process in making the famous rice paper (middle picture), we went off to take pictures of the marvelous VIETNAMESE BANANAS! Did they impress you like they impressed me?
Then we had lunch… before we had lunch, we took a couple of pictures and one of them was really really funny… being so generous, I’m really willing to share with you, in hope of brightening up your day. So here it is:
Hahahaha, I looked so stupid! And a very convincing Vietnamese too (not that they looked stupid, but with my hat and my skin colour and everything else you see fit!)!
Yan and I got our Vietnamese hats there (very cheap!), Po got her red Vietnamese cap at the pier and we befriended an Italian model, Angela.
We were on the boat again to another island and our hats proved to be really useful… look at pregnant Po :) We were exploring the beautiful jungle, it felt like sailing through Amazon (not that I know how that would feel like, but that was how I imagined it to be).
It was cloudy that day, lucky it didn’t rain though :)
On this other island, we drank some genuine (!!!) honey tea. There was a guy took the hive out, we had to show our bravery of course :D We also rode the cart with the horse (isn’t she pretty with a big flower on her head?) pulling. The picture on the right… shows you Yan, her “horse like teeth” and the cute horse!
I personally think that was a very cruel act… I hope, my dearest readers, that none of you are working in SPCA… if you do… please note that it wasn’t our fault!
Those are bricks! I wonder why are they using bricks like this!
We also enjoyed some very exotic Vietnamese fruit and music :) There were some singers singing in Vietnamese, we couldn’t understand a word. They were probably singing love or war songs. The Belgian couple gave us information on the famous and traditional water puppets show! We also forgot about it!
Brave Yan, screaming Po and wanting-to-escape Joey! I still remember the terrible texture on the snake’s skin! Ugh! Horrifying!
We went to another island again after the snake-episode… The tour guide asked Yan and I to do Titanic, haha, we did, but the picture taken by him wasn’t as good as I’d want!
The coconuts island. They make fresh coconut candies :D
All were very tired by the end of the day… It was a very nice (and cheap) day trip to be honest :) I liked it :D
On the bus back to Saigon. The traffic was soooooo unbelievable! Impressive!
We bought our tickets to the water puppets show right after we got off the bus. Before going to the show, we still wanted to get our friends some souvenirs but we couldn’t find any! It was so crazy! All those shops were closed and the markets too! Well, at least we had a lot of fun asking people for directions and got super cheap coconuts again!
This is the water puppets show. If you ever go to Vietnam, you should watch one of these. It’s one-kind-one! Hahaha, means it’s one of the kind :) I was just showing off my Singlish :p
Venue: Vietnam International Airport
Time: 4:09 am in the morning on 19 Aug 2009
Can you believe how many people were there already at 4am in the morning? Vietnamese, you are all very diligent!
Believe it or not, this was how I looked like, a walking-dead-Vietnamese-looking Joey Leung :) The officer at the Custom kept talking to me in Vietnamese… I could barely open my eyes but still I managed to utter “I don’t understand”, haha.
Anyway, this is the end of our Vietnam trip. We did have great fun. It was the last trip we went on together before Po left to Germany. Bye bye Vietnam, we will be back, someday.
