Hey everyone. Vietnam was great. I’ve written a bunch of posts, or at leasts notes, on my laptop, but haven’t had a chance to upload any of it, but they’ll be coming sometime!

Quick status update. From Hanoi we took a sleeper bus to Hue and rented motor bikes there to explore around for a day. Then we took a 3 hour sitting bus to Hoi an, which we didn’t like the looks of at first. I would have liked to see My Son temple near there, but we’ve been seeing so many, and were short on time so we moved on after grabbing lunch there. The sleeper bus got into Nha Trang around 6 the next morning, where we walked around, saw another temple, and got burned on the beach. The next day we went scuba diving in a coral reef which was truely incredible… too much to describe here…

From Nha Tran, we got another sleeper bus to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) / Siagon, where we and Jason split up. I took the first bus to the port I needed to be at to get to Phu Quoc Island, where my friend Thanh was, while J checked out the Chu Chi Tunnels. It turned out he was able to get a night bus to meet up with me that night at 2:30 so we could arrive on the island together, which we didn’t think was possible in the morning, so that worked out well.

We then spent 2 days on the island down the street from where Thanh grew up till he was 7 at his uncle’s place. We ate a ton of foods I don’t want to even think about right now, fresh fruits (they lived on a fruit farm), relaxed, went out in their fishing boat to collect dinner, and just hung out in general. It was great!

After that we left on a 3 hour old boar ride to a small port in Vietnam near a new boarder into Cambodia. We were one of 4 travelers on it. The other two were two girls Bre from Canada, and Kim from Holland, who we’ve been hanging out with since. We took moto-bikes and a taxi up to Phnum Penh. We pretty much just spent a night there, and moved on to Siemreab where we spent 2 days looking at the temples of Angkor Wat, which were awesome. J got sick both these days, and is considering going home, but got out of the hotel room and ate a late lunch with us today, so hopefully he’ll turn around and keep going. I really think he might be a bit tired tomorrow but after that he should be back on track.

Tomorrow we’re, or at least I’m off to Bangkok to meet up with Judy. J might stay behind a day to see what he can of Angkor (which really makes me think that he’ll decide to stay on for the rest of the trip), but is still undecided. From there, we don’t have too many definite plans in Thialand as of yet, but we’ll work that out when we get there!

When days start to feel like weeks and a week seems like a lifetime ago, you begin to realize how fast your actually moving. Add to this that I started this trip with a horrible cough, that has progress to the hacking up of a lung and its not too surprising that I’m pretty tired. So any free time up till now (which hasn’t been that much) has been spent sleeping, and thus I’m behind on the journal again…

Last night we went to bed pretty early, around 9 I think, which was somewhat an accident, but that probably only means that we needed it that much more, so I woke up around 6:45 am. We got ready and headed for Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum. The lady at the front desk here, Tam Thuong (Relax) Hotel, told us that this was only open from 8-11 and that we should get there early, and so we headed right over before breakfast.

It was about a 20-30 minute walk from where we are in town, which is nothing for us now, especially after a night’s rest as good as last nights, but in the essence of time, we decided to motorbike it. We found two guys willing to drive us (which isn’t very hard, they’re like pidgins flocking to bread crumbs here), and talked them down from 50,000 dongs each to 20,000 dongs total (about $0.65 each) for the 10 minute ride.

We ended up getting there a little after 8, which was a pretty good time since a herd of Korean tourists and school children showed up shortly there after. They didn’t allow backpacks or cameras in the mausoleum, so there weren’t many pictures from today.

The mausoleum itself wasn’t all that enticing. They seemed to enforce a great deal of respect (no backpacks, crossing of the hands, hands in pockets, shorts, or revealing clothing are allowed in his mausoleum), for a man who they did not respect his dieing wishes (I believe I read somewhere that he wanted to be cremated, but his casket is on display here). You pretty much just walk in, around, and out in a single file line at a decent pace, with guards prodding you if you start to slow down.

Once through the mausoleum however, for 10,000 dongs ($0.66) you can view where he spent his time while president. He had several different buildings in which he lived, but confusedly enough, it seems that he went from living in somewhat of a mansion/palace to living in a house on stilts with only two rooms. They didn’t give much information on why this move was made, but it would be interesting to find out.

After this we headed over to the museum. Museums covering historic things like this generally interest me, so I started reading through most of the things on display at a fairly through pace, as J kind of wizzed on ahead. A lot of the newspaper articles and letters were only available in Vietnamese, but a fair selection of it, particularly the quotes, where in E
english as well.

After completing the first section of the museum, I moved on to the next expecting to see J finishing up there, but no luck. I went through here fairly quickly since there wasn’t too much english material here, and moved on up to the next floor.

Knowing that J wasn’t as interested in this sort of thing I skipped over almost everything here, figuring I’d go back, and tried to find him. However, I reached the end of the museum with still no sight. Thinking that I took too long (the first section of was pretty interesting), I went outside and looked for him there. Still nothing.

I waited there for 5 minuets then went out to the front desk where I checked my bag. Again, nothing. I retrieved my bag, ate a few bananas, and drank some water while I waited. Still no sight, it was almost 10:30 now so I decided to head back in to see the museum while I could, this time with my camera in hand.

As I started to walk back in, J saw me outside, and quickly ran over. We both ran over what we did and laughed. We snuck back in through the exit and went back up to the third floor where J had actually been and spent most of his time, and showed me what he thought was interesting so I could as much as possible in the little time left.

Hungry, we haggled with some motorbikes for the same fare back near the hostel for noodles. Getting a good price here was much harder since it seemed that most tourists at a place like this overpay here, but after a few minutes and getting a few bikes involved, it was pretty easy. Upon arrival, I only had a 20,000d to pay my guy, while J was paying 10,000d to his. I saw this and when they guy tried to say that I was paying for both of them, I grabbed on to the back of his bike and asked for my change. He tried to play innocent, and gave me my change.

The afternoon we spent walking around the Old Quarter a bit more. We went out looking for the ‘Towers of Hanoi’, which is the name of a famous math problem commonly given to freshman computer science students. What we found marked at this location was more like a cheap version of the Sears Tower, than anything traditional like were hoping, but it was still funny to get a picture of this.

The rest off the day was pretty much spent haggling with different travel agents for good prices for open bus tickets to Ho Chi Minh City, and Ha Long Bay, where we’re off to tomorrow. From the pictures I’ve seen the bay looks absolutely gorgeous, and there are a bunch of mountaintops with caves we’re able to explore sticking out from all over the bay. So I’m looking forward to it!

After parting ways with Nazir, we took a ferry over to the mainland an waited for our sleeper train. The heat, lack of solid sleep, walking, and jet lag were really starting to wear on us, so we kept nodding off as we waited.

About an hour after it was supposed to arrive, our train came in, we boarded and immediately crashed.

We woke up 6 or 8 hours later just out side of KL. We organized whatever came out our packs or pockets as we slept (which I don’t think was very much since we were both so exhausted, despite us still be shower-less and wearing the clothes we started in four days ago), and headed over to our hostel.

We had booked a 2 bed room at _____ for roughly $9/person/night. Jason thought we were staying here for 2 nights, which I didn’t think was right, but we thought was confident about, and so we checked in. The place was very nice. Situated three blocks away from a popular mosque/attraction, near a college and a sort of financial district with lots of bank headquarters, and walking distance from both Little India and Chinatown.

There, we met a girl, Kat, from outside of Manchester in the UK. She was planning on going to some canopy walk (which ended up being closed for the Muslim holiday of Mohamad’s birthday) and then to the Batu Caves, a Hindu temple hidden in these caves outside of the city. I had read about these caves and wanted to see them, and the pictures of the canopy walk (think ewok-style rope bridges 30-40 ft up in the trees in the jungle) looked pretty cool, so I asked if she minded us joining along.

We stopped by the Central Market to pick up some rice lunches to eat in case there wasn’t food at the caves and caught a #11 bus all the way there. This was pretty easy to do since just about every person that worked there knew where we wanted to go before we even opened our mouths. This probably should have been our first warning, but I think we all over looked this.

The caves ended up being kind of interesting, but were seemed like more of a tourist trap than anything else. The majority of the caves / temple were free to enter, but there was a side trip one could do to do some spelunking (the normal / temple part of the caves where very open), and stores selling food, offerings, and silvorines. There was even a snack shop, and photo place in the caves after climbing the 280 something stairs all the way up there.

This all being said, I wouldn’t say that it was a waste of time or $1.33 in bus fare going here. There were real Hindus that came here, many of who had a really pale paste pasted over their heads which I wondered what it was, and the caves themselves were cool to look at. And then there were the monkeys in the parkinglot and on the stairs that you could give food if you were careful enough to do so before they tried to steal it from you, which was pretty fun.

The next bus home got us back to the hostel around 2-2:30, and we decided to shower and nap. This nap, our first in real bed in four, or was it five days?, quickly turned into a small day’s sleep, as we didn’t get up till 9 at night.

Famished, we set out for food, and found a Chinese night market. This was pretty cool, but incredibly touristy. I’d be surprised if there were more of a few stands that sold anything other than nock-off watches, fake designer hand bags, cheap tee shirts, or new sneakers.

We then set out to try and find a good spot to take a picture of the towers in KL. This proved more difficult than we would have thought, but was a good excuse to walk around the city. We did sneak into a really nice hotel which had glass elevators running the outside of it, which we thought might lend to a nice view, but due to other buildings around it, really didn’t provide much other than a little excitement and the tenative idea to come back another time to use the pool. All the walking got us pretty turned around, and it was getting sort of late, so we caught a cab back to the hostel and called it a night.