We arrived into the city at a sociable hour this time, after having a very surprisingly pleasant journey, we checked into our hostel ‘Hangout’. We stayed in Ho Chi Minh for four nights. If you’ve lost what month or day it is, so had we at this point, end of October we are there abouts. The weather was catching up to us, it wasn’t torrential down pour every day, but we did have wet evenings or wet mornings before we could do anything outside. It was manageable; there were plenty of bars around.
Let’s just quickly talk about crossing the road in Vietnam. Right so, we had seen mopeds before, we had even ridden them, we were aware that they would be on the roads. However, before we had seen them in small doses, but when we got to Ho Chi Minh, we had arrived at moped planet. They are everywhere, I’m not exaggerating either. Everywhere. They don’t really use cars on the road. I would say on the road you would see about thirty percent cars (which also includes all the minivan transfers for travellers). The rest? Mopeds. There are so many they can’t even all fit on the road at times. Don’t be alarmed if you are walking down the pavement and you get beeped to move out of the way – this is just Vietnam.
Anyway, our first stop in this city was the War Remnants Museum. You would think at this point we were a bit mental, for wanting to visit this and the Cu Chi Tunnels so close to the Cambodian killing fields, but these definitely weren’t as bad. We also split this across two days. The museum was so close to we walked there from the hostel. I would have said a straight walk would take around thirty minutes, however this was our first walk out, we hadn’t quite grasped the idea of ‘don’t think, just walk’. We got the hang of it fairly quickly but after a few questionable laps of judgement and close calls.
On the way to the museum we took a few pictures of the Notre Dame Cathedral of Saigon, which was just a very pretty church, not much else to say. Once at the museum you could walk around with or without a headset, reading or listening, and taking in the photography or the historic memorabilia. On the route back to the hostel area we took a different path which lead us along the side of the ‘Ben Thanh’ market. You’’ll find a lot of the same tat here, you know what I mean, just random shit you don’t really need, but if you bought it back to your mum she will probably cherish it forever even though it only cost you 50p. We weren’t interested in tat that day, or by about the third time we had seen it, which was probably three days into the trip. Today we ventured into the middle of these markets, can you guess what we were looking for? FOOD STALLS! Shock. These had been recommended to us as very good street food in Vietnam, by multiple people, and of course you know by now we will always take a food choice. They were great, they were huge, loads of selection of different Vietnamese cuisine. We were in our element.
‘The group’ ended up heading into Ho Chi Minh a couple of days later. We met up with two of the girls, it was time for a girly catch up and a nice meal out somewhere. Their hostel owner had recommended a Pho place. If you are unfamiliar with Pho, it’s a Vietnamese soup usually in a light broth which comes with noodles, vegetables, meats, depending on which choice you go for. You get the general idea. So, we get to this restaurant and the choices on the menu are vegetable, chicken, beef and salmon.
Oooo, salmon, I haven’t had that since I was back in England, I will go for the Salmon. The others choose the vegetable one I think, Nia fancied something other than Pho. I probably should have done the same. I was thinking salmon would be little bits of fillet salmon, pink and thick, however it was not. Vietnamese don’t do salmon fillet, they do fin. Yes, fin. As in the thing that salmons swim with. Flat, thin, bony bits of fish. Basically, inedible. It’s okay though I will just not eat the fin, but have the water and the vegetables instead. No, sorry can’t do this. The smell alone was as though you are walking down a fish market which has been opened for the whole day. Think of the smell. I can feel your face creasing up. Now imagine if that smell was a taste. Vom. I couldn’t do it, I did give it a go, but apart from Durian Fruit, which is still by far the most disgusting thing I have ever put in my mouth, this was the second. Did I ever order anything salmon again in Asia? Did I f***.
So, dinner turns into meeting the rest of the group for drinks, and of course a night out, standard behaviour. The next day we visited the Cu Chi Tunnels, the bus drives you out there, you look at some historic features in a forest that the Vietnamese used to capture or kill people. Crawl through a-metre-high space if you want for about two minutes, get back on the bus and come home. Cheery. Time for a beer and another night out of course.
The day before Halloween myself and Nia got on a bus and headed up to Dalat. As we got further up the country it was easier to see that the weather was not in our favour. We knew this from before, so it’s fine, we will coupe. On the bus over it was the first time I ever saw Nia sleeping with her eyes open, it was creepy as hell. Just wanted to add that in somewhere, she won’t mind.
We stayed at the ‘Dalat Sky Hostel’; clean, comfortable, good social area. Just what we needed for any rainy moments. The rest of ‘the group’ arrived the day after us, on Halloween, so we all dressed up with whatever we could find. I dressed up as Thing 2, we bought the t-shirts before we went to get some fun photos while travelling. However, my Thing 1 was unfortunately out of action this evening. Nia was ok, don’t worry. It was raining this evening, so we raided the hostel’s bar for all the beer they had, and ended up finding they had a karaoke machine. You could tell what happened after that.
Even though we had never even heard of Dalat before we got to Ho Chi Minh we ended up doing a lot. We hired moped’s and headed to a temple and some waterfalls. We then saw a sign there to do canyoning, so we booked it for the following day. Which was great fun, definitely add that to the list. It’s abseiling down waterfalls and jumping off rocks, sounds fun right? We also went to this very odd architectural building called ‘Crazy House’; give it a Google, you will see what I mean. You can just go and wander round it, was quite a fun, chilled afternoon one day.
We ended up spending five nights in Dalat, which was quite a long time for us. When we were finished, we booked our bus to Nha Trang, along the coast of Vietnam. We got all backed up, said our goodbyes until next time, drove for four hours before, mudslide. Luckily not us in the mudslide! But the whole slide had completely blocked the road, we couldn’t carry on, so we had to turn back.
LEAH HANCOX 