VacAsian: Vietnam

I know that this post is long over due, and Dallin is laughing at the fact that I am even bothering to blog about our VacAsian because it was two months ago, but I just don't want to forget about my trip without writing everything down!

We hit the ground running when we got back from Hawaii because we were leaving the country three days later!

On 6/23 Dallin and I flew to Ho Chi Minh city. It took about a whole 24 hours of traveling in order to finally get to our hotel. We got to our hotel at around midnight in Vietnam. Who knows what time it was in the U.S. It was quite a day!

Our day of traveling.

The next day we met up with our travel buddies, Braden and Jamie Maughn. Braden served his mission in Cambodia as well, but he spoke Vietnamese. He also just graduated from Westpoint, like Dallin. Braden and Jamie also got married this last summer. It was fun to travel with them.

Waking up in Ho Chi Minh City was a crazy culture shock. It was so humid, we felt like we were swimming through the air, and I knew right away that there was no hope of my hair ever looking good for the next two weeks. The roads are filled with motorcycles; that is everyone's main mode of transportation. They fit whole families on one motorcycle. It is crazy. Just crossing the street was death defying. You know how in America, when a pedestrian is crossing the road, all of the cars in the street stop until the pedestrian has made it to the other side? Well in Vietnam its not like that. The live by the rules, "pedestrian beware". You step into the road and slowly make your way across while all of the motorcycles and cars weave around you. It was a hard thing to get used to, always worrying you were going to get hit!

We started off our first day in Ho Chi Minh by meeting up with some of Braden's old mission companions who now live in Vietnam and speak Vietnamese.

All of us in a taxi with one of our Vietnamese friends. The taxis were great. So cheap!

They took us to the main market in town. It was so cool to just look at everything they had there! Beautiful paintings, dishes, Vietnamese cultural clothing, T-shirts, and so many different knick knacks, I wouldn't even know what to do with. They also had all of the ripped off merchandise, like fake designer purses and perfumes and clothes, and very discounted American movies on DVD. Who knows why they were so cheap? haha. One section of the market was all food. That was my least favorite section. It smelled horrible and looked even worse. The smell came from the dried fish and seafood and possibly other meats. To be honest, it smelled like a mixture of cat food and urine. Not pleasant. Other than the food, I loved the market! We ended up buying a lot of things there. I got some beautiful green silk, beaded shoes, and we bought some cute tea sets, and a painting, and some other souvenirs. It was fun to barter with the vendors and see how cheap we could buy things.

After the market, we were hungry. So our friends took us to a delicious restaurant called, "The Delicious Restaurant". It was very delicious. Dallin was so unbelievably excited to eat real Southeast Asian food again. I was ready to try anything.

Despite what Dallin's face is communicating, the food was delicious. He enjoyed his Loc Lac (seared beef with salty pepper lime sauce and lettuce and tomatoes) very much.

I got this fried pork and rice. The little yellow rectangle is an egg cake thing. I can't remember what the Vietnamese name is for this dish, but it was delicious. We got this dish in several places on our trip. It was a favorite. It is traditionally a poor man's breakfast food, but we, stupid, fat, rich Americans couldn't help eating it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It was so delicious.

Dallin and I outside of the Delicious Restaurant.

We ended up going back to the delicious restaurant for most of our meals in Ho Chi Minh City because the food was really good and clean. And they had amazing pineapple and banana milkshakes.

After lunch, our friends took us to Independence Palace and we took a tour of it. At the time, I didn't really understand the significance of Independence Palace, because I could not, for the life of me, understand our tour guide. I was still adjusting to the Asian accents and our tour guide basically just had her spiel memorized in English, so I am not convinced she even knew what she was saying. But I learned later what the Independence Palace was all about, and this is it...

Me and Dallin with our Vietnamese friends in front of Independence Palace.

"The palace was the home and workplace of the President of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was the site of the end of the Vietnam War during the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, when a North Vietnamese Army tank crashed through its gates."

(Thanks Wikipedia!) Basically the Independence Palace represents to the Vietnamese, the reunification of their country after the Vietnam war and the power of the Communist North Vietnam over the South.

This is the roof of the palace. The red circle represents where a pilot from the Vietnam air force, who was also a communist spy, bombed the palace, starting the end of the Vietnam war.

The next day we took a tour of the Cu Chi tunnels. These tunnels are man made and stretch for miles. They were used by Viet Cong guerillas as hiding spots during combat during the Vietnam war. The tunnels were also used as communication and supply routes. Parts of the underground network are areas were Viet Cong actually lived. Hospitals, schools and nearly whole cities were built underground. It was amazing to see these tunnels and crawl through them, yet eerie to walk on the grounds where many American soldiers died during the Vietnam war.

By the way, these tunnels were made for Vietnamese people, who are, on average, tiny. The tunnels we crawled through were around three feet high and three feet wide, and they used to be smaller than that. Apparently, the tunnels the tourists crawl through have been widened since they were originally used. We got a little claustrophobic, to say the least.

Me going into one of the tunnels. The entrances were well camouflaged because they were so small and before entering, the Viet Cong would put leaves on the wood covering you see in front of me, to blend in with the ground.

Inside the tunnels.

Dallin after exiting the tunnels, on the verge of a panic attack.

These were some demonstrations of the types of booby traps that Vietcong employed to trap or kill American soldiers during the war. They were really creepy.

Later that night we went through another interesting experience. We went to a water puppet show. This is a strictly Vietnamese tradition. It is a puppet show that is literally in the water. There is a stage and the puppeteers are behind the stage and move their puppets. However, the stage is in water. I don't really understand how the puppeteers made some of the puppets move the way they did. The show was a series of vignettes which told traditional Vietnamese fairy tales and fables. It was quite interesting.

After the show, we went to a night market and we got pineapple milkshakes. Yum!

This little girl kept coming up to Dallin in the market, trying to get him to buy her fans. When he refused, she called him a crazy, ugly man. I laughed.

The streets were crazy at night!

Me praying I wouldn't get hit by a motorcycle!

Using all the great public exercise equipment in the park.

Baby bananas! They were so yummy and sweet!

In order to get to our next destination, Niat Jiang, Vietnam, we decided to take a "sleeping bus". This is a bus with beds that leaves at night so you can sleep while you travel. We thought this would be a great idea. It was cheaper than the train, and we wouldn't have to pay for a hotel that night. Little did I know, I would be embarking on the worst night of my life. Okay, maybe I am a little dramatic, but the nights on the sleeping buses were flat out miserable. Here is a picture, so you can better visualize with me:

A bus with beds! What a novel invention! Just kidding.

To start off the voyage on the wrong foot. The beds you see above were disgusting. I could see the dirt on the blue coverings and yellow pillows. We got blankets, but I didn't dare touch them. We had to put our feet in these little foot cubbies in front of us. As you can see in the picture above, there was toe jam spread all over them. As solution to the dirtiness, I put my sweatshirt on with my hood on and I put the plastic bag they gave me for my shoes over my feet in order to avoid touching the end of the foot cubby. (I later found out that they reuse these plastic bags and give them to the next group of bussers for their shoes. Dangit. Gross. But oh well, at least it made me feel a little better during the bus ride.) I am sorry, maybe I am a princess or OCD or something but I cannot lie. I was freaked out by this bus. But that was just the beginning of it...

I don't really know why the bus was called a sleeping bus, because it was impossible to sleep. The driver thought he would be courteous and turn on the radio coverage of the world cup on full blast in the Vietnamese language. How could I sleep when all I could hear was the shouting of, "xuất hiện và có diện mạo như ngày nay, theo quy luật hình thành thanh điệu!!!!!" (I really don't know what that means, I just copied and pasted it from a Vietnamese website). In my opinion, Vietnamese is a really ugly sounding language, so to hear it yelling and blasting out of the speaker over my head while I was trying to sleep, was very frustrating. When the game was over I thought I could finally rest. I was wrong though. I would fall asleep occasionally, but as soon as I did I would be awoken by the bus mowing over a pothole in the winding, rocky, country road. Or sometimes I would wake up to the sounds of the Vietnamese people throwing up on the bus. Apparently because Vietnamese people rarely travel in cars, they easily get motion sickness and throw up. So that was nice. Not to mention that it stifling and stuffy on the bus. But I refused to take off my sweatshirt. I was not letting my head touch that pillow. The worst part of the night was the fact that I knew in two days we would be taking this sleeping bus again to get back to Ho Chi Minh City.

Jamie, Dallin and Me on the sleeping bus. I was trying to escape to my "happy place".

The morning after the sleeping bus. I was giving Dallin "the glare". You can probably tell that I am not happy.

We got to Niat Jiang in the morning and got some breakfast (delicious fried pork and rice). We tried to check into our hotel but it was too early to do so, so we changed into our swim suits and went to the beach that was right across the street from our hotel.

Dallin and I weren't too impressed with the beach after spending two weeks in Hawaii, and we were disappointed with how horrible of a trip it was (all night on a sleeping bus) in order to get to this mediocre beach. The water was a little disgustingly warm and murky, and the beach was kind of dirty. So we wouldn't recommend coming to Niat Jiang, especially because it takes so long to get there. It wasn't worth the trip.

Our hotel was ok, but for some reason, the government turned off the electricity pretty much the whole time we were in town, so there was never AC anywhere in town except for our hotel room, which was powered by a generator. The afternoon that we got to Niat Jiang Dallin got sick. We took a nap to recover from the night on the sleeping bus and when we woke up I was trying to get him out of bed so we could get something to eat because I was starving. He kept refusing to get out of bed and kept reciting quotes from Star Wars for some reason. I thought he was being stupid and I started getting mad at him because I was starving. But then I checked his temperature and he was burning up with a fever. Then the diarrhea kicked in. He was feeling really sick, poor guy. So I went to get some food with Braden and Jamie and we brought back some rice for him.

View of Niat Jiang from our hotel room. It looks pretty from here.

The next day we kind of just laid low and didn't do much because Dallin still wasn't feeling that great. When Dallin started feeling a bit better we ventured into the city to get something to eat. We took a motodope, which is a guy with a motorcycle who you pay for him to take you somewhere on the back of his motorcycle.

Me and our motodope. Both me, Dallin and this guy rode on the motorcycle. It was a little cramped, and unsafe, but fun!

We found an awesome Italian restaurant (random) and ate there. It was good. After lunch Dallin decided to do a little swimming in the pool.

Then we went to the spa. Ahhh. The spa. The one redeeming thing about the trip to Niat Jiang. Dallin and I did a spa package where we did a steam room and sauna treatment, a mud bath, and a full body massage. It was glorious. It made me forget the horrors of the sleeping bus. And the best thing was that it was only $50 for both of us. Nothing ever felt so good. However shortly after the massage I was kicked off of my cloud of elation with the realization that we had check out of our hotel and get back on the sleeping bus that night. NOOOOOOOO!!!!! And guess what? Now I was starting feel sick too. I could hardly eat dinner that night, I had to keep running to the toilet. I crammed five Immodium pills down my throat, because there was no way I was going to even look inside of the sleeping bus bathroom.

So basically the second night sleeping bus was just as worse as the first, except for this time I had diarrhea. It was lovely.

We arrived back in Ho Chi Minh City the next morning to get on another bus to go to Pnom Penh, Cambodia. It was a bus-filled day. But I was so excited to get to Cambodia because I knew we would be staying in an amazingly beautiful five-star hotel, Raffles Le Hotel Royal.

Well that's it for Vietnam, I am going to start another post for Cambodia. Sorry if I sound whiney in this post. I really did have an amazing time on this trip. I loved every minute of it... except for the minutes spent on the sleeping bus. But seriously, the sleeping bus was my only complaint about the trip. Every other part of the trip was filled with amazing experiences. Now on to Cambodia!