Vietnam Trip Summarized in Emails

Hello Blogosphere, I was going to write a full recap of our trip, but I thought I'd just write a short summary which we gathered on the way back to Yeosu, and then just put the emails I wrote to my family on the blog, since they captured my feelings at the times.

Here is the first email, recapping the first few days in Vietnam, and going to Nha Trang:

We made it safely into and out of Ho Chi Mihn City (HCM). We had few problems, which was really nice. Vietnam is much significantly, visibly, poorer then Korea, which leads to some interesting things, and some very sad things. For example, Mothers will use their children to try and sell cigarettes or gum to tourists who are out at night. We even saw one mother training her less then two year old child for this future job.

The weather has been in the 80's, or so, which was quite nice compared to around freezing. It is really humid, even more so then the weather in Minnesota Summer. The architecture really reflects the french colonial period of Vietnam. The buildings are tall, skinny and colorful. Some of them still visibly damaged from the war. We got to about 3 mueseums in HCM, one of which was a war memorial museum. It was really neat, but sad. There were hundreds of pictures of wounded or dead children, elderly, or other civilians.

We ran into a little trouble getting to and from Nha Trang. We had to take the 6AM flight this morning, which meant that we had to "wake up" at 4AM. More accurately this meant that Megan and I slept for about an hour combined. There were no flights coming back, period. We are going to have to take a night train, on January 1st (one day early), we will arrive back in HCM at about 7AM. The nice thing is this will allow us ample time to find all of the deals around our neighborhood (district one). The bad thing is we have to spend an extra day breathing in the fumes of 10000000000000000000 motorbikes.

The weather in Nha Trang was rainy when we arrived, and cloudy for most of the day. We are going to go on an all day boat tour of the islands of Nha Trang tomorrow, for some snorkling, sea food, etc. The next day we will (likely) go scuba diving. Nha trang air is much cleaner then HCM, but the markets are more expensive. I think the people in HCM might even be poorer then those in Nha Trang.

Here is the next email after we had completed the boat tour:

Today has been another rain filled day. We did nothing but walk around near the beach and do a little bit of shopping when the rain let up for about an hour or two. It has not been a good vacation, beach, sun, and relaxation wise... Korea was much more sunny, we have yet to see the sun in Nam, haha. We are making the best of what's available, but as far as it goes, Nha Trang doesn't have a lot to do in the rain. It is like being in Vallyfair in the winter... Not much going on. What now turns out to be a blessing, which we thought was a curse, is that we are going back to Ho Chi Mihn City one day early. This will enable us to find some kind of day time tour and get some more shopping in.

One good thing is Nha Trang has cheap beer (between $0.80-$2) that also tastes better then Korean beer, and cheap, good Western, Thai, Vietnamese, basically any kind of food you can ask for. I have been living it up with delicious burgers, and other things not available in Korea. Also, the people here speak much better English. I think it is due to two things. A cultural difference between Koreans and Vietnamese people, Vietnameses are more inclined to try to speak, and many Koreans just like speaking Korean, only. Also Vietnam is much more touristy, so all of the people speak English, so they can communicate with Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, French, and other Western tourists who come here.

Yesterday we had an all day / all rain island tour of Nha Trang bay. It ended up being pretty fun, but a bit miserable at times too, when driving the boat in the cold, wet rain. I swam for a while but could not snorkel since the visibility is terrible from the rain. Megan and I also tried parasailing, which was pretty fun. We recorded a video, so look forward to that. THe tour guide also did some singing and dancing, with live music from the crew. The drummer had to be about 13 years old. There are much looser child labor laws here, like I'd mentioned in my earlier email.

Here is the final email I sent from Vietnam, it goes over our touring in Nha Trang, the traveling, shopping, and the rest of our time in Nam:

We are setting up for our final night here in Ho Chi Mihn. We took the night train back from Nha Trang, which actually went pretty well. We arrived in HCM at about 6:45AM, took a cab to our hotel, dropped off our things, ate breakfast and then caught a tour bus out to the Co Chi tunnels. The Co Chi tunnels were the tunnels that were instrumental in the VC beating the allied forces during the Vietnam war. We learned a lot about the history of Vietnam during this trip as well, and had a pretty good tour guide. We had a chance to walk through the tunnels, which were quite a bit wider then the original tunnels, and get some good photos. We are at about 300 total for the trip, so I'll try and find the best of those to show everyone. The other good thing was that the weather cooperated today, finally. We were able to stay dry during the tunnel tour. A fun thing of the tunnel tour is the diversity of the people on our trip. We had Americans (us), English, Irish, German, Chinese, Korean (us), Russian, French people on the tour. You really learn how English is truly the global language when you have a group like that.

We got back at about 4PM, then went out to dinner, and did a lot of shopping. The goods here are so cheap that Megan and I were able to buy new large backpacks (like the BWCA trip size ones), and a bunch of other tourist trap kind of decorations for ourselves and friends (and maybe family ;-) ) as well as a few food items we cannot find in Korea (popcorn). I think I said this already, but Vietnam is much more international then Korea. I have enjoyed food from about 6 different cultures and world regions. In no particular order: Vietnamese, Thai, Russian, Chinese, American, English, and maybe a few others.

Yesterday was a fun, but also slightly miserable day. We had a few hour long tour fit in right before our night train to HCM. We took a private van out to "monkey island". Basically many monkeys live on this island, and then they have this cruel show we see at the end, were the monkeys are forced to perform and look really unhappy. The good part was we got to feed them, and it didn't rain. Next, we were supposed to see a waterfall, by the name of Bo Hahn (or something). We took, about a 45 minute drive down a flooded country road to get to the cold, wet jungle path. After about a 1.5 KM walk through TREACHEROUS terrain (I was wearing $1.50 flip flops btw), we got to the waterfall, but it was so flooded we couldn't stay long. Then, about 100 meters into the return trip, my $1.50 flip flops BROKE!!! I had to walk 1.4KM through the Vietnamese jungle on this rocky path BAREFOOT! In the end it wasn't terrible, but I think I took some solid steps towards the pain threshold of a Buddhist monk.

New Years Eve was really cool. Though the weather was really bad, we had a dance party on the beach. The Sailing Club had a big DJ set up on the ocean front, and we got to go out there. The rain started down pouring, and we all got soaked, but it was all in good fun. During the day we say a cool old Buddhist temple called Chom Tower, and then went to a mud bath, and the guys of the trip got a 45 minutes massage. It was the first one of my life. It was pretty cool, and relaxing. The traditional Vietnamese way is for the masseuse to walk on your back, so that was interesting.

Tomorrow we may take a tour, or we may sleep in and just burn time bumming around HCM, finding interesting things to take some more photos of. Ho Chi Mihn and Vietnam has been a lot of fun, and a needed break from teaching. Although the weather hasn't been great (or even good for the most part) we made fun out of it. I was able to get closer to Jeff, and Hye Gyoung and have a lot of fun a lot the way.

Finally, the last night we took the night flight back from Saigon after basically sitting around all day. We decided that we were not interesting in a five hour train ride back to Yeosu, so we canceled out tickets (95% refund, 2 hours before time, pretty awesome) and then bought two tickets back for W180,000. We arrived back at noon, and basically slept and heated up the house for the rest of the day. Afterward, winter camp started, I was bit by a dog, we met our new co-worker, etc. This will all be in another blog.