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Today we took a taxi to the nearby town of Danang to catch a flight to Ho Chi Minh City. For once we ended up with a cautious taxi driver which in some ways was great but also meant that the 30 minute journey to the airport took almost an hour. We still had time to check in and stood patiently behind the one person in the queue. As we waited a monk walked right up to the desk and waited. We agreed that being a monk we should respect the traditions and allow him to first. He then turned around and waved, suddenly a mass of family members with tonnes of luggage pushed their way past us and took ages. We were not impressed with his use of monk status to push his family through! Luckily though everything else went smoothly and soon we were walking out of the arrivals hall at Ho Chi Minh City and found the taxi driver waiting for us which the hotel had kindly arranged for us. From the relative calm of Hoi An we were suddenly flung back into a huge bustling city which has approximately 3 million mopeds on its roads and the drivers were just as reckless and fearless as Hanoi.
Our hotel was located within the main backpacker area of Pham Ngu Lao and was certainly remeniscent of Bangkok with bars sprawling onto the road in amongst hotels, bright flourescent strip lighting and food sellers walking up and down with their carts. Luckily our hotel was down an alleyway and as soon as we were inside the noise surprisingly was gone. Our room was on the fourth floor and with no lift we huffed and puffed our way up the staircases. We were greeted by a Christmas wreath on our door saying "Merry Christmas" and it finally dawned on us that we were actually heading home and in time for Christmas. By this point though we were starving and it was already 8pm so we headed across the road to an Indian restaurant for dinner. It looked full and we debated about finding somewhere else when the waiter stopped us and offered to show us to the first floor which he assured us had aircon; given our hunger and the heat we shrugged our shoulders and went upstairs. The aircon however was a fan above our table which only occasionally worked and a waiter that only occasionlly appeared. The meal itself was tasty but we were desperate to leave and get some fresh air again by the end.
The next day was our last full day and so we had splashed out on a day trip to the Mekong Delta. We were picked up in a very flash 4x4 with great aircon and joined by one other couple from America. The tour guide spoke excellent English and we chatted away throughout the day. It turned out he had been at medical school at the start of the Vietnam War. At the beginning of their third year they had been made to quit and join the South Vietnamese army. At the end of the war he was made to go to "re-education camp" for 24 months by the Vietcong but was not happy to tell us about what this entailed. He had not been able to finish his degree. He struggled to hear what we said because he was deaf in his right ear as a result of a cluster bomb firing shrapnel into it during the war.
When we were picked up we had to run into the car due to torrential rain, the tail end of typhoon Bopha. Luckily after a two hour drive to the town of Cai Be in the Mekong Delta it had cleared and the sun was shining. We boarded a motor boat and went for a tour around the boats that make up the floating markets. It was low season and so there were only a few boats. However we saw multiple fruits, a barge transporting rice husk and stopped at a coconut candy factory. We were able to watch the locals making rice paper, coconut candy and were also shown bottles of whiskey containing cobras and scorpions. Neither of us were brave enough to drink it though. We then got a shock when he called us over to see another box, thinking it would be food we merrily wondered over stuck our heads over the box to come face to face with a massive live python!
We then turned off the main river into the smaller waterways to transfer into a small rowing boat. Just as we were about to stop we saw something move in the muddy brown water and realised it was a huge snake swimming alongside the boat. Now there was no way we were going to fall into the water! We made it into the boat unharmed and it was a great, if unfortunately too short, trip through the narrow waterways and canals to an island. Here we were shown many different fruits growing and met the guide's cousin who makes wine from the various fruits. That certainly had a kick to it.
We were then taken across the river to a restaurant where we ate spring rolls, Mekong fish and various vegetables. We then had to get back into the car and make the two hour journey back to Ho Chi Minh City where the heavy rain started again.
That night we found a bar on the corner of a large road junction. We sat watching the world drive by and never got bored. We saw a man cycling along with sugarcane about 7 feet tall, and two mopeds crash directly into each other in the centre of the junction and somehow just stand up, brush themselves off and then carry on. We saw whole families squeezed onto a moped with mum holding her tiny baby in front of her without any means of securing the baby. The list was endless.
The next day we had a flight booked to Kuala Lumpur but had the morning free and decided to explore the War Remnants Museum. Outside was a collection of planes, helicopters and tanks used in the war as well as a reconstructed prison and exhibition about the treatment of prisoners in Vietnam. It also went through all the various methods of torture used to extract information which was very disturbing. The main one was the use of tiger cages which were tiny cages made of barbed wire placed in direct sunlight where prisoners were kept for days on end.
Inside the museum was an excellent photo exhibition of the Vietnam War which has been put together by international photographers. They have collected all the photos they could from both sides of the war. The descriptions with the photos were quite one-sided from the Vietnamese point of view, not surprisingly, but the quality of the photos was impressive but also extremley poignant.
Having slightly depressed ourselves we then had the fun of walking back to our hotel across several large roads. We held hands tightly took deep breaths and stepped out hoping the mopeds would move around us and they did. It is quite a satisfying feeling to have made it through that traffic in one piece.
Soon enough we were back at the airport. It was nice however to land in somewhere we had been before and we easily found our way out to the bus terminal and into central KL. We even remembered how to walk to the hostel but by now it was 10pm and so after a quick bite to eat we headed to bed.
We spent the next morning exploring the local craft market but then the rain began and so we sat in the lounge of the hostel awaiting another taxi. We couldn't be bothered with fighting our way to the airport by bus and train. Our taxi driver however was very entertaining and we chattered away whilst negotiating queues and heavy rain to the airport. We finally realised that we were on our way home and that this was the last time we needed to check in to an airport. We flew to Abu Dhabi and after a boring three hours we flew to Heathrow.
When we left KL it was about 35 degrees but when we stepped out of Heathrow it was minus 5 degrees and everywhere was white - a serious change in temperature for us and we were freezing! However there was something quite comforting, as we sat in the taxi home, looking out over the beautiful English countryside, we were home.
Overall, despite a rather hurried end, we had an amazing adventure. We were away for 100 days, took 18 flights (including jumbo jets, twin prop and light aircraft), visited 7 countries, spent 76 hours on public buses, travelled by 15 other forms of transport including elephant, bike, dugout canoe, campervan, cable car and longtail boat. We drove 1767km from Port Douglas to Brisbane. We visited 12 UNESCO world heritage sites as well as numerous cities, rainforests, caves, mountains, rivers and farmland. We stayed in 43 different hotels, hostels, campsites, a night train, jungle lodge, mountain lodge, bamboo hut and boat.
We saw a huge variety of birds, insects and animals including:
pelicans, cockatoos, Ibis, bats, kangaroos, many geckos, whales, snakes, spiders, a scorpion, bush turkeys, penquins, many fish, a sea snake, far too many ants and mosquitos, elephants, sharks, jellyfish, turtles, crocodiles, a moon rat, stick insects, dolphins, jungle squirrels, emus, frogs, orangutans, proboscis monkeys, tigers, and cats and dogs by the bucketload.
We drank 16 different types of beer (we think), several different wines and the most expensive drink was the Singapore Sling at Raffles hotel at £14. Our weirdest meal was fish head curry in Singapore, our favourite was a North Thai style Pad Thai that we had in a cafe in Sukhothai. The worst meal was a beef stir fry in Kuala Lumpur which looked and tasted a little bit like beef in a snot sauce (sorry but it's true).
We highly recommend every country but our favourite was Vietnam becuase of the opportunity to see a different culture, traditions, food and amazing sites. However, our top five places to visit would be:
1. Uluru
2. Mulu National Park in Borneo
3. Sukhothai temple complex in Thailand
4. Hoi An in Vietnam
5. Hong Kong
The worst experiences we had were:
1. Our stay in a dingy hostel in the depressing town of Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands
2. Our tough, muddy jungle trek down from Gunung Brinchang in the Cameron Highlands having walked up for two hours to see nothing but cloud at the viewpoint.
3. The 11 hour cramped, hot minibus journey from Penang in Malaysia to Krabi in Thailand.
4. The seedy side of Patong beach in Phuket
5. Fighting for a seat and the journey on the bus to Sayaboury in Laos (but equally something we will always remember and talk about).
Thank you to everyone for reading the blog and sending us your messages they really cheered us up. All we can say now is Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and we hope to see you all soon.
Lots of love Brenda and David xxxxx
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