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28/01
We hop on a 12 hour bus to get to Nha Trang, Viet Nam's beach resort( some kind of Mamaia to me:)) except the thing that it was nice and warm, we sat on the beach, watched the sea and we looked at "fake or not fake" North Face products(the factory is here) we had nothing to do here so we boarded on another 11 hours bus to get us to Saigon.
29/01-31/01
These bus rides are a nightmare: no suspensions on super bumpy roads and the average speed is 40 kmh on distances as far as 500-600 km. Yeeeey! Bring on the beers!:))
Everything in Vietnam is " same,same,but different", so is Ho Chi Minh City: big, overcrowded, motorbikes everywhere, filthy, hot and above all dominated by a communist flare. Head injuries resulting from traffic accidents arethe no.1 cause of accidental deaths in Saigon. People think you are scared if you wear a helmet...well we are!!!:) Nobody gives way to anybody. Everyone just angles, points, dives directly toward it's destination, pretending it is an all-or-nothing gamble. Pedestrians cross the road in clusters, holding hands and eyeing the oncoming motorist. The intersections are the worst, particularry for those who need to make left. When viets want to make aturn, they simply do it, plunge in ahead of the coming traffic, hoping that his timing is right.Saigon traffic is like vietnamese life, acontinous charade of posturing, bluffing, fast moves, tenacity and surrenders.
To escape the city we drive 2 hours to the SE to get to the Mekong Delta, we go tothe coconut candy fairtrade factory(not like the one we know, just a hut covered with palm leaves and 5 people melting the cocnut, cutting and packing by hand the coconut candy. Paddling down the river weget to the rice paper factory, the one they use to make the spring rolls. It's made like a pancake and dried in the sun, on palmtree mats. Then we take the tuk-tuk, a extended version of a motorbike, made to have 1 driver and carry about 6-20 people in the back. Very funny and adventurous!!
We keep wondering on the streets and markets of HCMC, so fascinating, so many weird fruits and dryed food to buy!
Quite impressive where the Cu Chi Tunnels, the ones that made the Vietnamese win the war.
Amazing turn, man handcrafts ( vietamies soldiers "vc-s" ) versus man 20th century technology ( americans soldiers), vietnamies with traps and tunnels and americans came with bombs, heli', jets,napalm . In our opinion nobody won the war although the Vietnamies say that they beat the yankees, but how can you say that when your nation just lost around 3 milion people, 2 million seriously injured and 300.000 missing!?
We enter the tunnels to feel like the vc-s and it was an intresting feeling, a bit claustrophobic, very warm cause it was not so much air and in some parts it was very tight so the american soldiers can not fit in, intresting feature!right?:) The vietnamese soldiers were very clever, they had like a parallel universe down there with everything they needed: from hospital to water resources. Their life was saved by the tunnels.
After that we tried the amazing Kalasnikov Rifle with 7,62 mm REAL bullets, great and weird feeling! We had to shoot some targets, intresting and very powerful!
Overall the quote of the trip in Vietnam is " same same but different":), because that was the answer we got when we asked questions:)
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