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Our journey back from Phu Quoc was a 2 hour ferry journey followed by 7 hours on a bus. This was our first experience of a sleeper bus and climbing onto the coach to find rows of beds was a bit of a shock. However both me and Scott like lying down (I'd say its probably one of our favourite things) so we were both pretty happy with this. Luckily we were given the back row where the beds are a lot longer and even Scott managed to just fit in, the only downside is that on the back you feel every bump about ten times more than anywhere else on the bus, so we spent as much time in the air as on the bed. The other problem with sleeping buses is that you are made to listen to really loud Vietnamese pop music whether you want to or not!
We arrived back into Saigon just before tea time and decided to spend an extra night there, the other reason for this was that we hadn't even decided where to go next! We had a quick look on a map and decided that we had two options one in the mountains and one on the beach, after spending 8 days on a beach and knowing we had another week of beaches to come we decided to opt for visiting a small, mountain town called Dalat. We booked to go to next evening setting off at 11pm and arriving there at about 6am.
Our last day in Saigon was spent eating KFC and riding scooters around the city trying to find a pair of trainers that would fit Scott's western sized man feet. We also had our 3rd massage since arriving, when it's only £3 for a 60min massage, it's hard to turn down. The best bit about this one was turning around to find the small Vietnamese woman totally stamping on Scott's back, he didn't find it quite so funny and said he felt like he'd been abused. That evening we planned to eat but instead got suitably drunk so that by the time we got on the night bus I was well away before we'd left the station.
Thanks to the number of beers we'd both drunk we pretty much slept for the full 7 hour journey, after we arrived we checked straight into a hostel and slept some more.
Dalat is a gorgeous little town famous for its Easy Rider motorbike tours, we decided to book a day tour and it was amazing. The scenery was stunning and we were taken to see all sorts of different things. From temples, to waterfalls, to silk farms and a small minority village where the residents have only recently started using money and spoke a different language to the Vietnamese. The village also had a small monkey that they tied to a tree otherwise it would attack any women. The villagers believed that it could tell if a person was gay, lesbian or even a hermaphrodite, not really sure how this works but there you go.
We also learnt that Vietnam is actually the 2nd largest coffee exporter in the world and we saw a lot of coffee plantations. One speciality coffee of the area was Weasel coffee; where a weasel eats the beans, they come out the other side and are brewed up to make a lovely cup of coffee. Scott tried one of these and thought it was great (he still thinks they clean the beans before they make coffee with them, I'm pretty sure they're just left in the sun to dry!!).
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Val Stanworth Sounds like your having a great adventure keep the blogs coming they're very interesting x
Eileen Great blog, good to learn all about parts of the world we don't know. I think when you come home you mat have to go to GISBURN PARK for a drying out!!!!!! Still you will swet it out in the heat. Love to you both, take care Eileen xxx