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Today was tour trip day!
The day started with breakfast in the hotel. I say breakfast but actually it was a bread roll and two fried eggs! Bread roll for me then! Don't think we will worry too much if we miss it tomorrow morning!
Our tour guide picked us up at around, 8.50am which was meant to be earlier but as you saw in my last blog the traffic here is crazy! There were 7 others on our mini bus and a Vietnam local tour guide who spoke quite good English. He was very friendly and an interesting guy who knew slot about Vietnam. I found out that district 1 where we are staying is actually the original Saigon which I like!
From the hotel we drove 1.5 hours out of Ho Chi Minh to the Mekong delta. The Mekong River flows here to the sea, starting in Tibet and through China and Thailand before reaching the delta in Vietnam. Once we arrived at My Tho, we boarded a big wooden tour boat with bamboo deck chairs for seats for a little journey across the river to a coconut candy factory. This consisted of about 8 people making sweets from coconuts. When fresh this tasted a bit like warm toffee. They add things to it including chocolate, durian, nuts and coconut to make different flavors! After visiting this factory our guide took us on a walk through the local villages to a public garden, which was a little fruit garden with tables, chairs and hammocks for relaxing in. After this we took a crazy tuc tuc journey deeper in to one of the 9 islands for a local lunch-of course I didn't really eat it. However I did try a little fish, some noodles and I also drank some honey tea which was actually quite nice! One of the other men on the trip decided to show us all some magic tricks, which our tour guide was very interested in! After lunch we took a rowing boat trip along one of the canal ways back to our big boat. This was interesting, only 3 of us in a boat at any time and it was very close to the water! This made me a little nervous and I decided it was probably best not to move on this part of the journey! But we did get to wear rice hats (the round pointy gaps you see on TV!) these were funny but really kept the sun of my head and shoulders! Terrie and I were going to buy one but we can't work out how to get them home without squashing them or carrying them! Once back at the big boat we were given a young coconut to drink-these are quite refreshing after being in the heat for so long!
I'm really glad we did this trip because we got to see what some of real Vietnam is like other than in the city. Although I am still surprised about that lack of evidence of war time here. I'm not sure what I expected to see but as the war only ended 36 years ago and the US only official handed full control back to Vietnam in 1996 I just expected to see evidence- maybe the museum will explain more.
This evening we decided it was time to try out or bargaining skills. So we headed from Ben Thanh Market. During the day this is the largest indoor Market in Ho Chi Minh City. However at night it is a night Market around the outside. Never the less we made some purchases! Need to start being a little more forceful if we go to the indoor Market tomorrow though!!!
Last full day tomorrow. Hopefully going to try and visit the war remnants museum- although it is apparently quite graphic and sad so we will see how that goes!
I have to say that now I'm not in Kuala Lumpur I am really quite enjoying this flash packing lark so far!!! :-)
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