Vacation from my vacation

**(Warning: i have an issue with writing wayyy too much and I apologize. so for a less detailed account please refer to Allyn's blog :)


As crazy as it sounds, my time in Vietnam was like a vacation from my vacation of sailing the world. I LOVE Vietnam. What an amazing country. There are so many places I wanted to go but I’m really glad I went where I did. The ship started down the Saigon river sometime around 4 or 5am—it was the biggest ship around by far going down this narrow, shallow looking river and all the people in the little boats around us were just staring up at us. I got up to watch the sunrise and watch us pulling into Saigon and it was such a beautiful moment.
The first day Allyn, Courtney, Mychaela and I got off the boat to explore Ho Chi Minh City.  As soon as we stepped off we were bombarded by Vietnamese people trying to give us rides or sell us hats and whatnot…. we tried to ignore them and started walking not knowing which direction downtown was and then we realized about 8 of them were walking with us surrounding us in a circle…all we could do was laugh..  they didn’t care how many times we said no or ignored them. So gradually they stopped following us but as we walked along the street there was just constant begging to take a ride or buy something. We still had no idea where we were going so we got in a cab and had our first experience on the CRAZY streets of Vietnam. The streets are packed with zooming motorbikes who just go every which way with hardly any traffic lights or road rules. At one point our taxi had to turn and just started straight across the other lane of oncoming traffic…. the bikes were coming straight onto us I thought for sure we were getting hit! But that’s what they do. And walking across the street is the same way—you just start walking confidently in front of all the bikes and hope they go around you… literally. It was pretty scary to try at first but it’s funny how used to it we were by the end. I feel like I’m going to try crossing the street like that when I get home and get hit. Soo anyway, wondering how we possibly stepped out of the cab in one piece, we ended up at the huge market in Ho Chi Minh. The market was an enorrrmous maze of people selling clothes, jewelry, anything made out of bamboo, prepared food, and tons of fresh fruit. We wandered around and shopped for a while and then decided to find lunch at this place called Lemongrass that Mychaela’s parents recommended to us. I was so excited to try Vietnamese food and it was probably the best meal I’ve ever had. We ordered so many things just to try them all-  fresh deliiicious spring rolls with shrimp, these grilled prawns on sugarcanes (which looked like shrimp popsicles), I got chicken pho and a fruit and vegetable salad, and Courtney got a whole pineapple stuffed with fried rice! The food looked so pretty…. I wish I could post the pictures I took. And it was all soooo tasty and fresh… they put fresh mint leaves in everything and all the fruits are unbelievably sweet. To top it off we got a mango for dessert which was honestly the sweetest mango I’ve ever tasted…it was heaven. So from then on I was in love with Vietnamese food and I don’t think one meal ever let me down :)
So after an amazing lunch we made our way around town, scared for our lives crossing the streets, and found a tailors shop so they could get dresses made. You can literally just bring in a cutout from a magazine with a dress on it and say you want that one and they’ll make it for nothing! So we spent a while in there as they decided what they wanted and picked out fabric and got measured. Then we went to the War Remnants museum which was really emotional and depressing, much more than I was expecting. It made me wonder how they can be so friendly and welcoming to Americans.
So after a day of exploring the city we went back to the ship and got ready to go out to dinner and hang out downtown. We found a very nice restaurant which looked fancy and pricy but everything is so cheap here! So we had another delicious Vietnamese meal and tried the popular banh xeo, which is like a crepe filled with meat and veggies that you wrap in lettuce. We also tried a papaya and shrimp salad and a lotus stem salad. Everything was still delicious. After that we went up to the rooftop of the Rex Hotel and saw a bunch of people there, so we listened to live music and hung out there for the night :)
Well, the night never ended because at 3:45am Allyn and I were leaving for Nha Trang! So we never went to bed, somehow I never got tired, and we joined our groggy group on the boat to go to the airport for our 1hour flight. Somehow someway I was the only one super awake and everyone else was dead and falling asleep…. I must have been pretty annoying. But anyway we got into beautiful Nha Trang around 7am, met our crazy little tour guide named Liam, and were off for a full day of exploring—and still I was the only one awake and ready to go. We stopped to take pictures on this cliff overlooking the gorgeous water and islands in the distance. Every part of Nha Trang was so picturesque and I felt like a spoiled little kid on this vacation away from my vacation. The first place we went was the Long Son Pagoda, where sitting on a hill was yet another beautiful giant Buddha. Third giant Buddha of the trip! This one was white and the sat surrounded by tropical flowers swarming with butterflies and overlooking the whole city of Nha Trang. It was such a beautiful place to be, I could sit there for hours…. we never get enough time to take it all in. After leaving the Buddha we walked over this bridge looking out over the green water and all the fishing boats and walked to the Cham Towers, these amazing brick towers I think also used in Buddhist worship, and saw even more fantastic views over the bay and the city. I got some adorable pictures of little Vietnamese kids but I just realized in one of them the little girl is eating a duck foot..
So thenn we went to a restaurant at Bao Dai for lunch, which was also on top of a cliff overlooking the water- as if the views couldn’t get any better. They served us our first of many fresh seafood meals which all consisted of some sort of shellfish soup, rice paper spring rolls, grilled prawns, fresh veggies, chicken or pork (and ostrich at one point), rice, calamari, chili sauce and fish sauce, and fresh pineapple or mango for dessert. Every meal was so much food and I felt bad when it looked like we hardly touched it. After lunch we drove down the cliff a little ways and stopped yet again to see another beautiful scene—a path around these big boulders down to a sand and rock beach, surrounded by crystal clear water and the other shoreline and mountains in the distance. Ahh I wish I could show pictures, it’s too hard to describe it all! So we played around the boulders for a while and finally put our feet in the water, getting so pumped to get to the beach. We left to finally check into our hotel which was right across from the beach and right in the middle of town. We all got changed and ran straight to the beach which was of course gorgeous. We spent a long time hanging out in the water talking about how crazy this is and wondering how this can be school…
When I started walking back up to the sand, I saw there was one Vietnamese lady trying to sell bracelets to a girl in our group… and by the time I got up there, there was a swarm of about 8 of them all selling different things. It was like a flock of seagulls! If you express any interest in buying anything at all, more and more will attack you and it’s impossible to make them leave. I felt so bad at first telling them no over and over but that’s just what you have to do. Of course I couldn’t resist buying a mango and the woman sliced it for me and it was sooo sweet. Then I was just lying on my towel trying to nap and one lady comes over and starts massaging my back! I was like no no no and she was like “massage $2” and I was like “no no I don’t have money” and the next thing I knew she untied my bathing suit and started pouring oil on my back and was like “you just pay me tomorrow”. I was about to say no again but then I began to wonder why I was resisting a $2 massage on the beach so I just let it go. And it was actually a really nice massage :)
These Vietnamese men and women just wander around the beach carrying buckets of anything from books to mangoes to paintings to whole freshly caught lobsters! So after a couple more hours of hanging out on the beach and being hassled and hassled to buy everything, we left to get ready for our night. How I was still so wide awake I do not know. I was going on 40-something hours of no sleep! We all went to another nice restaurant with another delicious seafood meal, and then had a fun night at a beach party with live music and entertainers throwing around fire. It was such a fun night and our group turned out to be all really cool people!!
The next morning we got up early to start our full day boat ride around the islands of Nha Trang. First we stopped at the Oceanographic institute which made me reeeallly sad because they had so many big fish and sharks and huge turtles trapped in tiny aquariums made of nothing but concrete. They had some unique and beautiful fish but if you feel bad for animals in captivity in the US, they have it so much better than they do here. So that kind of made me upset. Anyway, we left and got on our small boat to cruise around the islands. There are so many uninhabited islands out there, just mountains of green and gorgeous white beaches. We anchored just outside one of them to hang out and go snorkeling. There were a few shacks on the beach but I don’t think anyone lives there. So we all got up on the roof of the boat and jumped off a billion times into the amazing blue water, and then snorkeled around the coral and colorful fish beneath us. There were a couple women on our boat trying to give us massages and mani/pedicures and when some of the guys were dangling their legs off the roof of the boat our crazy tour guide Liam took some nail polish and painted a few of their toes without them noticing—it was so funny. Once again it was a beautiful day in a tropical paradise and I felt so spoiled. We eventually started up the boat again and went to another island for lunch in these beautiful bamboo huts on the beach, hung out some more, and then went back to the hotel for the rest of the day on our own. I went to get some ice cream because I was craving chocolate and their chocolate ice cream tasted like coconut—not that I was upset about that. It was super creamy and soft…definitely different but good!
We all went out to dinner again for yet another yummy seafood meal and then had the night on our own. Walking along the main street at one point I saw a guy cycling a rickshaw with a tiny seat on the back and a seat on the front- in which I counted a family of 6! Wish I had a picture of that… I feel like that would be my essence of Vietnam.
Our last day in Nha Trang we had on our own, so a few of us went to the beach and Allyn and I were planning on renting out a little sailboat for a while… buttt Allyn passed out right away on the beach. Still don’t know how I wasn’t dead tired… so I took a long walk on the beach, taking in the beauty of everything and not wanting to leave, and on my walk I was stopped about 3 times by Vietnamese people wanting their picture with me! It was so funny…they were so friendly and happy to meet me.
The rest of the day was not too good for me as I started to feel sick from something I ate…still don’t know what it was but my stomach is still not too happy! Somehow it didn’t bother me much because I feel like I was in a daze that entire trip, just because of how unreal it all seemed and how I couldn’t believe I was there. I think that’s why the exhaustion never hit either…. but as soon as we got home Allyn and I met up with Courtney and Mychaela and we decided to nap for a little bit and then go out downtown for dinner…. and Allyn and I got in our beds sometime around 7 and never woke up! I guess I was a little tired.
We had one more day in Vietnam, and I was soo lucky that the shark professor (Dr. Abel) who went to Nha Trang with us gave me his spot to go to the Mekong Delta!! I think it’s because he’s from Charleston… that’s all he talks to me about haha. But anyway I had wanted to go so badly but the trip was full. I had really wanted to see what I pictured the “real” side of Vietnam was, with all the fishing villages and markets along the river. So we drove 2 hours through the countryside of infinite rice fields and then into the town of My Tho. Of course we made a stop along the way to visit a pagoda and another giant white Buddha. This one was very fat and cheerful though. Once reaching My Tho we got onto a boat and cruised through the river past tons of colorful old fishing boats and villages along the shores. Our first stop was at a little dock which lead us into the jungle and into the real life of the Mekong Delta. This is what I wanted to experience, and if beautiful Nha Trang wasn’t enough, this definitely made my trip to Vietnam.
We walked on a wooden dock above the muddy marshes and through the tropical trees and plants of the jungle to a shack where a bunch of people were working making their special coconut candy! (it was like a factory except in the outdoors and more like a bamboo shack) They offered us fresh samples which were still warm and absolutely delicious. Our guide explained the whole process to us and we watched them as they made it, and sampled some of their banana candy and the yummiest banana chips I’ve ever had. We continued on a path passing a woman making coconut rice paper over a fire, and then crossed a bridge over a little channel of the river, and kept walking past a few scattered chickens and cattle and people sleeping in hammocks. We got to the main dirt road of the village where mini horse drawn carts were awaiting us. The horses were tiny and bony and after I got in the cart and realized how many of us they were putting in there I really wanted to get off…I tried but the guy leading our cart didn’t understand what I was saying. The little horse was so unhappy and the guy kept grunting at it to go faster and I felt horrible… it was an uncomfortable ride. But we rode pretty fast along the dirt road past other carts and people on motorbikes overflowing with bags of coconuts, and past tons of little shacks and houses and markets. When we got off the carts we continued walking through the jungle until we reached a little pavilion where we sat down and tried all the exotic fruits :D  A woman brought us these tiny glasses in which she poured some sort of liquidy honey in and then filled with tea… the cups were so tiny and about half full of honey so you can imagine how sweet it was. I’m pretty sure the bees who made the honey were still swarming all over the bottle, and a couple had some fatal falls into our cups. Then they brought out dried sugared coconut slices and sugared peanuts…. and then all the wonderful fruit. We had rambutans (which we tried in Hawaii), which are little red spiky fruits that taste kind of like a grape inside. There was also fresh papaya, pineapple, bananas, and some little brown balls that were also jelly inside like the rambutans. It was all delicious and sweet, but I didn’t realize we still had lunch coming up right after so I may have had a little too much.
So after our “fruit tasting”, we continued through the tropics to a little canal where we got in 4-person canoes and were paddled by the villagers back to our boat in the main part of the river. The canal was so narrow and we had to pass like 3 boats at one time—I don’t know how they did it! It was just neat to pass these old Vietnamese women paddling their canoes down the river going about their daily lives. We ended up back at our boat which we rode down the river to another village in Ben Tre for lunch. The lunch place was like a compound of different thatched and bamboo pavilions. I saw some Europeans and other foreigners there so it must have been more of a tourist spot. Anywho, I was interested to see what this “elephant ear fish” we were supposed to be having was, and sure enough they brought out this deep-fried whole fish sitting upright on our tables. It was a littttle bit scarier looking than I expected. I wasn’t sure what to do with it and then a woman came over to our table and started taking meat off the fish and preparing us each fresh spring rolls with the rice paper, mint, and rice noodles…. it doesn’t really get fresher than that. And mmmmm was it good.  Then of course we got a variety of other dishes like fried sweet potatoes and eggrolls, grilled shrimp with chili sauce, some kind of beef salad, AND a hot pot full of seafood and vegetables. I don’t know why they think we can eat so much. Although I do stuff myself because it’s all so good!
Sadly we had to get back on the boat and leave the villages—I didn’t want to leave…I could just live there and harvest coconuts for the rest of my life! We actually passed a place on the shore where the “coconut monk” lived who ate only coconuts and meditated for his whole life. I’d like to be him.
Anyway, we rode the boat back to My Tho and got to sip a fresh coconut on the way. Allyn and I got dropped off by the bus in downtown Ho Chi Minh because we wanted to take in as much Vietnam as we could before walking back to the ship. It was so sad getting back on—the time went by way too fast and there are so many more places I’d like to go! I’m definitely happy I got to see the life on the Mekong River, even if for a short time. It’s such a different way of life than we’re used to and it’s hard to think that while I’m living my daily life that this is their daily life. It was the part of Vietnam I really wanted to experience and I’ll never forget it.
I don’t really need to say it again but I love Vietnam, and would go back in a heartbeat. I’m sure it also has to do with the tropical humid weather which I was definitely not feeling in China and Japan. But the good news is it’s all warm from here! Some people thought Vietnam was unbearable but I hear India will be hotter…. I am so ready :)  We’re actually anchored in Singapore right now getting refueled and I just wish they would let us jump off and go swimming! The ocean is an even prettier shade of green here and right now we’re sitting so close to a little island with nothing but white beaches….I just want to jump in and swim there.
Well, I guess I’ve written enough for the moment… this only took me like 4 hours to do. Haha… but now we have a few more days to prepare for India, which is supposed to be our biggest shock. I’m sure some people on this boat will not be ready for it…and probably won’t appreciate it…. but I am so ready for anything and everything. The first day I am going with my digital storytelling teacher and some kids in my class to one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chennai…I don’t even know what to expect but I imagine it’ll be pretty emotional. We’re not allowed to bring cameras but I’m glad because I don’t want to look like a rude outsider. On a happier note though Allyn and I are going on the Art of Living yoga and meditation program for a few days, so I can’t wait to tell you about that!
Still wish I could post all my pictures from Vietnam…. maybe I’ll find internet time in Mauritius. If I don’t write before I venture off into India…. wish me luck and you can expect many stories when I return!!
-Michele