Good Morning Vietnam: don't tell Mum about the motorbikes or rice 'wine'

Have we discussed boarder crossings before? The Cambodia/Vietnam was more of an adventure than the last!

Well after a comfortable enough minivan trip (even with the Russian and Polish trying to make problems and some minor delays and a couple of van changes) we made it through to Vietnam. It was still seriously hot and this is where the real adventure began. A long wait saw us finally on a very rickety old bus with a supposedly 4 hour ride ahead. We were no more than 20 minutes into our trip when our Polish lady refused to let a lady sit beside her… Well talk about fighting fire with fire, the little ticket girl screamed and thumped the seats until finally the Polish lady moved, much to our sniggering delight. Let's just say that after 13 hours on the worst road, carrying the most traffic and averaging just 30kph, we made it to the bus station in Can Tho. The station just so happened to be 5km from the city centre and there wasn't a tuk tuk in sight… No worries we piled onto the back of 3 motorbikes and just like a real life fast and furious ride we raced each other and the million other scooters to a hotel to end a long but highly eventful day.

Stylie chauffeur.

Just to keep the adventure rolling we decided to take a boat trip along part of the Mekong delta to see floating markets in action. The only catch the boat left at 5.30am. It was a great morning out and we ended up doing about 45km on the river seeing everything from dead dogs to overloaded barges and piles and piles of fruit. A quick cold shower and some Kai it was on a bus to Ho Chi Minh. So would you believe the bus was actually very comfortable and arrived early?

Floating markets on the Mekong, it was all business. 

Our shock was soon dashed as we were hounded by taxi drivers and saw the share number of scooters. They were everywhere… it was carnage. We took a tour to the chu chi tunnels which consisted of over 250km of underground tunnels built for war purposes. It was highly educational to learn just how good the Viet Con were at stalking, foiling and terrorising the american soldiers. Their booby traps and resourcefulness had to be admired, however barbaric.

Chu Chi tunnels

Time out from the hussel and bussle of Ho Chi Minh

We decided we had had enough of scooters and people so took a night bus to the central highland city of Delat. Famous for its cooler climate, mountainous scenery and canyoning we jumped on a trip down the river. It consisted of abseiling, floating, bouncing and jumping our way downstream. All in all very good fun and great value for money even if some of the safety was a little slack…

We absailed down this then had to jump off backwards from about 4m

One of the other things Delat and the central highlands are famous for is motorbike tours. So with a little convincing we blew out our budget and signed up for a 3 day tour from Delat to Nha Trang. We were assured that we would be taken off the beaten path and be shown what Vietnam was really about and they lived up to their word. Our drivers were great, full of knowledge and very keen to show us a good time (and drink lots of rice wine (vodka)). We saw every primary industry imaginable from a silk factory, to a coffee plantation complete with weasels to eat the beans and poo them out (adds flavour apparently). 

Bare, deforested hills in thedistance 

An evening spent in a tradtional longhouse, dinner and drinks with the locals.

We passed through numerous hill tribe villages most of which were from the north but the government had moved them south to clear the forest and set up plantations. The scale of destruction was sometimes incomprehensible. The hillsides around every bend were being logged or burnt and the exposed soils were just running off – I guess it would have been very similar to NZ 100 or so years ago. How long the coffee plantations will last on such steep terrain is anyones guess.

Lucy, center of attention with the local hilltribe medicine woman 

Lending a hand to husk rice

At times we were also on the infamous Hi Chi Minh trail (or branches of it) which was used throughout the war to carry supplies from North Vietnam to the South. Much to the Americans anguish - and use of every known weapon including agent orange - they never managed to foil this roading network. The motorbike trip was a blast, seeing backcountry Vietnam on mostly dirt roads. I’d definitely recommend using Easy Rider (the company) if you are planning something similar. But be sure to get the legit people in the blue vests/jackets. 

After a long winding decent and an huge seafood buffet we had completed our 500km roady and had made it beachside. 

The final day of our travel as a tricycle was spent making sure Wazza could survive the next week or so without a wallet or access to money, cooling off at the beach with the thousands of Russian holiday makers and sorting our next moves…