Following in the USA's footsteps

We continued our trip south through Vietnam with a stop in Nah Trang about 10 hours by bus south of Hoi An. This is a city with a gorgeous beach front devoted to tourists, and is probably Vietnam's premier party town. We however decided that rather than devoting ourselves to a few days practice in the art of personal pickling we would go back to school and complete our open water diving certificates so that we can go diving during the rest of our trip with fewer restrictions.

The PADI course that we signed up for took 3 days, with half a day of studying and half a day of diving each day, Vietnam is probably one of the cheapest places in the world to do this course, and it only cost us about NZD$300 each. The primary goal is to teach you how to deal with any of the emergency situations that you might get into and get you practiced enough that you wont panic if something does start to go wrong. Pool dives first day followed by reef dives on the last two days made it good fun, though the studying put a bit of a damper on nightly boozing. Having completed this course we can now go diving to 18m depths, looking forward to putting this into practice in Thailand where there is purportedly some of the best reef diving in the world.

To combat the relatively high expense of doing this diving we naturally had to economise in other areas. Primary means for accomplishing this was Bia Hoi (ie Beer Hoi, the Beer part being obviously the most important element). These are small dirty little establishments with plastic chairs and tables intended and sized for three year olds in which you can purchase a litre of beer for about NZD $0.25, or about a fiftieth of what it costs in NZ. Obviously the bar tabs never run too large. On top of this they are very social and a great way to meet similarly tight-arsed people with marginal personal hygiene as you are forced to share the lilliputian furnishings. On the food side of things we made an additional discovery of Bo Ne, and variants, where you get a simple meal of steak, egg, salad, bread/rice for about NZD $1.00 served at the same sort of furniture as the Bai Hoi on the footpath by mobile vendors who show up after presumably finishing their day jobs. So consumables can be really cheap. Accommodation was also only about NZ$15 a day for the double room with air conditioning, cable TV and ensuite 100m from the beach. You are probably getting the idea that this is a very cheap place to hang out, and you would be right, we've been told that it is similar to what Thailand was like 10-15 years ago.

We decided we had to take a day off from our course to sample the nightlife, and went out in search of the crowds. We met a number of interesting bods at Bia Hoi and wandered off to a bar/resort on the beach (the "Sailing Club"with 100's of Europeans sitting out under the stars in the hot night air. We got chatting with a group played some pool and sat out at the palm-thatched bar on the sand with swings instead of bar stools and a speedy little crab that scuttled back and forth on the bar looking for new hiding spots. Here things started to get a little wiggly as we discovered that great Asian institution the "Cocktail bucket" which is basically a poorly thought out concoction of fruit juice or softdrink with industrial grade alcohol and ice served in litre quantities. Three of these later and it was time to gracefully depart the field. Not sure exactly how we got home, but the next day was a total right-off.

We completed our diving course (both passing final exam), had a more subdued night out and then had to spend the day on the beach waiting for our night train to Saigon. The Nah Trang beach is fantastic, with massive crowds of Vietnamese showing up at 5am and 5pm, but otherwise not too busy. However the continual harassment by hawkers every 5-10 minutes really started to piss us off, was tempted to pay one of them to keep the others way from us. After our bad sunburn from an hour on the beach in Hoi An we had to stick strictly to the shade of a hired beach lounger.

Saigon (No-one except government and business calls it Ho Chi Minh city, as the Northern invaders really aren't popular, and Communism has been a total screw-up) is just another big Vietnamese city, with the same mad and massive population of motorcyclists putting you in fear for you life anytime you walk the streets (and you do have to walk ON the street as the sidewalks are appropriated for every other use and activity by businesses). We were advised that to cross the street you simply start walking and ignore the traffic, as they will swerve around you as long as you don't do anything silly like pause, stop or notice them. So after getting our accommodation sorted we quickly booked a tour to the Meekong Delta for three days.

The Meekong is SE Asia river #1 Starting in Tibet and winding through six countries on its way to the sea. In the delta area it is divided into Numerous branches, connected by thousands of canals to each other and every habitable scrap of land. Some of the branches are over a kilometer wide, and anywhere up to 25m deep. It is also home to an entire civilisation of boat people, with floating houses, floating factories, floating markets, aquaculture and massive numbers of boats and lost Jandals floating around everywhere you go. It produces prodigious amounts of rice and other food for export and serves as a conduit for trade with all the countries along the navigable portions of the Meekong. We spent three days traipsing around on a ridiculously cheap tour (NZD$35 each including accommodation) transferring from bus to boat to bus to boat to boat to boat to motorbike to rowboat to boat to van to boat to bus to Saigon. I finally got to ride in an Asian long-tail boat in which a propeller on a long angled driveshaft is hooked straight to an engine that is muscled about on a pivot by the driver to steer. However, the highlight of the trip was being taken to a Mosque (Vietnam is 86% Buddhist) by our knob of a guide who explained to us how the school next door taught Arabic to the children so that they could talk to Osama and Saddam. This did not go over that well with the Mullah standing nearby, and there was a bit of a shouting match before our guide retreated saying "I ******* hate minorities".

We finished up our time in Vietnam with a couple of lazy days in Saigon as Jane waited for her replacement Visa to finally come through (we ended up getting it 1 hour before we left for the airport, and Jane in her usual charitable mood saw fit to educate the persons responsible for this in some of the richer and more evocative terms of emphasis and imperative that English has to offer). Meanwhile I was getting over a cold and while dosing up on antibiotics (standard antimalarial treatment) on an empty stomach I distinguished myself by projectile vomiting all over the road in front of our cafe table during lunch. Fortunately it was raining at the time so it washed away quickly, but I suspect the cafe owners were not totally impressed at this advertisement for their services.

So here our time in Vietnam comes to an end. Vietnam has been great (apart from Jane having her bag snatched in Hanoi), and probably the highlight of our trip so far. Friendly, helpful and funny people, nice weather (almost no rain), and interesting to boot, this place is going to move ahead in leaps and bounds over the next couple of decades. If they can just get their population growth in check (90 million now) , so do try to see it before its all gone.

If Thailand can match what we have had here then we will be very pleased.