Vietnam is cool. I really like it. The south and north are very different. We were in Saigon for 3 days and went to a couple of war museums. The propaganda there against the US and our "foreign aggression and imperialism" was intense. It seems that everyone in the country forgot that the South didn't want to be part of the North when the war started. We haven't really experienced any open dislike towards us but the Vietnamese in general don't seem to be as open to foreigners as the Cambodians and Thais were. Unless they're trying to sell you something there completely ignore you, cut you in line and honk a lot at you on the motorbikes. That's the other thing: the motorbikes here are way more intense. You can barely cross the street and even then you just start walking very slowly and hold out you hand and they will avoid you. You can't wait for a break in trafic because there hardly ever is one! It's very intimidating at first, though I'm used to it now.
The food in Vietnam is very good, though a lot of it is just soup. Even when you don't think you're ordering soup, you get soup. Tarik saw a show on TV before we left about "the soup lady" in Saigon so we spent a morning searching for her. We wandered for a while in the area we knew she was in and finally a woman who spoke no English but clearly knew what we were looking for started yelling and pointing. We followed her directions and found it. It was totally worth it. She had a small roadside stand where she boiled 3 large vats of soup with unknown meats in it. We didn't order anything she just pointed us to a table and gave us each a bowl and a plate of spring rolls. It was delicious, we think there was a beef sausage and duck meat in the noodle soup.
The next day we did an overnight in the Mekong River Delta. We took boat rides all around the river and the small canals through the area. The tour brought us to a coconut candy making "factory," a rice wine "distillery," a honey bee "farm" and many small towns along the river. The river itself was brown with silt and provide the most fertile soil in southeast asia. That is where a huge percentage of exported rice to the world is grown. That night for dinner we attempt to get some bbq chicken from an authentic Vietnamese food stall. We ended up with chicken feet! They looked gross and didn't really have any meat on them. They didn't taste like anything other than the chilli sause they were bbq with and most what was edible on them was skin and cartiledge. We paid and then went to get pizza afterwards.
The following morning we went to a large floating market that was full of houseboats with people buying and selling fruits and vegetables. I ate one of the most delicious pineapples I've ever had. Then I watched a woman kill, gut and scale 3 fish in about 45 seconds.
Saigon itself feels like the first real city we've been to. It has a financial part of town and its economy is not based on tourism. Bangkok was like this but we mostly only saw the touristy parts. We flew up to Hanoi in the north, bypassing many awesome sounding beach towns on the way up the coast. We went straight to the train station to buy a ticket to the mountain town of SaPa. Unfortunately there were no more sleeper cabins available, so we had standard bus-like seats for this 9 hour overnight train. It was miserable. The a/c in our cabin wasn't really working (every other cabin was nice and cool) and we sat right next to a sliding door which didn't stay shut and banged open and close every time the tarin turned. I knew it wouldn't be comfortable so I drank a bit hoping it would help me sleep, which it did except that when we arrived at 4 AM I was hungover and had to sit in the rear of a minibus as it bounced and turned it's way for an hour and a half up the mountains to Sapa.
It was totally worth it now that we're here though. This town is awesome! It's a small French-style town near the China border. There is lots of hiking and mountain villages around. We went to the market yesterday where the villagers were selling all sorts of handmade goods. Then we went for a hike up the closest mountain. Unfortunately it's always cloudy so the mountains in the distance are hard to see but that is offset by the fact that the low clouds are constantly moving and moving quickly. This gives the scenery a different feel every 10 minutes or so because you can seee new things in the distance and others are hidden. Today we rented motorbikes and drove around the winding mountain roads. We hiked up to a huge waterfall and drove over a pass to see some distant villages inthe valleys. It was all incredibly beautiful and I wish we didn't have to leave tomorrow.
Ok that was long enough. I'm going to try to upload some pictures now as well.
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