The Nam

The Americans coined the not-so-original nickname "The Nam" during the war in Vietnam in the 60's and 70's.  I thought it was a pretty orginial blog title for the second half of our Vietnam travel, which included much war-related site-seeing.

Shortly after writing the last blog about our motorbike travels to the beach, Tom and I got caught in our first Southeast Asian downpour.  Not bad given that it is rainy season here at the moment.  In continuing with our Vietnamese copycatting, we bought cheap raincoats from a street vendor, and scurried around the busy streets to find a restaurant to take cover in.  Give us a break, we've probably seen less than a half-dozen rainfalls in the last year!

After a quick meal of "com chay" (rice and vegetables), we headed back to our hostel to wait for our overnight bus to head to our next destination down the coast:  Nha Trang.  Nearly 12 hours on a honking bus is not fun.  It's especially not fun when they even fill the aisles with makeshift mattresses so that nobody can move.  It's even less fun when the person next to you doesn't realize they shouldn't move, so they hit you with their foot, knee, or elbow each time they shift.  No, I'm not talking about Tom.  I'm talking about the stranger that was sleeping next to me when they separated Tom and I to let another couple sleep side-by-side.  Let's just say it wasn't the highlight of our trip.

Nha Trang was a great city though.  With about 4km of beach, it is relaxation at its best.  We spent much of our first day lounging on the beach, spent the second day with a Texan we met, riding a motorcycle around the countryside to see some unique churches and enormous Buddhas, and spent the next day scuba diving.  I forgot the evening on the beach at a brew pub.  Tough life!

Our next train ride, to Saigon, was only 7 hours, was in the daytime, and didn't have anyone sitting in the aisles.  You really start appreciating the little things when you're traveling! 

Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City as it is now officially (but very uncommonly) named, is a big city, with a nice friendly backpacker area.  After taking it easy for our first evening, we met a woman from Edmonton in the morning for a run.  Friendly as you would expect a Canadian to be, she also met us that evening for dinner, along with a local.  Between the run and dinner, we went to the heart-wrenching War Remnants Museum.  Formerly named the "American War Crimes Museum", the museum is full of beautiful photos of a very ugly time and place.  While difficult to look at, it would be very short-sighted to visit Vietnam and ignore the war that although finished about 35 years ago, continues to impact Vietnam today. 

The following morning we went to the Cu Chi tunnels with Mady, a friendly guy from India that we met (actually the Canadian woman's roommate).  This is a tunnel network that was used by the North Vietnam army for hiding, living, moving supplies, and even attacking.  In the photo above, Tom is inside a tunnel that had a hidden area for shooting outward.  Only Tom and one other guy got to go into that section since they were closest to the size of Vietnamese soldiers at the time.  In our guide's words "they not drinking much beer or eating McDonalds back then".  We also got to crawl, and sometimes run, through the slightly larger tunnels.  I may have down a sort of crawl-run along with a girly scream when a bat was flying in one of them.

That night Mady cooked us amazing vegetarian Indian food, and showed us photos from India that have quickly shot it up our list of travel destinations.  We certainly don't have enough time to detour there on this trip.  We have lots of travel left in us for later!

This brought our big city stops in Vietnam to a close, but we still had a 3 day/2 night trip down the Mekong Delta remaining.  This region at the southern tip of Vietnam along the Mekong River has maintained a much more rural feel, although both cities we stayed in were larger than my hometown of Cornwall.

On the first day of the trip we stopped at a completely uninformative honey bee farm and drank some pretty tasty tea with honey.  I'll stop at uncle Genie's sometime to get the real scoop on making honey.  The boat ride within canals surrounded by coconut trees was quite pretty, and the coconut candy at the coconut candy factory was even better than the tea with honey.  The chocolate-coconut candy... not as much.  It tasted neither like coconut nor chocolate.  We slept in a city called Cantho that night, and left early the next morning for a trip to the floating fruit market.

The floating fruit market was like no market I've ever seen.  All buyers and sellers were on boats, mostly motorized, filled with bananas, papayas, dragonfruit, jackfruit, watermelons, pineapples, and lychee.  There were even boats that served as corner stores, with pop and chips, and as restaurants, to make you noodle stir-fries.   

Next we got to stroll through fruit orchards.  The first area we got to was full of "rambutin".  After saying it 3 times only to get a blank stare from me, the guide spelled it for me:  r-a-m-b-u-t-i-n.  As if this helped.  Finally he picked one, and I saw that it was what I had been eating and thinking was a lychee.  Apparently it's a little less sweet.  My favourite fruits to look at (and pretty high up there to eat) are dragonfruits.  They are such a bright pink, and the "scales" really do look like I picture a dragon looking.  That night was spent in Cau Doc, near the Cambodian border.


Another early morning and we were off to see a floating fishing village.  This time we took rowboats, which were rowed by Vietnamese teenagers and grandmothers half our size.  It was really peaceful coming down the river without the sound of motors.  The village was so interesting.  We'd seen a floating village when we were up in the north of Vietnam in February, but it only had a couple dozen houses.  This one had hundreds.  We rowed through it for at least an hour.  There were houses on stilts, some floating on canoe-like boats, and some built up on fishing cages.  I will try to explain the fish house design to my dad.  I know he'd love to open his living room floor to a fish pond. 

This was our last tourist stop before a beautiful boat ride and long and hot bus ride to Cambodia.  Goodbye Vietnam.  Good morning Cambodia.