With just 24 hours in Ho Chi Minh City, we had to make it a whistlestop tour. Then on to Da Nang with its beaches and nearby hills, and a ridiculous amount of seafood restaurants.
Day 162: Onwards to Ho Chi Minh City and the Water Puppet Show
With no real rush to get to Ho Chi Minh, we’d booked the 10.30am bus, with a pick up from the hotel at 9.45am. Time for a leisurely morning of packing, showering and breakfast. Or so we thought! We decided to have a go at having haircuts with our clippers in the morning, with Chris, Aiden and I all getting a trim. As this was Chris’s first go at cutting anyone’s hair, it took a bit of time!
In the end we had to rush down to the egg and baguette shop next door for breakfast. The lovely lady there cooked us some deliciously done fried eggs to have with a very fresh baguette. It’s a shame we didn’t have time to sit and enjoy it and stuffed it in our faces instead!
The timing was pretty good in the end, we were 10 minutes late getting downstairs, but the shuttle had only just arrived. We had time to change our reservation for tickets at the massive bus station before boarding the bus which was already waiting. The buses were super modern, with amazing double level sleeper seats. Each has a leather seat which can lie almost flat or sit up, a tv screen, charging point, and curtains so you can close yourself in. With three rows of these within each bus and two narrow aisles they are unlike anything we have in England!
They aren’t very social seats though, so we couldn’t talk to each other. Peace and quiet for a while!
After a peaceful journey, we arrived at Ho Chi Minh at a large bus station. We were immediately approached by some men in uniforms (shirts and tie of their company) and things got rather confusing. He informed us that Grab taxi was not possible here today, and showed us a price on Grab through his phone that was three times what our version of the Grab App was telling us the price was, which was odd, and his had slightly different names for the cars. We sort of understood that they wouldn’t come in here as they would have to pay to park. So he offered us a taxi from their company for the Grab price show in his phone. We went with it, although we did think that we could probably find our way out of the massive bus terminal and then call a Grab from there for a lot less. The more we thought about it in the taxi the more sure we were that we’d been ripped off. Ah well. We were paying £10 rather than £3.50 so it wasn’t exactly the crime of the century!
On the way out of the car park, our driver totally ran a scooter down, which tried to turn in front of us, stopped and then stalled when it tried to move on. I’m not sure it the driver thought he was pulling off and was being impatient not waiting to check, or if he had some sort of spasm, but he drove forward a couple of inches onto the bike, which was then stuck. They were both pretty calm about it, neither really shouted or got upset and our driver eventually reversed back so the scooter could get on its way. That is not how that would have gone down in England!
The roads through Ho Chi Minh were pretty crazy again, with huge amounts of scooters charging around and heavy traffic. As Steve and Marilyn had already been here for two nights, they’d booked into a nice hotel, and we’d looked for somewhere cheap close by. It actually wasn’t that bad, and we were happy enough with it for one night.
We found Steve and Marilyn at a café called Highlands café, which looked like a rip off of Starbucks. There are loads of them around full of locals, so it’s not for our benefit. Coffee is taking over the world here too!
We had planned to wander some of the local sites on the way to the Water Puppet Show, but ended up talking for too long (we had to catch up on their trip to Siem Reap) so instead we just walked to the show instead. A traditional method of puppetry involving puppets moved from below the water, this show tells stories of Vietnamese history and culture. It’s all in Vietnamese but you can usually get the gist.
We were quite near the back as we’d bought tickets on the door, and the people in front rather annoyingly seemed to want to take photos of everything constantly raising their cameras up and blocking the view. In the end the kids went and sat on the steps together. Apart from that it was highly entertaining, at times we had no idea what was happening, and the puppets splashed about chasing each other and doing flips. The six musicians sat at the sides did the voices too, and were clearly having a great time. The whole show had a sense of humour too, with the fishing man accidentally casting his basket over the woman’s head. She was not impressed! All along, we wondered how they managed to move them. There must be poles below the water, which go back behind the stage, but the puppets are constantly criss crossing over each other in a way which made that seem impossible.
A fun evening, followed by a quick play in the playground in the park for the kids and a short walk back to the hotel.
On the way back, Chris jokingly asked why we weren’t flying instead of getting the train 16 hours to Da Nang. We joked that it would probably be cheaper, looked it up and found £14 flights. Wow! We ummed and aahed a bit, as it goes against our attempts to be more sustainable, and we do like to see more of a country overland. But on the other hand, we were facing sharing a 6 sleeper carriage of hard sleeper beds in a cabin on a train for a long time, and for most of the journey it’d be dark, and we’d be paying more for it..
We decided to fly in the end, as ultimately, the plane is flying anyway, whether we’re on it or not, the same goes for the train. We’ll have to save a sleeper train experience for another time.
Day 163: Exploring Ho Chi Minh
With no breakfast available at the hostel, we wandered out down the street to find somewhere to eat. A man offered to drive us somewhere on his cyclo, and tried to show us a notebook with written reviews of his previous tour participants. Clearly he hoped that he could talk us into a day out on route to the breakfast place. We had plans already though, and didn’t want to go far as we had not much time until we were meant to be meeting Steve and Marilyn. Luckily, there was a noodle and coffee place about 50 metres further down the road which made for a great place for some people watching whilst we waited for our egg and noodles.
After breakfast, we picked up Steve and Marilyn at their hotel, and wandered out down the streets towards the Notre Dame Cathedral. On the way we passed through the market, where we got done on some sunglasses. Despite haggling quite a bit off, the next person we saw with sunglasses started at a lower price. D’oh! We then made a mistake heading down the meat ‘aisle’. There were fish and crustaceans everywhere, and then we wondered what was in one of the pots and saw a lady skinning frogs – alive! They were still moving after – urgh! It was actually quite disturbing and I’m not squeamish.
Moving on quickly, I found the streets fascinating as there is such a mix of influences; both French colonial and oriental. It was pretty tidy though, and there were a lot of green leafy parks to enjoy.
Arriving at the Notre Dame, we were a bit disappointed to see that there is a lot of restoration work being done currently, with some of the most extravagant scaffolding we’ve ever seen. It seemed totally unnecessary, and Steve should know being a plasterer! It was never going to be a patch on the original, but was interesting enough anyway.
The Independence Palace was next, and we had thought to go in and have a look at how King’s live (Evie’s shown an interest in it a few times). It turns out it’s not opulent at all and looks like a hotel instead, and not a particularly grand one at that! We decided to give it a miss and head to the museum instead.
From the palace it was only a short walk to the Vietnam War Remnants Museum. There were a lot of people here, but it’s large enough that that was not too much of an issue. The courtyard outside is full of old machinery, including planes, guns and helicopters. Standing next to a Chinook really gives you an idea of how massive they are!
There were Howitzers too, with numbers of how many of them were deployed during the war. When you look at the scale of the damage each shell can cause, the rate of fire and the sheer volume of these guns involved in the war (thousands) it’s sobering to think of the amount of destruction inflicted. Inside, the museum is predominantly collections of photos, many from the journalists who accompanied the missions and documented the atrocities being inflicted by their own countrymen. Their photos contributed to the anti-war movement which eventually caused America to pull out of the war.
We were pleased that there was a playroom for children as some of the pictures are incredibly raw, with bodies blown to bits and families left dead on the ground.
We’d heard of Agent Orange, but to see the photos of the victims and their children was also pretty harrowing. That there are still areas of land which received so many doses they are still toxic and barren I had not even considered. Vietnam are very much still feeling the effects of this war.
Perhaps, being a country which is a long time ally of America, we are fed the propaganda that America are always on the right side, always the good guys. I had certainly heard of the Vietnam War, and Agent Orange, but the story from this side is very different. After hearing that on Dec. 1, 1967, the International War Crimes Tribunal concluded that America was guilty of genocide, the use of forbidden weapons, maltreatment and killing of prisoners and violence and forceful movement of prisoners it’s hard to hold them as the good guys. It would be good to think of this as a one off incidence, but the World Tribunal on Iraq opened in 2003 and charged the United States with war crimes and violating the Geneva Conventions again. Somehow they escape sanctions and the other punishments that would be inflicted on any other country which committed such atrocities…
I’m no politician, historian or humanitarian, so enough on that, but my opinion of America has been soured.
We were feeling pretty subdued on the walk back, trying to educate the children on some of the details, without going into detail. Our moods were lifted when we met a street seller, who offered us a hold of his coconuts on his over shoulder contraption. It was heavy!
He’s a clever man, he offered us a free coconut as friends, knowing that we’d of course offer to pay for it. It was the nicest coconut I’ve ever drunk though so totally worth it!
We arrived back in time for some bread and bananas in our room before the taxi arrived to take us to the airport. The whole thing was totally straight forward, and we had a while to wait before the flight left as we’d left loads of time. We spent it eating some rather amazingly delicious cakes in the airport café. I’m not sure if it’s just been so long since I had good chocolate cake, or if it was just an excellent muffin, but it tasted divine!
We boarded the bus to the plane with about another 20 people. It wasn’t a tiny plane, but this was it, literally 25 people on the entire plane. We could all have had two rows of seats each! Although we weren’t allowed to move from our seats – Chris got told off when he tried to move to seats with better legroom. It was only an hour long flight though, so it wasn’t going to make much difference.
Upon arrival at the hostel, we discovered that the curse of the child beds had caught Marilyn out this time. Online bookings websites can often assume that you will sleep with your children in the double bed with you. For us that’s really not an option, especially in a standard double. Still, here we were, with only two double rooms for the 6 of us, and no other rooms available. The really lovely lady at reception was pretty sure we’d fit, until she took us upstairs and looked at us next to the bed. ‘Oh no, your family too big,’ she said. No kidding! Chris is 6ft tall and Evie by herself at only 9 years old is around the same height of a fully grown Vietnamese woman, so how she’d expected to fit us 4 into one bed was a bit of a mystery.
There was the option to move to a two bed apartment for the rest of our stay, so we just had to make do for one night.
Before bed, we needed to find something for dinner, and to check out the beach, which was just 50 metres away. It was getting dark, but the beach was busy. A lifeguard was running round blowing his whistle at anyone who dared to dip their toes in the ocean, and locals were kicking a ball about on the beach.
Dinner options turned out to be limited. Most were seafood restaurants. Proper seafood restaurants, with fronts more like aquariums!
There were a huge array of fish, shells, crabs and lobsters for you to choose, and a massive tank with groupers and sharks in at one.
We weren’t feeling the expensive seafood, so moved on until we found the Da Nang BBQ and pub. That sounded more like us. It wasn’t cheap, but it was affordable. It was also delicious, Aiden had pineapple rice, which was massive and actually in a pineapple 😊.
Steve was not so impressed with the size of his spaghetti!
My cashew nut chicken was delicious, although it was a shame it came out after everyone else had finished eating and I’d filled up stealing everyone elses food, but that’s SE Asia for you! It was so nice that I forced it down anyway.
The bed situation wasn’t great. We tried Aiden on the floor on the duvet (he chose this – he loves the floor!), and the other three of us across the bed. Unfortunately, this really didn’t work for Chris, whose legs dangled off the end of the bed until they lost circulation. He ended up ousting Aiden into the bed and claiming the floor spot where he got some semblance of sleep.
Day 164: Da Nang’s Marble Mountains and Linh Ung Pagoda
As expected, sleep was a bit rubbish. We’d booked a driver though the hostel to take us around a couple of the local sites, which meant getting up and finding breakfast before an 8am pickup. We headed left from the hostel and grabbed some noodles at a street vendor a short way down. With no prices, there were at least photos and the names in English on the board so we could choose some chicken noodles, beef noodles and egg fried rice. As soon as we ordered, Chris headed off to the nearest ATM as we were very short of cash. The food arrived about 40 seconds later – seemingly heated up in a microwave!? The chicken was not the best, three pieces each of ‘meat’, basically the bone bits no one else wants. I definitely had most of a leg as one of my pieces. They were straight out of my bowl into Chris’s!
We’d all finished eating and Chris was still not back. The taxi was due in 10 minutes. What to do? I had no phone, no key and no money to pay. Just as I was contemplating sending the kids back to the hostel to let their grandparents know we were coming, he appeared, but now rather hot and sweaty having run around the block on his quest for an ATM. The first ATM was broken, the second did not actually exist and the third resulted in a rather large circuit. We needn’t have worried about his food going cold though, the man popped it back in the microwave!
The kids and I had to leave him to eat, luckily he’s quick and so we only left 15 minutes late in the end.
We were taken to the Linh Ung Pagoda (the one on the Son Tra peninsula – there are three around here!), which we expected to just be a large female Buddha statue, but was actually much more. We spent ages here in the end!
We arrived fairly early, so there were few people here. The massive, white Goddess of Mercy statue built in 2018 was impressive at 67m tall (on top of her 32m lotus flower).
There were also older pagodas here, all with a lovely peaceful setting backed by mountains and looking out to sea. The oriental influence is strong here.
We made friends (sort of – she was posing for us) with a monkey, and explored the grounds and arch before the heavens opened. Our first rain for months, it was initially refreshing, and then a bit too hard to be fun so we hid!
The highlight here for us were the rows of small trees. Bonsai? They looked a little big, but were clearly the labour of a lot of love, grown purposefully over stones and statues. I couldn’t stop looking at them all – I want one! It definitely won’t fit in my suitcase though ☹
On the other side of the car park is another pagoda, with a reclining buddha and arch. No wonder he looks so serene with these views.
When we got back in the taxi, the driver said about going back to the hotel, but we’d agreed to go to the Marble Mountains too so were confused. He tried to use Google Translate to explain that this was his time to go to bed onions. That’s not a typo – Google Translate said onions! We took this to mean that he would take us back to the hotel for a break and then we’d go in the afternoon so we agreed. Then he drove us straight to the Marble Mountains! We were confused, but were where we needed to be. He presumably settled down for a kip in the car whilst we explored…
The Marble Mountains are five random outcrops of limestone and marble. Legend has it that a dragon came from the sea and laid an egg. These mountains are the remains of the egg shell after hatching. Either way they are sacred to the locals so the removal of marble from them to carve into statues and trinkets has now been banned. The multitude of marble selling shops here all use imported stone apparently… these are also not the easiest things to transport home, some are massive!
After leaving our driver, we were at the bottom of the Water Mountain, the only one open to the public. Here there are souvenir shops and restaurants everywhere, with locals trying to call you into their shop for a cold drink or to buy something. For once, we actually wanted something, so we allowed ourselves to be herded into a restaurant where we ordered some basic and cheap food. Just the job seeing as it was only 10.30am! Is this a snack or lunch? Who knows!
There are two choices for the ticket up the mountain. There’s an elevator that goes up around 40 metres, or you can just take the stairs. We did the latter, which were blissfully shaded and had lots of sculptures on the way up to provide breaks.
Here, there was another Linh Ung pagoda.
Behind this, a little hidden, is the Tang Chon Cave. Easy to miss, this has a narrow entrance, but an open ceiling, allowing light into the space and onto a small temple. Also here, tucked in other corners, are a couple of buddhas and two men playing chess. Yes really. I’m not sure of the significance, but they were the most interesting thing in this cave for us.
There’s a steep climb up to another cave which is home to bats. After this, we continued up the stairs past the elevator entrance and to the opening of another cave. The whole walk to here is actually really beautiful, and we enjoyed being here, even though it was pretty busy.
This second cave, Van Thong Cave, is a through route and comes out further up. Whilst the initial opening is fine, and houses a buddha, from here you have to climb through a slightly difficult narrow (but short) tunnel into anther chamber. This one is not for those with claustrophobia or a fear of caves, it’s for those who love caves only, so we agreed to meet Steve and Marilyn at the other end.
Continuing on, we reached another climb up a small chimney to get out into the open again, somewhere on the hillside. There were some less experienced Chinese ladies coming down this way, and Chris offered them a hand down. Then quickly washed his hands with antibacterial wash. I’m sure these ladies are not infected, but with Coronavirus going around at the moment, it’s better to be safe than sorry. The number of people exploring this tranquil place away from road pollution etc, but wearing face masks is pretty amazing. Our government is saying that they don’t really do anything, but I guess this part of the world are really used to wearing them already for pollution. There are a lot of Westerners wearing them now though.
After the climb out you are in the open, climbing up rock steps to a viewpoint. Much of the path and top are made of marble, which has been polished super smooth from the people walking over it. It makes the top a little more adventurous – one of the view areas required some sliding to get down! Standing up here for the view was a little precarious too!
The slippery steps turned into normal ones as the trail continued and took us back down to the main path. We thought we were meeting Steve and Marilyn here, but they’d not seen our path come out and so had continued on left somewhere. After looking for them for a while we continued straight on to the largest cave here Huyen Khong Cave. The cave entrance passes through the smaller Hoa Ngiem Cave, before entering the grand one down some concrete steps. Again, there is a temple sitting in the shafts of light from skylights in the ceiling, and there’s a buddha watching from up high. It really has a temple like feeling and everyone inside was quiet, maintaining the aura.
Here we were re-joined by Steve and Marilyn thankfully! The last cave, Linh Nham, was definitely the worst, more of an overhang really. There was a small, unlit tunnel off the side which got us excited for a minute. We got our torches out and headed in, before turning back at the dead end around 15m in.
Next up was the path to the highest point. There weren’t so many people up there, which is not surprising as there were 181 steps (Evie counted) up to the top, it was the middle of the day and hot, and some steps were odd sized and narrow. The views were worth it though, with 360 views across over the sea and the other four mountains. We were pretty sweaty by the time we reached the top, which is why we’re not hugging much in this picture!
After descending back down, we treated ourselves to a cold drink and an ice cream before following the final path out past more pagodas and down the stairs to the bottom, slightly further up from where we’d started.
Our driver was waiting where we left him and took us back to the hostel. A thoroughly enjoyable day out.
Now to conquer dinner again… We headed out to the left, inland from the hostel, this time, hoping to find a simple restaurant that was budget friendly and not seafood. We passed one restaurant which had a sign stating that they are no longer serving Chinese people. Yikes – that’s some pretty blatant racism right there, but I guess there’s some justification?? Still, it was quite surprising to see. The menu didn’t inspire us so we moved on. Steve and Marilyn needed cash anyway so we had to walk to the ATM. On the way we found more seafood places, and a couple of plastic chairs on the street jobs (selling our microwaved noodles from a small metal box). Where are the normal restaurants? Unimpressed, we decided to take advantage of our new kitchen in the apartment and walked back to the mini mart next to the hostel where we bought spaghetti, tomato sauce and tuna for a simple dinner. It didn’t require much cooking, but I enjoyed it none the less.
(I realised much later when looking at the map again, that we missed the Am Phu cave at the bottom – whoops!)
Day 165: Ba Na
Chris’s Grandma, Madge, had sent Steve and Marilyn over with some Christmas money for us all, and the kids had decided to spend theirs today on a visit to Sunworld in the Ba Na Hills. The hills looked lovely, and the 5km cable car and Golden Hands Bridge looked pretty spectacular, but the entrance price and the French town theme park on the side put Chris and I off, so the kids were taken by their grandparents whilst we had a day to ourselves 😊.
We had planned to walk on the Son Tra peninsula, which is covered in jungle and home to loads of wildlife, including some rare monkeys. The peninsula is raved about by people who take motorbikes around it, visiting coves and following short trails to beaches and a large Banyan tree. We tried, but could find very little about walking on it (the only post I found was from someone saying how they’d tried to walk it and failed, having to do the entire length on the road in the sun ☹). The footpath on Maps.Me turned out to be a concrete track when we looked at it in Google Maps satellite view, and with a temperature forecast of 31 degrees, in the end we were put off by the thought of 15km without shade and no way to bail out early! We wussed out as we ended up planning to go out of more of a sense of duty than desire, we were feeling uninspired.
With the kids gone, we instead laid around in bed, eating chocolate and watching movies. A chill day turned out to be a good idea in the end as I was feeling rather emotional. I’ve been tired a lot lately and it seems that was probably due to stress or something along those lines. Mental health problems never quite leave you alone again. How can I be struggling here when we’re ‘living the dream’? Simple really, I have severe planning fatigue now, so something that brought me joy is now a pain. Blogging, planning and doing all of this means I actually have less ‘free time’ now than I did when I was working in London, and I feel a lot of pressure to make sure that everyone with me is having a good time, as I’m the one who’s sorting everything. Early on this was all fine, as I was really enjoying the planning and the travelling, but now, with the planning losing it’s fun, and unexpected things starting to really grate, it seems I have reached a tipping point. I can’t keep going on like this! But how to change it?
We spent most of our day chatting and rethinking. We have already realised over the past few weeks that twelve months on the road is too long for us; certainly in this form. So we are planning to change things up after Malaysia and start heading back West, changing the scenery to Sri Lanka and Jordan, before a brief holiday in Malta (the flights there from Jordan are ridiculously cheap!) and some time in Spain to nail the language a bit more. This will not be travelling like we have been, but living in one place, self catering and spending more time on the kids’ education. There should be time for a brief visit to the UK for a bit of a reset and to enjoy some English favourites before we continue to Africa as planned.
The other solution is that the next few days in Hoi An are a holiday. Time to enjoy the beach, chilling and a relaxed food budget. Hopefully that’ll do the trick… we all need to look after ourselves right?
The kids returned from their day out having spent the entire day there having an amazing time. They rode the 5km cable car up through the mountains, enjoying waterfalls, jungles and all four seasons during the ride!
This took them up to the Golden Hands bridge, made infamous by Instagram, for some stunning views.
After walking through some interesting gardens, they caught the wrong cable car and ended up back at the bottom, where they had some trouble getting back up again as their ticket had been used already!
It worked out in the end and they got another 5km ride on a third cable car up to the French town, where they ate a buffet lunch of over 80 dishes, before trying out some of the games amongst the French inspired buildings. One of these is an original French Chateau which used to be up here on these hills, served by caves turned into wine cellars with a bar!
A final toboggan ride and they’d pretty much run out of time! Still more to see and do after an entire day there, and there are more cable cars being built!
After their massive, late buffet lunch, the others were not very hungry, so we cooked up the rest of the pasta and mixed it with our Dairylea for a quick dinner before an early night for the kids!
Our next move isn’t far, just down the coast about 20 minutes to another beach area closer to the ancient town of Hoi An. Follow us there, or head back to our time in the Mekong delta.