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2010-06-04
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Finally the pix are online! :-)

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Diary - 2009 July (Vietnam)

2009-07-18 to 2009-07-26

Halong Bay

The highlight of Vietnam is Halong Bay. But to go there is a different story. The bus trip with the local bus is cheap and takes about four hours ?nothing a traveler could not stand. But then ?always the dirty last mile ?you have to rely on the taxi mafia, the motorbike scam, the least part of mankind on this planet. The lowest level of the fruit chain.

So Martin and me told one of these representatives that we want to go to the harbour because we want to go to Cat Ba ?the big island in Halong Bay, the main attraction. Of course he can drive us there ?it’s just 4 US $. I told him, that we paid less for the bus, which brought us the last 250km and started bargaining him down to 15.000 VND which is about 60 Euro Cent. OK, yes, of course he can drive us there ?no problem (which is always the best indicator for a lie here! :-)
Instead of bringing us to the harbour they brought us to a hotel and told us, there is no ferry anymore, but we could sleep here and take a ferry tomorrow. It’s always the same with them! So again it was time to play the hard game and tell them if they don’t drive us to the place where we wanted to go we leave without paying at all. The response was just as usual, that this is too far and cost extra and we should thing about their

family and for us it would not be expansive anyway. This is when I have two ways of response depending of my over all mood. In a bad mood I just want to punch his face and tell him he is a f?bastard and when he will not drop me where he said he will I will not give him a single dime. In a good mood I just give him a smile and remember him about our agreement ?if you don’t start to get engaged in their game they will always deliver you ?this is the good thing when you pay afterwards and are not afraid of getting punched by them. Where ‘them?is a slimy guy or two of them one head smaller than you! :-) Well about 15 minutes later they drop us where we wanted to, realizing that there is indeed no ferry anymore ?sometimes they tell the truth, but this is just valid in about 5 out of hundred! :-)
We found an OK hotel, ate at an eatery where I was proud of Martin that he dared to eat (other people would have had the panic to get all the diseases of the world) had an early sleep and the next day we took two ferries and a bus to reach our target: The perfect beach in a perfect environment. Cat Co III. Cat Co II is the beach for the locals (about 5 person on one square meter) where else our beach we more or less had for ourselves! :-) Sometimes it’s good to have the money?

We were lucky to get the last bungalow ?tourist who arrived five minutes later had to sleep in tents ?without fan but with nice ants and other critters. Food was good enough, beer cheap to have a nice time to relax and enjoy the perfect beach. But to get the real hype out of the island we hired two motorbikes and spend the whole day driving over the island. Endless small hills and mountains bizarre formed by air and sea, sheltering a gazillion different plants and trees forming a place similar to the environment of Jurassic Park and I guess one of the 10 most beautiful places of the world! On this day (including visiting two caves) we took approximately a hundreds pictures each ?my Ram was full at the end of the day, otherwise it would had been more! :-)

We stayed another day enjoying the beauty and the relaxed way of living on the island. We also walked over an old catwalk leading about a km around a rock over cliffs. Closed for a good reason ?the iron posts were totally rotten and so where the wooden blankets to walk on. Some of them were already missing and something like a tricky path walk over game started. Which was maybe not the best idea, because it really started to become dangerous when the metal posts where breaking below us and a blanket collapsed while I was standing on it and I nearly fell through ?leaving quite an ugly scratch on my left lower leg. But hey, the ‘going back?genome is missing in both of our bodies so we kept on going further, sometimes climbing over the rocks, where there was to much of the catwalk gone already, facing the rocks below and just hoping to get home save?:-) No risk, no fun, so we had a nice adventure with the bill still had to come.

The next two days we organized a boat trip through the endless small islands of the Halong Bay including swimming, delicious meals on deck, sleeping on the roof, using the boat as a diving platform, visiting another big cave, exploring dark tunnels leading to hidden lagoons by kayak and had a lot of fun enjoying the amazing landscape and taking another gazillion pictures! :-)

Back in Hanoi it was time to say good bye to Martin ?he had to go back. Another two and a half weeks were over within a blink of an eye.

2009-07-14 to 2009-07-18

Hanoi

As the bus trip to Nha Trang was long and uncomfortable, we decided to take the plane to Hanoi. On top you save about a day of travel time.

In Hanoi the maximum leader Ho Chi Minh is ‘still alive? Well, not really but he is in a sarcophagus and when you queue in the right line for about two hours you have a chance to see ‘Uncle Ho?for about three minutes constantly passing by being pushed by guards and the masses coming from behind. It’s more the over all impression and seeing the people reacting and the hype around the person who lead the Vietnamese people to win against the American.

Hanoi is quite a good city to relax, have a party if you want, do sightseeing (the Library Pagoda is quite nice) have a big laugh in the puppet show (because it’s one of the biggest shit produced on this planet) and enjoy a walk at the city lake.

Of course we had to go to the local market again. Martin wanted to buy some kitchen stuff and it’s always fun to try things looking strange and tasting good. Well, sometimes they don’t taste good and when I tried one of these little oily brown thin things and wanted to swallow it despite one of the ugliest tasted of my life my whole body told me ?including hairs on the back, instantly produces sweat and green colour in my face ? NOT to do. It was just too ugly and I had to spit it out. My whole behaviour brought Martin so much laugh that we could not forget the episode and whenever one did something wrong the punishment was to eat a ‘cuttle fish??normally when they are just grilled they are extra ordinary, but marinated in this ugly sauce or however they produces this thing I tried on the market it’s the worst punishment ever! :-)

2009-07-10 to 2009-07-14

Nha Trang

Our second station was Nha Trang ?the guide book told us it’s a very nice beach and one of the best places to go scuba diving.

Well, it was quite a boring place with a beach we touched once, ignored the water, were going diving one day (with quite some nice caves at octopus rock ?without seeing an octopus) entered another boring museum, but had a lot of fun playing chess, talking and spending time in the local club.
The highlight here definitely was the day at the local mud bath ?a spa complex with waterfalls, hot tubes, swimming pools, steam bath, massage and the main attraction a bath in a tube filled with a mineral water mud mixture. You look like monster with all the mud on you but lying in it is really the best way to relax. When I told Martin that I was floating he first told me to shut up and stop talking rubbish, but when he soon found out, that that was for real, it was him to shut up! :-)
I guess it’s the same feeling in the Dead Sea, when you can ‘sit?in water and read a paper!

Another highlight was a perfect cooking course we did, where we got perfectly guided through the local food market to buy our stuff we wanted to cook later (spring rolls, lemon grass chicken, flamed mango) and to try all the other stuff we did not know ? this took about half a day! :-)
The rest of the day we tried to copy the ability of our chef, but she was far ahead. Nonetheless, we all managed to cook a very good meal which we enjoyed eating in the end. It was a splendid impression and we learned a lot ?and all that for just US $ 8 including transport from and to our guesthouse and from and to the market in nice bicycle rickshaws! :-)

2009-07-08 to 2009-07-10

Saigon - Another Asian Country

I arrived at Saigon and the second I left the airport it was all the same like all the other Asian countries ?same scam of taxi drivers start lying the second they open their mouth, crazy traffic, too much motorbikes, people don’t just think first, but start immediately, improvise later and if they do not finish today, there is time on the next day. They will not get a heart attack.
They eat the food on the street, they repair the bicycle on the street, they leave the car in the middle of the street when they go into a shop to buy something, they don’t care, when the man in front of them changes direction all the time and they come late to a meeting ?everything is easy ?hang loose the aussie would say.
Despite all this I found one thing which was new to me: As they always have a travel problem, they put as many people as possible on any motorbike (up to five) in any car (uncountable) onto trucks, trains, etc.
But what I haven’t seen before is, when there are to men on a bicycle ?where in Germany we would discuss who is sitting on the saddle and who on the back and who will do the pedaling ?these people here they share the effort: They both have the feet on the pedal and share the place and the effort! How cool is that!

Well, still sitting at the airport and keeping listening to all the stories about the crashed bus, the not anymore in service airport transport, the dieing grandma (at least four of them) I was joining to group up tourists to hire a minibus to avoid the taxi mafia. Keeping together as a tourist to not get fucked by the locals produces a lot of friendships, so I found myself four hours later with people from Japan, India, England and Holland having dinner in a fancy restaurant. Sitting in a caf?later on until late having beer is just the usual end of the day?

Retarded as I am I went so late to bed and with so much booze, that I could not pick up my best friend Martin from the airport ?what a poor start! :-( All I managed to do is buying a local sim card to send him a text message to come into town on his own! As he is used to Asia it was not too hard for him and after a thousand text messages where to meet we finally found each other at the backpacker’s hideout with him having the bottom line for the holiday: ‘I know why the Americans lost the war here ?they all died in traffic! :-)? So we haven’t seen us for more than a year we needed about twelve beers to exchange the major stories.

As Martin just had limited time we had to move fast. Next day there was city sightseeing including the famouse army museum ?primarily showing how bad the US were treating ‘innocent?people and how poor their efforts were to win the war.
The most interesting point here was that always the winner is writing the history and choosing what is the truth and what is not ?where I am definitely not a friend of any American invasions in what so ever country!

We ended the first days tour by sitting down on the rooftop of one of the ‘skyscraper? hotels on the river enjoying the perfect view and later on a brilliant buffet having oysters, sushi, roast beef, free wine, water?all for just 20 US $. Life could go on like that! :-)

Next day we went to the famouse tunnel system from Cu Chi ?a tunnel system which had more than 500km tunnels from the North of Saigon to all the major military points around Saigon to attack the Americans and hide immediately again. With hidden entrances, traps around and the entrances so small that just the slimy, small Vietnamese people could fit in. Walking (I mean crawling, because the height of these tunnels was just about 1,20m) through a tunnel like this brings claustrophobic feelings to everybody! :-)

Nice pagodas, a cool market with all the regions typical crazy stuff (snake wine, chicken feet, lotus flower stones, things you cannot define, etc? and a boring history museum completed the day.


	Start: 2008-04-10					Oli on his way from Munich to Hong Kong				End: 2010-05-12