Misses Saigon

Saigon is actually a lot less chaotic than I had expected. Having started our trip learning to stay alive in Hanoi, Saigon was actually quite tame! However, there are millions of motorbikes everywhere. It's quite phenomenal when thousands of them are lined up at traffic lights, and then completely ignore the signals, and just weave in and out of each other at the same time.
We headed to the central market for a spot of light shopping. It is somewhere between a local market, selling Pho, rice and various other dishes, and a souvenir market, with lacquewear, tapestries, and the usual gifty bits. We all got quite carried away, bartered hard, and bought too much to be able to carry!
Astrid and I then decided we wanted to do a Vietnamese cookery course, so sadly waved Caz off to the airport, and then went on what was to become a wild goose chase to try and find a cookery class. STA travel had reccommended one to us, and given us the address, but when we got there, we were met only by a small Vietnamese man who didn't speak a word of English. After a long attempted conversation, he wrote down another address, and we hopped in a taxi. There, we found no cookery school; we got quite excited for a minute by something that turned out to be a kitchen shop, but no sign of any cookery school! Eventually we gave up and headed to the River Saigon for dinner. There are a number of boat restaurants along the river, so we headed for the biggest one and sat down for dinner. Just as we were finishing our food, the buildings on the coastline started to move. It took us a few seconds to realise that we had set sail! We had no idea that it was a cruising restaurant! We called over a waiter to ask where we were going, and were told we were to be treated to an hour long cruise around the industrial harbour, with some traditional entertainment. The harbour cruise took us past lots of container ships, and not much else, and the traditional entertainment consisted of a table magician, two girls flamenco dancing and a flautist. An unusual and not very Vietnamese mix, but entertaining nonetheless - though perhaps not how it was intended.
We eventually got back on dry land, and went for an early night before our Mekong Delta trip.
The next morning, we took a boat down the Saigon river, for two hours until we reached the Mekong Delta area. It was a hot sunny day, and it was a lovely trip down the river, past locals fishing from small wooden boats, miles of coconut palms and people going about their daily business in the shanty towns that lined the river. When we arrive in My Thon, the first town in the Delta, we transferred onto a small rowing boat to navigate the many small tributaries of the Delta. This is how the local farmers get their produce to the floating market every day, and the narrow rivers got quite congested with all the boats rowing up and down. We stopped off at a coconut candy workshop, where they showed us how they make the most delicious coconut toffee sweets from just coconut and sugar cane. We walked through tropical fruit gardens - seeing mango, papaya, banana trees lining the paths, and then were taken to a bee farm. Were were then treated to a cup of honey jasmine tea made from the honey. It was quite an experience trying to drink the tea with hundreds of bees buzzing around our faces - maybe trying to get their honey back!
The rest of the trip involved getting on and off a series of different sized boats to explore th delta, before heading to our homestat where we were supposed to be doing a cookery course, rding bikes and staying with a local family on the river. Unfortunately this was not to be. Our guide suddenly swapped with another guide half way through the day, and it all went rather downhill from there. Our new guide didn't speak English, and kicked off things by asking where we were going - we thought that was his job!! 4 hours driving later (we were just marvelling at the sheer size of the Mekong Delta until more observant members of our party pointed out that we actually were at the same point 3 hours into the journey as we had been an hour in!) we arrived in the town of Ben Tre where we were staying. Unfortunately by this point it was dark, our homestay had apparently flooded (though we think it may have been an administrative error rather than actual flooding!) and we ended up staying in a hotel in the city, rather disappointingly. We joined a couple of other girls from our tour for dinner, and had 'hotpot' by the river. This is basically a pan of boiling stock which is brought to the table on a gas ring, and you then add meat, vegetables and herbs yourself and cook it all up on the table. It was good fun and surprisingly cheap!
The next morning we were up early for a trip to the floating market. We expected a quaint little bustling market with local farmer selling their various wares from their boats. In fact, it was a huge section of the river, with large boats, full of fruit, veg and hardware, that wouldn't sell less than 15kg of anything. In short, it was a trade market - not what we had signed up for! We did jump on board a pineapple selling boat (they all display whatever they are selling on a pole - like a flag!) for a pineapple, but other than that it was a wholly disapointing and quite tedious trip. We were fed up, and really not in the mood for the broken English tour of the rice factory, the rice noodle factory or the Bonsai gardens with no Bonsai trees (and aren't Bonsai trees Japanese?!)
We eventually got back to Saigon for our final night in Vietnam. Astrid hadn't yet tried a good Pho (noodle soup), so we went on the hunt for a good local soup, and found just that!
We have a couple of days of planes, buses and boats to get us down to Koh Phangnan in Thailand where I start the work part of my trip, volunteering at PAC animal centre on the island.