Vietnam so far...

After bumming around on beaches for so long, we decided we should probably get on and see some more of Vietnam.

Our first stop was Can Tho, a town on the Mekong Delta (where the Mekong River splits up into lots of mini rivers and waterways on its way to the sea).

One of the reasons I wanted to go to Can Tho was to visit one of its floating markets, where big and little boats punt along buying and selling fresh fruit and veg, sweets, canned drinks, coffee, baguettes and hot take-away meals.

A lot of people seemed to be buying in bulk, rowing off with boats filled with watermelon and pumpkin, so it was difficult to tell which boats were buying and which were selling. Eventually we realised that the seller boats all hang a sample of their produce from their masts, allowing those from further away to seek them out.

That evening we found a brilliant place for dinner where the concept is essentially a DIY barbeque. You order plates of seafood, vegetables and meat, which are brought along to your table marinated in a spicy sauce, along with a miniature barbeque. You're then left to cook your own meal and if you give yourself food poisoning – well, I guess that's your own fault.


This was followed by a couple of shots of snake wine at a nearby cafe – two huge jars filled with snakes and booze, how could we resist? Here's us in typical tourist pose:

A couple more beers later and we were staggering home munching on a delicious baguette filled with pate, cucumber, coriander, soy sauce, chilli sauce and some extra chillis for good measure. It was very spicy. If we didn't have a bottle of water handy, I would've hiccupped all the way home.

Next stop was Ho Chi Minh City (also known as Saigon), which is big and very very busy. There's an insane number of motorbikes zooming around, so road crossing is even more of an ordeal than it ever was in India. Apparently you're supposed to just take your time and cross slowly, letting the swarm of bikes weave around you as you inch forward at a steady pace, sometimes gesturing with your hands to let the drivers know whether you want them to go in front or behind you. No sudden movements, basically. It would be fine if I could convince myself that I'm not going to be spread across the tarmac every time I leave the kerb.

On our first day in the city we saw the first familiar, friendly face of our trip so far. I have a friend from high school, Cecilia, whose parents now live in Saigon. She very kindly put me in touch with them, so that morning her dad Lam and his business partner Louis picked us up from our hotel and took us out for lunch. We went to a fancy Chinese restaurant and filled our bellies with the BEST dim sum I've ever had – lots and lots of little parcels of delicious meat and seafood, followed by a variety of mini desserts. Interestingly, one of our favourite dishes was chicken feet in a spicy sauce – I didn't think these things would have enough meat worth bothering with, but I was so wrong, they're amazing.

Lam and Louis are in the process of opening a restaurant, and they took us to see how it's coming along. It's going to specialise in hot pots, where diners cook their own meat, seafood and vegetables in a pot of boiling soup in the centre of the table. It looks pretty good, and it's a shame that we're missing the opening by just a couple of weeks.

A couple of days later I celebrated my birthday spending the day at Dam Sen water park. I guess I'm not quite ready to be a grown up yet. We spent the afternoon going on all the slides, chilling out on the lazy river, floating around in the wave pool and then going on all the slides again. Got a lot of water up my nose, but it was worth it! And I finished the day off with my very own mini birthday cake.