Around The World – Egpyt can be found here. As I put together our travel photos in 2024 I am amazed at the difference between photos taken on an iPhone 4 and iPhone 15 Pro. Please bear with our old photos as it’s time consuming to retouch them and there’s a certain nostalgia.
Vietnam has been wonderful! It’s a very friendly and safe country, and we’ve enjoyed our visit here from beginning to end. The only difficulty we’ve experienced was self-inflicted – I managed to lose my iPhone just after we arrived – but such things happen during travel, and I’m very grateful to my mother-in-law for purchasing one in Canada and sending it on by courier.
The traffic in Ho Chi Minh – particularly the scooters – is as bad as they say it is, but you do get used to it. Within a day or so, we were weaving across the street like pros. We found it helped to follow closely in the footsteps of someone braver and more knowledgeable than ourselves – though I’ve heard that screaming as you cross the street is also an effective way of getting motorists’ attention.
Some travellers had told us to keep our time in Ho Chi Minh to a minimum, but we were glad that we ignored them, particularly as we have a family friend who has been kind enough to show us some of the local haunts. He took us to a small roadside restaurant that served up some of the best seafood I’ve ever had, and last night took us to a ‘Vietnamese gastronomy restaurant’ which served a wide range of excellent dishes. I would have never guessed that I would enjoy the taste of pumpkin blossoms. He’s also recommended some spectacular coffee shops.
We also visited Da Lat, a resort town in the Vietnamese highlands. The scenery was stunning, but it turned out to be a bit colder (and wetter) than we’d expected. The town has a lot to recommend it, but is going through a major period of construction, and we left after a few days – though not until after we had watched the kids race remote-controlled cars on roads closed for the weekend market and had taken in the local music scene. The crazy house is definitely nightmare-inducing. And yet you can book a room to stay overnight!
Photo courtesy of the crazyhouse.vn website
The sleeper hit of this trip has been Hoi An, a historic village on the coast of central Vietnam. We had planned to spend only four days there, but ended up extending our trip to eight full nights. Not only is the town very pretty (particularly in the evenings when lit up – see attached), but it also has a much slower pace of life. I don’t think any town has appealed to us this much since we first visited Prague.
We amused ourselves by reading at some of the many coffee shops and restaurants and lounging by the pool, while we waited for our custom clothing to be made. Oh yes, there are more than 600 tailor shops in the city, many of which will make a tailor-made suit for less than $100. I’m slightly ashamed to admit that we were forced to purchase a second suitcase before we left. A Dong Silk and Yaly Couture were our absolute favorite shops and going through the process of choosing fabrics, designs and then modifying it to suit you has been an incredible experience.
From Hoi An we headed back to Ho Chi Minh, and made it out just ahead of mega-typhoon Megi, which is not likely to affect us in any way. The parks dotted throughout the city are a welcome green space away from all the traffic so we’ve been enjoying planning our routes through them as much as possible.
We are planning to relax for a few days, and then visit the Mekong with our family friend, who knows people with a farm out that way. We have been told that we will have the opportunity to ride an ostrich, but I think it will be best for all concerned if I decline that particular honour.
It turned out to be quite a bus trip to get out the Mekong Delta but definitely worthwhile. And thanks to our travel doctor we even had our malaria pills. After hearing our proposed itinerary the doctor had insisted we’d only need malaria pills if we happened to end up in the Mekong Delta during the monsoon…
Fresh lychees from the farm – the most delicious I have ever tasted
Continue reading Around The World – Beijing.