The Narimatsujayne Vietnam Vacation - Part 1

[Note:  I just reread my long rant about blog comments in the last post.  I am so sorry - even I think I sounded like a spoiled brat.  My apologies.]

Ahhhh, where do I begin?  We were supposed to have our "early Christmas" at home on Saturday, Dec 22 because we were supposed to fly to Vietnam early Sunday morning. Unfortunately, our early Christmas Eve was spent with Ryan and me throwing up (Ethan started the illness earlier in the week) and our Christmas morning was spent at the doctor's office.  We were trying to get a medical certificate (no easy task, I might add) in the event that we were still sick the next morning and had to cancel our Vietnam trip.  (We would have needed the certificate in order to make a trip cancellation claim).

But ... somehow, we cashed in on some seriously good karma, as we woke up at 4:30 AM to make our Sunday morning flight and everyone seemed to feel fine.  Mind over matter, maybe?  Whatever works...

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Flights were uneventful.  Kids were thrilled because they could watch movies.  14 hours after leaving our house, we landed in Ho Chih Minh City.  Ooo-la-la.  I had arranged a car pick-up from the airport because our hotel was on the south-central coast in Mui Ne and was 150ish km from the airport.  I was none too happy when the car (which was actually a 17 passenger van for the 4 of us, ummm, ok) had no seatbelts, despite my being very specific with the hotel that we had children's carseats and needed shoulderbelts.   [I had made the decision at 4 AM in the morning to lug the carseats with us, for safety yada yada, and now we were putting the darn carseats in the trunk of the car.  Alas.... we were never able to use those $%^% carseats the whole time in Vietnam but we had to lug them to kingdom come and back.  Such a bad call on my part, but I tried to do the right thing...]

And then the driver, speaking almost no English, raises all 5 fingers of one hand and says "5 hours."  "This can't possibly be true", I think, "it's only 150 km. He must be doing one of those mind-jijitsu-things - won't she be happy when we arrive in only 2 hours?"

Uhhhh, noooo .....FIVE hours later, we arrive at the hotel - 11 pm Vietnam time, 1 AM Japan time, and 21 hours of travel.  But to be honest, it really wasn't that bad.  In fact, it sounds worse that it was.  All in all, everything went quite well.

The brightly lit
nativity scenes...

That said, I am STILL trying to figure out the math on the driving time: 150 km in 5 hours is 30 km/hour, which is 18 MPH.   Even if the actual distance was 200 km, that would be 25 MPH.  There was a lot of traffic getting out of Ho Chih Minh City, but after that, it wasn't like it was dirt roads through the bush; it was pretty normal-looking paved roads from what I could tell. Another one of life's little mysteries.

On our FIVE hour drive from the airport to our hotel in Mui Ne, there were many sights to take in.  It was December 23, which is apparently Christmas festival night in Saigon, so that added to the liveliness and colorfulness of our drive.  The sights as we drove ...

• Motorbikes everywhere!  And I do mean everywhere - it was fascinating to witness.  The Vietnamese must have nerves of steel to survive one drive through the city...
• Whole families on motorbikes - often 4 people to a motorbike, sometimes with a mom holding a fabric strap around the waist of a child as a "seatbelt"
• On every street corner was a vendor selling tiny baby and child-size Santa suits.  And on every motorcyle was a Santa-suit-clad child.  Made for a very festive drive for us...
• Every few miles, there was what I believe to be churches having their annual Christmas festival
• Lots of HUGE (and by huge, I mean, much larger than life-size) and elaborate nativity scenes decked out with extremely colorful holiday lights (some might say gaudy, but I won't go there).
• Lots of fields of wispy cactusy-looking potted plant things that had light bulbs strung all around.  I later figured out that they were dragonfruit plants.

Crashed as soon as we got to the hotel, to be ready to start our vacation in the morning.

Ethan and the South China Sea

We started our day with a short walk on the beach and then spent our first day in Vietnam at the pool.  There was a "mandatory" Christmas Eve Dinner at the hotel (ie we were gonna be charged for it, so we were surely gonna eat it) so it was a pretty low-key day and we did not venture very far afield.  

I was getting a little ancy about figuring out how to explore the area, so I asked at the hotel desk, "will everything be closed tomorrow because it's Christmas?"  My question was met with a blank look in response and then the answer, "I don't understand, today is Christmas."  Ummm, yeah, yet another poor assumption made by me.  Apparently, in Vietnam, Christmas is celebrated on December 24, so much so that December 25 is not even a holiday.  OK, I can roll with that - works great for us!

The next 5 few days were spent gorging ourselves at the hotel breakfast every morning - this was a VERY important part of our vacation - fruit, cereal, pancakes, cheese, and various Vietnamese offerings such as a different pho every day.  We all looooved the hotel breakfast!

Highlights of the next few days in Mui Ne:

• Barracuda for Christmas dinner - delicious!
• Pool everyday, but not the beach
• I was hoping to spend much of our time playing in the South China Sea, but that plan was foiled in 2 ways.
• 1) It was soooo windy every day we were there that we were warned against swimming because of both the waves and the riptides.
• 2) On our very first day, I saw a couple with huge boil-looking bites covering their bodies and when I asked them about it, they said they were sandfly bites from one walk along the beach.  Uhhh, no thanks.  They said the bites were itchy and painful and filled with pus.  Double no-thank you.  We stayed by the pool instead.
• A hike to the Fairy Stream waterfall
• This was touted as one of the main things to do in the area, but we found the waterfall to be less than spectacular.  This was a perfect example of the joy of the journey, not the destination.
• Along the way, the "trail" was basically walking through the shallow river.  Lots of litter, which made it also a little less pleasant.
• Walked through cool canyon-like formations ...
• Saw an ostrich-riding operation (???) along the way...
• Shared the river with several cows (and a water snake). Note from Ethan: There was cow poop in the middle of the river, so we had to go around it.
• Stopped for a refreshing fresh coconut juice at a little shack along the river bank - I love that kind of stuff...

It's the journey...

... not the destination.

• Early morning exploration of the local fishing village
• Very, very cool.
• Small round boats (think the teacup ride at Disney) that ferry the catch to and from shore
• Wide array in the catch - shrimp, blowfish / pufferfish, eels, shark, snails, shellfish, all kinds of fish, and more litter than you would think
• Several women crouched down sorting the catch - one gathering all the shrimp, one gathering all the fish, ... , and one gathering all the trash.  The trash was surprising and not-all-together pleasant to see (or to try to explain to the kids).
• Note from Ethan: It was very stinky!

See the pufferfish?

• The local market
• I LOVE local markets!  This was the day of offering to Buddha, which made it all the more lively with the vendors buying and displaying flowers in offering to Buddha.
• Fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, bread, spices, rice - so many smells, sights, flavors...
• We were on a hunt for French bread - mission accomplished!

Pig head, anyone?

• Mui Ne white sand dunes
• Huge and dramatic and gorgeous and so very unexpected!
• The thing to do was to rent a 4-wheeler, but we opted to explore on foot instead.  
• It was HOT but we all enjoyed the adventure (and the ice cream afterwards)!

• Orange sand dunes
• Large sand hills where young kids offer to rent you a large piece of hard plastic and show you how to go sand sledding.  
• We hooked up with a team of 2 sweet, young girls, probably about 10 years old, and they showed us how it was done.  Twas fun.
• Sparked some good conversations with the boys about kids working to help their families or to buy books for school.  I think it made a lasting impression, especially on Ethan.

• Local bus to Bo Ke
• Ahhh... the local bus.  My travel love was back.  Felt so real.  
• Tons of fresh seafood stalls right along the water.  You point at what you want, they cook it.  Fish of all sorts, tiger prawns, frog, turtle, sea snails, mussels, oysters, clams, lobsters, etc.
• Had delicious scallops, frog legs, tried a sea snail, saw (but did not try) a whole alligator roasting on a spit.

Ryan's opinion a'la facial expression about my sea snail.

Very sleepy boy

That's a whole alligator being roasted on that there spit...just sayin'

• The Nibbling Fish Foot Massage
• I happened upon a sign that said Fish Massage and decided to check it out.  I had read about this in Japan, but it was quite expensive, so at $3 for 15 minutes in Vietnam, I decided to try it.  
• Very weird sensation.  Like little tiny pin pricks that you actually know are fish eating your dead skin.  Sorta felt like the electrical stimulation I had to do in post-ACL-surgery physical therapy.  
• Kids wanted to try it too, so Kevin and the boys "shared" 15 minutes.  Ryan didn't much care for it, Ethan was laughing too hard that he couldn't sit still and kept scaring all the fish away, and Kevin's hairy legs seemed to make his legs less appetizing to the fish.  Or maybe they were all too full after feasting on my dead skin, because those suckers were all over me - you couldn't even see my legs; it was just a swarm of black fish covering my legs.

• Our last day in Mui Ne
• Kevin played golf - seriously.
• Kids and I went on a walk to the local market, on a hunt for more French bread for our next day's bus journey.
• On the VERY hot walk,  Ethan suggested we stop for a rest in the shade.  We did just that and the lady/girls at the little restaurant/bar place where we stopped to rest, were completely enamored by the boys.  They took the kids back into the kitchen - I followed not really sure what was happening.
• No worries - they opened up a big lid and in it, were 8-10 HUGE fish.  They let the boys "catch" them with a net (which was even funnier because earlier that morning, we had made a list of what we wanted to do for the day and Ryan said he wanted to go fishing).
• These people were so kind.  We bought drinks from them, hung out for quite a while, they taught us some Vietnamese words.  Ryan is clearly the best language learner among us - he was able to pronounce words correctly on the first try, which sent our new friends into gales of laughter and rounds of applause.

Interesting things we learned:

• Most of Mui Ne is Buddhist, which apparently also means that they don't eat meat on the full moon and the new moon.
• Kitesurfing is very popular in Mui Ne - there were tons along the shore and were quite fun to watch.
• Mui Ne is also quite popular with Russians and most signs/menus were written in both English and Russian.
• I had read about, but had hoped not to experience, a persistent feeling of getting ripped off in Vietnam.  We did experience that to some degree, but tried to let it slide.
• The only Vietnamese word I can remember is "Gam an" meaning "thank you."

The next day, we were headed further south to the Mekong Delta.  Time to say good-bye to Mui Ne and the south-central coast of Vietnam.  

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Kid Quote of the Day:

Ethan: "Is Jesus American or Japanese or what?"