My Dad and his Thai colleague Wichan had a few business duties to attend to down south of Ho Chi Minh City, so I tagged along for the ride.
Our first stop was Can Tho City which was a 5-hour drive away. We checked into Golf Can Tho Hotel, which was not bad at all.
Awesome view from the balconyIt was mostly uneventful for me as I spent most of the day in the hotel room while waiting for my Dad to come back from his meeting. We had a nice dinner later at a Vietnamese-German restaurant where they brewed their own beer, which was pretty sweet. We ate German food with chopsticks!
Woke up early the next day to have a pretty decent hotel buffet breakfast and was headed off for a 2-hour drive further down south to a town called Rach Gia.
Dull cloudy weather throughout the trip…Our SUV had to be ferried over the Mekong River to reach the place. The town looked no different from Cantho City, except maybe slighty a little more less developed.
One of a series of hilarious HIV/AIDS awareness campaigns promoting the use of condoms. These ads are placed every 500 metres in a long stretch of road in a poor community area. Excuse the wonky framing, I shot this from a moving vehicleIt’s a slow-moving coastal town, and we arrived just in time for lunch. My Dad asked our driver to take us to a small seafood restaurant which he has been to before. Ironically, they only served freshwater fish that day.
Would you like to drink whiskey, mineral water, or ginseng snake juice?We drove around and saw a nice seaside restaurant. We planned to have dinner there, but when we crossed the bridge over to the restaurant to book a table, what we saw in the water below us changed our minds.
I can understand bird flu… but eel flu?Dinner at another seaside restaurant was good though. Not many foreign tourists here, except a couple of Swedish men who ate at the same restaurant that night.
The next day, I had to wake up at 6am to go to another destination – Phu Quoc Island, which was about half an hour’s flight from the Rach Gia Airport (tiny-ass airport), or a four-hour boat-ride to the large tourist island. We flew there, on a tiny-ass plane.
I am the rockstar and this is my jet plane. Ignore the other people climbing into it.Guess what… the two Swedish men sat next to us in the plane. Landing was shaky and the plane swayed like a drunken cow, and it almost made me shit my pants. Just almost. We arrived at about 10am.
We reached Tropicana Resort Hotel by van pretty quickly, and the place? Paradise.
Right out of a tourism brochure… but rooms weren’t available yet, so we had an early lunch. The Swedes appeared at the reception area, and smiled to us as they recognized the absurd coincidence. One of them asked to look at my camera, and said that he has the very same one. Some photographer chatter went on for a few moments as he showed me some of his lenses and such. He got his camera for 1000 Euros. I got mine for 1000 USD. Heh.
Since rooms still weren’t available, we decided to go into the city to check up on the market and the availability of their product in the area. It was humid and hot as hell, but the place was quite a sight.
Fresh catch everydayThe marketplace was located alongside the river, and it was a busy, busy place.
From live seahorses to shampoo, you’ll surely find it hereWe went back to our hotel soon after to swim in the pool and take a little dive into the sea. Our next door neighbours yelled out “Hi!�? while I walked up to my bungalow, and you guessed it, it was the Swedes. I swear they might be stalking us. Russky spies undercover for all I know…
As I write this on my rattan rocking chair on the balcony of my bungalow overlooking the beach and sea, enjoying the evening breeze and the sound of the waves, my Dad calls for me.
“Hey Michelle come look at the gecko in our room…�?
Approximately 25cm long. Due to camera lens restrictions, I had to get close to the creature to take this badly lit photograph. The fella later took a nice shit on my hand and laptop from the ceiling for revenge… bluerghhhhhh!!!We ended up moving to another unit that night because our air-conditioning wasn’t working. I stayed up playing PC Solitaire when a large spider started flying towards my face, inducing me to jump into bed under the mosquito netting in a flash. When the clock struck midnight, winds started blowing crazily like a tsunami was about to wipe the whole place away. The blaring sounds of a propeller plane drowned the wind noise as dogs howled non-stop. When the plane was gone, everything went silent again. Was I brought back in time to the Vietnam War when American OV-10 Broncos flew the skies? Time stands still in Phu Quoc Island. I woke up feeling like I had slept 5 hours, but only half an hour had passed. Damn.
We checked out today at 8am, and flew back to the Rach Gia Airport where our driver waited. The rest of the journey home to Ho Chi Minh was mostly spent on sleeping. We had a brief stopover at Can Tho’s Victoria Hotel for an extremely nice lunch.
Yummmayyy…I’ve just returned home now, and I’m dead dog tired. But also happy.
will kill for beach
word
Hey ! Awesome review ! i love the pic.
i would love to go there with you !!!
^.^ => “happy face !”
OMG at the pic of the dead bird/duck/feathery thing and the dead eel. GROSS.
But wow at the beach! Gosh I suddenly feel like braving all these places and explore Vietnam.
And ew at the gecko.
Hope you’re having enormous fun…I’m still in Perth and gonna celebrate my 21st in 3 days. ^^
Raya: Merci, Raya! One day, we will travel extensively! Right? Right?? Right???!
Viv: Yep, it’s a duck. At least it was one…
I knew you’d love the beach pic! Hahah if you’re still around early next year maybe we could hit up a few other unexplored beaches in Western Australia!
Lots of sightseeing here to do, but I usually have to wait for my Dad to take me out. If I go out alone the chances of me getting run over by motorbikes or bicycles are pretty high, considering the insane amount of traffic they have here.
Two more days of being 20 for you… enjoy it while it lasts… but hey, I bet that you won’t really miss it — being 21’s great~! Here’s a pre-happy birthday wish and hug from me!!!
ugh, you and red dont go, i mean, i dont mind seeing u covered in blood and all, but seriously…
Trogs: Heh yeah I know eh… just chill man, this is only temporary, it has giant bugs that I don’t have the patience to fix. I just like that damn monkey shit up there — it’s funny shizzo!
wooooooolf…. visit mweee.. hugs miss u loads
I might be flying home in March for a week or two, Jeff