Local girl from the ancient village selling roasted sweet potato

I was up in Da Lat to witness their Hoa Festival, or Flower Festival. The place was packed to the brim as Vietnamese around the country and tourists alike thronged the usually sleepy town. Hotel rooms were fully booked but rooms were available in a flashy US75-a-night hotel made out of mostly pine and marble. Too bad the complimentary breakfast sucked like a US20-a-night hotel’s. But oh well.

I took on my Super Tourist mode again, donning my precious camera around my neck and visiting plenty of beautiful places in Da Lat, some conventional and some off the beaten track.

Some of the spiritual crafts made by the hill tribe found around their village

Among the places I went to was a minority village, where their art and practices amazingly seem very Native American. Did I mention that they can speak fluent French too?

I won’t indulge too much in my blabber this time, and I’ll let the photos speak for themselves. I’ll be flying to Da Nang tomorrow until the weekend. Yeah, remember that documentary? Anyway, photos from there and Da Lat will be put up soon after. I promise.

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.

Even though I found myself with less and less things to do in Perth in the days leading up to my departure, I still felt a reluctance to leave the place which has been my home for about 4 months. The last night was the hardest. Katie, my American housemate, knocked on my door in the afternoon to wish me goodbye as she was leaving earlier than I was. She’ll be spending the summer working/volunteering in Australia. Gerard’s staying put for the summer too but he left early to get laid somewhere so he wished me an early farewell as well. Aw, how nice of him…

Much later, Amy, Tom, and I gathered in Tom’s room and watched movies together. Adam joined us a little later after having his own little farewell with his friends as he was leaving around the same time as I was. He will be travelling up north to Exmouth to do volunteer work in turtle conservation for his Biology studies. It didn’t matter that we watched chick flicks (A Cinderella Story and 50 First Dates), but it’s the fact that all of us shared our last night as Flat 28 together. We tried going through Bad Boys 2, but we were all tired and dispersed at 5am to finish packing and stuff.

Andrew, a close family friend living in Perth, was nice enough to come over at 6:30am to pick up my junk and was to drive me to the airport. Adam was making/burning toast during that time, and the infamous smoke detector alarm went off as I entered the flat for the last time to pick the rest of my stuff up. I smiled and yelled at Adam that I will miss that racket. He shook his head.

“I won’t.”

Memorable times burning food and setting off the smoke detector alarm

My last goodbyes were short and somewhat a little simple, but I try to think that I will see them again next year when I go back early February as most of them are leaving only at the end of February. That’s my consolation from going totally emo.

The stewardesses speak Thai to me here. I do not speak Thai. Do not speak Thai to me. I do not understand.

At the airport, I was bummed that I didn’t manage to get a window seat, so I was stuck in the aisle with a Perth man who couldn’t stop talking to me. The two seats beside me were empty, so I scooted to the middle seat to avoid flying spittle.

Two people were passing by my aisle, one asking the other,

“Hey, what number’s your seat?�

“67!! Ugh!�

“At least you’ll live…�

This was when my eyes darted to look at my seat number – 32. I’m so dead.

My transit flight from Phuket to Bangkok was delayed by half an hour, and it made me shit in my pants for a moment wondering if it’ll make me late for my flight from Bangkok to Vietnam. I checked my boarding pass – hey seat number 62! At least I’ll survive…

Anyway, after 10 collective hours of sitting on a couple of airplanes (not including the hours of cluelessly walking around transit areas in Phuket and Bangkok), I’ve finally arrived in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. There was an improvement in the attitude of the immigration officers this time, replacing the unsmiling, strict and robotic demeanors of the old officers with young and courteous ones who’d try to chat and joke with you with a smile on their military-esque faces.

Vietnam, here I am, gimme your best shot!