HOME SWEET HOME

Well our walk the other day, to get some feeling back in our legs, lead us to Happy Happy Happy Tours on Bui Vien St in Saigon where we bought ourselves a ticket home. Our lack of finances meant we had to cut our trip short.. we never did get the hang of the whole bargaining thing! We got a ridiculously cheap flight from our friends at happy tours and three hours later we were on our flight!

We flew from Ho Chi Minh City to Bangkok then after a three hour stopover in Bangkok we grabbed our flight to Sydney. This was not as sudden as it all sounds but for the sake of surprising my mother we hadnt mentioned it to anyone or updated livejournal as honestly as we might have. Barry picked us up from the airport yesterday morning and we strolled into the house and onto the deck where my mother was sitting making her jewellery. She didnt have her glasses on so it took a while for her to recognise me. She sat there for a few seconds squinting and trying to place my blur in her memory but eventually she got there!

We have been back for about 24 hours now and it’s nice to be home. At the moment our plan is a bit sketchy but for those who don’t already know Luke and I will be settling in Sydney. We will be back in Melbourne for a couple of weeks around Australia Day (I believe there is a Summit party being planned – contact Shelly) so we will catch up with everyone there before coming back up to Sydney to find work and a place to live. At the moment we are residing in Barrys driveway in the nicest caravan you will ever see. We are completely self contained, although we have barely set foot in there except to sleep.. there is so much news to catch up on here!

We will be seeing everyone soon!!

xx

Yesterday we spent 25 hours on a bus!!!! What we thought was going to be a 20 hour trip turned into 25 after numerous food/cigarette/toiletbreak stops… But we have arrived safely (thanks, in part i’m sure, to the incense sticks stuck to the front of the bus as an offering to Buddha).

No more news.. we will spend today walking some feeling back into our legs

Dalat to Hoi An : The Easy Rider Way

What an adventure! I dont even know where to start, we have seen and done so much in the past few days that it is all a wonderful blur!

Loc and Tin Tin were just magnificent, they really made the trip for us and we are going to miss them heaps! Loc was an amazing man who could make us laugh hysterically with his childish toilet humour and horrify us with war stories all in the same sentence. And Tin Tin was like an old Italian momma (except with a french accent) he would pile our bowls high with food at every meal exclaiming “Eat Eat!!”. They did everything in their power to make us comfortable, Tin Tin especially who is possibly the most gentlemanly and considerate man I have ever met. We had quite a time trying to figure out what they were saying sometimes but their broken English was hard to resist.. “Please take care your health!” or “If we are lucky to be sunny tomorrow then to be sure you will see many beautiful things!”.. we were really sorry to say goodbye to them yesterday and if we ever come back to Vietnam we are definently going back to Dalat to enlist them on another great adventure!

We were a little concerned about the logistics of travelling by motorbike over long distances with such a huge amount of luggage but Loc and Tin Tin didnt even blink an eye when they saw the size of our packs! They wrapped them up in giant plastic bags to keep them dry and then strapped them to the back of the bikes with long cords of rubber. Those packs wouldn’t have moved in a hurricane! At the end of each day when we took them upstairs to shower and change our stuff looked as though it had been vacuum sealed inside!

The trip was fantastic, without a doubt one of the best things we have done since we left home. Travelling by motorbike is such a wonderful way to see the country and having local guides made it so much better. The only not so great thing was the pain.. after a little while on the bikes our butts would be numb and our back and legs would be aching like crazy! It didnt get any better as the days went on either, if anything it got worse and it would take a shorter amount of time before we would be hurting.. motorbike riding sure takes practise! The guys were used to the complaint though and would stop the bikes every half an hour or so and drive off into the distance leaving us to walk some feeling back into our butts. Those walks were fantastic! We would walk through tiny villages, past rice paddies or coffee crops, through the mountainside.. and what a sight we must have been to those driving passed! Two tourists walking along in the middle of nowhere with no obvious means of transportation in sight.. people would fly passed on motorbikes and both the driver and the passenger/s would be staring back at us, peering over their shoulders until we were out of sight, we were so afraid that we were going to cause an accident that way! The villagers would wave and smile and look confused. The best part though was the kids, over the last five days we have waved to countless kids.. thousands of them at least! They would shout out to us and chase after our motorbikes, they would stand in doorways blowing kisses and waving, and no matter what somehow they would recognise us.. at times it was freezing so we would be bundled up in jackets and long trousers, we would be wearing helmets and have scarves wrapped around our noses and mouths to keep from freezing our lips off. At times all that was showing were our eyes and our hands but somehow they would see us and wave and giggle and shout and run.. it was amazing!

Some kids werent so brave though, there were times when we had stopped, at minority villages or in small towns where the kids were so scared of us! They would hide behind their mothers legs or run away if we tried to approach them. Even the promise of candy wouldnt coax them out! Mostly though they made us feel as though we were celebrities, shouting hello and giggling when we waved or said hello back. In one small town a little girl came running down the bridge to meet us shouting and shouting as she ran when she finally met us she grabbed hold of my hand and wouldnt let go, we talked for a bit (her in Vietnamese and us in English, none of us could understand a word but it was quite a friendly conversation none the less) then she ran off down the bridge toward her house dragging me along behind her (Look what I found!!) one of her friends came and met us, another little girl so skinny and small, and she grabbed hold of lukes hand and wouldnt let go. It was a long time before we could say goodbye to them!

Another time we were walking along the road in what we thought was an unpopulated area when all of a sudden these kids started appearing from behind the trees. First one, then five, then ten.. all walking towards us with huge smiles on their faces.. it was almost children of the corn like (except they were smiling).. They had been working in the forest with their families cows. They knew a little english.. “hello.. what is your name?” and “my name is…” we stood with them for a while but they were cautious of us and by the time we had introduced ourselves to each child and we had used up all their english vocabulary they were losing interest so we continued on our way.

We visited many minority villages along the way, but not like the ones in Thailand who are used to a busload of tourists trapsing through their houses each day, these guys were not used to seeing westerners at all and some were cautious but mainly they were incredibly generous and amazingly happy. In one village a family invited us into their home. We sat at a table in the middle of the bamboo hut.. the walls and roof decorated with the skulls of various animals they had hunted in the forest and we shared our cigarettes with the leader of the family, a 100 year old woman who didnt speak a word of english but was happy to answer questions through Loc. She was wrinkled and had watery little eyes the way old people do but she was amazingly strong and if I had had to guess her age I would have said 70 or so! The hut was only tiny but slept twelve people over five generations. In the corner sat an old – unsociable – man smoking a bong and avoiding eye contact. Their were children being held by grandmothers and mothers and their were tiny little puppies roaming around in the dust at our feet (probably dinner but best not think about it).

In another village we were welcomed into the ‘meeting house’ a huge room on stilts with a massive thatched roof. Inside the room were four village men. They asked us to sit down and they chatted with Tin Tin about us. While we were there they gave us some rice wine and cigarettes and offered us food. It was incredible, these are some of the poorest people in the world and they were offering US food! We accepted the cigarettes and a little bit of the wine but the snails, caught by the men earlier that day in the river by their village, was just too much to stomach so early in the morning so we declined! It was amazing to sit there with them, they were so friendly and so happy! They told Luke he was very handsome (he gets that alot) and Tin Tin explained that it was meant as a compliment to me and not to Luke. He explained that in the village the woman is the boss of everything and the fact that I had such a handsome boyfriend showed that I must be a very powerful woman (LOL!).. Loc explained to us that when someone in the community does something wrong then the village elders will have a meeting there and decide how the accused should pay. They pay their fine in livestock and then the whole community will have a party and eat whatever the person had to pay. Such a great criminal system!!!

In another community Loc showed us a coffin carved from the trunk of a tree (almost like an koori canoe) he explained that when a person dies they are put into the coffin and then they will have a big procession into the jungle where the coffin is carried to the top of a tree and tied there in the branches. The person is left there to be eaten by the wildlife as a way of saying thank you for all the wildlife they hunt for food during their lives. (not something you want to come across during a leisurely jungle walk!)

Every meal during our five days was magnificent! Huge feasts piled in the middle of the table for us all to share (with Tin Tin in the background saying Eat Eat and filling our bowl again each time we took a mouthful!!) They took us to the best local restaurants and ordered huge tasty meals for us from waiters and waitresses who looked so surprised to see us there! Mountains of spring rolls, pork cooked a hundred different ways, fish in ginger sauces, fresh seafood, steaming soups, chicken from the famous chicken rice shop, the freshest, tastiest vegetables you will ever eat, fresh noodle soup cooked right at our table. One night we even ate in an illegal hole in the wall restaurant which served porcupine and wild deer and wild boar, we ordered plates of the stuff, bought raw to our table and cooked over a little hotplate in front of our eyes. porcupine is surprisingly delicious!

On new years day we visited what was going to be (according to Tin Tin) a very romantic spot with beautiful views but when we arrived it was swarming with hundreds of Vietnamese tourists having parties in the grass. They were using New Years day as an excuse (any will do). Tin Tin cleared a spot for us so that he could take a photo without anyone else in it – so it would at least look romantic even if it wasnt! All the vietnamese got so excited and they all wanted to be in a photo with us as well (as a souvenir, they said but of what I am not so sure!).. We stood and a group of men surrounded us and we got a photo (it is one of my favourite photos of the trip actually). In the meantime a vietnamese man was filming us on our video camera and calling out for us to wave at him and so many people were coming up to poor Tin Tin asking him to pass on messages to us and asking (for the six billionth time) where we were from. The view was, as promised, amazing but every time I tried to take a photo some person or other would start waving into my camera so I didnt get any good ones. On the way back to our bikes a group of men sitting in a circle around a massive picnic called us over, it took about five minutes to establish that they didnt speak english and we didnt speak vietnamese (the probably was that we said hello in Vietnamese which confused them and they said we dont speak english in english, which confused us) they offered us some of their food and some of their wine but sadly we had to head on our way.. such fun though!

We had good weather most days, on day four when we were way way up in the mountains it rained a bit which was an interesting experience from the back of a motorbike! We rugged up in ponchos and braved the rain but it was extremely uncomfortable, cold and stinging and very very wet! The views were incredible though! Loc and Tin Tin kept apologising and saying how pretty it is usually and how the rain was ruining it but we were already speechless at the beauty of it all! We would ride though the mountains and see a waterfall carved into the side of the mountain a full hour before we got there. It would be glinting at us so high up, hiding among the trees and then we would get there and it would be massive and loud, crashing over giant boulders.. just amazing! And because we were so high up the mountains around us were all misty and beautiful and incredibly serene.

We rode along the Ho Chi Minh trail.. which is mostly just a bitumen road now except for the parts that previously went around the mountainous bits that they have now dynamited up so that the road can cut straight through. For those untouched bits of the trail we would get out and walk through the mud and the trees. It was really eerie. Especially with Loc there being our commentator. He would tell us stories about how each side would trick the other, how they would modify weapons stolen from the other side, he would show us places in the mountains where soldiers would sleep (hollows dug under huge granite boulders, half submerged in water) he told us of men he had killed and those he had seen killed, men who had been killed for stupid reasons (one, afraid of snakes had slept in a hammock instead of in the ground and had been attacked while he slept) he told us (quietly but not ashamedly) about the nightmares he has that wake him up in a sweat even now and about how hard he tries to forget about the past so he can look after his family (his wife who is dying and his two children). He told us about failed attacks made by the americans, he showed us chatley hill, an american air base that had been attacked by the north vietnamese one night, previously jungle area, now barren, like a bald head sticking up among the many mountains. The americans had doused it with Agent Orange one night after the attack, killing not only the North Vietnamese but also many Americans. He took us to many battle sights and told us the stories of each battle and he took us to visit a local lady who collects unexploded bombs from the jungle and uses a saw or a hammer and chisel (!!!!) to open the bomb and get the gunpowder out (I am so surprised that she hasnt blown herself up!) she sells the bomb casing to the factories in town who melt it down to make all sorts of things and she sells the gun powder to another factory to make.. well that bit is obvious I guess. He took us to meet another local lady who scours the jungle for old american dog tags to sell to the tourists for a dollar a piece. Loc was very disturbed by this and was very relieved when we assured him that we didnt want to buy any dogtags. What a horrible souvenir!!

We visited beautiful teak churches, orphanages, war memorials, coffee plantations, pepper plantations, rubber and cashew farms, pottery workshops, rice paper mills, countless minority villages, a pineapple farm, bamboo basket weavers and so much more. We drove along roads with more livestock than traffic, dodging cows and ducks, chickens and geese, cats, dogs, turkeys and goats, even water buffalo! We saw hundreds of dirty little barefoot children with the clearest eyes and the happiest smiles, we saw old women with no teeth smiling and waving and we saw old men frowning. We drank countless cups of the sweetest strongest coffee in all the world and laughed at a million stupid Loc jokes. My butt hurt from bike riding and my face hurt from smiling so much but it truly was the greatest adventure! There is so much more to tell, so many amazing moments, but I think that is enough for now, I am sure you can feel yourselves growing old as you sit there reading!

Rest assured you will all hear about it whenever we get home, no doubt both Luke and I will be raving about it for years to come!

xx

safe in Hoi An

Just a quick update to say happy new year and let everyone know that we have arrived safe and sound in Hoi An. What a fantastically wonderful adventure we have had!! We will update properly soon but right now we are going to rest our aching butts and do some relaxing!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

xx