Vietnam

We started in Saigon from where we made a three-day trip to the Mekong-Delta. The people are extremely friendly there and don’t want to sell you anything. Everything was flooded, people had 1m high water in their huts, but sit their to watch soccer.

We’ve been to different floating markets and to the Cambodian boarder. From a holy mountain we saw the whole disaster, the rice harvest was destroyed because the water arrived three weeks earlier than usual. After we came back all tours were canceled because the tide reached the highest level since 80 years. Hundreds of people lost their lives, especially children.

From Saigon we took the bus to Dalat, the town itself isn’t very special, but the mountain with pine tree woods (like in the French alps) are very scenic and we enjoyed to drive with the motorbike. All children were waving and laughing as we drove by, everywhere not only in the remote parts of the country.

From Dalat we went on to the coast. Nha Trang is made for many tourists but only 20% of the capacity was occupied. With the motorbike we went 45km to the north to Doc Let beach. It was so tranquil that we decided to stay some days in one of the bungalows at the beach. We also made one of the famous boat trips to the islands near Nha Trang. Snorkeling was superb, but it’s every year the same: we couldn’t go diving because we had a flu.

Nowadays traveling in Vietnam is so easy, we bought a ticket and told them our hotel name. Next morning the bus picked us up and short before we arrived at our next destination they asked for the hotel we would like to stay. At each hotel stop, one of us went out to have a look at the rooms and if it was OK we got out of the bus. Because of that it was a very relaxed travelling.

We spend a few days in Hoi An and visited My Son the center of Cham Kingdom. With the motorbike we went to the Marble Mountain. The whole mountain consisted of caves. Inside the caves are Buddha statues and small temples. They used a lot of incense sticks, which gave the place a mystic touch and we felt like being in the middle of a Tolkin story.

At the China beach we tried to imagine how it was some centuries ago when American soldiers took sometimes their last bath there. When we saw the country it was unbelievable that they thought that they could win the war. To me it seemed that the Vietnamese have a very relaxed way to cope with the American war - it’s only one of many wars in their history. They made a very peaceful impression on me.

For the first time in our life we’ve made a reservation for a hotel by phone in Hanoi, because our flight from Danang should arrive at 9pm in Hanoi. Unfortunately our plane arrived at 1am, somebody from the hotel waited for 4 hours with a car a the airport! All taxis were gone and people told us that it took 2 hours to reach Hanoi and finding a room at 3 in the moring wasn't that easy.

We also made a three-days trip to Halong-Bay, it really looks like Guilin (China) in the water. We’ve seen two very fascinating caves, which were extremely huge and had impressive stalagmites and stalactites. On Cat Ba Island we met the first American in Vietnam, a very nice guy from Atlanta, who is teaching English in Japan (we’ve met many English teachers) and he had studied national egonomy in Germany.

We would like to make a trip to Sa Pa but there was no time left anymore.