Eating: Oh my god, the food. Mainly, our preferred method has been to look for a street stall where many locals are, hold up two fingers indicating we want two of whatever their main dish is, and then delight in whatever simple but exquisite dish they bring out. This worked well in HCMC. Doesn't work so well in the very untouristed town of Rach Gia where we are now- at least not when I forget to bring my fork (being embarrasingly chopstick-hopeless) and go hungry for much of the day....
Doing yoga on tiny spaces of floor in budget hotel rooms, squeezed between bed and door. Gives Pete an excuse to stay in bed an extra while as there is just not room for two of us moving about the rooms.
Vietnam vs India: here seems a lot less chaotic and traumatic than India?! (Not sure if Pete would believe that, having never been to India but having spent 3 days in Ho Chi Minh). How do things just keep ... working? And so smoothly? Is it the socialist/planned economy influence? Wish I'd done more political background reading before I came. What do you mean we can pay here for a boat/bus/as many stops as we like ticket to Ho Chi Minh and there'll be no 5-hour queuing and no missed buses and this little bit of pink paper you're giving us will mean we've paid and nobody will ask for money and someone will be at the pier to show us onto the boat- isn't travel meant to be harder than that?
Spending 5 days de-stressing on Phu Quoc was a great start to the holiday, especially after all the work-related travel I had to do recently. The downsides of tropical paradise were also the upsides, I guess: it was very set up for tourists, very easy... but surprisingly difficult to find the simple, cheap local food stalls we'd come to love in HCMC: instead we had to choose between Vietnames Italian, Vietnamese French, Vietnamese Mexican restaurants ... all playing the same music that I think of as "backpacker music"- I'm sure it's the same David Bowie/Bob Marley/etc compilation CD they were playing in the touristy areas of the Sinai and Turkey when I was there 20 years ago. Here at Rach Gia, we ate at a street cafe near the river and during the course of our meal two separate buskers turned up on cyclos, to which were strapped massive ghetto blasters, and sung in return for food/money/beer, while also distributing moist towlettes for donation. That's what I call fine dining...
The thing about spending one week lazing on the island is that we have two weeks left in which to fly to Hanoi then travel overland back to HCMC, and it was only yesterday we got our heads around the distances in this country... how could we have made such a mistake, coming from the rather large continent of Australia?! The prospect of overnight/all day trains or buses isn't as appealing as it was a decade of so ago... anyway now the marathon begins, as we attempt to see at least a few more parts of the country...
