Phu Quoc

We are in Vietnam.

There will, sadly, be no photos in this post because I can't find the right cord and the net cafe computer lacks an appropriate SD card slot. I will attempt therefore to create pictures using words, as difficult as that sounds.

We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) early in the morning after a long night in the Changu airport in Singapore. They had couches that were okay for sleeping in, but that was about it that late at night. Everything was expensive and bright. Then plane to HCMC, which was the opposite. And that was great.

The dominant mode of travel is the cyclo - the tiny motocycle/vespa thing that everyone seems to own and is used for all purposes. We ate in a cafe were a house was being demolished and every brick and strut was brought in by cyclo, carried precariously on the back of the bike.

The traffic is unbelievable. The rules are non-existent. People indicate absolutely everything that they are going to do by honking. Overtake? Honk. Make a turn? Honk. Drive the wrong way up a street? Honk repeatedly.

And it all kinda works, in ways that make no sense to me.

The food is amazing. Pho and ban mi and everything you could ask for.

We have spent the last couple of days on the tropical island of Pho Quoc to the west of HCMC. We went on a cyclo tour of the south of the island, where we saw a pearl farm, an old penal colony converted to a museum and - the highlight - a fish sauce factory.

Our cyclo guides - Do and Tai - were really nice and helpful and never asked for a tip or any gratuity. But when we left the fish sauce factory it was made pretty clear that we were taking a bottle home as a souvenir. Now if we can just figure out how to get it on the plane...