My travels, pictures and stories: Mui ne and Mekong

Back in town, we jumped on the “sleeper bus” to Mui ne, the kite and tourist paradise just 200 km from Saigon. I am still surprised that neither of us got bitten by bed bugs, or something worse, as it was one of the most nasty looking beds I ever tried to sleep in. Sleeping however proved difficult, the bad road, and the drivers fascination over the powerful horn installed on the bus, kept me and probably everyone else not on drugs, awake for the entierority of the trip.
Well in Mui ne, we woke up the night guard of “Song Huong hostel” and got to lay down and close our eyes for a couple of hours. Later that morning we loaded the kite gear in a taxi and took off towards the kite beach, which proved to be really good and full with people. The wind wasn’t really with us that day, but I managed to plane with my 8m kite, though pumping like a maniac. It felt great to finally get some time on the water again! A couple of spring rolls and a a coffee later, we got back to prepare for the night, which we started at a sea food restaurant. Man, there’s nothing like fresh seafood! And it was extremely cheap too! :-) Later on we ended up at a club located directly on the beach, full of russian people. Almost none of them spoke any english, so I got to practice my long gone russian skills, which stretched about as far as “hi, how are you doing?” and “have you seen the swan lake opera?”. Not really enough for a meaningful conversation, but anyhow, this was definitely the best night out yet!! It was a great feeling to have a drink in one hand, a warm breeze from the sea in the face and scores of people around having a great time without any fuzz. That, combined with some great music and a great location completed the perfect night out.
The day after, the wind was really crappy so we passed most of our time at the beach. Later on we tried out a different bar and some kind of kitesurf party but it didn’t quite reach the hights of the night before. After all this, we went back to Saigon to join an excursion to the Mekong delta.

The mekong delta was a pretty nice experience, we went by boat around all the rural houses set just along side the canals that made up the river outflow towards the sea, watched the floating market with boats loaded to the rim with merchandise and then got on smaller paddle boats to get deeper into the canal system. There we saw and tried rice puff making, coconut candy and also had the chance to bike around the whole thing after enjoying some local food, and fish, for lunch. The classic tourist tour, but it was really worth the trip. In the evening, we tried our best to kill off the last vietnamese dongs we had in our pockets, which bought us exactly one dinner in an indian restaurant and two teas at a café, before catching the night flight to Manila.

Yeah! Sleeper bus! Juan Carlos accidentially sat down on his dinner, a club sandwich. It didn’t look like much before, look how thin it turned out after!