A new vietnamese experience

So after much deliberation i got my haircut today. it has just been way to hard to maintain it on this trip, and we're only a few weeks in so with the prospect of 7 more months of travel i got it cut! this was an experience in itself, the hairdressers asked me if i would like a shampoo and i thought why not, will save me having to wash it later. well apparantly a 'shampoo'here doesnt just mean your hair, they washed my entire head, im talking face, ears, eye lids, hair, neck. it took a very long time!!! and was kind of strange, the head massage was nice but i couldnt even enjoy it coz i was paranoid someone was going to steal my bag while my eyes were closed.
the head massage matted up my hair agin so i had three hairdressers untangling it all chattering away in vietnamese and laughing (very off-putting)
when i told the hairdresser who did the cutting what i wanted he freaked out a little bit i suppose coz it was so much hair to cut. he didnt even use scissors, just some strange knife with teeth on it which was strange, but it looks good.
it only cost $7.50 which i guess is why they only blow dried it for about 30 seconds and i left with my hair still wet. but it feels so much lighter!
i'll put up photos of it later tonight probably
hope your not cross mum and riki!!!



this isn't the best photo but its the only one i have so far where you can really tell how short it is! luckily i can just tie it up

Bus from Dalat to Saigon

Not much to report on today, got the 8 hour bus to Saigon. we had seats right at the back of the bus which was good, meant we had a little extra leg room!
the poor bus conductor guy didnt seem to know what to do with us though as we were the only travellers on the bus and he didnt really speak any english. although he did tell us "Stop 30" when it was time for the lunch stop.
it was at this lunch time i had to succumb to the squat toilet... after managing to avoid these for 19 days of travel. did you know they dont come with instructions!!!


so that was a bit of an experience, luckily we keep hand sanitiser with us at all times! that was pretty much the most exciting part of the day sadly...
we got to saigon and luckily our hotel was just around the corner from where the bus stopped. we dropped off our bags had an early tea (5pm) went to a supermarket for snack supplies and have been watching tv and updating our blogs ever since.
hopefully tomorrow we will get to do a bit more, we plan to sleep in for the first time all week so hopefully there isn't too much street noise, fingers crossed! (which i have learnt is the equivalent of sticking up your rude finger here, probably a good thing to know)

Bangkok update

After a bit of research we've just realised the hotel we booked for Bangkok months ago is very close, if not in, the war zone. currently trying to cancel it and book something else... the more i read the more i don't want to go there!! looking into alternative routes to Egypt at the moment, otherwise we think we'll book a hotel close to the airport with wifi and have a relaxing two days watching movies and sleeping... Also we just found out that you can no longer get travel insurance to go to Thailand for trips planned since the riots however our travel insurance wont cover us NOT to go there... ridiculous!!!

120kms

We woke up extra early today (6am – my god do I need a sleep in!) today we did a tour organized through our hotel (Pink House Hotel Dalat) where they show you the real Vietnam, you don’t see any travelers all day (except the 9 in our group) and the tour guide, Rote explains all about Vietnamese customs, and takes you to his families house for lunch.
Ewen wanted to ride a motorbike by himself (it’s a tour on motorbikes… don’t think I mentioned that Mum!!) but me and the tour guide talked him out of it after a wobbily trial run in the car park. So we climbed on bikes behind our drivers.

Here’s a picture of Ewen as his bike flew past mine, he is the one far ahead not the one right in front of me.
First up was a trip to a cricket farm where they breed crickets to sell to local restaurants, it wax very noisy! For some reason they also had a tub full of scorpions there…

Towards the end of our visit here we were shown a plate of cooked crickets (some battered with rice)

Here are pictures of me and Ewen having a taste, I went for the safe option and had the battered one, Ewen was a bit braver than I was.


Next up was a visit to a market, usually westerners don't come here so we were shown a lot of interest with the stall keepers whispering and watching us,we were able to take as many photos as we wanted as it was a bit of a novelty for the shop keepers as the dont see too many tourists. at the very start of the market the tour guide showed us two puppies tied up, apparantly these were for sale, not for pets but to eat! although dog meat is considered a delicacy here apparantly dogs aren't farmed like pigs or cows but generally you just eat your pet dog....
the meat section of the market was very interesting, the little black dots in this picture are flies...

and in the following pictures you will see a brain, eye balls and a heart... not sure what animal these come from but i will guess a cow....



our next stop was a ilk factory where we were shown the life cycle of a silk worm to a moth and how they take the coccoon the silk worm builds to make this into silk. the sad part is that the coccoon needs to be harvested before the worm turns into a moth, so for every 100 they harvest they leave only one to turn into a moth and kill the rest of them.... doesn't seem like such a great idea to me, surely they will run out of silk worms soon!!!
here is a picture of one of the machines they use, this one was for making the silk into patterns

after this we went to a waterfall, apart from the rubbish in it it was beautiful, you had to climb down some very steep steps to get there but it was worth it, we were then shown a narrow cave you could go down to get to the bottom of the waterfall.



Next up was a stop at a coffee plantation where our guide told us about a snake that hides in the coffee trees and if bitten you will die after only 2 hours, a little while later when he had finished his talk he pulled a rubber snake out of the tree behind us giving me a heart attack!! he told us that 1kg of coffee last year was 45,000VND and this year it is only 25000VND so the greedy people who didnt sell their coffee beans last year in the hopes the price would get even higher have lost a lot of money now.

Here's Ewen about to get on his bike

We then went to our tour guides parents house and visited their neighbours who are from a different tribe i suppose you could say. they live very rustically, making clothes with intricate patterns

and getting their water from a well. the youngest daughter (she looked about 5 or 6) climbs down here once a month to clean the sides of the well

we were told that in this tribe 80% of marriages are arranged and the way it works is that the girls family must buy the husband. for example, you might buy him with two buffalos or a precious stone necklace, they do not use money.
the woman we were speaking to had fallen in love with a man that her parents couldnt afford to buy so they ran away together 15 years ago, they managed to stay together for 10 years having 5 children but 5 years ago his family came and took him away and made him marry someone else, he has never been back to see his 5 children.

after a vegetraian lunch of noodles with tofu (which was suprisingly nice) we were encouraged to try all the different fruits from the garden, been a bit of a fruit lover myself i was suprised that i had never really heard or seen any of these fruits before.


we then played a few games before getting back on the bikes to head back to Dalat, we stopped at a mushroom farm and also a tree with the only local chillies, which i didnt try, but ewen did.
it was a really good day, and i was suprised that it only took a few minutes for me to feel comfortable on the back of the bike, i had a very good, safe driver so that helped!

Dalat day one

Here are some photos from our day so far, i'm about to have a nap (it's 5.30pm our time) as i'm still feeling sick from the bus ride... was very windy on what i think was just a track at times.... I'll write about my day later tonight or in the morning
xoxox







Got up early to get the bus to Dalat. The bus trip took about 4 and a half hours and most of it was on windy unmade roads so I felt pretty carsick by the time we got here. We went and had some lunch after checking into our hotel and then went to a place we read about in the lonely planet book, its called the Crazy House. As you can see from the photos it certainly lives up to its name. you can actually stay here overnight, which ewen was pretty keen on doing until he realized how low down all the ceilings were and kept bumping his head.
We came back to the hotel room after the crazy house visit to rest up for a few hours then went out for tea. The waiters at the restaurant (I think it was called HP??) were hilarious, one of them challenged me to pick up some nuts with the chopsticks and got very excited when I could, and the other entertained us and another couple for over an hour with games and card tricks. His card tricks were incredible, we have no idea how he did it but he always got it right!! He is definitely in the wrong profession, he should be a magician!