I love Vietnam. The people are friendly as can be and the places I’ve been are great. I will present some highlights of my time in Vietnam so far.
The ice cream buffet. Need I say more? Yes. It was a couchsurfing meeting in Saigon, so I thought it could be perfect. Meet other couchsurfers and enjoy an amazing buffet, all you can eat ice cream and whipped cream, real chocolate sauce, sorbet, fruit salad, passionfruit juice, oreos and sprinkles galore. I think I had about 10 mini Sundays and then some other stuff on the side.
Khan’s birthday party. I was couchsurfing in a 4 person apartment on floor 12A (meaning floor 13) of what must be one of the biggest apartment buildings in Ho Chi Min City. It was one of my hosts birthdays and we celebrated with a homemade feast and some drinks followed by a trip to a Karaoke lounge.
Visiting a farmer with a biogas digester. Duncan had worked to install a few biogas digesters in the Mekong Delta during his semester in Vietnam, so I went to check out what they were all about. One of Duncan’s friends took me out to visit a farmer and translated for me the whole time as the farmer showed me around his fish ponds and pig stalls and then introduced me to his low budget biogas digester. Once he realized that I was truly interested in understanding the details, he drew it all out for me, pointing out some of the improvements he had made to the original system.
Dalat! The main destination for Vietnamese tourists to make a romantic getaway. Dalat is a small city in the mountains, surrounded by greenhouses growing strawberries and avocadoes, as well as more farmland, forests and lots of waterfalls. One waterfall had a rollercoaster that puts you in charge of the brakes winding down the hill through the jungle from the road to the waterfall. The other Dalat highlight was today. When I got here I met up with a French couchsurfer named Nans who had been hoping to raft down a river around here. We decided to buy some car innertubes and float down a river today. Getting there was the fun part. We drove my rental motorbike out of town and down into a flatter valley where we found a place to get our inner tubes inflated (a strange request for them in a town where we saw no other tourists all day) and then headed for the river. The river was beautiful, surrounded by rice patties and banana trees with basalt boulders strewn thoughout the river. The float itself wasn’t that successful as there wasn’t quite enough flow and the sun disappeared as soon as we got into the water, leaving us to slowly chill to the point where it was quite possible to forget that we were still in a tropical country.
Tip of the trip: Avocado smoothie, soooooooooo good!!! Just blend avocado and condensed milk, something like that, and you have a completely new way of experiencing avocadoes.
oh, and the title. It was something a Vietnamese said about when he would get married. Since coconuts and bananas grow all year round in southern Vietnam, it is a great way of not answering the question, i thought it was a good way of thinking about time in general.
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