That's it! We spent our last day in Vietnam shopping for souvenirs, wandering markets, and eating street food.
We ended up going for Indian again because it was so good, it was good to really fill up on some nice curries.
Now Leah and I are sitting in the airport in Seoul, about to catch some sleep before our Seoul excursion during our 12 hour layover.
So Leah's brother Chris and I have been scheming. He was in Singapore on business, and we were working on a plan to have him surprise Leah in Vietnam.
It was all going to plan, until they wouldn't let Chris board the plane without a Vietnamese visa. That set him back a day, but on Friday morning he emailed me and we prepared for the surprise!
He was staying at the same hotel, so I told him to knock on our room 304. Chris emails, there is no room 304. Uh oh.
I tell him to meet me in the lobby. We're both there, but neither of us are there. Go figure there is more than one Ngoc Minh hotel in Saigon.
So I figure I have to bust the surprise to Leah, and we rode a scooter out to meet Chris. After a breakfast reunion, we rented another scooter and the three of us headed out into the rain to visit the Chinatown markets.
That night we had a delicious Indian dinner, and then rented a private karaoke room for a few hours. That was fun!
According to our guide Mr B, the longest tunnel system in the world.
Mr B gave us a history of Vietnam starting with French occupation in the 1800s, which meant pretty much constant war until after the Vietnam war with the USA. It is a long and sad history.
But hey the tunnels were neat, we crouched through over 100m of constricted, hot, humid and very dark spaces. We were with a huge group so even though Mr B was a very knowledgeable and charismatic guide, it was tough struggling to see what he was talking about through the throngs of tourists following him.
The tunnels were a major strategic element for the VC so the history is interesting, but it is not really that interesting to see, I think the tunnels in Turkey were better. But if you've never been in a tunnel so short you had to crawl through 100m of it, then it would be something to see.
Tonight is party night as we don't have anything planned for tomorrow, besides museums and shopping.
We spent the last day in Nha Trang playing on water toys and lounging on the beach.
In the evening we caught a hard sleeper train to HCMC. The hard sleeper is a 6 person berth (3 on each side) with a 2cm mattress for each bed. A family had sneakily moved into our beds (probably from Hanoi or somewhere else up the line) so we had to kick them out. We felt bad for the kids but we had nowhere else to go either.
We arrived in HCMC around 5:30 in the morning and just checked into the hotel and slept.
We walked around the city here and sweated buckets. Either I'm getting accustomed to the heat or just getting smarter about managing it, but I think that despite it being hotter than Hanoi it isn't so bad.
Holy waterslides batman!
This place was a lot of fun. We could see the island from our part of the beach and we knew they had waterslides there. There's something about the lure of waterslides and carnival rides that we all found pretty much irresistible.
We started off on the first ride, which could be aptly named "The Eyeball Popper" or "The Brain Aneurysm" or "The Big Forehead Vein Buster". It was kinda bad. We were mounted facing outwards on a big ring, and that ring would rotate upwards and even upside down. It was actually fun when we were perpendicular to the ground but the operator left us hanging upside down for a long time. I had so much blood in my head it hurt my eyeballs, and it hurt even more to laugh! I am clearly not destined to be a fighter pilot.
Leah didn't even go on that one because her stomach wouldn't handle it. But a weird thing happened. Because I had applied sunscreen I had taken off my travel ring (a steel substitute for the real wedding ring)
We went on a tiny roller-coaster, which was okay. But then we found the Alpine Bob Coaster which was totally awesome. You're in a 1 person (or 1 big person 1 little person) car, and you can control the brakes as you fly downhill. It was totally wild because after I realized that the cars can't fly off the rails I went pretty fast. Even Leah went on this one, because being able to control the speed she was able to keep from barfing.
After a tiny lunch we wanted to go on the water slides but we were totally heat exhausted so we went into the aquarium to see the fish, and hang out in the air conditioning.
Finally the fun stuff began! Our first water slide could be called the Nasal Hydration Device, we laid on our stomach on top of a toboggan-like foam mat down a slide with six tracks in parallel.
The second slide we went down on our backs, but the spray from my heels totally covered me and went into my eyes. Fun?
The third slide was called the Tsunami (its actual name) and we rode in a tube down a slope, down and up and down and up. It was great fun, we did it again and again!
There was a ride that dumped us out into a huge bowl vortex. One was called the family slide, which meant that the tube could hold a family of six, but the ride was REALLY crazy, we were flipped up on the sides and everyone pretty much fell on top of each other. It was really fun!
We ate a nice dinner, rode the Alpine coaster again and caught the gondola back.
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