MORE FLASHBACKS FROM VIETNAM!!!!!!!







Xin Chow, Ni Hao, and Hello.
While life is moving swiftly again here in Taipei, I want to take a moment to reflect again on my time in NAM. The pictures that you see above were taken on day 3. These pictures were taken in a town called "My Tho" in the Mekong Delta. Most people have heard of this region through the movie "Apocalypse Now" or John Kerry's PBR. It was a crazy trip to My Tho from Saigon (HCMC). We had originally planned to take a cargo ship down the river. Our info was a little bit off and we also were running a bit behind because of our evening out in Saigon the night before. A great night I must say, we went to a club called Apocalypse Now, and then to another bar where I had an interesting time and my fellow traveller almost got into a fight with this French jerk. The night was way crazy. I was ready to brawl in the event it was necessary. I tried hard to keep the peace..... but the guy was a jerk and I was ready. We barely escaped conflict that night. There were a lot more interesting events that occurred that evening, but this blog requires me to summarize things to the essential points. And in order for me to do that... I will go back to the trip south of Saigon. We missed the last cargo ship and with out thought we asked our motorcycle "taxi" drivers to take us to the bus station. These guys drove us quickly through the streets of Saigon. I was in full backpack in the midst of the chaos. I almost fell off once because I thought we were there and I took my feet of the pegs as the driver jetted forward. I caught myself when my feet closed quickly around the bikes handle bars.
We ended up on a bus south. We were the first people on the little bus. We thought that we were the only group on this bus, but soon it was full... or so we thought. We found that this was not a tourist bus. It was straight local. We were the only foreigners on the bus, and at every corner more and more people got onto the bus. They set stools out in the aisle and threw more luggage onto the roof. People were hanging out of the bus and the spitting image of Ho Chi Mihn got onto the bus and sat next to me. We were both tired and I dosed a bit despite the deplorable conditions. At one point the ticket taker told us we had reached our stop (in Vietnamese). It was a small shelter in the middle of nowhere. We reluctantly got off, but held close to the bus until we made sure we had our luggage. It was at this point the fun began. Originally we had planned to go to Ben Tre by boat. We didn't know that there wasn't a bridge to this city. We didn't know what was happening and we didn't know we were not in Ben Tre. We showed the locals the address and another set of motorbikes took us to a closed down shop, not the hotel we had hoped to find. Eventually we got to a hotel with the help of my traveler's guide language section. After that Blake took a nap in our $7 a night hotel. I walked about and explored the city, took pictures, and read my book. The next morning we took a trip on the river. "MY THO" reminded me a lot of Davenport, IA.; Except it was far more poor. There was a great park on the river front. I spent a lot of the evening reading and looking at the river along the park.

Anyway thats the just of another day in Vietnam. Again I barely scratched the surface, and much was neglected due to time and memory. If you keep coming back I will eventually unveil the majority of my experiences.

Sincerely....
Daniel James