happy new year from mui ne! (that's a place, not a person)

hellooooooo, it's been a while. internet places are not as ubiquitous here in vietnam though they are significantly cheaper. which is good because the connections are crap. good thing it's only about 4000 dong an hour (haha. i said dong.) that's about 20 cents. it's about the only thing in vietnam that's really cheap, comparatively.

so, i'll dig way, way back into my memory to hue (so much happens here, and combined with my goldfish memory it's amazing i can remember what happened 5 minutes ago). after writing my last blog entry in hue, i left the internet place to a waiting cyclo rickshaw guy. he had followed me to the internet place convincing me to go on a tour, i said maybe when i was finished. i have learned that you never, ever tell a vietnamese person you might do something because a: they never forget it and b: they never let it be. the sucker waited for over an HOUR that day, so of course i had to say i'd go on a tour. i told him to meet me at the hotel in 1 hour, and shea and i would go for a ride. he gave me a freebie back to the hotel.

so, shea and i hopped in our rickshaws and went for a cruise. we went to the citidel, the forbidden purple city, a crazy ass market, and back to our hotel to pick up our bags and go to the train station. we paid far too much for our little tour, but god i hate haggling, especially here. in vietnam, they start at about 10 times the price, and it takes so much effort to get it to what's reasonable and what most people tell you you should pay. it's actually a bit frustrating, westerners are seen as walking ATMs, and i won't lie, it's wearing thin. a t-shirt in laos started at $5 an you got them to $2. here they start at $20, and by the time you get them to $5 they're so pissed off at you, babies have grown into children, seasons have changed, but they still sell it, so you know they're making a profit. anyway, we got to the train station to find out we'd been given the wrong information, and that the train didn't leave until 1 AM, not pm. we've learned this "misinformation" is the one thing you can rely on here in vietnam.

so, this guy, mr. linh, who speaks exceptional english (most people here do, it's really cool, and they love to practice on you.) tells us he has a travel shop, so he whisks us there and sells us two open tickets on sleeping busses from hui to hoi an, then hoi an to mui ne. perfect. three times the price that my lonely planet, published in september 2007, said. but whatever, you can't haggle with these people. as long as it's not a packed local bus for 14 hours, and as long as there is a bed (yes, a bed. on a bus. beautiful.) i'm happy. oh, and toilets! yes, there is a toilet on the bus. they proudly exclaim this complete with photos of said toilet on the bus. PLUS we get a baguette (baguettes are everywhere in vietnam and laos - part of the french colonization, which is actually kind of nice, since in thailand the only bread you get melts in your mouth to form a sugary lump, exactly like cotton candy) oh, and a damp towel to clean our faces. well, the disappointment i had about missing the train (i love travelling by local train. it's real and comfortable and the scenery cannot be beat) went out the window. a towel to clean my face
AND a toilet. we're riding in style.

we got on our bus to hoi an, and wow - what an incredible scenic drive. the train would have been better (more countryside) but it was the first real beautiful vietnamese scenery we'd seen - everything else was just long stretches of houses and rice paddies. oh, and this tunnel. ok, most of you know, i love tunnels. it's a weird thing to love, i know, but i get so excited to go through real tunnels (not lame snow sheds like the coquihalla), and i always hold my breath, you know, for good luck. so we came up to this massive tunnel, and i start to hold my breath.

and hold.

and hold.

i couldn't do it. this tunnel took FIFTEEN MINUTES to get through, i shit you not. 4 songs, anyway. about 10 minutes (or 3 songs) into it, i started feeling a little panicky. i'm under essentially a mountain in a tunnel engineered by a country whose standards are considerably less strict than canada. i mean, we have tunnels that go under rivers, yes, but a 15 minute long tunnel under a mountain? let me tell you, i was never so happy to see the light of day.

so then: hoi an.

as i mentioned, i spent too much money in hoi an. in fact, i'm really sad to report we didn't see any of the old part of hoi an because we spent our entire day going from shop to shop getting fitted and re-fitted. i'm still sad about that. but i'm not so sad when i look at my awesome new jackets, my shoes, my new bathing suit bottoms (finally - no diaper bum or chest high bottoms) or my new boots.

oh - the boots.

so leaving hoi an was a bit insane - they kept telling us the bus was full, but we called good old mr. linh and he assured us we had a spot. we decided just to try and be first on the bus and claim ignorance if we were questioned. sure enough, they didn't believe us, but after a couple of calls they suddenly weren't full anymore and we had a bed on the sleeper bus. the sleeper bus, remember? with the toilet? and the face towels? well, problem was our boots weren't there yet. she didn't show. and she had half of our money. i ran my ass to her shop in a panic, i wanted our money back. she refused, and assured me she would send them to mui ne. my heart sank - no way was she going to send them hundreds of kilometers away. no. way. i was sad our entire bus ride to mui ne. the bus that had no toilet, and no baguette, and no face towel. we did get a bottle of water though. score.

we had a stop over in nha trang, our other beach option, which was heavily commercialized and basically a big city. i was more and more excited for mui ne, and shea for the first time on this trip picked up my lonely planet and read about it. she too was excited - the "action capitol" of the coast! yes!

we arrived here at 1:30 in the afternoon, another long haul on the bus (about 18 hours). we got a hotel room, beach view, three times the normal price (thank you, new year) in a nice little resort called noan hoa. mui ne is truly beautiful - a fishing village, there are fishing boats everywhere out in the water, and these funky little round bamboo bowls that they fish from - seriously, it's like a soup bowl, but fits 5 vietnamese (or probably 2 canadians). they're all over, and they're pulling up clams and snails and all sorts of tasty things. oh, and mui ne is where most of the fish sauce is made, so it smells fabulous here (shea wanted to throw up. i wanted a spring roll). we had dinner at this place where the seafood was so fresh, one prawn actually crawled off of the plate as he went to put it on the BBQ. oh yum yum yum.

so yesterday, shea and i had a busy new years eve. we hired two motorbike drivers and we went on a tour to a bunch of touristy things - first the fishing village, where we checked out all the boats, the catch, walked along a beach loaded with millions of shells, played with these little kids (they love the digital camera. it's like magic when they can see the screen), and found a dead dog.

oh yeah, this little doggie was all stiff and bloated, legs up, people all around it not blinking an eye. shea and i had exactly the same string of emotions:

1. oh, god, a dead dog (sad)
2. ew, that's gross (disgusted)
3. let's take a picture (morbid)
4. where's a stick so we can poke it (disgusting)

we're definitely related.

then we went to these giant sand dunes, where four kids attached to us like a fungus, and took us sand sledding. oh yeah - good times. what a racket. they carried all our stuff, learned our names, asked if we were sisters, asked our ages to see who was older, because they couldn't tell (bless them), said "really? you look same-same" (darlings) then said we were beautiful (they know how to get lots of money from girls). the sand sledding was fun, but between the sweat and the sand we felt pretty gross afterwards. so, we got on the motorcycles and drove REAL FAST (don't worry mom, there's a new law only 2 weeks old that requires helmets) so we dried off and lost our sand. we went to this beach then to the "fairy stream", this really beautiful natural stream you can walk in, past cows and butterflies and lizards up to these amazing hoodoos and red cliffs. it was really nice, and, surprisingly, free. though these kids walked back with us then wanted money for, i guess, their company.

and guess what we came back to? our boots, from hoi an. she send them on good faith that we'd pay her - now i have to find her bank and deposit the money. i'm impressed and my faith in people has been restored.

then it was beach time. we rented bicycles and cycled to the beach (mui ne beach front is like, 16 kms long, so it's a big walk anywhere. our beach isn't good, we wanted to see the kite surfers (read: hot guys) so we went down a couple of kms.) we ran into the waves and frolicked for a while - as a new convert to the two piece i now realize how easy it is to lose your suit in the waves. i nearly lost my top about 4 times and shea pretty much lost her bottoms twice. this poor old bastard got knocked over and lost his suit completely, his saggy 65 year old bum bared to the world as he struggled to get his suit back on, only to be knocked over again and again, naked as a baby. it was awesome.

one thing we noticed about mui ne is that it's almost entirely couples and families. not exactly conducive to a killer new years party, so we found two new friends, petra and anna-lee (swedish) and this couple aisha and tim, and we all went for a nice dinner (more seafood and spring rolls - i've had them every day) and drank loads of cheap vietnamese wine. then aisha scored some "happy water", which is vietnamese rice wine that tastes worse than lao lao, and we proceeded to shoot the entire bottle. we almost missed the countdown. so then we wandered along the beach to this giant bonfire party, and the night became fun. some of you got drunken phone calls, lucky lucky, until we ran out of minutes on our phone.

so here we are, new years day, spending it in mui ne. well, shea is spending it in bed, apparently. so, happy new year to you all - what a way to wrap up 2007. it shows promise for 2008.

tomorrow we're off to saigon (or ho chi minh city now) but i think we're carrying straight on to phnom penh, cambodia. we want to get up to siam reap pretty quickly so we can get back into thailand (where it's so much cheaper) and just have a straight week of relaxation on phi phi. i just want to go diving and tan more than my arms and face.

happy new year, hugs from mui ne.

tasha.