Okay, so I think an update is required since its been so long.

Sofiya and I have been staying in MUi Ne for the past few weeks, it’s been a great place to relax and just take it easy. Unfortunately, well, maybe fortunately, there was a typhoon hitting the the islands of the Phillipines and we were getting a little bit of it. The waves were absolutely huge, almost terrifyingly huge at times. We’d go sit at the beach and be mesmerized by the sheer size and power of the waves hitting the side of our hotel. A couple of buildings away, two bungalows were destroyed by the waves they were that huge.

Anyway, my update that I wanted to make was two fold, the first is that my computer is broken and I’m forced to use my iPad… It means that updates will be difficult. The second is that I leave here in about three days for MalaysiA. My visa runs out on the 30th so I’ll be going to Kuala Lumpur on the 29th. I have a possible medical problem that I think I’ll need surgery for, and Malaysia seems like the best place to have it done.

We arrived in Mui Ne, Vietnam yesterday. I don’t think I could feel so good getting someplace, but as the bus dropped us off I felt like I had stepped into a new world. A world filled with palm trees, beach resorts, and long beaches. The area we are staying is basically a very upscale beach area situated along a single road. There seems to be more white people than Vietnamese though and many, if not most, of the white people are Russians. There are so many here that many of the businesses have Russian language on their signs and menus. It’s weird but I get kind of offended if a menu is in Russian… I guess I now know how many feel when the menu is in English. J

We threw our bags on the bed and headed out to the beach. It was very windy and I guess the wind is typical for the area because about half the shops on the three kilometer beach are for kite surfing lessons or rentals. The first night here there were dozens, maybe hundreds of kite surfers flying across the water. It looks like a lot of fun. The sun was going down and the sky was turning orange. We walked to the end of the beach and then walked back along the road to the hotel. I know, boring right, but I have to set up the next part of the story.

After we finished with dinner, we decided that we’d sit near the beach and have a beer. It was about 8pm and very dark, Sofiya goes to the beach and I go to the room to get a beer. I grabbed a beer and head down to the lounge chairs that are overlooking the beach, remember there aren’t any light on at the time and it’s very dark. I’m able to make out someone sitting in a lounge chair and head over. As I get close I see dark hair and glasses, just like Sofiya, so I reach down and romantically run my hand through her hair. The person jumps and turns around, that’s when I realized that it was just a guy sitting listening/watching to the waves. I was mortified and in shock, I apologized about ten times and tried to get out of there as quickly as I could. Sofiya wasn’t that far away so I got to her and basically hid for the next twenty minutes. The next couple of days I kept running into him, but in all honesty I don’t know if he recognized me and I wasn’t about to give any sign that I knew it was him.

I left Sihanoukville a couple of days ago for Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam. I was in Vietnam about six years ago but I never went south of Hanoi, and have always wanted to visit HCMC. When I left Sihanoukville I took a sleeper bus, with a single bed. I have to admit I loved it. There was wifi on the bus, I had the space to myself, and had more than enough room to stretch out. It was so comfortable that I fell asleep after about an hour.

The bus got to Phnom Penh where I would have about a two-hour layover for the bus to HCMC. I didn’t like the idea of the layover, but sometimes you just have to take what you’ve been given and waited. It was about 1am when the bus dropped us off on a street in the city. Except for a small street restaurant there wasn’t too much around us. The people in charge of the bus service put us on a tuk-tuk to take us to another location. On the tuk-tuk I met a couple, the guy was from Portland, Oregon. It was kind of cool to talk to someone from my hometown even though I haven’t lived there in a very long time. He’s in HCMC teaching English.

So the tuk-tuk drops us off in front of a closed travel shop. By now the streets are nearly empty and except for the other six people going to HCMC there isn’t really anything going on. I was so tired that I could barely keep my eyes open.

When I bought the bus ticket I was told that there was a chance that the two-hour layover could end up being three-hours. Talking to the others there, they were told that it was a four-hour, maybe longer. The reality turned out to be about six-hours. I wasn’t very happy with waiting in front of closed shop at four in the morning. In the end everything turned out and at about 7 we were on a bus on our way to Vietnam.

Going through the border was surprisingly painless. The bus had a guy on it that did all the work and all any of us had to do was to pretty much walk through the borders. It was a little bit more complicated than that, but it sure seemed easy. It probably took us a little bit less than an hour to go through both borders.

About two hours from the border we finally stopped in HCMC and the bus dropped us off. My hostel is about 300 meters from the bus stop and I had no problems finding it. There was a festival of some sort going on in the park next to the bus stop so after putting my bags away, I headed out to get a better look at what was going on. I don’t know exactly what to call it, but the festival was very western. What I mean is that it was modern and contained mostly small tents featuring food from area restaurants. In Portland we had an event called Bite, and I kept thinking that it was what was going on here. There was some great food and I spent probably a couple of hours walking around and tasting different things. I even had Durian, and I was surprised it was pretty good.

Ho Chi Minh City is chaos. That’s the only way I can explain it. There are scooters going everywhere that don’t seem to follow any sort of rules. There are very few traffic lights or stop signs so it’s a challenge to get across the street. Most of the time I just start walking and hope that the scooter that seems to be heading straight towards me will veer away. There is al a kind of sense of a little of Taipei here, but I think it’s more on the architecture and less on anything else.

Sofiya finally got here about a week after I did and once she arrived the city seemed just a little bit better. Not that it was fun now that she was here, but it was at least nice to have someone around to validate my feelings about HCMC. We ended up leaving about two days after she arrived. At that point I was about to give up with Vietnam and head back to Laos or Cambodia so I asked Sofiya to decide where we should go. She decided on a beach town in Vietnam called Mui Ne.