Currently back home!
Today we said goodbye to grandma and cousin Katie as they were leaving to go to another city and we were staying in Cần Thơ.
It was fun to have them with us and we shall miss them now they have gone. Looking forward to seeing Katie in Barcelona next year with Auntie Manda!
Dawn was breaking as Mum (aka Kate, aka Grandma) and I got up extremely early one morning to meet Toby our guide who had come to take us to the floating market.
We walked through the town at 5.45am down to the river passing groups of exercisers on the park and early morning traders on the streets.
We met with our boat driver Miss Truc (pronouced ‘djuk’). It was a picturesque scene with the rising sun, passing by the water hyacinths floating in the Mekong River during our 40 minute ride to the markets.
Miss Truc created various items for us along the way using natural plant materials and shaping them into grasshopper and flower rings, bracelets and crowns! We’ve managed to send some of them home.
Farmers bring their produce to the markets and live on boats to sell it all, staying until all their goods have been sold. This could be for several months whilst the whole family live on the boats. Their boat is also their market stall.
To advertise what they are selling they put their product on a stick high above the boat – so if there are bananas above the boat then that is what they sell. Often there is more than one item shown, so it looks a little like a kebab sticking up made of sweet potato, pineapple or cabbage etc!
The market is open 24 hours a day but is busiest early in the morning.
There are smaller boats that sail around with items such as rice, coffee, and toiletries for the boat people to buy what they need.
We then sailed down a small canal off the river and Toby took us for a walk alongside the river to a noodle factory. We got to see how the local noodles are made and how colours are added to them (add beetroot to make red noodles, baby jackfruit to make orange, and bamda leaf to make green).
We then went to a local cafe on the canal for a traditional Vietnamese breakfast of pho (it was still only about 8am by this point!).
A very interesting morning!
Today we went to Cần Thơ on a lying down bus. It was very comfortable!
In the evening we went on some exercise machines in a park on the way back to our guest house.
We visited the Museum of Vietnamese History in the morning and saw a short water puppet show.
We then went to Independence Palace (also known as Reunification Palace), which was the site of the end of the Vietnam War when Saigon was captured by the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong in 1975.
The current palace was was built in the the 1960s and since it was overtaken in 1975, not much has changed externally or internally.
The basement bunker was really interesting as it contains lots of secret tunnels and a war room and old telecommunications equipment from that era.
We got a really long bus journey then went to the Cu Chi tunnels. It was in a jungle and we first saw some air holes then went down a tunnel. The air holes were made to look like ant or temite mounds. It was very dusty and dark in the tunnels and it got very small in the 1st and 2nd one. They were used during the Vietnam war.
We also saw some traps to trap the American soldiers.
We heard machine guns firing at the shooting range. They were very (x3) loud. Me and Martha sat on a tank!
It was very hot in the jungle and in the tunnels. In one tunnel which we weren’t allow in we saw 2 scorpions and a big spider!
After a leisurely start to the day, we decided to go see the Central Post Office. It was built between 1886 and 1891 when Vietnam was part of French Indochina.
Apart from being a tourist attraction for its French architecture, it is still a working post office, so we bought some stamps!
Across the street from the post office is Notre Dame Cathedral, also known as the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica of Saigon.
This was built between 1863 and 1880 by French colonists and all the original building materials were imported from France.
We arrived late on in the day so we couldn’t go inside. Also there was some building work going on so we weren’t quite sure if you could go in anyhow. However we managed to get a photo of the exterior before it got dark.
On our way back to the hotel we stopped off at a little bakery next to a busy roundabout/intersection…
After saying goodbye to my cousin David and his wife at Hong Kong airport, we caught a flight and arrived in Vietnam a few hours later.
We got a taxi to our hotel (dodging many motorcycles along the way) and when we got there we were glad to see 2 familiar faces… Angela’s mum Kate and niece Katie!
They had arrived a few hours earlier from Japan and would be travelling with us for the next few days.
