Halfway up Vietnam
Yesterday, we finally got around to posting photos to the photosite http://picasaweb.google.com/astuartmuirk of our tours in Nam so far.
After the trip to the Mekong Delta, we left Saigon for the coast, stopping at Mui Ne for a couple of days. The typhoon brewing off the coast made the sea too rough to swim and we instead spent an afternoon on the back of a couple of bikes visiting a very picturesque fishing village and the dramatic sand formationsof the area - yellow sand dunes that we slid down, red sand canyons that we climbed up, and a creek that cuts its way through sands of many sunset colours from brick red to sand so white that it looks almost blue when wet. Nice photos, but we took the next bus north to Nha Trang.
Nha Trang, famous in our memories for the tiny hole in the wall bar in which we spent many happy hours drinking draught beer at 80 cents a litre, is protected from the South China Sea by a cluster of islands. We visited four of them on an all singing, all dancing boat trip, swimming and snorkling in protected waters full of coral, sparsely populated with tropical fish but densely crowded with tiny stinging jelly fish that rapidly made the experience less than pleasant. The closest island houses an aquarium in the shape of a huge pirate ship, with the largest groupers, morey eels and sea turtles we've ever seen, but kept in depressingly small tanks.
From Nha Trang, we headed inland on our four day motorcycle tour of the Central Highlands. The first day was perfect driving weather - overcast with no threat of rain - and the muted light made the valley full of sugarcane fields shine a silvery blue. Of course, we didn't get a photo of that. We did, however, get photos of the smooth green hills we first rode through - smooth because the whole area had been carpetted with Agent Orange during the war. (The Central Highlands were favoured by the Viet Cong because they were completely covered by jungle, and most of the farmland there that now supports a thriving population was cleared by the Americans. How kind of them! A lot of areas are still being regenerated, with telltale lines of grass plants and shrubs. You can still see the bomb craters.)
After that day, the typhoon hit the coast and we spent most of the next two days riding through miserable rain and/or thick fog. Cold, wet, and generally unpleasant are things we throughly embraced when we were riding around Laos. The real downside to the weather this time round was the low visibility which obscured the marvellous vistas that we would have witnessed in riding through the highlands, and the fact that we were riding much slower and so didn't have the time to stop and really take in the breathtaking scenery when we COULD see it.
Had it been otherwise, the photosite would now be full of rolling hills, patchworked in the myriad of greens from Vietnamese crops and punctuated by cows; of more dramatic, densely crowded hills with steep, narrow valleys walled with near-vertical fields of tapioca and beans and floored with snaking ribbons of paddy fields only a couple of meters wide; of high mountain passes wreathed in mists where, in inhospitable gorges miles from anywhere, hemmed in on all sides by wild jungle, someone has nevertheless planted a square of rice.
When the rain eased off on the third day, riding among much gentler slopes and wide river valleys, the beauty of the country side through which we had been riding really struck home - we really wish that we could have seen the high mountains clearly.
Please enjoy the photos that we did manage to take.
We've been in Hoi An now for a couple of days and it is a truly beautiful town. It was a thriving fishing port before the French arrive and the Old Town centre is wonderfully preserved. When we find a computer that doesn't have a virus on it (Alec's MP3 player just had all its music files wiped) we'll upload some more beautiful photos.
After the trip to the Mekong Delta, we left Saigon for the coast, stopping at Mui Ne for a couple of days. The typhoon brewing off the coast made the sea too rough to swim and we instead spent an afternoon on the back of a couple of bikes visiting a very picturesque fishing village and the dramatic sand formationsof the area - yellow sand dunes that we slid down, red sand canyons that we climbed up, and a creek that cuts its way through sands of many sunset colours from brick red to sand so white that it looks almost blue when wet. Nice photos, but we took the next bus north to Nha Trang.
Nha Trang, famous in our memories for the tiny hole in the wall bar in which we spent many happy hours drinking draught beer at 80 cents a litre, is protected from the South China Sea by a cluster of islands. We visited four of them on an all singing, all dancing boat trip, swimming and snorkling in protected waters full of coral, sparsely populated with tropical fish but densely crowded with tiny stinging jelly fish that rapidly made the experience less than pleasant. The closest island houses an aquarium in the shape of a huge pirate ship, with the largest groupers, morey eels and sea turtles we've ever seen, but kept in depressingly small tanks.
From Nha Trang, we headed inland on our four day motorcycle tour of the Central Highlands. The first day was perfect driving weather - overcast with no threat of rain - and the muted light made the valley full of sugarcane fields shine a silvery blue. Of course, we didn't get a photo of that. We did, however, get photos of the smooth green hills we first rode through - smooth because the whole area had been carpetted with Agent Orange during the war. (The Central Highlands were favoured by the Viet Cong because they were completely covered by jungle, and most of the farmland there that now supports a thriving population was cleared by the Americans. How kind of them! A lot of areas are still being regenerated, with telltale lines of grass plants and shrubs. You can still see the bomb craters.)
After that day, the typhoon hit the coast and we spent most of the next two days riding through miserable rain and/or thick fog. Cold, wet, and generally unpleasant are things we throughly embraced when we were riding around Laos. The real downside to the weather this time round was the low visibility which obscured the marvellous vistas that we would have witnessed in riding through the highlands, and the fact that we were riding much slower and so didn't have the time to stop and really take in the breathtaking scenery when we COULD see it.
Had it been otherwise, the photosite would now be full of rolling hills, patchworked in the myriad of greens from Vietnamese crops and punctuated by cows; of more dramatic, densely crowded hills with steep, narrow valleys walled with near-vertical fields of tapioca and beans and floored with snaking ribbons of paddy fields only a couple of meters wide; of high mountain passes wreathed in mists where, in inhospitable gorges miles from anywhere, hemmed in on all sides by wild jungle, someone has nevertheless planted a square of rice.
When the rain eased off on the third day, riding among much gentler slopes and wide river valleys, the beauty of the country side through which we had been riding really struck home - we really wish that we could have seen the high mountains clearly.
Please enjoy the photos that we did manage to take.
We've been in Hoi An now for a couple of days and it is a truly beautiful town. It was a thriving fishing port before the French arrive and the Old Town centre is wonderfully preserved. When we find a computer that doesn't have a virus on it (Alec's MP3 player just had all its music files wiped) we'll upload some more beautiful photos.