(Version française plus bas)

For the past month in Saigon I’ve sweated buckets. The weather is changing, I can feel it. It’s so hot! The weather forecast says temperatures go up to 35°C but it feels like it’s so much more. And it’s not even the rainy season yet, when humidity makes everything so much worse.
I can hardly bear it. One evening I went to the aerobics class in the park and I really thought I was going to pass out. March and April are supposed to be the hottest months in southern Vietnam, but here too climate change is a reality. Or so it seems.

Sweating buckets.

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In Sihanoukville (on the shores of Southern Cambodia), everywhere you look offers the $3 BBQ. For this price, they will grill for you anything they offer – tuna, barracuda, squid, etc., all freshly caught. I flirted with the cook this particular night and actually got a filet and a half of delicious tuna, rice, salad and garlic bread, all for $3.

I seriously don’t know what I am going to do when I eventually leave this continent.

(Version française below)

New Year’s Eve didn’t start so well. I had a very difficult time finding a hotel room in Dalat as everything had been booked months before due to the flower festival Dalat was hosting. It was obvious I wasn’t going to be able to stay in Dalat as long as I had planned. Over lunch, I asked my waitress for some tips. Ngan said there was no hope to find a room as Dalat would be crowded with Vietnamese tourists over the next few days.

Despite this bad piece of news we became friends and decided to spend New Year’s Eve together.
Her younger sister, Phuong, and her aunt, Hong- a baker- joined us too. We had a night stroll hoping we would see fireworks, but there were none.

At 10.00pm Ngan had to go back to her five month old baby. That’s when Hong told me she used to go to a French high school in Dalat. She doesn’t speak much French anymore but somehow, she remembers the 1960s songs she used to listen. So here we are, in a café on New Year’s Eve, singing old tunes like France Gall’s ”Poupée de cire, poupée de son” and Françoise Hardy’s ”Tous les garçons et les filles de mon âge.” Unforgettable!

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(This is the seconde episode of my Xmas series)

December 24th is a normal day in Vietnam. Except for Anhs’s family who is catholic and celebrates Christmas.

Au Viêtnam, le 24 décembre est un jour tout à fait normal. Sauf pour Anh et sa famille, qui sont catholiques et fêtent Noël.

As soon as I left the big city of Saigon to start exploring the rest of Vietnam just over a month ago, it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Suddenly I could breathe again. The rut I had been experiencing seemed like ancient history. I was back to doing what I enjoyed most: travelling. I am a fairly restless person – not always this way, mind you – and for better or worse, this characteristic has coloured many of my decisions over the past 10 years.

And now that I’ve seen Vietnam from top to bottom, the thought of returning to Saigon and working causes a bit of a twitch to develop. So I’m not.

Instead, I’m heading off on my own. The next month will see me backpacking through Southern Cambodia and Myanmar (Burma). I will be posting updates and stories from the road, assuming I can find an internet connection in some of the places I have on the agenda. I’m planning on continuing until there’s no dong left in my pocket.

Hope you’re up for the journey.

(I have finally found some time to edit all the films I took during my Christmas holidays. This is the first episode of my Xmas series)

On a trip to the beach in Tân Thiên village, Anh tells us what the future holds for the yet preserved seashore.

Lors d’un petit tour à la plage, Anh raconte ce que le futur réserve pour le rivage encore préservé de Tân Thiên.

A game I would play in one of my English classes was to give students a list of questions that they had to answer (and then guess each other’s answers). One of the standard questions I had devised was “Name a Hero”. With the first group I tried this with, every student’s response was “Ho Chi Minh”. “Wow”, I thought. “Unanimous”. In the next class, one student responded with “Spiderman”, and everyone else said Ho Chi Minh. Results in my other classes were the same.  I began to understand the reverence Vietnamese people have for this legendary man…

Educated in Paris and influenced by Stalin and Mao, “Uncle Ho” was a Communist revolutionary who forever changed the face of Vietnam. He led the Viet Minh independence movement and was leader of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1945 until 1969, when he passed away. He is an integral part of Vietnam’s history in the 20th century, and to say the people admire him is an understatement.

I cannot emphasize the love the Vietnamese people have for this man. His face appears on every banknote, the city of Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City after his death, and the vast majority of locals speak lovingly of him.

His body is on display at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Hanoi, in a granite structure modeled after Lenin’s tomb in Moscow. Interestingly enough, Ho Chi Minh wished to be cremated and his ashes spread across Vietnam, but he also expressed his wish against being canonized and, well, that didn’t quite go as requested either.

Jen and I made a visit to the Mausoleum while in Hanoi. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I’m seen quite a few mummies in my time so it took me by surprise to see how well-preserved his frail little body was. It honestly looked like he was simply taking a nap. The visitors stream past him quietly and reverentially, paying their respects. It is truly like a pilgrimage for many, and a highlight of Vietnam for myself.

"It is better to sacrifice everything than to live in slavery!"

(Version française plus bas)

Yen, Anh and I have gone out a few times for dinner and beer. It’s not always easy to find time to get together because we are all busy. Yen works for a Japanese travel agency and on top of that, she and her husband are about to open their own Japanese curry restaurant. Anh is a university student and works for a Travel company. As for me, I sill have two jobs and a half. But somehow, the three of us manage to get together.

Anh, Yen and I eating out at a local restaurant.

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Yesterday I posted about a visit to the Temple of Literature, so in keeping with that theme I thought that today I would write about books! Travelling offers a fantastic opportunity to catch up on all that reading that you always mean to do but can never seen to find the time to do at home. In a foreign country and away from your usual routine, you often end up with many long bus or train trips on the agenda, lots of downtime (for me, often spent in coffee shops and the like) and less distractions. I generally have a book on the go at home but read WAY more on the road.

What have I been reading lately? I am normally a fiction reader, but I’ve been reading quite a bit of non-fiction lately for some reason, perhaps because those are what books have circulated among our crowd. I thought I’d compile a list of the books I’ve tackled since we’ve gotten to Saigon.

Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts

My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult

Tears of the Desert – A Memoir of Survival in Darfur – Halima Bashir

A Long Way Gone – Memoirs of a Boy Soldier – Ishmael Beah

Into Thin Air – Jon Krakauer

River of Time – Jon Swain

The Rum Diary – Hunter S. Thompson

Reading at the moment (and loving it):

Anthony Bourdain – A Cook’s Tour

Next on the docket:

Graham Greene – The Quiet American