Thinking about leaving

It’s our penultimate week in Soc Trang so, naturally, our thoughts have turned towards leaving this peculiar city where we’ve been living for the past 15-18 months. While we haven’t really started any of the practicalities of leaving Soc Trang (such as packing or tidying up our house – we’ll get to that soon enough!), we have realised that some of the activities we have been doing on a regular basis we are now doing for the last time. For example, we went for a motorbike ride out to Cu Lao Dung Island yesterday, the island is part of Soc Trang Province and we’ve been there a couple of times either for a bike ride, or, in Dan’s case, for work. Yesterday was the last time we will go to the island; I don’t imagine that we’ll ever go back there.


All of these ‘last-time’ scenarios have got me thinking about what I will and will not miss about living here. Doubtless I’ll think of more things as these 2 weeks go by, but the items listed below represent the most obvious and glaring examples of things to love and hate about Soc Trang and Vietnam.

Things I will miss:

• Friends and colleagues. We’ve met some lovely people both in Soc Trang and all over Vietnam. In Soc Trang I’ll miss all our colleagues – as well as working with us they have been such a huge help in our personal lives, helping us find somewhere to live, helping us go shopping, keeping us entertained and always translating for us. I’ll also miss the friends we have made outside of work, friends that we play badminton with, go to restaurants with and go out drinking with. Outside of Soc Trang I’ll miss our fellow project workers in the ‘swamps’ and the other Australian volunteers we’ve met. Visiting these guys has always been a means of respite from life in Soc Trang and it’s always interesting to hear what they’ve been up to.

• Work. It’s not just the people from work I’ll miss; I will also miss the actual work that we do here for the project. I’ve enjoyed working for a project that has real benefits both for the poor local people and for the environment. I’ve also appreciated being able to work on such a variety of different activities, e.g. I never imagines that I would co-edit a co-management proceedings or that I would co-author manuals for teachers on climate change and mangrove forests!

• Year-round hot weather. Soc Trang has two seasons: hot-and-dry and hot-and-wet. Perfect weather conditions for someone like me who, back in Australia, complains bitterly about how chilly it is in the refrigerated aisles of the local supermarket.

• Travelling. Regular readers of this blog will know that Dan and I have used our time in Vietnam as an opportunity to explore not just this country, but also all around Southeast Asia. Being based in Vietnam means that travel is pretty cheap so we’ve been able to visit some pretty amazing places. For me the highlights have been seeing the Angkor temples in Cambodia, Luang Prabang in Laos, Melacca in Malaysia and Hoi An and Sapa in Vietnam.

• The motorbike. Dan tried to teach me how to ride the motorbike but I’m not very good at it (the roads and traffic here make me too nervous). I’m more accustomed to sitting on the back of the bike, watching the world go by as Dan drives us out into the countryside. We’ve explored some pretty amazing places around Soc Trang, including Cu Lao Dung and My Phuc Islands. And while it does get a bit sore after sitting on the back of the bike for too long, I will miss our countryside jaunts past rice fields, orchards and coconut plantations.

• The shopping. Vietnam is a shopper’s paradise. I’ve bought: tailor-made clothes; store-bought clothes (including a lovely ‘silk’ skirt from Hanoi); cheap shoes; silver and costume jewellery; silk hair accessories; ceramic bowls and plates; and a whole heap of clothes for my niece.

Last but not least is the food and drink here. This is such a big category for me that I've decided it needed to be listed separately after the jump.

Working, working

I've realised that my entries on this blog make me look like I'm always off having a holiday somewhere. Which isn't entirely true, I do work sometimes! One of the activities I've been working on is producing teachers' manuals on climate change and on mangrove forests. The climate change manual is finished now and we've held two workshops to introduce the topic to local teachers. The manual is available here on the project website. The manual on mangroves is nearly finished and we will be holding a workshop for it on the 6th April. We'll also be holding a ceremony during the workshop where we hand over 1,600 copies of the climate change manual to the Soc Trang Department of Education and Training. It will be pretty exciting, the local media have been invited!

We have also finished editing the proceedings of the National Co-management Workshop which we held here in Soc Trang last year. The proceedings is also available on the project website. Editing the proceedings was a lot of work and, while I edited all the reports, Dan did the bulk of the editing and formatting. He is very glad that it is now finished!

I've also had the opportunity to be a bit creative and design some posters and do some illustrations for the project. A couple of examples are below:

This is a drawing I did for an environmental awareness raising poster. The colours, the patterns....so very Vietnamese! (That was the idea anyway!)

This is a food web which I illustrated. I've never had to draw shellfish and fish before. Do you know how hard it is to draw a prawn? It's incredibly hard! And don't ask me what that thing on the left of the prawn is meant to be, some kind of shellfish. And the thing on the right of the prawn? Ummm, a goby fish?

Nevertheless, I'm pretty happy with how the shark turned out. It's a pretty cool-looking shark, right?

And can I just add that this is the grumpiest-looking fish I have ever seen.

Finally, this is one of the pages from the children's environmental colouring-in and activity book which I wrote and illustrated. The aim of the book is to encourage kids to reduce, re-use and recycle garbage and to raise awareness about climate change and the importance of mangrove forests. This colouring-in page is all about recycling.

On the back of the motorbike in Sapa

These are a couple of videos I took while I was sitting on the back of the motorbike as Dan rode through the countryside of Sapa:

I took this one while we were driving along one of the main roads out of Sapa. The road was interrupted by a waterfall - which everyone had to drive through. There were quite a few of these over-thr-road waterfalls, some people even stopped in the middle of them so that they could give their bike a quick wash. Quite a bizarre site!

This video is of us driving through one of the villages of the ethnic minority groups. There were quite a lot of tourists there, most of them had trekked the whole way or had caught a tour bus there. It was interesting to see the buildings and lifestyle of the hilltribe minority groups.

Possibly the funniest photo ever...

...to me anyway. I think it's so funny that it deserves it's own separate blog entry.

I love it! Those water buffalos and the dog are looking at Dan and their expressions clearly show what they are thinking: "What a clown! I'm embarrassed for that guy."

Sapa photos

Snow in Sapa! (Which you can only just see - the whitish stuff on the roof of the building.) This was the view from the balcony of our hotel room

 Dan trekking through the farmlands of Sapa

 Dan and Ben at a red bridge

 Yeah, I don't know

There were photo opportunities everywhere we went in Sapa, it was so impressive. So this post doesn't become too long I've included more photos after the jump.

Halong Bay photos

 Looking out over Halong Bay.

 Inside the Surprise Cave. The cave is huge, it has about 3 chambers, each bigger than the last.

 Dan and Ben were more surprised by the penguin bins inside the cave. There was a surprised-looking penguin bin approximately every 10metres. Though this penguin looks more worried by the weird Westerners standing next to it than surprised.

 Ladies selling food and drinks on a boat. These women rowed up to every tourist spot and up to every tourist boat and were easily identified by their catchphrase "You buy sumsing?". Dan and Ben were impressed that they could buy beers by leaning out of the cabin window on our overnight stay on the boat.

Rabies Monkey Island. There really was not much there to see!

A cold and wet holiday

Last week Dan and I had our very last holiday in Vietnam. We went up north to Hanoi, where we met Dan’s friend Ben, then went down to Halong Bay then up to Sapa. Both places are quite spectacular, though, unfortunately for us, the weather decided to turn nasty.

We spent a night aboard a boat in Halong Bay (despite the fact that a tourist boat sunk there a few weeks ago, drowning 12 people). The mist and rain had rolled in so it was quite eerie to see ghostly limestone cliffs emerging from the fog as we slowly went by. We also visited the Surprise Cave, a massive cavernous gulf in one of the cliffs which was absolutely jam-packed with tourists. Still pretty impressive though.

After successfully not sinking overnight, we went to Monkey Island; renamed by Ben “Rabies Island” (the Lonely Planet warns that the monkeys on the island do bite). Luckily or unluckily (depending on how you look at it) we didn’t see any monkeys. We didn’t see much of anything really, spending a night on a bungalow on a beach on a secluded limestone island is a bit boring when it’s raining and cold and the only thing to do is listen to the soothing sounds of a circular saw being used in the construction of more bungalows. Still, I’d rather be bored than catch rabies!

So the weather was a bit of a let-down but we were lucky to get out into Halong Bay at all, the day after we left all the tourist boats were denied permission to leave the harbour because visibility was so poor.

Anyway, onward and upward to the northern highlands of Vietnam and on to Sapa. After a fairly gruelling night on the train we arrived in Sapa where it was snowing. Snowing! In Vietnam! In springtime! Crazy! I am eternally grateful for the rain jacket I had just bought in Hanoi, without it I would have absolutely frozen. The first few days in Sapa were spent waiting out the snow and rain by sitting in one of the (somewhat) warm cafes or restaurants which sold mulled wine. And getting food poisoning, again. That was fun.

On our final day in Sapa the weather cleared and we had enough time to go for a trek through the valleys and take a motorbike out through the countryside. The scenery around Sapa is so beautiful, the mountains, valleys and raging rivers are all so impressive. Then there are the local people themselves, many of whom belong to an ethnic minority group and still wear traditional clothes and practice traditional farming techniques. The whole area really is amazing to see.

After another gruelling overnight train ride we arrived back in Hanoi (at about 4am) for our last holiday night. We decided to treat ourselves by going to the wonderful Koto restaurant for dinner, the restaurant is run by an Australian man who decided to help the disadvantaged and street youth in Vietnam by training them in hospitality. The food and the service at Koto were fantastic; Dan had the duck while I had chicken skewers with Saigon peanut sauce – yum! My absolute favourite though was the cheesecake, so good! Anyway, if you ever find yourself in Hanoi or in HCMC then I recommend having a meal at Koto. We know a couple of Australian volunteers who are working with Koto to get the restaurant and training centre in HCMC started and the work they do to help the young people is absolutely amazing.

Now we are back in Soc Trang and back at work again. Our time in Vietnam is quickly coming to an end. We only have about another 2 weeks in Vietnam then we start to make our way back to Australia. It’s strange to think that we are leaving so soon! Our last weeks in Vietnam will be really busy as we try and finish off our work, which includes holding another teachers’ training workshop on mangrove forests plus holding a handover ceremony where we give the Department of Education and Training 1600 copied of the teachers’ manual on climate change that Dan and I wrote. Plus there will be farewell parties; Dan is planning on having 4 parties! One for work, one for friends, one for his tennis buddies (which I won’t go to) and one for the co-management members out in Au Tho B Village. And on top of that we have to pack up all our belongings and try and sell off our furniture. I have a feeling the next couple of weeks will be so jam-packed that they will just fly-by. Then Dan and I will likely find ourselves at the international airport in HCMC going “What just happened?! Are we leaving already?!”

If you go into the woods today...

...you're in for a big surprise. If you go into the mangrove forest in Soc Trang today you'll certainly be surprised when you're confronted by this:

This...thing...is in the mangrove forest in Soc Trang where our project is conducting mangrove monitoring. I don't know what it is but those broken dolls with their mud-splattered white, white skin and white, white lifeless eyes are completely creepy. I'm a bit scared that there might be a Blair Witch here in Soc Trang!

Vang Vieng and Vientiane

Vang Vieng is the weirdest place on Earth. Truly bizarre. We arrived at Vang Vieng in the early afternoon and were pretty underwhelmed - it just looked like a dry, dusty small town with no redeeming features. Dan set off to find us somewhere to stay while I waited with our bags in a cafe. There was no electricity at the time so all I could order was a soda water. The underwhelming experience continued. Dan came back for me and took me to where he had found a room - it was actually a small, basic wooden bungalow on the riverbank, surrounded by vegetable gardens and fields with a stunning backdrop of limestone karsts. So that was pretty impressive.

 The view from our bungalow

Later that night we strolled into town to find something to eat. We were surprised to find the streets lined with restaurants, all with televisions showing episodes of Friends or Family Guy, and all the restaurants were full of drunk (or possibly stoned) backpackers all staring blanky at the tvs. What was even stranger though was, as the night went on, the streets filled up with drunken backpackers who were all only wearing bikinis or boardies. We didn't know what was happening. It all became clear on our 2nd day in Vang Vieng when we went out to explore some caves then went tubing down the river.

The tubing was surreal. The idea is to float down the river towards Vang Vieng on an inner tyre tube. It's about a 3km trip and we were told that it should take about 3 hours. We expected some small rapids and some stunning scenery, what we didn't expect was the bar after bar after bar that lined the riverbanks, all full of backpackers chugging Beer Laos. Some of the bars had slides and swings going into the river, after a few beers Dan went down a really massive slide, he took it too fast and ended up hitting the water sideways, hurting his ankle and bruising his side. We stopped at about 4 bars and we ended up taking about 4 hours to get back to Vang Vieng. We realised that all the backpackers who we'd seen in the streets at night time in their swimwear must have stopped at nearly every bar and had ended spending hours and hours on the river. 

So that was Vang Vieng, an alcohol soaked backpackers Disneyland. Next stop, Vientiane, the capital of Laos.

Rather than catching a bus directly to Vientiane we decided to kayak part of the way. Which ended up not saving us any time at all and we had to spend more time in the back of a tuk-tuk. But the kayaking was pretty fun. We went down a few rapids and, due to my extensive experience and superior kayaking skills, we managed to stay upright. (Ok, that wasn't completely true, we didn't capsize but I think it was more because Dan knew what he was doing. I sat up the front of the kayak with my oar up in the air until Dan yelled at me to paddle.) Our kayaking trip included a bbq lunch which our guides cooked for us on the rocks of the riverbed. We also had the opportunity to jump off a cliff face into the river - a drop of about 12-13m. Needless to say I passed, but Dan did the jump.



 Dan jumping into the river

Finally, after another tuk-tuk ride, we arrived in Vientiane. We only had 1 day in Vientiane so we had a quick look around the sights, including Pha That Luang: Laos' most important national and religious monument; and Patuxai: Laos' version of the Arc de Triomphe which was built in the 1960s out of concrete dontated by the US in order to build a new airport.

 Blending in with the demons at one of the temples surrounding Pha That Luang

 Dan in the foreground, Pha That Luang in the background

Patuxai, also known as the vertical runway. Patuxai remains unfinished and a sign on the interior states that, on close inspection, it resembles a concrete monster

Then it was back to Vietnam, back to Soc Trang and back to work. Not for long, however. It's taken me about 3 weeks to write about our holiday, which means in another week we will be off to Hanoi, Halong Bay and Sapa. Then we only have another 3 weeks of work until our volunteer contract expires and we head back to Australia, via Malaysia and Indonesia. In addition to holidaying, our next few weeks will involve finishing up all the work we can, trying to sell our furniture, posting all our excess possessions back home and trying to pack the rest. Busy times! I need a holiday just from thinking about it!