7 beds in 11 days

No, that is not an attempt to be raunchy! I just want to show how much Dan and I have been travelling around since we returned to Australia and New Zealand. We got back to Australia on the 29th of April, spent a few nights with some friends there, then went to my parents' place, then my grandparents' place, then my sister's place, then across the ocean to Dan's mate's place in Auckland, then finally to Dan's parents' place. Which is where we are now - Cambridge New Zealand. So, as you can tell, we've been pretty busy catching up with friends and family.

It's over a month ago now that we left Soc Trang. It seems a lot longer. It's hard to believe that a month ago we were in hot, humid HCMC, trying to do some last-minute shopping, catch up with friends and trying desperately to fit all our luggage into our overstuffed bags. Now we are amongst the green, rolling hills of country New Zealand, rugged up in jeans, jumpers and ugg boots and watching the wind howling through the trees and across the paddocks. It's a world away from Vietnam!

Thinking back over our time in Soc Trang, I have to say that, although it got pretty tough at times, overall it was a pretty positive experience and I'm glad we did it. It was such a bizarre time for us, being completely immersed in a culture so different to our own and struggling to break through the language barrier. We challenged ourselves, had some successes with our work, met some amazing people and had lots of really yummy food.

But it's good to be back. We're enjoying catching up with everyone and reacquainting ourselves with some old habits. (Yesterday I went to a supermarket for the first time in ages - I got a bit over-excited by all the products I could buy there: cheese! chocolate! wine! make-up! I had to restrain myself from going on a shopping and junk food binge).

Seeing as we are settling back into our regular lives (which includes, hopefully, finding jobs as soon as possible), this will be my last post on this blog. I've enjoyed posting my long, rambly rants on here and I hope I have kept you somewhat entertained. Thanks for reading!

Homeward bound

It’s been nearly 2 weeks since we left Soc Trang and already it feels like a lifetime ago. Since we left we’ve had more farewell dinners in HCMC, visited the orang-utans, lions and crocodiles at Singapore zoo, gotten lost and frustrated in the traffic jams of Jakarta, chilled at the beach in Pangandaran and marvelled at the 1000 year-old Buddhist and Hindu temples near Yogyakarta. Now we are in Bali, in Ubud to be precise, on the final leg of our meandering journey back to Australia.

We came to Ubud via Kuta, the main tourist beach drag of Bali. The last time I was in Bali I was about 11 years old, I don’t remember too much of that holiday except for watermelon juice and apple pancakes for breakfast, street sellers with dodgy watches and silver rings, women wanting to touch my (then very blonde) hair and endless market-type shops selling cheap t-shirts, paintings and wooden carvings. Well, things have changed in the last 15-16 years. The streets of Kuta are now lined with endless surf stores (Rip Curl and Billabong must own nearly half of Kuta by now) and trendy bars offering happy hour cocktails and ear-shatteringly-loud techno music. It’s like the Gold Coast but louder, cheaper and much hotter. (There’s probably less silicone and bleach here too, though that will probably change as more and more tourists arrive.)

Which is why we abandoned Kuta quite quickly and made our way to Ubud. I’m sitting in a café now, waiting for Dan to come back from his attempts to find us some accommodation. Ubud seems a lot more relaxed than Kuta and the surrounding countryside is very beautiful. I’m looking forward to exploring this area a bit more, although, if my dodgy memory serves me correctly (there is a reason why Dan calls me the Travelling Goldfish), the last time I was in Ubud I was bitten by a sacred monkey. My plans for the next few days are to catch up on some sleep, sample some Indonesian delicacies and visit the local sites – as long as I don’t have to go anywhere near Monkey Forest that is!

The final week that was

It's our final day as volunteers! We've spent a large part of this morning cleaning our house and selling our fridge and air-con unit. Then we came into work and gave all our collegues a farewell present. Now we are finishing off our work, tying up loose ends and trying to clean up our desks.

Despite this being our final week in Soc Trang we've been very busy. So I present to you, in photos, the week that was...

We started the week with a trip to Soc Trang's only beach.

Where the sand and water were brown, brown , brown. We found a seasnake at the waters edge then I got eaten alive by sandflys.

Dan went to a farewell dinner with his tennis club that night, where they presented him with a souveneir trophy and flag.

On Monday we went to a meeting at Au Tho B Village. Then we put on a seafood and beer lunch for all the co-management sub-group leaders. I tried 3 different kinds of snail.

On Wednesday we held the teachers training workshop on mangrove forests. Dan gave a presentation on "What are Mangroves?"...

And look how interested everybody was!

The project put on a farewell dinner for us that night at Restaurant 36. Project staff and government officials from the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, the Department of Education and Training, the Forest Protection Sub-Department and Fisheries all came along.



Dan and me with our boss and the project driver.

Drinking buddies: Dan, Philipp and Mr Vinh.

Tonight we will have our final farewell dinner then we leave Soc Trang on Sunday - once we have finished all our packing and tidying!

Thinking about returning

It’s now our last week in Soc Trang. I’ve been living here for about 15 months and Dan has been here for 18 months. We both have that surreal feeling of not quite comprehending that our time here is coming to an end. Nevertheless, leave we must. Last week I posted about the things I will and will not miss about life in Soc Trang, Vietnam. This week my thoughts have been about returning home. What to expect, what I’m looking forward to and what I’m not looking forward to.


Things I am looking forward to:

• Seeing my family and friends again. It can be tough living so far away from all our family and friends, I can’t wait to see them all again. I’m particularly looking forward to catching up on all the gossip with my friends, seeing my grandparents again and letting my mum cook me dinner (hint, hint mum! I’m joking, of course!). Obviously seeing my family and friends again is at the top of my list of things I’m looking forward to, but it very nearly was knocked off the top position by...

• Seeing my cat again. Yay! I get to see Miffy again soon! I know she will be so happy to see me too!

Yay! Another excuse to post a picture of Miffy!

• Hot showers, every single day. Heaven!

• Reuniting with all my clothes and shoes. It feels like I’ve been wearing the same old clothes, day-in, day-out for the past 15 months. Every day is a variation on which of the 5 pairs of long pants will I wear to work, which of the 3 pairs of shorts will I wear on the weekend combined with which of the 5 t-shirts I own. It’s going to be a sensory overload when I get all my old clothes out of storage and have bags and bags of clothes and shoes to choose from. I can’t wait!

• Reuniting with my hair straightener. As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, my hair is pretty much always an unmanageable mess. Straightening it is one of the few ways in which I can control it. My hair will be in for a nasty shock once I start brandishing my hair straightener again! Similarly, I have bags of other cosmetic items to re-unite with, like all my bottles of nail polish – currently being lovingly preserved in my parents’ fridge. I haven’t had painted nails for 15 months! That is mind-blowing for me, especially seeing as I used to paint my toenails a different colour every week!

• Driving my car. Apart from a couple of wobbly attempts at driving the motorbike, I haven’t driven anything bigger than my bicycle for a while now. It will be great to get behind the wheel again and drive at 100km/hr down the highway. (Shock! Horror! Such speeds are unimaginable on the roads in Vietnam! – except for the resident hoons that is.)

• Going to the beach. It seems particularly unfair that we have spent the last year or so living in a tropical environment, near the coastline, and there is not a proper beach anywhere nearby. The ‘beaches’ in the Mekong Delta are not what I’d consider beaches at all – they are mud flats and I have absolutely no desire to go swimming in any water that is cappuccino brown. I cannot wait to go back to some of Australia’s picture-perfect sandy beaches with sparkling clear blue water, sigh!

• Earning money. Volunteering is a great experience but I am looking forward to having some cash again! Once I find a job that is...

Once again, I have to list food and drink separately after the jump.

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.