Exploring Vietnam: solo trips and short-term travel buddies

When I was not going on some crazy adventure like the ones described in the previous post, I would be discovering Vietnam at a more leisurely pace. Sometimes by myself, sometimes alongside other travellers, I steadily worked my way south from Hanoi onwards.

Cave visit with some usual suspects

After the impressive jungle trek to Hang En Cave, I teamed up with John and Lynn, the two other solo travellers from the group. On two rented motorbikes we headed to the much more accessible Paradise Cave. Granted, this one did have a lot of stairs to climb before reaching the entrance! But on the inside it was furnished with concrete paths and staircases as well as appropriate lighting, nothing like our previous adventures. It was a gorgeous cave, boasting a dazzling display of stalactites, stalagmites and all of these other underground marvels which are the perfect combined work of nature and time.

Paradise Cave

In the meantime, I had been in touch with Anne, a German girl I’d previously met at my hostel in Hanoi. She was in the south of the country and wanted to go and travel the Mekong Delta with me. Although I would have to reverse my itinerary a little, I gladly accepted the offer. But first, I headed to Hue by train, which was on my way south anyway.

Happily visiting Hue on my own

At the start of this day, I didn’t really feel like being just by myself. I already missed having other people around and I just felt some vague sort of dread. I then decided that I did not want to spend my entire day feeling like that, especially since I was to visit the imperial citadel and the weather was absolutely lovely, too. I managed to completely turn it around by talking to myself. I would go over all of the past twenty days in my head one by one and then started commenting on them as though I were talking to a friend. Call me crazy, but this homemade type of self-therapy worked like an absolute charm for me. I had a huge smile on my face while strolling around the citadel, feeling very happy and content, intensely living the moment of visiting this delightful bit of local heritage.

One of the many colourful buildings that are part of the imperial citadel in Hue.

The prettiest gallery in the imperial citadel in Hue.

Strolling around the imperial citadel in Hue

In the evening, something very interesting and remarkable happened at the restaurant where I ate out. After I had been served the first course of the discovery menu, a waiter came up to me and asked me where I was from. “From Belgium,” I replied. “The north or the south?” he inquired. That surprised me a little bit, because why would a Vietnamese waiter know about the fact that this tiny western European country has two distinct regions? (It’s actually even more than two, but you won’t see me getting started on the Belgian state structure here.) “The north,” I retorted, upon which he started actually talking in Dutch to me. In Dutch! I felt like I had suddenly entered some sort of parallel reality. He explained a little about the dish and how to eat it. Then, before I could say or ask anything, he vanished and left me completely baffled. I will probably never know why this man all the way in Vietnam was able to speak my language.

Later that night, I headed to the Hue train station and took up my spot in the night train to Ho Chi Minh City. There, I would meet up with Anne, with whom I was going to discover the Mekong Delta.

The Mekong Delta with my favourite German girl

After Anne and I had spent one night in Ho Chi Minh City together, our guide met us near our hostel the next morning. We were rather surprised with how fancy the car was which would drive us around for the next two days. We had booked the trip online very shortly beforehand and we got a driver and a guide all to ourselves.

I’ll be honest though: I would not recommend this trip. The sightseeing was not particularly impressive but that wasn’t the problem. More annoying to me were the mandatory little tourist stops and activities. We would stop by commissioned restaurants along the way, ride in a cart pulled by a tired horse, go and listen to a random local folk music band… It was not all bad though, we also visited some noteworthy things like a Cao Dai Temple and local markets.

And luckily, Anne was some of the best company I could hope for and we ended up really making the absolute most of this trip.

Inside a colourful Cao Đài temple, sacred place of the Caodaist religion, which was founded in Southern Vietnam in the 1920s.

Coconut candy factory. We voluntarily bought some at the end of our visit, because they were too good not to!

Little boat tour amidst the palm trees

Can Tho is the city where we spent the night.

Floating market in Can Tho

Non-floating market in Can Tho, where we saw some gruesome merchandise, such as skinned decapitated frogs still walking around in their own blood.

Back in Ho Chi Minh City, Anne and I enjoyed an incredibly good meal at Den Long Restaurant, before I had to say goodbye to her, since she was leaving for Cambodia already. I wasn’t done with Vietnam though, and so I took a bus and headed back north a little, to the mountains, to visit Dalat.

Dalat with hostel folks, myself and… an easy rider

After a nice couple of days spent in Anne’s company, I was again by myself, looking to either find a new temporary travel buddy or to spend some more great time on my own. Meeting people at the hostel turned out to be very easy thanks to the daily ‘family dinner’ there. However, the English and Swiss whom I hung out with that night, left the next morning, so that I was left to go and visit Dalat by myself. I didn’t mind that at all though. I discovered it to be a fascinating place, where the former days of French colonialism had clearly left their mark.

I saw this next to the lake where people paddle around on swan-shaped waterbikes

Dalat, the upper part of town

Inside Crazy House in Dalat

There is more to the region than just the city of Dalat, though. After having tried some adventurous canyoning on one of my days there, I decided to do what many tourists do: to go and discover the mountainous area on the back of a motorbike with a so called easy rider, a local who basically drives you around to show you all there is to see.

My Vietnamese guide was already in his sixties. He picked me up at the hostel the next morning and I soon found out that he was more comfortable speaking to me in French than in English. What an interesting experience to be driven around by a local stranger. I felt very safe though, he was clearly a careful and experienced driver and a gentleman, too, consistently addressing me as “mademoiselle”. We spent the day driving around, visiting all sorts of interesting places around Dalat like a waterfall, a local village, coffee plantations, a silk factory…

Our vehicle for the day

The roads around Dalat

Coffee beans

Local silk factory

French colonial houses on the outskirts of Dalat

After this, I had seen enough of Dalat and its surroundings and I was ready to take the bus to my next destination: Mui Ne.

Mui Ne with some random people

Being close to the coast, Mui Ne is especially famous for its sand dunes. Therefore I booked the standard dunes tour offered by the hostel, which would leave the next morning before sunrise. Witnessing the sun appear from behind the sand dunes should be a magnificent experience, but on our way there we waited for what seemed like an eternity on one last person who was to join us. She arrived in the car all dressed up and continued working on her make-up on the way, ready to pose for an entire photoshoot. By the time we finally arrived at the dunes, the sun had risen. Slightly disappointed, we walked around the white dunes for a bit, then visited the red dunes as well. We ended with a stop in a local fishermen’s village and a walk down the fairy stream, which I thought was the prettiest thing we saw on the entire tour. According to the Frenchman who was walking along with me though, it wasn’t as impressive as something similar he’d seen… in Argentina.

The white sand dunes in the early morning light

Local fishermen’s village

Walking barefoot through the lukewarm water of the Fairy Stream, marvelling at the colourful geological formations

I was ready to round off my time in Vietnam. All I had left to do, was catch the bus to Ho Chi Minh City, from where I could travel to Cambodia.

In Ho Chi Minh City, I spent a nice evening back in heavenly Den Long restaurant with a young Austrian traveller from my hostel, who turned out to be great company. After some wobbly days, it made for a good last evening in Vietnam. The next day, I was on the bus towards Cambodia, on my way to new adventures.