Mui Ne, Ho Chi Min city, Mekong Delta and Phu Quoc

Mui Ne
We arrive in Mui Ne and after a 5km walk we find ourselves a room with an ocean view for only 7 dollars each. Mu Ne has a really nice beach. Next day I go to see the red sand dunes by bike, while Jen chills out at the hotel/resort/hostel. I go by bike, can' find it; end up cycling around for a total of 3 hours in the boiling hot sun. So it turned it to a battle of attrition not unlike the two I had in australia. When I finally find the dunes I'm so exhausted I can hardly enjoy. Take a couple of pictures (on which it is quite obvious how I was feeling) and head back to our hostel. Next day we chill out in the morning and then we're on our way to Ho Chi Min city.

Ho Chi Min
Ho Chi Min is crazy in terms of traffic. Crossing the street is a unique experience. Overcoming your fear of death, you just walk into a swarm of motorbikes, after which you need to apply supreme concentration in dodging them, while they do the same. When seen from the outside, this actually produces a quite harmonius effect, where every part of the whole does it's own respective task, creating a very efficient whole :) This is a good analogy for why capitalism seems to work better than communism (the former is an emergent system, while the latter is top-down managed system that attempts to manage something too complex for one (or even several) human mind(s) to comprehend).

That night we meet Anouk and Nancy again and hang out with their friends for a bit, which is very enjoyable as always.

Go to work out at a really good gym (finally got to work out my ham strings!). Go out that night to the famed Apocalypse now. On the way I meet two typical Swedish girls (not a necessarily a bad thing) and am having a nice conversation with them, when BAM! One of the girls camera's gets snatched :S A scooter had been waiting for us and when we passed they pulled away, simultaneously grabbing her camera which she had dangling from her hand. I'd heard this was bag snatching central, but had not seen it yet. At the club I lose the girls, but they come and find me and make me sit with them. Fun conversatio ensues. After they leave I go and interact with the rest of the club, which, again, is filled with hookers. I was the only one wearing shorts, so I'd go up to people saying "I'm wearing shorts.". Half the time it wouldn't take long before the girl in question would ask me whether I was coming home with her. Now I'm quite confident that I'm reasonably attractive to people of the opposite sex, but that statement after 2 minutes of conversation obviously set off my hooker alarm, which would cause my immediate departure :P Had some other rather retarded interactions, which included slow dancing with two girls at the same time (because they started playing slow dancing music out of nowhere?!). Apocolypse now wasn't too impressive, it was quite small and half of it was more a bar than a club, still a very amusing night out :). On my way home a prostitute offers her survices and she's quite hard to get rid of, but I do get rid of her. I can't find my hotel, so I'm walking around. Someone offers to help me find my way, it's the same prostitute! I'm like "no I figured out where to go, don't worry about it", she keeps following me, so I then honestly tell her I'm not going home with her (was little bit of joke before). This seems to get rid of her. Later I'm walking around a round-about, where she finds me AGAIN, saying "why do you keep walking around? You come home with me??". I have to walk quite fast to get rid of her. Obviously I'm quite paranoid walking around on my own at night after I saw the girls camera getting nicked. So I finally find my way home, when out of the bushes all of a sudden the prositute comes rushing at me reaching towards me while making a shrieking sound! I freack the frick out and sprint the entire 400 meter road to get rid of her. Don't see her again after that. It was like a horror movie where you keep thinking the killer is dead and then he turns up again out of nowhere! Get home, Jen is still awake and I tell her about all my adventures. Oh I almost forgot; some guy in the toilet almost puked on me, like I literally had to point his head away from me so he just missed me :S

Next day me and Jen go sight seeing and we decided that since it's our last day (we thought) together, we should have some pizza and cake again. We end up having way too much of both (see pictures, it's quite ridiculous). We go to see a market, the reunification palace and the war remanents museum. You can feel the history at reunification palace (this is where the north's victory over the south was made complete with tank number 390 crashed through the gate of the palace). The war remants museum had a bunch of cool tanks and planes in front of it. I left my eternal mark on the museum by walking through newly laid cement, which the construction workers didn't seem to care about at all for some reason. The inside of the museum has very graphic exihibits about all the horrible things that took place in the war. It's a very depressing and humbling experience. I found this museum to be a lot more objective than the ones up north. Me and Jen go for a masage in the most legit place we can find. As we walk up the stairs the place kind of looks like a high class brothel. The girls are all hot and wearing short skirts. In a seperate room the girl straddled me multiple times an paid an unecessary amount of attention to the groin and buttocks area, but in the end it was... simply a massage. The same happened to Jen and they mentioned how her husband would be out shortly. So my theory is that it was an establishment with definite brothel capabilities, but they assumed we were looking for simply a massage, since they assumed we were married. Oh the day before we'd had a massage by blind people.

Mekong Delta
Despite my renunciation of tours I end up doing one more: mekong delta. Jen and me do it together, but she's heading back to Ho Chi Min after, while I'm continuing on to Phu Quoc island. We take a number of boats over the Mekong and into the jungle (see pictures). We had a guide who would sing a lot (in Vietnamese and English). He would sing the tour itenerary too. My favorite song was the one that ended with the three-fold repetition of the lyrics "vietnam, certainly, will be in your mind!". We also go to a coconut candy factory. Our guide tells us how every coconut has something that looks like a face on it, which is why it should be called 'Mr Coconut', after which he proceeds to throw Mr Coconut into the fire :O That night we go out for dinner with the young portion of our group. Very fun dinner with lots of good humor. Jen and I have a lot of strange conversations and it's fun to see how other people react to them when we do. There's two pretty English girls in the group, which are fun and nice. I'm a guy, so I love attractive women, but I also like to see their very specific effect on my (male) mind / thoughts.

Next day we visit the floating market, which is a ton of boats all selling differnt products to each other (mainly fruits and bricks from what I saw). Go to a noodle factory too and on our way back we see a quite sizable ship sinking. Apparently there were still people inside, since our guide was explaining how they should save themselves, not their belongings. It sank really fast as there were tons of bubbles coming out of it.

Rach Gia + Phu Quoc
Say goodbye to Jen after having traveled almost an entire country with her :( I'll definitely miss her. We had a really good vibe going on, where the most important thing was the fun and sometimes intellectuality / insight that we shared, instead of any kind of mutual dependance. I get on a bus to Rach Gia and sit with an American girl, which I pay no real attention. At this point I'm extremely tired from going out and getting up at 6am for the tour twice. Arrive at my Hotel at Rach gia; same girl is at my hotel. At breakfast she's sitting there waiting and the owner points to her table as though I'm expected to have breakfast with her. This is when we become friends (we later established). Get on seperate boats to Phu Quoc island, get on a random bus, there she is again. She goes to her resort, I go to check out 4 different ones an finally choose one. Go down to the bar and there she is AGAIN! turns out our resorts are next to each other and she just happened to wonder to the next door bar. Go to have lunh with her, she's a really fun and attractive girl.

I'm in a mini-resort here which is tranquil and has a very nice beach with an almost completely flat sea. I will stay here for a couple of days to relax and do nothing.