International Sampoon's vacation 2007

The days are going really slow but it feels like the week here at Mui Ne has gone by quite fast. We are going to Nha Trang not tomarrow, but the next day so we had better make the most of lazing about. Sam does anyway. He spends at least 14 hours out of a 24 hour period sleeping and sometimes up to 18 hours! My god, who would've thought it was humanly possible.

We found another good and cheap local restaurant today, and even though the husband and wife owners have intense screaming matches in the kitchen out back, we still really like it. I call it the 'blue-plastic-chair-place' . It doesn´t mean we are ditching the 'red-plastic-chair-place', we still love the red-plastic-chair-place.

The blue-plastic-chair-place is cheaper than the red-plastic-chair-place, although its pretty much the same except it has blue plastic chairs instead of red ones and it not right on the beach like the red-plactic-chair-place.

The lady that runs it (the blue-plastic-chair-place) waves her hands at everyone getting off the buses across the street going into the resorts. It does no good. She has bad teeth but thats ok, we are going back for dinner tonight. For lunch today it only cost us $5! Five bucks!
Five bucks for fried noodles with veggies and fish in claypot, steamed rice, lemonade, watermelon juice and a very yummy thick and tastey mango shake. How good that eh?

Things that make us smile about Mui Ne

- The beach, its just beautiful here. In the afternoons we wait for the tide to go down to go for a walk otherwise the waves crash right up against the breakwall of our resort.

- Our resort, the umbrellas, the lazy sunbeds and the pool

- The friendly locals at the grocery store down the street

- The NZ gelato, it's everywhere, I haven't had any yet, but I know it will be good. 28 flavours.

- Cheap bananas and mangoes

- No postcard hawlkers in Mui Ne

Things that dont make me smile about Mui Ne

- Overpriced thongs, I mean $42 for reefs! please!

- Our resort restaurant, not only do they serve shit food, but they trick you into thinking you have free breakfasts and then slowly start charging you for them.

- The stinking red brick shack half way down the street. What is it!? It f"@k'n stinks!! What is it!!??

- The moto guys asking you one hundred and seventy two times a day at least, if you would like a ride down to the other side of the beach which looks exactly the same as the side of the beach we are on.

- The padantic Canadian in the room next door who tacks away at his lap top all day and night and orders coconuts and coffee for breakfast and just has to watch the sunset everyday or he will die. Get out of his way.

- The unbelievably stupid TV channels with repeats of the making of American golf courses.

Last night we were maggot. We smuggeled our vodka into the resort restaurant in a water bottle and when no-one was watching we tipped it into our orange juice. That was my idea. Last night the food and the service was crap. The beef and the morning glory tasted like rubber and salty grass but we ate it anyway and said it was nice.

In Vietnam when you order entrees, they always come out with mains, and mains always come out in two halves. I dont like this restaurant, they dont have any tofu and we are not eating here again, only for the free breakfasts. And then only the noodles or the pancakes because you only get one egg when you order eggs.

Sam is very seedy today. We drank the bottle of vodka last night and played cards. We had a fight which resulted in Sam spitting toothpaste in my eye and me pulling his hair and kicking his sunburn. It wasn't funny last night but it is now.

We spent most of the day in bed but eventually we got hungry and had to do a food run. We walked down to the street shop and bought what they would probably sell in one week, we bought in one pop. We ended up with chocy milks and plastic wrapped sausages that tasted like catfood and prawn crackers and lots of other random unidentified foodstuffs.

We ate our sandwiches under the umbrellas and went for a swim and then an old man from Canada came over to talk to us and stared at my tits the hole time.
Tonight we are having dinner at the red plastic chair place because we know the food is good. I hope they have fish coconut curyy because thats what i want. Give it to me. I want it now.

Sam is sleeping again and I am watching the garden guy hose the chickens. Theres not much to do around here but thats ok with me.

my sandwich

I have been observing the locals here in Vietnam and have come across some bizarre and odd practices.

Vietnamese people are professional loiters. They casually make it their sole purpose in life to do absoluely nothing at every given chance.

And I like it.

90% of the people pick their nose in public and 100% of them have no problem with it. 9 times out of 10 they will try to sell you something and mostly it's of absolute no interest to you, like a pair of scizzors when you are about to travel through 5 of the most top security airports in the world.
They will sell you lighters, sunglasses, crappy bracelets, earbuds, anything! And if you want something they dont have, they will find someone who does and they will sell it to you. Most often they will try to sell you a trip on their bike and when they are not selling you a trip on their bike they are most likely sitting on it, loitering and picking their nose.

Yeah, they do some odd things, as I´m writting this a women walked into the ocean in her pajamas. I would normally put an exclaimation point at the end of a sentence like that, but this time I didn´t because I´m not really suprised, things like that happen all the time in Vietnam and I am becoming immune to it. Who knows, by the end of this holiday I might be walking into the ocean in my pajamas without even giving it a second thought.

I do love their honesty towards life, I mean, 'who cares if someone is watching, who cares if I have two different shoes on and I´m eating my dinner in a very very tiny plastic chair next to the gutter in a thick cloud of bus smog. Who cares if I sit in the middle of the footpath and I pick my feet, eat my noodles and then try to sell you pineapples, who cares!!!'

just hanging around

Mui Ne beach

We have spent the last two days living on buses (grrrrr)but now we are finally at the lovely Mui Ne. Mui Ne is a long stretch of beach filled with expensive resorts priced right up to $300 per night or even more. We found a cosy little resort further up the beach, it's right on the water and has a restaurant, a pool, and lots of places to laze about. Mui Ne is on the south east tip of Vietnam, it gets quite breezy after 11am and the place swams with wind surfers and kite surfers. There are massive burnt orange sand dunes at either end of the beach that you can fly down on a piece of cardboard

Today I had a banana and condensed milk pancake for breakfast and Sam some noodles with egg. We spent the morning soaking up the sun, jumping in and out of the pool and reading our books under the thatched umbrellas. This is my sorts holiday.
In the middle of the day we went for a walk to the other end of the beach. It didn´t look that long from here. By the time we reached the southern end we were absolutely roasting. Our skin was red raw!
We bumped into another Aussie along the beach who told us the restaurant with the red plastic chairs in the sand was the place to eat. So we gave it a go. The springrolls were so yummy and they have cheap bottled tiger.
By now I was stinging to get back in the pool and we hopped on the back of a couple of motos to take us home. We stopped to buy some Vodka and I burnt my leg on the exhaust pipe. Ouch!

Minh Tam Resort

Now I'm sitting by the pool nursing my full body burns, I´m lobster red from top to bottom, beetroot Shell!

Siem Reap kicks arse on PP. The people are so friendly and there is hardly any garbage on the street. We are staying at the Golden Village Guesthouse. It has nice staff, balconies, wood panelled rooms and a massive budda statue. The main street in Siem Reap is long and is full of restaurants, bars and tourist offices. We found some markets where you could say no and not be hasselled.

We've been sitting on the balcony watching the sun go down, our mission tonight is to find the cheapest restaurant in town cause we spent all our money on those temples! We ate a $2 Panang curry which has been the cheapest and best yet, we had Phat Thai, that's right Phat Thai, not Padd Thai, I guess it's the same thing and a really yummy Cambodian oily fried rice, it had egg, sausage, spinach, shallots, bok choy and cabbage. Yum!