Hey all!
Here’s a little summary of our experience in Vietnam! I’ve just realized we have been traveling for about 4 whole months. A life lesson occurs to me now: This is all our first rodeo.
Back home, there’s a road near the downtown area that had so many wonderful Vietnamese restaurants. It was our go-to area when we were in the mood to eat out. So when we arrived here, we knew we were going to have the best time eating.
We’re often leaning over to each other saying, “When we get back, we’re incorporating this…”
Those things usually include:
Fruit for breakfast
Pho for dinner (collagen!)
Mango sticky rice for dessert
Coconut milk/water + Espresso + Sparkling water + Banana
2 mile walk every morning for steps and sunshine (we’ve developed a preference for beach access)
We stay about a week in each spot we go to, spending the week days locked in on morning walks, coffee and laptop work, gym time, and sunset dinner. This leaves only 2 days of the weekend to explore the country beyond the city we’re staying in.
Klook, an excursion scheduling app, has been my #1 tool for searching tours and classes in the area. In Thailand and the Philippines, I booked through the app to schedule tours to the most beautiful islands. They take care of all the details, we just had to show up with hats, money, and smiles.
Day Trip to Angthong Marine Park from Koh Samui:
Day Trip Twin Lagoon, Barracuda Lake, and more from Coron, Palawan, Philippines:
For our first week in Vietnam, Klook was how I found a company to take us on the Cu Chi Tunnels and Mekong Delta River day tour from Ho Chi Minh City.
Pick-up was at 7:30AM from our hotel. It took about 45 minutes to get to our first stop at Quang Minh Handicapped Handicrafts. This article by Sundae Scoops dives into the detailed process they go through to create the most outstanding pieces of art I’ve ever seen.
They gave us some time to shop around and offered shipping services so naturally, we began searching for pieces we wanted to send to our moms. I went ahead and got a mini version of the pieces we picked out; my first piece to our travel collection I’ll display in our future home! :)
I kick myself now for not learning how to ship stuff back when we were in Thailand and PH… but then I tell myself that it just means we’ll have to return in the future!
Afterwards, it took us about 1 hour 45 min to arrive at the Cu Chi Tunnels.
Don’t freak out, the snake wine was not poisoned. I am alive and well. No hospital visits followed. Reality: it tasted like vodka.
I never thought I’d be adding Drink Snake Wine in Vietnam to my bucket list and checking it off in the same day.
After Ho Chi Minh City, we flew to Da Nang for a perfect week at the beach and a visit to Ba Na Hills at Sun World theme park. Guys, this park was HUGE.
There is the French Village with loads of restaurants and even hotels. Ba Na Hills has the very famous Golden Bridge held by two giant stone hands. In order to get from the entrance to the different sections of the park, we had to use their cable car system, which holds the world record for the longest non-stop cable car (over 5.8 km) and highest elevation gain over mountains and waterfalls. We wouldn’t have known though, because the weather had sent the whole mountain into a misty, grey cloud. We enjoyed the moodiness of the weather, as it makes for a more unique experience, but we did miss all of the views promised from the cable cars and bridges.
Our two lessons learned: visit at a different time of year and get there when the park opens. Thankfully, they had booths at the entrance selling rain coats, hats, gloves, etc. (I think a lot of people underestimate how must cooler it gets in the mountains). We immediately got ourselves fleece-lined raincoats and clung to them all day.
The last stop in Vietnam was Ha Noi, and there, too, it was cold, rainy, and grey the whole week (we only packed clothes for warm weather)! I kept thinking about how nicely timed our purchase of the rain coats were as we did not remove them once all week.
This week was slower as we followed more of a routine and didn’t break for an excursion. It was here that we began really discussing where we were going, what we wanted, and timelines.
Long story short, we made some changes to our next destinations and one of them being our postponement of Japan and going to Bali, Indonesia instead! So I have officially caught you up to speed on all things travel as I sit here in Canggu. There’s so much that has already happened and many points to touch on about Bali so far, but I’ll save that for another time. :)
Until then, thank you for reading along and I’ll see you in the next post!
x