The Mekong Delta, Muine and Nha Trang

If there is one time in the year that it's not advisable to travel around the county, it must be during the week long Tet festivities. I just so happened to pick that week for my tour around the Mekong Delta, struggling to find the non-existent empty or half empty roads. It seemed that most of the population of Saigon had moved there for holidays, and since there, what better than to drive around en-masse. Not that I minded much, there still were plenty of quiet backroads, and when not, it was funny dodging all the drunk drivers. Added to the constant honking were the sirens of the ambulances, going back and forth, playing catch-up with the accidents, a battle lost before it even began. The delta is one of the wealthiest regions of Vietnam, amounting for half of the country's rice production, placing it second-after Thailand- among the world's exporters. It is also over populated. I did my best to choose the remotest parts of it, but even there it was mostly house after house, and wherever there was some space, rice fields-sometimes with a grave smack in the middle.


Thankfully, there's plenty of backroads and small tranquil paths, that might not get you all the way but are a most welcome break.In one such case an awkward incident occurred. Some men were sitting in their porch and invited me in. I was offered rice wine and pork and for a while we tried to communicate, half in English half in Vietnamese. Then, one of them asked me for money, supposedly for his mute child that sat close to us. I was very annoyed, tried not to show it, and did my best to explain to them that they can't invite me in and 5 minutes later ask for money. I left shortly after. Grrr.

Trying to stay on the eastern side for most of the way, involved maybe a hundred bridge crossings and at least 10 ferries. There is still villages accessible only via 1 minute or more ferry rides. In the other side, and the closer one gets to the 1A (Vietnam's main highway) it's bridges only, sometimes humongous ones like the one above Can Tho.

The Mekong region is flat as a pancake, the only exception being the bridges with their few metres of elevation, where apparently the locals will prefer to get off their bikes and push than cycle. Come on, it can't be that hard!







While waiting for the ferry there's ll sorts of entertainment, from gambling like bau cua ca cop, a dice game popular during Tet where children are allowed to play as well, or some quality series/movie in the TV. Foreign films are dubbed by a single voice, in most cases a woman's, who's not acting of course, just reading the lines. What makes it even better is that the original voices can be heard as well in the background.

The second night finds me in Than Phu, a tiny town some 20km east of Tra vihn. No hotels here, just a small, dirty sex motel with used condoms all around. The usual dont-touch-anything-use-your-sleeping-bag rules apply, but what it lacks in services, it gains in aesthetics, having by far the most ingenious decoration I've seen. 

Further down the road there is a carnival of sorts, a big noisy one, where the whole town is having fun spending their money in the lucky games stalls. There appears to be a competition going on for the biggest, loudest sound system, I'm guessing there's about 1000 Megawatts of speakers, through which every vendor is screaming their lungs out to lure their customers. To my eyes, the wheel of fortune seems to be the more normal one, the rest of them ranging from the bizarro to the outright surreal. The half-drag-half-santa drew my attention in the beginning for winning the most decadent appearance prize, but then I found the mother of all weirdness. I'll do my best to set the scene. A ladyboy in a violet dress is lingering and doing her best to sing while holding a piece of string that's attached to a bucket placed upside down right in front of her. Around it there's an array of numbered little openings. The crowd is placing bets in god knows what-maybe how long it's going to take her to slip from this little stool she's dancing on. The collectors are running frantically around, the crowd eagerly awaits, the heat rises, and then... Then she pulls the string, the bucket lifts, and a hamster that was trapped inside the bucket runs for cover in one of the openings, hopefully the one you placed your bet on. Genius, sheer genius.

Painting workshop for children. Felt almost out of place!

Merry-go-round put to good use when the carnival is closed

Every other day I would see lion-and occasionally dragon- dancers doing their thing, a tradition originating in China, something like the christmas carols back in Europe only far more exciting to watch. They enter houses and shops and dance on the rhythm of a giant drum played by one of the group. The spectators will offer some money and the dancer will collect it through the beast's mouth, eat it in a way. The real treat is when the offering is not on the ground floor but above, in which case the dancer will climb a 5-6m bamboo pole held by the rest of the gang and depending on his abilities perform some pretty wicked acrobatics.     

Ben Tre and Can Tho seem to get all the tourism in the area but to my eyes they are not any different than the rest of the cities, pretty nondescript save for the odd promenade. Speaking of Can Tho, the main-and possibly only- attraction is its floating market. There is quite a lot of villages or settlements around Can Tho, and their main connection with the city is the river. As a consequence, the main market is located there instead of the land, comprising of hundreds of boats each with different goods for sale. Of course during Tet week everybody is on holidays, there is not a single boat to be found, a guava to be bought. Nevertheless, I decided to have a boat ride since I was there but instead of going for one of the many 30 seaters across the promenade whose owners harass the tourists like there is no tomorrow, I got me a nice small boat with a happy woman named Mooum for captain and cruised sloooowly around. At some point even she realised that it was painfully slow so in order to entertain both of us she went on making me a ring, a bracelet,a cricket and another thingy that could be a sword but probably wasn't out of a bamboo stick while steering with her leg. In the end she decided I should wear it all, together with her traditional vietnamese hat and have a photo. I still have some self-respect left and won't post it.

For some weird reason, spiders in the area enjoy making their webs in the power lines. It's usually hundreds of them, quite big ones as well.

Some random photos

The ever present Uncle Ho

Crushed ice for the stalls

The promenade in Can Tho

A concert. No reason to get off the motorbikes!

Communism at its finest

A floating petrol station

Heading back towards Saigon, I decided to stay on the 1A for a while. On the last day of Tet week. Bad move... Never seen a motorbike traffic jam before, not on this scale anyway.

After staying one night in Tan An, some 50km before Saigon, I went into full auto-destruct mode and decided to do the 450km to the beach in 3 days. Did my best to stick in the backroads, but it was impossible, managed it for the first day but afterwards it was 1A till the end. Can't say I enjoyed it much. There is something to be said about my lack of planning and researching as well. At some point before entering Vietnam I was told that it's a well known fact that for 6 months a year there is strong NE winds sweeping the coast line and I would be mad to cycle against them. Well, I did. And it drove me mad alright. Some 30km before reaching Muine, my first stop on the coast I got a small taste of what was to come, winds so strong that a) I couldn't even hear my self bitching and moaning and b) would drop my average speed to 6-7km... What the hell, I knew that after Nha Trang(200km up north) I'd be heading inland to the well protected highlands.

A sign in the highway. What a sweet way to state the obvious.

Entering Muine, I was shocked to see that I couldn't read the signs any more. A few seconds later I realised that it was because most of them were in Russian. Shortly afterwards I was told that the place is called little Moscow, no wonder why. Most of the tourists are Russian and they make sure that the usual cliches are respected, skinny blond beauties walk around followed by beefy thick necked guys you don't want to mess with.



Some of them seemed to be there for their honeymoon, and didn't miss the opportunity to have some pictures on their wedding dresses. I wonder if they brought them all the way from home or if there is a place to rent them. I see a good business opportunity here...

Muine-or at least its touristic side is nothing to write home about, or if so it's probably for the wrong reasons. An endless stretch of resorts, guesthouses, reastaurants and bars right in front of the beach. A tiny problem is that there is no beach, or no sand anyway. The uninviting waves break directly in the concrete walls. It could be that the tide was high when I was there I don't know, still, most of the seafront is off-limits unless you're staying in one of the resorts.


The village though, has some charm, almost like a different world, no hotels there, mostly locals going about their business. Only a few foreigners go there, to have a look at the impressive armada of fishing boats.

Fishermen use mostly these round dingies to throw the nets. Apparently some of them have an outboard motor as well. Not an easy thing to steer!









Thousands of shells are caught and emptied everyday and then crushed on the spot.

Many Vietnamese enjoy having a caged monkey, my guesthouse's owners being no exception. The saddest pair of eyes around.

I decided to enter a bicycle-tour shop in case they could give me some info about cycling routes in the area. Marc, a Swiss ex-pat who owns the place, spent the next 3 hours giving me all the info I'd ever need and then invited me for a ride the next morning. We had some great time and I got to see parts that I'd never find otherwise. Marc seems to know everything there is to know about Muine and it's surroundings, be it flaura, fauna or the people, and also speaks the language. He showed me a bit what he does and I must say I was quite impressed with how methodical he is when finding and preparing new routes, plus how adaptive he is depending on the customer's needs. A couple of days before he had organised a trekking-cycling-treasure hunt combination for a family but he really filled me with envy when he showed me the 3 day Saigon-Muine route he does through backroads without ever touching the main highway, what I tried to do a few days earlier and failed miserably. I highly recommend you try him out, his shop is in 289A Nguyen Dinh Chieu(the main Muine road) and his site is www.bikinghikingmuine.com  

Right in the entrance of a charming creek called Fairy Stream there's a place that gets the "silliest activity of the decade" prize. I'll quote the board: " Inviting you to participate a relaxing adventure of riding Ostrich". further down it says "As skin conditions". Some explanation was due but I let it go. Really? Riding an Ostrich? Basically meaning getting on, doing 15 metres in a confined space, coming back, getting off, the end. Whatever. The creek was nice though, peaceful and everything, worth visiting if you're in Muine. 

This is in s3d freeview format. Check the link for instructions: http://www.neilcreek.com/2008/02/28/how-to-see-3d-photos/

Muine is apparently THE place for kite-surfing, but when not cycling I'm against any physical activity that doesn't involve eating.

CSI: Muine

The sand dunes some 40km north of Muine are the main attraction, but most of all it answered my question of where did all the sand from the beach go. Didn't answer how they moved it though. Felt like being in the desert for a while.

Showing off my sexy 2$ orange raybans

 Somehow riding a motorbike in the dunes is called "Ecotourism"!

On the road to Nha Trang, finally a beach.

So many sea-shells around, why not fill a grave with them.

Even though when it comes to computers I'm fairly literate, sometimes I'm impressed with the things I don't know. For example, I hadn't used Google Earth before and when Marc showed me what I could do and what I'd missed I was shocked. I sat down and planned my route for Nha Trang. Somehow there was a nice little country road going all the way up parallel to the main highway. Would that mean I'd have a relaxed ride there? The god of railways had other plans, among them failing to inform Google that he laid tracks there many years ago. Save for half of first day's ride, it was back to the highway for me, making it a noisy and veery windy ride. Adding insult to injury, 60km before Nha Trang a stone got tangled in the back wheel, breaking two spokes. I still lack the proper tools to repair that on the road, but not for long. Till then, it's buses...

One of the countless war memorials found in every village, town or city of the country. The bigger, the better.















Not much to say about Nha Trang, just a ginormous city with a crammed beach on the side. I only went there to meet a friend and had some great time. Swam a bit as well(at last).

Somewhere in the city there is a Cham temple, relatively small, but very nicely restored. I'll write more about the Cham in a future post, need to go to bed now, long day tomorrow, crossing the border to Laos. This blog is seriously lagging behind. Till next time, have a nice one!

Some stats about the Mekong part.

Saigon to My Tho: 110km. I stayed mostly on the QL 50 and then switched to backroads. Most of them are not marked on the map so it was mostly asking around what is the smallest road to my destination. Same goes for the rest of the ride in the delta, the marks are mostly for reference. You can possibly push to Ben Tre which is only slightly better that My Tho for the first night, shouldn't be that hard considering how flat the ride is.
My Tho to Thanh Phu: 83km. From now on and for the next 2 days the ride is quite interesting, lots of ferries, trails and small villages on the way. In Thanh Phu there is only on lousy hotel, make sure you bring a sleeping bag.
Thanh Phu to Soc Trang: 104km. Big, ugly city, nice ride getting there and away though.
Soc Trang to Can Tho: 75km. Head north in order to avoid the main, and you'll be fine!
Can Tho to Tan An: 138km. Did most of it on a heavily jammed 1A. It was fun then, only because I had to zig-zag between the buses and motos but it's probably boring otherwise.
Tan An to Lhong Khan: 168km. Struggled to stay on backroads and took my a while to get out of the outskirts of Saigon through some industrial areas and then switched to the 1A. The only hotel I found there is next to the highway, and was pretty decent. Can't remember the name, but you can't miss it.
The map doesn't include the rest of the ride, but it's pretty straight forward.
Lhong Khan to Phan Tiet: 120km. I was too tired to push to Muine, the wind didn't help either. Big city, lots of hotels to choose from.
Phan Tiet to Muine: 22 easy km.
Muine to Phan Rang: 131km. Most of the ride is by the coast, next to the 1A, lovely if windy. The sand dunes are some 40km on the way there.
Phan Rang to Nha Trang: 100km. Most of it on the A1. Boring...

A small note. In the Fahasa bookshop in Saigon you can get maps for most of the regions of the country. They are not very accurate, but are quite detailed. Get them there or in Hanoi, in the rest of the country it's hard to find any.