If you are seeking that adrenaline rush which traditionally is only available at a theme park there is now another alternative. No need to hand over thousands of dollars to Mr Disney for an amusement park getaway… now you can just take an 18 hour flight over to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and then take a bus ride up into the mountains. It would probably be cheaper in the long run given that one could easily subsist on $50 a day in Vietnam and that modest sum would be almost impossible to spend in one day there whereas in the theme park one would hardly be able to even purchase lunch.
Our particular bus ride was an eight hour journey from Ho Chi Minh City up into the Central Highlands to a town called Da Lat, a charming alpine town catering mostly to Vietnamese tourists looking to escape the heat of the city. The driver seemed at first glance a nice enough fellow although he did run over someone’s motorbike whilst pulling into the boarding area… red flag missed!
Funnily my mother being a bit nervous about my travels to Vietnam continually warned me about the undetonated land mines still scattered about the countryside here. What she didn’t warn me about however was the much bigger threat for tourists: the bus rides in Vietnam. That would have been much more useful information to me. Just to share a statistic with you it seems that approximately thirty people die from vehicular accidents in Vietnam everyday. After boarding the bus I did a rough count of the passengers as I walked down the aisle looking for my seat. I came up with about thirty or so of us. Just wonderful I thought. So after our bus careens off the side of a cliff we will fill the quota on accident fatalities for today.
Continue reading “Dispatch from Paul: Mr Toad’s Wild Ride… Vietnamese style.”