The funniest part about Nihm Bihn is how we, and everyone else, pronounced it. Maarten pretty much nailed it the first time and I can get it right from time to time but the sound is different than what one would think. On more than one occasion we would be going back and forth with a local trying to discern if he was in fact saying Nihm Bihn or some other city that sounded similar but wasn’t the same.
When we arrived to the bus station we were all swarmed with touts trying to lour us back to their hotels. If you know exactly what you want and can communicate it to someone who understands and will give you a free ride then it is not always a good idea to ignore them. In this case we grabbed all their cards and decided to walk around ourselves a little first. We finally ended where we should have started and were given a decent room by a smiling staff. That nights dinner was really fun because we grilled our own meats on a little, portable stove while sitting in little plastic chairs on a bridge. It was delish!
The following day we decided to rent motos and do some site seeing. On the way out to our first destination I popped a tire…..lame…but repairing it was easy. There happened to be a shop half a mile away and he fixed the leak for a buck in no time. Maarten took pictures for his motorcycle repair album. He rode a motorcycle from Saigon to Hanoi and said that there were issues almost daily with his or his partners bikes. This was easy and we were back on the trail to Tam Coc Caves. This was described in the guide book as ‘Halong Bay in the rice fields’ and it was exactly that! I would highly recommend this to any traveler in Vietnam as it was cheap and beautiful. For 3 bucks each we boarded a boat in pairs and were paddled down the river and back…through the caves and beautiful rice fields with huge rocks jutting out of them. It was fantasatic. Usually I am doing most of the speaking as Charlotte’s first language is French but our guides happened to only speak French so they did most of the talking and I did a lot of smiling. It has been really fun travelling with Charlotte as she is teaching me some French and I am teaching her some ‘Californian’ (i.e. ‘totally awesome dude, I have no fucking clue, duh, WHA?! and ewww dude).
After the cave/river ride we had a delicious lunch across the street and headed to the Mua Cave and Dragon on the Hill. It was a beautiful ride and nice hike up to the top of the hill. Such amazing views from the summit.
A local had told us to check out Bai Dihn even though it is still under construction so we ventured further out of town to find it. Wow…this temple, when it is completed, will be the biggest temple in Asia (or so they say). It was started about 4 years ago and will take another 5 to finish. I was stunned. The place is beyond words huge with many temples inside the walls. Thousands of statues line the walkways and there is the biggest bell I have ever seen in the middle. I can safely say that this will be a huge attraction when complete and worth a visit as well!
That night we managed to find the fresh beer and enjoyed a relaxing night. The following day was our last in Nihm Bihn and our last with Maarten and Helen. Maarten and I decided to have some ‘boys time’ and toured the city looking for ganja. This is fun for me because it is a way to see the ‘other side’ of most cities. We went sight seeing the previous day and went to all the major attractions and this day was spent walking down dark alleys and looking for shady dudes. The amazing thing is that there was no ganja in the city but plenty of heroin…yuck. I had no idea there was an international hand signal for heroin but apparently there are two…yuck…so we gave up and headed for some fresh beer and a little tutorial of South America by Maarten who has spent some time there. We had plenty of laughs, plenty of beer and I snagged a lot of valuable information from him for my next journey. We grabbed a snack then decided to stop at some bumper cars we had passed several times to have a go at each other. It was so amazingly funny….we would just go in a circle and then ram into each other busting up only to push away, go in another circle and slam into each other again…this went on until I broke my ride and we had to bounce. We rolled back to the hotel to find Helen and Charlotte sufficiently buzzed too so we turned the reception area into a little party doing youtube requests and dancing with the staff and each other. It was hilarious. We all headed out to grab one last meal and that turned into a laughing-fest as well. We found a hot pot spot and ordered some chicken…the weird thing is that you don’t get a breast, leg and wing like you would in the US….the best explanation I got was that since it is a communist country, everyone gets a little of everything…bone, cartildge, head…everything just chopped into bits. At one point during the meal Charlotte leaned over to tell me something and I broke my chair pulling her down on top of me…it was hilarious….and it wasn’t the last chair I would break in Vietnam…oi….my fat American ass doesn’t fit into many small Vietnamese chairs!?
We boarded our sleeper bus and set out for Hoi An to meet up with James and Kenny….
PS. I am writing this as I wait to board the airplane for home….now almost two weeks after actually being in this city. It got hard at the end to keep up with the entries.
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