biking, Ho Chi Minh

It might be a little late for the first report describing our travel until now, but believe me I really have reasons for this huge delay. This delay is not only due to my dis-motivation to create an easy written story, but also because of the lack of Internet sources. But also time was a limiting factor, since we have been busy enjoying our fist week here in Ho Chi Minh City.

René, Melle, Jasper and me have used this week for Sight Seeing, including visiting a war museum and an awesome bicycle tour Hosted by Jose, a former water management student from Rotterdam university. The fact that parts of this tour took us trough 20 cm deep waters located in urban areas, might take away your question why a simple bicycle tour would be such a blasting experience for us dutchy's. The traffic (and not to mention the attention from locals we got as Europeans on bikes) was another factor that made this trip remarkable since most of the people here use motorcycles as transportation. The attached pictures might illustrate the chaos on the streets because of this mass abuse. After a few minutes we discovered that if we kept an eye on the passing cars, the motorcycles and scooters would just maneuver around us.

Now, a week after arrival in Vietnam, we arrived in Can Tho. Here we were welcomed in the University by a nice small mister called Pham van Toan, who basically helps us arranging everything we need. With his help we managed to get 4 bikes, two 100m2 houses(2 in each), 1/2 Internet, 20m2 working space in school and contact with our supervisors here. The Bikes and the Internet are a story apart. Since both the bikes and the Internet are malfunctioning at times. Lets hope that the Internet at school is better.

After many frustrations because of the Internet the group decided to leave everything behind for a while to go t get some noodle soup at the same restaurant as the day before. There we were welcomed by the tree middle aged sister Bat, Joang and Tiuen. As soon the woman were done cooking and serving they joined our table giggling and photographing. This giggling was strengthen when we started our attempts to order more Cha Gio, witch are more or less the spring roles as we dutchy's know them as Vietnamese ones. Although that 'real Vietnamese spring roll' seems to have been an other creation of the Dutch.

The coming weeks me and the team will focus on writing our Report, so it might not be to interesting to hear our stories then. I therefor leave the description of Vietnam as a country and the Vietnamese people for next time! That might be something to look forward to!!

I hope everything in Holland, South America, Ecuador, Swiss, Canada, Korea, Bangladesh and Vlissingen is fine! I would really like to hear from you!

Greetings to everybody, and don't forget to tell people about this Log!

Hugs, Arthur and René