Cambodia and Vietnam...finally!

In November Lance and I spent 2 weeks in Cambodia and Vietnam. And yeah...I'm just getting around to posting about it. I'm terrible. But we had an AMAZING time and I want to be able to remember the details later. It's ridiculously long, so feel free to just skim down through the pictures.

Getting to Siem Riep was insane. Two hours to Seattle, twelve hours to South Korea, five hours to Ho Chi Minh City, a quick sleep in HCMC, then a 2-hour flight to Hanoi, and finally a 2-hour flight to Siem Reap.
Before we left Ho Chi Minh City, we had time for a quick breakfast in the hotel restaurant before heading back to the airport. The above picture is one of the pages of the menu - each thing was weirder than the last. They brought Lance some nasty octopus dish he hadn't ordered. He tried it, but it was so gross that he had to just share with me. Luckily mine was delicious!! It was some bbq'd meat over rice, with a fried egg on top. Yum.

This was the view from the restaurant window. The city was SO crazy - cars and people and motorbikes EVERYwhere. Really cool-looking though. Right after breakfast we had to go straight back to the airport for a 2-hour flight to Hanoi.
I took a couple of pictures from the taxi on the way to the airport. Here's a shot of some motorbikes, but I never got a picture that shows how insane it is when you're actually driving - they just surround the car and it's an absolute miracle that there aren't accidents every five seconds.

Here's a video from YouTube that kind of shows how crazy it is, although most of the streets are way more crowded with motorbikes than that. Can you imagine trying to cross the street in that kind of traffic?
Huge wad of power lines.
We were dying over all the crazy things people carry on their bikes/motorbikes.

We finally got to Siem Reap around 6 pm, a good 2 days after having left Salt Lake. Wow - what a journey. The minute we got there we fell in love. Still crazy driving, but it's a really small city, so it's not so chaotic. It was absolutely beautiful, and our taxi driver was AWESOME. Totally decent English, really friendly and nice, and just a cool guy. He told us he would drive us around each day for $30/day, which included ice cold waters. Wow. Even in the cheapest place we've ever been it costs $30/day to RENT a car, plus you have to pay for gas, and you have no idea where you're going. We went all out and got a $40/night hotel, even though we could have paid closer to $20/night. We just figured this was the one time in our life when we'd actually splurge to get a decent hotel. :)
Here's a little gecko that was in our room waiting for us.



These next few pictures are from my mom's friend Becky, who went there with her husband last year. I loved that the ladies would sweep the streets. So weird. And their brooms are awesome.
Another couple of examples of the weird stuff they carry on their bikes.


So...this is why I'm not down with eating meat from the market (although let's be honest, I'm sure this is where the restaurants we ate at get their meat from). Como se dice "unsanitary"? Bleh.
There was a HUGE outdoor market near our hotel, with zillions of vendors selling everything under the sun.
Everywhere you go, there's a sea of bikes/motorbikes parked outside.
This picture is a good example of what the traffic situation is like - it's just one big free for all, with no rules or order - they just go.
You see tons of these little gasoline stands all over the side of the road. They just buy it by the bottle - I don't even think we saw a real gas station, now that I think about it.
This is what pretty much all Cambodian food looked like. It was okay, but usually lacking in flavor, and the meat wasn't the best. But not bad. Luckily there were all kinds of restaurants in Siem Reap - the Indian restaurant was so good we had to go back twice.
The nicest thing about Sam (our driver, short for Samrach) is that he knew all the best places to take us, and the best times to go to avoid crowds, etc. He'd pick us up at 8 or 9 every morning and we'd be out all day long, doing things in whatever order he suggested. Our first day we went to Angkor Wat and bought 3-day passes. This is entering the park, or whatever you want to call it.

I was so excited to see monkeys, and we saw some right away! They were the cutest!
Sam would usually drop us off right at the entrance to a temple, or whatever, and then meet us at the exit a couple of hours later.
All the taxi/tuk tuk (motorbike with cart on the back) drivers would wait in the parking lot, sleeping in hammocks, or just hanging out. No matter how long we were gone, Sam would always spot us coming and have the car turned on with cold drinks in his hands for us by the time we got there. Sometimes he came with us if it was just some small thing at the side of the road, or something extra cool, so it was nice to have a built-in picture taker. Plus he'd tell us all about whatever we were seeing.

I stalked that little girl in the pink for awhile, trying to get a picture of her without being too creepy. She was the most beautiful child I've ever seen. I would've paid good money to take her home with us. Okay, back to not being creepy...



They had big old cool spiders all over the place, with crazy webs.
We took pictures of so many trees - I can't get enough of those gnarly roots.
I wish I had done a better job of remembering the names of the places we went. It hasn't even been 3 months and I've forgotten SO much.


This was a little funnel spider, but the picture makes me laugh because the leaf looks like a Mexican wrestler.
Most of the places we went weren't very crowded at all. We'd pass a place with zillions of tour buses in the parking lot, and Sam would say, "We'll go there later." He'd take us to somewhere with almost no people, and just as we'd be ready to leave the tour buses would come pulling into the parking lot, and we'd go see the places they just came from. I would've gladly paid double for him - he was priceless.



The monkeys are like seagulls at home - watch out or they'll steal your food. But they're WAY cuter than seagulls.

We didn't see this very much, but at a couple of the temples little kids would come and start giving you a tour, hoping you'd give them money afterward. They were so cute - it was hard to resist.

You can't tell very well from the picture, but the steps up this temple were way steep. I decided to take a breather while Lance climbed to the top.


Most of the temples had little markets at the end. The soliciting was pretty heinous. We tried "No hablamos Ingles," and they just start trying to sell us stuff in Spanish without skipping a beat." Lance tried it in Portuguese but same thing. I wonder how many languages they know how to harass people in. I felt like a jerk ignoring them because they're all so sweet, but my money would've been gone the first day if I'd given in.
There were a few little ponds like this, where the algae, or whatever, just sat there on the surface and never moved. But then there'd be a little spot where the algae was missing. This one looked like a tree.
This next bunch of pictures is all from Ta Prohm, which was our favorite set of temples. I'm told part of Tomb Raider was filmed there. Almost makes me want to see it. Just kidding, it doesn't.
These pictures don't even come close to showing how cool this place is. It kind of sucks to go back and look at them, but whatever. Better than nothing. Way better than nothing.










Why do we have a picture of this random lady? Because this is one of the more famous spots and there were a few people waiting in line to get their pictures taken. We didn't want to wait.
So we just got one with people in the background.


Everywhere we went there were tiny little kids working. This kid and his little friends or siblings or whatever were "fishing." I say "fishing" because to me it just looked like a pile of mud. But in the bottom of their muddy baskets there were little things moving around, so...
Sam would tell us little random things as we were driving around. He pointed out this rice paddy, and we asked him to pull over so we could take a picture. Neither of us had ever seen a rice paddy, so it was kind of interesting.
Okay, if you ever get the chance to have fish nibble on your dead skin, DO IT. It was so hilarious. The sign wasn't kidding when it said, "Dr. Fish massage can make you funny and happy."
That's how hard I was laughing the whole time. It took every bit of strength I had to keep my feet in the water. It tickled SO bad!

Lance must have had a tastier feast for them than I did, because he had a giant ball of them on his feet at all times. They looked like fuzzy fish slippers.
I was kind of jealous, but then again, I had all the tickle I could handle.
Best $2 I ever spent.

This was the view from our window. Apparently volleyball is super popular there. They'd be out there playing all day long. I was just glad to see that they took a break from working long enough to play. Sam works 12 hours a day, 7 days a week during the high season (Nov, Dec, Jan), and just as much during the low season - he just gets paid less. He's our age, and when we asked him if he was married he basically said that it was really hard to get married because it's so expensive - about $5000. That's a lot of money for us, but nearly impossible for him. He works all day every day, and still only makes $150/month. He rents a room in an apartment outside the city for $40/month. He was such a sweet, hard-working guy that it just broke our hearts to think of him never being able to get ahead, no matter how hard he works. Everyone there seemed to work insane hours. It kind of made me feel like a pig - I can't imagine what they must think of all these tourists who come and drop more money in a week than they'll ever see in their life. And everyone was SO nice, always smiling at us and helping us and just chatting with us.
We took a 45 minute drive to go on a tour of a floating village. We went pretty early in the morning, and Sam took us to a less touristy one, so we only passed one or two other boats along the way.

There's Sam in the background - he came with us, which was nice because nobody out there spoke English.
After maybe a half hour boat ride through these narrow little rivers, it opened up to the village area, which stretched on for quite a while.
I took a bazillion pictures - I couldn't help it. Every little structure we passed was crazy and different and I just couldn't quit staring. It's so weird to think that this is where/how people live.


This is the village school. The little kids carpool to school in canoes.

After the village it's another 10 minutes or so before the river empties out into the Tonle Sap, the biggest lake in Southeast Asia.


You could see forever in every direction, and it was so quiet. We just sat there in silence for 10-15 minutes.
Then we headed back past the floating village, only this time the kid pulled between 2 houses and took us to a lady's house to eat.
Every house seemed to have something funny at the bottom, like pigs.
And bikes. What are they going to do with a bike?
In some areas, the water was super shallow and the kids who were too young to be at school would fish and swim.
The house with the red awning is where we ate lunch. Just as we were finishing, the little boats full of school children started arriving.

Everywhere we went the little kids seemed like they were having so much fun, even if they were working. These little dudes were swimming and playing in the mud and were having the time of their lives.
These next pictures are all of Angkor Wat (the specific temple, not the park in general). It's SO beautiful. We'd driven past it early in the morning (when it was too crowded with tourists) when it was all misty and cool, and I about died. Wow.
Every other time we'd driven past it there were hundreds of people along this walkway. Yay Sam!


Even though I knew it would be super boring to get home and have 10 million pictures of carvings, it somehow didn't stop me from taking pictures non stop. You just wouldn't believe the quantity and detail of the carvings. Every single temple we went to had centuries worth of work - it makes you so curious why it was so important to them. There's no way I'd be writing this blog post if each word took me weeks of work. Not a chance.
There were cool lizards all over the place.
I about died going up those steps. I ended up losing 10 pounds on this trip from getting sick, but I'm sure at least a pound or two was from going up and down thousands of steps like this.
One set was so steep that they had to have railings for people to hold on to.
Most of the temples had these little shrines in them, and usually some old lady who would keep the incense lit and take donations.

There were tons of Buddhist monks all over the place; their orange robes were SO gorgeous against the rock of the temples. I kept wanting to take pictures of them, but didn't want to be rude, so I had to wait until they were far away and wouldn't notice. :)





None of the bathrooms in Cambodia were nice, but this was my first experience with a little hole in the ground for you to squat over. Plus they wanted to charge us to use it. It was pretty nasty, but we tried to play it off like it was normal, so as not to come across as hoity-toity Americans.
This is what the four entrances to the park look like - one on the north, south, east, and west.


This guy walked around with us for awhile and tried to get us to come to church with him. We got a nice little lesson in Buddhist history. Except not really, because his English was...not awesome. But he was a sweet guy.



There were tons of trees with crazy vines - these were super spiky. I was imagining the ancient people using them to make ridiculous weapons.
We. Rode. An. Elephant. But as amazing as it was, it might be one of those things that I just check off the list, because I'm not sure my back/neck could handle another elephant ride. Especially because I hurt my neck pretty bad at that last temple with the monk. I went to step through a super short doorway, but I had a hat on and couldn't see how short it was, and slammed my head into the top of it super hard. So it was actually kind of painful to get jostled around on the elephant. I can't even describe how rough of a ride it was - I felt like I deserved an award for staying on for 8 seconds. But it was SO cool!

It was nuts passing the other elephants on their way down. So amazing to see them so up close.

Up at the top is a temple that has an insane view of the whole valley. Every night people trek up there to see the sunset.
You can see Angkor Wat in the distance.
I wish the pictures would show how amazing everything looked from up there.
The closer it got to sunset, the more and more crowded it got up there.

About this point we decided to climb down then, rather than braving the crowds after the sun had set.


There are tons of water buffalo along the sides of the road - such a scary animal. I was happy to stay in the car for these pictures. :)
We took an hour-long drive to some mountain whose name I can't remember.
We went on a hike to see the River of a Thousand Lingas. Lingas are these ancient, underwater carvings. I don't know why they carved them underwater - maybe the non-underwater carving was just getting too easy and they wanted a challenge
More crazy vines...

There were a few spots with really amazing views of the valley.

This vine was a perfect swing.
This is at the lingas at the end of the hike. These holes are super deep and went straight down to the river below.
Here are some of the carvings.






On the way back we stopped at Banteay Srei, a set of temples that's quite a ways away from Angkor Wat, where the majority of the temples are. They had this map that showed a timeline of when other famous structures were being built in comparison with the temples here. Pretty interesting.
I always like how signs in foreign countries put things. These were the directional signs that told you the way to go.
It's hard to see that tree in the background, but it's made up of zillions of spiky vines. Weird.


This is a tiny little temple at Banteay Srei that was one of our favorites.

You'd think it would get boring after so many days of walking through temples, but they were all so different. They were built over centuries, and it was interesting to see the difference between the older ones and the newer ones.

This is what Cambodian writing looks like - I love it.
On the way home we stopped at the mine museum. I don't think I was prepared for how intense of an experience it would be. I knew quite a bit about Cambodian history, because Lance is way into it and has had me read books about it. But going through the museum just made it all so real - especially reading about America's part in it, from their point of view. So sad.
The guy who owns the museum was forced to be a child soldier for the Khmer Rouge. After he escaped, he spent the rest of his life finding and destroying mines, which still litter the country. He also runs an orphanage (behind the museum) for kids whose parents were killed by mines.



Sam stopped on the way home to show us how the women prepare sugar cane. The sides of the streets are full of them. They melt it in those fire pit thingies, then shape it into little disks, then wrap a dozen or so disks into a husk and sell them for a dollar. They mostly use it to cook with, but Sam said they also eat it as a treat. The lady gave Lance one to try, and if we was less polite, he would've spit it out. But he still bought a roll, because when you look in the eyes of these people, you have to buy whatever they're selling. Needless to say, we kind of tried to avoid eye contact.
This was the longest worm I've ever seen. It was probably a foot long.

I think the middle-right one is no sneezing. Lance thinks it's no yelling. Either way, you ARE allowed to throw away your garbage and wear shirts, so that's good.
Lance thinks I have insanely good balance (he's right), and would laugh at how easily I'd amble up steep things that other people need to use their hands or railings for.


We'd been passing these little mounds of dirt for days before Sam mentioned that they were termite nests. Some of them were HUGE, like almost as tall as me. So weird.
This was at the Killing Fields museum, which was another sad, sad place. This is just a tiny, tiny representation of the people killed during Pol Pot's regime. Throughout the week as we spent hours and hours in the car with Sam, we (mostly Lance) asked him question after question about Cambodian life, politics, the war, how Cambodians feel about Americans and the Vietnamese, and any other topic you can think of. He always answered really honestly, and it was SO interesting to learn about everything. Our trip would've been so different if we'd gotten a driver who didn't speak much English, or didn't love chatting - I feel like this trip was just as much about the people as it was about sight seeing.
Sam took us to a couple of factories - it was crazy to see how everything was made. It was also crazy to think of a tourist buying something like a mini replica of Angkor Wat. Kind of hard to fit in your suitcase.
I wish I got more pictures of Siem Riep. This was the downtown area where there were all kinds of shops and restaurants and markets. I felt like a turd getting a burger while in Cambodia, but I have to say it was the best burger I've ever had in my life. I still remember sitting in that Irish Pub with my burger and fresh squeezed pineapple juice, listening to Queen, just feeling on top of the world. Cambodia is such a happy place. Well for me, anyway - slightly less happy for some people.
This was the one street we went down where it seemed to be a little more posh, with expensive clothes and fancier stuff.
I was smitten by these tin cans and paper cups dipped in ceramic, or whatever. I wanted one SO bad! I'm going to do my best to figure out how to make one myself.
Everything was so cool at night, all lit up and sparkly. And it was nice to be outside when it wasn't hot.
I know this shot is really blurry, but I love how the one thing in focus is the girl trying to get people to eat at her restaurant. Every restaurant had them, and I can still hear the sound of their cute little voices saying, "Lady you want cold drink?!"
The next day we took a 2-hour drive to Kulen Mountain. Our first stop was to visit the giant Buddha statue. The path was filled with merchants selling stuff. There were so many things we would have loved to buy, but we were traveling with one small backpack each, which can barely hold 2 weeks worth of stuff as it is.
This isn't the best shot of the Buddha, but it's super long and golden and pretty crazy.
It's inside this giant shack thingy, which is at the top of a bunch of stairs.
The view from up there was beautiful - you could see out over the whole forest.

That's the little hut the Buddha is in. I don't know why they chose to carve it out of a 50 ft rock.

A popular side-of-the-road treat is smashed, fried bananas on a stick. Sadly, I never got to try one. We had bananas for breakfast every morning though, and they were delicious - way better than the ones here. We had a buffet every morning at the hotel, and it was a pretty weird mixture of stuff. My usual breakfast was bananas, porridge, hard boiled eggs, spanish peanuts, toast and jam, fried egg, lemonade, and friend rice. Whoa - that sounds like a lot of food. But...we needed a lot of fuel to be able to hike up zillions of temple stairs every day. :)
This was a small little hike close to the Buddha where there were more underwater carvings.
This was a natural spring with super fine, white mud bubbling at the bottom. I wanted to get in and swim, but it looked way too much like quick sand.
This was at the top of the huge waterfall, which might have been our favorite part of the trip.
On the way down to the bottom there was one of many little swings made and decorated by the old ladies.

This was my first glimpse of the falls - it was like I was peeking into heaven.
There were only a few people down there - it was so quiet and peaceful, and the roar of the water was so loud and powerful. I love that sound.


I hadn't really thought about swimming in the falls, so I hadn't brought a swim suit. Luckily I was able to pay a little old lady $.50 to borrow her stuff. I WISH I had a picture of my get up - it was ridiculously awesome. But it did the trick. Lance ended up with some sweet florescent 80's trunks with the net in them. We were quite the pair.
Even my pitiful camera couldn't make this place look meh. It was so gorgeous!

There was another decorated swing that we took some pictures on, after which an old lady sitting nearby started trying to tell us something. We had no clue what she was saying - she just kept gesturing toward the swing. Sam saw us trying to talk to her and came over to translate. He looked embarrassed and said, "She wants you to give her $1 for using her swing." Funny.
We swam all around the base of the waterfall - it got pretty insane the closer we got to the falls, like the water was going to just pound us into the ground.
This was back up at the top of the waterfall. For how much water there was spilling over the edge, it was surprisingly calm.
This is right before it goes over the edge, and people were walking right through it to get the the ruins on the other side.

They were just tiny, but they were cool. I don't know what the ancients were thinking when they built all the temples. All the stone they used came from Kulen Mountain, and had to be transported by elephants to the building sites (a two-hour car ride away, so who knows how long of an elephant trek). I would have built ALL my temples next to the gorgeous waterfall.

On the ride home Sam pulled over to show us a jack fruit tree, because I'd been wondering what they look like. You can't see it in the picture very well, but it's right next to the top of the middle post. They are HUGE, like the size of a watermelon. We were dying that they hung from these tiny branches .
This was the war museum in Siem Reap. We hadn't had a drop of rain until right as we were going in the museum. Perfect timing.

We took 2 pictures before noticing the "no pictures" signs. Oops. It was a pretty cool museum. By the time we got out, the sun was shining again, so we went back to the hotel and went swimming.
The pool was super nice. That's our hotel in the background.

On the other side of the pool was the massage place, and a little house - we weren't quite sure who lived there.

Right behind our chairs was this beautiful little field with chickens running around in it.

I think it was right after swimming that I started getting sick. I'll spare you the details, but I spent the next week barely able to get out of bed. As horrible as it was, I have to say that it was good timing. After the 5th day, we made the comment that we'd pretty much seen everything we'd wanted to see and weren't sure exactly what we'd do for the next 2 days that we were in Cambodia. Lance went out a couple of times while I was sleeping or just watching movies. We were so sad to leave Cambodia - it was definitely a life-changing experience.
These were a bunch of frogs outside the window at the Siem Reap airport. They were everywhere!
We spent the next week in Hanoi, Vietnam. Our hotel room in was tiny, but super nice and comfortable, which I normally wouldn't care about, but I knew how much time I was going to be spending in bed. It was also nice to have the internet for the first time in over a week, although I have to admit that it was really nice to be so disconnected for so long.My favorite thing to do when getting to a hotel is put away all my things so I don't feel like I'm living out of a suitcase. This place had tons of good compartments.Plus it had the nicest shower ever. By the time we got there it was time to go to bed. The next morning, a shuttle bus picked us up at 8:00 for a 3-hour ride to Ha Long Bay, where we were going to take a 3-day cruise. Our tour guide, Anna, was awesome. She was born and raised in Vietnam, but her English was near perfect, and she spoke amazing Spanish and Dutch too. She was so cute. We chatted with her most of the way there.
There were about 24 of us on the cruise. Most of them were on the shuttle bus with us, and a couple met us at the harbor. The docks were filled with little boats to tender people out to the bigger ships.
The one on the right was ours. I love the look of the junk boats.
Our cabin turned out to be really nice - much nicer than a cruise ship cabin.
The shower was awesome - other than the fact that it only had about 5 minutes of hot water. Sorry Lance!
The bed was cozy and the windows were our favorite. They were huge, and you could open them up and sit on the window sill. Ahhhh.
This was the dining area. I was a little nervous for the food - I was still barely able to eat anything. But they ended up serving some really good stuff - lots of Vietnamese food, but plenty of American food too.
The pictures don't even begin to capture the beauty of this place. Everywhere we went it was another spectacular view.
I especially loved all the little caves around the islands.




We spent lots of time up on the deck. They had a bunch of lawn chairs, and it was just so peaceful and quiet up there. And it was nice that even though I wasn't feeling well enough to do much, I could just sit there and watch the beautiful scenery go by.
We passed one or two little floating villages, which really only consisted of a few houses, and a couple of little stores.

This was the big cave that we got to go through. I'm so glad I was feeling up to it - it was insane! From the outside it didn't look very big, but when we got inside it just went on and on and on.
This was standing inside that mouth of the cave that you could see in the last picture. This little bay gets stuffed full of junks - it's quite the sight.
The caves were pretty crowded, so we didn't stop to take too many pictures.
Each cavern we went in was bigger and cooler than the last. They had different lights in each of them - I loved the glowing effect.


After the cave tour we went kayaking around the bay. We took our waterproof camera with us, but when we went to turn it on, the battery was dead. So this is a picture I took after we got back on the boat, of other people kayaking. It was super fun. I didn't have much strength, so Lance did pretty much all of the paddling. It was fun to go up close to the islands and explore them. I would have loved to get out and do some swimming or snorkeling.
The spot where you get the kayaks had a bunch of goody boats. They had pretty much every treat you could possibly want - candy, chips, crackers, beer, cigarettes, gum, water, you name it.
This is a sucky picture, but the spot where we anchored for the night was the Las Vegas of Ha Long Bay. Zillions of boats all over the place with flashing lights and loud music. It was quite the sight.
When we woke up in the morning, Lance was feeling sick. I was SO sad, knowing exactly how he was feeling. We were supposed to go on a day trip to an island to go biking and eat lunch and do some more kayaking. I wasn't feeling great, but I'd been planning to go anyway, so Lance wouldn't miss out on the fun. So it was nice to be able to not go and not have it be my fault. :) We took a nice long nap, and just took it easy on the boat.
This was the one island we saw that had any sort of beach. We didn't get very close to it though.
Sitting in the window was my favorite. There were were little ladies in row boats who would come row right to your window to sell you stuff. Lance was dying for some American food, so he got some Oreos and I got some crackers. The Oreos were the best ones I've ever had.

Here she was paddling away from our window. It's not often that the grocery store comes to you.
The sunsets were so beautiful.
Luckily we both had books because we spent a lot of time just sitting on the deck reading.
I don't have any more pictures from the trip, and I can't find the little notebook where I took notes, so it's hard to remember the rest of what we did. The rest of the pictures are from Google. I never felt great the rest of the time, so it was a lot of laying in bed watching movies. They had the same 3 movie channels in both Cambodia and Vietnam, and I'd just flip back and forth stopping on the least lame movie. At one point Lance went out to do some exploring, and came back with 3 movies. They were selling movies that were still in the theaters at home for $.50, and luckily our room had a DVD player. It was so nice to watch some decent movies after the junk I'd been watching. I did venture out of the hotel a couple of times. It was scary to me just to wander the streets; the traffic is so ridiculous that we literally YouTubed "how to cross the street in Hanoi" before we dared try it. There are motorbikes flying at you from all directions, and no such thing as a light or stop sign or anything. I've never been more terrified. We also found out that the only American fast food place in Vietnam was KFC, and there was one not too far from our hotel. I was so excited to eat some not gross food, but it wasn't great. I should have known better. We walked around a big pond in the middle of the city and saw the coolest thing ever. Apparently some hundred-year-old turtle lives in the lake - Hoan Kiem Lake. It's the rarest freshwater turtle in the world, with only 5 in existence. The other 4 are in Chinese zoos.
Can you believe how nasty-looking it is? When we first saw it, nobody was looking. It only stuck its nose out a little, just like in the picture, and we had no idea what it was. I seriously thought it was a monster. We stared at the water, hoping it would come up again, and as soon as people noticed us looking, a little crowd formed. Over the next 20 minutes or so, it surfaced another 4 or 5 times, and the crowd got bigger and bigger. We finally found someone who spoke English to tell us what it was. It was pretty sweet.

This is how thick the traffic of motorbikes is at all times - it's SO nuts.This picture kind of shows how everybody just goes at the same time, and they somehow manage to avoid each other. Well...most of the time. We only saw one accident while we were there. After a couple of days in Hanoi, we took a flight back down to Ho Chi Minh City and stayed there for the last day and a half. It's even bigger and crazier than Hanoi, and I wish I was feeling a little more up to braving the insanity. We wandered the streets a little bit, and spent the rest of the time watching movies in the room. The day that we were leaving it started raining like crazy. We had to go out to get some food, and the streets were like rivers.

This is seriously what it looked like - we were dying. We couldn't believe that people just carried on like normal. Most of the people on motorbikes just pulled over and put on a rain coat, and cruised through the water.The restaurant we were in started flooding, so they moved us up the the second story. We sat next to the floor-to-ceiling window and had a great view of the madness. It was so cool to see. If it wasn't for the thousands of motorbikes I would've loved to go out and wade/swim in it. Oh, and the sewage...

The flights home went well. In total we took 11 flights on the trip, so needless to say, we never wanted to see another airport again. I have to say that I've never been so glad to get home in my life. Although it was an absolutely amazing trip, it was also a bit of an ordeal, between the sickness and just the craziness of the countries we were in. It was SO nice to sleep in our own beds, and get back to our normal routine. We decided that our next trip has to be something super low key, and not halfway around the world.