Our Trip To South Vietnam  -2017

By: Shoubhik Bose & Debanjana Maitra

Shoubhik and Debanjana, senior engineers in software companies of repute in Bangalore love travelling in India and abroad. They take time out to share their experiences through their travelogues.

The Love For Tea

Being a bengali, it wasn’t hard to share the immense love for tea which the Vietnamese had.

Quán cóc ( ‘hot’ or ‘iced’ green tea ) is a part of Vietnamese culture.

‘Tra Chanh’ ( Lemon tea ) is used as a slang for hanging out thanks to the popularity of tea amongst youngsters!

I did get chance to touch their pet snake as well as hold their beehive.

We walked down to another hut in the vicinity where local performers sang Western and Vietnamese contemporary songs.

The locals offered us exotic fruits which Mekong Delta is famous for.

Vinh Long Rambutan

We boarded one of these hand-driven(‘rowed’) blue boats to head for lunch where they had cooked chicken specially for us. Interestingly, the boats were driven by a male member of the family but always navigated by one of the female members of the family.

 

Lunch was overwhelming — we had Vietnamese ‘sushi’ spring rolls and the Vietnamese rice ball, all cooked in an open kitchen in the village, for us.

Catch of the day ! The locals taught us how to make sushi rolls by taking out the fish crumbs from the cooked fish.

Post-lunch we hopped on to one of the boats to relax while we headed back to the assembly point from where we had started out trip.

Pagodas of South Vietnam

A visit to this part of the world couldn’t be complete without a visit to a Pagoda. Quan Âm Pagoda is a Chinese-style Buddhist pagoda in Ho Chi Minh City. Founded in the 19th century, it is dedicated to the Chinese goddess of mercy and the Chinese form of the Indian bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara.

On the way back, we stopped at Ben Thanh market where shopkeepers encourage you to haggle, if you don’t you literally get chased down the street by the shopkeeper.

Our stay and commute

We stayed at a hotel called “Bong Sen Saigon” — whose name had a funny similarity to the colloquial term used for Bengalis.

Kolkata has taxis which have a meter but rarely agree to run on meter.
Bangalore doesn’t have taxis other than the app-aggregators.

For a change, we loved the ‘Vinsun’ taxis in Ho Chi Minh City which run on always run on meter, were equipped with GPS and always had electronic payment machines.

The local currency was Vietnamese Dong and 1 Indian Rupee equals 355.11 Vietnamese Dong — and that implied I was a Vietnamese millionaire ?

Cost of living, urban commute and business — Vietnam surely has come a long way from decades of turbulence. For someone born in a tropical country, Vietnam is a great place to unwind and learn about world history.

This blog has also been published in https://medium.com/@sbose78/our-trip-to-south-vietnam-2017-d8d6e781d8e7 

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