Jeep Tour - Market, Enormous Buddha, Children's Parade
Next morning the four of us got a Jeep with a guy called Then who we'd met in the restaruant the night before and headed around the market. This made for a very inciteful trip - with him doing all the bargaining we got pineapple for 4000 dong, 1kg of bananas for 4000 dong and coconut also for 4000 dong. We've been paying more like 10,000 after hard bargaining - cheeky buggers!! Still that is only 33p. I was also going to have a look at T-Shirts but they all just had I Love Vietnam designs on which wasn't quite what I was looking for.
The Americans really would have cried if they'd seen how our driver drove the Jeep - he was more careful over the random packed-stone section which joined two sections of dual-carriageway than we'd have been if we were driving over it in a car!
A cable car took us up a mountain in the middle of the plains to a temple which they were still building! We were beginnign to think we'd got conned! A bit more of a climb and we saw it - a 49m reclining Buddha! We've seen a lot of Buddha's now but this was definitely impressive. Its certainly the largest in Vietnam, and we're also told the largest in Asia - I'll check this before claiming it though! It was definitely a little less maintained and respected than the ones in Thailand though going by the grafitti work. The Buddha also came complete with its own selection of luminous-orange crabs!
We timed our journey back through the middle of Phan Thiet really well - finding ourselves suddenly in the middle of scores of childrens parades, each school dressed in a different brightly-coloured costume in celebration of the end of their school year! And we only got muck-up day!
The final stop was Po Shanu tower, a Cham tower overlooking the coast and dating from the 8th century. A little hard to see in the fading light but nice too see all the same.
That night we chilled out playing guitar and then tried to get Skype working with Moneybookers then deciding to block my account as it didn't like my credit card, nor that I was accessing it from Vietnam. Grrrrrrr - overly safe systems are the downfall of travellers once again!
The Americans really would have cried if they'd seen how our driver drove the Jeep - he was more careful over the random packed-stone section which joined two sections of dual-carriageway than we'd have been if we were driving over it in a car!
A cable car took us up a mountain in the middle of the plains to a temple which they were still building! We were beginnign to think we'd got conned! A bit more of a climb and we saw it - a 49m reclining Buddha! We've seen a lot of Buddha's now but this was definitely impressive. Its certainly the largest in Vietnam, and we're also told the largest in Asia - I'll check this before claiming it though! It was definitely a little less maintained and respected than the ones in Thailand though going by the grafitti work. The Buddha also came complete with its own selection of luminous-orange crabs!
We timed our journey back through the middle of Phan Thiet really well - finding ourselves suddenly in the middle of scores of childrens parades, each school dressed in a different brightly-coloured costume in celebration of the end of their school year! And we only got muck-up day!
The final stop was Po Shanu tower, a Cham tower overlooking the coast and dating from the 8th century. A little hard to see in the fading light but nice too see all the same.
That night we chilled out playing guitar and then tried to get Skype working with Moneybookers then deciding to block my account as it didn't like my credit card, nor that I was accessing it from Vietnam. Grrrrrrr - overly safe systems are the downfall of travellers once again!
Labels: Vietnam
posted by Ian Matthias at
10/15/2006 08:08:00 am
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