Saigon
Pam got back from the north about midday on Thursday. I will let her blog about her experiences when she gets a minute. I am looking forward to reading about them as much as you are. Although I have heard bits and pieces, I have yet to hear the full story, Pam not being as given to verbal fluency as one who continues to make his comfortable living from such activities.

Our last afternoon and evening we spent hunting for souvenirs to bring to Canada in June. Vietnam is home to some remarkable craftsmanship, much more so that any South-East Asian country we have yet seen. Carvings, paintings, woodwork, lacquer work and ceramics are all done at any exceptionally fine level of craftsmanship, and we were hard pressed to choose from such a rich assortment.
Vietnam Laquer Crafts
Choices finally made we settled on some tasty noodles for supper, cuisine being another well developed aspect of Vietnamese culture and then went for a stroll along Nguyen Hue in the cool evening air. Saigon, with its blend of American hustle, French cuisine and civic planning and Asian culture and resilience, is a captivating city.

But Saigon is not Vietnam, and we both got out of the city enough to see that. With a coastline of 3,500 kilometres – longer than the distance from Key West to Bangor, Maine – there is clearly a lot of the country that we didn’t get to see. Fortunately for us Vietnam is less than two hours and only about $70 US away from us in KL. It may have taken us more than two years to get here, but we are both thinking that it will not take that long to get back.