This is how our last week and a bit in Vietnam has been (this was actually ready on the weekend, but internet has been a bit sketchy so could only get it up and running now!)
An honest take on how it’s really going…

Enjoy!
(Here’s the link if you’d rather watch it later.)

Okay, well, perhaps not quite first impressions – we have been here 10 days by now! But some impressions of Vietnam…

* We were told to be on our guard about scammers and tricksters, and expected to be harangued at every turn. So far, hasn’t happened.

* That said, people are out to make money here, so you have to be aware of that and cleverly sidestep it (for example, you can buy train tickets directly from your hotel, and they tell you the only other option is to go to the train station outside town and buy your tickets from them. Turns out there’s a tourist railway office just around the corner, and it’s US$8 cheaper each to buy from them! But nobody’s going to tell you that, obviously).

* The people here are a lot less wowed by foreigners – in Cambodia and Thailand we felt like we stood out a lot, whereas here the Vietnamese seem much more confident in their own country, and don’t seem to feel the need to kowtow (is that how you spell it?) to foreigners. There’s hardly any English signage anywhere – finding our way around is quite an adventure!

* Things run well here. We’ve been in Ho Chi Minh City (the old Saigon) for the past five days, and we’re amazed how different it is to the other capital cities we’ve been in (mainly Phnom Penh and Bangkok). Traffic is ridiculous – more on that later – but there are wide sidewalks, rubbish is swept away and picked up, and people take charge of their property. I like it!

* Traffic is ridiculous. Completely and utterly insane. For the first day, I stood paralysed on the pavement because I was too scared to step off into the mass of scooters, motorbikes, cars, taxis and buses. Absolutely terrifying. Eventually you just have to step off and trust that they will weave around you, but try remembering that when a bus is heading towards you at full speed! Eek.

* The food is great. Ho Chi Minh is kind of a melting pot of all of Vietnam, so it’s a bit of a hodge-podge menu, but the national dish (pho noodle soup) is light and delicious and fragrant, and there are all kinds of other delicacies to choose from (including spring rolls every way you look, yum!)

* It’s busy here. Reallll busy. We’ve been in the city a couple of days, and have been taking a few hours each day to explore and get lost and found and make a personal map of the city for ourselves. Thank goodness we’ve had the time for this! I think if we only had one or two days it would just be totally overwhelming, but to take it in bite-sized chunks it’s good fun. I’ve actually really enjoyed Ho Chi Minh.

And now! Tonight we catch an 11pm train northwards, to the beachside town of Danang for two or three days, and then into the historical town of Hoi An… I’ll keep you posted!

PS: On the diabetic front, nothing to report. Isn’t that lovely? One of the main things I love about cities is that they have supermarkets, which means I can buy normal food, which means my blood sugar is more stable. We’ve also been walking around so much that I’m getting a good dose of blood-glucose-lowering exercise. Great stuff!

One of my favourite things about our Round-the-World-traveling-with-diabetes journey is that we get to do our Best Moments of the Day, the short video snippets of one daily moment that stands out of the crowd and waves.

In the past week or so we’ve walked in a nature reserve on the border of Cambodia, said a fond farewell to Cambodia (while lounging on a day bed), driven around Phu Quoc island in Vietnam on a motorbike, experienced the (zany) pleasure of a portable karaoke machine in the town of Phu Quoc, taken an aeroplane (a VERY exciting treat after all the dodgy transport we’ve been taking!), come face to face with the madness that is Saigon traffic, and eaten famous pho noodle soup in the capital of Vietnam.

Best of all, these moments are recorded forever (or for a very very long time), so we’ll be able to relive them over and over again.

Here’s my favourite from this week:

Now, though, I’m off to find a new dress. After 2 months of the same boring clothes, I am dying for something a little bit pretty (and a little less travelworn!)
Wish me luck!

I’m back! Sorry, it’s been a bit of a silent week – we’ve had extremely sporadic internet access and I wanted to wait till I had a little down-time to update you properly.

It’s been a lovely week. Ever since my bad health day when we first arrived on Phu Quoc Island I’ve been feeling heaps better (thank goodness!) due in large part, I think, to my secret to travelling with diabetes (which I reveal in this week’s video diary… to be posted tomorrow).

We had a really fun couple of days in Phu Quoc – the first two nights we spent at an eco-friendly resort called Mango Bay, right in the middle of nowhere surrounded by stunning views and beautiful beaches. Then we moved to town (we were craving shops and snacks and easy access to things), although still with a beautiful sea view and a mere 3 minute walk from the sea. What a stunning sea it is! Clear and bright blue, no waves, warm… heavenly! (You can see some footage of it in our video diary and in our best moments… Be warned, though! You might get jealous.)

We had a fair amount of work to do – catching up on hotel reviews for Just the Planet and real work, to try and earn some money as we travel (turns out travelling is rather pricey, who knew?) But we made time each day, usually around sunset, for a long swim in the sea, just as the sun dipped into it and turned it golden-pink-and-purple. Incredible.

It was during one of these late sunset swims that it hit me (once again) how lucky we are to be this age, living this adventure. I feel like there’s this small window of time in life – when you’re old enough to be able to have a clear head and look after yourself overseas, but not so old that you have a mortgage and responsibilities – and we are lucky enough to not only be in that stage but be living it to the full. Some days I find myself longing for a slice of familiarity or to see my family or my friends, but most of the time I feel (quite rightly) like the luckiest girl in the world.

The feeling was heightened by finding this fantastic little restaurant right on the beach where we could sit at small, lantern-lit tables, our feet in the sand, and eat delicious fresh seafood and yummy barbecue, while sipping on iced fresh lemon juice (my new favourite drink – about as diabetically friendly as you can get with something resembling fruit juice). This place (whose name I can’t remember) became our regular hang-out for its’ really reasonable, really fresh food. If you’re planning a visit to Phu Quoc, pop me an email and I’ll give you directions J

We also spent a day scootering all over the island on a hired motorbike, exploring little side streets and beaches, and picnicking right next to the sea… And we popped into the night market for some authentic Vietnamese food (delicious! Although a little strange, I was served flat squares of vermicelli noodles with my pork. Hmmm… How many carbohydrates would that be?)

And then we jetted off to Ho Chi Minh, or Saigon, as it is still known, on our first aeroplane in months! Turns out it was only $20 more expensive to take a 1 hour flight than a 2 and a half hour ferry and a 7 hour bus ride, so we treated ourselves… And what a treat it was. I’ll fill you in on our delicious time in Saigon so far in the next day or two – looks like we’ll probably be more connected this week… If you have any tips for us for Ho Chi Minh, let us know asap (please!)

Any suggestions for us as we head to the North of Vietnam?

… I get really sick of being diabetic. Today is one of those days, I’m afraid.

The last day or two I’ve had pretty crazy blood sugar – really high and really low, which is unusual for me. Yesterday, Border Crossing Day, was particularly bad. I was strangely high after breakfast, then strangely low a few hours later, low again before lunch and then high after lunch, despite having taken enough insulin. I couldn’t figure it out – I’d changed my short-acting (daytime) insulin a few days before, so I couldn’t blame that, and I was sure I was taking enough for the food I was eating. I actually started thinking I might have some kind of allergic reaction to crossing borders – that the stress of avoiding scams and waking up really early and figuring out a new country’s code of conduct made my blood sugar go haywire.

Not a particularly medically sound diagnosis but, you know…

It was only as I was lying on a garden lounger watching the sun set over the sea that I hit upon the answer. I think it was from watching a fishing boat bob in the waves – it made me think that my blood sugar readings didn’t seem to have an anchor, they were really up and really down. Anchoring blood sugar is the job not of your daytime (short-acting) insulin, but your nighttime (long-acting) insulin – the one I take every night before I go to bed. And that made me realise that although I’d changed my daytime pen a few days before, because it wasn’t working properly and had obviously been heat-damaged, I stupidly hadn’t changed my nighttime pen (extremely foolish, seeing as I carry them around in the same bag). D’oh!

But still , a solution! I went to dinner feeling rather pleased with myself, and made sure to take a fresh pen out of the cooler full of insulin I kept in the fridge.

And then.

I woke up this morning feeling like death-warmed-up. Exhausted, heavy and with flashing eyes, a sign that a migraine was just around the corner. It wasn’t a fully-fledged migraine, I must admit, but it was enough to send me back to bed, miserable, head pounding and feeling nauseous. Not a great first day in paradise!

I’ve just surfaced now, after 3pm, and I’m feeling somewhat human again, but pissed off at diabetes. I feel like it’s one of the only conditions that never gives you a break (this may be an emotional rather than a logical statement). If you work too hard and abuse your body, you’ll usually get a cold or flu or feel rundown, but if you catch it in time you’ll be fine. If you drink too much you’ll usually get a hangover, but sometimes you’ll be fine. But if you have a crazy blood sugar day, even if you figure out the problem and sleep 11 hours and do all you can to rectify it, it still punishes you with a bad health day the next day. I know, I know, you can’t look at it as punishment, but that’s what it feels like today. I want to say to my body: “Seriously, can you not give me one day off? Can the diabetes not take a back seat for one day? Please?’

But of course it can’t.
That’s the whole beauty of a chronic condition, it never takes a day off.
And just for today, I wish it were otherwise.

Tomorrow I’ll be chirpy and feeling well again, I’m sure. For today? I’m taking it reaaaallly easy. I think I’ll go for a stroll in the garden, check out some of the indigenous trees, and maybe take a dip in the ocean. Restore my perspective a little. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

PS – It’s a few hours later, and my blood sugar has stabilized, so I feel like myself again. I’ve also remembered that a side-effect of high blood sugar is that it makes me irritable… Something to bear in mind next time I’m blogging on a high!

As you can see from our photo, we managed to cross the border into Vietnam without too much bother. Compared to our Cambodian border crossing, actually, it was a breeze!

We woke up early yesterday morning, all prepped for the journey ahead from having read lots of accounts of the Ha Tien border crossing between Cambodia and Vietnam (it’s only been open a short while, so we tried to get as much info as possible – don’t you love the internet?)

The first stage of our journey was to get from the small seaside town of Kep to the Vietnam border, about an hour ride on a tuktuk. Tuktuks, as I’ve mentioned before, are charming little motorbike-driven vehicles, open-air and perfect for getting around town in short bursts. Not so perfect for traveling in with all your luggage for over an hour, most of the way on a bumpy dirt road, but our driver was a champ and took us all the way to the border (most of the time the tuktuks stop a few kilometers beforehand, and make you pile all your stuff onto motorbikes for the last haul).

Getting through Cambodian customs was no problem – surprisingly. We had to overstay our visas by a day because we could only get 30 days in Vietnam and our flights to Indonesia are on the 2nd of December, but they simply charged us the (official) nominal fee, and even gave us a receipt! Marvelous.

Then we hopped onto the backs of motorbikes and zooted off to the Vietnamese customs area. We filled in our forms and had our visas checked no problem (they don’t issue them at the border), and even got a 50% discount on the scam fee – most people said they had to pay $2 to get their passports back, we only had to pay $1! Bonus.
But then.
To pass over into Vietnam we had to get our visas stamped, and the stamping-visa-man was nowhere to be found. You would think that at a border crossing with only one conceivable restaurant and no other entertainment spots, it would be quite simple to find one man, but no. We waited over an hour (along with a group of ten other people wanting to cross the border) for this one guy to pitch up – never mind that there were at least five others who (surely?) could have stamped our passports. When he finally arrived (no apology) he proceeded to make three phonecalls before getting to our passports. I would have been seething, but I kept thinking that this was the last step before freedom…

And it was! We set off for the Ha Tien Bus Station, about fifteen minutes on the bikes, I think, to catch a 2 hour bus to Rach Gia, from where we would catch a two and a half hour ferry to the island of Phu Quoc (pronounced something like foowark), our home for the next few days.

The bus station was a patch of dirt with a small sign. No ticket office, no schedule and (more worryingly) no buses. We were approached immediately by a skinny guy with long neck hairs claiming to be a tourism official and telling us that we would have to wait two days (two days!) for the next bus, but luckily we’d read up on this bus station and were on red alert for ‘a skinny guy with long neck hairs who speaks good English’! The guy really needs to cut his neck hairs if he wants to further his scamming career.

Just then, as we were wondering what to do, a young Danish guy walked up, eating a baguette. One of the refreshing things about traveling in an Asian country is that you don’t need any excuse to talk to other Westerners – the fact that you both speak English is excuse enough. We started chatting, and it turned out he’d just come from Phu Quoc, and had taken the Ha Tien ferry from just down the road (the one that website forums had warned us was ‘un-seaworthy’ – so you can’t believe everything you read!) Thanks to our serendipitous meeting, we trundled down the road for a few minutes, found not only the ferry but a lovely booking office (hooray!) and managed to get onto the next boat, leaving in 2 hours, just enough time for an ice-cold freshly squeezed lemon juice (my new favourite drink) and to get some local currency and a local SIM card. Should have been enough time to eat, too, but somehow our fried noodles took 45 minutes to prepare, so we had take-away for the ferry. Which was, incidentally, completely seaworthy.

The two hours on the boat passed very pleasantly chatting to two other travelers, and we arrived at the hectic pier of Phu Quoc in one piece (hectic because of the crowds waiting to try and convince you to take their taxi / minibus / motorbike). Luckily we’d booked a ride ahead of time, and slipped out of the madness and into Vietnam.

So far, so beautiful. We’re staying at an eco-friendly resort right on the beach, with stunning sea views on all sides and natural indigenous forest. I’m having a bad health day today (more on that in the next blog), but it is a simply stunning entry into Vietnam.

Any tips for us about Vietnam?