Going to school in Vietnam & Buddhas & Butterflys in Penang!

A new port on our Asian run was Nha Trang, Vietnam which is a coastal resort city in southern Vietnam where one of the big attractions is to take the cable car over to Hon Tre Island. Although there was still a million motorbikes everyone the pace Nha Trang seemed much more relaxed than the hustle and bustle of Ho Chi Minh City

Tha highlight of our excurison was a trip into the countryside where we were going to visit a local school, something that on paper really did seem that an interesting idea until we were there.

As we entered all the kids were lined up and performed a tradtional song for us which the guests all loved, admittedly with none of us speaking Vietamese they could have been calling us a bunch of arseholes and we would have been none the wiser. Once the performance part was over it was like being in a BBC documentary, we were getting mobbed by the kids and of course having a massive camera with me all the kids swarmed me. I flipped the camera around so they could see themselves on the LCD and they went wild. It had never occured to me that these kids probably had not seen a video camera or seen themselves on a screen before, even back in 2008 the cultural differences were massive.

Our tour guide told me an interesting fact (though I'm also not sure if it was true and he was messing with me!) during our lunch about the traditional pointy hats that lots of people were wearing. These hats were everywhere and I hadn't given it a thought until he said 'but do you see any men wearing them?' I had a quick look around and couldn't see any men wearing them 'So why's that?' I asked 'Because only women wear them, so it is always funny to us when we see tourists arrive and all the men buy these hats and wear them!' After a bit of googling I don't think what he told me was completely true but there are subtle differences between male and female tradtional hats, 'so what do men wear then?' I asked 'Baseball caps' was the reply.

Next on our countryside tour was a walk through some of the paddy fields and the amazing sight you'll see in the above and below pictures!

A massive field full of ducks, now being English you equate seeing ducks with water and ponds, not in the middle of rice field and in such great number, also the noise they made was deafening as well. I regret I never asked how and why in response but I was too busy shooting as much footage of the ducks as I could as I knew that one shot of hundreds of ducks would be a scene stopper onboard!

Next we went to small open air market which in a post Covid world is somewhere I doubt all the handwashing instructions are being followed. It was the smells of this place that really stood out and as you walked through there was almost always someone hacking at some raw meat somewhere.

It was a good first trip to Nha Trang and I'd be back a few more times in later years and I'll post those videos in some later blogs but the next stop for this blog is Penang, Malayasia and one of the most disappointing tours I've been on for not living up to the name and description in the brochure.

Now if you are going to market a tour as 'Snake Temple' to your average western tourist most of us are going to think of Indiana Jones and Raiders of the lost ark! I was so excited for this tour, not because I love snakes but because it sounded so cool! I had visions of a dark lamp lit cave as we descended deeper underground to a writhing mass of serpentine terror, instead we got this -

If you look near the top of the picture you can see two small snakes wrapped around the tops of those sticks, which was inside a very small temple along the side of the road. No danger, no fear, no 'why did it have to be snakes?' instead we got two smallish snakes asleep in a tiny shrine, disappointed was an understatement!

Afterwards it was on to another temple & you haven't spend a day ashore in Malaysia unless you've seen at least 3 temples, now multiply that by days & weeks and I'd pretty much had my fill of temples by now.

I think part of the problem on my first run through Malaysia was that I was still learning the job, the filming conditions were not ideal and I never really had time to prep and learn about the places I was visiting which meant every day was a run and gun shoot.

Our final stop was pretty cool though at the Penang Butterfly farm where we would walk through the subtropical temperature controlle areas with more butterflys than you've ever seen in your life flying past and landing on you.

I'd enjoyed my first run through Asia & Malyasia but now we were getting ready to head back to Sydney and prep for our 3 month long world cruise!

On the next cruise diairies - Prepping for a world cruise!