Rain, rain go away come again another day.

Bella likes a free ride

Just before the rain....

Rain is down right evil especially when you are not equipped for it and you have a soggy, tired, cold three year old baby with you. Yesterday we went out once again to go look around the busy streets of Old Delhi to look for gifts. At the time we went out it was a nice, sunny day not too hot, not too cold, like a normal Canadian summer day. We flagged down the nearest tuk tuk which brought other tuk tuk drivers to us. My father briefly bargained for the best price which is about 100 rupees or 1.79 Canadian dollars. The traffic was so bad we decided to get out and walk the rest of the way (which was about 3 blocks). After walking for a bit we noticed that we were in the shoe retail area and my mom saw some sparkly slippers that she liked, so we decided to walk around this area for a little so my mom could get some sparkly slippers for her and Bella. After buying multiple pairs of slippers for my mom and no luck

In the tunnels of downtown Old Delhi

for Bella, we wandered around the area looking for a pair for Bella. By then it was starting to get a little cloudy after about half an hour we gave up. Jack, our navigator, said that it would be a little faster to take a few small side streets to get to our destination. At  that time it was starting to rain a little and I thought it was just going to pass. After about 45 minutes of walking through little tunnels and side streets, we were lost. By then it was raining a little harder, nothing that bad though. It was about 2 o'clock by the time we got back to the streets and we were all starting to get a little hungry so we stopped at a little corner store to get a snack which consisted of cookies and pastries. By then it was raining very hard and my dad just said that it would pass in a few minutes. Ten minutes later it was raining very badly and we all decided that we would make a break for it to the street to get a tuk tuk back to our hotel. It took about 5 minutes of running in the rain to get to the street and by then my shoulders were soaked and in the tuk tuk the rain just blew in the sides and made us even wetter. By the time we good back to the hotel we were all very soggy doggy's. Later that day when we were all dry we looked for the forecast and it said that its going to rain for the next few days (weee).

Traveling!

The Botanical Gardens in Singapore

Humayun's Toumb in Delhi

My Dad at Qutab Minar in Delhi

In the past few days we have been traveling a lot.  Four days ago we said goodbye to Vietnam and took our flight to Singapore. In Singapore we went on a little walk around a botanical garden.  After that Jack, my mom, and I went to a mall to look at cameras, but everything is more expensive than Canada (from what we saw). The next day we took our flight to New Delhi, which was a lovely 6 hour flight (6 hours are my new favorite time for traveling). We arrived in New Dehli 2 days ago and so far we have just been wandering around looking at stuff. Today we took a tour of the city seeing the big sites to see in New and Old Dehli, like a fort, and India's biggest tower. So far India seems to be a pretty nice country other than the fact that almost all the food here is to spicy to eat and that no one in all of India can make a proper pancake.

Trip stuff!

In my first post I never really talked about where we are going and why. So here it goes,  my family  and I are going on a 5 month trip around the world (more or less). We are flying to 3 different stops and spending about 1 month at each stop. The first stop on our trip was Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam but we only have 3 more days in Vietnam.  From there we  bused it to Cambodia. The next stop on our trip in 4 days will be  Singapore. Then we stay 2 nights in Singapore (to non jet-lag ourselves and to shop). From Singapore we are going to take a flight to India. After going to India and a few other countries we set off for London. When we get there I believe that we are going to try and rent a car or fly to the countries by the Mediterranean, like Greece and Italy. Then we might go north up to Switzerland and then back to London.

The Beach

Over the past few days we have basically done nothing. On Saturday we took a bus back to Ho Chi  Minh City then we stayed there for a night.  The next day we took a bus to the beach and we  are staying here for the remainder of our time in Vietnam. The thing about the town we are staying is all of the taxis are trying to rip us off. The town is behind a mountain and the hotels along the beach are on the each side of the mountain. Each time we try and get a taxi back to our hotel we have to around the mountain when you can just cut through the town so it is a longer ride and the cabby gets a bigger fare. We have taken a total of 4 taxis in our time here and every time they have  gone around the mountain , so then one of us has to tell the driver to turn around and go the fast way to our hotel.

In Vietnam when you go to the beach it is all about the sea food people from the city flock to the coast just to sit on the beach and eat sea food. When we were at the beach yesterday we had a great B.B.Q.ed octopus and  it was delicious. The person next to us was having some sea food dish, but they had jeans and a hoodie on  and they there shivering. To the Vietnamese this is freezing. The average temperature here is 30c or over and we see everyone bundled up and shivering everywhere. Personally i think they're crazy.

Angkor Wat

Angkor Wat is a series of very old temples surround by moats and walls.

The main temple which is called Angkor Wat is the largest temple. The entire complex of temples, lakes, and walls is 400 km2. Angkor Wat's main temple nearest the entrance is the biggest and the best restored.  Also sadly the busiest one.  We more or less escaped that by going early in the morning which involved me waking up early (weehoo). We looked at 3 other temples (I don't know their names) they were mostly the same as the Angkor Wat. 

Some of the highlights of the day were trying to find our "tuk tuk" every time after we looked at a temple (you have to drive in between temples), seeing wild monkeys running around a temple and driving by elephant taxis.

Monkeys!

Angkor Wat from space. This is just one of the wats (temple grounds)

 

Bikes!!!

Did you  know that the  Khmer language is really confusing. For starters the letters are gibberish to Canadians. For example,  this is equivalent to “hello” in English :  “ជំរាបសួរ” .  See what  I

mean?   So yeah, it makes it really hard for us to communicate around here therefore ordering food involves a lot of pointing while Jack tries to find the translation of it on Google Translate. In Vietnam we asked an English speaking person how to say "hello" in Vietnamese and the response was a grunt that sounded a little like "ug". The actual language to us sounds like a "Newfie " and a British person mixed together.

     During our time here, we have noticed a massive amount of motorbikes on the street. The other big thing we have noticed while being in Southeast Asia is that there are no rules of the road. For example,  just yesterday our "tuk tuk" (which is a small 4 person taxi pulled by a motorbike) just used the other lane (blocking traffic) to do a U-turn when we said he was going the wrong way. The people here have no respect for pedestrians so crossing an avenue is like trying to walk through the Amazon River. Since  no one respects the rules of the road  here I have wondered how the road isn't just one massive blob of bikes, tuk tuks, and cars honking at each other to move out of the way. I think that there is a series of hand signals that indicate where a person is going or some unspoken rules that everyone just knows (other than me) to make sure everything isn't chaos. But I haven't seen any proof so far that my theories are true so I guess that the more and louder you honk, the faster you go.

Mekong Delta

The Mekong Delta is big--very big.  It is 39,000 square kilometers big  and I took a boat up it.  We woke up around 5 and met our  English speaking guide by our hotel.  Then we walked to our boat which was around 7 m long and 1 m wide with our driver, a middle aged woman. We found out later that she was very good at turning water coconut leaves into flowers). The highlights of the boat ride included a dead pig jamming our propeller, an orchard with about every fruit imaginable, a famous floating market of the Mekong and a tour of a rice  noodle factory where they hand make noodles. After that we hit the road to a small town called Chau Doc with our private driver, Cuong. (Tourists can't rent cars here.) The reason we went to Chau  Doc was to take a ferry up the river to Cambodia. After we arrived at the ferry terminal in Cambodia we had to walk about 50 m in the hellish sun  to the actual  border which was just 2 sets of small gates that just blocked the road. In my experience that is a typical 3rd world country border. Then after doing all the fun paper work involving entering the country we took a rather bumpy bus ride to the city called Phnom Penh.
 
 

Ho Chi Minh City

The  day after we landed was not fun. It involved being  horribly jet lagged then going on a walk. The next day however was a little more eventful ( a little less jet lagged too ). We went to a museum about the Vietnam War. The museum was formerly called the "Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes " because of the many atrocious crimes that were committed by the U.S. army against the Vietnamese. After that we walked by the Palace of Reunification and almost got ripped of multiple times for a Popsicle. Then we went to a Vietnamese grocery store which was interesting because about 3 bags of groceries cost about one million dongs. By the way, did I say the currency here is called Dongs and it is 19,000 Dongs to a Canadian dollar. 

Day One

11 hour flights are not fun especially if you have a 3 hour lay over in South Korea then after that another 5 hour flight. My day started out by waking up at 7 then having to walk across the Vancouver airport then a lovely 11 hour flight over the pacific (in a very uncomfortable chair)

then siting in a Korean airport (in another uncomfortable chair) for 3 hours trying to sleep but of course i can't sleep at all. Then sitting in another very uncomfortable chair and occasionally nodding off and waking up with a very sore neck. Then watching a movie and falling asleep and repeating those steps for about 5 hours.

  We finally landed in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam at 1 o 'clock pm their time, but it was already 5 in the morning in Sechelt, B.C. Then a  taxi driver drove to another hotel with the same name  because apparently there are 4 of the same hotels in the city.So we finally got to our hotel at about 2 o'clock in the morning and once again I couldn't sleep until about 3 o'clock. The past 2 days have been very tiring. Last night I went to bed at 6 o'clock, so I'm about as jet lagged as you can get.