Our journey from the airport in Ho Chi Minh city (HCM) to the village of Vi Than, in the Mekong delta, will always bring a laugh and a smile to my face. The traffic and driving rules in Vietnam are so alien to any normal way of thinking that I will dedicate another blog entry to it (along with some hilarious video). Anyway in HCM no one had ever heard of the village of Vi Than, luckily my brother had prepared us well with a map and a Lonely Planet Guide book, which did not even have the village of Vi than in it. But we knew the closest largest city was Can Tho so decided to head there. We took a taxi to the western bus station in HCM city to discover that, like in Turkey, the bus station consists of 30+ different bus windows for different bus companies, all of them waving to get your attention and business. We only had American money and nothing was in English so I chose the window with the only English word "express." I showed them my map, none of them spoke English, flashed some U.S. green and a half hour later we were on a 4 hour bus ride on narrow roads across several rivers to Can Tho.
We arrived in Can Tho, not at a bus station, but at the local office for the specific bus company we chose. There were no buses from that company further into the Mekong Delta. Showing our map to a couple of guys on motor cycles who, with with hand gestures, finally figured out that we wanted to go to another bus company, not ride with them on the back of their motor bikes for the hour to Vi Than. So after a couple of minutes, with Aja on the back of one motor bike and me on the other, zipping down the road the motorcycle taxi guy noticed the bus to Vi Than driving ahead of us. So after a short chase, he got the attention of the bus driver who pulled over and we were on the bus to Vi Than...does the adventure end there, naah but you get the picture.... however, everyone said the trip should take about seven hours... we made it in five....
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