Merry Christmas from Vietnam

Merry Christmas, friends, family and random travel blog enthusiasts! Ashley and I are sending much love back home via the blog. We miss the whole lot of ya and wanted to wish everyone a happy holiday.

Now, what have we been up to, you ask? Well, since departing Cambodia on the 20th, we’ve been in Vietnam. We spent our first few days in Saigon (more on that later), then caught an 11 hour sleeper bus ride north, up the coast, to Nha Trang–one of Vietnam’s beachy areas, which is where we are currently at. We are working our way north until we reach Hanoi in about in a week or so.

Last night as we were having a few local brews, a man and his son, both dressed as the Claus approached us, threw two Santa hats down on the table and matter-of-factly said, “100,000 Dong.” The father then took three steps back and gave us an expressionless stare. He knew that Santa hats sell themselves. He was a wise ol’ salesmen and ’tis the season for purchasing unnecessary things, so we got a couple Santa hats. They were, indeed, a real bargain.

Today we packed our newly purchased, creaseless Santa hats, jumped on our hog and headed north of Nha Trang for a day trip to see the countryside, visit with the locals (we’ve been practicing our Vietnamese), and take pictures. We even managed to find a waterfall and got to practice our cannonballs jumping off the ledge, into the refreshing water below. An old Vietnamese woman was nice enough to guide us through the thick jungle and over the rocky terrain to the large waterfall, which was flowing heavy because of all the rain they’ve been having lately. She also told us where the best location was to scale the rocks and where to leap to so we wouldn’t break any bones landing in the pool below. Not sure what the depth was, but we never touched bottom, thankfully.

Happy Holidays!