Ilene traveled to Vietnam from mid-January to mid-February, and Robert joined her for the first two weeks in February. We were mostly in Saigon (a.k.a. HCMC) except for a side trip to the beaches of Mui Ne and a bicycling trip to the Mekong River delta. These are some of our favorite pix.

Most of the the market scenes in here are from Cho Ben Thanh, which is Saigon's biggest market. It's indoors with thousands of stalls selling everything for a household or for cooking. We went there several times, starting with sightseeing and later for our own shopping and to eat at the food stalls. Pix from some other street markets are mixed in here, too.

We made a trip for two nights to Mui Ne, a rural fishing village where nearby many tourist resorts are being built on the beach. It's about five hours by bus from Saigon. We stayed at a small resort, walking on the beach and lounging at the pool, and we explored the town a little, eating fresh seafood at roadside cafes.

We took a side trip from Mui Ne to see the Red Canyon and the White Sand Dunes. The Red Canyon is a dry canyon of unusual sand formations. The White Sand Dunes are massive, saharan dunes with a couple of small lakes near by. It's the driest location in southeast Asia. We took turns sliding down the dunes on plastic sleds that children rented to us.

Our second side trip--and probably our favorite day--was cycling in the Mekong Delta. We hired a driver and guide for a personal tour. They drove us about two hours from Saigon to the drop-off point. We took the bikes on the ferry from the city of My Tho across the Dai Mouth branch of the Mekong delta to a point south of Ben Tre. (Ben Tre, now a small city, was the subject of the famous remark "We had to destroy the village in order to save it.") From there we rode for two hours through hamlets, forests and rice fields, makng our way to Ben Tre. From there we loaded with our bikes into a small boat and went up a tributary on a small island. We stopped for lunch at a farmer's home--fresh juice straight from the coconut and shrimp and fish straight out of the farmer's ponds. We had a quick nap and then got back on the bikes to ride over the island and back to Ben Tre and to get the ferry to head back to Saigon.

On the way back from the Mekong Delta we stopped at a coconut candy factory. It's handmade--the only machine in the place was big electric mixer. In the back were furnaces fired with the left over shells. The cocunut milk and sugar and other indredients were cooked in big pans until it turned into a big blanket of taffy. That was passed into the front room where about 50 women worked pressing it into molds, slicing it and wrapping and boxing each piece individually.

Most of the time we were in Vietnam, the country was gearing up for Tet. It partly has the feel of Christmas with everyone shopping for gifts and food and preparing for trips home to family and partly has the feel of New Years's Eve with people preparing for big public celebrations. In Saigon, the center of the city slowly transformed to make way for a giant flower show with the main boulevard being gradually shut down until it finally opened. Every night families would come out to take pictures of their children in front of the flower displays.