Vietnam Vacay in July of 2016! HoChiMinh City and Nha Trang

We are off to Vietnam! July 2016

We flew in and out of HoChiMinh and got to meet up with the Smoots! We had an awesome trip!  Vietnam is a beautiful place with amazing cuisine and lots of scooters! It's like walking through a school of fish when you want to cross the street. But the fish are all people on scooters. It's crazier than China!

At the Beach in Nahtrang.

Perfecting belly flops.

Amazing Mud bath resort park! We soaked in the hot mud tub and other pools, played on the slides and other water works as well. And swam in the pools. Really fun outing.

We stayed a few nights at the Eveson Anamandara Resort. Beautiful resort and beach. We love so many things about Vietnam! There are a lot of Russians and it was always funny when Vietnamese tried to speak to us in Russian.

The food market we found on our way to a hot yoga class.

This was a really fun hike and the kids were really into cliff jumping!

Brian and I went to a fancy buffet one evening on a lovely date. Pics with the chef and beautiful Vietnamese servers and delicious local foods. 

We went to the Po Nagar Cham Towers. In Tamil Poo Niagara means city of flowers. These four cham towers are still actively used for worship by Cham, Vietnamese and Chinese Buddhists. The history dates back to as early as 200 AD.... But it was rebuilt in 774 AD.

I could eat Pho every day! Fresh basil, lime juice, bean sprouts and chillies in a chicken or beef broth with noodles. It's the toppings that really make it amazing for me. So good! 

Cu Chi Tunnels in HoChiMinh City with the Smoots! 

Our good friends, the Smoots, lived in Shanghai with us for a few years and moved back to the States about five years ago. And now they live in HoChiMinh City! They moved there a couple weeks before we got there. It's a really fun city. We drove out to the tunnels together after returning from Nha Trang. It was fascinating. At it's peak the tunnels stretched from South Vietnamese capital to the Cambodian border and was about 172 miles. It was also several layers deep. They could make tunnels in this 30-40km area because the earth there has a lot of clay in it. So all they had to do was dig and they did it with a little dust pan and tool. Crazy! In the tunnels they had rooms for infirmaries, kitchens and weapon making. Tiny bathrooms where they would carry out the waste. That's it. Super small. Many could work in the field by day and live in the tunnel and fight at night. 

Their booby traps were scary too. Many of the farmers were interested in fighting for the VC because of the promised wealth it would bring for them. And they could live in the seriously deprived conditions that those tunnels provided. Wow. Some of their leaders were hidden in them for several months at a time and they would go temporarily blind when they came out. They used all of the items from tanks etc. that the Americans left and were industrious with it. The tire rubber they used to make shoes. They even made what they called decoy shoes. The sole was turned around so the tracks would show them walking in the opposite direction. 

These tunnel entrances are so well hidden with leaves on top you'd never know it was an entrance. Incredible. So well disguised.