My last day in Binh Hoa

  • By Daniel
  • 2010-01-08 00:01:00-0800

On Nov 22nd we woke up in the familiar Ruby Star, pretty much a third home by this time. My stomach was a little bit upset, probably from the meds, but it was better than the alternative.

The last time we were in town I had seen a building I wanted to check out that looked like a great vantage point to take photographs from. We went out after breakfast and wandered around the streets looking for it. We never ended up finding it though. I had really wanted to take some tilt/shift photos from the top of it, which looked like it might be a restaurant.

That afternoon we caught a bus back to Binh Hoa and managed to score the front seat for once. I enjoyed the ride and the change of perspective from the typical bus rides we get where we have to sit in the back. I thought back to my first bus trip to Binh Hoa which was in the middle of the night. The roads were winding and bumpy with lots of short uphills and downhills. I had thought this was us driving through mountains, but this time I could clearly see in the daylight that it was just bridges over rivers and there were no mountains in sight.

That evening I felt like I may be having some unreasonable side effects from the medicine and so I decided to go off of them. This was a great opportunity for me to finish some wine that Tien's family wouldn't be able to, and that put me into a deep deep sleep that night.

The next day was a lazy day spent in Tien's village. That evening we went out and cruised around the city with her sisters while they were shopping for some stuff. Tien and I spent a lot of time waiting for them to finish what they were doing. We occupied ourselves by looking for cool things to photograph and ended up down by the river. A little while later we met up with her sisters and we all went to eat dinner by the river. I got eaten alive by mosquitoes and the food was only OK. I was in a funk from that, the general mood of the evening and the fact that I'd be leaving the next day. I wished that something would be different, that we wouldn't be spending the last evening waiting and riding around Long Xuyen on a scooter killing idle time. That's how it was though, and after dinner we went home to Binh Hoa for my last night in the Mekong on this trip.