My blog

Breakfast was nice. I made a mess of the Japanese section and then stuffed myself with fruit. The only problem Malaysian hotels have with breakfast is the lack of decent coffee. Luckily, there is an omnipresent Starbucks here, so it's manageable.
After breakfast, with three clicks on my phone I called an Uber outside the hotel entrance to take me to the airport. It's amazing that with a smartphone with internet and the services of four dotcoms, you can quickly solve almost all of a tourist's problems (google.com, booking.com, uber.com, kiwi.com).
The flight to Ho Chi Minh (formerly Saigon) took less than two hours. I immediately exchanged hard currency, bought a SIM card with Vietnamese internet and booked a taxi to the hotel, which I received a receipt with two stamps and three signatures from high-ranking airport officials. I was so embarrassed by the whole bureaucratic procedure that I left the airport without collecting my luggage. Fortunately, as soon as the exit doors opened for another passenger, I slipped back to the baggage claim without anyone noticing. They have such security procedures that not a mouse can get through.
First impression in Saigon: the city is literally flooded by a gigantic wave of scooters. They are everywhere, and they seem to have no regard for traffic lights. Crossing the street is a real fight for survival.
At the hotel I met my dear friend from college, Maciek, and his beautiful wife, Anita. Not that it was a coincidence: while still in Poland, it turned out that Maciek and Anita, like Tony Halik and Elżbieta Dzikowska, who spend most of their lives on the outskirts of the world, had just planned their next trip to Asia at the same time as me. So we would spend the next few days together.
The moment we stood before each other in the hotel lobby, I felt like Tom Hanks in "Cast Away," speaking to another human being for the first time in years. And so I was, speaking to my homies in our native language for the first time in nine days. What a relief.
The Szwarcs immediately took me on a tour of Saigon, and since they had flown in the day before, they were good guides around the city.
Even though Saigon is a real colossus of seven million people, there is really not much to see here and in two hours you can see the most important things.
There is an incredible atmosphere here, though. Not at all like the atmosphere in Malaysia. Many buildings date back to the French era, there are loads of stylish pubs and bars, and of course, loads of street food.
For dinner we went to a lovely little restaurant in a fun neighborhood - for the first time in nine days, when the waiter at the door asked "for how many people?" I was able to hold up three fingers.
We ordered spring rolls with sauces, Vietnamese soup, mackerel, honey chicken, water spinach and some other vegetable whose name I don't remember. Everything was excellent.
And then we were enjoying Putin's vodka in one of the many rooftop cafes here. At one point, I saw in Anita's gaze that if I had just said one word, she would be ready to leave Saigon and go to China with me. But I decided I shouldn't drink any more...

Right after a hearty breakfast we left Saigon and headed one hundred and seventy kilometers south, to the Mekong Delta region - the longest river in Indochina, which begins in Tibet and irrigates thousands of hectares of Vietnamese rice fields.
In the town of Can Tho, situated on one of the branches of the Mekong River and famous for the fact that apart from the monument to the leader Ho Chi Minh, there is basically nothing significant to be said about it, a wonderful colonial hotel was waiting for us, where we were welcomed with a massage of our necks, tired after a two-hour journey, and a miniature banana.
The unmerciful thirty degrees left no doubt: we spent the rest of the day by the hotel pool.
We were Kindling, rubbing our backs, taking a nap, speculating when the chief would give up power, eating fruit, drinking beer. A little Easter laziness, maybe not with such nice weather as in Poland, but without holiday gluttony. Well, maybe with one small exception - when the sun had already baked me well, I got hungry and ordered my first Pho soup in Vietnam.
Note. If you want to eat this soup in Vietnam (other than, for example, in Galeria Mokotów), you should probably say "fa" and do it with the correct phonetics - otherwise it will come out as a word that the waitress probably doesn't want to hear.
Pho soup is eaten here for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It's a broth with boiled pieces of beef or chicken, rice noodles and a dozen or so other ingredients. It was delicious. Well, maybe not as good as my Mother-in-Law's broth, but please understand me - I would like to eat dinner at my Wife's Mother's again sometime.
As the sun faded, we took the hotel’s shuttle boat into town to take part in a losing battle with street scooterists and explore the local street food scene.
We had dinner at the second best restaurant in Can Tho - according to Lonely Planet. For a starter we had a pancake with pig and shrimp, which in the skillful hands of the waiter became a filling for spring rolls made of some unspecified leaves. Then Anita Ciężka ordered tofu, Maciej Szwarc ordered fish, and I ordered seafood first - but it turned out that it had run out, then chicken - but it turned out that it had run out, and then Vietnamese pork neck. Fortunately, the whisky did not run out.

Instead of Śmigus, we decided to spend today on the water.
When we booked a boat trip to see the morning river market yesterday, the receptionist informed us of the departure time, and Anita Ciężka quickly calculated that in order to get her daily, necessary, non-negotiable, non-reducible, ten-hour dose of sleep, she would have to go to bed before seven. In this situation, we had no choice and negotiated a departure time of seven-thirty.
We met for a hotel breakfast in the middle of the night, at seven o'clock. Unfortunately, there were no Easter eggs, bunnies or even water hoses on the food tables. A strange country. Since sharing scrambled eggs is hardly a holiday tradition, I stole a few pieces of hard-boiled eggs, which are an addition to the morning "noodle soup". And somehow we managed.
The day before, at the market we also bought balloons on sticks, in the shape of chickens and rabbits, so we were ready for a Christmas photo session.
For our romantic excursion boat we were assigned a captain, a seaman and a cultural and educational leader - Mr. Tha.
Tha, with whom we quickly became on first-name terms, turned out to be a very nice, communicative and witty guide who understood the European sense of humor. Throughout the entire five hours of our trip, he did not stop talking and told us a lot of interesting things about himself, his family, the Mekong and Vietnam.
The Mekong River Market is impressive. You can buy any fruit you want, and there are also occasional small boat supermarkets and bars. Each boat has a bar with a piece of fruit attached to it, informing you what the boat has to offer. Some boats have large eyes painted on their bows to scare away crocodiles. But we didn't see any crocodiles.
The tour also included a 1.5-hour bike ride. Cycling in the heat isn't exactly fun, but at least it gives a bit of a cooling wind in the hair, at least for those of us who had it.
We drove around the local villages. It's poor here, but it's real, and the people didn't seem any less happy than we were. The kids going to school laughed just like our Polish kids. We made three of them smile even more by handing out our balloons on a stick.
At the end of the tour, Tha took us to a rest stop where we could buy fruit, Pho soup and coconut bracelets. The local mango tastes delicious and in a nearby garden you can see it growing on a tree. Tha also arranged for us to taste the local moonshine, which is just as mind-blowing as ours, even though it is made from rice.
For dinner, Anita Ciężka ate pancakes with pork and shrimp, but gave the shrimp to Maciek, Maciej Szwarc ate Pho, and I had Vietnamese vegetable soup.
After lunch pool. Then an hour massage with hot stones and two ladies massaging at the same time.
And for dinner we had the local specialty - Mekong Elephant Fish. As the waitress explained to us, the name of this fish comes from the fact that when it swims, its fins wave like elephant ears. They deep-fry it and then serve it upright, held by a rhizome of chives stiffened with a stick stuck in the cucumber. They also serve rice cakes and ingredients for filling spring rolls. The waiters have a lot of work to do, because first they have to scrape the fried fish from the scales, divide it, and then teach the customer how to make spring rolls with all these ingredients and fish. Delicious.

After breakfast we left our colonial hotel and headed for another branch of the Mekong to the town of Cai Be for one night.
The new hotel, located far from everything, on the riverbank, is surrounded by palm fields and tropical fruit plantations. Mr. and Mrs. Szwarc took a more expensive room with a view of the river and the sunrise – but after all, they are a couple and probably treat themselves to romantic urges. I settled for a cheaper solution with the possibility of watching the local vegetation grow from the morning.
The sun was beating down, so to cool down my companions chose the pool, while I opted for a bike trip to a town about four miles away. I made the mistake of wearing a Vietnamese straw hat instead of a baseball cap – a must-have hotel accessory that provides excellent sun protection, but unfortunately not on a bike. It fell down over my face, covering my eyes, just as I was crossing a busy bridge over another branch of the Mekong, holding a beer in one hand and my phone in the other. I discovered that my bike had virtually no brakes.
The town turned out to be a large, bustling village. Lots of tiny shops with squawking poultry in cages and live seafood in bowls, fruits and vegetables and cheap food. A real atmosphere of the Vietnamese province.
On the way back I stopped at a roadside body shop and got a pedicure. It lasted forty minutes and was really professional. The lady used all sorts of Western-looking creams, lemon slices to polish her nails, and at the end asked for ten thousand dong, which is one zloty seventy.
After returning to the hotel, Mr. and Mrs. Szwarc and I let ourselves be massaged, then we put on our best clothes and headed for a cooking lesson at the hotel restaurant.
More specifically, the male part of our group was learning. The female part was developing their passion for photography and took pictures of the culinary students.
The cook classes included deep-fried spring rolls, chicken in sauces, and rice in lotus leaves, followed by the consumption of what one had prepared himself. I noted everything down meticulously and have no doubts that as soon as I return, the best spring rolls in Warsaw will be served at Chyliczki.

As soon as I woke up, I checked to see if all the company that had tried to get into my room the night before when I returned with my last drink—namely, geckos, mosquitoes, flying cockroaches, and grasshoppers—had not wreaked too much havoc on my body. Fortunately, the mosquito net that I had unfurled before falling asleep had done its job.
For breakfast, for the first time in Vietnam, I dared to eat Vietnamese soup in addition to scrambled eggs. Bun Bo Hue.
Our last day together, I started with concern for my physical condition and went for a bike ride around the area. And then I checked what effect Vietnamese massages have on cyclist's feet. I must admit that foot massage has one advantage over "full body massage" - you can drink tea and browse Polish newspapers during it.
For dinner, I decided to fulfill an old childhood dream of mine: eating an entire watermelon by myself without having to share it with anyone - not even my little brother.
After an early lunch, Mr. and Mrs. Szwarc boarded our taxi for the trip back to Saigon.
We started by visiting the war museum. There is no doubt that there is no point in any war – and certainly not the one that took place here in the 1960s.

For our farewell dinner, the Szwarcs suggested an elegant but still vegetarian restaurant. As a self-confessed and active meat eater, I don't usually compromise on my meat-free eating. However, I was persuaded to do so, in exchange for bringing my straw hat to Poland. I have to admit, however, that both the restaurant and the food were outstanding. And if there's anything to find fault with, it's the lack of meat.
We ordered: bamboo soup, cabbage rolls, taro with chili and lemongrass, yam with tofu and coconut, hot pot with broth, noodles, vegetables and noodles, and fruit jelly. We shared everything as if we were one, albeit incomplete, Vietnamese family.
Around 9pm, when the Szwarcs started sticking matches in their eyes, we went for another drink. We ended up in a decidedly European bar attached to a restaurant that served really good-looking steaks. I feasted my eyes on them while I drank whiskey.