Afterthoughts
Trip Start
Dec 18, 2009
1
24
Trip End
Jan 08, 2010
Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
Sunday, January 31, 2010
One of the reasons for our choice of this Intrepid trip was the Cuc Phuong National Park, which was completely ruined by the idiotic activity of several group members. One of said group pronounced "I don't like birds. They are boring". Well, how about respecting the rights of those who do wish to watch them ?
At this point we thought of just getting ourselves to Hanoi, and doing our own thing, but as we had paid for the rest of the trip and there were only a few days left we stuck with it. Barb has been on two 2-week group tours previously, in 1995 to Indonesia (privately organised by Adelaide Zoo) and in 2001 to Vietnam (with Peregrine), We had had a week together in the Galapagos in 2006 (Adventure Associates). All had gone really well, we got on with other group members, despite two 9-year-olds in the Galapagos. But for us, this current group did not gel.
After a couple of weeks we were getting away by ourselves as much as possible. We were much older, we couldn't talk about our jobs because we were retired (and intellectually-challenging volunteering in the State Herbarium doesn't count as real work, does it ?), we had very different interests, (we liked birds rather than elegant restaurants and boozing all evening), we didn't want to splash money around, and we had exhausted every possible avenue of conversation (and by now we knew all the problems with the Brisbane freeway system !). We did our very best to fit in and be sociable, but without any common interests this is a big ask.
A group with such a wide age range (14-66) must make life tough for a guide trying to keep everyone happy. And Intrepid please note, retirees would not generally choose to travel for 3 weeks with 1/3 of the group younger than their grandchildren. We had been expecting more older people, and something must have given us that impression.
Bus travel between cities can be organised, as can tours to places like the Mekong Delta, from any city hotel catering for tourists. There are many almost-tourist-free places to visit, as chance encounters with independent travellers told us. Language was no longer a problem as many people had acquired a smattering of English over the past few years.
Would we go back to Vietnam ? Pete, never, he says. Barb, possibly, but only to the less-popular areas, the central mountain regions, and towards Cambodia or Laos. Neither of us would set foot in that 'favourite with travellers', Hoi An, again.
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