Day 19

We rent a motor scooter and head for the mountains. Today we will try and see the monkeys or the slow loris or the macaws. We expect to see a lot of forest. We are right.

We drive out of town through the mountains. The air cools off as we rise. We take a left on a dirt road, drive past a split in the road and eventually make it to the forest walk. We guess it’s the forest walk anyway since a couple vans are parked by it.

The walk is fruitless as people live down the little path and we pass a couple people driving motorbikes. I doubt monkeys hang around when people are hungry. We see some ants, a couple birds but that’s about it. On the way back we stop for a drink at a roadside cafe.

Pepper farms dot the road. They also use the road to dry the peppercorns. We pass quite a few tarps covered in pepper. I never really thought about how pepper grows. This island has pepper farms and fish sauce factories. The latter I’m not that excited about. I like fish sauce used quite sparingly.

Back in town we eat and nap. We find a small kitten on our doorstep and Dawn takes to nursing. The kitten hisses at us and I decide to let dawn handle this one. She gets it to eat some mashed up crackers and drink a little water. Then it heads back out hopefully to its mommy.

We take a walk on the beach to find dinner. The sun goes down and no camera will do it justice. Junk boats and little circular round boats set out against the setting sun fishing for squid. After the sun goes down the green lights from the squid fishermen dot the horizon.

Read the other entries from our Vietnam trip below
Day 1 – Day 2 – Day 3 – Day 4 – Day 4 1/2 – Day 5 – Day 6 – Day 7 – Day 8 – Day 8 1/2 – Day 9 – Day 10 – Day 11 – Day 12 – Day 13 – Day 14 – Day 15 – Day 16 – Day 17 – Day 18 – Day 19 – Day 20 – Day 21