Gone for the Weekend: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

I have a friend, E, who balks at the idea of a trip to Ho Chi Minh.  She complains that there really is not much there aside from the cheap North Face bags being sold there.  But surely there should be much more to this city other than factory overruns right?

Right! For as soon as my friends and I stepped-out of our hotel on our first day in Ho Chi Minh, or Saigon, as it is popularly known among the locals, I knew that E could have been balking at the wrong city.  The revving hordes of motorcycles winding through the roads of Ho Chi Minh is  already a reminder that this is no boring place.  Saigon is also well represented in the "East Meets West" adage of most cities for its history of being once the capital of French Indochina.

So before you go and buy your dirt cheap and brand-new backpacks, grab the most reliable one you have first and get ready to dance with motorcycles, be french with you architectural tastes, brush up with important history and open your eyes to a glimpse of life on the riverside (yes, get out of the city for a while!).

Surf trip to Baler

I badly need sunlight. And while I believe there is an app for that, nothing still beats the real feeling of the heat warming up your skin and the slight breeze of the ocean cooling you out at the same time. Alright I do not just miss the sun's heat, I miss it particularly in the beach.  Fine, I miss the beach and being able to surf the smaller, pretty waves that summer brings on the waters of Sabang Beach at Baler, Aurora.  Since I am on an honest streak here, I am also going to tell you that when I just said the word "pretty" to describe the waters at Baler by no means do I mean absolutely.  It is a surfer's paradise for a reason and that reason does not include my penchant for the smaller, boring, beach breaks to surf on (its the girl in me).  Surfers come out here most especially during September, October when the monsoon winds bring in the larger, testy waves that can only mean great for them and can just mean plain scary for any other non-surfing person or even to those less-experienced surfer-types (i.e. me).  So as a way to muster up my guts (and the skintight rashguard tells me I do have lots of those) in surfing on a non-summer day, I am going to tell the tales of what went on during a surfing trip I had with friends on last year's summer.