This is our Ask the Lord (ATL) month. My team prayed and the Lord put Vietnam on our hearts. So here we are. Right now we are in a city up north. I’ll try to briefly summarize my first week moments in Vietnam to bring you up to speed.
Bus ride from Siem Reap to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) took 16 hours.
Saigon is packed. About 8 million people packed. Feels more crowded to me than New York or Bangkok with more lights and sounds than Vegas.
The second day here I came down with some nasty stomach bug. Went to the hospital to get some meds, and I’ll spare you the details but it was bad news bears in my belly for three days keeping me out of ministry. I think it was from a bad pint of draft brew I got at a local place. I should have known. The beer smelled like that annoying guy that sits behind you at sporting events and yells lewd comments to the opposing team.
Ministry looked like a lot of things in Saigon. Orphanage one day. Tea time hang outs with twenty something’s at night. Another day we just walked around the park and prayed for opportunities to tell people about Jesus.
One night we went out to dinner with our new Vietnamese friends. They decided to pick us up on their motor bikes and vespas to save us some cab fair. I rode on the back of Mai’s bike. She’s in her 50’s and drives with the confidence of John Wayne in western flick. It felt like a six flag’s ride weaving in and out of night traffic more crowded than the Denver Tech Center on a good day. Trip highlight for sure.
For whatever reason we decided sleeper bus was the way to travel up north. It took three different buses and many more stops to get us to our destination. The first sleeper bus was hot and smelled like tuna fish and urine. I slept in the back of the bus on my back in a small space I could only relate to as submarine like while trying not to spoon my teammate Tracy 6 inches to my left. In the end we didn’t spoon (World Race policy), but in my mind I figured it would have been a more appropriate choice than having to spoon the small Vietnamese man who slept peacefully to the right of me.
Aside from the submarine leg of the race I found the landscape in Vietnam to be stunning. Misty mountains backdrop to the China Sea. Random limestone structures shoot upward next to lush green rice patties. The weather here feels like Ireland. It feels nice to have a long-sleeve shirt on again.
We decided to hop off the bus at Than Hoa closer to our destination of Dong Tau. Just so happened Than Hoa isn’t a normal stop off point so we got dropped off on the side of the road at 3am. This was after 43 hours of travel on the road. Not a bad first leg.
