Hello all!
First off, I’m alive and well!
We just got back from our couple day excursion into the unknown!! Tom Sipling (one of our amazing squad coaches) said Matthew 10 (the message…you should read it to get a really good idea of what our month has been like) would be extremely applicable to our time in vietnam…man, was he right! We packed our daypacks with our sleeping bags, a couple tents and a few packs of noodles and hiked out to a village unknown to most..even in Vietnam J
We started our journey at about 9am for our 12 km hike out into the wilderness. We had a mix of walking and catching random buses that saved us a few km here and there, all while having tea at literally every house we passed.
We ‘randomly’ came across a woman from England having tea with a Vietnamese family that had set out last month to cycle through Vietnam and into Laos over the next 6-9 months. She said she hadn’t had a real conversation in 3 days, so we were glad to offer her at least that since we had little else to give.
After drinking more tea that I’ve consumed over my entire life, sugar cane and hard candies galore, we eventually made to our destination. We set up our tents, and within minutes, we were surrounded by locals. Before we knew it, it seemed the entire village had shown up. We then played soccer, frisbee and volleyball with the kids and traded smiles with the adults.
That’s when the Vietnamese police showed up.
The police went back and forth talking to a couple of the kids we had made friends with, and then I called our friend Timmy from Ho Chi Minh, who was able to translate what the police man was trying to tell us. (Huge blessing to be able to meet just enough English speakers to get us by J) Turns out he didn’t think it was safe for us to tent out, so he drove us to what looked like an abandoned hotel back towards town. The kids we were playing with offered to give us rides on the back of their motorbikes, while I hopped on the back of the police officers. My latest ‘I never thought I’d…’ happened during that motorcycle ride haha The next morning we were literally locked in to our hotel complex so Jess and I proceeded to jump the gate in order to get some more snacks for our travels. A girls gotta eat!
After we all broke out of our prison hotel (as some called it) haha, we went back to the school that we were in the previous day and played more games with the kids. We then got invited to have tea at the house next to the school where we were then told that a wedding was going on haha Of course there was! So far I’ve been to a few weddings and a funeral while on the race. People around the world are very quick to invite anyone and everyone to their family gatherings…very community oriented.
ok, this is getting really long so i’m gonna do something i’ve neever done before!… i’m going to break this up in 2 parts! thanks for reading!
