Can Gio (to pronounce it you have to say "yuh" like a retarded Looney-Tunes villain), the closest patch of green space to Ho Chi Minh city, is still pretty far away. Still, I risked taking my electric bike. Big mistake. The one road I needed to get there was one-way, so there are more turns than I was prepared for. I got lost for about a half-hour, and after less than two hours I ran out of juice and had to pedal the entire way home.
But I had a few more days off, so I swiped Jenny's motorbike for another go at it. The journey was made more adventurous by Jenny's mom imploring me not to go for fear of bandits. But, the 1.5 hour drive to the ferry was pretty uneventful.
Here we are herded like cattle while we wait for the ferry.
The ferries are pretty big hulks, taking on trucks and city buses as well as cramming as many motorbikes as possible.
After only a 5-10 minute journey we approach the hovels of Can Gio.
It is quite a beautiful drive, though on a gravel road. I can't say I'd want to live in one of these makeshift huts, but it would be nice to camp out here for a while.
After a couple of bridges the scenery changes dramatically to a huge mangrove forest. It's just what the city needs--mangroves purify the air and water. They also trap sediment, eventually creating islets where other trees and plants grow. They serve as natural erosion and typhoon barriers. The waterways shelter countless fish and attract lots of birdlife--at least I hoped.
There were lots of black-capped kingfishers, birds that do not venture into the city.
Bird watching has many occupational hazards, steamrollers were a new one for me. There was one rambling steamroller every 50 meters, so every time I stopped to look at a shrike or kingfisher I had to park between them. Maybe the roads are unpaved so they can provide jobs--might as well let them lounge in a steamroller than a hammock, or whatever the proverb is.
"Life on your own" sounds nice, coming from the city. But the resorts are so far removed I never saw them, just the murderous coaches plowing through the tiny village streets.
As I feared from checking out the map, there are no trails through the mangroves or anywhere to pull off the road. There were thousands of little blue crabs with red fiddle arms and mudskippers waving their fins at each-other, but there were no birds by the roads, possibly because of all the noisy steamrollers. I passed by this, but there isn't much English on the signs to tell if it is visitor-friendly. Anyway, it was national siesta time and no one was home.
With perfect timing, I pulled into the village of Can Gio with a flat. Had to wheel my bike around until I found a sua xe who was awake enough to do 15 minutes worth of work. Fortunately, two patches only cost 15,000 dong.
Tourist trap, government building or spaceship?
The village is very quaint, with rice paddies, schools with kids on bikes pouring out of them and not much in between.
The "beach" is very hard to find. I squeezed through a driveway to get it but there was no place to park. Anyway it's more like a mud-flat, and with only a few Kentish Plovers stuffing themselves on the plentiful invertebrates I pushed on. In fact, I never left the motorbike. There were no shops worth looking at, no restaurants apart from the usual local plastic stool joints--just a market with a few items on the floor.
So, I went all the way back to the ferry. I was planning on going to Monkey Island to break the tedium but missed it on the way back. Probably a good thing--I was informed later that it is a place where you go to be watched and abused by the animals. Yes, see you again Can Gio, though I'd better bring someone who either knows what they're doing or can egg me on.
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