Monkey Island - Scooter Trip

Marshall, his co-worker Lance who was visiting from China, and myself went on a little scooter adventure to Monkey Island/ Can Gio. It was a 120 km round trip with tons of bridges and even a ferry ride. Each of us were on our own scooter - Lance was driving my scooter, Pipi, and I used his rental since it was a semi-automatic and Lance had never driven a scooter before, Marshall was on his sweet Honda CL. 

What I didn't realized before we set out was that it was a holiday weekend so I think traffic was exceptionally bad. The 60km trip there took over two hours - half was in super congested traffic on narrow one lane streets, the other half was cruising along a straight highway in the country side. 

The actual park was pretty surprising. There are no gates or fences to keep the monkeys in any particular area - they are free to roam. When we were parking our scooters, a monkey jumped onto the scooter next to me to dig through the picnic bags hanging on the bike. The monkey hissed, bared its teeth and tried to claw at my face. Little jerk.

We stopped at the concession stand to get some cold drinks and a snack. Lance was unwrapping his ice-cream cone when a monkey with a perfectly timed assault, dropped down from a tree and landed on Lance's arm. Luckily, Lance has a frightening scream and he managed to keep his cone. 

Further into the park there were monkeys and people being stupid... everywhere. I saw people handing out wrapped candies to monkeys, handing monkeys bottles of water and watching them chug  it, giving food to their small children to walk around with only to be attacked by monkeys. One woman gave the monkey a small piece of food and then coaxed it onto her lap and posed with it - as soon as the monkey was done chewing the food, it was looking for more and started clawing at her hat, scarf, glasses and bag. The lady started freaking out, completely surprised that a wild monkey would do such a thing. 

The worst part was that people started to throw bags of trash at the monkeys to watch them dig through it in search of food. I saw one monkey grab a plastic bag from the garbage heap and carry it away and eat it. It was incredibly disturbing and horrific. There was garbage all over the park - which, sadly, is sort of the norm in Vietnam. People seem to have no shame in littering no matter where you go.

Also at the park was a wildlife/vietnam war/anthropology museum. They had a bunch of stuffed animals (the dead kind, not the cuddly type unless you're really weird) that must have been very old as most of the animals' hair was rotted away. There were creepy jars filled with sea creatures, a display with an ancient human skull, and also weapons of all sorts that were used in the Vietnam war such as boards with 6" spikes that were hidden in the swamps and a heap of rifles that were randomly shoved together in a corner.

Supposedly, they have a salt-water crocodile sanctuary at this park but the bridge to get there was demolished. When it was open, you could pay to feed the crocodiles with meat at the end of a fishing pole. Maybe next time.... or not. I don't think I'll be going back.

To cleanse ourselves of the horrors, we decided to drive a little further to see the ocean and find a good place to eat. We took our motorbikes down the little oceanside path and found a cafe with and ocean view, hammocks and cold drinks.

Along that same road, we found a fresh seafood market and helped ourselves to anything that looked delicious. The drive back was a little more relaxing - the traffic was lighter and we had filled our wanderlust for the time being. This trip was pretty easy to plan out and cheap to do - I'm looking forward to other day trips out of Saigon in the future.