AN UNFORTUNATE END 🇻🇳 the Mekong Delta was NOT what I expected

Welcome to the beautiful Mekong Delta, a serene and unique environment here in Vietnam, and the perfect place to finish our tour in this magnificent country. Or is it? I don't want any bullsh**. It's a souvenir. I have to drive far away. Right, okay, so this whole place is a scam. Sadly, this is the last episode of the Vietnam series and things took a turn for the worst. My experience got soured and I left with my tail between my legs. I got chewed up and spat out here in the southern part of the country. And, well, this is my story. Enjoy this last episode of Level 2 of Next Level Adventures. People often say to me, Paddy, what's the best thing about traveling solo? And as you've seen in this series, there's lots of pros, lots of cons, and one of the major cons I noticed straight away, here in Vietnam anyway, was the online censorship and the fewer streaming options available compared to home. That was until I discovered NordVPN. Using NordVPN, I am able to quickly switch my virtual location to a country that suits me and access sites that I love that are actually restricted here in Vietnam, such as the BBC. It's also great to switch your location to somewhere such as the USA so you can get access to much more in-depth libraries of content on places like Netflix. Honestly, the Netflix library here in Vietnam is very limited. There's hardly anything decent on there. So using NordVPN, just switch your location and boom, opens up a whole world of entertainment on the road, which is so important, especially on those long bus journeys, long train journeys. If you're backpacking, NordVPN is going to open up so much more entertainment and make your trips so much more enjoyable. And it's not just for people with laptops or MacBooks, but it's also for your phone. Let's face it, not everyone is traveling with a MacBook or a laptop, right? So just open up your phone, go to the NordVPN app, switch your location and boom, no online censorship and you've just unlocked everything that you would have back home. NordVPN is also great for scanning infected files and dangerous malware. Simply toggle threat protection on and whenever you attempt to download something that may contain dodgy or dangerous files, NordVPN threat protection steps in and prevents such files getting onto your system. To get an exclusive NordVPN deal, go to nordvpn.com forward slash paddy doyle and use code paddy doyle. This one is a no-brainer because it's completely risk-free. If you're not happy, Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee will cover you. So yeah, use the links in the description and in the comments and start leveling up your enjoyment and protection of the internet. And thank you to NordVPN for sponsoring this section of the video. Now let's pick things up at four o'clock in the morning because this is where things will start to go wrong. Bright and early today. We're doing something special. I'll show you what it is in a minute. I've got a 12-minute drive to get there first, so bear with me. Don't ask me where I am because I don't know. But I've been flagged down by two Vietnamese people and I think this is our Mekong Delta tour. Let me get... I haven't been told a price yet, so let's make sure I'm not getting absolutely shafted. I think the going rate's 250,000, but let's just check. This is, uh, how much? Yeah, okay, 250. I have no idea how long this is going to last and I have no idea what's going on. I'll sit here. Okie dokie. So at this point I need to do a voiceover for two reasons. One is I need to explain a little bit more about what was happening around me because I wasn't really in the mood for talking too much on camera. It was super early. I was knackered. I was also sick. But also it was deafeningly loud. I'll just cut the music out one section here. I won't talk. This is how loud it was. So yeah, at this point I thought, Oh God, what have I got myself into? I'd clearly driven down the wrong road. I'd been flagged down by a couple of charlatans and my tired, ill state. I had kind of just gone along with it, thinking that everything was going to be okay. If I had my wits about me, if I'd had a coffee in the morning, if I was well rested and not sick, I probably would have just stopped this entire experience right here and right now. This was clearly not what was sold on Instagram. Now off camera, I had been to the hospital actually a couple of days before. I was suffering with tight chest pain and shallow breathing. I was getting out of breath quite often, just from walking upstairs and I thought this isn't right. So I went to the hospital in Saigon and I had a little x-ray and I have a chest infection. So I took some antibiotics and he just said, just wear a mask when you're outside, stay away from smoky pollution, don't smoke cigarettes, I don't smoke anyway. But anyway, long story short, I had a chest infection and this was not the place to be. The fumes of the boats and the tours and the industry, this whole area of the delta, the whole area south of Saigon, this is where the industry is. So many factories pumping smoke and all sorts of pollution, not only into the air but into the rivers. This part of Vietnam, I'm sorry to say, isn't pleasant to be in at all. So yeah, as you can see, I was having a nightmare start to the day but I thought maybe this tour is going to get better. Maybe we're going to get out of this area and get into the delta, get into those luscious green swamps and connect with nature. I did see an opportunity that this might happen. I'm not hungry. That just looks like a restaurant. I'm not hungry. So far this is proper ----. Hello. Yeah, I don't want a souvenir or any bull****, so I'm going to go back on the boat. I don't want any bull**** souvenir. Back in the main river, the big river, the big dirty polluted river of the Mekong itself. Obviously, it's right at the end of the river system, so there's lots of factories and lots of industry and lots of pollution. I wasn't expecting thousands and thousands of people at five o'clock in the morning on tours. And obviously, as you saw, they were all getting dropped off at restaurants on these group tours and she wants me to go into her friend's shop and buy souvenirs. I don't want to do any of that ****. I thought we would just go down the Mekong delta, see the forest, see the monkeys, see the birds, peace and quiet or something like that maybe. But we'll see. Maybe this is where the tour starts after the carnage of the delta and the touristy scam of get breakfast, buy a necklace. Hopefully now, especially if we get ahead of everybody, we can have some serenity. She turned us around. She took us back into the crazy, busy, polluted, dirty river. And at this point, I was just getting my phone out using Google Translate. Where are you taking me? What is going on? Where is the delta? I was showing her pictures on my phone, you know, Google images of the typical images you see on Instagram. And she was just shouting at me saying, no, this is not where you need to go. We'll go this way. She took us down another dirty alley, another dirty canal. It was just, it was horrible. I asked her to end the tour. She kept going. And then I just said, look, I want to get off this boat. I'm going to pay you money. Don't worry. I just want to leave. And, you know, if I'd had my wits about me, this would never have happened. I fell for it. Hook, line and sinker. Like an idiot. I have to drive far away. Right. Okay. So this whole place is a scam. Right. Well, that was what? An hour of just pure hell. So how much do they want for this? I'll pay them because I can't be bothered to argue. Oh, I've got the right money as well. That's, that's a result. Thank you. Get me out of here, please. Hey, buddy. You okay? Okay. I've made a decision. And I'm not, I'm not going to push myself to the southernmost point of the country. I, one of the things that I told myself I would try and change, like a new year's resolution kind of thing was to not be as stubborn. I'm so stubborn. If I have something set in my head, then it's going to be that way. And I will do anything and everything to make whatever it is happen. And it's one of the reasons why I was able to complete the 77 provinces because I was just so stubborn that I was going to, wasn't going to give up. But I'm going to, I'm going to technically give up trying to get to the southernmost point. I've just done some math on Google maps. And for me to drive from right here to the monument would be 240 something kilometers. And then to get back to this point would be obviously 500. And then it's another 250 back to Saigon. So it's almost 800 kilometers, which is a huge distance to cover in just a few days. And also just to touch a landmark, there's nothing to see and do really, just open countryside and lots of, as it's been so far since Saigon, just lots of dirty, polluted towns and cities. This part of Vietnam is by far the worst in comparison to the rest of the country in terms of nature, clean air, and the roads are really dangerous. And I'm just completely over it. I'm completely over it. And getting to the southernmost point wouldn't fill me with joy. It would fill me with dread that I had to drive all the way back to Saigon. So I'm going to pack up. This is the little apartment thing that I was staying in. It's quite nice. And this town was okay. This town was on the river and there were some nice restaurants. But I don't know what that tour was supposed to be, but it wasn't what I was expecting. And I still didn't get any information yet about what went wrong. Where did I go? Why did it not come to fruition? Maybe I just got scammed or maybe I went to the wrong place. I still don't know. Let's just go back to Saigon, sell the bike. Bye-bye. Enjoy. And just like that, Super Dreamy is out of my life. And he's happy with it. Side boxes, a really good helmet and driving gloves and a new motorbike, all for six million dong. What a steal. Hi. I'm sorry to end this series on such a somber note. But it felt like a defeat. I took it like an L. But I think it's important to finish on a positive note. So just quickly, thank you so much for watching, not just this video, but the entire series. All the way from when we bought the bike in Hanoi, all of our amazing adventures in the north, down through the center, into the south, and all of the struggles that happened after that. I will make a couple of videos about my experiences in Vietnam. Let me go to Thailand. Let me go see my girlfriend. Let me rest. Let me recover from my chest infection and from the emotional and physical fatigue that I undertook to not only travel Vietnam from top to bottom, but to share my experience with you every three days on YouTube. Thank you for watching. Let me go digest. I'll come back with the highlights, the lows, what I learned, my advice. I'll sum that all up in one or two videos very soon. I also have a very exciting announcement. I have a new motorbike. It's waiting for me in Bangkok. And I'll be taking my new motorbike to a new country very soon. Level three is coming. And I hope you enjoyed level two. It was a wild ride.