Back in Nam

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We can now officially use the term 'back in Nam' when we refer to our time spent in Vietnam as we have arrived today in Laos after a painstaking 25 hour journey on 3 different buses.

Vietnam was incredible and so far my favourite country in South East Asia, we really managed to get to grips with the culture and take its history firmly by the horns.

Our time in Saigon was rather short as it didn't have too much to offer besides your standard bustling Asian city. It was however the gateway to our learning about the history of the Vietnamese-American war, with an enlightening war remnants museum housing many weapons, aeroplanes, tanks, graphic photos, replica tiger cages where prisoners were kept and disturbingly, jars of deformed foetuses, the result of the horrific chemical weapon, agent orange.

Saigon was also the nearest access point to the Cu Chi tunnels, one of the locations during the war which has become a tourist attraction, allowing you to see how the Vietnamese lived and fought in the jungle. Truly amazing stuff with over 200km of tunnels underground streching from Saigon to the Cambodiasn border. Here they ate, slept and lived up to three stories underground for months at a time. For tourists they have slighlty widened one of the tunnels and you can crouch and make your way down the very claustrophobic 100m long shaft, giving you a feel how horrible life must have been. They also have a number of replica traps, mainly consisting of trap doors to bamboo or iron spikes and general animal style hunting traps. All incredibly innovative and often used from the iron recovered from American bombs. There was also a shooting range where Paul shot an M50 but it gives the place a very warlike atmosphere as you hear machine guns whilst crawling through a tunnel.

From Saigon we made our way to Dalat which i can only describe as the Disneyland of Vietnam. At 1450m above sea level it was a refreshing change from the burning heat of lower down and was amazing to be able to use a proper duvet without the assistance of a fan or air conditioning. Here alot of the attractions are bizarre with a crazy house straight out of Alice in Wonderland, Pedolo Swans and Dolphins on a beautiful lake and a self operating rollercoaster down to a waterfall where you can take part in some archery.

From Dalat we managed to organize a 5 day motorbike road trip through the central highlands of Vietnam. Covering around 900km this has to be one of the highlights of the trip.

Too much happened just on our first day to be covered in the blog but a couple of the highlights include:

learning how to make an instrument out of a banana leaf, seeing how they make rice wine, seeing fields of tea and coffee, going to a silk worm factory where they extract the silk and make dresses/scarves etc all by hand, seeing a number of waterfalls, meeting a number of hill tribe villages and playing football with the kids, eating silk worms, pig tongue, pig heart, pig throat and pig stomach and drinking too much rice wine with the locals singing vietnamese songs, playing guitar and drums with chopsticks.

Throughout the trip we got to visit families who have hardly seen any tourists in their lives and were so excited to see us especially the kids who loved it if you gave them something as small as a sweet. We learnt so much of the history visiting countless memorials, battlegrounds and war heroes who shared stories over lunch. We also learnt how they make everything from clothes to fresh noodles and rice paper. All this and beautiful landscapes of mountains, rolling hills, jungles, lakes and waterfalls.

When we arrived in Hoi An it was sad to part with our bikers who where such nice guys and really funny but we were excited to see Hoi An. It proved to be beautiful, a very old town of French buildings with a river running through and a beach a couple of kilometres away. Hoi An is famous for its tailor made clothes where we bought some ridiculous shoes. The beach was really good and suprisingly empty, only getting busy when the locals get off work.

The best part of Hoi An though had to be the Miss Universe competition which is being held this year in Vietnam. The contestants arrived by boat on the beach, one beautiful girl from each country who had won their respective countries beauty pageant. They played volleyball, danced on the beach and rode on jet skis. In the evening they paraded down the streets of Hoi An but a couple of feet from where we were standing an electricity pylon explodes and chaos ensues: there's fire everywhere, people are getting crushed, running in every direction, all the lights have gone off, the contestants are getting groped by overly keen onlookers and the police react by going on a rampage and tazering everyone in sight. All highly exciting stuff and just to make matters worse when the presentation starts it begins to rain and so gets cancelled, it couldn't have been worse.

Despite only supposed to be staying one day we liked it so much we stayed for five meaning we had to go straight from here to Laos and didn't get a chance to explore the north. We have no regrets though as we loved every part of our time in Vietnam and it means we have around three weeks to explore Laos which we have only heard positive things about.

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