Vietnam, last stop in SE Asia .or so I thought

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I said goodbye to my pops and made my way to Ho Chi Minh city. The journey was painless and short (a bit of a deviation from the norm!). My dad, on the other hand, had a pretty bad deal. His journey already was to be horrible with two long flights with a long wait in Bahrain but then his 2nd flight got delayed quite a few hours just to make it worse. That, coupled with his struggle to get to me in the first place just proves what a trooper he is. Thanks dad, for going to all that trouble to see lil ole me :-)

SO Vietnam. A place I was supposed to be visiting in June immediately following Laos with Agnes before the snap decision to hop over to the Philippines for a “two week visit” heh heheheh he ha ha ah mheh - didn’t quite work out that way. As soon as I arrived I pined for Agnes straight away, knowing that we should have been doing this leg of the trip together and that she would have loved the quaint chaos of this city. Alas, fear not. I had heard only a few days earlier that Dan was gonna pop back over and see me for another 3 weeks!! I was super stoked indeed. I had almost 2 full days before he arrived though, I suppose this would give me chance to acclimatize and do things I thought he may not wanna do (incidentally he did wanna do ALL the things I ended up doing!). I walked for ten hours around the city, stopping only to pick up some street food or visit a museum. The war museum broke my heart, so horrific.

People on scooters, it appears, don’t necessarily need to drive on the road, so in rush hour the pavements are filled with bikes. This makes traversing the city around this time of day a frikkin nightmare. One thing I did see that shocked me a little was a wee old grannie pullin her nick nacks and trousers down in full few of two main roads and squatting to pee. I guess she thought that the tree to the right of her orange peel buttocks was a lot bigger…(I seem to recall doing something similar on a drunken night out in Glasgow so I best not linger on this anecdote).

Turns out that Ho Chi Minh was a pretty cool city. One thing I liked most about this place was in the evenings when the parks would fill up with Vietnamese couples, groups of boys playing ‘kick around’ and friends coming together. The place buzzed. It was the first time I had ever seen Asian couples making out in public, like full-on making out….even with a bit of petting - oo er!! So far in all Asian countries I’ve visited, members of the opposite sex just don’t touch in front of anyone. I think it’s real sad. When I’m in love I don’t care who sees it…..It’s a good thing isn’t it?

So Dan arrives the next evening and I’m so glad to see him. I don’t like being in cities much, especially alone. I find that I don’t feel as safe and I’m reluctant to go out at night. He looked great with his huge smile and told me I’d gotten ‘skinny’ which of course wasn’t true but nevertheless scored him brownie points….we spent a couple of days in Ho Chi Minh, sightseeing, drinking (too much) and eating (even more) then we decided it was time to get the hell outta there and get to somewhere beautiful. Lord knows that if Vietnam is anything, it’s beautiful. We bought an open bus ticket from rogue company An Phu - (don’t use them!) and boosted to Dalat, a cool mountain town with plenty to do. We trekked over three peaks the next day with a guide who charged too much (something which we would later discover as the norm in Vietnam) and was a wee bit crap. However, the trek itself and the scenery was well worth it. The landscape there didn’t look or feel like I had imagined Vietnam. It felt like somewhere in Europe but with huge red clay scoops in the hills. Gorgeous. The wild horses running around just added to the feel of this pretty little place. We decided that all the way up the third peak the clay under our feet turned from tikka masala to a madras and then on the way back down I noticed a bit of Korma. Well Dan IS a curry freak, what do you expect?

We worked out that we were on a bit of a tight schedule and decided to leave Dalat the next day and miss out the beach, Mui Ne. I borrowed a motorbike from a lady who would become a good friend and tried to find the An Phu travel office. An hour and a half later returns a very frazzled Lizzie having zimmed around the entire town 5 or 6 times being told to go all sorts of different ways by the locals and then after finding the office having a wee spat with the very unhelpful dude behind the counter. Thankfully though, I didn’t get in an accident - riding a motorbike on Siargao and riding one in Vietnam are two VERY different things. And I got the ticket changed, phew.

We left Dalat and headed to Na Trang the next morning and ended up befriending and sharing a room with Sharon (the kind motorbike lady). Na Trang was cool, very touristy in parts but cool. We hired motorbikes and sped up the highway along the coast and through a little fishing village, it was a great ride and good to get out on our own steam and in our own time. Dan rode on the back with me and every now and then I could feel his thighs squeezing in anticipation of my crashing the bike!! He still maintains it was all reflex and unintentional but I have to admit, what the hell was he doing getting on a bike with the likes of me?!! I’d feel the same… As we were on our way back Sharon missed a turn and we lost each other…..we all ended up back in the room later on that night and went for a slap up in a fancy restaurant on the sea. The meal wasn’t so good but the setting was lovely.

So we spent another two days in Na Trang getting drunk and zooming on our scooters to the hot springs (not at the same time of course - what do you think I am?) where I had my first ever mud bath…..and it was gooooooooood. We got the night bus to Hoi An, lovely little Hoi An. This place had been pretty much unaffected by the Vietnam/American war and had an entire old town still in-tact. Dan had a wander whilst Sharon and I hired bikes (again) and rode for over an hour to My Son (a huge ruin kind of like Angkor Wat only way way smaller). Unfortunately the ride turned out to be much more interesting than the ruins themselves. On the ride back it was pissing it down with rain making it hard to even see let alone ride a bike, but we did it. As I returned I realized I’d left my ipod on the overnight bus, I tried to get it back with a huge ordeal but I think its safe to say that mr driver nabbed it, along with a mobile phone that was handed in to him but never passed on to the manager…..gutted. From Hoi An we got another night bus to Hanoi and I was passed out for the majority of the 15 hour journey - must have needed the kip.

My first impressions of Hanoi were good. From hearing others talk about it I was expecting this horrible city with horrible people but it wasn’t that bad at all. We decided that to save thinking and any more effort we would book two all-inclusive tours; one to Halong Bay and one to Sapa. This does kind of beg the question - 8 months of traveling on a shoestring, numerous tours and have I learned? Nope. The travel agency scammed us (because we paid the cheapest price possible - learn!) for the whole deal. I won’t go into it too much but we didn’t get what we paid for (or put in the more accurate term we repeatedly used, we got ass raped). ANYWAY! One great thing that happened in Halong Bay was that we met a great bunch of people and had a lorra lorra laughs. Halong Bay itself was amazing, knocked Ang Thong national marine park (where I went with Dan before he left Thailand) way out of the running. The boat we were on was pretty cool, we were jumping into the water off the top deck on the 2nd night. We visited Cat Ba island on day/night one and stayed in a lovely hotel with wicked views of the bay. Although we all got so drunk on the boat I’m not sure if there was much appreciation of the view going on. The 4 hour trek up the mountain/ hill the next day was the first one I had attempted with a hangover. At first death felt imminent, but then it disappeared completely and I felt tiptoptastic! So theres a good way to cure your hangover folks, walk it off, walk it off…

After Halong Bay the three of us decided to stay an extra night in Hanoi before nipping off to Sapa so that we could have a big night out with our new buddies. Trouble is, we then realized that Hanoi wasn’t as cool a place as our first impressions led us to believe. We were all real hungry and were looking forward to a big slap up Mexican when they served us drinks and then told us they weren’t serving food anymore. So we moaned, drank more, moaned more and decided to go to the jazz bar. None of us had a map and tempers were fraying…..the long and short of it was we got lost (which was kind of my fault cause I was being cocky saying I knew the way) and it ended up being too late for any shenanigans to commence cause everywhere was closed. We should have gone to Sapa after all…

Sapa was laaaaaaaaarvely! The only drawback was the fact that we were on an organized tour for 3 days and 4 nights with a shoddy company. However, we still enjoyed it. The mountains, rice terraces and villages were so beautiful and it was great to be trekking again. We didn’t do much trekking on day one and were brought to our home stay very early on. So when we asked our guide to take us walking up he seemed very reluctant and kept saying that maybe we were tired……yup he was pooped after two hours of easy trekking. Naughty guide. Everything would have been fine if we hadn’t paid for 5 hours of trekking per day! So Dan and I spent time down at the river whilst Sharon got it out of her system and walked up the hill. That night we ate some good food and enjoyed the company of our group and some rice wine of course ;-)

On day two of our trek we got shafted again, this time we had only 1 ½ hour trek instead of our prescribed 5 and so I’m afraid I kicked off…..Lizzie style. The guide who kept saying we must be tired and hungry was really starting to piss us off so we ditched him and decided to make our own way back to Sapa. It was such a beautiful day and we went down to find a trail along the river. At first it looked easy and we would get back there within a few hours….on the way Dan found a little still swimming pool and we jumped in to cool off - it was pretty chilly but I’m used to that! Then we tried to find a trail heading back up the long way up to Sapa and scrambled over a few rice terraces before relenting and making our way to the road for the 9Km hike back to Sapa. It didn’t take us long but it was so hot and I was glad when we finally arrived. We got our 5 hour trek that day after all. Our last night in Sapa involved spending the evening pooped in our hotel room watching Pineapple Express (funny!) on Sharon’s laptop. Following our last scammy trek(!) through a couple of villages we returned back to our place and prepared to get the night train home.

On the train, Dan and I had a couple of beers and watched Indiana Jones - it was our last night together…it was all a bit low key, low energy and sad. As soon as we arrived at the train station it was off to Hanoi airport to fly to Bangkok. I was so relieved when I boarded the plane and heard ‘Sawadee Ka’. It almost felt like coming home, I had gotten sick of being taken for a ride by the Vietnamese. Such a wonderful place but so draining, shame. I hear that even four years ago it wasn’t so bad, wish I had gone then. Still, I hope that the majority of my memories will remain fond of this country and the experiences I’ve had. Especially for being able to share it with my very good friend, Beddy-Boes ;-)

I know that this is probably one of the longest entries I’ve written, this is because I didn’t type it on the net but used someone’s laptop so I had time! I can assure you that future entries shouldn’t be too long and boring.

I came to Thailand to spend a further 3 weeks in the South. Im currently on a 7-10 day fast at a place called The Sanctuary, Haad Tien, Ko Phagnan. I cant write much about it right now because its pretty intense (Im giving myself a colonic every day so the emotions are flying out - so to speak) but will do when I get to Oz - I fly on December 7th to Brisbane. If anyone needs to get in touch check out the sanctuary website for phone no’s.

Love you all xxx

P.S Photos pending

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