HighPlainsDrifter

Hi, hope everyone is well and has been enjoying their summer…more meaningless drivel from Saigon…. At the beginning of July I headed off to Borneo for a holiday. I went with Nick, and then met my mate Jon out there. Borneo is amazing and I definitely plan on going again as I barely saw any of it. We went to Kuching, in Malaysian Borneo. It made a nice change being out of Vietnam. Kuching is a great place to relax, quiet streets, interesting things to see, and a nice selection of restaurants and nightspots. My favourite was this Lebanese place, which was under this strange archway. It even had a cinema so I was able to catch up on the latest edition of the Predator franchise: imaginatively titled ‘Predators’…hmm… We stayed in a sweet hotel that ... read more

I got the title for this blog entry from a postcard i picked up somewhere, although Corto Maltese was actually on his way to 'Cambodge'...I don'tknow much about the chap personally...from the postcard and what little i read online he sounds like an older, tougher,meaner and grizzlier version of tin-tin.. May 24th Hi, hope everyone is well…. A while ago I bought a Honda Supercub. Now, it’s hardly Judge Dredd’s Lawmaster or a top trumps superbike favourite but for whizzing through the streets it’s pretty sweet. I had to custom built by a guy called Philip out in Saigon South…it’s a sweet matt olive green with a bigger engine than the usual cub…which means I get extra purchase on the long straights and little more than a cursory glance from the po-po. Although on the downside ... read more

I’ve now been back in Ho Chi Minh City for about 6 weeks. It feels great to be back. As much as I enjoyed living in Hanoi, I’m glad to be back in the madness of the south. I’m not sure that much has changed while I’ve been away, but not being a local I doubt that I’d notice too much. I still work for the same company, but am now working at a school near the airport. The traffic is pretty insane trying to get there each day, but the view out of the windows whilst I teach is great…and I now have no problems teaching students what airport/take off/landing/airbus is…it can be distracting at times though…I’ll be in the middle of explaining something and suddenly my eye is more interested in the 19.50 Air ... read more

Late November Not only has fintan managed to extricate us from a rather nasty looking karaoke situation, but tonite he saved us from a stabbing at a local bia hoi joint….me…I never let go of the bottle just in case…. basically we got into an altercation with some decidely dodgy looking VN guys at four in the morning at the Bia Hoi place up the road...they were pretty serious looking guys and judging from the way the waiters and local customners made themselves scarce at their arrival i'm just glad that we got out of there in one piece...I can't remember a great deal of the incident but i do remember Fintan (who has a reasonable grasp of Vietnamese) awakening me and Jake from our glorious drinken ignorance with the words 'We should go, this guy ... read more

A few weeks ago I took a trip with Matt and Alex (two other teachers) to Ba Vii national park, about 40km out of Hanoi. I hadn’t really been out of the city since I went away at the beginning of September so it was nice to get out on the open roads and see some of the Vietnamese countryside madness…psychotic truck drivers, entire families piled onto tiny motorbikes, cows being transported by bicycles…that kind of thing. Ba Vii itself is lovely, pretty hilly so it’s a steep climb on my bike, to the extent that on more than one occasion I ran out of gears and had to push. However, this was more than made up for by being able to freewheel for an hour on the way back down out of the park…no ... read more

Yesterday as i was 'heading down the highway, looking for adventure and whatever comes my way', i pulled up in traffic next to a couple of soldiers on the back of a motorbike...nothing unusual there, except that it was raining quite heavily and whilst they fidgeted, texted and revved whilst waiting for the lights to change i noticed that sticking out from under the passengers poncho was a the barrel of his AK-47...whilst the AK is a familiar sight in Vietnam, none more so than in Hanoi where you see soldiers (usually not that vigilant looking) outside a lot of places, i was glad to get ahead inthe traffic and away from them...the potholes in the roads are easily deep enough to jolt a squaddie sitting on the back of a honda..gingerly cradling his assault rifle..i ... read more

Hi, it’s been a while since I updated this blog so you may want to grab a beer, strap in and prepare…perhaps open up another web browser to flick to during the boring bits…it’s going to be a long one…and because the internet connection where I am is shit there aren’t even any photos to look at…No fucking photos? why do you waste your time with this shit you ask yourself? End of June: June 28th was my last teaching day in Saigon…it was a typical Sunday, hot as hell and the building was full of screaming Vietnamese kids…(that’s not fair really, that makes them out to be brats, and most of them aren’t). Anyway, my classes this day were fairly uneventful…I had a bunch of tests to give, which wasn’t how I wanted to say ... read more

Hi. As a western adult male I don’t match the physique of the local man and so I have struggled to buy a pair of jeans recently that were not designed for someone with the body of a ten-year-old girl. On the odd occasion that I found a pair in the style I like, when I enquire about some in my my size I have usually been presented with a pair of sand blasted crotch ridden monstrosities that even Devvo wouldn’t wear and told ‘same same’….As a result my current look on an evening out is ‘festival nasty’…I look like I’ve lost a fight with an ankle biting bear whilst watching Primal Scream in a sea of shit… T’other dayi played golf during a thunderstorm. Whilst I’ve been trying hard to get my score down recently ... read more