Vietnam

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We arrived in Vietnam by boat along the mighty Mekong river. It was very relaxing and refreshing to be away from all the beeping and the crazy roads and buses with karaoke playing at full volume. Arrived in Chau Doc and stayed in a floating hotel. We had a short walk through town and dinner from a street stall. It was unbearably hot that night and so refreshing to be out on the river again the next day to see a fish farm underneath someone's floating house and a Muslim graveyard where they buried the dead vertically instead of horizontally. Had lunch on the boat and then changed to a bus to go all the way to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) it was relatively painless, at least there was no karaoke and the air con worked.

First Day in HCMC Andy and I did some exploring, and tried not to get killed by motorbikes. Crossing the road is initially like a gauntlet, especially in HCMC where when the traffic lights change you face 28 rows of motorcycles coming at you in both directions, and the occasional car. There is definitely a knack to crossing the road here. We went to the War Remnants Museum. It is about the atrocities committed by the USA during the Vietnam war and is full of photos and articles and accounts from people. It is very in your face, hard hitting information and the Vietnamese still have no closure on it all. Only very recently did the USA actually pay some compensation to families affected, disfigured by Agent Orange and other chemicals that were sprayed widely over Vietnam. Later that day it rained, a lot, so we hid in a cafe until the rain sort of passed and I walked down to the river and Andy went back because he wasn't feeling well. I got hassled by a man and a cyclo who wanted to cycle me around for just half an hour because he hadn't had any business because of the rain, I didn't cave and continued to walk as per my plan. The plan was to go to visit the Cu Chi tunnels the next day, a network of underground tunnels that were used during the war, however Andy still wasn't feeling well so we had a rest day, I had a wander, wrote some postcards and went to mass, in Vietnamese. So the next day I went to the Cu Chi tunnels and Andy went to the doctor having decided he might have malaria (oo er). Luckily it wasn't malaria but was Dengue fever, (nasty mosquito borne illness a lot like flu but can be very serious) so he was told to rest up and take paracetamol. I went on without him, at his insistence, because I had finished seeing HCMC and had been to see the tunnels too. They were very interesting and stiflingly hot. The guide showed us all these different kinds of traps designed to kill or seriously injure or disfigure the unsuspecting victim. The group all crawled through a section of tunnel where you had to shuffle, squatted down in order to move forward in the (what would have been) pitch black darkness.

The next town I visited was a quiet beach town called Mui Ne. I had lunch in a restaurant and got talking to the girl working there and ended up helping her with her English homework. I walked along the beach and saw lots of local people looking for shells by digging circular patterns in the sand with palm fronds. In the evening I met a couple of people from my guesthouse and went to a bar with them. The next day I went to visit the nearby sand dunes of varying colours, there are lots of children there trying to get you to hire a plastic sheet to slide down on but I didn't fancy it so I just walked around. When I got back to the guesthouse, I realised I had lost my key in the dunes, doh and had to pay for a new one.
I got a bus to Dalat in the hills the following day and met some friendly girls from China/New York and we all found a place to stay together. Unfortunately then it started to rain and they decided they didn't like Dalat and caught another bus straight to Nha Trang. I bumped into Simon (who I met in Melaka, Malaysia) and some of his new friends and spent the rest of the day with them, eating mainly.
A man named Hoang and his motorbike took me on an "Easyrider" tour of the area for the day. He was a very nice man and I had a really good day in the sunshine looking at the countryside, a waterfall and a big Buddha and some ruins of a house that was bombed by the Communists in the North. I saw people farming fruit and vegetables, went on a walk over a hill and got lost, not seriously lost but I was supposed to come out at the same point and I didn't, so then had a short walk along the road and was stared at by every single motorbike that went past. Visited a silk worm place and saw all the stages of the process from getting the silk off the silk worms, to it being woven into cloth. Also went to a rice wine place where they let me try some 60 per cent proof rice wine, which burns, I was in front of the owner at the time though so had to suppress my spluttering and smile politely. Back in Dalat town I visited the Crazy House built by some weirdo who studied architecture in Russia (it's very unlike Russian architecture or any other kind of architecture come to that) and I went to the Summer Palace which was the Palace of the last King of Vietnam.

I arrived in Nha Trang that evening and knew half the people staying at my hotel, the Chinese girls, Simon, Crissi and Pete, Guille, Herman and Jules and a whole bunch of new people to share some partying goodness with that evening.
Had a lie in the next day, mostly because of the aforementioned partying goodness, and eventually made it to the beach where I met Simon, Crissi and Pete and sat under their umbrella all day. I had a shoulder massage on the beach and generally got harassed by people selling things because of my 'lucky hair' according to Pete, which he then suggested he would cut off and try and buy things with! We all had a lovely sea food dinner at Chopsticks next door and then Simon and I head out on the town again leaving Pete and Crissi shopping. We had a really funny night with lots of laughing and eventually lots of dancing on the beach at the Sailing Club. We even negotiated a free bucket out of them.
The early start the next day was as fun one to get a boat trip for the day on which we were the only 4 Europeans. It turned out to be a day filled with hilarity though, snorkeling with no fish because the Vietnamese have eaten them all, singing songs we didn't know the words to - that'd be kakaoke again, and flinging ourselves from the top of the boat to swim out to the floating bar where we were made to have shots of rice wine with fruit, which actually made me feel sick. Really good day. Said bye to Simon and had dinner in Chopsticks again, the place does good food. Then Andy appeared so I went for a drink with him, Jules and Herman and had an early night.

Had lazy morning, checked out and got breakfast with Herman and Mark and went to the market with Mark. It was quite a walk in the heat but a nice one along the seafront and the beach. I didn't buy anything at the market and got a moto back across town and went to sit in Pete and Crissi's air conditioned room and then to the beach with Pete where 10 minutes after we got there the sun went in.

The night bus to Hoi An was very late, probably due to the torrential downpour that flooded the road and made it look more like a river. It was an OK bus I even managed to sleep a little bit, I know this because I remember waking up which is a good indication that one had been asleep no?
Andy and I found a hotel and met Dave and Gemma (from Sihanoukville, Cambodia), who were just leaving, in the lobby. Mark had also found the same hotel by coincidence. We had showers, breakfast, a look around town, Andy wanted a suit made so we found a tailor, which is surprisingly easy in a town of almost 500 of them. Finally worked up the gusto to go to the beach, fell off my motorbike and promptly returned to the hotel, covered in iodine and dust from the road. We went out in the evening with a large group from the hotel and others and then went to another beach club but getting to this one involved getting 30 people into one minibus, crazy but it happened I assure you. I was in the front hahaha.
We had a wander around the town the next day to see some of the old town sights and then went to a bar for happy hour drinks before dinner. Then we went to a bar called Happy Why Not bar because it promised us free buckets. Then Mark, Herman and Nomi showed up and we watched the football until there was a town wide power cut and the guy had to get the generator out. Luckily the electricity came back on just as we arrived back at our hotel.

In Hue we did a city tour that took us to see some tombs, one was an older style which I much preferred. They are tombs of past emperors in different dynasties. It was a really hot day (the North of Vietnam was having some sort of record breaking heat wave while we were there so during the day it was at least 43 C) so getting back on the barely air conditioned bus was far preferable to being outside. We also went to the Citadel and the Imperial city which was where the emperor used to live with all his wives and mandarins. The final stop was a pagoda by the river and it had cooled down a bit by now and actually looked like rain but it didn't. We then got a dragon boat along the river back to the city and walked back from the port. We met Crissi and Pete for dinner and they had found a great French Restaurant that did good steak (they had been there the night before too). They, Pete more so, turned out to be a bad influence on my wallet, food, taxis, drinks..... 😊 After steak dinner we all went and played pool and Crissi and I beat the boys (once) but it was enough, Pete probably didn't sleep properly thinking over what went wrong...! We had a few drinks and went to a club called Brown Eyes that we were convinced was a gay club, it certainly had cheesy music! Andy and I spent the next day wandering, slowly, around town and spent more time than necessary in the air conditioned shopping centre.
We got the bus to Hanoi that night which was ok-ish except for the deafening loud music they insisted on playing until late and then starting again at 5am, and the bumpy road too. When we arrived at the hotel we just collapsed in a heap. Pete and Crissi had coincidentally found the same hotel as us and we went for a wander around the Old Quarter with them. We walked past the cathedral and had some coffee and in the evening we went to watch the World Cup Final at Le Pub after some Bia Hoi on the street. Jaime who we'd met briefly on the night out in Hoi An happened to walk past and join us for the football, he felt rotten though so ended up leaving before the end. I had to go outside to keep from passing out from the heat and dehydration, it was rammed. Great atmosphere though. Slept a long time the next day, these games aren't on until the middle of the night here you know, and we went and booked our Halong Bay trip and Tam Coc/Ninh Binh day trip. The morning of the Tam Coc day tip we were pretty sure that they had just scammed us out of our money, it was 3 hours after they were supposed to pick us up, it had absolutely poured with rain, the inside of the hotel was dripping, even the walls, so we were relatively unsurprised that the electrics failed and the top of the building caught fire. Honestly this hotel was the Fawlty Towers of Vietnam! We did eventually get collected and it was a good day, it even brightened up! We visited a couple of Chinese temples and then cycled, much to the guide's displeasure, to lunch. It would seem he was too tired/behind schedule to actually want to cycle but we did anyway, we'd paid for it after all. After lunch was a very pleasant boat trip in Tam Coc. We had a late dinner having arrived back late to the city, with 4 guys from our hotel and the next day we went to Halong Bay.

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