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Published: January 6th 2010
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Move it baby
Stu shows off his best moves....no, not really! Good morning Vietnam!
We arrived in Hue after a gruelling 22 hour bus trip (!) from Vientiane in Laos. A long jouney even by China standards but we were really excited to finally arrive in Vietnam. Hue has a load of ancient history including a Forbidden city along the same lines as Beijing. Very impressive though a lot of it was battered by bombs duing the war. We spent an enjoyable afternoon pottering around the grounds and watching the locals marching to the national anthem in their lunch hour.
We soon got very used to the constant pestering from touts and tuk tuk drivers, although we seemed to fair better than a lot of tourists and they left us alone on the whole. Maybe it's because we're starting to look like tramps. We also got wise to their usual ploy of asking “where are you from?” and learnt to ignore them.
Next stop Hoi An, tailor capitol of the world. I couldn't resist getting an early Christmas present from Stu in the form of a tailored jacket and dress. All for the princely sum of 1.3M Dong (43 quid in our language!). The town was like something
from a postcard, it really felt like we were in Vietnam as we strolled along the river and stopped off for Fresh Beer...whatever that means. We spent 4 days relaxing in the old streets, enjoying the food and drink and getting some decent clothes before getting the train to Hanoi. One of those annoying journeys where you end up arriving at 4am. For some reason, these early morning trains never arrive late when you want them too!
Our first day in Hanoi was a bit of a nightmare, we arrived to the news of the BA strike which was going to stop us getting home for Christmas dinner. After over an hour on the phone to the airlines who wanted to charge us 500 pounds to change our flight, we finally got some sense and they moved our flight forward a couple of days to miss the strike. I'm just hopeful I get to deal with the Unite union in my next job because we still had the cost of changing our connecting flight to get to Singapore...I can wait for my revenge!
Hanoi was one of the craziest places I've ever been to, I pretty much said
a littly prayer before I stepped out in to the streets. There didn't seem to be any traffic laws at all. One of the places we visited was the local prison, affectionately known as the 'Hanoi Hilton' by the American POW's that were imprisoned there. The conditions were disgusting and John McCain the US presidential candidate was imprisoned there for 3 years. Before that the place was run by the French who continued to use the on-site guillotine to lop off prisoners heads until the late 1940's.
We took a 2 day trip out from Hanoi to Halong Bay, the drive there was a little hairy at points, Vietnam has very narrow roads and lots of traffic so overtaking has become a bit of an extreme sport. We arrived at the bay and boarded our boat, it was fab and we had our own en-suite cabin. The boat headed out for a cruise and we stopped off to visit one of the caves and do some kayaking. I enjoyed the kayaking, apart from when Stu started to do the jaws theme tune and tell me that the rocking of the kayak was probably a shark banging into us. And
he wonders why I have a shark phobia?!
There was a good crowd on board so there was a fairly lively dinner and drinking and then we headed to our beds. It wasn’t long after the light went out that we heard the dredded sound of scurrying above our heads. Rats! We were kind of expecting it from what we’d read before we left, but it still made for a pretty restless night though thankfully we didn’t see any of the critters in the end. Next day was the cruise home and head back to Hanoi for the journey home via Singapore.
It was a pretty uneventful journey home to the big freeze, it was great to catch up with our friends and family and especially the 2 new arrivals to the Lemmon family, Ruby and Rosie. It all went a little too fast and Stu managed to regain some of his lost self (3/4 stone in 2 weeks). We flew off to Mexico on the 4th of Jan and are enjoying getting to grips with the language and the food!
Will keep blogging, some exciting tours coming up.
Lisa and Stu
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