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I mean this literally. At the moment our life primarily involves sitting on some form of transport.
I think James underestimated how long these journeys would be to get us up north towards China, and I think I just sort of didn't think about our route and smiled sweetly... (by the way, James has edited this log...)
So far we have had an 8 hour journey, an 6 hour journey and an 11 hour journey and we are not even close to halfway through the country yet! Yay for buses. They're great.
The problem is that the roads in Vietnam are only 1 lane wide (thats one lane wide each side) and coupled slow lorries and mucho hillos (we're practising our Spanish for South America) makes for slow journeys rarely going above 50km an hour...
Not to mention when the wheels are nearly falling of the bus. But thats another story.... (involving about 2 hours of going really slowly with a couple of Vietnamese leaning out the back looking at the wheels all the time and another 2 hours stop and a lot of Vietnamese crowding round a wheel as if looking at it would make
it magically fix itself).
Journeys consist of overtaking (usually uphill, round a blind bend and at the apex of a corner beyond which is a almost sheer descent into the sea), honking the horn and braking hard (and I mean hard) when inveitably there actually WAS another car/bus coming. If its a bike or a moped, they have to swerve and pray... The passengers of the bus should generally just pray all the time and avoid any distractions caused by observing the current likelyhood of almost certain death. All said and done, the statistical distribution of crazy Bus Drivers is about the same as that of the rest of SE Asia.
Lily guilded, but you get the idea.
The honking is neverending - there are times its understandable (e.g. when motorbikes drive in the middle of the road) but am not sure what lorries should do when we approach...maybe drive over a cliff?!
Having said that, on a honkometer, we would perhaps only reach 7, and North India would probably be about 9.5, where 10 has all vehicles wired to provide constant horn upon engine ignition.
Another thing....James kept saying that he was hearing the Lambada
music being played but couldn't pin point where it was coming from...he finally worked it out today....when some vans reverse here the lambada is played rather than the "beeps" we have at home! We tried to catch it on Mpeg, but were unsuccessful.
Anyway, moving on - we went to see My Son today (ED: No - Aristi has not had an illicit Vietnamese Love Child outside of matrimony), its a UNESCO World Heritage site. My Son is a series of Hindu Temples ranging from the 3rd to the 14th century and was built by the Cham civilisation, not idigenous Viet people, but probably orginated from Indonesia. They _were_ pretty impressive however almost all were destroyed during the Vietnam War (or American War as its called here) - there were 70 temples complexes. There is now 1 semi-complete which a large amount of which is standing, and 2 large collections of brick mounds with some sparse remaining bits of structure languishing ready to fall over but for the supporting wooden reinforcing struts put up by the site managers. I think James wrote this before, but the US dropped 8 times the total amount of ordinance (by explosive power) on
Vietnam than the total amount dropped by all sides during WW2.
As Frankie goes to Hollywood said: "War!......... What is it good for?......Absolutely nothing!"
Or as Bagopeas once heard me (James) say: "War!......... What is it good for?......(Its rather good for the advancement of science and technology, but apart from that).... Absolutely nothing!"
Say it again! Best check noone else is in the room first - they might think you are a bit weird... anyways....
Hoi An itself is a disappointment. It marketed as this sort of amazing Vietnamese/Colonial Historical Town frozen in time. In actual fact its very small and every building here is either a hotel or a tourist shop selling souvenirs, handicrafts and tailor-made clothes. They were even playing European and South American music (or rather pan pipe musik) in all the cafes. You can probably see the bus tour coach loads of aging US tourists all proclaiming the place to be 'so quaint' as we speak. It took all my energy just to avoid disembowling myself with a spoon during our stay there. If only all people visiting the place could actually be frozen in time (and perhaps ejected into space as
part of humanity's first colonisation experiments - preferably on one of the less favourable candidate worlds) then maybe some good could come of it. Mind you, it's the first place in Vietnam that has made us feel like this. So we are largely moaning.
Hoi An does have some musems (but they're all rubbish) and a historic Japanese Bridge (rubbish) and a riverside setting (actually rather nice), and its an okay place. But know what you are getting.
By the way - most of the last paragraphs were James - you can probably tell this. (!)
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