Floods, Scorpians and AK47's

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Well,

After a month I have finally got round to updating my blog with tales of Vietnam - the fact I left the place nearly 3 weeks ago means this is of course overdue.

I landed in Hanoi after a surprisingly comfortable flight on Lao air after all the warnings I had received and headed straight to the Old Quarter, it was late at night and I needed a room before the city shut down for the night. Fortunately I found space in only the second place I tried and was content with a cold beer and the original Star Wars on the TV and dozed off.

The next day I set out for a walk through the Old Quarter and was impressed by the big wide roads and cleanliness, it had a feeling of central London to it while being completely diferent (or I am just mental and missing home, one or the other). Hanoi is crammed with mopeds and the rules when it comes to crossing the road are more than a touch unnerving. Basically, step out into the Maelstrom of swerving, honking, psycopaths and hope for the best! The idea is to get eye contact with them before they make tyre contact with you, they will then just swerve round you! More bizzarely, it works! (Except for with cyclists who continue to prove to be wankers the world over).

After a couple of 12p beers and a truelly fantastic feed of chicken and cashew nuts and lemongrass and chille pork I went to see the famous Hanoi water puppet theatre. This was an interesting spectacle that was exactly as it sounded but impressive in parts. After that I ended up in a bar with a couple of lads that were out in Hanoi to teach English and ended up home at 03.00 inspite of the fact that the city supposedly shuts down at midnight.

I was picked up the next morning at some ungodly hour to go on a 3 day 2 night trip of Howlong Bay. Howlong bay is currently in the running for one of the 7 natural wonders of the world. If anyone has seen Man with Golden Gun, it is basically a huge area of islands like that in a great big bay. The legend is that a giant Dragon when running into the sea created the bay and islands by whipping his tail back and forth and the holes were filled with water. Either way it is absolutely gorgeous.

Day (and night) one saw us on a boat trip through the bay and sitting on the top deck with a cold beer watching the scenery was something that won't be easily forgotten (I took about a million photo's which will slowly appear on my facebook). My cabin mate for this trip was a Sweedish fireman called Martin. Martin was 47 but looked 34 and quite honestly has the worlds largest Hampton.... irrelavent to my story but worthy of mention all the same!

The evening was spent with 3 Canadian's, 2 Irish a Dutch guy and the Sweedish Lunchbox playing drinking games. One of the Canadians was a strange mix of two characters from American pie. He looked like the Sherminator but had the voice and mannerisms of Stiffler. Between him and his 6'5" Oil rigger, Borat impersonating mate and everyones pathetically hilarious attempts at the German Porn Star Game and 21 we were all laughing into the early hours.

The next day our guide (who would have done well in Stalin's Russia) informed us that we would enjoy our breakfast and then enjoy a shower before enjoying ride on boat to Cat Ba island.... There was never any doubt with this guy.... we WILL enjoy it! On the Cat Ba Island front he was right, we did enjoy. An hour jungle hike took us to the highest point on the island and a rickety 100 ft observation tower. The tower's stair case had many a wooden slat missing and was infested by hornets but the view from the top was fantastic. it was only when we made it back down that someone saw a sign chucked in a bush - no more than 5 people in booth at a time.... there must of been 20 up there when the discovery was made!

We spent the night on Cat ba island and just had a few quite beers and a game of pool and the next day went sea Canoeing on the way back to land and Hanoi. The first nights drinking crowd met up for dinner and drinks that night and we saw the most spectacular moped crash that nobody has been hurt in in history. Some pillock came flying through a crossroad and clipped another bike. This sent him into a wobbly skid and he went straight through a soup cart sending veg, broth, china bowls and god knows what everywhere, the impact actually straightened him up (he was headed for the pavement and 2 petrified women) and he shot of down the road without a backward glance!

I spent the next day in the company of a friendly Xe On driver (moped taxi) and he took me round all the local cultural sights. The highlight was the museum of Ethnology where I was particularly amused with the wooden fertility carvings (I'm such a child!) and the fact that there were about 20 weddings going on at the museum, apparantly very popular! Afterwards myself and driver went for a few beers in his local..... 7p a glass!

That night it was time to move on so I boarded my sleeper bus to Hue and solved a long standing mystery. If you have ever been in a pub when they have kareoke and there is a video screen with some weird video on it and thought 'where the hell do they get this sh@t?' then I can provide the answer. Vietnemese music videos. The coach played them for about an hour (speaker exactly 1 foot from my face in my cot) and restarted them at 06.00 the next day, for which I was eternally grateful!

Hue didn't turn out to be all that I hoped as the minute I got there, the rain started.... not normal rain but biblical, apocolyptic rain. It did not stop and within 6 hours the road outside the hostel wan knee deep in water. After staying in all day I ventured out into the flood and waded through schlong deep water for 15 minutes to the pub where I was 7 balled by a Vietnamese pool hustler and got stuck drinking with an increadibly boring Swiss guy. The pub did have a unique piece of graffiti though - Terry Phelan = darwinism. Random!

Next day there was no let up, matters got worse and all bus and train transport was off. Word was that the situation was worse down the coast in Hoi An (my intended next stop) where chest high water had seen large portions of the population evacuated. To make it a bit more fun a crocodile farm got flooded and now there were 400 crocs 'at large'. Accepting that I was going to have to knock Hoi An and Nah Trang on the head I booked a flight out to Saigon for the next day.... there is only so much sitting in your room watching crap movies on HBO you can take (although the Star Wars films were still running on Star Movies). That night I gathered an intreped gang fellow hostel inmates for the trek to the pub and off we went.

The trek provided another funny moment at a German blokes expense. This time an efficient German guy on the other side of the road had his rain poncho over his head like a tent with his map and torch underneath directing his girlfriend through the flooded urban jungle of Hue when he dissapeared straight down a hole! Up he game shouting and screaming and damning the shoddy Vietnamese while our little expediation all fell about laughing at him form the other side of the road, he did not see the funny side but it was comedy gold!

The flight to Saigon was a good one which I took with an Asian Canadian couple who were working in Taiwan, nice people. The most immeadiatley noticable thing about Saigon is that there are more mopeds than Hanoi.... 4.5million of them to be precise! and road crossing is even more fun! Still, after a late arrival it was an early night so that I would be ready to face the next day feeling refreshed. Saigon is a big and bustling place that was more like a squalid Bangkok that Hanoi. It also had more nightife that Hanoi and that evening I went out for dinner with the canadian's and a 4 or 5 others.

This dinner saw me push my culinary boundarys as myself and a lad from Surrey ordered a plate of Deep fried crickets (tasty actually!) a Scorpian each (crunchy.... don't eat the stinger!) and a grilled field rat (quite tasty - a bit gamey if anything) each. I'm still waiting for the photo's to be e-mailed by the Canadian's... I hope they do it as the pictures are good :-)

After dinner, myself and my intrepid cullinary buddy and his missus went to Saigon's number one club, Apocolypse Now. The beer here was nearly 2 quid a go which was very expensive over there so we didn't stay too long and headed back towards home and the Go2 bar. After the financial bruising of Apocolypse Now we decided to split a bottle of Vodka on the street first (classy but at 1.10 GBP for half a ltre who cares) then another as we were being entertained by the street kids and my conversations with the local drug dealers, making up things I wanted and would pay handsomely for.... One actually went to see if he could get hold of a long stand!

By the time we made into Go2 bar we were all a little inebriated which ment I was easily tempted into a dance off with a big African bloke which I won with some tradenark stupid dancing and meant I was now apparantly friends with the big gang of Africans. the night finished at 10.00 the next morning with a drunken game of ring of fire in my room with a naked aussie bloke, a canadian bird asleep in my shower and me and two of my african mates drinking Vodka redbulls.... needless to say the next day was a write off!

After my day of rest I went on a day trip to the Chu Chi tunnels, about an hour outside of Saigon this is a site where the Viet Cong tunnels have been preserved from the war with the septics. We were shown all sorts of nasty boobie traps and a sniper hole which was tiny (pictures on facebook). I got into the sniper hole (just) and couldn't believe that these lads would hide in there for hours at a time. I also crawled through 130 metres of tunnels, 14 of us went down and only 4 came out the other end, everyone else bolted through get out holes along the way. Its no surprise, it was hands and knees and even on your belly through parts and when you come out the other end you are litteraly dripping with sweat from the heat. Refardless of your polotics on the war you can't fail to be impressed with what the Viet Cong guys put up with to beat the yanks.... from seeing this they earned their victory!

After the tunnel we got the cance to fire an AK47 which was really cool. The gun has a big kick but is remarkably easy to aim as demonstrated by the fact I hit a target 60 metres away! After the AK I had a go on a Rambo M30 machine gun and that was even cooler! it took less than 2 seconds for me to fire 10 rounds! That night, the guys from the tour all met up at the Go2 bar for drinks and were entertained by the most inappropriate thing I have ever seen. A three year old boy came up to our table and imsisted we move everything off it. He then went up to the bar and got the bar maid to lift him onto it to talk to the DJ. He came back and clambered onto our table and then did a remarkable rendition of Bon Jovi's living on a prayer while pelvic thrusting and dry humping the palm tree that grew through the middle of the tree! His mother stood and laughed!

My next trip was a 2 day cruise through the Mekong Delta where we drank snake wine and visited little villages and took a bike ride around a rural island. That night we stayed in a town on a big island and I was billeted with a butch dutch girl and and Aussie lad and we went ut for dinner and a few beers. When we got back there were three gay guys from our trip in the hotel bar. One was from England, about 45, skinhead, not camp. The next was an East German of similar age who had not been camp during the day but now pissed was hilarious, camp with a thick accent and naturally humourous. The third had been a queen all day, 30 and born in Vietnam this was his first return home since his family smuggled him out when he was 1 year old.

Next morning we went on a boat trip through the floating market which was nice, especially the pineapple's from a local vendor who cut them down like a big icecream. After that we went to a market on land and that was an eye-opener! One woman had bunchs of live frogs held together by eastic bands and another was tearing apart live crabs. I managed to put my sandled foot into a sludge of dead crab, poo and random other sludge much to the stallholders mirth.... I used 2 big bottles of water to clean myself off :-(

On the way home we stopped for some snake wine and then had lunch. I had a snake whcih I had to pick out like a lobster. He was actually very tasty (if a little tough) and the skin was full of flavour! This was to be my last day in Vietnam as I needed to be at the airport by 06.00 however the England crunch game was kicking off at 03.00.... I stayed up - what a shower of shite that turned out to be! Still, I got to the airport on time and there ended my Vietnamese Adventure.

I'm not bothering with the travel index anymore as its entirley subjective so unless there are requests to the contrary I'm binning it.

Anyways, I'm off for lunch now so I'll update Sri Lanka later,

In the meantime, look after yourselves, and each other :-)

Chunk

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