Continuing down the coast

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Hello to all from Dalat in the mountains of Southern Vietnam. Apologies in advance for the length of this blog - it's been a while since we blogged and we seem to have done more than we had realised! Since we last blogged, we've taken a slightly slower pace to get to know a couple of places a bit better than a couple of nights can allow.

We took the train from Hue to Danang which was as promised a very impressive journey with beaches on one side and cliffs towering over us on the other. Danang itself was a town not used to many tourists and mostly closed for a holiday but a surprise hit was the "Danang Museum of Cham Sculpture". The Champa people were a civilisation which reigned over Southern Vietnam from about the 6th-12th centuries and had a great eye for sculptures of camp lions and cheery, partying birds. I'm sure there was more to the sybolism than that but we enjoyed it on our own level!

Another interesting local bus experience (1 hour bus ride in 35 mins thanks to a horn-tooting, "I'm bigger than you so get out of my way" driver) took us to Hoi An - shopping capital of Vietnam! The streets are lined with tailors of varying skills but all very persuasive and only too keen to tell you how "beautiful" you are to get you to purchase. So we did. Final count between us was 4 suits, 1 winter coat, 9 shirts, 2 dresses, 1 skirt and a pair of trousers.... Flattery was effective! And the Hoi An post office did pretty well out of us sending it home - they must be the most proftable post office in Asia! They are so appreciative of the business they even come to your hotel to pack up your purchases and take your cash.

Quite apart from the shopping, Hoi An was a great little town with some beautiful old houses and assembly halls. It appears that every minority community which has lived in Hoi An built its own Assembly Hall (presumbly each trying to outdo the last) hence you get great temple-like buildings in the centre of town called the "Assembly of Fujian Chinese Congregation". Another favourite was the "Department of Managing and Gathering of Swallows' Nests" - not sure the British civil service has one of those yet?

We also visited My Son - an ancient worship site of the Champa people (remember them - camp lion statues etc) which was like a warm up for Angkor Wat in a few weeks time and worth a 5am start to beat the crowds and the heat.

Whilst in Hoi An, we also took the opportunity to improve the skills we developed in Thailand by taking another cookery course. We have now added spring rolls, shrimp and papaya salad and stuffed barbequed mackeral to our repertoire (although I'm not sure where we can source banana leaves to wrap the fish in in London...).

Between the lovely old town, shopping, a great beach a few kms cycle away, a pool at our hotel and some fantastic restaurants, you can see how we needed a few days to "get to know" the culture of Hoi An.

We dragged ourselves away on an overnight bus to Nha Trang with only the promise of miles of unspolit beach to keep us cheery. It did not disppoint and we were soon consoled by the great beach resort which we frequented regularly with loungers on the beach, a swimming pool, great restaurant and even a micro-brewery.

We also took to the water for a couple of days, once on a snorkelling excursion to see some lovely reefs and tropical fish and once on a backpacker island-hopping trip on which Louise was disppointed to discover she was the only person born in the seventies out of the 40 odd people on the trip! A couple of drinks at the floating bar (reached by jumping from the top of the boat into the sea and then directing your rubber ring the right way) soon consoled us and made us feel young again!

Another highlight of Nha Trang was the hour or two we spent wallowing in mud! No - not a rainy trek but a hot mineral mud bath experience. Whilst sitting in a jacuzzi-sized pool, mud is pumped in to bath level and you sit in it and pour it over each other. Apparently it has some health benefits but mostly it's just good fun! They also had hot springs, mineral waterfalls and pools to clean the mud off!

We managed a bit of sight seeing in Nha Trang (including some of our favourite Cham ruins) but the heat meant that sitting by the pool was generally the better option.

We also had some great food including a superb local place where you barbeque marinated meat, fish and vegetables yourself at your table - fortunately our cookery skills paid off!

We are now in Dalat in the cooler mountains and have had a great day's trekking today past coffee plantations, up a mountain, through a minority village to the raging "tiger waterfalls" (although the only tigers now resident there are cement - which was a relief). The trek also involved going across a couple of Indiana Jones style swinging suspension bridges with many missing slats. Our guide was a really friendly guy with the traditional in-depth Asian knowledge of English premiership football (e.g. when Matt said he was a Spurs fan, the guide recited the names of the Spurs starting eleven!). He has invited us to join him tomorrow in his cousin's coffee shop (they all double as bars in the evening) for the FA cup final tomorrow night (9pm kick off here) which promises to be great fun and a good opportunity to meet some more locals (and try some local vodka).

We're heading back to the beach at Mui Ne on Sunday and are currently debating whether or not to do the bike ride from here down to the beach (it is a 60 mile trip in one day, so you can see why we are a bit hesitant!). We'll let you know whether or not we do it in our next blog. Be prepared for an excuse of heavy rain if we don't...

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