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Published: November 23rd 2008
A Small World
After surviving our first sleeper bus experience we rolled into Nha Trang at about 6am, when obviously all of Vietnam is in fact fully awake by then, we managed to eventually find a really nice hotel and headed straight for the beach. Paul and Jamie couldn't decide on what to build in the sand, they started off by building a giant toaster, which turned into a kind of Arabian fort complex before turning into just a very big hole.
That evening we went out for a meal at a restaurant which offered free rum & coke or vodka & lemonade all evening as long as you ordered a meal, so quite a few rum & cokes later we wandered down to a club on the beach only to be told that it free drinks for ladies all night and cheap buckets of booze for men. We managed to make it back to another bar just in time for the happy hour so ended up having one of the cheapest nights ever. Incidentally, that day Jamie had been playing pool with a girl from Nottingham and decided to invite her out for the evening and after a
bit of chat we found out that her best friend back home used to work with Paul at Boots, "what a small World!" we must have said dozens of times.
More beaches
Next we visited a place called Mui Ne which we found was just like a smaller, quieter and cleaner version of Nha Trang. We stayed in a nice room right to the beach and the sea was clean and tranquil and the beach almost deserted in our little area, making for a really nice stop before we headed off for the rest of the trip with the knowledge that we would be beachless for at least a good month and a half. The weather also kept up its half of the bargain, plus we found some 25p strawberry shakes that tasted like petite filous which were really good.
Ho Chi Minh City
HCM City was our first taste of a city since Hong Kong and we were staying at Suze's friend Ben's house just outside the city centre so it was a nice change to feel like were living in a city for 5 nights rather than just visiting as tourists. The amount of motorcycles
on the roads was back on India levels, real dicing-with-death-crossing-the-road stuff.
The city we found to be pretty modern and had some cool architecture and an interesting, if a bit gruesome military history museum which documented the Vietnam War. We also got the chance to eat a variety of places around the city; the first night was real local cuisine fare with cheap meat, beers and lots of rice, the second night we went to a restaurant where you got to bbq the food you selected from the menu in a cool open-air restaurant which had some great beef and cheese as well as some nice shrimp.
Build up to Halloween
After a few days of lazing about and general travellers stuff (market, laundry, visas etc) which also included changing our flights to Oz to the 16th December giving us a little bit longer in Asia, which we did at the Singapore airlines branch in the town, where they had a fire drill which literally involved the arrival of a fire engine shooting gallons of water at a fake fire...
So our group of 3 skeletons, 2 zombies & a witch, set out for Saigon city
centre for our final proper night in Vietnam. After popping into a house party on the way to the city we walked down some side streets and were immediately accosted by all of the locals out drinking on the streets. For some reason though they kept handing all of us beers, just kept handing them over "It was like a dream" Paul kept repeating, he even took two beers off an old woman, although she did seem slightly rattled, maybe she thought her time was up and she was just trying to buy some time. We all seemed to create quite a stir, with Paul getting into role very seriously and posing for countless photographs with all the locals as well as all the Vietnamese people in the bars who all seemed like they'd never seen a Westerner in a Halloween costume. Seeing as most of the bars in the city have a 10pm or 11pm curfew we had to keep moving from bar to bar as soon as the lights came up but managed to navigate the curfew pretty well and ended up in the backpacker district until the early hours.
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Jane Murray
non-member comment
HALLOWEEEEEN
Whoever did your make up for halloween is indeed an artist. The photos are wicked. I know what you mean about the Russell Brand lookalike. Scary!! It was brill to talk to you both on Skype this morning. Hope your bus trip to Bangkok is better than your last overnight coach trip!! Until the next time, take it easy and enjoy yourselves. Lots of Love Mum xx