I'm sorry, did you say rain?

This blog will please those of you who have been sending less than loving messages to me from work. A picture says a thousand words so please take time in your busy schedules to view my holiday snaps of our time in the fabled beach resort of Vietnam, Nha Trang.

Blog over.

Well not quite. As is plain to see our proposed plan of spending 5 days on the beach and ingesting many fattening drinks and foodstuffs did not quite pan out as expected. Sigh. Those 4 bikinis still hadn’t gotten a decent airing. It got to the point where we couldn’t leave our hotel but Vietnam being Vietnam we managed to get the local Tex  Mex and Ribs emporium to suit up with their scuba tanks and deliver, god bless them all. Understandably after 2 or so days of apocalyptic rainfall we decided to cut our losses and head straight to Saigon. Again it looked like our bus had divine qualities and we were driving over a lake as there was water absolutely everywhere. Following us it seems.

Chomping at the bit and, this is important, dry we arrived in Saigon ready to do something. In fact do anything! Anything involved getting some fodder in our bellies and ambling to the nearest bar to drink some very very strong drinks. When I noticed a fair few hairy men (mostly Australian strangely) in togas I gave my mint twig filled mojito a fair few suspicious glances until a woman who walked past us dressed up as a pumpkin alerted me to the fact that it was Halloween. Those comments from Al about Darth Vadar riding past on a moped suddenly made sense!

Bemused, and I must say a smidge tipsy, we retired to our room for our vital dose of Star Movies and rest up for our sightseeing filled next day. Our day was filled with war and the violence and ingenuity that sprouts from said state. First we went to the Cu Chi tunnels. It was here that our guide, a Mr Bins, showed us around the maze of tunnels used by the Vietcong as a base for their guerrilla warfare against the Americans and the southern army. Mr Bins actually fought with the Americans against the Vietcong which gave for a very conflicted tour. He was imprisoned for 4 years following the communist victory but didn’t have a bad word to say about the communists themselves. Whether this was through necessity or a genuine dislike for fighting his fellow countryman I couldn’t quite tell. We did get a small clue that there was some sort of bias involved when we watched the introductory video that mentioned the ‘crazy white devils who kept bombing innocent civilians’. 

The tunnels were amazing, a real example of a) the resourcefulness of the Vietcong and b) how bleeding small they all were! We saw where the VC snipers would lie in wait…..tiny,

We saw their home made traps for their enemies……vicious,

After being shown various homemade instruments of death and posing on top of a tank

we decided to commemorate the evils of war and violence in general by shooting some guns at pictures of endangered animals. This is the first time I have ever held a gun and I have to say I quite like it. That white rhino didn’t know what was about to hit it as we grappled an AK47 and Garand m1 rifle.

Keyed up, whooping and feeling very Rambo-esque...

 we attempted to walk for 150m through one of the many Vietcong tunnels…….TERRIFYING.

 

These tunnels had already been widened a considerable amount for the larger ‘farang’ but were still frickin tiny and at one point 10m beneath the surface. My claustrophobia kicked in the moment I saw the entrance which made for a happy Efua. When you got into the tunnels you were basically bent over double with both shoulders brushing the walls on either side. There were lights on the ground, say about every 10m, but as soon as you walked past one your body blocked out the light and you were pitched into darkness. If there hadn’t been about 10 people behind me I would have backed out of that tunnels faster than you can say panic attack but unfortunately onwards was the only way to go. Luckily there were ‘escape tunnels’ every 25m or so I managed to vaguely hold it together by swearing under my breath until the first one came up.  Both Alex and I shot out of there a good deal paler than when we went in. I like to think I’m up to trying anything but small enclosed spaces? No way Pedro. I still don’t know how most of the rest of the group managed the full 150m (the shame).

Having quickly lost any Rambo like feelings we may have had we skulked back to Saigon in readiness for some TLC. So it still mystifies me why we decided to go to the War Remnants Museum. Sheesh.

 
According to the plaque the point of this museum was to show the pointlessness of all wars. This wasn’t my prevailing view as I stumbled out a few hours later. The main thoughts swirling around my head at this point were….. ‘ I just can’t look at these photos of people deformed from agent orange anymore’, ‘ I just can’t look at these photos of dismembered corpses due to bombings anymore’, ‘Evil is universal, the pictures of tortured victims in a national army run prison testify that it’s not only the farangs who hurt people’, and ‘is it wrong that this is one of the most visited tourist sites in Vietnam?’. Feeling battered, bruised and guilty for being an American (??) we sloped to the nearest restaurant and ate away our pain in readiness for our next stop which was sure to be even more of an emotional battering ram, Cambodia.

Hue and Hoi An....try saying that out of breath.

Following a miffed fare-thee-well to Hanoi (did Uncle Ho have to take a holiday whilst we were in town, just plain rude man) we started our train 12 our train journey down to Hue.  We had been warned that there had been heavy rainfall and floods down the coast so the train may take longer than expected. What were weren’t told is that at 5 in the morning the train would have to stop due to the tracks being underwater and all the passengers would be booted off onto decrepit buses in the morning darkness. No one is at their best after being rudely awakened so I was getting up a head of steam to being a smidge grumpy but when the dawn light finally came I got back in box sharpish. The roads down the coast are raised about a metre from the ground and that morning I could see why. There was water everywhere, sometimes spilling over the surface of the road. Looking out of the window it looked like we were driving over a lake. Seeing all the wooden huts under about a metre of water was pretty sobering but the people looked like they were used to this living and zipping around in their canoes.

After a few hours on the bus then another few on the train we all arrived in Hue very late and in a very subdued state. The poor girl from our hotel who had come to pick us up had waited 3 hours at the station before giving up. When we got our hotel I’d like to say we were all geared up to experience Hue life but in actuality we fell into bed and only managed to drag ourselves out for dinner. Besides, the film Mongolian Death Worms was on the box so I wasn’t going out for anyone. The next day we prepared to get back into the tourist groove. Hue is a town on the river that is over a 1000 yrs old and (I think) may have been a  capital at one point. The upshot of this is that it was surrounded by lots of old stuff, tombs, a citadel and a forbidden purple city and such. We weren’t particularly keen on being herded around the tombs on a big tour so elected to hire a dragon boat to ourselves and do our own thing. The tombs were incredible but unfortunately (cough) our camera battery ran out the moment we set foot on the boat so we had a day of no photos. We did manage to get a photo of the car that a monk drove to Saigon. Sigh.

You can see the really famous photo of the monk on fire in the background

 You’ll also be pleased to hear that I slipped on a muddy bank and looked like I’d had a terrible accident in the posterior region. I had Al and a woman on the boat wiping my backside down with damp clothes getting rid of the mud. This did the trick but until my trousers dried it looked like I had had a different sort of accident already. Sigh again. In order my damaged zen we went out that evening and proceeded to get silly drunk sampling the delights of the many many happy hour specials. It was in a bar called Brown Eyes that we met an old sea dog (literally and figuratively) called Pete whom we would proceed to bump into in various states or inebriation all the way down the coast. This night of excess may have accelerated Alex’s malignant cold and the next morning he was a shell of a man. So off I trotted into the bright morning sun to visit the Purple Forbidden city. Very much like Beijing’s forbidden city but 1% of the tourists and this one has been allowed to aged gracefully. Did notice the rabid koi carp mind that followed me up and down the bridge waiting for me to throw some nosh in, or fall in, I couldn’t quite figure. 

The city was lovely, very much like a forgotten garden as you can see.

All was very peaceful until I looked at my watch and realised I had a very small amount of time to get back, pack and catch out bus to Hoi An. One look at my sweaty and determined face and I didn’t get bothered by a single hawker all the way back.

With minutes to spare we caught the bus, and what a bus it was. We’ve been on a whole variety of forms of transport recently but none quite like this. Basically the set up was like a normal bus until you got to the waist area. Instead of being a normal chair the bottom half stretched out like a bed. Basically we each had out own air conditioned chaise longue for the  hour journey which was VERY much appreciated.

After crossing the Hai Van pass (another reference to Top Gear there….sorry), we arrived in my favourite part of Vietnam, Hoi An. This is also  very old trader town on the river that has influences from the French, Japanese, Thai, Chinese…. you name it. It’s a world heritage site and very little of the old town has been changed, beautiful.

It also has the bonus of being about 5k from a very very long stretch of white sand of beach which we took advantage of for the day. If all theta wasn’t enough Hoi an was a foodie heaven. Top notch fare and proper desserts finally! Ask Al about the passion fruit and chocolate mousse cake when you next see him but be warned, bring a tissue to wipe the dribble of his chin.

Since we seemed to have based our entire trip on the Top Gear trip it seemed only fair for Al to go to the exact same place they got their lairy suits done and get a shirt. The measuring process was very amusing for me but I was a bit disappointed by the sober material he used…….they did have some lovely peacock feather silk prints.

So, as you can see, all was well in our world, not even the last evening of torrential rain could dampen (sorry) our spirits. Had we but known that this was an ominous omen we may not have been so chirpy………….

Following Jeremy, Richard & James around Vietnam......

So. On to a new country we go, Viet Nam! Taking the second flight of our trip so far (ahhhh the ease of the thing!) we arrived in Hanoi. We elected to stay in the old quarter as the guide books waxed lyrical about stepping back in time and this being the old Asia that we all dream of. I tend to think of Thai beaches when I think of the South East but, honestly, what do I know eh?

In reality the Old Quarter was pretty cool, a warren of narrow streets teeming with mopeds, hawkers and everyday life. My theory is that people’s houses/apartments are pretty small in Vietnam so, like, China, people live their lives on the street. Beady eyes are a necessity in order to avoid dirty water that is chucked in the street from people cooking on their doorsteps. Don’t get me started on the man who sneezed all. The. Way. Down my arm as I sauntered past him on his moped.  Whilst wandering around the old streets and watching life in front of the gracefully decaying old French colonial buildings was a soothing way to pass a few days this inner peace was dragged out on to the street and battered by the masses of beeping mopeds, shrieks of woman selling oranges and kids playing football in amongst the traffic. Oxford st on Christmas eve has nothing on this.

Still, we set about with our usual sightseeing, a highlight being an American B52 that was shot down as the tide turned against the American Army in the Vietnam war. This landed in a small lake in a sleepy suburb and has been there ever since. After a strange bout of haggling for 2 motorbikes to take us there whilst a man kept yelling in my face and eventually trying to push me away, we were off. Through gritted teeth I kept my cool but seriously he was half my height and twice as annoying. It was worth it though, the journey was full of interesting twists and turns (I hate not being in charge or any vehicle I’m in mind) and the lake was surreal.

Who's that in the rearview mirror?

After a few exhausting days avoiding kamikaze mopeds and their mucus ejecting drivers we headed for what we hoped would be a soothing few days cruising around the beautiful Halong Bay. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last year (or alternatively have never spoken to one Master Southern) this is the area where the Top Gear boys tried to reach a floating bar using their semi amphibian mopeds.  So in a world, beautiful. In fact there seems to be a competition on at the mo to name the 7  natural wonders of the world and the country to squeeze Halong bay in there. We were a bit unlucky with the weather but did have one day of sunshine and as you can see from the photos one day is all you need!

I’ll admit that the trip was ever so slightly tarnished by a night of karaoke (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh!) but Al and I made a quick and what we thought was stealthy exit (so so wrong, everyone noticed) and managed to avoid any lasting damage. The trip involved a night’s stay on the boat and a night on Monkey Island and various other activities, some enjoyable, some…….not so much. Though I have to save my sympathy for the poor German girls who were wearing flip flops whilst we clambered up a steep, muddy, mozzie infested hill following our Vietnamese guide wearing wedges. Health and safety not high on the list of local tour guides! Further proof was the rust eaten old watch tower which we merrily climbed up to get our hair messed up by the high winds and enjoy the view. 

Recognise the person in the Liverpool shirt?

Onwards and upwards as they say. At least we worked up an appetite for our lunch of various types of sea food on the boat. I’m pretty sure the pinkish tinge to Al’s tan was due to the 40 or so bbq prawns he consumed.

Full of sea fauna and with my first of many sets of ridiculous tan lines we returned to Hanoi for one last bout of Italian ice cream and a little investigation into the father of Viet Nam, Ho Chi Minh, by visiting the National Museum, the Royal Palace and his famous house on stilts. Not to take away from his huge contribution to the country but don’t you think he looks a tad like a famous poultry chef?? 

His little house of stilts where he lived rather than the palace to show that he was a man of the people was rather nice though, nice and breezy. Now this was all very nice and cultural but we wanted to further our quest to see as many waxy dead men as possible in one year. So off we trotted, or rather oozed it was so bleeding hot, to his mausoleum, full of the joys of life in readiness to view a man who was so very very dead. Unfortunately this was not to be. The father of Vietnam was having his annual holiday and getting the full spa treatment and wax touch up in Russia. Mutter mutter. In an effort to contain the crushing disappointment felt by us both we knew we had to get out of Hanoi and move to pastures new, so we prepared to wind our way down the coast to Hue.

Why did the Brits ever leave?

With a subtle shiver running down my spine I realised that I’m my mother’s daughter. Rather than get a bus overland straight to HK (very easy, very cheap, pretty comfortable) I decided that the only way to arrive in a world destination is by sea. Unfortunately, I may have neglected to inform a very relaxed Master Southern that this would involve getting a night bus to Shenzhen, hotfooting it across the soulless city at 7am the next morning to the ferry port and then an hour long jet ferry to HK central. Full of vim and vigour following our hour long body massages we set off on what we hoped would be an uneventful journey.

Wrong.

The bus was almost comically uncomfortable, Shenzhen is a vast area of concrete nothingness that is actually quote hard to navigate at 630 in the morning after no sleep and I saw a mangled corpse close up. Sheesh. Whilst trying to soothe my cramped body on the bus by watching How to Train Your Dragon at around midnight I glanced outside to notice flashing lights. Sadly accidents are a dime a dozen on Chinese roads so I didn’t pay much notice. This was until a flash of red caught my eye. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was (and for the life of me I can’t quite understand why I tried) so as the bus slowed down I leaned out for a better look. What it a moped? A dented car? Nope. AS the bus grew level and I was basically on top of the object I realised that it was a battered, bloody man with no left arm below the elbow and no left foot. The reason why I hadn’t realised what it was earlier was that I was looking for 2 feet on a human body. Shudder. I’ve rarely seen anything so visceral (although a recent moments in Phnom Penh spring to mind) and that image will stay with me a long time. I don’t think I went back to watching the film………

Sardine-like, shattered and shaken neither Southern or I got any sleep that night and were mean and miserable by the time they bus dropped us off. Of course our moods were vastly improved when we realised that the bus stop was miles out of the town centre and the streets were deserted. With a little trudging, a little miming and a lot of drawing pictures in the hot morning sun we finally made it to the ferry about 2.5 hours later. Happily all was plain sailing (sorry) from then and we arrived at Central Pier in style and tiredly happy. We had planned to stay at Al’s old work mate Kai’s flat whilst we were in HK but is brother had only just left after a 2 week stay so we decided to bunk in a dorm for a couple of nights to give him a quick breather before we descended. These couple of nights in a dorm were….interesting. I’m not sure that Al ever believed my stories of just how few inhibitions some people have after spending extended periods in a dorm room. Let’s just say that HK proved me right. We had a smorgasbord of human activities normally kept behind closed doors. Whispered (hah!) arguments about who disrespected who by kissing someone else, making up session, full on biblical sessions and mad old Japanese guy who liked to wake up a 3 in the morning to rummage about in plastic bags for 15 mins then go back to sleep. I tried to block this all out with my iPod but I don’t think Al & I will ever be quite the same after my inadvertently hearing ‘why don’t you take our pants off’ and Al’s catching a healthy glimpse of a hirsute male French bottom. Sigh. And shudder for that matter.

Kai has probably never seen 2 people more pleased to move into his flat. We haemorrhaged money in HK anyway getting all giddy about modern services that we have gotten to grow and love. Decent haircuts, toiletries, Subway, clothes that fit my behemoth (in Asian terms anyway) body and, cough, a kindle an iPod all did an admirable job in draining our finances but we would have been in a much worse situation if not for Kai. Both his bottomless well of generosity in buying us moochers drinks but also in letting us cramp his style for staying in his flat. All I can say is he is a glutton for punishment as we are going back for his birthday in Jan.

Having both been to HK before we didn’t visit many tourist attractions but instead concentrated on the finer things in life. Namely a smidge of gambling at Happy Valley (luckily I had a small winning streak or would have been a little peeved) drinking and dancing in bars and clubs singing along to Katie Perry and Justin Beiber (I kid you not), eating half our body weight in dim sum in Maxim’s dim sum palace, lolling on the beach (for the first time since we left home!) at repulse Bay, having a lovely dinner with Peter from Brunswick alongside Suki and Jasmine and the crowning moment of indulgence eating high tea and drinking earl grey and decanted diet coke at the Peninsular listening to a string quartet play such masterpieces as ‘Our Song’ by the eminent Mr Elton John and a few other musical classics. Life doesn’t get much better than that!

We can’t exactly say we did anything hugely worthy but by jiminy we enjoyed ourselves......

and were sad to leave for our next destination, Vietnam.

It's China, but not as we know it............

Yeah, I know that it is basically Disneyland China and is overflowing with tourists to the point of madness but you can’t argue with views like this…

Yes, my fellow world citizens, welcome to Yangshuo, China.  Now we did visit Chengdu & Kunming following Lhasa and before arriving in Yangshuo but for the sake of brevity….and also as I really don’t want to relive the debilitating bout of Chinese tummy experienced by moi… I shall gloss over these and head straight to the big kahuna, Yangshuo. Alternate name, “easiest place in China to pretend that you are not in China.” Transport, food, DVDs, Books, street signs, all in English but with one extremely salient point….alll the prices were in Chinese. If you are looking for a real china experience this probably isn’t the place to go but for scenery and the ability to soothe two fevered travellers brows this is it! We spent 5 days there happily reclothing our bones in fat (how many portions of steak and chicken cordon bleu can one eat without exploding one asks?) and pretending to be world class photographers, honestly you can’t take a bad photo of that place.

Shortly after we arrived we strangely forgot the intimate agony we were in after cycling on a 45 degree incline (upwards!) for about an hour in Kunming and elected to cycle out to the 600 year old Dragon bridge, hopefully along the riverside with picturesque views of karst limestone mountains, water buffalo maybe a few scattered chickens and some such. Armed with some foodstuffs from the bakery (ask Al about the unnaturally coloured blueberry cakes and watch him salivate), mountain bikes and a deceptively simple map we were off.

We did get the desired views but also got more than our fair share of mud. Once we left the road we suddenly remembered that we were travelling through the countryside famed for its waterlogged rice paddies and that it had been raining recently. I got absolutely covered in splatters of mud from the back of my beck to my slightly aching ankles, to the point where it looked like I’d had a serious accident of the toilet nature. Master Southern, on the hand, had not a drop on him. You can imagine my extreme pleasure at this. Back to our cycling, about 5k in we realised that the map was useless and doubt started creeping in. Happily we met up with a guy from Kilburn called Andy who had attached himself to a young Chinese girl who had the foresight to hire a guide. One look at their scatter-free clothes and by golly we did the same. With a bit of slip sliding around, numbness in the bum, a minor puncture that took an old dude 30 mins to fix and pretending that the smell of country air is refreshing (water buffalo faecal matter) we made to the bridge! And what a picturesque little bridge it was.

It was at this point that ‘our’ guide decided that she had enough of these free loaders and asked us for £5 each to get us back to the town. Myself, Master Southern and Andy left in a flurry of ‘pffts, not in my lifetimes and how hard can it be’s?” and decided to make our own way home. Ohhhhh dear. I repeat, oh dear. At first all was well and conversation leaned towards what are your favourite restaurants in London and ooh that’ll make a nice photo. We even saw a sign that said Yangshuo was only 2.5k away so we carried on as a happy little team. Our first dark cloud appeared when we stopped a man and his pet buffalo for directions. His startled laugh and convoluted instructions gave us our first clue that all was not well. Things deteriorated pretty quickly after that, including our conversation which had moved on to “do you think this mud will ever come off?”, “I swear we’ve ridden past this hill before” and “do you think that a spa will massage my bum without getting the wrong idea?”. To cut a long story short we cycled through the Chinese version of Deliverance (even with the funny teeth and maniacal laugh) and got to a main road and some signs in English. One of which said Yangshuo 11km. Sigh. You’d better believe I had extra chips with my steak that night following our 50k ride (or thereabouts).

The next morning (mid-morning if I’m honest) we spurned the idea of cycling and decided that gliding along the river via diesel power was the way to go. And so it was. Southern and I hopped on a local bus quite clearly designed for local travel, I was in the back corner hanging out the window with my knees fighting for the same space as my chest and Southern didn’t even get a seat, he sat on the ledge between the driver and the door for an hour. After an uneventful hour (apart from the man chasing the hundred or so fluffy chicks that had escaped the confines of the cage on his moped and spilled across the road) we arrived at the river and hopped on a romantic bamboo raft for. Pretty stunning I’m sure you’ll agree though not so romantic as Al & I had had a minor disagreement about something or other.

I may have erroneously mentioned that there wasn’t a surplus of culture in Yangshuo. We did get a close up view of how death is treated in that part of the world. Whilst studiously eating some gastronomic wonder we noticed that that corner stall next door was being dismantled. This distracted us from eating only as it was one of the few places that Al could get his liquid crack, sorry, his ice cold Pepsi max. The lady serving us explained that a 60yr old lady had died next door that day. This all became evident as a huge carved wooden coffin arrived on a moped and trailer and 6 men struggled to place it in the now empty shop. The next day there she was in her coffin festooned with bright ribbons whilst her friends and family came to pay their respects before settling down to a good session of beer & tea drinking and cards. Not a tear in sight and lots of smiling people. Made me happy.

Another piece of ‘culture’ experienced was the light show. All a very worthy and imaginative concept. Basically it was a light show on water under the watchful gaze of the karsts. They also hired a lot of the local fishermen & kids so some may have got a warm fuzzy feeling whilst buying the tickets. Unfortunately this is yet another example that I am, according to Al anyway, dead inside. It was bright, imaginative, colourful etc. etc. but to me it felt a  bit like Sin City. Looked amazing but after 15 mins I descended into boredom. I can only apologise for my entrenched nature. Sorry.

 Do I gain some ground by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed and wasn’t remotely bored by the cormorant fishing? No? Ah well.

Sadly, the mini respite of good looking luxury in Yangshuo had to end of some point or we’d have to buy new (larger) wardrobes so we prepared to leave and make our way to that island of dissolution Hong Kong. The fact that our preparation for this trip involved a full body, 1hr long massage tells you just how low we had sunk into the pool of decadence that is Yangshuo.