Vietnam

(15/12/2006-2/1/2007)

From Nanning the scenery remained much the same, karst formations all the way to Hanoi, although the vegetation was now a bit more tropical looking. Our bus took us to the border which we then had to walk across to another bus after having a health check consisting of us paying a few yuan and getting a ticket. The fields we passed we now smaller, there were plenty of people in conical straw hats, far more motorbikes, less cars, the writing was in western script rather than characters (though we still couldn't understand any of it), there was similarly bad music on the bus, and every now and again we would pass bizarre colonial style building, several storeys high, looking like they'd been stolen from a street of attached houses in the South of France and dropped on their own in the middle of a field. Some were still being built, so obviously this was the Vietnamese style of architecture. Eventually we arrived in Hanoi and for simplicity took the first hotel that was offered to us (by a girl on the bus), which turned out to be pretty good, with hot water, a DVD player in the room (though we found it didn't work), satellite TV and free internet. We had a walk about, and then to make sure our first meal was good so as not to ruin our first impressions of the country, we ate at a fairly expensive restaurant, ordering a delicious seafood steamboat (which everywhere else called hotpot).

Our first day was a rest day, so we did nothing except sleep, internet and eat beef noodles, which were pretty good. Papa had sent me a list of buildings that my great-grandfather (on the French side) had designed when he was the chief architect for the occupying French, so the next day we went looking for them, first following the train tracks that went straight through the streets with no barriers to the station. This had been all modernised so didn't look to great, but as a World War and Civil War had passed through the country, along with decades of modernisation, that and the prison were the only two buildings we could find the first day. There were plenty of other colonial buildings, but their roles may have changed since they were built, and many were embassies guarded by plainclothes agents that told you off if you tried to take a photo. We did see a police station with a copy of Sherlock Holmes on the desk though. Having walked around for a while we went to the park for ice cream and bought a (cheap, photocopied, illegal pirate) copy of the Lonely Planet South-East Asia on a Shoestring guidebook, then finished the afternoon with tea and pain au chocolat in a nearby rooftop café.

In Russia I missed the chance to see Lenin, and in China I missed Mao, so I thought I should try to see at least one pickled Communist leader, but Uncle Ho's mausoleum was closed, so we just had our photos taken outside it. We did see the presidential palace though, which my great-grandfather designed, and then the Temple of Literature that after China seemed refreshingly unrestored and genuine. We followed this with a meal including Christmas pudding and some shopping for our trip to Halong Bay booked for the next day. Unfortunately though we ate at the night market, making the mistake of not eating where all the locals ate, so I got food poisoning and spent the next day in bed, and only felt marginally better the day after. We both posted boxes of stuff home so as not to carry it and then went to the rooftop café again where Sally had "mango macerated with milk". I could only manage eating potato salad that day though.

Two days later then planned then we went on our cruise in Halong Bay. It was a few hours bus ride then we changed to our boat, which was a reasonably sized "traditional" style ship (all done up for tourists of course) with about 10 other people aboard, plus staff etc. The cabin was small but pretty nice too. It was a nice sunny day, there was a bit of mist but not too much, after China it seemed much clearer and warmer. Halong Bay is famous for all its islands, which are basically the same as the landscape around Yangshuo, but in the sea, so it was very nice. After cruising around for a while, having our photos taken with the captain who seemed very friendly, we were dropped on one of the islands to see a cave. This would have been a very impressive cave, if they hadn't ruined it with ridiculous lighting, draining the floor and concreting it and the ceiling, completely destroying its natural beauty. It was quite funny though. From there we went to an area where some people went kayaking, though we didn't because my hand still hurt quite a bit from Songpan, then the boat dropped anchor in an area with pretty much the whole fleet of tourist ships as the sun set. Dinner was almost exactly the same as lunch, which was OK, but then most of the evening was taken up with me and Sally arguing with the crew because we hadn't got change for our beer at lunch, assuming that they'd let us have beer later instead, but they claimed we hadn't paid. It was all pretty daft, especially when the captain got angry as it had nothing to do with him. Anyway, towards the end we just ignored them and played Scrabblecards with some of the other tourists.

At 8.20 the next morning we were dropped off at another island to climb up a hill where we got a 360 degree view of the bay, and then we slowly cruised back to the harbour, passing various rocks that allegedly looked like heads or fighting cocks, or anything else you wanted them to look like, and also floating houses, which weren't houseboats but looked like just houses with verandas stuck on floats. Lunch was at a restaurant in the town, and was very similar to the other meals we'd had, but then they were all included so we didn't really expect anything spectacular, and then it was a minibus back to Hanoi to pick up our luggage and get a bus to our next destination. Unfortunately Sally felt ill now, but didn't want to stay in Hanoi any longer so we got the bus anyway. As we waited for the bus to fill up there was a very loud and annoying American guy, joined by several other idiotic foreign tourists, who complained that the bus didn't leave on time, and then that they were over filling it with people sitting in the aisle and so on. They had clearly forgotten that this was Vietnam.

I don't think either of us slept much on the bus as it was noisy and uncomfortable, as were nearly all the night buses we took in South-East Asia. The bus was a jump-on jump-off tourist bus all the way down the Vietnam coast, which meant that we had to get off at Hue and hang around for a few hours to get the next one to Hoi An where we wanted to go. It was a nice enough town to wait around in, though we saw hardly any of it as we spent all our time sat by the Perfume River so Sally could recover a bit. Apparently on the bus to Hoi An we passed lots of nice beaches, but as usual I was asleep so missed it. Once there we went on a bit of a quest for a cheap hotel with an Australian couple, but ended up getting the one we'd started off at, then we went for a meal by the river consisting entirely of starters: the local dish "white rose" which is a bit like an open spring roll, spring rolls, and wonton soup.

The next day we had to change hotel as they were booked out, and as it was Christmas Eve we decided to pay a little bit more for a nice one with a friendly Chow Yun Fat lookalike guy working there, and then went walking around down. It was all fairly old and rundown colonial buildings, although full of tourist shops, and every other one seemed to be a tailor, so if we go back I'll get a bunch of clothes made. This time though we just both got hats with red stars on and I got a Tintin T-shirt, then we spent the rest of the day eating, as is traditional. There were lots of nice restaurants with good seafood, so we started with crab (I had mine steamed with ginger), and followed it with grilled duck, and finished at another place with delicious French-style mango and chocolate cakes. Christmas Day we also spent eating all day, with a few breaks to phone family and sleep. We started with white rose and spring rolls with mango juice and a coconut, followed by seafood hot pot with cocktails and then mango sorbet and coconut ice cream accompanied by a lime beer and an almond beer, then after a break we had steamed duck and vegetables with beer and wine, and finished the evening with mango and strawberry cakes from the same place we had the night before, with cocktails, then had to collapse on the bed from eating too much.

For our final day in Hoi An we decided to do something more than just eat, so we got motorcycle taxis to the My Son ruins. This is a complex of temples out in the jungle built by an ancient Vietnamese culture, and as there weren't too many tourists and it was still surrounded by jungle it looked very cool, and felt much more like a historic sites than most of the ones in China. After that we found a nice little café tucked away by a fountain near our hotel and had ice coffee with sweetened condensed milk (it's delicious and everywhere in South-East Asia), got some sandwiches in baguettes from one of the little sandwich making stalls they have everywhere in Vietnam, and got on our night bus to Nha Trang. It wasn't quite as crowded as the other night bus, but still not pleasant, so we didn't get alot of sleep before arriving in Nha Trang in the early hours. As we had got in the habit of doing, we left our bags at the office or hotel we were dropped at and then went looking for a hotel, as that way we attracted fewer touts. Once we had a room and had breakfast we set off for a walk.

Nha Trang is an alright city, nothing special really, though it is right by the beach, and has lots of tourist agencies organising diving and boat trips. We didn't bother with any of them, and spent the first day wandering around by foot, first to a big Buddha on a hill for a view and to get pestered by beggar children (I gave one of them the weird Korean thing the Russian girl had given me in St Petersburg as she hadn't replied to my emails since I told her I was an atheist in response to her crazy Christian ranting), then went for a snooze on the beach after lunch. Just next to the beach is the Yersin museum that I visited on instructions from home because apparently apart from doing lots of medical research himself, especially about the plague, Yersin also stole some from one of my ancestors and claimed it as his own. It was pretty interesting anyway, and after that we had ice cream and I got my haircut by one of the street barbers that you find on the corners of Vietnamese cities, as you can see from the photos Sally took. The guy next to me was even having his ears cleaned! For dinner we had blood clams and eel, which was remarkably close to the vegetarian version I'd tried in China. The next day we rented a motorbike as Sally can ride, and intended to go looking for Suoi Giao where my family used to have a house, but no one knew where it was and it wasn't on the map, so instead we went for a nice drive along the coast, coming back in the evening to get our bus to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon as it is still also known as).

The first day in Saigon was spent first looking for a hotel as we arrived really early again and they all seemed to be full, then once we had somewhere, sleeping, eating then sleeping. The next day was a bit more productive as in the morning we'd booked to go to the Cu Chi Tunnels, used by the VietCong during the war. Or so they claimed, but this was a stupid touristy outing, the bus stopped at a souvenir place even before we'd left the city, then our guide told us that they were the rubbish tunnels built for tourists and that there were some much better ones somewhere else, and it generally felt like a kind of VietCong World. Attractions included looking at boobytraps as used by the VietCong, bad moving models of VietCong, a destroyed American tank, some tunnels you could go in (possibly original, more likely recreated), and having a go on a rifle range if you felt like it (we didn't). Once we got back to the city, we had burgers then went in search of the house my grandma and great aunt used to live in when they were children, but all the street names had changed, and most of the buildings looked pretty new, so alot were presumably destroyed in the war or knocked down for modernisation. Anyway, we couldn't find it or the palace we went looking for on our way back, although we did have a nice chat with a student wanting to practice his English. We also passed a park that on the way had old people dancing in, and then later when we came back had people speed walking in a circuit.

The next day, New Year's Eve, we left on a "cruise" up the Mekong. This turned out to not be a cruise, as we stayed in hotels and got on several different boats. The first stay began in Mytho, in the Delta, and was the worst, because our idiot of a tour guide made those of us going for more than just the day tour cart our huge backpacks around all day, even though we came back to the same place as we had started, including on tiny boats only one person wide. It was also a pretty pointless, typical touristy tour of places built specifically for tourists, although it wasn't all bad, the coconut toffee was pretty nice, and going in the little boat would have been fun if we hadn't had our backpacks. Once we got back to the shore though, we thankfully were put on a different tour with a different guide, a hilariously camp guy called Hung who enjoyed singing to us and made jokes that were actually funny. After a short ride in a crowded minibus we were dropped and had time for ice cream before being put on a different bus with the same guide, which was bigger but a Spanish guy and I still had to sit on the floor (it was Vietnam after all). The day finished rather better though, as Hung took as all to a good restaurant where Sally and I finally tried snake (it was tiger snake apparently, and delicious, like really good chicken), and the town had a cool Uncle Ho statue surrounded by chain made up of stars. Then with the Spanish guy and a Swedish couple we went to a café and sat on the roof drinking cocktails until midnight with the other handful of foreigners in town, including some Germans and some other Aussies. As in Asia they use the lunar calendar, it wasn't New Year for them, so they turned off the lights and left at 11.30, which seemed a little odd.

New Year's Day was much better than the day before, as we got to see a real floating market, which was pretty interesting, and a traditional rice noddle factory that also had a pig, allowing our guide to give a hilarious explanation as to why they eat sows and not boars, involving the phrase "too much boom-boom make the meat smell" being repeated about 20 times. Sadly we then had to say goodbye to Hung as those of us taking the full three day tour into Cambodia got a bus to Chau Doc whilst everyone else went back to Saigon. Once we arrived, the Spanish guy, Sally and I were given a free lift to the base of a "mountain" (small hill) in a rickety motorbike trailer, and claimed it for a pretty stunning view of the Mekong plain at sunset, passing a monk playing foot-badminton (a popular game throughout Asia it seems, where people kick a feathery thing between each other trying to keep it airborne as long as possible).

The next day we got a boat to first a fish farm (not so exciting, people got to through food at the fish so they went wild and it looked like the water was boiling) and a Cham village (a Muslim minority group in Vietnam), then it was a long boat trip to the Cambodian border where we got our visas (and saw some bloody big spiders in the trees) and were put on a new boat. Along the shore of this last part of the boat trip, the settlements got more and more basic, particularly on the Cambodian side, where most of the house seemed to be built on stilts. All the kids here seemed ecstatic to see us, running down and jumping in the river, screaming "Hello! Hello!" and waving. Finally, a little after the sun had set we docked and were transferred to a bus for the 1 or 2hrs journey to Phnom Penh, eventually found a hotel and had a pretty good cheap dinner.