Feb 2008

I only ask because i think he's opened an English Language school in Vietnam. I haven't seen him in the flesh, but I've recently met locals who seem to have picked up his accent. If you close your eyes and imagine being guided around ancient wonders of the world by Pee Wee Herman, it all adds a new and slightly surreal twist to the tour. His show got cancelled in 1991 because he was caught masturbating to the film Nancy Nurse in a porno theatre, so maybe the shame drove him out here...who knows.

As i write this i am in an internet cafe in Phnom Penh, Cambodia sat next to a Buddhist Monk, who seems to find whatever website he's browsing very amusing. So much for a simple, humble way of life. Even the Monks can't resist the might of Facebook.

Sadly looking at the first entry in the blog we seem to be way behind...again. But we will step back in time anyway and i'll try and recap the last few weeks in as much detail as i can.

So where did we leave off? Ah yes we were in Nha Trang going to head up to Dalat in the Central Highlands.

We took a bus up to Dalat from Nha Trang, which cut across the country from the coast up to the highlands (for the journey we bought some Doritos, Cookies and shortbread to eat, which in total cost the same as two nights accomodation). The views as we wound are way up on narrow roads to the second highest peak in Vietnam (after Sapa in the north) were pretty good. Which was lucky because it distracted most of the passengers from the weird noises and copius amounts of steam coming from the bus engine. This bus was damn slow. It's a pretty bum clenching sight to see a bus overtaking your bus on a blind bend with a good 200ft drop on the other side of the road. As the buses passed i swear i saw the Grim Reaper on one, looking at me, shaking his head and tapping his watch.
About half way up our bus decided it didn't want to go any further and finally collapsed at the side of the road. If it was a horse it would of been Pritt Stick by now, but the determined (or demented depending on the light) driver was not about to give up on it and attempted to, well, flog a dead horse. Whatever he did it seemed to work (i think it involved pouring water over the engine and giving it a good kick) as after about half an hour the bus jumped back in to life and dragged us up the last few hours in to Dalat. We all piled off the bus as another bunch of unsuspecting passengers were ferried on and sent off down the hill to Saigon.

Time for some tourist office rubbish about Dalat now. It's a charming french designed town, built high up in the central highlands of Vietnam. Surrounded by forests and vegetable fields and frequented by friendly locals and with the cooling breeze it all adds up to a relaxing and mediterranean syle town...blah, blah, blah. The Vietnam Paris it's been called with its own 'eiffel tower' (a rather smaller version that you can't climb up). It's a pretty lame tower actually, but it's been given this tag and now has to live with it. It just stands there looking slightly embarrased, knowing that everyone who looks up just feels rather dissapointed. Anyway, Dalat has a big lake (Xuan Huong Lake) in the middle which is rather Riviera-like (although i've never actually been to the Riviera, so don't really know what it's supposed to look like), but more excitingly has Pedalo Swans for hire. If i ever wrote a book on the 10 best lakes in the world I would demand they all had Pedalo Swans on them. During our short time in Vietnam we haven't seen any real swans though, so these might be Pedalo Geese, which in my book would put it 'top 5' easy.

It was still Tet new year, which as I've mentioned before is a time when all of Vietnam is on holiday. This meant Dalat was heaving with Vietmanese families. This not only meant we found it a little bit difficult to find decent accomodation (if you've seen the film 'The Beach' you can imagine what our room was like) it also meant the prices of everything went up. Hotel rooms, bus and train tickets, Oreo's, everything was double the price. The standard reply when you ask the price was "well it is Tet so..." accompanied with a Gallic shrug. This went on for about two weeks around the actual new year's day. A cynic would say it just seems like a good excuse to put prices up for a couple of weeks a year, but maybe that's just being a bit 'bah humbug' about it, after all there was a decent fireworks display in Nha Trang and all the flowers in bloom and kumquat trees look lovely. In our Guesthouse there was a guy staying there who had been born in Yorkshire, had Irish parents and lived for half his life in Australia. This guys accent was the best i have ever heard, even better than Pee Wee's. I swear if i had hung around listening long enough he would of said "alrite our kid, u wan t' throw another shrimp on t' barbie, to be sure to be sure". I thought it was brilliant and he has inspired me to mash some other accents up. At the moment i'm trying a Geordie/German mix. I'll let you know how it goes.

While in Dalat we hired a couple of 'Easy Riders' (old guys with motorbikes) to drive us around the sights for a day. The 'Easy Riders' are supposedly a group of former South Vietnamese Soldiers who fought alongside the Americans in the Vietnam War. After the war ended they found themselves unemployable so they set up this group to use their local knowledge and act not only as drivers, but tour guides for the tourists who came to Dalat. It became quite successful and now (this being Vietnam with no copyright laws) any old Tom Dick or Pee Wee with a moped call's himself an 'Easy Rider'. We chose a city tour and happily drove off in to the sunrise to see the sights of Dalat. Happily drove off for about 20 minutes that is, then Rachel felt ill (sun stroke from our marathon walk around the lake and flower garden the day before) and we had to go back to the hotel. Not the best start to the Tet New Year. After a day's rest in bed we ventured off again, this time seeing the sights just outside the city centre. The guides (Mr Hien and Ba) knew where to stop for the views and tell stories from the war and point out the devastation caused to the surrounding countryside by the Agent Orange dropped to flush out the VC (Mr Hien was an ex-helicopter pilot of the South Veitnamese army). They also guided us around to a Pagoda, the Elephant Falls (with a hazardous dice-with-death path to the bottom), all the Coffee and Tea Plantations and the Silk Weaving factory. Vietnam is the second largest exporter of Coffee in the world after Brazil and you can see it as you travel through the small hamlets. There are large impressive houses (in complete contrast to the neighbours shack's) whos owners have literally grown fat off the land. Vietnam is also the fifth largest Tea Exporter and, as i've said previously, the 2nd largest rice exporter in the world. So nobody can accuse them of not working hard. The tea they grow is split three ways, with the last cheapo crappy part of the leaf, (the end of the stalk) used in Lipton Ice Tea. So remember that when you next buy a packet. We also stopped off at the Hang Nga Crazy House. It was designed by Mrs Dang Viet Nga (now 80 years old but still living there), who's dad was a big cheese in Ho Chi Minh's government back in the day. Have a look at the photo's, but imagine a concrete Disney themed guesthouse, designed by Blackpool council and built by Frank Spencer. I haven't seen building work that shoddy since school when we tried to make a bird table in woodwork class.

With our visa coming to an end, we headed down the hill for our last couple of stops in Vietnam...Saigon and the mighty Mekong Delta.

Saigon is like the bigger brother of Hanoi who has travelled the world and got rich on Wall Street. In contrast to Hanoi it's a hell of alot more globalised (A massive Louis Vuitton store was just the tip of the iceberg). Although we didn't venture too far out of the tourist area of the city, it had a completely different, cosmopolitan feel to it compared to the rest of the country. Lonely Planet described it as the most crime ridden part of Vietnam, but we found it all quite plesant. Not too unlike many cities around the world, maybe just like a Vietnamified Paris.
We took the usual route to all the museums and other touristy things. The trip to the Museum Of War Remnants (formerly called Museum of American War crimes) being probably the best of the bunch. It houses some amazing photo's taken during the war by American and Japanese photographers (including the last photo they took before they were killed). The photo's taken at the massacre of 'My Lai' and the after-effects of agent orange were particularly disturbing and heart wrenching.

As Rachel thought it would be a little too clastrophobic for her, I took a trip out to the Chu Chi Tunnels on my own (type 'Chu Chi tunnels' into wikipedia if you want to know about them). The guide on the trip was an ex River Boat Captain for the U.S army and worked with the Commando's. His first hand account of the war and emotional connection made the whole trip come alive. As these guys are getting old now, in a few years most of them will be retired and the tours may feel slighly cold and detached. Anyway, these tunnels are bloody small, and that's after they've been widened for fat arsed westeners. Even though you only crawl through a few metres of one of the tunnels (there were about 250km of them) it's a sweaty and back breaking experience.

Back in Saigon we booked a 3 day cycle tour of the Mekong delta. The trip took us to MyTho, Vinhlong, CaiBe, CanTho and CaiRang floating market. We saw villages of brick, terracotta and pottery kilns, cycled through riverside villages and Rice fields and along some pretty hair-raising highways during rush hour. This is a beautiful part of the country (even more beautiful-er than the other beautiful parts that i said were beautiful earlier). We cycled alot (up to 60km in one day), saw some lovely scenery, ate some lovely food, drank some lovely beer, conversed with some lovely (and sometimes weird) locals and it was all bloody knackering. We wore some proper cycling shirts and even had a back-up support van, which drove behind us carrying water and supplies. This made us look like a bunch of bewlidered competitors from the Tour De France who had taken a wrong turn somewhere around the Alps. Sadly only our clown-like cycling gave us away as amatures. Even so, it was one of those days that you would be quite content for it to be Groundhog day.

After the Tour de Delta and a day of rest, we crossed the border in to Cambodia by bus...and this is where we are now.

Over the last month we have met many people that have made the trip even better than we thought our first foray in to Asia could be. Now after just settling and adjusting in to one countries way of life, customs, money and food we move on to another and have to start over again. But i guess that's what this travelling lark is all about.

The weirdest thing we seen so far on our journey (and which i would say is up there as one of the weirdest things i have ever seen in my entire life) was a small dog dressed up in kids clothes, wearing a hat and riding a tricycle in the town of CanTho. I am not kidding, look at the photo in the Mekong Delta folder! At first i thought it was a stuffed toy untill it started moving and slowly turning its head a la Exorcist, to intently stare at us. It was pretty scary stuff. I can see it Chuckie-like, murdering a whole town while it sleeps, then casually cycling off to the next town laughing to itself. We don't know why it was there or what it was doing. It wasn't outside a pet shop or anything remotely linked with animals. I think its owner must of just been a bit mental.

Our top 4 'must see's' in Vietnam:
Hanoi old Quarter (there is nothing like it anywhere else in the country)
Halong Bay
Hoi An
Mekong Delta

We have noticed over the last few weeks or so that large sections of the Lonely Planet guide books are complete rubbish. Most of it is at least a year if not two years old and some of the maps aren't even to the correct scale. It's a bit frustrating, but maybe we sould see this as a sign and free ourselves from the shackles of the Lonely Planet Sat Nav and venture out in our own way. But maybe not. So if you would like to know where we go next and what we'll probably see and do, please turn to pages 123-145 of your Lonely Planet Cambodia travel book. There will be a test later.

I'm definately no Adrian Mole, but i will try and keep this diary a little more up to date and a bit more frequent from now on (although saying that it's already behind because we have been in Cambodia for 9 days)

One fact before we go: Did you know one person a year dies in the good ol' U.S of A from the Plague! I'll have to look up to make sure our travel insurance covers that one for when we get to California.

Rachel has uploaded a load more photo's in to the folder for you to look at if you like. Here's the link again: http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii40/rachelandjoseph/?albumview=grid

See you soon.

Joe and Rachel.x

Stats:
Most people seen riding on one moped: 5 (five!)
Amount of Laughing Cow Cheese eaten: 223 triangles
Snakes seen: 0

Hola from Benidorm! Where at Club Tropicana drinks are free, fun and sunshine there's enough for everyone. And all that's missing is the...........waiiiiiiiiiiit a minute?!? This isn't Benidorm it's Nha Trang in Vietnam. An easy mistake to make if you've ever been here. Same Same but well just the same really. It's good to be here though because it's the first hint of sun we've had for the last 2 weeks (and like proper Brits abroad we've burnt ourselves in just one hour of sunbathing to prove it).

Hello everyone.

For numerous reasons too long to list (although lazyness being a big one), this is the first real chance we've had to write down anything we've done since we started travelling a few weeks ago. But now we have some photo's you can look at (to make this a little less dull) and a computer that nearly works (if words run in to each other it's because the spacebar doesn't work too good - although that doesn't account for the terrible spelling, so sorry about that) this is what we have been up to so far. I will be throwing in random facts and figures along the way, not that any of them will be of much interest to you, but i'm going to do it anyway for my amusement...and to prove we've been places and not just sat in the pub playing pool for the whole time. Sorry it's also a bit long, but hang on in there and at the end you can leave abusive responses untill your hearts content.

As you know we are in a town/city/whatever it is called Nha Trang, which is about three quarters of the way down (or a quarter of the way up - depending on how you look at it) the coast of Vietnam. It's nice and hot, it has a beach and a few decent cafe's/restaurants/bars and well errrrrrr that's about all that's worth mentioning really. It's not a bad place by any means and a good place to relax for a few days before we head off to Dalat in the Central Highlands for more adventure/playing pool in a different bar. We did go on a boat tour, which turned in to some 18-30's holiday hell on a boat, but it wasn't that bad, more amusing and relaxing than i'd imagined (although i did snorkel with a wallet full of money and credit cards in my pocket and forgot to bring the towels). We are just spending today writing e-mails and catching up on a bit of TV before we head of to a micro brewery pub along the beach as i want to try some of the beer they are brewing. I have decided to take a photo of every different brand of beer i drink over the year from all the countries we visit. So far i have a few and there will be a photo folder of them soon, if you are in anyway interested in that sort of thing. An interesting fact i did read the other day though was that San Miguel beer was first brewed in the Philippines long before it was in Spain. So there you go.

TV wise, Vietnam is a football fans paridise. All the hotels (well, the half decent ones) show nearly every Premier League/FA cup/Champions league game. It has shed loads of highlight programmes aswell, so just by having the Tv on in the morning or evening for a few minutes a day i've probably seen more Premiership football than i ever had at home. The other english speaking channels are CNN Asia, BBC World News and the Discovery Channel. And with this i have realised that these are all the channels you need for a happy Tv viewing life. In fact if i ever decide to become morbidly obsese and spend my final days gorging myself on Laughing Cow Cheese, Oreos and Pringles (that's all the western food they seem to sell here) in front of a Tv, my last physical effort would be to jump (or waddle) on to a plane and head over here. That reminds me, on another side note (sorry i will get to the the point of describing the trip soon, just keep on reading) I don't know how it is across the rest of South East Asia (although i've heard it's the same in every country) but for breakfast in a hotel/guest house they give you a foot-long baguette and one (yes only one!) Laughing Cow cheese triangle. How the hell they expect you to spread one traingle over that much bread with no butter is a miracle on the same level as when Jesus fed the 5,000 followers with a couple of kippers and a piece of mouldy bread. In fact if Jesus did return and spent a few weeks of his precious time in Vietnam this would be his modern day equivalent - feeding 5,000 hungry travellers with one Laughing Cow cheese triangle and an Oreo.

Anyway i digress......

We started off in Hanoi up t' north of Vietnam (flying in from Singapore with Singapore Airlines and the best breakfast ever!). We stayed in the Old Quater of the city (dating back to the 13th century). A crazy, but strangely beautiful place, which would remind me of old medieval Europe if i had ever been alive then. It's a mentally busy and congested part of the city, not made any better by narrow streets and alleyways. Oh and it's smells weird. We saw many Pagodas and Temples and Museums and other old things, many of which were dedicated to or about that great Communist Revolutionary and French Ass-kicker, Ho Chi Minh. We saw a WaterPuppet performance (think Punch and Judy on water, but without the mild domestic violence and rubbish crocodile/sausage storyline) and walked around a very big pond called Hoan Kiem Lake. There are tortoises in this Lake and apparently it's very lucky to see one. After about 20seconds of waiting to see if one of the little fella's would kindly pop his head out of the water for us, a Vietnamese lad strolls over to the edge of the lake, casts out his homemade rod (a coke can and a bit of string) and drags out a tortoise. After a quick shifty look around, he sticks it in his jeans pocket and runs off. On the Buddhist scale of luck I'm not too sure how lucky that is for us, but i'm sure that tortoise has seen better days.

From here we went on a two day trip to Halong Bay. No1 tourist attraction in Vietnam i think, and probably righly so. It's a stunning place with over 3000 small limestone islands around the bay. The tour we went with (Handspan if you care) and their guide made it probably the highlight of the trip so far, even if it was bloody freezing and a bit wet. Staying on a Junk boat in the bay and visiting the caves over the two days was a good break from the madhouse of Hanoi. Although if you ever go, don't stay in Halong City. We drove through it on the way back to Hanoi and it's a sh*thole. Oh and Rachel just told me to tell you we saw some monkey's on one of the Islands and fed them Bananas (threw Bananas at their rabid heads from our boat would be more of an accurate description mind).

From Hanoi we took a very long overnight train (suprisingly comfortable staying in the soft sleeper aircon coaches - nothing like what the local Vietnamese were sleeping on a couple of carriges along mind) down to Hue and spent a few nights there. Compared to Hanoi it's a bit quieter and smaller. You don't get hassled as much by Xe om (moped taxi) drivers or Cyclo's. I've learnt there are two rules to driving in Vietnam. Rule 1: Press your horn every 10 seconds to make people get out of your way. and rule 2 is....errrrr okay there isn't a second rule. Aparently they use the horn just to let the other drivers aware of their actions, rather than in anger. I can't see how this works if everyone is pressing their horn at the same time, but they seem to enjoy it.

Hue (a walled city or Citadel) is pakced full with more Temples, Tombs, Palaces and Pagodas than you could shake a Spring Roll at. It's not a bad stop on the way down the coast though, so we did. It's not far from the DMZ (the Demilitarised Zone) from the American (or Vietnam depending on how you look at it) War. From Hue we took a moped tour around some of the sights just outside of the city, with a great guide from a cafe called 'Cafe on Thu Wheels' (they also do the best Garlic Bread if you're every in town and need a Garlic fix - which you probably wouldn't as they put garlic in everything here). This was another highlight of the trip, and one which Rachel enjoyed, being her first time on the back of a bike...and one which i enjoyed becuase i saw a live pig tied up on the back of a moped....trust me when i say you haven't seen anything in life untill you've seen a live pig, looking very sorry for itself tied up in a wicker basket on the back of a Vespa. It's like a farmyard Quadrophenia over here.

From Hue we headed off by bus to Hoi An, a bit futher down the coast.
Hoi An old town is an Unesco World Heritage site (there are quite a few of them in south east Asia) and probaly the most laid back and hassle free place in Vietnam. A lovely little city, although very touristy. This is the capital of cheap tailors. If you ever want any clothers made, bring along a photo and they'll make made-to-measure-fitted-top quality (depending on what store you go to) rip off's. It's a shoppers paradise and not just because of the tailors. You could quite happily furnish your whole house and your neighbours with all the crap they sell here (to be fair it's not really crap, but that's the only collective noun i could think of). This probably explains why we bought two bedside lamps, some very old Ying and Yang coins (made around 1509-1516 from 'Le Tuong Due' dynasty aparently) to wear as a necklace and Rachel had a lovely fitted dress made. Although this wasn't made by any old fly by night tailor..oh no....she only went to a tailor who the Sunday Times recently voted the second best in the world! (Check out the website if you don't believe me http://www.thanhniennews.com/travel/?catid=7&newsid=35369 ) and guess what, it only cost 13 (yes thirteen!) of our good English pounds. You don't get that down Saville Row. Unfortunately in our smugness, we didn't realise the tailor shop the Sunday Times voted the greatest was just next door (only kidding).

We took a quick trip to My Son (another world heritage site and apparently the Ankgor Wat of Vietnam, although we haven't been there yet, so can't really compare). It was bombed a bit during the wars and was left to ruin for a good few years so there's not much left of the thing sadly. We also took a short paddle boat tour down a small part of the Thu Bon River with one of the poor mad old guys who tout on the river banks in Hoi An. This included going under two of possibly the lowest bridges in the world (wait for the photos, if they were any lower we would of been in a submarine).

After Hoi An and a good day-long train ride we ended up here in Nha Trang (sat at the train station in Danang I've never seen 100 people so engrossed watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon before...and all of them adults. Afterwards they put on Mr Bean and everyone left...and some people say the Vietnamese don't have good taste!). On our arrival at the train station the Hotel didn't pick us up like they said they would, we got taken by a taxi driver to another hotel as he tried to palm us off in that one to make a few quid on commission. We walked off down the road to the hotel we originally booked and found they had given our room to someone else (probably why they didn't bother coming to pick us up) so they put us up in a friends hotel for one night. This was run by a very lovely women, but the room had a fridge which probaly hadn't been open since the 1968 Tet offensive and stank like it had held an American prisoner of war in the ice tray for the last 40 years. The Tv didn't work so we couldn't watch the Discovery Channel and the bathroom had no window....not in the usual sense that it had no window, it had space for a window in the wall, but had no actual window in it, just a massive gaping space looking out to the world. We moved on from there to stay in a great hotel right by the beach with a lovely room and Tv that has the Discovery channel. And now i'm sat writing this e-mail so that's the story so far.

Vietnam is a beautiful place (landscape wise very much like you would imagine if you've only seen Platoon) where i'm told 60% of the population are still farmers. You can see them all in the rice/vegetable fields if you go 2 minutes out of any town or city. We hope to see some minority villages when we head up to Dalat in a few days, before we head on down to Saigon (or Ho Chi Minh city, depending on how you look at it) and then on to the Mekong Delta. Oh and i almost forgot, it's Tet New Year's Day here today so "Chuc Mung Nam Moi!" ('Happy New Year' in Vietnamese). It's like Chinese New Year, which handily is also on the same day, so it's easy to remember the date.

Here is a link to the photo's on Photobucket:

http://s260.photobucket.com/albums/ii40/rachelandjoseph/?albumview=grid

It isn't all of them by any means (Halong Bay and Hanoi so far plus a bit of Hue) as the internet conection is pretty slow here (it would be faster to make brass rubbings of all the buildings and post them home by sea mail). Plus i forgot the USB cable for the camera so we have to get photo's burnt on to a CD. Doing this in Hoi An meant an exciting day spent sat waiting for hours in a shop while the owners, their friends, a random stranger and next doors dog attempted and failed to burn a few Cd's worth of photo's. Then, comically, they gave us blank CD's while deleting half our photo's off the memory card, which was nice. In the end i had to sit at the computer and search for them myself. Luckily the ones they had deleted were still in a folder, hidden deep on their computer...which we found just before we were going to give up, buy a gun and shoot the owner in the balls.


That's all for now. Hope everything is all cool at home and everyone is well. We'll catch up again...probably just before we head in to Cambodia.


Stats:
Most people seen riding on one moped: 4
Amount of Laughing Cow Cheese eaten: 153 triangles
Snakes seen: 0

Yours Sincerely,

Joe and Rachel
xxx