Ha Long Bay, the Caves and Cat Ba

A three hour bus-ride with obligatory souvenir-shop stop brought us to the port of duelling ferries and the start of the seemingly least-organised tour of our trip so far! Once our captain finally finished playing bumpercars with the ferries trying to get into port and our new compsci Israeli friends had finished telling me about the delights of working with a British company like 3M, we headed out between some truly spectacular limestones karst islands. Small ports had been set up at the bottom of some, whilst others were far too steep-sided for people to visit. Two of only four functional deckchairs were commendiered by us for ample snoozing!

We made an island-stop at the cave from the party in Matrix Reloaded (well it seemed like it with all the funky lighting) though more likely it was just called Hang Dan Go, Hang Thien Cung, Hang Kom Quy, Hang Sung Sat, Hang Luon, Hang Bo Nau or Hang Trinh Nu - take your pick! The ceiling looked like some over-exaggerated artexing in concrete though I'm assured it was 100% natural. The cave would truly have made for some awesome parties - especially with the purpose-eroded croc-pit for gatecrashers!

The whole of Ha Long Bay was beautiful, probably further emphasised by the pleasant lack of scooter horns - their arduous chorus so persistant all over Vietnam! We headed past a number of floating fishing villages and then into a bay surrounded by islands for some swimming in the warm salt water. Being on the late side we jumped into the water only 30 minutes before it goes really dark (about 5.45pm). Others took kayaks and about 6pm in total darkness you could head the anxious cries of "come back now please" from the local tour guides worrying that they'd lost tourists, or worse-still their mate's kayaks!

We checked into the Sun and Sea Hotel in Cat Ba Town, Cat Ba Island where we watched a part of Batman and Robin until our substantial dinner of spring rolls, rice and some amazing tuna fillet dish...oh and a heap more tofu to top off the stack we'd had at lunch in place of any kind of meat!

We were very impressed with the amount of civilisation on such a small island - they'd even gone as far as providing coloured fountains on the waterfront, banana pancakes at knock-down prices and a great selection of Bia Hois! Being shattered we headed back for and early night, but found Moulin Rouge on TV. Following I indulged in some slightly dangerous Kung Fu practice on a 5th floor balcony. Fantastic for privacy and peacefulness but not so good when your hand slips on the tiling and you invisage your cartwheel rolling and bouncing happily to land a rather long way below! Adrenalin-rush over it was time for bed.

Black Chicken Day

We headed to the War Museum by way of the unspectacular cathedral to find that (surprise, surprise) it was closed - well what person in their right mind would expect a museum to be open on a Friday? Instead we went with the moto-touts to the Ethnology Museum which presented loads of information about the lifestyles of the various tribes within Vietnam in a slightly confused, haphazard way. The fish-trap seller's bicycle did provide a great example of just how much you can fit on a bike or moto in Vietnam...the laws of equal-and-opposite forces don't really exist here. Until then we had both been unaware of the dramatic differences in the apportionment of rations during the American War - based entirely on how close to the inner circle of The Party you were. Differences could be as much as four or five times, even for essentials such as rice and sugar.

Outside there were reconstructions of various tribal buildings, including a Bahnar house complete with rather high ceilings requiring a harness to be worn to dust the corners and a grave adorned with graphic and rather-pleased-with-themselves fertility symbols!

En route to buying our tickets to that night's Water Puppet show we were befriended by two local students, apparently trying to find something to do with their Friday night. Martin and I were very suspicous and involved our minds fully in the task of trying to suss the con. My first theory was they intended to get us drunk and then take us to an illegal gambling den. Later on during the meal we got onto the subject of South-East Asian men (married and unmarried) going with prostitutes. Tom seemed rather keen and with phrases like "Sure sure why not?" splattered around liberally we thought we might have clocked them.

The meal consisted of a black chicken for starters - a whole black chicken, claws and head still attached. Literally a black chicken (a medicinal delicacy found only in North Vietnam) minus feathers and cooked in extra medicinal juices for your life's fulfillment! After overcoming the initial "what the hell am I eating" thing it actually tasted fairly alright, even if it was a bit of a hassle trying to find the flesh. Martin actually helped finish Tao's off, but eating the head was beyond either of us. Tom however relished the opportunity to try and munch three at a once!

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Course two was a huge seafood hotpot, also with loads of veg, beef, tofu and tofu-skin which was actually very good. And then it came - the con - the price of the meal! Bearing in mind we were in a restaurant one step-up from a street-kitchen and although we had eaten a lot of seafood, GBP45 for the four of us seemed a little excessive. That explained why the waitress had come back three times to discuss the bill with our two "friends" before finally settling on this amount! With only minutes to go until our show and with arguing getting us nowhere we split it 4-ways, paid and left the other two there - supposedly we would meet them again after the Water Puppet Show. With hindsight we should have just left what we though was fair and gone, but it is a beautiful thing! However we were told later that black chicken would probably cost us 150,000 - so at 200,000 ut ciykd gave been worse, but then the hotpot btween four at 270,000 and the drinks at 30,000 instead of nearer 10,000 I think prove that it was a con. Even so we went less than GBP1 over our daily budget even after I upgraded from my beloved Casio watch!

The control the operators had over the Water Puppets was really impressive, especially the things like simulating swimming and dragons breathing fire, the Phoenix's swimming, the King going fishing, water-snakes, angels and boat-races. When the operators appeared at the end they were a definite bunch of random arty-types!

After the show we quickly found ourselves a stake-out in the shade of the trees on the other side of the road. Waiting for ou learned (they did actually know their stuff) economist-friends would unsurprisingly have taken an eternity though so we headed home.

Fine Arts and the Cinema

Martin spent the day recovering in bed whilst I went for a walkabout through streets with rediculously narrow and long houses - due to them being taxed on their shop-front space. I found the remains of the old Citadel - closed 11.30-2pm for lunch, Ho Chi Minh's Museum - closed 11.30-2pm for lunch, and Ho Chi Minh's Mausaleum - closed until November! They really do like to make things difficult!

I headed to the Fine Arts Museum which was actually open and which turned out to have some cool carvings of lions and dogs, a hall of really ugly people and some beautiful laquer paintings. In the tribal dress room there was also a pair of the most impractical and uncomfortable-looking high heels I've ever seen!

We took the evening off the whole culture thing, hitting the home comforts at the cinema for a showing of Miami Vice which was brilliantly realistic during the gun-battle scenes! Having so far eaten kebab and popcorn by the bucketload, we then indulged in a slab of cake each on the sixth-floor patio. Definitely a day for a few luxuries!

Happy Birthday dear Martin!

So what did Martin want to do for his birthday? Go shopping! So off we trundled in the direction of the shopping centre. En route we came across what looked like a missile-targeting system with what was presumably all of Vietnam's silos highlighted in red and yellow.

We hit two very modern shopping centres, though the electronics prices weren't far off what we'd pay in the UK and we couldn't find contender number three for Martin's ultra-safe, never-to-be-lost camera! However, we did find a really smart cinema playing films in English and another bottle of GBP1 rice-vodka and some mixers! Immediately outside the civilisation of the cinema there was a huge motorbike park to remind you where you actually were!

In an attempt to do things differently we began a game of blow the cards off the selotape reel, further extending the game with a pair of special cards - the cheesy Ian cards! We progressed naturally to the Bia Hoi where some local guys and American girls aided me in my rather easy quest to get Martin smashed. My mission was complete not much later at a cost of about half a bottle of vodka (50p) plus seven Bia Hoi's (48p). Not many places you can take a quid, get hammered and still have change in your pocket! Oh and the kebabs next door cost 33p a go!



After a wee rendition of Happy Birthday the party moved to New Century - a huge club with great music, great decor and unbelievably free entry too!

We boogied the night away, well at least until one of the new-rich locals decided he didn't like Martin and tried to barge him to the side. The favour was promptly returned and as the kid went for a swing, what must have been the fastest bouncers in the world were already between us! After the same thing happened for the second time we were escourted from the club. Even in a foreign country we get kicked-out when its not our fault - legendary!

Hanoi and the Visa Fiasco

Woken once again by the driver turning on really bad (music-for-deaf people) Vietnamese music very loudly at all of about 6am! Didn't arrive until an hour later when we headed to the recommended hotel. Bar the smells and noises of the market which we later discovered started promptly at 6.30am it was kind of OK! Darling Backpacker Guest House - the salesman/receptionist is a bit of a dick if you don't go buying his overpriced tours and visas!

We set out to get the China visa sorted. It was all going OK until we realised our Vietnamese Visas didn't last a month from when you enter the country, but a month from when it was intially valid. I was fuming as I'd checked that point three or four times with the TAT office we bought the visas from in Thailand and they'd assured us we'd get 30 days from when we entered. We'd have been quicker through Cambodia if we'd known. Amazing how Thailand idiots can bite you in the arse months after leaving the country.

So, in the end, as we'd also found a cheap place for trips we bought a Vietnam extension ($25 beats the $100 fine at the border for overstaying!), a China Visa, a Halong Bay Tour, a Sapa Tour and even arragned for our passports to be delivered to us in Sapa so we didn't have to do that journey 3 times. We'll see if that works out!

3 hours later we were done and after the attentions of a Vietnamese lady getting us to post for a photo with her state-of-the-art fruit tranportation device and making a significant score finding The Magus in a bookshop which amazingly had every book listed on computer, we headed back for some much-needed kip.

Jenni found us that evening after her taxi driver had taken them to a compltely different hotel, not ours as promised - the whole commission thing takes over again! We got some fresh mugshots taken as te Chinese Embassy said they needed some more-clear and handsom photos than the ones we'd already given! The cheek!!

After some woman-whinging about where we were going as we wanted to have a wander first we found an ex-pat place where we made sure we left a note for everyone to give Martin a wink and a kiss tomorrow if they saw him, life-like sketch included! We wandered the streets and bumped into a few more of Jenni's friends who were just about to fly home and then hit the Bia Hois. Either mass inflation had hit the nation or Hanoi thinks its beer is superior as they were charging 2000 dong a glass - that's 6000 a litre, up from 3500 in Saigon & now totalling just over 11p a pint - extortion! Rice popadom things dipped in chilli were great and also a steal at 1000 each (3.3p)!

The De-Militarised Zone Tour

Unsurprisingly, before booking, they didn't tell us that this was actually a rather long tour totalling some 360km through the old DMZ between North and South Vietnam. This basically meant spending almost the entire day in a bus with short stops to ease the pain and see a quick sight! Had I not been seated with the wheel arch at my feet and hence my toes only just below by bum I probably wouldn't still be so unimpressed with the whole journey!

The first sight was "The Rockpile" - a nearly sheer-sided 230m high mountain which the Americans used for observation - quite dramatic rising from the plains.

Stop 2 - Khe Sanh base which the American had to retreat from due to relentless bombardment. Some long-exposure photos in the museum showed the arcs of the incoming arillary from every directions imaginable - completely overwhelming the base. Generally there wasn't much to see in the DMZ as the Americans destroyed everything they could as they retreated and then the Vietnamese took the metal from everything they could to seel as scrap. This included the "McNamara Line" - America's coast-to border project to build an electric fence, planned to stop the North Vietnamese Army supplying the Viet Cong.

These supplies travelled along the Ho Chi Minh trails - names after the president in the North who wanted to reunite the country as a communist country. A bridge and road now run along the route of one of the old Ho Chi Minh trails. Whilst we were standing on the bridge there were a few kids fishing for what looked like bits of metal in the water below...whether it was waste from the bridge of still stuff left over from the war we've no idea. It could plausibly be either - there were quite a few groups out in the rice paddies with metal detectors searching for mines and metal...though we're told most mines are found when locals get limbs blown off, not by the people who go searching. Hence the stay-on-the-paths message which the guidebooks drill into you constantly!

During the war North and South battled over who had the biggest flagpole - boys will be boys! Only one remains but it is undoubtedly enormous. Nearby the stress of tanks can be seen on the old French bridge where each steel section is sags significantly in the middle.

By far the best part of the entire afternoon were the Vinh Moc Tunnels. Following instructions to the letter "Do not lose the person infront of you" Thomas (a guy we met from Denmark), Martin and I got rather sidetracked by all the tunnel entrances we were walking straight past and as I had a torch we somehow ended up going in! Whatever they say about health and safety (which is laughable here anyway), being in the dark tunnels and exploring them on your own gives you a brilliant impression of what it must have been like to use them during the war. These tunnels were much bigger that Chu Chi, allowing you to walk (albeit stooped). Obviously they were still very black and the flash blinding us when we took photos didn't help!

From one tunnel we popped out beside a beach, and from another we were projected into the back of an immovable, thorny cactus-bush. We then decided we should catch up with the others. We only missed reading the photo captions in the museum and I still got to pose with the antiaircraft gun so all was not lost!

Following the group through the tunnels (which we now thought we knew like the back of our hands) we took advantage of their slow progress to check out some of the darkened tunnels to either side. Great in all but one case when we realised we'd probably gone 600m down a tunnel with lots of twists, turns and junctions and should the torch go out it could get difficult to find our way back!

By the time we got back we'd completely lost the group though we knew where the seaboard entrance was so we headed there. Well almost - we came out by the sea, but from a different tunnel and at a different point. Ah well, we were out and from there we missioned it back over the hills, some guys farm and a dirt track to the bus!

Our next challenge was to try to distract ourselves for the 4 hours we had to wait for the Open Tour bus in Dong Que Restaurant, Dong Ha by playing guitar. Our challenge was short-lived though as the restaurant owner headed over with a dual-language magazine - so we ended up teaching him English using some text about the founding of Houston by two brothers. We were rewarded most kindly with tea and biscuits - clearly he'd read some stereotypical texts about what it is to be British!

We caught the nightbus up to Hanoi, this time with only a single Vietnamese-sized seat each and a bad air-con unit. Part way through the night I awoke thinking someone was singing. Somehow in my sleep I'd combined the mobile ringtone with the voice of the local guy who was now talking very loudly on the phone whilst everyone else trying to get some rest. He deserved a smacking!!

Gun's Don't Kill People - Bus-drivers do, you're a moped rider and I might kill you! We sing only the truth...bloody maniacs!

Hue - The Citadel and Imperial City

So on the 14th October, this must now have been about the third early start in a row - this time departing at 7.30am from Hoi An to reach Hue by lunchtime. We lost no time in hiring some Mary Poppins bicycles again and heading to the Citadel - the 19th Century walled part of the city. To get there we cycled across one very narrow and traffic-congested bridge absolutely rammed full of every form of two and three-wheeled transport you can imagine!

We headed straight to the Imperial City where they had the cheek to charge us for parking our bikes! Not motorbikes but merely your Mary Poppins jobbers as I previously mentioned! The expansive Ngo Mon gateway was very impressive with lots of ornate dragons and tiling covering the roof apexes. It was probably the most impressive building in the whole Imperial City.

We then walked across the Esplanade of Great Salutations - what a name!

The Thai Hoa Palace was full of very ornate, 2-tonne wooden columns which had all been manually replaced during restoration. It was basically one huge hall with a throne in it and a smaller room to the rear.

The Forbidden Purple City was a bit of a building site though the restored Left and Right Houses had some interesting exhibitions and a throne and dressing-up closet you could indulge in for a fee!

The Theatre was very pretty inside, though not like a western theatre - seat filled a flat floor on the bottom level, whilst the upper seating was separated on either side of the aisle.

Thai Binh Reading Pavillion was again beautiful and very ornate but in serious need of repair.

Somewhere wondering around the back of the Imperial City here a guy initially professing to be a teacher got us to fill in a questionnaire and then proceded to tell us that he also worked for the Vietnam Red Cross and showed us an ID card which I couldn't read and which I'm quite sure didn't have a red cross on it. He then started asking for cash and after saying I already donate at home and deciding I pretty much didn't believe him we ended up paying 50,000 dong between us just to get rid of him! What a waste - that was 16 litres of Bia Hoi! Good con though.

After that we went for a little cycle around the Citadel taking in the lakes and the city battlements which they'd turned into allotments!

Dinner that night featured an awesome array of plates for a Hue-style construct-your-own spring roles for dinner! Made my night and cost - oh let's see - less than a pound!

Finally after all the early starts the next day we had a lie in and did pretty much nothing all day other than catch up on diary writing and blogging and eat! A bit of relaxation at last!

My Son Ruins

So we had another early start to go to My Son - "Vietnam's most evocative Cham site". It was a massive religious site built in seven distinct phases and styles between the seventh and thirteenth century - a holy place considered the "domain of gos and god-kings". Well Martin and I are aspiring. The site had various Cham towers and halls, with various degrees of decay, hidden in the partially-cleared vegetation of the surrounding mountains. Back in the day the A towers would have been a great lookout on top of their hill. The crowning glory of the complex as found by the French - tower A1 - was kindly toppled by American bombs during the war. Around the site you can see plenty of damage in the form of craters and bullet holes and toppled buildings - not surprising as the Viet Cong based themselves here.

Interestingly no mortar was used in the construction of the buildings and the bricks were cut so smoothly they left only a hairline crack between them. Some have suggested that a glue from local trees was originally used but no-one seems to know. What is for sure is that the Chams would beat me at a game of Jenga!

On the way out we went past a fine arts centre with a really cool stylized elephant gargoyle outside. (I'll put a pic here once it lets me!).

Trying to get onto the boats later, a little local boy dressed in a Chinese dragon mask was running between us all and then decided to start running at the bull (almost next to us) which was protecting its calf and the calf's mother. It didn't take the bull too long to become distinctly unimpressed by the torments and decide to charge towards us! It might have only had short horns but I didn't fancy getting hit with them so it was quite fortunate we move quickly!

The boat dropped us off at a wood carving village where they produced everything from furniture down to ornamental bowls, laughing fat blokes and some robust-looking crabs which were actually secret storage devices. James Bond eat your heart out. The fine detail in the bowls was amazing and would surely make you go blind trying to copy it.

Tailors, Meeting Halls and Chavs

Having decided what we wanted and having looked at coat/jacket styles on the internet we headed back to the tailors to get a suit and a coat/jacket each and Martin also got a pair of security shorts! But then has the combination of zips and flaps ever stopped a prostitute getting into a man's shorts?! The tailor girls were massive flirts and having got our room number so we could be contacted about the suits we were promised a midnight rendezvous! Haha!!

We went to wander some more of the halls in Hoi An, firstly heading into Phuc Kien Assembly Hall - with its quiet patio retreat outside, blissfully free of the noise of motorbike horns. Inside it featured a 200 year old papier mache figurine of "Thien Hau, goddess of the sea flanked by her green-faced and red-faced assitants who between them can head any ship in distress over a range of 1000 miles". A mean feat for a couple fo statues! Huge josstick coils hanging from the ceiling kept the place smelling nice.

On the way out some random Vietnamese lady who we'd asked to take our photo decided she wanted to be hugged by us in one of hers!

The Museum of Trade Ceramics documented how far trade from Hoi An went during the 16th Century - amazingly as far as Africa and Europe! It also told us about the watchful eyes installed in houses and painted on the front of boats. The philosophy seemed to be that if they can't see then how can they be safe? Fair point.

We had a brief guided tour of the spectacular Old House of Tan Ky, which had only just recovered from the flood the typhoon brought in its wake. The house was a mixture of Japanese (3 cross beams supporting the roof) and Chinese (5 beams running the length of the roof) and Vietnamese (er - somewhere!) styles.

For dinner that evening we foudn ourselves a balcony spot in a riverside restaurant for dinner and got two free beers just for going in due to our residual charm! THe highlight of the entire meal was watching two chavs trying to park their motorcycles on the pavement outside. The first one managed OK, but the second one had stopped his too close to the kerb so he really had to gun it to get it up the kerb. The front wheel went up, but then the back got stuck at the same point. No problem - just throttle it even more. As commanded the bike launched forward. It took the pavement in one easy leap and then bounded off the other side, through the air and ditched said chav burberry cap and girlie scream thrown in, straight into the waiting river!

The whole street errupted with locals rushing to help and westerners in hysterics or taking photos. Personally I though both were obligatory! Some local guy, probably the owner, dived in and heaved it out with the help of a few others. Young chav paid up for the diver and probably the required servicing of the bike and scarpered very quickly...blatantly trying to save face and avoid looking too cool with his new wet-look clothing!

The ever-illusive Cao Dai Beach at Hoi An!

After a rude awakening by the morning light streaming in through the bus windows we travelled through the typhoon-damaged coastline of torn palm trees and battered buildings and into the wee tourist hotspot that is Hoi An. We ended up in a hotel with breakfast included which wasn't a bad choice seeing as it actually made us get up in the mornings!

As recommended we went to the hotel tailors to see what was on offer and how impressive the rates were (very!), but left so that we could have a think about what we actually wanted rather than being told by the saleswomen!

We wandered Hoi An to see the Japanese Covered Bridge and the Cantonese Assembly Hall. Both of these dated from the mid 16th century when communities from China and Japan settled in Hoi An (then Fai Fo) under their own laws and customs to take part in the vast amount of Asian and European trading in the port. We also saw some ornately carved and painted good vs evil doors on another Chinese meeting hall.

After passing the markets and reaching the edge of town we decided to continue walking the "3 to 4 kilometres" remaining to the beach. Oh how wrong we were to think that the Rough Guide and business card maps we had would actually be anywhere near correct! It turns out that the beach is not actually just due East of the town and moreover not down the road which was indicated and down which we tried to walk! After about 35 minutes with no beach in sight we were quite sure we weren't where we intended - appearing to be in the river delta rather than in the vicinity of the beach. Our sixth traveller-sense also told us we were far off the beaten track as the children only knew "Hello" and not "Hello, one dollar"!

Finding a random cooking school we were provided with a map which again showed the beach to the East, only this time it was apparent that we needed a road  alittle further North. The cooking teacher drew on the roads, well tracks, which we needed to walk down. Once again though the map barrier (ie lack of proper orientation of features) illuded us so we walked a good few more kilometres back in the direction we'd originally been going!

Finally as our track was about to turn into mud we gave up when a man on a motobike asked if he could help us. He looked a bit surprised when we said we were headed to the beach and took us right back the way we'd come and then along a road which actually went NORTH-EAST!!! No wander two hours of walking in the scortching sun had been fruitless! (Next day a proper map showed us how we'd been wandering aroudn a peninsula nowhere near the beach!) A good job we set off early!

When we finally arrived the beach was lovely apart from the persistant hassle of locals trying to sell you fruit and footballs. Its fun to begin with but it soon wears off, especially once it becomes very likely you're going to get the runs from the amount of fruit you've already consumed! The even went as far as saying "You buy from her, why you no buy from me?"!

That evening, at a broken cash machine, we bumped into Mark, a guy working as a teacher in Bangkok, and Joel, a construction engineer from Sydney. Xing Xang Bar (or similar!) seemed to be lively and have cheap beers so in we went. The food was good and we had a good few games of table football which always goes down a treat!

Nha Trang City Tour

After the fuss two days previously that a two person city tour could not be done for US$10 we were a little surprised to be picked up by a people mover and on our very own personal Nha Trang City Tour. First stop was the Oceanography Centre where the water was a little murky, but it was good to learn the names of some of the sealife we'd seen whilst diving and see some lephard and black tip sharks (like those Katie and I swam with) and a huge skeleton of a hump-back whale.

Next stop Long Son Pagoda with a distinct Chinese influence, more so than any we'd previously seen and complete with some cheesy flashing lights around Buddha's head! 152 steps led up to the top of the hill and to a huge 30m white Buddha. This again was ancient - "crafted in 1963 to symbolise the Buddhist struggle against the repressive Diem regime". There were great city views from the top.

Po Nagar Cham Towers (Nha Trangs main tourist attraction) were overgrown by the surrounding tree but well preserved and impressive. I guess most people inside the towers were praying to leave alive as you could hardly breath inside due to the vast quantity of jossticks being burnt in an enclosed space with nearly no ventilation! Down the hillock there were also the ruined pillars of the meditation and offerings hall (madapa) which used to be used by the Hindu Chams before reaching the towers.

Off to Nha Trang's circular Cho Dam Market for a quick shop for belts and T-Shirts. Every stall within that market had a sign up saying "Fixed Prices". A little hard to believe when there were no price tags on the item though they did like to point to the sign when we tried to bargain. Being stubborn though we got their prices down and beat another little money-making scheme devised to ensnare us!!

At lunch we had a quick look at Nha Trang's beach which did look very nice, though it was actually surprisingly devois of sun and locals trying to sell you stuff...rather pleasant in fact!

Thap Ba Hot Springs were the final stop of the day. We bathed in warm mineral mud which if I'd seen flowing anywhere else I'd have assumed it was an open sewer and certainly wouldn't have jumped in! You soon got used to the smell though and we had a very relaxing 2 hours in a warm mud bath, drying in the sun, in a mineral shower, in supposedly high pressure mineral jet sprays, in a warm mineral water bath and finally in a hot mineral water swimming pool. All for GBP2 and like the adverts said - "bathing in mud is very interesting"!

We grabbed the now-finished police report and a quick bite to eat and then hopped on our first ever nightbus to Hoi An. Very selfishly we made sure we got on early and reclined our seats before anyone even thought of sitting behind us! Well it was the only way to get a snooze. Unlike the last bus this one was very much on time - trying to leave 3 minutes early whilst Martin was still in the tour shop using the loo!

The Great Nha Trang Police Station Fiasco

Needing our second police report of the trip, we postponed our city tour to the next day. We walked all over Nha Trang in search of the police station - once again in not quite the correct place Mr Rough Guide! After various left-means right directions we spotted it on the roundabout we'd walked past twice already!

They didn't speak a word of English, well beyond, "Hello what is the problem?", "camera" and "Violet" - the name of our hotel which they kept repeating with and almost French accent. Through some kind of sign language they realised we wanted something writing down - so proceded to get out a pen and plain piece of paper - apparently this police station didn't do official forms! Twenty minutes more of confused "violet"'s later and we walked to some building with a badminton court and four people, all clearly unimpressed with us interrupting their game. Back to the police station and "violet, violet, violet" and "you are fomr England? Ah Manchester United" landed us on the back of polive motorbikes and heading for...another police station! Fantastic!

So the policeman from the first station explained the situation (that we were staying at Hotel Violet and wanted them to write about a camera for which we had a manual) to the policeman at the second station. Hardly surprising this is all they knew as the Rough Guide provides you with Vietnamese for police station, but no way of explaining the problem once you get there! So then this policeman explained to another policeman who then phoned a friend, well two actually. The second one wanted to speak to Martin and explained that we should come back in two hours with the receptionist from our hotel. Erm...OK.

Bemused as we couldn't get any reason for why we had to wait for another 2 hours we got a moto back to the hotel. Enter our saviour - Mi - part hotel-owner, part receptionish and partly wandering what Martin had been up to outside her hotel with three prostitutes in the middle of the night! She was probably wandering what drove them to steal his camera and like Nick she probably cited stingy tips!

She got Martin to write his story down and then explain it all so that she could in turn translate it into Vietnamese. After dinner we found ourselves back on the motos and back at Police Station 1, which shunted us once again to Police Station 2. This time we had an explanation - number 1 was a "Police Station", whilst number 2 was a "Police Office". This means they have forms and upon Mi's request we finally saw what we'd been trying to get all day!

We don't really know what happened in the following hour, but what we are sure about is that Martin was the butt of all the jokes and everyone in the Police Office had a good laugh at his expense! I'm quite sure from his actions that the officer with the forms though Martin should have just slept with them and had done with it!

After much persuasion it was decided that the forms could be stamped before 5pm the following day, just before our bus left. "Now" never seems to be a good time to do things!!

That night, worn out from the day's test we headed upstairs and recorded Saigon's Burning's first ever music video! Apologies for the poor quality of the vocals but the acoustic dampening in our studio wasn't quite up to scratch... ;-)

Island Tour, The ACTUAL Sailing Club

So our diligence to travel quickly was thwarted a day after on 8th October by the man in reception who managed to screw up our booking through trying to put us on a cheaper, but which was under capacity so it was goign to end up costing us loads more. A last-minute run-around the tour shops got us on a crazy sprint of a motorbike ride to the docks and on to Mama Linh's Island Tour!

This started with a trip to Hon Mun (Black Island) for snorkelling infront of the 'dark cliffs' - actually just rocks. We potted some Angelfish Bannerfish, Snappers, Starfish and a few others we still don't know in amongst the coral.

Then on to Hon Tam maybe? Well it didn't really matter...this time we weren't there for the scenery. First we ate a true feast of local cuisine - main course and fruit desert, and then out popped our musical entertainment, in the the form of the cook, assitant cook, captain and tourguide's band with their designer drumset and pitch-perfect guitar!

They could play any song as long as it was turned into some kind of skar-tyle sea shanty! Apparently England was "same same" as Australia (Waltzing Matilda) so we didn't get to sing.

Next we hopped into the water for a our very own floating bar! With some dodgy liferings (I reckon it was meant for someone half my weight) to keep us afloat we drank ?elderberry? wine by the shot whilst trying to stop ourselves floating away. The best technique was definitely to hook your feet through the bar (two floating rubber rings with a crate of wine and our guide on top!).

We headed on to play beach volleyball on an island with a mermaid and far too many stones in the sand for diving and then back by way of Hon Mieu, skipping the Aquarium in favour of the Oceanography Centre on our re-booked city tour the day after.

Then straight back fro some drinks at the Aussie Ranger/Artist Dude's and Louise's place before they took the nightbus. I continued the night with Martin, Irish Ian, a bottle of vodka and a deck of cards at our hotel room. Following this, realising our previous mistake, we made it to the ACTUAL Sailing Club and we found it just as we were told - a very lively place! We had a great night drinking Jam Jars with people from the tour and a whole bunch of randoms.

Completely knackered from lack of sleep I ended up heading back early (well about 2am!). Martin left a little later and on his way back got stopped by three local girls who'd just jumped off a motorbike! One of them reached around and grabbed his nuts (and his attention!) whilst the other two each took a pocket, managing to life his camera and almost his wallet too. Camera 1 lasted 3 weeks, and camera 2 lasted 1 week. Maybe we should just give camera 3 away...

The Beach, The Sailing Club, The Journey

After fancying windsurfing but finding it was going to cost $55 for 2 for 1 hour we though we'd wait until we find somewhere cheaper and do a 3 or 4 day course. So we hired possibly the worst bicycles in the world - mountain bikes but without gears, but with loads of rust, buckled wheels and the most uncomfortable seating in the world and headed to Mui Ne's fishing port beach. We watched the locals bringing in the catch of the day in their circular floating wicker boat things. whilst we got laughed at by the locals who couldn't understand why we wanted to sit in the sun where there was perfectly good seating in the shade!!

On the cycle back we saw some crazy cloud and rainbow combinations which looked like the beginnings of a storm. Fortunately tho that had been the night before  - and we'd really known about it with the waves crashing into the sea defences so hard that they shook our room whilst we tried to sleep!

That night we ate at a really nice fish restaruant then headed to the Sailing Club for the exciting nightlife which the guys off our Chiang Mai trek had recommended. We found it closed with the barman just clearing up. That made for a very long walk back along the beach on which we finally gave up and got a moto back home to bed!

Next morning I couldn't sleep so got up and did some blogging, then moved on to pool and still we were waiting for the ever-illusive bus. It turned up nearly an hour late for our journey through the green countryside in the rain (felt like home!) to Nha Trang. I managed to mend my broken headphones which promptly broke again twice in the journey and haven't worked since. We realised that morning just how little time we had left to do Vietnam if we wanted our planned 5-6 weeks for China so we lost no time in booking ourselves on the City Tour for the next day, ate and then hit the sack.

Jeep Tour - Market, Enormous Buddha, Children's Parade

Next morning the four of us got a Jeep with a guy called Then who we'd met in the restaruant the night before and headed around the market. This made for a very inciteful trip - with him doing all the bargaining we got pineapple for 4000 dong, 1kg of bananas for 4000 dong and coconut also for 4000 dong. We've been paying more like 10,000 after hard bargaining - cheeky buggers!! Still that is only 33p. I was also going to have a look at T-Shirts but they all just had I Love Vietnam designs on which wasn't quite what I was looking for.

The Americans really would have cried if they'd seen how our driver drove the Jeep - he was more careful over the random packed-stone section which joined two sections of dual-carriageway than we'd have been if we were driving over it in a car!

A cable car took us up a mountain in the middle of the plains to a temple which they were still building! We were beginnign to think we'd got conned! A bit more of a climb and we saw it - a 49m reclining Buddha! We've seen a lot of Buddha's now but this was definitely impressive. Its certainly the largest in Vietnam, and we're also told the largest in Asia - I'll check this before claiming it though! It was definitely a little less maintained and respected than the ones in Thailand though going by the grafitti work. The Buddha also came complete with its own selection of luminous-orange crabs!

We timed our journey back through the middle of Phan Thiet really well - finding ourselves suddenly in the middle of scores of childrens parades, each school dressed in a different brightly-coloured costume in celebration of the end of their school year! And we only got muck-up day!

The final stop was Po Shanu tower, a Cham tower overlooking the coast and dating from the 8th century.  A little hard to see in the fading light but nice too see all the same.

That night we chilled out playing guitar and then tried to get Skype working with Moneybookers then deciding to block my account as it didn't like my credit card, nor that I was accessing it from Vietnam. Grrrrrrr - overly safe systems are the downfall of travellers once again!

Motorcycle Madness!

So the 4th October brought with it an all new, no-driving-test-needed experience in Mui Ne! Martin and I hired motorbikes, having never ridden one before in our lives and after very brief instructions in broken English as to what everything does Martin nearly killed himself by swerving straight over to the wrong side of the road! After his first warning as he nearly landed in a ditch due to not leaning as he corned we were initiated and with our manskills no-one could stop us!

We headed to the Red Sand Dunes and on the way we got boxed-in by kids on the back of motos with their dads driving. It was a bit like a chase scene from the movies with us constantly trying to get away, but them just speeding up or slowing down to match us! A bit intimidating considering our learner status and lack of protective gear (ie shorts and a helmet), but it turned out they were just being a little in-your-face about trying to get us to use their plastic sheets to slide down the sand dunes.

So we got there and the three kids organised themselves into 2 slide-pushers and a photographer! It was awesome fun slipping and bumping down the dunes and what's more we got to go the the hardcore, much steeper section rather than where the throngs of tourists were!

Next we motorcycled off a long way down the coast to another long beautiful bay, this time completely free of development. Realising we only had a 1/2 tank of fuel (well Martin did, my instruments panel including speedo was non-functional) we turned back for the Red Canyon. This was a bit like Bryce Canyon, with Hoodoo-style rock formations, this time though made out of sandstone. We had a bit of a scare whilst we filmed a mini documentary on how the formations reminded us of Lord of the Rings...

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****USE THIS LINK FOR NOW: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-924956064014925519&hl=en ****

We put the motos into 1st gear - a rediculously viscious gear which tries to throw you off the bike at every opportunity. Worse than this - your natural reaction is to hold on harder to the handlebars which in turn increases the acceleration from the handlebar throttle just worsening your already ungainly and uncomfortable ride!. The bike would just accelerate away leaving you flying on behind gripping the handlebars! Amazingly we made it across the soft sand Mui Ne's fishing port without any tumbles and out on to the harder sand by the water where we felt the need to pose with our new-foudn favourite means of transport!

That night we ate at a BBQ restaurant which we'd found on the motorbikes. Then we endulged in a spot of "Diese ist der Zauberer. Der wer? Der Zauberer." - this is the witch translated into German. Naturally this progressed into "Diese ist der Irische Zaubere" and it had to be said with an Irish accent - I think sometimes we just make things very difficult for ourselves! Tried to head to a club for the evening but alas it was closed for the low season so a spot more guitar tuition was in order!

Tiny Seats and Drinking Pool

Again we were frustrated by the incredibly early starts that the Vietnamese like to have on their tours and bus journeys! This was a 7am - so up at 6 to pack and eat - that's no holiday! It wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't for the tiny Asian seats which don't allow you enough room for the width of western shoulders, let alone sleeping!

On the bus we met and Aussie family who own a farm near Adelaide which they'd rented out for an entire year whilst the four of them went travelling. When I asked them what was harder - running a farm or travelling with two little ones they didn't seem to be able to make any firm decisions!

Sitting behind us on the bus were Suzie (a physio) and Nicky (an Occupational Therapist) from Munich who were disappointed to be missing Oktoberfest. We ended up finding a nice guesthouse with them after a long walk and eventually giving in and getting a moped to take us round! it worked out rather well at Hui Yen guesthouse with us sharing a balcony overlooking the sea! Awesome.

By the time we'd gone for a swim, had a snooze, played guitar and eaten it was very dark (well it was only 6pm but that's when it gets dark here due to the interesting time at which they set their clocks - they just love getting up early)! Anyway, being too lazy to walk very far and having found out that a 750ml bottle of vodka was GBP2.33 it was time for some drinking pool in the guesthouse! We looked particularly good dressed in our Vietnamese cone hats I feel!

Retiring to the balcony it turned out that Suzie was actually very good at the guitar after lots of complaining about us making her play. Now she's taking on the role of teacher so be ready for music to astound coming soon from yours truly!

Shopping Trip & more Bia Hoi!

So here we are all set for Extreme Shopping excursion number two! The mission - find a huge replacement rucksack for me, a replacement camera for Martin, a better blue guitar, and some new T-Shirts. What did we find? A 120L rucksack (up from 65-85L so now loads of room!) for GBP11, camera and 1GB memroy card for GBP203 from a shopping centre complete with an electric piano in the atrium which I just had to try out! A few gifts and T-Shirts from what seemed to be fashion street right behind Ben Thanh market...it also happened to be where all the Vietnamese hotties hang out! Following this a quick ride in a taxi from a man who knew where to go to buy guitars and we found Martin his very own Vietnamese hand-crafted blue guitar, a steal at $30! Mission acomplished!

Now with 3 guitars we headed out that night with our old blue guitar in the hope of giving it to some deserving street urchin! In the meantime it provided everyone at the Bia Hoi with some entertainment. We played and tried to sing a few English songs to everyone's amusement and drunken encouragement and the locals played a few of theirs. Wandering dumbfounded after our regular Bia Hoi closed we were called over from another Bia Hoi - I guess news that Phnom Penh's Burning were in Saigon was travellign like wildfire! Guitars are officially a great way to meet random people - that night we met Mr Thanh, a pianist in a restaurant in Saigon District 3 who wanted us to go and jam with him (clearly deaf!) and Billy from Melbourne who we could not for the life of us work out where he was from. First we thought maybe an aboriginal from his looks but apparently not (tho we didn't ask!) he just said he'd emmigrated there. His English was a bit off which confused us but hey he'll show us around Melbourne if we make it there!!

Before making it to Eden Bar we were approached by a cheeky little street girl asking to play our guitar. We were more looking for someone to give it to rather than someone to leech it off us, but after getting her to promise to learn (??!) and getting her to strum whilst I play the chords we told he we'd be back in a year to check out how she was progressing and went tut-bar!

It seemed to be a night for exchanging contact details, with the girls in Eden Bar being in on the act too! Apparently we'd promised when drunk the previous night to come back to Eden Bar about 10pm that night tho, so we were in trouble when we only made it there nearer 1am!! They were still lovely as ever although in my opinion they were not forthcoming enough with their free shots this time...I guess that was the retribution for being late - women!!

Mekong Delta Tour

So after a rather heavier night than planned celebrating with old friends we headed off for our two day Mekong Delta tour. First we hit the Cao Dai Temple...a very colourful temple interestingly guarded by both demons and angels and featuring the backwards swastica which stands for reincarnation. All in all an interesting religion composed of apparently the joining of seven "regionalised" religions of Buddhism, Hindu, Christianity, Catholicism (which is apparently a different religion to Christianity? Am I being naive here?), Muslim and something else...I'll find that one out later! Each had images of its various prophets up above the alter. By far the best thing about Cao Dai is that it considers Louis Pasteur, William Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Sir Winston Churchill and Napolean Bonaparte to be saints!

Next we hit the local longboats for a through the narrow delta waterways which were completely surrounded by tall palm fronds. We learnt how to make coconut sweets, through squashing old coconuts and mixing with chocolate and peanuts (paraphrased so don't try this!). Then we held a Python around our necks - that was cool but what wasn't was the huge great red ant crawling up the length of the snake towards me! Oh yeh and green tea with honey is really good.

I then commendered our vessel for my own uses, captaining it across the choppy waters to my booty on the far shore! Aaarrrgghhhh!! From here I whipped the local vagabonds into shape and they paddled us upstream, deep into enemy territory through the palms and reeds of some of the narrowest waterways on the delta. We all looked particularly great in our vietnamese hats and waterproofs when the heavens opened! Upon landing the locals danced their traditional (since 1920!) folk songs which teach the children such things as how to rotate crops. Meanwhilst we invested much artistic expression in the construction of our face of fruit. I also tried on a Kung Fu style shirt and looked particularly dangerous!

Here you really need to see the video to believe it, but we got on a ferry to go across the Mekong but the current and wind on the river was so strong that the ferries actually had to head a good 45 degrees upstream of their intended destination to actually reach it! Even so the were swept rapidly downstream...you can see why they are building a bridge.



The first Vietnamese word we learned at our homestay that night was 'Yo'. You say it whenever it goes quiet and pretty much any other time you fancy at which point everyone has to toast with their rice wine (yup the nasty 40 percent stuff from a few days earlier!). Martin got stuck down the end of the table with 'Dad' and 'Uncle' who preferred to drink rather than eat, so whilst the rest of us could sup to each toast he downed pretty much every single one. The second word we learnt was 'Tuk', which means 'a little' - used in the context of them pouring your rice wine. Interestingly though 'Tuk Tuk' actually seems to mean a double, Tuk Tuk Tuk probably about a quadruple and so on. Fortunately the food was awesome and plentiful else we might have all come off a lot worse. The people we were staying with were actually rice farmers, usually getting up at 4 or 5am to start work and in bed by 6pm. Tomorrow they were definitely not going to be up that early...though it sounds as though they are so used to drinking rice wine that they don't even get hangovers - maybe that should have been the solution at Uni?! That night we slept in a Bamboo hut over a cat-fish farm - you could hear them jumping in the night!

Next day first stop was the noodle factory where they basically made huge white-rice-chip pancakes, put them on bamboo, dried them in the sun (if ever available!) and then cut them into strip with a mangle-like device. Absolutely nothing was wasted with the rice husks used to fuel the fire on which to cook the pancakes, the white rice sold at the market and the rest was fed to the animals.

A few more delta waterways past women doing their washing in the muddy water and under a monkey bridge or two. Called-so because people crossing looked like monkeys as they really have to stoop and cling on. Well except for a fat German woman who broke the trunk and fell straight in so that tourists are no longer allowed to cross them! Gluttony is selfish.

The rice factory was next with its laughable health and dafety - machines could easily rip hands, feet and full limbs clean off and the drive belts all ran without guards. Rice was taken to the boat on two huge baskets on a piece of wood over on shoulder. The guys carrying the baskets challenged us to have a go. Martin struggled for a good minute (we have a video!) - due to a lack of proper stance and twisting I believe - either that or I'm superman as I managed to life it straight up. It wasn't a comfortable cutting right into my shoulder though and I've no idea how they balanced across a narrow plank to the boat with it!

From there we headed to the floating produce market - actually a proper floating market unlike the floating tourist trap in Thailand! Here they attached the produce they had bought from the local farms or the sea on offer to a bamboo pole and sit it out for days until everything they had was sold...and then trot off back to get some more.

Today was the day to try my first meal of snake...and in all fairness probably the last, well unless it also comes in fillet form as what i had seemed like tiny scraps of chicken with tough skin and too many small bones involved...not quite the huge snake fillets Jamie and I were expecting.

In celebration of, er, Bia Hoi being in Saigon we headed back to sample some more. The waitresses in Eden Bar who seemed to have a fascination with us and so dutifully tried to teach them English drinking games and get them drunk. Apparently bar staff aren't allowed to drink tho so instead we just got hammered...well we can cope with that - back to freshers week again!

Cu Chi Tunnels, War Remnants Museum

We made an early start considering our night of cheap beer, making it in plenty of time for our tour reps to spend ages persuading us we should go on the full-day tour to the big Cao Dai temple to fill their bus (which we'd been advised we'd see on a later tour) and then change their mind and put us back on the half-day! I love the organisation!

First off we went to the handicapped handicraft factory which the Vietnamese Government had set up (along with other similar factories and communes) to give the war-injured Vietnamese useful employment making various products. This particular factory made various sourveniers from coconut wood and eggshell. It was really quite impressive what they could do - I bought a wall hanging picture of a Vietnamese fisherman casting off his net from his boat.

The lush green countryside on the journey up to the factory and the tunnels was amazingly similar to the UK, had it not been for the occasional palm tree you could have believed you were back home!

The Chu Chi tunnels were amazing. We had a talk from a Viet Cong veteran who told us how he cannot remember how many American soldiers he's closed the mouths of with their dogtags inside (to make sure they didn't get lost). He said that's exactly what he sees when he sleeps. The Chu Chi tunnels are a network of 200km of tunnels over 3 levels built during the American War. The top level is for living, bunkers etc, the middle for communication and the bottom for escape and trap-setting, each pitched at 3m, 6-8m and 10-12m respectively.

Originally they were even more narrow at 0.8m wide and about 1.2m tall though they've been widened slightly now for the larger western build and the larger Vietnamese now with broader diets. We went for the hardcore option, crawling 90m of level 1 and level 2 tunnel which was very hot work being in this climate! There were loads of small tunnels leading off to either side and you could really tell where the ventilation shafts were - they were quite refreshing! Even with their 'widening' program there were still some exceptionally tight squeezes which your average American would plug!

We were given a tour of the various traps built for the Americans to fall or walk into which used either snake-venom tipped bamboo shoots or nails fashioned from shrapnel. A messy ending!

The Viet Cong kitchens used 3 consecutive chambers in their chimneys to cool and filter the smoke before releasing it from beneath large rocks. It worked impressively well. It was hard to imagine what th landscape must have looked like during the war with Agent Orange stripping the land of vegetation - its looks almost like and English wood today!

We tried out tapioca (which actually looks like a sweet potato when it leaves the ground) dipped in peanuts which was very good and then some 40% alcoholic volume rice wine. Its amazing how wherever you go in the world humans will have found a way to get themselves drunk using whatever is locally available no matter how disgusting it tastes!

Later that day we went to the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Ming City which provided a rather graphic representation of the American War including deformed pre-birth babies pickled in jars, photos and journals of dead war correspondants expressing disgust at the way Americans treated both living and dead Viet Cong and even civilians. The photos showed things like devasted landscapes, troops sheltering from enemy fire and one with an American soldier amused a the sight of a mutilated corpse of a Viet Cong soldier.

Many of the photos had captions saying things like "8 members of a family we came across in the jungle. As I turned my back and walked away I heard 8 gunshots". Another photo showed two brothers dead on the road, the older one lying over the younger one as he tried to protect him whilst they were shot at. It also included a confession by US Senator Bob Kerry of cutting the throats and stabbing Vietnamese to death and subsequently opening their abdomens.

There were also a lot of tanks, guns and aircraft on display and part of a "Tiger Cage" prison ran by the Vietnamese on the American side, but used by the US Military to extract intelligence (well they had to get it from somewhere). Inside there were photos of inmates who were hideously deformed from broken bones, malnutrition and the general beating they got whilst held there. All in all it was a pretty gruesome insight into the American War.

That night Martin, Russel and I went for Bia Hoi again (no surprise there!) and then met with the guys from the tour earlier that day. After a few drinks in Go2 bar we headed out looking for somewhere lively. Suddenly 4 people came out of nowhere and started hugging Martin and me! It turned out to be Seb, Kate, Stuart and Andy from our Chiang Mai trek - how random!

Destination decided! We chilled out and danced the rest of the night away in Eden Bar whilst catching up with tales of all our travels!

Beer for 12p - Good Morning Vietnam!

This time we made our early start and the 4 hour bus journey to the border, 2 hours across the border (not helped by cheeky locals trying to push in but we beat them at their own game again!) and then 2 hours to Ho Chi Ming City (it used to be called Saigon). We met a guy called Russel from South Africa at the border who was to become our travel buddy for the next few days. Going through the border he'd had to put his bodyboard through the scanner - the officials made him open it up and had no clue as to what it was so he decided it was better to tell them it was for sleeping on than try his hand at a bit of dry-land surfing! Also briefly spoke to a guy who was cycling Bangkok to Hanoi - sounds like a challenge for the future eh Nick?!



The bus ride to Ho Chi Ming featured a tour guide who was very informative about Vietnam and even sang us a song (see video complete with Martin's peeping-tom style filming)!

Ho Chi Ming has 8 million people and 4 million mopeds - no joke! Trying to walk across the streets here is even more of a challenge than Thailand and Cambodia - the technique is the same - walk and the vehicles will part for you, but the roads are so much wider and there are so many more motos to keep an eye on!

Later that night we found surely the most awesome beer prices on the entire planet - 3500 Dong for a litre - that's about 12p - so in English terms we're talking about the 8p pint!! This place rules!

Add to this the fact that you can get massages (for 66p to a pound) as you sit drinking your beer and this place pretty much becomes lazy-heaven! On the plus side I finally got a proper rought massage here which finally started to sort out my leg properly, alleviating my mobility problems since our Thai Boxing fiasco!

Late for Vietnam!

So the next morning we kind of overslept and missed our bus to Vietnam! So now that makes Thailand that we were one day late to get out of (and had to pay for it!) and one pre-booked bus across the border to Ho Chi Mingh City which we missed! By some stroke of genious this bus ticket was actually transferrable so we didn't need another $6.

Determined not to waste the remaining few hours once I did wake up I headed out to the huge market just North of our guesthouse which turned out to be far too big and I didn't have any kind of patience for it! Then I headed to the Railway station which is actually not at all impressive Mr Rough Guide!

Wat Phnom (photo) was nice in a surprisingly subdued way inside but you couldn't see the outside for the trees. Some begging kid followed me all the way around...he was actually the first one I couldn't shake no matter which tried-and-tested techniques of ducking in and out of buildings and viewpoints pulled. As ever I had to leave my shoes at the temple door, stepping inside I suddenly thought I wander if he'll try to steal my shoes and sure enough he was just bending down to do exactly that! Chased the little git and then got the security guard to let me take them inside!

Had an unfruitful walk to the National Museum (though was nice to see some of the local parts of the city) but Mr Rought Guide was wrong again - this time about the opening times for the museum so that didn't happen!

Had a dinner of Luklac again - an awesome beef stew with rice, salad and chips and all for $2.65!

Happy Birthday to Me!

So in true Southampton Uni style we decided to get cracking on the Vodka, Lemonade and Limes nice and early...we commended ourselves with using the local produce (limes) in favour of lime cordial. So drinks sorted it was time for a spot of Blow the Cards off the Glass followed by our own genius new invention two-handed This is the Witch!

Unable to finish our sizeable beverages we arrived in style on a couple of Motos, beverages in hand! Cleverly I had my passport with me which netted me a dirty coctail and a birthday cake slither from the barmaid whose birthday it actually was as it was still 25th September. I don't remember quite what it tasted of but I'm assured by Martin that it heavily weighted in the top-shelf department!

Being low season it was on the quite side, but not to worry though we found Jenga and a couple of Aussie girls to challenge to it. By this point I was on a pure losing streek - managing to cause something like 16 out of the 18 falls of the Jenga tower due to my decidedly swaying motion both when trying to play and when crashing into the table after returning from a visit to the little boys room!! A good night all in all though even if I didn't fancy clubbing at Sharkies due to my new-found ability to fall asleep on my feet!

Something loud must have happened that night when we got back (I reckon drunken guitar singing) because the next morning at breakfast we got some knowing looks from the family who run it as they politely enquired whether we'd had a good night! Oops...

Anyway we got chatting to Jack the hostel Tuk Tuk driver who was trying to get us to go to the Killing Fields. We'd decided we weren't going to bother as we'd seen and read so much about them already and it basically just sounded like a bunch of exhumed graves. But then Jack mentioned the real reason he wanted to take us there - there was a shooting range with machine guns, antiaircraft guns and if you really have the inclination and the cash you can blow up a cow with a rocket launcher!

So after heading down to this place full of locals with weapons and us with all our valuables on us we contemplated the "menu" (unfortunately we weren't allowed to take photos of this) and decided on an AK47 and an M16! Th raw power of the AK47 was phenominal. For the first few shots it was scary enough just being behind the thing...probably not helped by the complete lack of eye protection whilst white-hot bullet cases flew out of the gun just infront of you! Not to worry though - they were heading upwards and backwards towards Martin!!

And then we set it to automatic...there is no purpose for this other than ripping through huge quantities of flesh and just generally mutilating whatever is in your way. I'll be giving guards with machine guns and even wider berth in future!

The M16 seemed a little tame after the Russian monster, though by tame I mean slightly less noise and a little less kick but still completely terrifying! Got our target back at the end and we were glad to see Martin and I obliterated it and made plenty of headshots too. It was funny to see the local kids actually give us quite a wary look when we showed them our target so we must have done pretty well! One thing I'd say for sure is that the Americans must be mad - there's no way I'd compaign to get these legalized in the UK!

We then headed to the Killing Fields, which were as expected a lot of exhumed graves in a field and a memorial with the skulls from the graves in it. Slightly macabre and a bit controversial considering how recent (1978) it all is. The graves were surprisingly shallow for the number of corpses they contained. As you were walking around it seemed like the wear and tear of visitors might have started to bore down into unmarked graves as you'd see tell-tale signs of clothing partially buried in the earth. It was certainly interesting, but lacking in information compared to the Genocide Museum and certainly not the tourist hotspot they were trying to make it out to be!



To continue my birthday celebrations we headed to the backpacker area of Phnom Penh around the lake where we found a nice restaurant/bar over the water and played a bit of pool with some randoms (Tom a plumber from Kent and later two Israeli guys). Then it was decided another full body massage was in order where we got chatting to two guys just about to go and work for the WWF in the jungle for a year on only $100 a month! We're budgeting about GBP600 a month!

As we were leaving Cambodia the next day we decided to try the legendary (Cambodian?) traveller's dish of "Happy Pizza", well actually we had large pizzas with extra happy! Surprisingly it seemed to have no immediate effect.

Couldn't find anywhere with webcams to chat to my parents and Laurie so we hit the waterfront, managing only to find an internet cafe which was so slow and frustrating that we'd only normally get sound in one direction so we should have probably just stuck with msn. Grrrr. At that point good old Mr Happy kicked in with a bang and sent us both packing straight home to bed! Fortunately not on the back of Motos as Martin suggested but in the back of a Tuk Tuk!