We have made it all the way down to Nha Trang in that time, but most of it was spent totally relaxing in our new favourite place, Hoi An. Here's a map to put it into a bit of perspective :
View Vietnam in a larger map
Hanoi is the first dot in the north, then Hoi An (its only about 20 miles south of Danang) in the middle with Nha Trang lower down. We did the trip from Danang down to Hoi An in a taxi, which was a pleasant change from the usual bus/train/plane epic to visit a new spot, definitely more civilised! We took the usual pick from the Rough Guide for accommodation, but the first choice was closed for renovations so we made do with a place just up the road. It all looked much the same but sadly the hotel didn't have wifi - which we'd got completely used to having all the time. This turned out to be a bit of a pain, having to lug everything out to a bar a few doors down for facebook and skypage, but the beer was cheap and the music was good so it wasn't too much of a hardship.
So I've already let the cat out of the bag about our new found love for Hoi An... maybe it was just the timing; we were still screaming out for some quality beach time, but we ended up staying for 10 days we liked it so much. In a nutshell its a fairly small town whose centre is a protected world heritage site, so the buildings are all really old and have a really diverse blend of local and foreign influences. Some bits look really medditerainian, others really oriental. It makes for a really lovely place to stroll around and take in the sights, and there are so many restaurant/bars you could probably eat at a different place every night for a month.
The town is about 4km from the coast, so in classic tourist style you rent pedal bikes and cycle down through the paddy fields to hit the beach. The whole area is cut through by the river, which made pretty much every direction you looked pretty amazing. We couldn't help a few surreptitious photos of the locals going about their business with us gurning in the foreground :
We spent the first night exploring the place, and taking quite a few pictures!
The second day we hit the beach, and the lovely bike ride became part of our daily routine after that. When we got back to the hotel we passed a chap handing out flyers for an all-you-can-eat/drink BBQ, which for me is like a moth to a flame. It was a bit of trek to find the place, but the ribs were the tastiest either of us had ever tasted.
(Unfortunately we were a bit too tipsy to find out the secret recipe :p)
The bar was across the bridge from the main town, so we took a stroll around and took some pictures of the market, which was still pretty busy at night.
The next few days we really got into the relaxing routine of getting some breakfast, renting some bikes and cycling to the beach, lying around and then heading back as the sun started to drop. The cycle home was a good excuse for a cheeky beer at one of the restaurants on the riverside :
With our new found cycling freedom we went exploring around the islands in the river, fortunately we didn't need to cram ourselves onto the tiny ferry that connected the islands, it would have been quite a fight against the legions of ubiquitous mopeds.
In the evenings the town came alive, and we joined the throngs of tourists pottering around and taking in the sites and having leisurely dinners along the riverside.
So all in all it was pretty idyllic, and we fell for it pretty hard after the carnage in Hanoi. But sods law never fails to catch up with you in the end, and sure enough I picked up a nasty man flu the next day. This meant I was out of action for two days, which gave Alex some quality shopping time; Hoi An is famous for its tailoring, every other building is a clothes shop, so there was plenty to check out. She managed to land one tailored dress, one top, another dress and a bracelet for less than a tenner, so she was in her element =)
When I finally made it from my death bed, we got back into the beach life again.
One funny thing around the town were the hoards of local school children who would be bussed in to harass the tourists - erm I mean practice their language skills. They hunted in packs, but fortunately for me they'd always go for the lanky blonde girl first :p
The next day we decided to explore a little further afield and rented a scooter again. (If you remember our last ill-fated attempt in Goa, we made it about 2 miles before a massive storm trapped us in a bus shelter for hours..) My riding skills had improved little since we left the UK, but we managed to negotiate the local roads easily enough. The only real downside was the only helmet big enough to fit my massive head was pink... seriously, why not just make the big ones all black!?
After so many days of lommering on the beach we thought we should probably get back on the sightseeing horse. The main day trip out of Hoi An was to a place called My Son, a series of ruined temples build by the ancient Champa people who lived in the area in ye olde days.
This was nice enough, but the blazing hot sun meant we made it around in a fairly rapid fashion. The clever trick these chaps had was building these massive buildings without using mortar, so it was pretty amazing they had survived since 14 AD and made it though the war in one piece.
After another few days at the beach we embarked on another mission, this time to the Bach Ma national park. It was pretty eventful, and we've already posted some stuff on facebook already. Alex was really keen on the trip based on the guide book, but I had my doubts as the first line was something like "Totally off the beaten track, hardcore botanists and ornithologists will love it blah blah...". We had to arrange the trip ourselves as it wasn't one of the common ones from Hoi An, but we had no trouble arranging for a car and driver to take us up there.
We arrived at the base station bit (thats a bit of a grand term, it was just a few buildings at the bottom of the hill) at around 11am, and had to arrange for another van to take us to the top of the mountain. Yep we kind of cheated this time; instead of climbing up we thought it'd be a lot more fun just to climb down ha! The van dropped us off near the top, and checked our route to arrange a rendezvous time to pick us up from the end of one of the trails 3 hours later.
The guide book had already warned us that this was one of the wetest places in the whole of Vietnam, so we were well prepared with brollies and macs. At this point we were still expecting the walks to be fairly straightforwards, and the sun was still shining, so we set off on the short walk to the summit. We ascended up into the clouds, so the view was a bit lousy, so we started down the trail. It didn't take too long before we realised we'd bitten off a little more that we'd anticipated - I was on my arse after about 10 minutes of battling the steep downhill sections. The jungle was pretty dense, and the terrain was covered in spindly little white spiders that could have easily made a career in horror movies. Alex hadn't seen fit to dig out her walking boots, so she had to battle the critters in her trusty open Birkenstocks.
We'd made it a little way down before the rains started, but when the first drips started it wasn't too long until it was a full on down pour. Macs and brollies out, and more falling around on our part. It didn't take long to adjust to the wet - I think we'd both realised by now that we were in a little bit of a pickle and started taking things a little more seriously (for the first time ever I was really glad I'd watched all those Ray Mears programmes on TV ha!)
We fought our way downwards and after over an hour of downpour the rain let up. Our progress sped up a little and we found the series of waterfalls and small lakes we'd been aiming to reach before we headed back to meet up with the van to take us down. With all the water these were pretty spectacular, and well worth the mission to get these :
The sun came out and made for some amazing scenes in the jungle clearings :
It was about this time we both started noticing painful little sensations from our ankles, and a quick check of our feet brought on the second major battle of the day - the leeches :s
Neither of us had faced a real-life blood sucker before (gags about lawyers and estate agents aside) and it was pretty disgusting at first, but after we flicked the twentieth one off we sort of got used to it. This is where I must have missed a Ray Mears episode, as it turns out the best thing to do with leeches is to leave them be. After they've had their fill they should just drop off (into my socks?!) of their own accord. We were just grabbing them and pulling them off; this is medium bad as it can mean you rip their teeth out which then get stuck in the wound, making a right old mess of things. (Even worse, if you attack them with a flame or salt, they can puke back into the wound, pretty much guaranteeing an infection!) Hindsight+google also told us that they use an anti-coagulant to keep the juices flowing nicely, which means that the cuts can bleed for hours and hours after you get shot of them. More on that later...
The track got a little bit silly at this stage, as the route kept crossing and recrossing the river. After all that water the river was so engorged that the handy stepping stones they'd build to help people across were under at least a foot of fast flowing water. Instead of risking the fall, I started wading across with the gear held in the air, and the whole thing became a proper adventure. Alex's sandals came into their own as my waterproof Merrells meant I had a very soggy afternoon after this.
We had to pick up the pace at this point as we'd gone so slowly during the rain and rivers we were in danger of missing our pickup. It turned into a forced march through small streams, lush green fields and more jungle - and it couldn't help but bring on images of Vietnam war movies as the landscape is so distinctive.
Somehow we hit the rendezvous exactly on time, and the reward for our pains was an amazing view across the plains and rivers to the east of the mountain.
As in all the best horror movies, we weren't quite out of it yet. The van took us down to the base camp, where our driver had been waiting for us all day. He got lost a couple of times heading back to Hoi An, but we made it back in time for dinner. As I was getting ready, Alex lets out a shriek and an "Oh my god, whats that on your leg?!" - yep I'd not noticed a leech had attached itself to the back of my thigh and had been chugging away merrily for some time. The leech however hadn't had predicted that I'd be sitting down the whole way home, and by the time we managed to get it off it was well and truly squashed to bits. It wasn't a sight for the squeamish though, and I really really hope that the taxi had dark coloured seats :/
We settled down in the pub later on to watch the Man Utd game on TV, but just after half time I felt a sticky patch on the back of my leg - turns out a plaster can't hold back a leech bite and my leg was soaked in blood again... I had a few pretty funny looks as I shuffled as quickly as I could back to the hostel. Hours of fun =)
(End of leech stories, honest.)
We idled away the remaining time in Hoi An as lazily as we could. We'd settled on our favourite bars and restaurants, and the locals were starting to ask how long we were planning on staying. Wandering around the streets at nice was still great; we'd buy and ice cream and take a stroll over the river each night.
We had a great meal near the Japanese Bridge on our last night; this is one of the oldest bits and is one of the major landmarks in the old town :
And that was about it - we both felt it was time to move on after a really relaxing time. So we booked tickets on the Reunification Express heading south towards Ho Chi Min City/Saigon, and we jumped off at Nha Trang.
This is much more of a classic beach resort, with a long beach front strip and tons of hotels, bars and dive shops lining the roads. We'd decided to go a bit crazy to start with and landed in a 30 USD a night hotel room with a beach view for a few nights. It was nice to live it up for a brief period, but we realised quickly that the different between a 10 dollar and 30 dollar room isn't all that much here.
When we woke up on the first day proper, we saw a strange sight from the window - a flying dinghy.
This took me straight back to the days when CMC bought out the guys who founded Information Intheneck - one of the directors bought a yacht and was seriously thinking about buying a flying dingy, we couldn't believe it at the time and we spent a good week or so laughing. Anyway, if any of the old school are reading, it put a smile on my face again =)
After we moved to a hostel just around the corner, we settled into the beach life once again. Not having to cycle 4km to the beach meant we could come and go easily, and the choice of bars and restaurants was pretty good too - including a couple right on the beach with seats that guaranteed laughs after a few cocktails too many =)
We beached it up for a few days, and then decided it was time to check out the dive shops. I'd done my basic training a few years ago in Thailand, so Alex wanted to find somewhere reputable to do her PADI Open Water qualification so we could dive together. We settled on Rainbow Diving (out of about 16 dive shops around!) as they seemed nice and had a pretty good reputation. This meant Alex had to spend two days in a classroom and then swimming pool before we could hit the dive boat and do some real diving. I booked two days of diving on the days Alex would be on the boat so we could go out together, including a refresher lesson as I couldn't really remember much of the details.
We totally forgot to take a camera onto the boat, so I'm going to be a bit cheeky here and dodge some typing - these guys did the exact same thing and they've written it up really well if you wanted to read more about the diving here !
Someone else's blog who went diving
The good news is Alex passed with flying colours, and is now a fully carded member of the scuba diving world. We will probably look to do the advanced course at some point later on the trip, as its a good way to keep progressing and be qualified to deeper dives.
We hit the bars hard that night - the dive boat left at 7am so we'd had to go easy for a few days. The local bars all have free pool tables, and I keep getting hustled by the local lads - the other night I had to buy a fake book after loosing horribly to a kid that had clearly misspent his youth...
So thats about it, an epic catch up after so long without blogging. I'm resolved to doing more frequent and smaller updates now, but we'll see if that works out! We took a couple of photos on the way to the bar we are writing this from :
This last picture is basically trying to get one up on a certain Daniel Jones, who is forever winding up the office crowd with tweets that he is working in his garden back home... I know this is not technically working, but the beach-front-restaurant-with-pool has got to come close on the internet smugness scale?
Until next time...
