Vietnam

Hello from Vietnam, the 3rd country on our itinerary. We left things last time in the middle of the travelling week from hell, getting through 4 cities in 5 days.

The only real highlight was the stop over night in Hong Kong, we revisited the best sushi place ever and then took a stroll around Kowloon Harbor at night. This obviously resulted in the usual cheesy night time photos, but it was amazingly nice to look at after dark.





From there the trip to Hanoi in northern Vietnam was painless, and as soon as we stepped out of the taxi in the city we had to quickly adjust back to the sort of chaos we'd got used to in India. Our hostel was in the Old Quarter, a warren of small roads and moped-based carnage. You can't move for the little buggers, and we had to learn an entirely new way of crossing the road - sort of edging forwards and praying that the bikes flowed around you like a stream.

The next biggest thing that hit us was the heat! I know I've probably moaned about this before (maybe every single post) but the heat here tops the lot. From the look of things on paper it was supposed to peak at 29 degrees in August, but since we arrived the needle has been steady around 36 degrees. Not really a patch on the 40+ from India, but the humidity is the real killer. Again it looks to be much higher than normal; over 90% each day we were in Hanoi. Needless to say there will be some picture of extremely sweaty people to follow - you have been warned.

The centre of the Old Quarter is a big old lake with a temple in it, which was nice but we were still adjusting back from the scale of things in China... it only took 30 minutes to walk around rather than 4 hours. And there were no pedalos! Robbed.



(Alex's t-shirt was from Hong Kong, they all say "Cheer you up" on them and have pretty scary smiley faces with crossed out eyes, and seem to be all the range in China and HK.)

Our first trip out was to Ha Long Bay, a beautiful area of islands on the north east coast. It was a 2 day trip, with an overnight stay on the boat at sea.

This was definitely one of the highlights of the trip so far, the place is absolutely amazing. Time to bore you into submission with lots of photos =)



There are thousands of little islands all jutting up straight out of the ocean, which made for awesome pictures pretty much anywhere you pointed the camera. (Movie/TV buffs out there might remember it from the stealth boat bits from Tomorrow Never Dies, and more recently the guys from Top Gear had to sail it on mopeds...)

There were quite a few stops on the first day, the first was at some amazing caves inside one of the rocks. They weren't particularly deep, but the large cave at the back was huge - the guide claimed the locals used to store ammo during the war.



Having already given fair warning, you should be prepared for this... even though we were in a cave, we came out a little worse for wear, and stayed this manky for about 48 hours afterwards =)



Fortunately we did stop off at another little island for a swim later, which gave us temporary respite from the heat.



This was after a short but amazing canoe trip - they basically put is in a canoe, waved in the general direction of some caves and let us loose. Some might say this is a really bad idea in an area where every single island is pretty much the same as the next one, but off we paddled.

We managed to find the caves after some frantic arm work - and it was well worth it as you could paddle underneath the rock face into the centre of one of the islands. As it was impossible to get in there via boat it was really secluded and felt like quite the adventure.

Getting back to the boat was more of an adventure though, sadly we turned left at the identical island when we should have gone straight on... and by the time we managed to find our boat (oh yeah the boats are all the same too, with helpful names that are all pretty much the same. And there are tens of the things parked up all over the place) we could barely raise our arms.

All good fun though =)

As dusk settled the boat sailed to a calm area so we could jump off into deep water and do some more swimming. I was still going crazy with the photos as it all looked soooo nice...



We both managed to jump in, Alex first with me on camera duties.



Unfortunately just as I got back up to the surface, Alex was already bolting to the ship's ladder as she'd managed to plummet into a small gang of jellyfish who weren't that impressed with her graceful entrance. Thankfully the stings weren't too bad and she was able to carry on enjoying the trip after a quick rest.

We had some well deserved beers, and obviously this meant climbing on the bits of the ship that we weren't really supposed to...



Dinner on the ship was fairly unspectacular, we had to make very strained conversation with a Parisian family for the duration, much more entente cordiale than we'd expected considering the main entertainment on the boat seemed to be karaoke. We made a quick break for the deck and enjoyed some more beers as the sun set behind the islands...



And we couldn't resist the cheesy sunset shots...



That was all in one day, so we slept pretty well that night. The bad news was they woke us up at 6:30 am for breakfast - by turning of the air-con. That was the start of a monumentally sweaty day...

The boat ride back to the harbor was pretty much the reverse of what we'd done the previous day, so we kept out of the sun and tried to stay chilled. The trip included some lunch in the harbor on the way home - we were praying for a nice cool restaurant and some tasty seafood... but instead they had something else in mind.

The second bit of heat related bad news that day was the air con in the restaurant wasn't working - a power cut they said - although everything else seemed fine. This had probably happened before, so they'd had the ingenious idea to attach a fine mist sprinkler system to the roof, and spray the whole lot around with large ceiling and wall fans.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out what will happen if you do this when the ambient temperature is over 35 and the outside humidity is already 90% plus... thats right, we ended up eating lunch in a sauna.



It was one of the text-book coach tour restaurant we've come to hate; with about 40 tables all churning out the same ropey food to the tourists. When combined with the sauna it was all a bit much and kind of took the shine of the second day of the trip to say the least (it definitely put a shine on us though... haha)

We stayed in Hanoi for a couple more nights, and by far the most fun night was my birthday. We'd hoped to make it to a beach for the occasion, but Ha Long trip meant we had to stay in town a little longer. This worked out really well as Alex had tracked down a really nice fancy French restaurant and we had a lovely meal out - I had my first steak for months and remembered what it was like to eat out somewhere fancy for once =) We rounded off the night with some seriously strong cocktails at a nearby bar, but sadly we forgot to take the camera out, so no pictures of me looking worse for wear.

This is getting epic again so its time to cut to the chase... we were still really crying out for something more relaxing than the city, so we took Phill's advice and headed south. The first place down the coast with a decent beach seemed to be Danang, so we jumped on an internal flight the following day. We headed out to the beach today, and it was really nice... (although a wedding reception in one of the beach front bars did its level best to destroy the mood with some god-awful karaoke!)



We lounged for a few hours under the umbrellas (yep, I got burned, again) and then wandered over to another touristy area called the Marble mountains. These are pretty much what they say on the tin, with hundreds of shops carving pretty amazing statues and the like. The better bit was the mountain itself; it was a lovely place to explore the various pagodas, caves and mountaintop views.



It was a pretty tough and sweaty climb in some places, but the views were amazing from the top as most of the surrounding land is at sea level.





Theres not much else to see in Danang, so tomorrow we are heading a short way down the coast to Hoi An. This promises to be even more picturesque and relaxing, so fingers crossed for some more restful days ahead.