Cockroaches, Motorbikes and a Honey Cocoon

STATS: Day count=213; theft count=0; rip-off count=1; tourist screw-up count=5; Chris’ photo count=1979; Emma’s photo count=90; touch-typing char/min=238 (woo hoo!); Poi skills mastered since last post: None

In this digital photographic age with its instant results and zero- or low-cost developing many people (including myself, wrongly) think of themselves as one short step away from a professional photographer. Recording things on camera has become the norm (as our photo count can testify!) and many times I see people arrive at a scene, take a photograph and immediately move on to the next scene, without stopping to appreciate the vista or event in itself. Often I have to stop myself from doing the same. I need to remember that a photograph should be a memory of a place or event, not a memory of taking a photograph. Seeing the world just through a lens can be very restrictive.

The sleeper bus to Nha Trang dropped us off in the middle of the city, in the middle of the evening. It seemed to be higher season than expected, as it took a few attempts to find a room in a place clean enough for Emma, cheap enough for Emma, friendly enough for Emma, bright enough for Emma and with wi-fi for me. One of us is more fussy than the other. Though to be fair, the places Emma finds are generally really nice whilst the places I find are pretty dire. Though they do have wi-fi.

Nha Trang is a touristy beach town, with aspirations to be a bit classier than it currently is. The beach is nice enough, the restaurants not as good as hoped, but ok, the sewing skills of the ladies in the tailoring shops seem excellent – though time will tell if my repaired trousers stay in one piece or fall apart as quickly as they did after buying them.

We stayed in Nha Trang only long enough for us to realise that we didn’t want to stay in Nha Trang. The cable car across the sea to a nearby island (the longest in SE Asia, apparently, though I’m not sure if that is impressive or not, since I don’t know of any others) looked like fun, but we made the mistake of walking to the cable car station on a weekend, when it seemed that everyone else had the same idea, and the queues were reminiscent of Alton Towers on a half term weekend. The comparison is even more appropriate as the destination of the cable car was a big amusement park on the island. We gave it a miss in the end.

Nest stop Hoi An, famous for its multitude of tailoring shops. Another sleeper bus ride, this time overnight – whilst it did save on accommodation costs and was relatively comfortable, the Vietnamese karaoke on the video screen and loudly through the speaker right above my head until after midnight meant sleep was minimal. However, as our destination hotel in Hoi An was a special one, it didn’t matter…

We had booked a couple of nights in a spa hotel as Emma’s Christmas present. Perfectly thought-out present, as I also benefited from it. The hotel was excellent – I would even say good value for money, which is praise indeed from me when talking about a relatively expensive hotel! We made full use of the great air-con room, lovely swimming pool, complimentary massage and Emma had a couple of spa treatment-type-things which sounded messy to me (“honey-cocoon”, anyone"?) but which were apparently really lovely and relaxing. Sitting in the restaurant overlooking the river with some people celebrating the Buddhist mid-year by placing hundreds of floating candles across the river and letting them slowly float downstream was another trip highlight. They even had a free Vietnamese language lesson that we both attended which was good fun and very useful. We are now rattling off numbers and phrases in Vietnamese like natives. Strange how the prices of things seems to fall far quicker when you haggle in (albeit poor) Vietnamese! Shame we’ll be in Laos in a couple of weeks and we’ll have to start all over again.

With all that time spent enjoying the offerings of the spa hotel, we didn’t spent a lot of time in Hoi An initially, so after our treat had ended, we stayed on in Hoi An for another couple of nights. Brought down to earth with a bump, our next hotel had a family of cockroaches that wanted to share our bed. Well, I guess they were there first. Catching and removing one of them just brought the rest of the family out that night in protest.

Hoi An is a nice town – small and very pretty, on the tourist trail for its well-preserved shops and houses (i.e. it wasn’t bombed as much as other places). A riverside town with many cafes alongside art shops and, as previously mentioned, hundreds of tailoring shops that can knock up a suit overnight at prices that Primark would think too cheap. We didn’t succumb (though many tourists do) to having hand-made clothes created – the weight of our rucksacks never being too far from our minds. We have avoided the temptation to just mail stuff home, as once we start the floodgates would open and our house would end up looking like a tacky souvenir shop by the end of the trip.

I have been criticised for deleting too many of Emma’s photos from our collection and thus skewing the statistics. I therefore humbly include one of Emma’s photos of a shop selling lanterns in Hoi An.

Yet another highlight of our trip so far was a motorbike ride out into the countryside one morning. This was a guided tour, on proper motorbikes – the “Mighty” Minsk – Russian motorbikes in a communist country, very appropriate. The tour took us along canal paths, narrow irrigation channels in paddy fields, floating bridges, muddy fields (as it had rained hard the afternoon before) and small  villages with laughing kids wanting to high-five us as we rode past (as the bikes were inefficient 2-strokes, the kids could hear us coming long before we arrived!). Great fun, very enjoyable. So much so that despite being expensive, we decided to sign up for another trip of theirs, this time to go all the way to our next destination, Hue, on a day-long bike ride the following day.

The ride to Hue wasn’t quite as good as the previous tour – a bit too much highway driving in the morning but improved in the afternoon as we went along small village roads, a lovely high mountain pass and around lakes and fish farms, arriving in Hue in the early evening where a few of the local beers with our tour companions went down very well! For Top Gear fans, this route was one taken by the team in their Vietnam Special a few years ago. Hammond was riding a Minsk motorbike too. They described the route as one of the most beautiful coastal roads in the world. Clarkson was wearing a colander on his head as none of the local bike helmets would fit him, apparently. We were much more sensibly wearing helmets, though I’m not sure they were any more protection than a colander.

A nice clean hotel in Hue tempted us into staying 4 nights. The town itself is pleasant – enough to do there for a good few days. The cockroach that we found in our room looked out of place (unlike in the previous hotel, where they looked very much at home) so, after failing to catch it ourselves, we thought we would let the reception staff know so they could get rid of it. I thought that Emma’s impression of a mosquito in Thailand, when we were asking shopkeepers who couldn’t speak English for mosquito coils, couldn’t be topped. But watching Emma do an impression of a cockroach to the reception staff, who’s English skills didn’t stretch that far, was hilarious to all who watched. That didn’t work, unsurprisingly, so Emma resorted to trying to draw a cockroach. I’m not sure if it was her artistic skills or her zoological skills that let her down the most, but they still struggled to understand. The fact that she drew it with only 4 legs and no eyes made it look more like a coffee table than an insect. After I had added a couple more legs, and the receptionist had confirmed a level of recognition by adding some wings we had achieved some level of understanding. The mosquito spray they gave us to get rid of it with was as effective as spraying it with water, but at least everyone had been entertained.

After our backsides had recovered from a day riding a 1940’s designed motorbike, we hired bicycles to cycle to some nearby sights. A really nice ride along a riverside path to a pagoda (former home to a monk who burned himself to death in 1963 to protest against the government’s anti-Buddhist regime) and on to one of the numerous mausoleums of the Emperors of the 19th and 20th centuries who are buried in ornate tombs nearby. High entrance fees and long cycling distances stopped us from visiting more than one of these, but the mausoleum of Tu Duc was pretty enough to make the trip there worthwhile. Seeing incense sticks being made (and displayed) on the route there was a pretty distraction from the hills we had to negotiate.

An increase in the tourist screw-up count due to my ‘mislaying’ of some of our Vietnamese money. Not a vast amount, but we believe it was a case of using the wrong notes to pay for things. Too many zeros, that’s my excuse. The difference between a 10,000 dong note and a 100,000 dong note is a slightly darker shade of green and an extra zero hidden away. An easy mistake to make. But then I would say that.

Onward to Ninh Binh on another overnight bus journey – this time with double ‘beds’ rather than singles and a tyre blowout at midnight.