Archive for August, 2008

So, Hanoi, huh? Well, the place is similar in many ways to Saigon really, except even hotter and (thankfully) drier. Other than that, the traffic is still insane, there’s still somebody trying to sell you sunglasses / books / a motorcycle taxi / rat on a stick / their mother every five paces, and you still feel like you’ve stepped into a sauna within seconds of leaving the hotel room. We haven’t really seen that much of it as yet, as we’ve only had a couple of evenings to do any exploring.

After a day of organising stuff – annoying but necessary I guess when you’re travelling for a while – we now have all of our flights, accommodation and excursions organised through til the middle of September. Which is pretty cool, means we can ignore that stuff again for another couple of weeks.

One of the little side trips that we had booked was out to My Son (“me sun”), a ruined holy city of the Cham people that lived in central Vietnam from the 2nd til 13th centuries, and a UNESCO world heritage site. The Lonely Planet (yes, that bastion of accuracy) considers it a smaller version of places such as Angkor Watt in Cambodia, amongst others.

Our wanderings the other night took us back into the heart of Hoi An’s old town, alongside the river where there are a couple of blocks of restaurants and bars on one side, and quite a few on the other side as well. Forgoing the more obviously tourist oriented ones (the Lonely Planet effect was strongly evident unfortunately), we headed over to the less populated bank of the river and enjoyed a great meal with views of the old town from the balcony. I think I’m going to look like a seafood hot pot by the end of my time in Vietnam. That’s ok though, people will be too busy checking out the spring roll that I have as a travel companion…

Our last day in Nha Trang was frantic. Just flat tack all day. Not a minute to spare. Cultural highlight after cultural highlight, walking miles from pagoda to temple to scenic wonderla…. oh who the hell am I kidding? I did decide that (unlike certain nameless travel companions…) I couldn’t quite cope with the idea of an entire day doing nothing on the beach again, so after breakfast and swapping one of my books at Shorty’s Cafe (and book exchange, obviously), I beat the streets to check out Long Thanh Gallery.

Well I didn’t quite manage the not drinking theory, but was pretty close – only a two or three beers at the Backpacker’s Place bar and home before midnight. Positively teetotal by current standards.

We’d booked on Mama Linh’s boat tour for the following day – a trip that goes out around several of the islands offshore from Nha Trang and costs all of $8 US. Lonely Planet billed it pretty much as a party cruise, an assessment I’m not sure that I agree with – there were other boats out there looking a lot more party like than ours, especially in the first few hours. Things loosened up considerably after the free fruit wine at the floating bar, strangely enough. Still, plenty of good stuff to enjoy, especially the hour or so of snorkelling at a marine sanctuary off Hon Mun island. Incredible colours and variety of both fish and coral, in those warm and crystal clear waters … ahhhh. It was brilliant. Shame I don’t have a waterproof case for my camera really.