Vietnam

I’ve been back in Vietnam for a little over 48 hours and have already fallen back in love with the crazy brand of awesomeness that is Saigon. For the first time visitor though – ie, me two years ago – the place can just seem like a total madhouse. You can always spot the person who has just stepped off the plane that day – they will be the one searching for a change of underwear while waiting in vain for the traffic to thin sufficiently to cross the road. Hint: it never will – just make eye contact with the oncoming stream of traffic and walk slowly and steadily across the street. Vehicles will go round you if you keep moving. If you hesitate, you’re toast.

So with a hint of sadness (and an awful lot of sweatiness) we bade a fond farewell to Hanoi and Vietnam, and jumped on the plane to Bangkok. Being Air Asia, the baggage allowance was a mere 15kg – always handy when you’ve been buying small, lightweight items like suits and shoes, I find.

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…