Dateline: Ha Noi, 23rd March, 5.11pm

So, as promised, here is our first blog post from Ha Noi, about finding a house.

Sadly, we didn’t get the house we thought we had. As mentioned previously, while we were there phone calls were incoming offering much more money than we were paying, and also a higher deposit. Fortunately the ink already was drying on the contract, so the house was ours. Or so we thought.

24 hours later we received a phonecall from the landlady’s son, stating that there had been a change of plan, and we couldn’t have the house – cue much frantic phoning between us, the agent (wouldn’t answer his phone) and the landlady’s son (who also, mysteriously, seemed to have mislaid his phone immediately after speaking to us). Eventually, we managed to pin everybody down and arranged a meeting between all parties for 6pm that evening. Around 5pm, just as we were preparing to leave, we received a call from the agent, who told us that it was all a ‘big misunderstanding’, that the landlady’s son wanted to set up a business from the house but it was ok, he had found another property to rent and the house was ours. Cue a big sigh of relief. The only odd thing was a phone call ten minutes later, from an unidentified source, telling us that his mother was tired and could we postpone the meeting. As we had arranged another meeting for 10am the next day, to pay the rent and sign the lease agreement, we thought nothing of this. Until 9pm that evening, when we received yet another call from the agent, stating that the Taiwanese embassy had offered more than double what we agreed to pay in rent, that there was nothing he could do and he was very sorry.

What had happened is thus: the landlady and the agent had been in contact, the Taiwanese embassy had been in negotiation with them both and the agent had agreed to break his contract in return for, shall we say, the landlady assuaging his conscience about letting his clients down. Apparently this is common in Ha Noi, when relating this story to colleagues they just smiled knowingly and said ‘welcome to Vietnam’. Talk about a baptism of fire to Ha Noi’s housing market!

So we found ourselves, with little over a week before we had to leave our hotel, with no house to move into despite firm belief to the contrary. We immediately swung into action, rescheduling cancelled appointments and frantically making new ones. We must have met every agent in Ha Noi over the next three or four days, some good some bad and some just plain old cowboys. One particular agent showed us a few places we had already seen, but the rent was mysteriously $400 higher than previously. Unsurprisingly perhaps, this was the same agent who had let us down on our original house. More fool us for trusting him to show us yet more property I suppose.

Eventually, after seeing what felt like every house and apartment available for rent in Ha Noi, we had just one more to see before signing a three-month lease on an apartment in HCMCC Tower. I remember distinctly the conversation in the taxi – ‘y’know, we would be the luckiest couple in Ha Noi if this was THE house’. ‘I know, I mean, what are the odds? But we should see it – just one more, then we sign’.

I wish there was a happy ending to this tale – and guess what? For once, wishes do come true. We walked in and immediately felt like this was a house we wanted to live in. The kitchen was big and roomy, there were five floors, each with progressively more natural light. There was a space at the top for painting in, a space outside the lounge to make a den, a gorgeous roof terrace with views of treetops in the botanical gardens – not to be sniffed at, having seen views of walls and other peoples windows on our expeditions – and, best of all, two fish ponds, complete with fountains and lots of guppies. Perseverance really paid off for us in the end, of course the last house you see is always the one you move into, but in our case it really took on a whole new meaning!

So now we are in our house, and in the process of setting up. We have enough furniture to live, but we don’t quite yet have a home. Our living room is currently bare and devoid of furniture, and since the rains have arrived we’ve discovered the kitchen gets distinctly wet in humid weather – to the point that water is dripping down the fridge and the floor is so wet that I’ve slipped twice despite wearing shoes! Nothing a quick trip to the furniture store won’t solve, but not ideal when you are living in a work in progress. Give it a couple of weeks though, we’ll have it all set up and be living the life of Riley in our very own Asian palace. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself…

We have a house!

http://www.hanoifullhouse.com/property/perfect-house-4-bedrooms-fully-furnished-ren-ba-dinh-dist-ha-noi

It's BEAUTIFUL.

Second day of looking, and we've put down the deposit.  While we were there signing the contract, two other agents called saying they had people ready to give the deposit and willing to pay more money.  The ink was spilt in the nick of time!

Pictures and more detail coming soon.

Love, E.

May Tinh Xach Tay

Our word of the day helpfully arrives two days after we scour Hanoi for a laptop!

After several hours of browsing through dodgy deals we got what we needed so now you will hear more often from yours truly & co!

Off to look at houses, will relate all this evening.  Our first day yesterday - saw 6, some of them very lovely.  Beautiful architecture but often poorly built and damp.  Still, a good start.

Love, E.

Da Nang

Well, here we are.  It's a huge sprawling town, undergoing an awkward growth spurt as its commercial hormones run wild and skyscrapers erect hither and thither across the stormy skyline.  At night it drapes itself in neon and glowers into the dark.  Aside from a gaudy array of guesthouses and hotels, it's not set up for tourists - it's a living, breathing, industrious seaport town with its own multitudes of lifestyles and plenty going on that, quite rightly, we won't be privy to on this short visit.  Last night we roamed town looking for a bite to eat.  A rat as large as a terrier leapt out in front of us and I'm ashamed to say I jumped like a squeaky cartoon character.

From our 5th floor hotel room on My Khe beach, we have a great view over the sea.  To the left, the bay curves around, a vast leafy hill rising gently behind.  Halfway up this hill stands a magnificent statue - a 67-meter tall Lady Buddha, gazing serenely out over the bay, surely sending goodwill out to the sailors and fishermen below.  At night, we see her lit up and glowing like a candle.

Matt has done more exploring than me, I've been taking it easy here, reading and writing and watching films on HBO.  He's hired a scooter most days and climbed the surrounding mountains, coming back with stories about the Cham civilisation that once reigned here, the bustle of the busy city centre and today, while I stationed myself to write, the marble mountains.  These I am very jealous of not seeing this time around, we will be back soon.

Matt popped in around midday by surprise to take me away from the screen for a quick tour up the nearby hill, which looks out over the bay.  We passed hundreds, maybe a thousand lovely wooden fishing boats and coracles on the shore.   He wanted to show me something on the hill, but I didn't know what it would be.  Up we climbed, closer and closer to the Lady Buddha who rose up in her white marble robes above us.  We parked under a tamarind tree and climbed a stone staircase that must have been built for her, not for us mere mortals.  Cursing my level of fitness, we huffed in through a teal pagoda covered in gold lions and dragons, and met Lady Buddha in her lovely garden with bonsai in huge ceramic pots and many wonderful stone sculptures, including another rolling-tummied Happy Buddha sitting in a lotus pond, overlooking the bay.

Surrounding Lady Buddha and up some steps from her bonsai garden was a temple with a turquoise tiled roof, curled at the edges in that beautiful traditional Chinese style and crawling with fiercesome dragons.  Inside were large statues of Buddha and two kings beside him, adorned with ornaments, flowers and gifts from temple-goers.  What was really lovely about the place was that it was free of tourists, other than us, but busy with locals coming to pray and use it as it was intended.  I wished I understood more about much of what we saw - the two kings, and ten or so fantastic marble sculptures lining the path outside - each as large as an Asian Elephant and of a fat man on top of a different creature.  I took a photo of each as I want to know what they are, I'll add them in here soon.

Here's a short video tour of the place - not ours, just found it on YouTube.

Matt dropped me back to continue writing, but took me off again later to jump in the sea before sunset.  The waves were huge but we dove into them under the careful watch of lifeguards on the shore.  The water was cool and refreshing and clear enough to see our feet below.

Now, showered and fed, I'm putting the final touches to the blog before I head up to pack for Hanoi.  As one journey ends, another begins.  Our efforts with the language have brought us many fruits in the form of friendships on our way, and relief on the faces of cafe staff off the beaten track.  We're pretty slick with numbers and basic survival stuff now.  We've been teaching ourselves using made-up games and rhymes, but will be glad to study more seriously with a teacher and some language software at home.  We've dared ourselves to try many exotic foods and found plenty to make the mouth water.  Green papaya salad will be a staple of my new, nourishing diet.  We've seen sights but know there's plenty more to learn, plenty we don't yet understand about what we're looking at.  So while we leave with a hunger to return to many of the places we've seen, we are thirsty for the deeper tid-bits of knowlesge that building our little life out here will bring.

To Hanoi we go!

Love, E.

Hoi An

I made a fatal error navigating us to Hoi An, and forgot to check exactly where the bus departed from.  I assumed it would be the main bus station in Nha Trang, but after a 5am start and 90m taxi there, the only buses we could find were sleeper ones, leaving at 7pm.

We hurried around town in our cab, jumped into an internet cafe to see if we could locate the bus.  Somehow on this google search no such morning bus came up - but several websites listed 7pm incorrectly as 7am.  I suppose this is what happened, as no other travellers had heard of a morning bus to Hoi An!  We checked into a nice budget hotel for the day and napped and went for little walks and nibbled chocolates until the 7 P.M. sleeper bus was ready.

The sleeper bus, I thought, was brilliantly comfortable and a great way to enjoy travelling.  The plush seats reclined right back and Matt and I had the whole back row to ourselves.  A far cry from any of the travel I've done in India.  We got to Hoi An at dawn, and allowed ourselves to be whisked off to a nice hotel by a snappy young female tout.  I told her I was very impressed with her businesswoman skills - and I was.  Much of the tourist trade seems to be run by enterprising young women with a great grasp of various languages, they work effectively, efficiently and with confidence and smiles.  It's good fun to be their customer.

Hoi An is gorgeous.  It's the place I have most fallen in love with on our travels - at night it lights up with millions of coloured silk lanters, they glitter along the riverbank and seduce you in to cafes and pagodas.

Our hotel was very comfortable and a great deal, $15 a night with a nice pool and elegant French architecture.  At their beauty salon we indulged in massages and for me, a facial and manicure.  The facial was  incredible, over an hour long and I came out glowing, Matt said.  I think I might make this part of my routine in Hanoi!

Soon after arriving we were swept up in the cloth market by a collective of the aforementioned enterprising young women, and before we knew it we were flipping through a catalogue and picking sumptious materials for our tailored outfits.  We went along with it because it was something we'd planned on doing - although retrospect showed us that we could have been more cautious in choosing our tailors.  Matt got a full suit, shirt and tie - the suit came out fantastically, he looks incredible in it!  But the shirt and tie were very poorly made.  I got three (I know, I know) dresses....  I'm not very happy with any of them sadly!  The work isn't very good, and I went for three fittings to get it right.  Two of them will be okay for work, but the other I think I'll take to another tailor at some point and change it into something else.  A girl at the hotel showed me a dress she had made somewhere else and it was brilliant - and all of her own design, so I might try there next time (and just get one the first time!)  Also within the cloth market are shoemakers, so Matt got a handsome shiny pair for his suit and I got 2 pairs of heels.  They came out brilliantly, and I designed one of the pairs myself - sky blue, with cream-and-red-polka-dot silk material for the ties and heels.  They are SO cool.  Love love love.

We hired a scooter another day and visited My Son - site of some extraordinary Champa ruins.  It was a long drive out and on the return journey I started to feel quite unwell.  Annoyingly over the weekend I came down with glandular fever, so we left town early for Da Nang to visit the international hospital and get a blood test, just to confirm it was nothing serious, which is wasn't.  A couple of days later I was right as rain again and so now, here we are, spending the last days of our journey in Da Nang.

Love, E.

Nha Trang and Jungle Beach

Nha Trang seemed beautiful driving in on the back of the bike, wide tree-lined avenues all the way along the coast.

Alas, on closer inspection, we found that the wide avenues become noisy traffic mayhem next to the beach - ruining any chance of a relaxed, clean-feeling sunbathe or dip in the choppy waters.  The town seemed much like Mui Ne - resort-ridden and soulless.

We had some difficulty with the hotel and a taxi... in brief, our romance with Nha Trang was brought to a halt by the combined efforts of cockroaches, various rip-offs, and being held hostage with our passports locked in the hotel safe.  We weren't allowed to leave only two hours after checking in, despite offering a large sum for the room service.  We put our foot down and got the hell out eventually, stayed somewhere else and checked out the next morning, headed for Jungle Beach.

Jungle Beach was everything we'd hoped for - and despite a sudden rainstorm, we finally found the relaxed beach weekend we'd been hankering after.  As guests you have the choice to stay in a little bamboo hut, or a larger one down by the water, or for the really adventurous - a bed out in the jungle sheltered only by a sweeping mosquito net.

We went for the little hut to be closer to people, as we were feeling social, and enjoyed the company of other travellers sitting around the large communal dining table.  Meals are included in the deal and a bounty is spread out at lunch and dinner for everyone to share together.  The rain finally let off and we played volleyball and boarsurfed and beachcombed with the others, and watched the Scottish head carpenter at work on the roof of a new bamboo structure.  Itching like mad, Matt had to be stern with me as I counted no fewer than SIXTY-FOUR bites on my ankles from Lak Lake!

I look forward to returning and trying the outdoor beds - hoping to spot a pygmy slow loris in the nighttime forest!

Finally we tore ourselves away and headed away at dawn to Hoi An...

Love, E.

Da Lat and the Bike Tour

At the Phuong Hanh Hotel we were treated to the company of the most enigmatic, helpful and personable staff, especially a young lady called Tot who told us loads about her life and the city, and a gentleman called Ti who ended up being our tour guide later that week.

We arrived in town just as a "really important" match was being played by Man U and Liverpool....so Matt and I threw down our things, changed our stinking clothes and hit town to find somewhere to watch it and sip cold beers.  This we found quickly and painlessly, but soon abandoned the game to join Ali and Cassie for dinner.  Ali (from Manchester) and Cassie (Colorado) were propping up the bar as we came in, and we soon made friends - Matt and I were so desperate to chat to people, having not really met anyone in Saigon.  They were lovely and generously shared their last night together with us - Cassie had a flight to catch the next day.  They took us to the V Cafe for dinner (pizza was good comfort food after our journey, though I nearly fell asleep on my plate), filled us up with beers and then took us to the V Bar - an outrageously shiny nightclub with a very sweet and very effeminate waiter who hung around with us all night.... I have horriffic memories of doing the can-can with him, but the less said about that the better.  After a shocking bill, we rounded off the night with a brief but belting kareoke session somewhere...and then home.  Ali lives in Hanoi, so hopefully we'll catch up with him there.

Da Lat is a romantic town on a plateau, 1500m above sea-level.  In the centre is a vast, clean lake.  There is a cultured air about the place but it was very recently nothing more than a tiny village with no roads - development happens fast in Vietnam and most of it in concrete.  It used to be a much-loved French resort town, and is still dotted with lacy French villas in pastel shades.

It is apparently the nation's favourite honeymoon destination, and Matt and I enjoyed a fairy-tale like Valentine's Day on a hired scooter, exploring the Valley of Love, The Golden Lake and some little streams and waterfalls in the mountains, where we made friends with a bunch of local students, and joined them again later for... more kareoke!  They were so inviting and warm even though we shared barely any language.  One of them put their little girl on my knee to sit, and she dipped her finger in the cake icing for me to lick.  They swept us out before the bill arrived and wouldn't let us give them anything for it.  I have their email addresses and must write to thank them.

Also in Da Lat is Hang Nga's Guesthouse, popularly known as the 'crazy house'.  The female architect's personal story is as incredible as her masterpiece - a guesthouse built like a tree stump, its sinuous limbs act as corridors and bridges, you feel you will never finish exploring its many themed rooms (bamboo forest, bee room, bear room, tiger and eagle, and more...)  Mostly made of poured and painted concrete, there isn't a straight line to be found.  We felt like children playing in a treehouse, running through the garden and climbing across the rooftop.

After a blissful few days, we repacked and prepared ourselves for a three-day bike tour with Ti and his English-speaking partner guide, Yang.  We would spend the first night in a longhouse on Lak Lake, the second in Buon Ma Thuot, the third day we would be taken to Nha Trang on the coast.

The tour was every bit as informative and eye-opening and jaw-dropping as we'd hoped, and more.  Our bags were slipped into plastic covers and expertly secured onto the back of the bikes, so Matt and I had backrests hanging on behind our drivers.  We had good helmets and their driving made us feel completely at ease, enjoying the scenery and the wind in our hair.  I am now completely converted to the commonly stated belief that bike is the only way to see Vietnam.

I think our photos will give a better idea of our journey so I won't go on now, but the sheer amount that we saw and did is worth mentioning.  We were given a great overview of the agricultural roots and lifeblood of the country.

We stopped at a flower farm, a cashew farm, a rubber tree farm, pepper farm, cocoa farm, we saw dragonfruit and pineapple and small white ball-shaped nameless things growing.  We saw rice paper being made by a young schoolgirl over a hot fire.

We swam in the cool turquoise waters below a waterfall in Buon Ma Thuot national park (Matt braved the thunder of the waterfall - I abstained), we paid a visit to the happy Buddha sitting high on the hill above Elephant Falls, we marvelled at the technique at a wood carving village.

We saw rural life go by in a 'chicken village', tiny pigs snuffling around, one enormous pig - tall as a red pillar post box - went by in a trailer ("Many times father pig", Yang smirked).  We saw a silk weaving factory and ate the silk moth worms, crispy and nutty, they get stuck in your teeth.  We got tipsy in the rice wine distillery and saw how everything is used, nothing goes to waste.  The pigs are fed the final mushy remains of the fermented rice; "pigs get drunk, then have hangover", Yang informed.  I wish I could see this.  We explored the brick ovens and learnt the laborious, endless process that provides the foundations for the development of villages into towns, towns into cities.

We tasted pepper green and fresh from the vine.  We tried the bitter raw cocoa butter in its pod.  We stroked the leaves of the sensitive plant and watched it curl up shyly and we stared out over incredible vistas from mountain roads.

We ate frog and eel and an entire chicken squashed flat to barbeque.  Everytime we passed a pig or chicken, Ti would point and firmly state; "baa-bi-kew".  I have no vegetarian pretentions here, but I take the option when I can.

We took an elephant ride, an experience that many reading this will know is absolute heaven for me.  Matt couldn't remember seeing an elephant in real life before.  We galumphed along on her back as she waded deep into the middle of Lak Lake, where she slowed to a crawl, luxuriating in the cool muddy waters.  She refrained from spraying us.

By Lak Lake, over the chicken bone-gnawing sounds, Yang told us some wonderful stories, which I'll try to recapture here...


The Monkey Tail Story


One day, long ago in the forest, a group of monkeys went jumping, jumping, happily through the trees.  One little monkey was leaping up ahead, out of sight of the others.  Suddenly he came crashing back, spitting nonsense, something about another group of monkeys, over the river up ahead.  The monkey group went together to check out his claims, to see for themselves the strange things the little monkey had said.  There, over the water, were a haggard looking hairless group of creatures, standing on their back two feet.  "What are you?!"  The monkey leader cried.  The hairless creatures startled and started pointing and exclaiming about the monkey group in turn.  "What on earth are you?"  They cried.  "We are monkeys!"  The monkey king said.  "What?  We are monkeys too!"  Said the hairless ones.  The monkey group were confused, what were these strange ugly things doing, calling themselves monkeys?  Noone could understand it.  Suddenly, the little monkey burst into a shrieking laugh.  "What is the matter with you?"  The monkey king demanded.  The little one spoke; "haha...sorry, haha.... they ARE monkeys!  But their tail is on the other side!"



Cow and Stork


One day Cow and Stork struck a good deal; Stork would stay by the large Cow, eating the flies and ticks from her skin.  They signed a contract, and so it has been until this day.  And do you know why Cow has no top row of teeth?  It is because she has ground them away laughing, laughing at all the people, signing long and complicated contracts all the time, and getting frustrated when they break them.


The Bear and the Lovers Story


One day two lovers were walking hand-in-hand, totally mesmerised in love with each other, through a beautiful forest.  The birds were singing and the sun was streaming down through the trees.  They whispered promises to each other, they were the most perfectly in love people you have ever seen.  Suddenly a terrible bear came crashing through the trees towards them.  The boy shimmied straight up a tree, the girl fainted.  The bear didn't see the boy, but he came to the girl, and the boy watched completely still, as he sniffed around her.  Finally the bear decided she was dead and not good to eat, and went lumbering off.  When he was long gone, the boy came down from the tree and woke up the girl.  "What happened?"  She asked.  He said he chased away the bear and saved her.

___________________________________________

Such were the delights of our evenings with Yang and Ti.  We were sorry to say goodbye to them.

Exhausted and late in the day we arrived in Nha Trang, only to be met with a Mui-Ne flavoured de ja vu...

Love, E.

Getting to Da Lat

Our arrival was a flood of relief after our experience in Mui Ne, and the escape journey out.

The private bus company collected us from our hotel for the mere 4-hour ascent into the hills, but that is where the convenience ended.  We bundled on with our large packpacks stashed in the aisle, headed to the back where there seemed to be the most space.  The driver stopped every few hundred yards, squeezing more and more red-faced sweaty passengers on until we were really bursting, knees up around ears and the aisle popping with bags which new passengers had to climb over to fill the last seats.  Still not satisfied, a child was put on her mother's knees and a large American bottom was placed upfront by the driver.  Bags were adjusted to find more room for more large bottoms and every time the bus stopped and the doors opened, all the faces peered nervously out to gage the size and number of embarking passengers.  I was right at the back in the corner by the window, Matt was sort of next to me with with legs hanging down the aisle, a woman next to him shared the aisle as she also had a knee injury, and the man next to her, squeezed up against the other window, was part of a young Israeli group travelling together and spread out across the bus.  Finally, it seemed we were moving out of town and no more chattel was herded on.

Then we got a puncture.

Pulling into a workshop, first the fit and flexible Israeli men monkeyed down the aisle, hanging on to the luggage rack and tiptoeing along the armrests, finally navigating the pile of bags by the door and swinging down out of the bus to the ground.  We all followed, realising we may be a while and we should stretch our legs.  Everyone smoked nervously but Matt and I were good, resolutely sticking to our quitting ambitions.

I watched a small boy sew up a patch on the tyre, it looked fragile as a plaster.  Other workmen napped in hammocks, I had to duck under one to get to the toilet.

Eventually we were ready to go and everyone clambered up and everyone clambered along the aisle and everyone groaned as we tucked ourselves back into our seats like contortionists, and everyone fell silent as we climbed the most beautiful mountains and rose about valleys and plateaus, electric green with paddy fields and banana trees and the most splendid flora stretched across the huge rocks jutting up like mossy teeth.

Vietnam is beautiful.

Hissing and puffing, the bus pulled in to a rest stop halfway up a mountain.  We hadn't passed another vehicle for hours, no signs of human life for miles around.  The back wheel (the one below my seat) was hissing air and looking rather forlorn.  We didn't hold much hope for it, but where else were we going to go?  Matt and I buckled, and I bought a packet of fags.  All aboard once more.

Somehow, 7 or 8 hours later, after a languid sunset that had lulled us all into a squashed but happy stupor, we pulled into Da Lat.  A chirpy young woman broke the spell, leaping on board to tell us about the cheap but comfortable rooms they had at the adjacent hotel.  Matt and I were glad to fall straight into a room, which turned out to be a great choice for our stay in Da Lat.

Love, E.

Mui Ne

...was not the beach holiday we'd hoped for!  After a hot and tiring train and bus ride to get there, leaving Saigon at 6am and arriving after 3pm, we checked in and grabbed our swimwear - only to find the entirety of the long strip of golden sand had become one giant kite-surfing resort.

Kite-surfing, we admitted, looked like brilliant fun - athletic thrill-seekers leap from the waves on boards strapped to their feet, their arms and torsos balancing the pull of huge bright kites.  We figured; can't beat 'em, join 'em - but at $180 for a 5 hour lesson, during which you don't actually touch the water, we thought we'd save our funds for a diving course later on.  And the silver-tongued salesman we chatted to was much more convinced than Matt or I that the motion wouldn't inflame his knee injury.

The salesman, incidentally, told us that he was a boat person, and had lived in San Jose for years until returning to Vietnam a few years ago.  I was keen to know more, but he moved on to other customers.  Since then I read a simple but poignant fictional novel about the Vietnamese boat people called 'A Boat To Nowhere', written by a non-Vietnamese American called Maureen Crane Wartski.  She says she likes to write stories based on the coutries she visits in SE Asia.  Quite a bold thing to attempt I think, but she does it well and with unpatronising empathy.

Anyway, all Mui Ne had to offer other than the unusable beach was a strip of bars and restaurants, sort of more bijou-packer than back-packer, catering to the new and increasing flood of Russian tourists that are streaming in to beach resort towns across the country.  Many of the menus are now in Viet, English and Russian.

We cut our stay short and skipped town the next morning for Da Lat...

Love, E.

Sights of Saigon

We stayed at the New Pacific Hotel in Saigon from 3rd-10th March.

Following our arrival we were bristling to fill our senses with the country we are going to call home for the next two (or more) years.  After gaining a feel for the place and the impossibility of turning our first impressions into thoughts and words, we began to settle into a travel routine, balancing energetic efforts to DO as much as we could, whilst keeping cool in the midday sun and calm through the frantic streets.  We found a little gin and tonic, ice-cream and/or a cold beer helped this no end.

Fragments of my memories of the lively town include visiting the Reunification Palace - beneath which lies a complex series of basement rooms and tunnels, used during the war as the President's HQ.  David Lynch couldn't have arranged an eerier mise-en-scene.  I left Matt absorbed in the old radio transmittor systems and wandered the narrow, pale concrete chambers and tried to decipher the maps and codes posted on the walls.  The president's "War Room", next to his bedroom (complete with antique carved hardwood bed), was covered ceiling to floor in gigantic maps with trails and numbers and Vietnamese text all around.  The room was empty except for his desk, chair and telephone.  There were markings in the desk by the chair where we must have scratched away as he sat on the phone.  A blocked tunnel nearby would have served as his escape route, surfacing some several miles away out of town.

Also, a beautiful old Citroen, and a fully-furnished kitchen (with giant ice-cream maker) to cater for the officers.

As I mentioned before, we visited the War Remnants Museum (previously called the Museum of American War Crimes).  Much, much worse than I had anticipated.  Truly devastating photographs, and harrowing original instruments of torture.  Wonderful section on the photojournalists, many of whom never returned.

We visited the Ho Chi Minh Revolution Museum - but there was no information in English.  We tried to make sense of the photographs and personal items of Ho Chi Minh, known affectionately to his supporters as "Uncle Ho".  We came face to face with him downtown - a forbidding bronze statue gazing out from his lotus pond over the rising commercial skyline of Saigon.  All along the wide avenue leading to him stood billboards with detailed scenes of communism in action across the nation - volunteers bringing fruit to the poor; free music and theatre performances in schools and community centres; medical care outreach to the rural areas.  I was impressed.

At some point in your first few days in a country, you are going to get ripped off.  You may benefit from accepting this, and enjoying the luxury of being taken for a ride - ours was in a rickshaw, a scenic tour of a tiny fragment of town near the Grand Continental Hotel and market area that took a great deal longer than it may have done if every sidestreet and turning hadn't been taken, several more than once.  We giggled as we brushed past death at every near-hit with a motor vehicle and lay back to enjoy the sights fly by.  The error was of course ours in not agreeing a price beforehand - I was prepared to pay over the odds and gladly give the boys a tip for wheeling our big western bums around in the heat!  But when they asked for $50 we had to get a little apologetic with them.  I think we handed over $20 or $25 in the end, comparatively a taxi for the same time would have been about $1!  Well, I like to think their families are eating well this month.

At night the city lights up like a 50s diner, with neon on every conceivable surface.  I think the moment we put our arms around each other and said; "Welcome to our new home!  Wonderful Vietnam!" was on the stumble home after discovering the kareoke bars.  Now, those who know me, know that I dread singing in public (or rather, sing gladly...but badly, and never if put on the spot!) ...but kareoke, Japanese-style, is....wait for it.... waaaiiiiit fooooorrr iiiiiit......  bloody good fun!   First of all, the mic is set to echo so much that it totally distorts your voice, and I think there might be some sort of autotune mechanism (or maybe that's just the beer).  The best part though is that you don't sing in front of a crowd, you have your own private booth for you and your most tolerant of friends.  Most bars are in tall, narrow highrises.  You enter and an escort takes you up several floors in a lift, shows you to your room and takes any drinks orders.  Beers ordered in bulk for groups of friends arrive in a large crate.  You are given the song books (all but one bar that we've been to have an English section) and enter the song code into the machine.  Then the twinkly synth starts up and you're ready to go.  Stupidly entertaining until you can't croak out another "hey hey hey" and off you go to settle the (refreshingly light) bill downstairs.

Our sightseeing was interrupted towards the end of our stay when I had to visit the British Council's office and run a little errand of having a health check at the International SOS hospital.  Meanwhile, Matt wandered off to do some of his own exploring.  During one jaunt he was harrassed by a guy who wouldn't accept that he couldn't possibly sell Matt anything.  After trying 'motorbike', 'city tour', 'hotel', 'shop', 'restaurant' he finally resorted to 'happy massage?'  While we were amused by the euphemism we were also both rather horrified by the in-your-face reality of sex tourism.  Matt noticed that nearby our hotel there was a women and children's centre run by volunteers, privately funded by a Dutch woman (I couldn't find anything more out about it, but they seemed well-organised).  We paid a visit and with our trusty phrasebook clumsily offered a small cash donation.

On Friday 10th March we grabbed our bags at dawn and headed out of the dirt and grime for a beach holiday in Mui Ne...

Love, E.