Well, my apologies for taking so long to update you, making your anticipation reach unsustainable heights, but I now hope to provide a little entertainment for you by enlightening you on our activities. However, before I start, I must warn you that the following includes references to guns, red light districts and attempts to avoid British immigration controls, though naturally I have behaved impeccably throughout.

I’ll start at the beginning then (or at least, where I last left off)

Going all the Hue

Because of when the date fell, Victoria’s birthday was spent not in the nice hotel promised, but instead on a $2 boat cruise down the Perfume River to visit an assortment of tombs and temples. As entry fees were not included, upon reaching the first place we had to pay to enter we decided that because of the quite high cost (55,000D – around 2 pounds) to visit a place for about 30 minutes, we would instead spend our money on some soft drinks (rather than working out how many we could have bought with the money). This actually led, later on, to me leading what I would like to describe as a rogue tour group, who similarly thought they would save their cash. This in fact led to a far better experience than I think I would have had in a tomb, where we walked into a little town and I had a little kick-around with some school kids, though me wearing sandals inhibited me in performing kick-ups.

That evening we went out to celebrate Victoria’s birthday and yes, I admit, Victoria beat me fairly (it would be ungracious to suggest any lack of effort on my part). The evening also led to a further addition to the Vicki drunk section, and her spending at least 4 days trying to step onto a table in order to graffiti the ceiling of the DMZ Bar in Hue to spread the good name of Upminster (even though she is only a late-comer).

The following day we said goodbye to the couple running our guesthouse to move to more upmarket accommodation, though I couldn’t help feel like I was betraying them by moving to another place in the same town, particularly when they saw us walking around. In contrast to the last hotel we stayed at with a pool (Jaipur), I was quite confident that I would not catch any hideous diseases from it, with Victoria also swimming to double the number of people users whilst we were there.

On to Hoi An

A four hour bus ride brought us to Hoi An, which is a really nice town where we spent far longer than we planned to. This also marked the start of the weather turning much warmer, and increasing my forehead sweating exponentially.

Having learnt absolutely no lessons from Hanoi, we were tempted into having more clothes made because of them being a fraction of UK prices, though this time they actually seemed quite fitted to us. Indeed, we became sufficiently confident to have some shoes made, though this would prove quite a mistake on my part…

Victoria had already had a couple of shoes made in a particular store run by 3 girls, during which time one of the girls had (half-jokingly) suggested that I marry her and (or in order to) take her back to England with me, whilst I was sitting next to Victoria. I’d decided to try to get a hybrid trainer/shoe, and ordered a pair in a combination of tan and gum metal.

Unfortunately, when I collected them I was a little disappointed with the end result when they looked like clown bowling shoes. Embarrassment of having these monstrosities in public stopped me from properly examining them until I returned to the hotel room, when it transpired that I now owned my first pair of any type of footwear in gold, with the ridiculous contrast of colours the cause of my pure hatred for these devil-shoes.

Upon regaining my composure, I returned to the shop to tell them that unfortunately there had been some mistake on their part, as I had ordered a pair with tan and not gold. It was here that my relationship with the girls running the store started to sour, as they repeatedly maintained that the shoes had been made out of the colours I had ordered, even though they also said that the maker had lost the piece of material attached to the receipt.

Eventually, with neither side willing to concede any ground (just so you know – I would NEVER order gold shoes or trainers – football boots maybe, but not anything else), a compromise was reached whereby I would pay a few extra dong to have a (hopefully) wearable pair of shoes, or at least ones I would be less inclined to cover with petrol and burn. After an afternoon at Hoi An beach, which is a bit rubbish, had lots of sellers and a rough sea, I collected them for a second time and managed to leave on good terms with the sellers. You can see the results yourself on photobucket (I don’t plan to wear them with white laces)

Whilst in Hoi An, we were also forced to change hotels as the receptionist decided that me saying we might be leaving in a couple of days actually meant we would leave the following day, though this led to us staying in a far nicer YHA place which actually had a quite nice pool and, which was a huge bonus for Victoria, 24 hour free internet which I understand helped her pass the 6000 post mark on her feeder forum.

The only other thing worth mentioning is our trip to My Sore, which wasn’t great as most of the structures were destroyed by bombs, though the jeep ride up the hill side was pretty entertaining. Also, I am pretty sure I saw a snake in the grass about a metre from us, though to avoid panic I waited until we were well away from the area to share that information with Victoria.

And to Saigon

Well, catching our bus was an amazing example of inefficiency, with us being collected by one bus to be taken to another tour operator, via a series of other hotels, which was a 2 minute walk from our hotel, and then waiting there for 1½ hours for a bus which was not quite as advertised by our travel agent.

En route we saw Nha Trang, with the beach not really seeming worth the effort (from the coach window at least) and Mui Ne, which might. These broke up our mammoth journey of 24 hours, though I personally don’t mind such long journeys, particularly as you know the amount of effort that will be required to carry your bags at the end. Indeed, this meant we settled for a more expensive (a whole $10) room for one night, before settling in a more budge ($8) alternative.

In comparison to Hanoi, Saigon was far busier and hotter, meaning that I preferred the former, though the latter was still enjoyable to visit. One very noticeable occurrence was the number of middle-aged western men going out with quite young Vietnamese girls, with this quite strange-looking coupling rarely failing to get our attention (though we tried to be as subtle as possible). Anyway, on with the stories…

Going Underground…Again

Probably the most enjoyable day I have had since going on this trip was spent visiting the Cu Chi tunnels on a day trip from Hanoi. Although no tunnel expert, having only seen one other similar system before, I thought the day was absolutely brilliant, even if it was very touristy. Accompanied by a quite capable guide, we watched a video about killing Americans (actual term used on video – they even gave medals expressly on the basis of being a good American killer), and then saw a variety of methods used which had to be a little more inventive than dropping bombs (though hardly less painful).

The whole place was set up more as a celebration of Vietnamese efforts during the war, rather than attempting to display any of the more tragic consequences (which were instead focused on in the War Remnants museum), with quite a “war is cool” approach taken. Indeed, though references were made to American-killing in the introductory video, the rest of the exhibits were far more sanitised.

However, this is quite understandable, as seeing the actual consequences of fighting might have put tourists like us off taking advantage of the opportunity to fire real guns (my choice, and M16), an activity which literally blew a whole in our budget (I know how weak that is). Similarly, I had a great time going through the tunnels, which were a pretty tight fit (I had to crawl through some stages) even after they have apparently been widened for tourists, though had they reminded me of the number of people trapped underground after direct hits on the tunnel it might not have been such an enjoyable experience.

Trying to find a Rock and a Hard Place

Well, though her birthday had passed some time before, Victoria had decided she would wait until reaching Saigon before having her birthday dinner paid for by Daddy. This was primarily because she had noticed on the LP map of Saigon that there was a Hard Rock Café, which also meant that I had the opportunity to inflict the mortifyingly embarrassing treatment you receive when it happens to be your birthday (my 13^th birthday meal in Orlando remains firm in my memory). So, upon returning to the tunnels we set off, and following my directions, we reached the place where the restaurant was meant to be. Only, it wasn’t. Despite a pretty long period of searching, I remained stubbornly convinced that we were in the right place, though things did not look hopeful when a woman selling Hard Rock Café Saigon T-shirts on the road it should have been located did not know where the place was.

Now starting to lose a little confidence in my navigating skills, I decided that rather than just looking at the map showing where the place should have been, I would actually read the writing about the restaurant (which Vicki informed me she had read) and discovered that there was in fact NO HARD ROCK CAFÉ IN SAIGON, and the thing listed as such was a copycat anyway (explaining the lack of obvious signs that would have helped us). It then dawned on us that we were in fact in quite an “unsavoury” part of town, with the attendant female pedestrians that you find in such places. Making a hasty retreat, we then went on in search of other LP recommended restaurants, though ones which this time turned out to either have turned into jewellery or clothes shops. However, upon walking back to the area of town in which we were staying in order to eat in a restaurant we knew existed, things immediately got a little brighter as our meal was accompanied by a showing of Top Gun, bringing with it cries of “Goooooooooooose” to accompany our meal.

Otherwise, the rest of our time in Saigon was spent visiting the War Remnants museum, and making the necessary preparations to send 30kg of stuff back to the UK. Oh, and being a prize idiot, naturally that package included the photo-CD with virtually all of the pictures of Saigon that I wanted to upload. Fortunately, for all your benefit, I risked missing our bus to the Mekong delta to have another CD burned from the place as they had saved the pictures onto the hard drive, enabling me to upload a huge number of photos.

Well, having now written more than anyone will read, and also got bored updating the photobucket, I will retire and make you wait before I tell you all about our Mekong Delta tour and reaching Cambodia.

Mark