It’s not that we haven’t enjoyed it – it’s an amazing place – but it’s quite expensive and there’s not so much to do here that you couldn’t fit into a couple of days.

Hong Kong has the 7th highest GDP per capita in the world and oh how it shows! Literally everywhere you go has shops. Shopping centres, shops, malls, more shops, markets and more shops. Most of them are big brand shops like Armani and Versace and each has several branches. There’s Tiffany’s, Vivienne Westwood, DKNY – you get the idea. It’s all designed to hoover up the bucket loads of money that oozes from the pockets of the bankers and stockbrokers that swarm around the place, pouring into and out of the vast skyscrapers of companies like The Bank Of China, HSBC and various other multi-nationals. The point is, this place is not really designed for backpackers on a budget – even middle class, middle aged (ish) backpackers like us! Not that that has stopped a certain Trini lady friend of mine from shopping! Oh no! We’ve trundled around enough shops to make my feet hurt quite a lot but, due to the high prices and the fact that we can’t carry much more weight than we already have, only a few things have actually been purchased.

In actual fact, Happy Valley races was the place that recieved the bulk of our cash after a drunken and (for me, at least) fruitless night at the most stunning setting for a sports venue I’ve ever seen! The old Victorian trams – one of the few old things left around here – take you to the racecourse which is right in the heart of the insanely overcrowded city. The race meetings are held at night and the view all around is of huge tower blocks of apartments, squeezed in between the office blocks. We arrived with 15 minutes to go before the first of the 8 races and, with me having written down some tips for races 2 to 6 from a local TV programme the night before, we decided not to bet on race 1 but Annika, having seen a jockey wearing turquoise in the parade ring beforehand, chose number 9 just so we had an interest. It won. At 9/1. Apart from one other small winner – the favourite in race 4 – we failed to win any money whatsoever and only managed to achieve the same as all the other expats who were there – a large consumption of alcohol. As a result, the night was top class fun but we have both suffered bad hangovers today.

Another feature of Hong Kong has been the food. Due to the big money and the number of foreigners here, there is evey kind of food you can imagine but it’s all quite expensive – around London prices. But our budget can’t cope with that and, to be honest, we’d rather try the local stuff so we’ve been eating in the Chinese places. They don’t really offer what you might call proper restaurants here – just very brightly lit cafe/diner type places with TVs blaring and air conditioning turned up to 11. We have had a mixture of good and bad with roast duck and beef stir fry being some of the best and tonight’s ‘pork with ginger and green onion’ being the low light – it was mainly offal, those springy, tubey bits of a pig you really don’t want to eat. Our dim sum was quite good but we have absolutely no idea what was in it as the owner didn’t speak any English. All I can tell you was that it was a small meat thing and some buns with ’stuff’ in them – one meaty stuff and one sweet, beany stuff.

We are now looking forward to New Zealand and spending 3 weeks driving around in our camper van accompanied by Damon and Adele, friends from home, who are currently in the air between London and NZ. It’ll be nice to get away from the crowded streets and chaos of Hong Kong and see some nice quiet countryside – but more than that, we’re really looking forward to spending some time with friends which we haven’t done in ages.

Next morning, after a consultation session from our helpful hotel owner, Mrs. Moon, we came to the conclusion that being in Hanoi over the Tet period would have been pointless and boring and, with the weather grey and cold for the first time in the 10 weeks we’d been travelling, we decided to get a train up north to Sapa that evening.

We spent the day wandering aimlessly around a rapidly emptying town, trying to find things other than alcohol to occupy us, then grabbed some dinner and headed for the railway station. It meant we’d miss the apparently impressive fireworks at midnight but there was literally nothing else going on – Tet is a time for people to go home and visit their families for a while and ours are more than a short bus ride away, sadly.

The ride to Sapa is around 10 hours on an overnight train. The accommodation consists of sleeper cabins with four beds in each – we had the top and bottom bunk on one side and an English guy who lives in China took one of the others. We managed to frighten off the local guy who’d booked the final bed by chatting for hours in our cabin with Dan and the Australian couple we’d met on the platform.

At 5am the train rolled into Lao Cai, near the Chinese border where a minibus was waiting to take us up the mountain to Sapa, at 1500m. Within a mile or so, we were in the clouds and the bus climbed continually up for more than an hour, flinging around corners into the thick clouds making for an interesting and frightening trip. Arriving at our hotel around 6am, our room was ready for us, thankfully, and we slumped into bed til 10.

Sapa is a beautiful part of the world. Set high in the mountains, the people still have to grow their own body weight in rice every day (probably) so every hillside is covered in stunning rice terraces. After a rubbish lunch, we hired a moped and scooted off to see the local villages where minority groups like the Hmong and the Dao have lived for generations. Inevitably, these hill tribes have gradually abandoned their farming, subsistence living in favour of harassing the tourists to buy their apparently hand sewn clothing which, according to one person we met, came from China! The local women, wearing their traditional clothing would sprint, in gangs of around 9 or 10, after any bus load of tourists that appeared asking the usual questions of “where you from?”, “how old are you?”, “you buy something?” in quick succession. Luckily, the mobility earned by having a motorbike ensured our easy escape. It was a shame to actually want to avoid the local people but the level of harassment really was incessant.

Sadly, the clouds had ascended (yes, ascended) the next day and the view from our freezing cold bedroom (these people live high in the mountains and yet have nothing to provide heat other than an electric blanket!) had completely disappeared. Eventually, we plucked up the courage to leave the hotel but, after a fairly long trek, we returned home with Annika not feeling very well.

Unfortunately, she was not much better the next morning so she remained in bed whilst I ventured into the now wet as well as cloudy, gloom for a walk to the nearby Dao village of Cat Cat. After shrugging my way through a few rounds of the local sales patter and wandering through the village, I had a decision to make. Turn right and head back into town, which was what all the tourists were doing – or turn left and walk on to the next village and see where I ended up. I had a rough idea that I could find my way round to the right and get back to the hotel via the main road so left it was. The road gradually bent round to the right, giving me hope that I would soon see the road but it never appeared. In fact, nothing appeared, the clouds so thick that visibility was very low. Every once in a while, someone would walk past and we exhange sin chao’s (“hello”) and I even tried to ask some locals which way to go but no-one speaks English up there so long sets of instructions fell on confused ears. Eventually I arrived at a pair of remote houses, barking and snarling dogs hinting that maybe I should go back – but a teenage boy managed to convince me to let him take me up to the waterfall, which I knew was next to the road, for a dollar. We set off over rice terraces and up and up and up. Endlessly and exhaustingly up. Through streams and forests we trudged (well, I trudged – my guide fairly skipped his way up in his plastic sandals, waiting for the fat old Westerner with the expensive walking boots to catch up every hundred yards or so!) for an hour until, to my great relief, we found the road and I hitched a ride on a motorbike back down to the town. Bit off more than I could chew there, I think.

An eventful, but un-bloggable minibus ride back to Lao Cai for the return train to Hanoi delivered us back into the miserable, closed city whose temperature was now down to around 18 degrees.

After another wasted day, the tourist attractions at least began to open up so we set off early to see Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum which, oddly, is only open until 11am. The experience was typically Vietnamese. We found the right place but were then instructed to go an incredibly long way around, despite the lack of any signs and the fact that we could just walk straight to it from where we were. Once we’d been abruptly told that we would need to collect our valuables by 11am or we would lose them, we joined the queue to see Uncle Ho. Various locals pushed in, armed guards instructed people to be quiet, pushed children to be in front of their parents, hands had to be removed from pockets – it was all very friendly and amiable. We filed into the building, up the stairs, saw the corpse laying in its coffin looking gaunt and, well, dead and then left, rushing to retrieve our bag before the deadline which was only minutes away.

Next, we visited what the guidebook describes as the ’serenely calm’ Temple Of Literature – along with the rest of humanity it seemed, as hundreds upon hundreds of pushing, shoving, shouting, excitable Vietnamese elbowed their way around with us. Feeling like we’d been in a massive barging football crowd, we escaped and went for lunch, exhausted.

After a visit to an old prison which contained all sorts of ‘America Is Rubbish’ type propoganda, we decided to give up sightseeing for the day and returned to town for food and booze.

We simply had to get out of town the next morning so we headed off to the bus station to travel down to visit the ‘Halong Bay of the rice paddies’ at Tam Coc. We hired bikes from the hell hole that is Ninh Binh and cycled to the rice paddies, hiring a boat when we got there. Again, along with most of the other people on planet Earth, it seemed. Tam Coc is pretty beautiful, huge karsts sprouting out of the rice paddies as our rower woman pushed us (they row by pushing the oars, not pulling them – either using their hands or, in some cases, their feet!). We fought off the now customary “you buy something” requests and the rower’s request for a tip and cycled back to the town, down the insane main road to get the bus home. Arriving at the bus station, you are almost physically assaulted by hordes of motorbike riders offering lifts into town but we wanted to take a taxi, so we flagged one down and jumped in for the 7km ride. When we got there, we were told the fare was more than double what it had been that morning – mainly due to the fact that his meter showed that we’d apparently travelled 19km in 5 minutes through rush hour Hanoi traffic! By this point, we’d both had enough of the hawking and conning and Annika decided to argue the case, eventually thrusting a 100,000 VND into the driver’s hand and we left the car in a fury. Power taken back, we sunk a few beers and stuffed our faces, leaving our forlorn taxi driver to wonder how his idiot tourist marks could have figured out his cunning plan.

Our last 2 days in Vietnam have been spent in Halong Bay, on a junk sailing around even bigger and more dramatic karsts. Sadly, the predictions that the English style weather would abate and sun might rear its quite nice, warm head turned out to be slightly wrong and I write this sitting on the deck wearing my hoodie and coat, with both hoods up! It has been a good trip though with some decent food, some really nice people, some kayaking and some superb scenery. It’s just a shame that we couldn’t have ended with some good weather.

One more meal in Vietnam and then we fly to New Zealand, stopping in Hong Kong for 4 days on the way.

Vietnam. Done.

Our first test came around 20 metres or so from our launch point. We failed. The river turned left. How were we to know?! Well, we did know actually – we steered too soon, hit a bush growing on the bank and promptly tipped upside down into the ankle deep water. River 1 Humans 0.

Luckily, our guide caught our escapee transport further down river and we climbed aboard to soggily continue on our way. We had met a really nice Aussie guy the night before whose mate had broken his foot at a full moon party in Thailand the week before and so was travelling on his own and, just as we were staggering gingerly to our feet in the fast flowing water, he came round the corner with his guide, both laughing.

Fortunately, we figured it out in the end and the remainder of the trip passed relatively incident free bar a few ‘moments’ – we saw another two caves, did a bit of hiking and ate some pretty decent food cooked by the guides on a fire they built while we chatted.

After lunch, we continued down the river, surrounded by stunning scenery, idly paddling in the serene atmosphere. We began to hear some music and, after turning a corner we realised what the warning about drunken people was referring to. Vang Vieng is famous for an activity called ‘tubing’ whereby (mainly Australian) people float down the river in rubber rings, stopping at various bars to get steadily plastered, dance to the deafening music and launch themselves off swing rope things into the water. Fortunately, none of the intoxicated party-goers attempted to board but the sight of it combined with the white noise of each bar playing different dance music at high volume – and all in such a beautiful setting – was quite strange and horrible. We were all young once and I’ve had my share of nights acting like an idiot and almost certainly making an arse out of myself but this just seemed so out of place.

The day was also noted for Annika spotting our new Aussie mate, Adam, slyly spooning some of the Carnation condensed milk for his coffee directly into his mouth. Apparently his dad, who is Phillipino, regularly consumes the aforementioned sweet milk by squeezing it directly from a tube! Dan, you can make friends this way.

After our previous transport experiences on Laos, we ensured that we bought a ticket for a big bus for the trip to Luang Prabang the next day. Arriving at the bus station, the man in charge still tried to lump us onto a minibus but I insisted and eventually we set off. The bus was old and quite knackered but at least we had room to move our legs and there were no more passengers on board than there were seats!

The road from Vang Vieng to Luang Prabang is around 210km but the journey takes 7 hours due to the fact that the road winds its way up one mountain and down the next and is not straight for more than about 20 metres at any point. The scenery was absolutely stunning as we climbed higher and higher, a new view appearing with every turn. The real drama, however, took place on the road around 2 hours in.

As we approached a sharp left hand bend in the road, a high cliff to our right and a long drop on the inside of the corner, our driver was beeping furiously to warn the driver of an oncoming bus of our presence. The other driver didn’t seem very interested though, and reached the bend at the same time as us and swung round the corner so sharply and swiftly that several of the passengers on the left hand side of our bus leapt out of their seats, afraid that the bus would hit them – and with good reason, as the corner was too tight and the bus had straightened up as it swung round. The driver then hit the brakes suddenly, bringing his bus to an abrupt standstill just in time. Our bus stopped too and we all got out to see what the situation was. The situation was that the driver of the other bus had managed to stop one rotation of the wheel short of going over the edge! The front of the bus had gone round the corner however, leaving the bus straddling the gap – to the amazement and terror of the passengers as, one by one, they clambered off the bus having to sort of jump off sideways to avoid plummeting to their doom. Inevitably, neither driver seemed overly concerned and, once the bus had been wrenched back up the hill a few metres to gasps from the watching tourists we were all packed back in and continued on our way.

Luang Prabang is another UNESCO World Heritage town and justifiably so. It has managed to keep a lot of the old buildings and architecture, much in the same way as Hoi An in Vietnam and it has an unbelievably laid back feel despite the number of tourists. The night market was particularly bizarre, the stall holders happy to just sit there and let you make your own mind up about whether to buy or not. We rented bicycles for both days we were there and had a lovely relaxing time, pedalling around seeing the Wats, shopping and having the odd drink. On our final day, I had my first massage of the trip – a Lao lady pressed and stood on my back, tried to pull my fingers out of their sockets and slapped my arms for an hour. I swear she was making it up as she went along – she even pulled my hair at one point! I did feel a little better afterwards I suppose but I’m not sure massages are really my thing.

And with that, Laos is done – we very nearly skipped Laos when we realised how little time we had for North Vietnam but we are so glad we didn’t. Some of the transport has been tough going but the friendly people in particular have been brilliant and it’s a shame we don’t have longer to see more.

As I write this, we have just landed in Hanoi, having cheekily flown back to Vietnam in order to avoid a 24 hour bus journey. The captain has just informed us that it is 19 degrees outside! I don’t think it has been below 28 at any point since we left so this is going to be a shock. Wish us luck.

But first, let me describe our night in Tha Khaek. We walked from our hotel to the tiny main town on the banks of the Mekong and grabbed a beer – after a short storm, we began to look for a restaurant, finding one up river which had an interesting line in badly translated food. We managed to avoid the usual intestine type items and had quite a pleasant meal in what was a strange place which, as with a lot of South East Asia, was quite keen on karaoke – they actually had a separate room in the restaurant featuring darkened windows, quite good sound proofing and the usual karaoke paraphenalia. During our meal, we noticed that the room, which had seats for at least 40 people and it’s own bar, as well as a DJ booth on a stage and a big screen, had a meagre 3 people in it, sitting at a table wailing to the music. One or two more joined them later and Annika started wondering whether we should join them. Next thing I know, we are sharing a table with 5 excitable teenage Lao girls, being forced to down the local beer and asked to write down the songs we’d like to sing. Now, I have never done karaoke in my life. This is down to the fact that I simply cannot stand the idea of singing in public (football matches notwithstanding) so I tried to come up with a song which I could be pretty confident they would struggle to find on their machine. I wrote “Sweet Child O’ Mine” and sat back, readying myself for my next role as ‘crushingly disappointed wannabe karaoke guy’. Imagine my horror then, as the menu of songs appeared on the screen during the current Lao dirge and, as the DJ typed in the first few letters, the options dwindled to reveal the 4 words I didn’t think it was possible to see that night. It wasn’t the original- in fact it was only the first verse, repeated twice, the chorus, the ‘where do we go now’ bit and the famous ‘guitar solo’ played on what sounded like a Bontempi organ but I belted it out like Axl Rose himself and I am no longer a karaoke virgin. I feel dirty. Annika tried to sing “Hello” by Lionel Ritchie, despite writing down “Madonna” and then the locals returned to some more familar Lao fare which perked them back up again after the confusion of Guns N Roses. Much more beer was consumed, photos were taken (featuring the ubiquitous, South East Asian ‘V’ sign) and we eventually made our excuses and left.

Next morning, we had to leave early to get a bus from the local market to a village called Konglor. I say bus but it was to be what is called a sawngthaew which literally translates as ‘two benches’ – a flatbed truck, varying in size with two benches down both sides and a roof to carry stuff on. We would soon be getting used to them.

After an hour or so of stacking up with all manner of things, including gallons of some kind of clear liquid that was apparently alcohol and some tables, we began our journey to Na Hin, where we would need to change to another sawngthaew to get to the village. On the bus, a local guy with some mirror shades chatted to us – unlike most Lao people, he spoke quite good English and told us all about himself (his name was Phone) and plied us with all manner of foodstuffs including some white fruit he was carrying mountains of which was like an apple and some banana/rice thing. He was a bit of a wide boy, talking enthusiastically to all the other passengers and, after our experience of people who speak good English to tourists in Vietnam, I am ashamed to say that we wondered whether he was going to try and rip us off but he turned out to be very representative of all the Lao people we’ve met and was just a really lovely guy. His moment of glory came when he managed to get the woman next to him to not only show him a photo of her daughter but to give him her the girls’ number, which he then proceeded to call, there and then, as we rumbled up through the mountains. Lord knows what he said but it seemed to go pretty well and, the chat up complete, he took some time to take a photo of the photo with his own camera so he could remember her when they inevitably met up. We also exchanged email addresses with him but he wrote his hotmail password on his as well as the address!! “I have no secrets”, he said. Mental.

The journey was also notable for me having the hair on my arms tousled by an old man sitting next to me. It was not the last time I had such close contact with the local population that day.

After 3 hours or so we arrived at Na Hin – we pulled up near the market and were immediately asked if we wanted to go to Konglor by a new sawngthaew driver. We jumped onto the back of the new truck and waited for it to leave along with an old lady who was already there. It left after 5 minutes, drove a circuit of the market dropping some stuff off and then returned to the original spot. The driver got out, switched off the engine and went to sit with his mates. It was a good 45 minutes before we left again, with more passengers this time, including a lady with knarled toes and an apparently drunk man, holding a mysteriously shaped bag and babbling Lao to anyone who would listen. Again, we trundled off round town, looking for more passengers by beeping the horn (a common practice around these parts) and after a few more circuits and a stop to deliver some petrol, we were off at last!

One by one, the passengers were dropped off on the way and, lucky me, I was told to move to the other side of the truck to sit next to drunk man who very quickly took a shine to me. His first move was to begin playing with my beard, stroking it and sort of pulling it a bit, despite my efforts to stop him, a sort of leery grin accompanying the gesture. It was followed by a big slap on my thigh, his hand lingering just a little too long once the impact had taken place – about 10 minutes too long I think. The rest of the journey was spent trying to resist the man’s advances whilst the locals looked on, mildly amused and Annika desperately tried to stop herself from laughing so hard that she was weeping. Attempts included more thigh touching, thigh rubbing, arms round me and a wonderful moment when he put his arm through mine whilst I guarded against his roaming hands, resulting in our arms being linked. Thankfully he left us before we got to Konglor village but by then, Annika had laughed so hard it was clearly causing her much pain.

We found a homestay in the village and wandered off for some food as we were starving. On the way back, we walked through the village to get to our house – the village consisted of around 100 wooden houses (on stilts to cope with the floods that come in the rainy season), each one of which seemed to have a few children outside it ready to wave and shout “Sabai dee” to us as we walked by. These people really are so nice. We were fed by the family we stayed with, which was tough as we’d eaten too much before but we got through it and, after realising that conversation was impossible when neither party speaks more than 2 or 3 words of the other’s language, we went to bed early.

Next day, we wandered down to the caves and hired a boat and a driver to take us through. The river from the south disappears into the mountain and winds its way through 7km of caves an out the other side. Our boat had to stop every now and again because the water was too shallow and our guides dragged it over the rocky bit and we’d jump back in. Once out the other side, we stopped for a drink and chatted to the people we met during the trip (including a French couple who are travelling for 14 months!) and then returned the way we’d come. It took ages to get to Konglor but it was well worth the effort. We met some great people and staying with the family was brilliant, despite the fact that, with the heat and lack of shower, we both felt pretty grubby by the end.

Our next challenge was to get back up to Na Hin and try and catch a bus to the capital of Laos – Vientiane. The aforementioned front-seat sawngthaew trip took us to Na Hin where we were given to another truck to take us to the junction where the Vientiane buses would pass by. After 45 minutes one arrived and, after the usual period of stacking with stuff and milling around of people, we jumped on. There weren’t two seats together so I asked someone if the seat next to them was taken. It was. They all were. Most people had only got off to go to the toilet or get a snack. We had to stand, as did around 20 other people. A 45 seater bus with around 70 passengers – I managed to stand under the roof air vent which meant I could stand up straight but the air which I was breathing was thick with diesel fumes. Being as we knew the journey was at least 4 hours, we assumed that some people would get off in Paksan down the road but they didn’t – Annika got a seat for the last hour but I ended up standing for the whole 4 hours. Absolute agony and an experience I would not like to repeat. By the end, I think I had begun to hallucinate. We eventually got to our hotel at 10pm, showered and collapsed into bed.

Vientiane is one of the most bizarre capital cities I have ever seen. It is tiny – a population of only 600,000 apparently – and is quite westernised. The streets are very clean and tidy, they have traffic lights and road markings and clear pavements and, wonder of wonders, the drivers obey all the rules! If you want to cross the road, you wait for the lights to turn red for the traffic and for the green man to light, then you can cross! It’s bizarre and the first time we have experienced this kind of crazy insanity since early December. We loved it and it’s a real shame we had to move on so soon but we are pushed for time so after a day cycling round in the raging heat and an evening at another restaurant which trains street kids to cook and wait tables etc. we got a VIP bus to Vang Vieng. As usual, the VIP bus turned out to be a crap old minibus with no legroom so another early night is required. We are staying in a wooden cabin in the mountains, next to a babbling river on which we will be kayaking tomorrow.

The last few days have been bonkers, exhausting, dirty, fabulous, fascinating, confusing and great. We have 5 more days in Laos – I fear that it might not be enough.

http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog/sbarnett/1/tpod.html

Going back a few days, we visited the Cu Chi Tunnels near Saigon. As was previously mentioned, the journey took forever due to some roadworks and the insane attitude to traffic in Vietnam. This, coupled with a tour guide who started off quite interesting and informative but slowly turned boring and bitter as his available material began to run dry in the rush hour traffic made the experience quite draining, but the tunnels were certainly very interesting and crawling through them for 120 metres was totally exhausting. They were dug just after the 2nd World War but more extensively used and expanded by the Viet Cong to transport weapons, food and supplies from the North to the freedom fighters in the South. Made for the tiny Vietnamese that were to use them, they are extremely cramped for a big fat Westerner like myself and I was quite relieved to escape after a brief period. The VC virtually lived in these tunnels for months on end. They also showed us some of the top class, almost cartoon-style booby traps that they used to catch the Americans, most of which involved soldiers falling into pits of rotating spikes and all of which filled the VC with much pride. The introductory video talked of several VC who were decorated as ‘American Killer Heroes’.

Next day, we took the bus to Dalat in the Central Highlands, 7 hours away. We’d bought an open tour bus ticket which allowed us to get on any TM Brothers Cafe bus to get first to Dalat, then Nha Trang, Hoi An and finally Hue and this was our first mistake. The bus was ancient and had dreadful suspension, bouncing around like a weeble after every bump in the road was encountered.

Many hours later, after having stopped to pick up various collections of locals, we bounced into Dalat which is set in the mountains. The town itself is not lovely but the area is beautiful and much cooler than Saigon. The highlands look and feel like the Alps in the Spring which was a nice change from chaotic cities in stifling heat.

First day there, we took a motorbike up to the base of Lang Biang, the tallest peak in the area, looking forward to a bit of exercise and a decent climb. Two hours later, after walking for miles, up some incredibly steep, slippery and muddy paths, we reached the top, exhausted and sweaty. Relieved that we’d brought food and drink with us, we devoured it all in seconds, relaxed for a while and the began the descent, which turned out to be just as hard, in a different way, to the journey up. By the time we’d reached the bottom, we were too late to get to go on a cable car across some valleys nearby and so ended up just scooting around pointlessly, ensuring that bums were as sore as legs and feet when we fell, exhaustedly, into bed that night.

Our much anticipated sleep was sadly interrupted around 1am by the banging of doors and the shouted voices of drunken Australian men, however and a nice few hours of recuperation were ruined when they talked (shouted) to each other long into the night. We were due to go on a tour with the manager’s cousin at 7am the next morning but, thanks to our Antipodean friends next door and some other ‘unspecified’ issues, we decided to leave for Nha Trang instead. It was a shame because the area was lovely and we’d like to have spent more time there but we would have been wasted had we done the tour and we haven’t got time to waste days so we had to push on.

After our unpleasant journey with TM Brothers, we chose to buy new tickets for the trip to Nha Trang with a much nicer local bus called Phuong Trang. Much more comfortable at first, this really seemed worth it, and it was – overall.

The bus wound it’s way down the mountain and through valleys and hills to reveal some truly stunning scenery which made me wish even more that we could spend more time there. After a stop for some food however, we seemed to find oursleves on a road which wasn’t exactly being repaired, more being built in the first place! Travelling in a bus, rather than a 4×4 or a tank did not make the route any easier and some unbelievable and, frankly, sometimes terrifying scenes followed as we bounced and leapt through muddy trenches and round bends which had sheer drops on both sides with no barriers. Lots of other buses were taking the same road so I’m sure all this was just normal for the locals amongst us but I, for one, was extremely relieved to see tarmac at the bottom and the arrival in Nha Trang was more than welcome.

Nha Trang is all about it’s beach – a long stretch of beautiful, white sand which runs along the front of the city, which appears to have mostly been built in the 1960’s. As such, there is not much to report other than the fact that the weather picked up again and 2 whole days were spent soaking up the sun and drinking the beer from a local micro brewery which offers loungers on the beach and waiter service. In between the 2 days of beach, we hired another motorbike and visited a local hot springs and mud bath – just for a change, you understand.

After having read some real horror stories of the tour bus we were booked onto for the trip to Hoi An, 10 hours North, we tried desperately to get onto another bus but conceded defeat in the end and gave ourselves to TM Brothers once more, this time for a night bus. Picked up at 6.15pm, we tried to get the vaguely less uncomfortable seats at the back but were told, sternly and uncompromisingly, that our seats were elsewhere. Having grumpily moved, the bus rumbled off around town to pick up the remaining passengers until every seat was taken and then off we went. Barely 1 mile down the road though, we stopped to fill up with petrol and off we went. Another mile and another stop, this time so that the driver could have a cigarette and a chat with some friends. Eventually we really did get moving though, 11 1/2 hours of confined hell followed. Annika described the beds as narrow hospital beds and, as we had top bunks, we had to keep our rucksacks in the seat with us. The bus rocked and rolled and bounced over the uneven road all night and only trundles into Hoi An at 7.30am, despite the predicted 6am arrival and the early departure time. After spending the night in a narrow hospital bed on a rollercoaster in a nightclub (the constant beeping of the driver as is the way with the Vietnamese) I was more tired than I have ever been so when our hotel offered us breakfast as we checked in, I was very happy indeed.

I have just regained my energy now, 24 hours on and am looking forward to spending time in Hoi An which seems lovely so far. We’ve eaten some superb food and ordered some bespoke clothes and have just now been to see the ancient ruins of My Son, an area of Champa temples which are older than Angkor Wat.

Having left the pool due to what turned out to be some sort of party for the employees of a local cooking school, which started with bad karaoke (‘We Are The World’) and is now in the throws of excitable party games, I am heading to the beach for some serious reading.

On Sunday, we have yet again forfeited our prized tickets on the tour bus and are going to Hue by train. Then we leave Vietnam for Laos and country number 4.