Hoi An mighty

Excuse the terrible pun in the title. Hoi An is a small town in central Vietnam, just south of Danang (where US Marines first landed in what is known as the American War in these parts). This part of Vietnam (Danang and Hoi An, at least) seems much more affluent than the north, and Hoi An in particular must get a lot of tourist dollar. The Old Town is lovingly restored to look architecturally a bit like what it might have looked like hundreds of years ago. Hoi An's been a trading centre for a long time - excavations have found Roman and Persian bits and bobs here, presumably having been traded all along the Spice Road or whatever it would have been called back then. Nowadays the main trading that takes place is tourists buying tailor-made clothing for cheap prices. I contemplated getting a shirt or two made but decided against it as the fabric was insufficiently flamboyant for my needs. I've got enough charity shop dead men's shirts that I don't need any more tasteful vertical stripes at present. Mind you, I could do with more shirts on this trip - I idiotically packed a pale blue number that will not see much active service as it immediately turns dark blue in contact with sweat. Reminiscent of those global hypercolour t-shirts that were inexplicably popular for a bit in the late 80s or early 90s. The shirt is thus unusable unless I want to look even more of a big sweaty white man than I currently do (I don't want to).

Anyway, back to Hoi An. During the day it's a sun-baked sweathole with a few westerners strolling around in the blazing heat, strolling from shade to shade and trying to ignore the constant call of tailors and tat merchants from shops all around. During the evening, though, it's lovely, with paper lanterns lit all along the river (the small islet the other side of which is called, confusingly, An Hoi), and beer available at riverside for 4,000 dong a glass, or approximately 12p. The local food's nice, too, particularly if you get it from a riverside hut with plastic chairs (also nice from a tourist trap place with proper air conditioning). Despite all of this pleasantness, however, the reality is that there's bugger all to do here if you don't want to be measured for a suit, and so we're off on a night bus tonight, heading for beach town Nha Trang. In this heat the beach should be just the ticket.

Nightbus to Hue

Hello!!!

Here to fill you in on our adventures in Hue - the cultural hub of Vietnam. But first, our surprisingly comfortable 14 hour nightbus journey to get there from Hanoi. I was really dreading the thought of being cramped up on a hot and sweaty bus for such a long time with a stinking toilet and not being able to sleep a wink, but actually it was fine! Apart from sometimes waking up to the sensation of the bus almost toppling over, we both slept pretty well - better in fact than our night fighting with the air conditioning unit on the boat on Halong Bay.

A room for the next couple of nights found, we headed out on some push bikes to explore the area. It's quite a small place really and even hotter than Hanoi - 35 degrees. Started to go a little insane with the heat, so retreated to a supermarket to cool down, look at the intriguing items on sale and buy lunch. Also purchased another unusual drink, this time, Lipovitan Beauty, For Ladies. Yes, that's right, a drink that claims to help enhance your beauty. I'm looking a bit tired after a week of travelling, a little bit of liquid beauty wouldn't go amiss. Tasted like a sweeter version of Red Bull. Sam ended up drinking most of it, no effects so far. After lunch, we cycled round the Citadel, the centre of Hue, where the Imperial Palace is and where the emperor governed from.

Next morning, we were picked up from our hotel and taken to the Perfume River for a dragon boat trip to visit lots of temples and tombs of prolific kings of Vietnam. Interestingly a recurring revelation was that many of them kept concubines and in fact on average had over 100 wives. Life as a concubine was pretty rubbish, having to bribe the eunuch to get you a night alone with the king in the hope that you might bear a son and become his Queen. With thousands of women all hoping for the same thing, it was pretty improbable that you would make it and so were destined to spend your life miserably hanging around in the harem buildings, never allowed to leave, as you were the property of the king.

Incredible lunch of vegetables, rice, tofu, fish and prawns on the boat. Lunch was supposed to be included in the price of the boat trip, but that turned out to just be the basics, so we had to order more. Also, drinks weren't included either. Luckily we had gotten wise to this from the Halong Bay tour so had taken loads of water with us. This sort of attitude to business in Vietnam is becoming all too familiar and leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth.

Tastiest meal of our stay in Vietnam to date was cuttlefish noodles and Bun Bo Hue - the best noodle soup ever, slightly spicier than others we have had in Hanoi and the noodles were much thiner. Also tried dragon fruit for the first time.

Next stop, Hoi An...

Bay of Descending Dragons

At the moment we're in Hue in central Vietnam, but since we only arrived today the tale of Hue will have to wait until another time. This post will tell you all about our trip to Halong Bay, a site of no little beauty off the northern coast of Vietnam (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha_Long_Bay), and the key point in the itinerary of many a tourist in Hanoi.

Halong Bay, as our tour guide told us, means "Bay of Descending Dragons" because apparently some dragons defended Vietnam from China in the mythological past and then came down into the bay (and possibly turned into the islands that dot the bay, or possibly just lived on the islands, depending on who is telling the story). The water is green and inviting, and the cruises are plentiful. You can even, as I did, dive off the top of a quite large boat into the sea (though I wouldn't recommend doing as I did and catching your genitals on the water, as it does knock the wind out of you a bit).

So we spent two days and a night enjoying this beautiful part of the world. Less enjoyable was the air conditioning in our room which alternately cooked or froze us and which wouldn't be turned off by its own remote (to which it was generally reticent to respond, causing my temper to somewhat fray at 3am while it was boiling my brain in its own juice). Also less enjoyable was the continual sense of mean-spirited penny-pinching that accompanied the tour experience. I've heard it said that a good rule in business is to promise less and deliver more; this has not been taken on board by Halong tour organisers. Although the tour was really good and well worth doing, all the little things (leaving later than was said, arriving back earlier, no free drinking water, over-priced drinks generally, making us leave our cabins earlier than originally said, making us wait around in the hot sun on the quay for ages to no apparent purpose) add up to leave a slightly bad taste in the mouth. Some of our fellow tourers were quite irked by it all by the end. I realise that the people running these tours figure that there isn't much repeat trade anyway, but you'd think word of mouth would be a powerful form of generating business amongst backpackers, especially in these socially networked times.

Anyway, in conclusion, Halong Bay is well worth seeing. We went into some limestone caves and marvelled at the shape of rock (I was given props for my imagination by the tour guide for correctly spotting that one rock looked like a dolphin); we saw a floating village and its fish farm (including a horseshoe crab trying to escape) and we went kayaking (is kayak usable as a verb? "to kayak"?), but the best bits were just floating around through the bay and enjoying the peace. Tours should focus more on that. And less on parking up in a bay with ten other tour boats blasting us with their awful Asian karaoke numbers until 10pm.

Hanoi - Uncle Ho and the Metropole

Hello lovelies,

We're in communist Vietnam, and its capital city - Hanoi. It feels even hotter than Hong Kong and everywhere you look and try to walk there's a motorbike or a car. Crossing the road is definitely a leap of faith.

As befits our first visit to a communist country, we spent our first night swanking around the 5 star Metropole Hotel, a very generous wedding gift from Trev. It's got to be the poshest hotel we've ever stayed in...staff on every corner bowing and wishing us good day in French, slippers being laid out next to the bed in the evening and a whole host of complimentary items available in the room for the use of patrons (if it wasn't nailed down, it came with us). On my first day in Hanoi I also tried Pho Bo for the first time and it was amazing, think I could eat noodle soup everyday and looks like I will be for the next few weeks. Something I won't be having on a regular basis though is Chrysanthemum juice - yes, that's right - the juice of a flower in a can and it tastes really bad. Banana chewing gum and banana ice cream on the other hand, amazing.

Spent our first afternoon lounging around at the hotel pool with the other residents of the Metropole, a group of people who spend thousands of pounds travelling to Vietnam to lounge around a pool like they're in the Costa Del Sol, apart from that it's overcast and humid. In the evening it poured with rain and I slipped off a curb whilst walking out for some food and managed to bash my arm up pretty badly on a railing - got a huge unslightly bruise on my arm. Looking good! Needed a strong drink to get over the pain and the shock of my accident, so we had some cocktails at the hotel bar and Sam managed to visit a Bia Hoi (a roadside beer pump where locals gather to drink super cheap beer - it's only 20p a glass) to fill up a 1.5 litre bottle with beer which he then smuggled into our 5 star hotel room for us to drink. We know how to live!

Day two and we depart our luxury abode for the super busy, hawker-ridden, pavement-free streets of the Old Quarter. We had breakfast on the street - a feast of some slightly strange deep fried tofu, noodles, cucumber, nettles, and fish cake. Once we had found a room (a slight shock after the Metropole), it was time to do some sightseeing. Off to The Temple of Literature, Vietnam's first ever university and a temple to Confucius. Also time to sample another weird drink in a can, this time 'Birds Nest' with white fungus...as you can imagine, not hugely refreshing or at all tasty. Just massively sweet with a bitter, lingering, chemical aftertaste. Went on to the Mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, but it was too late to see the embalmed man himself, so instead, walked around the botanical gardens.

Once we were finished sweating our heads clean off in that part of town we headed to the Water Puppet Theatre. Water puppetry is, according to the pretentious fan of cliches who wrote the Lonely Planet section on this, a "fascinating art form" which "originated in northern Vietnam". It was a bit like Punch and Judy, but in a pond. Oh, and much less violence and no story. Just a series of vignettes of dancing puppets, backed by a full Vietnamese band whose music sounded oddly like it should have come from a western. The puppet show was ok, but there's always a question mark over art forms that are only found in one place - if it was that good, why didn't it catch on everywhere else?

Tomorrow we're off to Ha Long Bay to gaze deeply into one another's eyes whilst cruising the calm and picturesque waters of this corner of the far east. Speak soon, noodle soup time...

xxx

Hong Kong

Hong Kong... a humid and historic location, and our first stop. We've been here two and a half days now, leave tomorrow for Hanoi. We spent our time wandering around and taking in the atmosphere, and enjoying the food. There aren't really any first rate sights in Hong Kong. The best bit so far has been The Peak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Peak), a mountain that affords fantastic views across both Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, with more skyscrapers in view than anywhere else on the planet (probably). The views are great, and the tram up there is charmingly faux-Victorian. Although for the real Victorian colonialist experience they should probably offer Sedan chair rides up the mountain (this is in all seriousness how the ruling class would get up there before the tram was built).

The view of Hong Kong Island from Kowloon at night is also pretty spectacular, with all of the neon lights on the skyscrapers making an impressive backdrop to the harbour. At 8pm every night there's a light show, pompously entitled "The Symphony of Light". It's quite amusingly underwhelming, though: rather than turning off all the neon and then embarking on the light show, they leave half of it on as normal, so it's not immediately obvious which flashing lights are part of the light show and which are just flashing as part of normal advertisement. The only reason you really know when the show starts and finishes is because there is pumping music played, and spotlights on top of some of the buildings. The whole thing is fantastically camp.

One thing that Hong Kong can certainly be recommended for, however, is the food, which is sensational. The dim sum in particular has been a real hit - for those that don't know it's a bit like Chinese tapas. We've been eating crazy dumplings filled with unknown meats, and all for cheap. It's been dead good.

All in all Hong Kong has much to recommend it for the casual visitor like us, if perhaps not enough to recommend it for a holiday destination in itself.

Welcome to the Tazzyman Trail

Hello!

Would you like to know what will be happening in our lives while we are in Asia for three months? If the answer is "yes", then you've come to the right place. We'll be (semi)regularly posting up stories of our exploits on here for your delectation and delight.

For those who don't know, our rough route plan is as follows:
Hong Kong - Vietnam - Cambodia - Thailand - Malaysia - Indonesia - Singapore
We fly on Saturday.

Look forward to updating you soon,
Katie and Sam
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