We stayed in a little hotel in a place I cannot pronounce that was situated on a small river. It was amazingly beautiful and amazingly cold. I had hoped that since it was so cold I’d finally get a snowy winter for the second time in my life but alas I wasn’t that fortunate, but on the bright side the place was white with frost.

I’ve really come to live wales and hope to spend more time out there photographing it in the future.

Below are some photos in no particular order.

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I love it because its social and there are people to come home to, and as it seems at this hostel there are a lot of people who are looking for work or a place to live in London, so its not too much of a party atmosphere.

I hate it because its a hostel. Shit, who wouldn’t hate living in a hostel while they’re working. Its so freaking tiring. Especially when you frequently have to move rooms. So far I’ve had to move rooms (and sometimes hostels) on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, today, Monday, Wednesday, Friday and from there I’m homeless, which is something I probably should sort out soon. I’ve got a chance (at least yesterday I did) to stay in the linen room here on Saturday night. I have no idea how much it costs, but to be honest I might take it just so I can say I stayed in the linen room hehe. That and I really can’t be arsed carrying my pack through the tube and across town just for the sake of a night and then back again the day after. Oh well what can you do.

Anyway, I’m working, yay! I don’t get paid for a while, boo. I was a bit apprehensive about work given I haven’t worked in Max for 7 months and even then it was 10+ months since I did any quality jobs. But I’m surprised. I have picked it up pretty quickly. I guess its like riding a bike as they say, you never forget. Just takes a little while to stop acting like a gumby and get on with the job.

I’ve only worked there for 3 days now, so its hard to really give any judgement on the job, but so far I enjoy it and the people and it looks like I’ll get to work on some fun work.

I had several job offers while I was in the process of looking for work, which is great but bad at the same time. Its really hard to get offers from two companies you’d like to work with. I had to turn down an offer with a company I’ve wanted to work with for the past 5 or 6 years. I had them pegged as the company I’d always work for, and when it came to crunch time, I turned it down, but at least for the moment I believe I’ve made the right decision.

So here I am, back at my hostel, writing, chilling with a beer. This weekend has been good. I’m exhausted from lugging my bag around but in a good mood. Yesterday I went out to the markets at Portobello which were awesome. So much fun and I plan to go back. Heaps of cool stuff to buy, mind you most people were charging tourist prices (280 pounds for a Polaroid SX-70 – are you kidding me???).

Right thats it from me, stay tuned for more news in the near future.

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This entry was partly written on the road, partly after the fact so there is potential for it to be disjointed, so I apologise.

After getting off the train at Da Nang and stretching our legs, we caught a cab to the nearest bus stop which would take us through to Hoi An (or at least the bus termanal). The public bus was quite possibly the wildest form of transport I have been on to date. Brisbane City Council, your bus service has nothing. Basically, the idea is, you wave down the bus, throw everything your holding and jump on board, without the bus coming to a stop. You have to be quick. Easier said then done with 10 tonnes of baggage per person. But possible all the same.

Thats where the fun starts. The bus has a well used accellerator, questionable breaks, a mad driver (in our case two) and an airhorn that pretty much screams “fuck off, coming through”. The general tactic is to get on the horn, drive on the other side of the road and play chicken with the oncoming truck while your trying to overtake someone. I guess the bus was big and angry and no one was going to fight it.

We arrived at the bus termanal in Hoi An and then all jumped on a bike each to be driven into the town. The bike rides generally arent all that hard and are quite fun, but they can be a task with a full pack on.

Some food and hotel hunting later we had a nice cheap hotel with a pool. I think we justspent that night not doing a whole lot. I’m pretty sure we spent it eating, though that really has been the theme of the whole trip and its safe to say I’ve gone up a notch on my belt.

Hoi An is a beautiful place, and quite a nice break from Saigon. The roads are quieter, the place is cleaner and the hastling to buy something is kept to a minimum. You still get offers to buy umberellas and ponchos when it rains, and water when its hot but thats really it. Even the moto riders don’t push it too hard to give you a lift somewhere.

The key attraction to Hoi An is that every second shop is a tailor. You can have anything you want made. In my case I had a pair of shorts and two shirts made which I’m quite happy with. On the whole the general quality of the clothes we all bought was quite good, though I did buy a pair of pre-made shorts that were pretty shit.

The bulk of the trip was spent eating, shopping, eating, getting massages, eating, swimming, drinking, and drinking while swimming before we went out eating followed by a massage. Oh and pool. Lots of pool. I think Tim and I must have clocked up 30+ games. Its free and the beer is about $1.20 for a large Tiger (620ish ml). Need I say more? It was quite relaxing overall. And when we weren’t doing that, we were spending our time out on a boat with a beer on tours up and down the river.

We did make our way out to two tourist destinations – My Son, and Marble Mountains. My Son was first on the to do list, and we had managed to find ourselves 4 bike drivers to take us out there, who were a pretty cool bunch of guys.

It was about a half hour trip out there, and Ruth, Tim and my drivers were racing eachother out there. Brookes was lagging behind. We couldnt decide if he was trying to be safe or if he just had a dodgey bike. Brooke thinks the latter. He was the last to arrive by about 10 minutes and he certainly got a ribbing from the other guys to our ammusment.

The Me Sun ruins were quite spectacular to visit. I know they’re small, and lets face it I haven’t been to any ruins before but I enjoyed it. The biggest disappointed about it was the fact that a lot of it had been destroyed through (intentional) American bombing during the Vietnam War (or American War, whichever side of the fence you sat on) . But what was left was still quite fun to look around.

After exploring a bit and then made our way back to town to resume our beer/pool/food/massage business that we were doing prior to going out there with an early night as we had to head out to Marble Mountain in the morning.

Dinner that night was good and after I went and met up with some Americans that had been staying at our hotel for a game of pool and some beers which was a lot of fun.

The next day was Marble Mountain. Marble Mountain was awesome but a killer on the thighs. I would hate to think how many stairs we climbed that day. I also don’t think I have ever been that sweaty in my life. Oh yeah, it was sexy. Basically its a never ending mountain of stairs with an awesome view at the top designed to kill westerners. We were most of our way to the top of one of the peaks (after scaling at least 2 prior) and passed a bunch of local kids sitting on the stairs laughing at us and taking photos on their mobile phone. Good to provide the entertainment.

On the whole, Hoi An was fantastic and I was really happy to have stayed for a longer period then the rest of the places. To be honest, when I get the chance, I’m going to go back.

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On our third day in Saigon, we did a tour out to the Mekong Delta. This trip was via bus and was about 4 hours each way out there and back. Along the way out we stopped at a few different locations to see the locals.

One of the places we stopped at was a small village where we sampled the local honey, played with snakes and went for a row down a small canal that ran through the middle.

Id have to admit, sitting on a bus for so long does get a little bit boring and rather tame (mind you, that can be good at times). It is, however a nice way to watch life as you pass by and see some of the key constructions along the way.

When booking the tour, we had the option of a Standard, 1st class or Superior Hotel Suite (why its superior is anyones guess…), or a homestay. We opted for the latter, and oddly enough, we were the only ones out of the 30 or so people on our tour that decided to do so.

Upon arriving at the main tour hotel, everyone checked in, and we were told to wait outside. Then Hung, our home stay host who’s family were staying with, turned up with 4 scooters and told us to get on. This was my first experience on a scooter and for the initial few moments, it was shitting myself. It takes a little to get your head around sitting on the back of a small bike, holding on behind you while you dodge people, busses and other scooters and pass through 4 lanes of intersection without any traffic lights. But once you resign yourself to the fact there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it and just to trust your driver, then its a bit of fun. Its by far the best way to see the area and fortunately Hung was my driver and he talked me through all the locations as we passed. Kind of a personal tour guide type deal.

Anyway, we took off for a 20 minute ride through the city and down the highway then we turned off onto a bumpy little dirt road that eventually led us to our homestay. The place was perfect. The whole village was an 8km strip of huts/houses that ran along the river and our place was opposite Hungs family house in a row of little huts that overhung the water. There was about 8 huts, so it looked like it could accomodate quite a few people, but as we were later told, the area isn’t too popular in the wet season. Thankfully we were the only ones there.

After settling in to our huts for an hour, we were told to head over to the family house for dinner and a little bit of a cooking lesson. This was actually just a lesson in spring roll rolling which we did a good job of butchering. After doing our part in the dinner, we sat around and had a few beers before the food was brought out to us. We were given our spring rolls that had been fried, rice, salad and a steamed Elephant Ear Fish, which tasted fantastic and was quite possible the wosrt smelling fish I have ever smelt. Something akin to a sewer. It didn’t kill us so it couldn’t have been too bad.

That night we slept under mosquito nets, though oddly enough there weren’t any around. I slept really well, it was so quiet and peaceful out there. Well that was until about 6am when the boats started up and down the river, and they’re all powered by 50 year old diesel engines that sound like trucks which inevitably woke us up.

At about 7am Hung came and got us and we went for a walk through the village to say hi to the locals and to make our way to the local market. It was a nice reprieve from the relentless hounding of the locals in Saigon trying to sell you something. You learn pretty damn quickly to say no and walk away. But there was none of this here.

At 8am we took off on a little boat to meet up with the rest of the tour group who were floating out on their bigger tour boat and after jumping aboard we took off to have a look around some more sights.

We went via the floating market, which is essentially a farmers market but on boats. This place wasnt without its people trying to sell you water/beer/bananas/their child. We then went up one of small rivers to see how rice paper is made, the rice factories, and a number of other interesting local attractions that my brain fails to remind me of at the time of writing this.

After finishing the tour we all hopped back on the bus as the rain kicked in and headed for home via some new Buddha statues that have recently been built.

The ride back was initially uneventful. 2 hours passed and the usual bus sleepyness kicked in and we all dozed off (with the exception of the really irritating English girls that were madly flirting with the two Scotts). As we were cruising down the highway in the rain, the bus suddenly braked hard locked up and turned hard right before smashing into a concrete barrier on the side of the road. After the initial shock of what had just happened, everyone piped up and tried to work out what had happened.

We all piled/jumped/fell off the bus into the rain and to the shelter of a little road side shop/hammock shelter (much to the luck of the owner I’m sure) to discover we had hit a concrete barrier and torn the front door off the bus.

As best I can understand, a truck hit the concrete barrier on the other side of the road, pushing two of them out in front of our bus. Surveying the damage post crash, it was obvious shit really could have hit the fan and we could have been touring the inside of a hospital. So to our bus driver – nice work. Not only did he hit the barrier that was square on to the bus, he missed all the scooters that were hanging around the bus like flies. I was impressed.

Thankfully, it only took about 45 minutes for a replacement bus which was a bit of a surprise given how far we were out of Saigon. The rest of the trip after that was back to the same old boring uneventfulness, however there was still a mild paranoia on the bus every time we braked a bit harder then normal (which was 90% of the time).

The next day (and I’m going to keep this paragraph short because I forgot to write it the first time around and Im too lazy to write anything detailed), we went to the Cu Chi Tunnels to see some of the tunnels from the Vietnam War. The site was quite interesting. We had a strange 20 year old dubbed movie talking about the war before hand which was slightly anti American – and fair enough too. We were shown around the different styles of traps and other goodies the had thought up and we got to crawl through some pretty dark and cramped and highly claustrophobic (for those that way inclined) holes in the ground. There was no light, it was stuffy and it kept changing in size and elevation. Its not hard to see why people would get lost in there. Apparently the tunnels we went through were widened for westerners. Which even then was pretty cramped.

Anyway, thankfully that tour bus got us home safely and uneventfully and went out to dinner to sort our plans for the rest of the trip.

Our plans were to ditch Saigon and head up to Hoi An, and have a look around there for a while at a slower pace as we had done all we wanted to in the South. It was decided that we should bypass the rest of the south of Vietnam and head straight to the middle, and the easiest (read: cheapest) was to catch a train.

Now the trains in Vietnam are quite like their traffic. Slow. Here is what I wrote on the train.

Well, I’m currently on a train from Saigon to Denang. I’m in an air-conditioned “hard sleeper” birth which has 6 people. Well, 6 beds and 7 people, there is a young Vietnamese couple here with their baby. So far the baby hasn’t made a noise, but then again it is midnight. I hope it stays that way.

This train is proper old school. It’s an old diesel train pulling a half a dozen carriages (I guess, I was crammed in here so I am just estimating).

The bunks are not quite westerner length, so I have a choice of head-butting the bar above me, or toe-poking the bar below me, I’ll leave asleep Luke to sort that one out.

There are two stacks of 3 bunks, and I’m in the middle of one. As a result, I have a pretty awesome view out my window for sunrise. The train bounces around quite a bit, but it’s somewhat therapeutic in an blender kinda way.

Truth be told, this is awesome, I’m loving it, although it is 15 hours long, so I may change my tune. Mind you, something smells stale in here, and I’m not sure if it’s me or the blanket. It’s could very well be either.

I will continue this in the morning as I’m shattered, and I think I won’t be allowed to sleep in.

Its about 3am. I have been woken by the train breaking hard and a thump. I think a cow just copped it. We are on our way again, no delays here. Back to sleep

Well, it’s now going on 2pm, so an hour left as we are roughly an hour behind. I caught up on a heap of sleep and have spent the last few hours playing cards with Tim while the girls slept with a bit of Creedence Clearwater Revival pumping out on the iPhone in all its tinny goodness.

Sleeping last night was good, the baby kept relatively quiet, but I slept with my headphones on so it made no difference. To our luck, the others in our room got off at morning so we have had our stuffy little cabin to ourselves. I’m about ready to get off though.

After finally arriving. We all had to depart while the others tried to get on. This lead to a bit of a problem. There is no etiquette when it comes to this. Basically, me and my bag take up a walkway, which is fine when everyone is single filing it out the door. The problem arrives when the locals want to push on while your getting off. I had a guy push through me with his bags ultimately pushing me back and crushing all the poor people behind me. Id have to say that somewhat pissed me off and abusing him achieved nothing as he didn’t speak English. I did have the rest of the crowed on my side, and they backed me up. So my yellings I think were roughly translated and conveyed to him by the rest of the crowed.

Once outside safely we had to find our way to Hoi An, but I’ll save that for a later post. Hopefully the next one won’t be too far off.

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After what appeared to be a panic stricken moment where I managed to somehow change the lock code on my bag, I finally have it open through a painstakingly slow method of trial and error.

Well, I’m currently on a train from Saigon to Denang. I’m in an air-conditioned “hard sleeper” birth which has 6 people. Well, 6 beds and 7 people, there is a young Vietnamese couple here with their baby. So far the baby hasn’t made a noise, but then again it is midnight. I hope it stays that way.

This train is proper old school. It’s an old diesel train pulling a half a dozen carriages (I guess, I was crammed in here so I am just estimating).

The bunks are not quite westerner length, so I have a choice of head-butting the bar above me, or toe-poking the bar below me, I’ll leave asleep Luke to sort that one out.

There are two stacks of 3 bunks, and I’m in the middle of one. As a result, I have a pretty awesome view out my window for sunrise. The train bounces around quite a bit, but it’s somewhat therapeutic in an blender kinda way.

Truth be told, this is awesome, I’m loving it, although it is 15 hours long, so I may change my tune. Mind you, something smells stale in here, and I’m not sure if it’s me or the blanket. It’s could very well be either.

I will continue this in the morning as I’m shattered, and I think I won’t be allowed to sleep in.

Its about 3am. I have been woken by the train breaking hard and a thump. I think a cow just copped it. We are on our way again, no delays here. Back to sleep

Well, it’s now going on 2pm, so an hour left as we are roughly an hour behind. I caught up on a heap of sleep and have spent the last few hours playing cards with Tim while the girls slept with a bit of Creedence Clearwater Revival pumping out on the iPhone in all its tinny goodness.

Sleeping last night was good, the baby kept relatively quiet, but I slept with my headphones on so it made no difference. To our luck, the others in our room got off at morning so we have had our stuffy little cabin to ourselves. I’m about ready to get off though.

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After many months of planning then quitting my job and having a leaving party then moving to Brisbane then getting a job then quitting that job then having a leaving party then leaving then getting to Melbourne and having another leaving party, its finally happened.

The last few days in Melbourne have been great. It was nice to have a few days grace after the manic packing spree to relax before leaving. We didn’t do too much in those days except for leaving drinks on Friday at the Espy. Cheers to you all for showing it up, it was a great turn out. Sorry we couldn’t stay longer, but we had to get up and leave for the airport.

We flew 6 hours from Melbourne to Darwin then 5 from Darwin to Ho Chí Minh with Jetstar. Its the first time I’ve flown with Jetstar, and to be honest, I don’t understand what all the fuss is about. They were great, besides the fact that the staff didn’t particularly give a shit. But thats what you get with a budget airline.

We landed last night at about 10:30pm local time, and after being stuck on the runway because they had no where to put our plane, we got off and the plane and went through customs. It was a bit weird there. There were lots of people and no one said a word. It was quieter then a library.

Completing that, we headed through to grab our bags and then out into the 10 million degree / 5000 percent humidity taxi rank. After a quick breather, we jumped into a cab on the way to our Hotel (hostel? I don’t know, I think they’re all the same here).

Thats where the fun started. I was aware of the scooter mayhem that awaited us before we arrived, but holy shit, its another world entirely to be in the middle of it. We spent most of the time on the horn (its more a ‘coming through’ warning then aggression), while dodging bikes and avoiding trucks that were dodging us. We managed to communicate our hotel, Saigon Sports Hotel 1 (or is it 3 or 5, meh), and also managed to negotiate the fee to be on the meter. To the drivers credit, he weaved through the traffic and took us exactly to our door.

Our first experience in dealing with the local currency while not being able to talk the same language started here. Our trip fee was along the lines of VND 120 000 with a fee of VND 50 000 for the taxi parking. That brought us to VND 170 000 which is give or take $10, but our driver wasn’t happy with that. We had the ‘you have no idea what your doing’ tax imposed on us and he started trying to take the fee up to VND 300 000 and beyond, telling us that it was because of the taxi parking fee.

This is where I started to get lost. I entered the country with 1.5 million Dong. I had no idea what was worth what but its all in the thousands. But fortunate for us Tim and Ruth have been-there-done-that and took up the fight for us. Tim told him it was too much (which I’m starting to see is what you generally the done thing for non-locals) and the argument started. After much debate and not backing down (and already paying double our fee) the driver gave up and let us go with what we had paid. We took off down the street looking for our place only to realise we had started at the right place to start off with and went back.

By this point I was pretty exhausted. I was hungover from the night before, hadn’t had much sleep and had been flying for over 10 hours. It was also past midnight back home so I was probably jet lagged. Ignoring all this, we checked in, put our bags down and went down the road to the swanky expensive bar (think $2 for a beer instead of $1.50) and settled in for a little bit of food and a few drinks. We were there till about 2am and decided it was time for sleep.

The beds over here are harder then a wooden floor. My back has been reminding me of this all day. We decided to leave the door to our very tiny balcony (with an awesome view mind you) open to let the breeze through, however we discovered at about 5 am this was a stupid idea because the air-con was venting all its hot air back in through the door and defeated the purpose. We rectified the problem and the aircon is doing is job and keeping us cool.

That brings us through to today.

We woke up at about 9:30, met up downstairs for our complimentary breakfast then took off into the street. Its a very different world in the day, but equally as mad. There are shops everywhere and if the shop isnt in a building, its on the street. Its awesome. There is shit happening everywhere and horns going wild and I love it. You have plenty of opportunity to trip over a bin/piece of concrete/rat/box. Scooters are everywhere. Every flat surface is fair game. You head in the direction you want, regardless what side of the road your on and if in doubt use the footpath. Its ok though, they’ll let you know they are coming with their horn. You adapt very quickly to it.

The heat is still a killer. I’ve been living in my own little sweaty ass crack land since I landed, regardless of how many times I’ve showered. Hug anyone?

Anyway, after breakfast we took off down the road to have a can of coke at a little corner bar to discuss our plans over the next few days. One of the things you learn very quickly is to say no to people trying to sell you things. Me, being the nice person that I am, give (gave) people too much attention and that made shaking off the local person selling sunnies a bit of an ordeal. I’ve since learned the errors of my ways.

After our can of coke, we came back and booked our next few days. We are going to head up the Mekong on a boat for a day, stay at a homestay then head back again for another night here then hopefully head out to the tunnels. With our bookings made we went on our way to lunch at a nice cook your own bbq place (I’m sure I’ll be paying for that tomorrow).

Finishing that (which was great food mind you) we went through one of the local markets to see what the deal was. You can get your hands on quality ripoffs of anything you could possibly want. The catch is everyone wants to sell you something. People litereally hang off your arms trying to sell you something you don’t need, which is somewhat entertaining.

After surfacing the other side, we then made our way across town to the Reunification Palace which was quite an interesting place to visit. We had our own tour guide, and although it was very scripted, it was still informative.

After, we walked home via a Buddhist temple (which resulted into another money argument) and that leads us to now.

I’m sitting at home in the aircon, taking it easy drinking a 333 beer before we head out later to get food and watch the world cup. I hear they are football mad here, so that should be fun.

As I do not have a mobile number here, I will generally only be accessible via email or skype. We have free wifi here, so that should make me contactable for the next few days. It turns out facebook is banned in Vietnam, however the iphone app lets me through, so I have limited facebook access as well.

Hope all is well back home and I’ll keep you up to date as I travel.

Photos are to come soon as I don’t have the time to do them right now. As you can understand there is beer to be drunk and football to watch. They will be up soon I promise

In the mean time, here is the view from our hotel

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