Hannoying Hanoi

Ok, so our time in Hanoi has been fairly up and down. Generally up in the night time and down in the day. Things started off in the usual manner. The guesthouse we wanted to stay at was full and the surrounding ones were either full or out of our price range, so Scott did the usual wandering around for an hour in the beep beep of the traffic (to be honest the continual sound of horns and dodging through crazy motorbike drivers has slowly started to send us crazy. It was fun for a while but now the thought of stepping outside to face the chaos gives Shell a small twitch in her left eye). Anyway, Scott found a pretty good, cheap and QUIET (Oh my god such luck!!!) guesthouse. We then booked a trip for Halong Bay for the next morning.

Our Halong Bay trip was not as much of an up as we had hoped. After being an hour late to pick us up and overbooking the boat, then trying to blame the guests for "making things difficult" for all wanting to actually go on the boat, having 2 stand offs on the port, 1 stand off on the boat in the port (with a break from the stand offs of a nice pleasant lunch of peanuts, cucumber and rice for the vegos), we finally left the port for the legendary Halong Bay approximately 3 hours later than scheduled.

We then got dropped off at some big cave thing, which was an impressive series of quite large limestone caverns, but then our boat broke - are you serious!!! The guide made some feeble excuses about the port being too shallow to bring the boat in but we noticed that from that moment on we found our boat being towed by another little but hopefully more reliable boat.
After that we cruised round the bay for about an hour - which was quite beautiful. We spent the night playing cards with the other guests. Made some friends with a nice NZ couple and a gang of 6 nice English lads (and one lass). Woke the next morning for a quick kayak session around the islands, which was pretty, jumped back into the big boat being towed by the small boat, back to Halong Bay City, into the bus and back to lovely Hanoi. Actually, Halong Bay itself was nice, but the organised boat trip was a bit of a cock up.

We then spent the next 4 days in Hanoi, because we decided to fly to Laos - yay - but the earliest plane was on the 27th - poo, stuck in Hanoi-ing. Everywhere we go people tell us how horrible the buses are and how difficult the border crossing we planned to use is, so bugger it, we bit the bullet and bought the flight.

The days in Hanoi were a bit frustrating - lots of wandering around avoiding traffic and being beeped at. We did get to see Ho Chi Minh stuffed in his mausoleum (which Scott thought was interesting, but just gave Shelley the giggles), and some cool markets. But the nights in Hanoi have been much more enjoyable - we spent the first night after Halong Bay going out to some pubs with the English guys we met on the boat, had 1 litre "Big Man Beers", played some pool and had a dance - it was nice for us both to have some other people to play with!
The next night was also fun as the soccer final (Vietnam and Thailand) was on, being watched by everyone in town, and luckily Vietnam won, so the streets were full of motorbikes and people waving flags, everyone driving round and beeping for hours after the game! Since it was Christmas eve there was a mixture of Vietnam flags and santa balloons being waved around, and our waiter was a santa who gave us lollies - yay. Christmas is celebrated heaps more than we thought it would be here - well at least the commercial aspect is everywhere, with tinsel, santa suits and christmas trees in almost every shop. Our Christmas day was nice and relaxed - we had bought each other some cool little gifts, then we rang our parents and went out for a decadent Christmas breakfast of pancakes and chocolate ice cream -yum!!

Last night was also fun - we went to see a water puppet show, which was entertaining and very pretty, accompanied by a band of traditional vietnamese instruments. So now it's off to Laos - Gooooooooooood Bye Vietnaaaaaaaaam!!!

The High Road to Hoi An

After the excitement of Dalat we decided we needed some relaxation, so we headed to the much-rumoured (but difficult to track down) Jungle Beach resort. While the water wasn't as clean as we hoped and it was a bit on the expensive side, it was still nice to chill out there for a few days, away from the constant horn-tooting that pervades the rest of Vietnam. We had sent our trusty guinea pigs (Sarah and Chantal) on ahead so we knew how to get there and we managed to convince them to stay an extra day so we could pester them. Notable events at Jungle Beach included lots of reading, card-playing and beach-walking up to the local fishing village, as well as the appearance of a cobra (very exciting) and shelley getting bitten by a dog (small panic until we found out it gets yearly rabies shots). Shelley is now banned from hurting herself any more for at least another week.

Our hut at Jungle Beach

We then sent our faithful guinea pigs off again ahead of us, to discover that the night bus was not a very good idea (something to do with drugtaking bus driver and plentiful horn beeping) so we backtracked to nha trang and got the overnight train to Hoi An instead. This turned out to be a great idea since we spent a lovely afternoon in Nha Trang visiting a big buddha and a great photographic exhibition and walking along the seaside, and the train was quite comfy. We took our poor guinea pigs out for dinner in Hoi An to thank them for their suffering on our behalf :)

Big buddha in Nha Trang

So we finally arrived in Hoi An, which has turned out to be a great little town, full of life and little streets, old buildings and most of all - clothes shops! There are no photos of our (many) purchases yet as they are still being altered to our size, but we have definitely done our share of shopping for the year! It's quite fun being measured and getting things made especially for you. Scott especially looks very spiffing in his wedding tux!

As well as shopping (it takes lots of time!) we have been wandering the streets of Hoi An and eating the yummy and cheap food here (3 course vego meal for $3!!). It's great seeing the pretty temples and just watching the street life go by - yes pretty much everyone wears the pointy conical hats and they manage to balance ridiculous amounts on motorbikes and bicycles! We really like the Vietnamese, they have a good sense of humour and seem to be very playful and friendly all the time. Bargaining involves lots of laughter (what! noooo! i not buy the material for that! You help me, you no worry! you give me little bit more!)

Boats on the river in Hoi An

Pretty pagoda

We have managed one side trip while staying here - to the ancient Cham ruins of My Son. They were pretty (very old and covered in grass and ferns) but the girls had most fun taking photos with the large Lingum statues :)

Deafening, Dangerous, Delightful, Death-Defying Dalat

Ok, so we had to get out of Saigon quick smart because it didn’t really suit our style. Big noisy Asian cities never do. We had heard about Dalat, which was supposed to be this nice little place out in the mountatinas, so we made a beeline for it pronto.

Unfortunately Dalat was not as quiet and as little as we had hoped. It actually attracts over 800,000 Vietnamese tourists every year and we were hoping it would be because of it’s nice quiet scenery but apparently Vietnamese tourists like kitsch attractions, because Dalat is full of pig-shaped balloons, rollercoasters down to waterfalls, and locals dressed as cowboys and bears.

The first night and most of the next day we spent valiently trying to find a room that wasn’t noisy (Shelley’s criteria) and had a view (Scott’s criteria). This isn’t easy with the constant beeping of motorcycles, taxis and buses everywhere. We finally found somewhere a bit out of town, which we could get to easily as we hired a motorcycle! Scott has become adept at negotiating the crazy traffic here, which never involves traffic lights, rarely involves giving way, and often involves people driving on the wrong side of the road or cutting across in front of you. But there is some sort of order to the chaos, and we haven’t hit anyone yet.

His best feat involved the two of us on the motorcycle with our two big bags and the one small bag (drving quite slowly I might add) to our new temporary home outside of the city. Next we thought it would only be fair to let Shell have control of our new toy. Ten minutes later we had our first motorbike accident. Well, not so much an accident as Shelley driving the bike into a ditch. It would be nice to say that it was a tricky turn, but it wasn’t. There also wasn’t any traffic to be seen anywhere, it was quite a wide road, and the bike wasn’t very difficult to drive.

Note to Jill and Chris that nobody was really hurt during our crash. Shelley got a few little scrapes and bruises (it was her pride that was hurt the most) and Scott being the big brave man that he is jumped off the motorcyle just before it hit the ditch so he got away pretty much scar free except for Shell calling him a big wussy wus bag for the next 2 days.

So our first 2 days in Dalat weren’t exactly success plus. But we had our motorcycle and our health and were going to find some nice places to explore God damn it. And we did! In fact we had a really great 3rd day of cruising around on the bike (this was the beautiful mountain scenery we were hoping for ) looking at a couple of random waterfalls, getting a cute duck paddle thing and having an explore around a man made but very pretty dam, playing pool and having a few beers with some other random travellers and finding the weirdest “waterfall” we had ever seen, which was more like a continuous mudslide.



The best part of the day was finding this amazing six tier pagoda, which we spotted randomly as we were cruising around. It was really beautifully coloured with pieces of ceramic plates and you could climb up through the inside to the top, which offered some amazing views of the local country side.

The most interesting part of the pagoda was this massive 3 metre tall, 2 metre diameter bell, with a big piece of log hanging next to it that you could use to ring the bell, so of course we did and we took a video of it, but the strangest thing is that you couldn’t hear the bell on the video. We tried three times and it made a really loud noise and you could hear the kids outside of the pagoda and other background noise on the camera but for some reason not the bell. Scott’s therory was that the bandwidth of the transducer of the camera was too narrow to capture the low frequency noise the bell made but Shell’s theory was that the bell was holy and therefore magical so its sound could not be captured (either that or we haven’t figured out how to use our new camera very well quite yet – nah it must be magical)


As if the success of our third day wasn’t enough, our 4th and final day in Dalat was so awesome!!! We went canyoning and it was great!! I’ll let the photos tell the main part of the story but basically we went for a 5 hour walk/climb down a river with 4 parts that we had to abseil. The highlight was abseiling down a 25 metre waterfall (not just a little trickly waterfall but a full on gushing, spraying, “what do you mean we’re going to absail down through that” waterfall). We also went down a natural waterslide and we were supposed to jump off a cliff into a rockpool at one stage but just before Scott was about to jump a 2 metre snake swam into the spot Scott was going to jump into so we decided to let the snake have that one.

Overall, Scott was stoked that Shell took an awesome photo of him doing a big jump off the abseil rope and into a rockpool and Shell was stoked that she did every single abseil even though she was scared out of her wits and that she was not a big wussy wus bag even once (unlike Scott who jumps off motorcycles just because of a little incy wincy ditch).

Swimming under a waterfall

Shell going down the 'Washing Machine'

Scott about to venture down the big waterfall

Scott's big jump at the end of the big waterfall

Saigon is super speedy

Well we made it! We're on holidays again! Yaaaaay! It's great to be back in Asia, almost feels like coming home. This is just a quick first blog entry to let you all know we're alive and having a great time - Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) has manically crazy traffic but it seems to have some sort of order - you just have to walk slowly across the road and hope it all goes round you! We have been having fun seeing all the weird and wonderful things people can put on motorbikes: families of four, bus windshields, huge hands of bananas, steel pipes..... we've also been wandering around seeing some museums and things and learning lots about Vietnamese history - so much walking!! We are going to have buns of steel. One fun random event yesterday was we happened to find the finals of the Vietnam Open (badminton) so we went along to that - the crowd went wild because the Vietnamese guy won!

Will do some fun stories in a few days, for now here's a couple of photos:

Incense coils in a pagoda we visited

Bananas!

Elephants feet at the reunification palace....weird...