From North to South Vietnam

To start our journey from North to South Vietnam we took a 12 hour night bus to Hue, (A night bus here is around 30 semi flat seats, we’d been told to avoid the back as it was the bumpiest and hottest as over the engine and to not go on the second row of beds as you’re likely to fall out – hopefully you can see by the picture what I mean) What was supposed to be 12 hours ended up being 17 as the bus only went 40 km/hour. But on the plus side we managed to get quite a lot of sleep as the back row had 5 beds in a row so no falling out.

Hue is the cultural capital and we spent a day there seeing the sights, tombs, palaces, temples and pagodas. It was destined for ruin until in 1993 it was given world heritage site status and the restoration and preservation work is still going on today, so now it’s a cultural Mecca for tourists and nationals. We took a Cyclo (a human powered tuk tuk) around the city which was one of our main highlights.

We moved onto Hoi An the next day. Hoi An is traditionally the highlight of any Vietnamese trip due to it being rich with history having escaped the destruction of the wars going on around it. It’s built on the river and has much more class and Mediterranean feel whilst still being cheap and warmingly Vietnamese. Hoi An has its own special food delicacies which we sampled on many occasions. Hoi An is very well known for its tailoring industry, shortly after arriving we were invited into a shop where we perused the latest Next catalogue/ Vogue to chose any design made with any material you could imagine. We’d discussed getting dresses made for Amy’s wedding and I found a nice design in a magazine, picked a colour, material was measured and the dress was finished 24 hours later after 3 fittings. Hopefully it will still fit after 3 months in America!

After we had spent all our money on shopping we moved onto Nha Trang, one of the main seaside resorts in Vietnam. Although we had a great time there on the beach, getting alcoholically persuaded on an intentionally innocent boat trip the town was full of “holidayers” and so its Vietnamese charm was neglected.

We travelled the 6 hours to Delat to get a bit of reprieve from the hot beach weather. Delat is situated in the mountains, we knew only about its famous wine which is for sale all over the country. Its only 40,000 Dong and at just over 1 pound as you can guess it’s not the best! As Delat is considerably cooler and has more mountainous terrain they offer all different outdoor persuits. We decided to take up canyoning and trade in our bus ticket onto Mui Ne for a 70km cycle down to the coast.

Canyoning is the way by which you travel through a canyon by any means. Mainly for us this was abseiling down waterfalls. There were rock slides, cliff jumps and all other scary activities, but on the whole the day was very fun.

Very early the next morning, still sore from our previous day activities we headed off to Mui Ne. There was only us two, Thao; our guide and our driver in the support vehicle. Our bikes were imported Giant mountain bikes from Singapore, though had very hard small saddles which were fairly unbearable towards the end of the trip. We started cycling around 9:30 and finished about 2:30 and covered 57 km in total. The best part on the bike was covering a 14km downhill section in about 20 mins – very good fun! We stopped for lunch in a minority village which was very interesting.

The day was tiring but very enjoyable, every single child we passed would run out into the road to wave at the crazy white girls pedaling manically on bikes and shout a happy ‘Xin Chao’ (hello) to us.

Thao our guide was a really nice guy and we found out was only paid about $8 for the day and our driver would’ve been even less. We did tip him; it wasn’t very much for us but for him would cover half his rent. He had moved from Nha Trang to go to Delat university and now he works in a adventure company with all his mates, sounds like a good job to me but maybe not paid enough!

I’ve always noticed that the Vietnamese always put salt and pepper on their fruit, I thought it was a matter of taste, but from talking to Thao he said that it was because the Vietnamese know that a lot of sugar is bad for their teeth and fruit has a lot of sugar in it they counteract this by putting salt on it…crazy!

Another adventure we had was our trip to the hospital one night in Delat. Sophie hurt her ear (suspected burst ear drum) from jumping off the boat in Nha Trang. We were directed to a new hospital where we hoped someone would speak English. Unfortunately no one did and also there were no doctors around. After conveying what was wrong with Sophie through the medium of Charades/Pictionary (I’ve still got the note – very funny) the nurse looked down her ear with a torch and we gathered we should come back in the morning when a doctor might be around. In the end, her ear seemed fine so we didn’t go back.

We are now in Mui Ne until 19th,, which is the surfing capital of Vietnam. We’ve managed to catch a few waves this morning whilst trying to avoid the kite surfers. I’ve been told to look on You Tube for ‘kite surfers and Mui Ne’ because in high season you can’t move for them!

We’ve now changed our plans to spend Xmas on Kho Phangan Island in Southern Thailand as our time to travel the rest of Asia seems too short. Also we have a few more days at the centre next week which will be really nice to go back and see the kids.