Things started off well enough. Getting off the bus in the early afternoon, the weather was nice, there wasn’t too much traffic about, and I had met a nice Vietnamese/American girl called Lawn, who bizarrely agreed to share the cost of a room with me in a little guesthouse. The guesthouse in question turned out to be little more than a single room upstairs for the two of us on two comfortable double beds, while the whole of the family (numbering six of them) slept on the hard tiled floor in the single room downstairs. It certainly was awkward returning home after a night of eating well and drinking better, treading cautiously among the old people and the children to our penthouse suite upstairs. They didn’t seem to mind though, after all we were giving them the princely some of five dollars each.

The next morning, the War battered the good mood I had developed from the previous night. The two dutch guys I had met in Vietnam (Arjan and Erik) were coincidentally staying just next door to us, so we four set off to the War Remnants museum 30 minutes walk away. On the way, a local man on the pavement in the distance started yelling at us, with some obviously important information. Only when he got closer did we realise how important it was. Just ahead of the man, a small, but maliciously coloured snake was slithering along the path towards us. Like the terrified mice we were, we scampered to safety in the road. Only when the man was near did he tell us that this snake was apparently the deadliest in southern Vietnam. He seemed to be under orders to follow it about (not a job I would want) and warn unsuspecting pedestrians.

Anyway, the real horrors were to come. The museum, a drab, gray and unassuming building, contains some of the most emotionally charged exhibits I’ve ever seen. Outside, various examples of millitary machinery litter the forecourt, but didn’t evoke any particularly strong response from me. Inside, though, are thousands of photos and documents recounting the Vietnamese side of the story. While much of the material is quite obviously propoganda (letters of support from various communist groups around the world, etc), most of it cannot be easily swept aside. On the top floor, entire rooms are plastered with photos of victims of Agent Orange – such a poisonous herbicide that it still affects generations today; horrible deformities that want to make one look away; of children turned into monsters; of so much pain its hard to take in in a single go. Other floors describe the brutalities of the war itself. The torture of women and children, and portraits of the emotional hollows that many of the US veterans who performed such actions became.

The Dutch guys left afterwards to find something more cheerful to do. As did me and Lawn. It was lucky that I ran into her. Being a Vietnamese and an American meant she understood almost all aspects of this sometimes bewildering culture and was able to translate it all perfectly to me. We wandered around together that afternoon, she showing me the less well known sides of Vietnamese culture, going to strange restaurants, eating strange fruits (heard of Jackfruit anyone? I hadn’t. Its good though.) Speaking fluent Vietnamese also meant she was able to get us good discounts wherever we decided to spend money.

That was a fun afternoon, for sure, and it helped cheer my mood up from the black pit of dispair it had been after the museum. I was hoping the next day would be good as well, but a tropical typhoon that had decided to visit this day, ruined that plan. The typhoon seemed to have a good time; she was splashing and dancing in her rain for hours and hours. The tiny streets around my guesthouse soon filled with 3 or 4 inches of rain that couldnt drain away. My room was well stocked with a good sized television playing all the latest Steven Seigal movies and reruns of Tom and Jerry, so for a good number of hours I spent my once-in-a-lifetime trip to Asia vegetating in front of the box.

I went outside very briefly to get some lunch and a shave (which having grown in blonde and ginger was just plain embarrassing at this point). My trip instead of taking a few minutes as I planned took 2 hours. The lunch was quick, but the shave turned into something else. I;m sure I just asked for a shave, but what I got was a haircut, a shave, a moisturising scrub, an ear clean which went so deep I nearly broke an ear drum, a face massage, a hair wash and what felt like a chemical peel. Everytime I tried to get up to leave, they slapped some strange concoction on my face and shoved me back down. Think I ended up paying them 200 dollars or something stupid like that. I was the cleanest I had ever felt though, although that quickly changed as I marched through the dirty, acidy rain back home. It felt like quite a bit of a waste, to be honest.

I decided not to stay too long here, who knew how far my mood might sink. I booked my bus for Phnom Penh and my sixth country, Cambodia, for the next day. Read all about it, tomorrow.

Nha nha nha nha, nha nha nha nha, nha nha nha nha, nha nha nha nha, Nha-traaaang! (to the tune of Batman). Cough, anyway.

Me and the two boys called Archie I adopted in Hue arrived in Nha Trang stupidly early in the morning. No hostel would have us, so we checked into a very fancy hotel with towels and showers and AC and TVs. The only problem with it was that it only had one double bed. Not wanting to get arrested, I offered to sleep on the floor on the duvet, which was actually quite comfortable. It was pretty damn expensive though, so we checked out the following day to the local backpacker haunt – Backpackers (original).

Nha Trang is pretty famous for its 6km stretch of white sandy beach, so we headed there after breakfasting at noon. Since it was such a nice place to stay, we spent 3 whole afternoons here, lazing around on the beach sunburning, or breaking our bones trying to body surf in the 10 foot high breaking waves. Here’s my friend Jon – who I also met in Hue, and randomly checked into my same dormroom a few days later – doing his best Pamela Anderson impression on the beach. It really was beautiful (the beach, not Jon’s impression).

It was exhausting though, all that reading and suntanning and relaxing, so afternoon’s were spent in little local restaurants, recovering in the shade with cold drinks and random dishes of food from the menus.

The evenings were whiled away in the little bar outside the hostel. Starting off with pool, we would migrate outside to tables to play drinking games with strangers (learning way too many personal details about each other than I was comfortable with), before finally stumbling to the Why Not bar, where all manner of lecherous activities were excused under this banner.

This is all I pretty much did. It was the first proper beach I had visited since Phuket months before, so wasn’t particularly ready to give it up for a day of sightseeing or activity-doing. The others felt differently on the last full day, so went off to some water park – where one of them got slapped by a little Russian boy (I was a little sad to have missed that).

The next morning, we all split up. I was headed straight to Ho Chi Minh City, while the Archies were off to Dalat (a town overrun by sand dunes) and Jon was heading home.

From this point on, this blog will mention two guys named Archie a lot. We were all now taking the same route down Vietnam, and at about the same pace. They like to joke that I was stalking them, tracking them down whereever they went. But really, I felt sorry for them, these two poor gap year kids, with noone to look after them. I would take on the role of parent and guardian, helping them keep safe and teaching them my pearls of traveling wisdom. I was definitely not stakling them because I had noone else to talk to.

Anyway, we three got into Hoi An around 2pm on a slightly more comfortable bus than the one that took us to Hue. We checked into a nice three bed room in a hotel called Greenfields, which lured us in with the promise of free cocktails every night at 6. I had 4 hours to kill, so I headed off into the old town, while the Archies watched Steven Segal movies in the room (i told you they needed looking after, poor kids). The only thing I wanted to get out of my trip to Hoi An was a tailored suit, since this place is apparently famous for its large number of quality tailors. I headed to a little side street to a tailor called Mac Khai which I had been recommended by a traveler a few weeks before.

The shop was full of immaculately dressed manikins, men in fine pinstriped suits and women in silk dresses. The walls were lined with roll upon roll of colourful fabrics. A young woman greeted me, and after haggling over the price of a suit and some shirts a little (unsuccessfully, I should add) she began measuring me up. Only a minute or two later she was done. I would come back the next two days for fittings and some adjustments, but that was it. The whole process, over three days, only took about an hour of my time. What I was left with was a suit that, to be honest, looked too good on me. I’ll put up a pic as soon as I get back.

The rest of my time in Hoi An was mainly spent wandering around the old town. Built around the river Thu Bon, it mainly consists of a huge market, selling live chickens, exotic spices, strange looking fruit, crawling insects, plus all the regular tourist crap. The best product on offer was Cao Lau – a flat noodle dish with pork and croutons that is the local speciality. Pretty much every meal I had in Hoi An was Cao Lau.

Wondering around the town, me and the Archies found a bridge crossing to a small dusty island. We were attracted by the sound of what appeared to be a street party in full swing – cheering, laughter, screaming and the ubiquitous karaoke. What we found was actually some sort of sports day or school party. Hundreds of early teenage kids were swarmed around a stage where confident youngsters were massacring the songs of Adele and Bryan Adams. In the distnace, another crowd surrounded a tug of war competition, between groups of people wearing different uniforms. I guess it might have been some sort of inter school competition, the events being only karaoke and tug of war. We found two other English travellers we met in Hue (Johny and Stevie) equally bemused. When the teenagers saw us all together, dozens of them came up to us, smiling, offering hands, wanting photos. It was quite surreal.

That evening we went to the three largest tourist bars in the town. We played some fierce games of Table Football – loosing heavily to two innocent looking Vietnamese girls. Our crippling defeat required a lot of cheap alcohol to help us get over the shame. Luckily ever bar served mug fulls of beer for only 50 cents. As you can expect, with such cheap alcohol, my night didn’t end early, or well for that matter.

That’s all I really did in Hoi An. There wasn’t really much else to do in the vicinity. But it was a nice place, with its quiet Chinese influenced architecture and slow pace of life. Our next destination was Na Trang – which in many respects would be the opposite of Hoi An. Come back soon.

So, when I arrived in Huế (pronounced as if Johnathon Ross was saying “hurray”), around 9am, I wasn’t the happiest of bunnies. Finding the bed I had booked the previous night wasn’t ready didn’t help my mood too much. To pass the time, I took a quick jaunt around the city, walking to the old citadel and back (an imposing 200 year old fortress and palace).

Getting back after my walk in the bright sunshine, I felt a lot better and more sociable. I had a breakfast of instant noodles with some guys on my night bus (2 Dutch brothers called Erik and Arjen, and 2 English guys both called Archie). I cracked a stupid travel joke in front of all of them. How long is the bus to Hoi An?  Oh 4 hours? No, I meant in meters). I probably shouldn’t have made such a terrible joke in retrospect, as I would end up seeing and traveling with all four for the next few weeks. Didn’t give myself the best first impression.

Ignoring their better instincts, the Archies invited me with them to go see the Citadel. On the way, we saw the giant Flagtower of Imperial City Hu?, and a collection of old American guns and vehicles from the war. We paid an excessive amount of money to enter the Citadel walls (any money would have been excessive). It was rubbish inside. Just a large number of semi dilapidated, identical buildings with no explanations as to what was actually what. The best sight I saw was 12 exhausted looking women practicing a traditional tea dance -wtih plastic cups glued to plastic trays – being yelled at by a stressed and sweaty middle aged man.

Later on in the day we relaxed on the balcony, reading and writing journals. This was a calm before the storm of the night to come. It started, and night’s should never start like this, with shots of chile vodka so strong I throw up almost instantly. I was a little naive here. When 4 or 5 grinning Enlighmen come up to you asking if you want a free shot, you should probably be more than a little weary. I survived the feeling of my heart exploding within my chest,and the guffawing laughter of my compatriots, and was prepared for the night to come.

We went to a club famous for handing out free crisps (not the best reputation, but it seemed to draw the punters in). Unfortunately, they were chili flavoured which I really wasn’t in the mood for. Anyway, the music and dancing was good, and the night ended in the usual vague and uncertain way good nights do.

I had stupidly booked a coach tour the day before of the Demilitarized Zone (the strip of land between north and south Vietnam during the war), which started at the most spiteful time of day of 6am. It took a lot of poking by the Archies (who were also going) to wake me from my comatose state. They managed somehow, and I found myself half an hour later nursing my hangover with a black coffee  in the restaurant they took us before we were to start. I would have much preferred an extra half hour in bed.

The tour started with a trip to a series of tunnels that local Vietnamese villagers used to hide from falling bombs. Carved from solid rock, they were meagre in scale and sight. Families of 5 had to crowd in a space smaller than a bathtub. The ceilings were often only a few feet off the ground, and the walls never any wider.

Only a short 3 hour coach ride later, we were at our next stop – a small  museum surrounded by a number of tanks, helicopters and guns from the war. We were only there for half an hour or so, before being shepherded on to our next destinations on the DMZ tour – a big suspension bridge with apparently no connection to the war era, and a local person’s house – which apparently made a good photo opportunity. Overall, I think we spent over 5 hours on that coach – less than the time we spent at the things we were supposed to be touring.

Getting back to the hostel a little disappointed, I was ready to drown my sorrows with any nearby spirit that didn’t contain chili. Unfortunately, I had a bad reaction to my malaria medication, and had to make do with a nauseating night’s sleep up in my dorm. From the noises emanating from downstairs at the bar, it sounds like the rest of the hostel had a good night.Bit of an anticlimactic end to my stay in Huế. Hopefully my time in Ha Noi – my next desitination – would be better.

I’m going to lay my cards down early and say, Dear Reader, that this blog post isn’t likely to be that interesting as I did hardly anything in Hanoi. So if you want to stop reading now, I won’t mind too much. I’m not being self-depricating or modest – I know how awesome my other travelogues have been – so please, do save your self the trouble and read something else.

Ok, well, I arrived in Hanoi on my first ever propeller propelled passenger plane (say that eating a plate of peas). As usual, I hadn’t done any research into this place. I didn’t even know any of the language. Usually I make a token effort at learning ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’, but my iPod, with the Vietnamese language app, had broken the day before. Thankfully though, you can always count on the kindness of strangers (up until the point they murder you with an axe). A helpful lady at the airport was heading into the city centre, took me under her wing, taught me some of the language and showed me where the backpacker district was.

The place I had wanted to stay was called, imaginatively “Backpackers”. It has an Aladdin’s cave reputation for drawing in travellers who are never seen again. As well as the most popular bar in town, it houses dozens of computers, giant flatscreen TVs, pool tables, table football, blah, blah, blah. I know the point of travelling is to see amazing new things, but still, it’s cool. Unfortunately, they were fully booked, so I was shut out in the wet streets of Hanoi to find another place. I found a reasonable hotel, but it was very lonely in the private room, so I immediately headed back to Backpackers.

I had my first taste of frog’s legs outside (at a restaurant, it wasn’t something I just found in the gutter), which were actually very tasty, although I didn’t like the site of seeing an entire foot in my noodles. I wasted the rest of the evening getting wasted in Backpackers.

The next day is when really, nothing happened. I tried to find the cathedral and got lost for hours. I tried to walk to the war museums, and got lost. I was going to go see the remains of Ho Chi Minh, but thought, either I’ll get lost on the way, or I’ll find it and get creeped out seeing a communist corpse.
Hanoi itself was all right, I supose, although I didn’t see it in the best light (overcast and gray). The amount of tuktuks and motorbikes racing down the side streets was staggering, even for Asian standards.  I got nearly run over at least half a dozen times walking the short distance from my hostel to Backpackers. The walk around the central lake, with colourful bridge to the ancient temple in the middle, was charming, but mostly it was an overindustrialised, polluted city. I didn’t feel too guilty leaving it so soon, for the smaller town of Hue, by night bus.