Down but not Out in Huế and Ha Noi

Huế is in central Vietnam, and during the Vietnam war - or the American war, depending on whose side you were on - it was situated right on the border between the North and South. It got pummelled by American artillery, which is a shame (as most pummellings are) because it is home to some amazing architecture. Much of it remains, and it's now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

To be brutally frank, at this point, we couldn't give a shit. 

We went to some really good street-side cafés and had some of the nicest food we'd had in a while, but the effort of doing anything of real cultural value seemed too much to surmount. Plus Helen was walking around with a lump the size of a golf ball on her forehead and two black eyes. I must have looked like some sort of violent monster.


None of this mattered to us any more, whatsoever. We found a cheap hotel, just round the corner from where Ed and Nicky were staying, and didn't really leave its surrounding area. The wind had been thoroughly knocked out of our sails, and into our pants. The slightest odd look from a Vietnamese person - male or female - sent a small shiver down our spines. Again, this was a horrible shame, but the horrible truth.

Just over the road from our hotel was an example, possibly the only example, of when the Lonely Planet guide actually got it right. There was a small café run by a lady called Tu, which was called Tu Wheels Café. It did nice food, cheap beer, rented motor and push bikes and had a really good atmosphere. We spent our first and last evenings in Huế here, and it lifted our spirits somewhat.

Then, one morning, rain fell like I had never witnessed before.

Jesus, bearing in mind I'm not meant to be the Son of God or anything, it's not hard to look like you're walking on water.

In half an hour the water was a foot deep, splashing into the hotel reception and going down the lift shaft, meaning that it had to be pumped. This was an arduous task, and so I asked how often it happened. All the time, apparently. Which raised the question - could you not make the step higher?

The rain continued to pour down like it was water condensed from atmospheric vapour under the influence of gravity for the rest of the time we were there, and put a final stop to any thoughts we had of venturing much further than round the corner to go on the internet to argue with the twats on the Lonely Planet forum.

After a few days, we left Ed and Nicky in Huế and went on the bus up to Ha Noi. We did even less here, but caught up on some much needed sleep in a very cheap hotel Helen had found which had only just opened.

Hanoi was a great city. We really enjoyed walking round and got our confidence back up a lot. We went to some nice restaurants and bought some presents for the kids that we would be staying with in Australia over Christmas. 

We also found Snoop Dogg's hotel room.

We had more than a little trouble with an air conditioning unit that sounded like the Chernobyl reactor in its last throes, but this place was cheaper than potato oblongs.

We got an email from Ed and Nicky and decided to pay a bit of money and go on a trip to Halong Bay with them and some of their friends. After a few days on our own, we met up with them and we treated ourselves to a superwicked (read: silly expensive) curry, and the next morning we set off for Halong Bay.

A Little Help from Our Friends

I'd left Helen alone in an empty police station for at least half an hour. When I let myself consider what could have happened, considering the obvious state of corruption in the town, I shudder.

Me and the nicest Vietnamese man in the world sped back to the station. We picked her up, and discovered that she had been taking photos of her battered face using the timer. (Some of which, with the grace of hindsight, are actually really quite funny.)

Getting my Vietnamese guardian angel to stop round the corner from our hotel, so he couldn't tell where we lived – this was the level of trust we would have in people until we left Vietnam two weeks later – I gave him 100,000 dong and he pop-popped away on his bike.

The reality of the situation donkey punched us, hanging over us like a badly fitting suit. With that suit in mind, we immediately thought of Ed.

Somehow we got into Ed and Nicky's hotel and went door-knocking to find them. Luckily, we only got it wrong once. After waking up some poor Irish couple, we found the correct room and Nicky very kindly tidied up Helen's face and examined me.

They, like many other people – as I will show you later – could hardly believe it when we promised that we hadn’t done anything more than leave the bar to provoke such a reaction.

It was then that we really started to think about what had happened. They had set up an ambush for us – but why? They didn't demand any money from us, they didn't steal any of the dozen cameras that we had on us. In fact money wasn't even mentioned once.

What their motives were will never be known, but they've been discussed a lot since. Plus, the irony is if they'd had any foresight they would have realised that we would have been back later that night anyway as the only other bar shut at two o'clock. But, as far as we were concerned, money didn't seem to be the motivator.

With a sudden dropping feeling in my stomach, I clocked that I still hadn't found Jon.

Going out on to the street, this time with Ed, I realised that I hadn't really got a clue what I was going to do. I was worried sick. I walked around the streets trying to remember the name of the hotel that Jon had said he was staying in, when I saw a taxi pull in further up the road.

I ran down as I saw a big group of people get out of it – I was overjoyed – it was Jon, his mates and the two Swedish girls.

I gave Jon a very big bear hug and told him he was a cunt for going the other way. He looked at me, incredulous as to what I was going on about – and told me that they'd just had a nice drink in the Sleepy Gecko. Not really getting his sarcasm and suddenly feeling very tired, I told him I would meet him the following day.

Good as my word, I went round the next day and retold what had happened. It turned out that the gang had followed them up to the other bar and had started to throw rocks at them and the bar itself. Jon, however, was quite content with having a nice beer or nine and decided to just weather the storm. Plus he was necking one of the Swedish girls. Priorities.

It turns out that this bar, and its owners in particular, did not have a great reputation in the town. Nicky and Ed, without mentioning what had happened to us, asked their hotel staff what they thought of the King Kong Bar and they said that it was 'A bad place, run by bad people.'

According to the staff at Jon's hotel they were the local drug dealers, and were essentially the local mafia (sic). This somewhat, perhaps, explained why the pigs hadn’t done a lot to help me out.

Whoever these people were, there was no possible way to hold them accountable for anything. The police didn't care, the tourist police (who we walked the town searching for for two hours that day) seemingly didn't exist, and Helen was too scared to leave the hotel once it started to get dark, let alone take it back up with them.

This incident had well and truly taken the wind out of our sails. Vietnam had turned from our favourite country on our travels so far to a place where we were suspicious of everything and everyone. It was a crying shame.

Perhaps we were naive to leave the bar so soon after coming into it, but I don't think any of what followed was in any way justifiable. For me, the most horrifying part was what had happened after the scuffle had occurred. The police, incredibly, were more intimidating than the people with sticks. But then again, I'm sure Helen would tell you that the girl with the sovereign rings was pretty terrifying herself...


If you want to read about really horrible human beings, then copy and paste the link below into your interweb slab, it goes to the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forum. Helen attempted to post a bit of a 'heads up' to other backpackers going to Hoi An. It met with mixed responses, to say the least…

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa;jsessionid=DD770ABC0B4EB33E052B0AE0DE3B812E.app02?messageID=14876433

Helen's riposte is one of the funniest thing's I have ever read though, so it's worth a butchers.

Since we posted on the Lonely Planet site, and also set up a random one-off blog as a warning to people thinking of going to Hoi An, we've received three emails from people saying that they had similar experiences, or they knew someone who had.

The most harrowing of their accounts included a boy who had become separated from his friends, beaten up outside the bar so badly that he feared for his life – and hid in a paddy field until dawn.

[NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Hello, it's the 2012 version of Chris here, how are you? The King Kong Bar has apparently changed it's name to 'Old & New Bar' [THANK YOU FOR TIP OFF, ANONYMOUS POSTER BELOW HERE] – and who can blame them. If there were dozens of accounts of violence and thievery about my bar on the internet I'd change its name as well. (Seriously, search 'King Kong Bar Hoi An' and you get a mixture of people telling stories about how they were robbed or how they barely escaped with their teeth.)]

Our message here is, if you're going to go after King Kong, make sure you're not a blonde lass. Have you not seen the fucking film?

Anyway, next time we'll have much more funner stories to tell. Sort of. It'll make the Plagues of Egypt look like the Cold of Egham.

The Battle for Hoi An

As we were paying the lovely lady that ran the café, the heavens opened. It was cats and dogs and rats and frogs. Undeterred, but minus the emotionally and physically drained Ed and Nicky, we paced it up the street and hailed two taxis to carry us the diminutive distance over the bridge to the Happy King Kong Bar.

Making the short sharp sprint from the taxi into the bar, we were slightly disappointed that it was so empty, especially considering that the place was only about 20 square metres in size anyway. Strolling up to the bar, past the half dozen other customers that were there at the time, I asked if we were in time for our promised free drink. I did this only out of faux politeness, as I was safe in the knowledge that we were; it was 10.25, and the offer ran from ten until eleven.


'You got five minutes' snarled the squat, tattooed and Mohican-haired man behind the bar, who looked as though he was being run off a twelve-volt battery.

'Really?' I thought, glancing at my imaginary watch. Either way, we were here now and we weren't going to head out anywhere else just yet. Especially as the only other place on the isle was a good half-mile away and it was still wetter than an otter's slot outside.

I asked for one of their famous(ly free) rum and cokes, and received a small tumbler glass with an ice cube the size of my forearm in, a hamster's spit of rum and an eighth of a small bottle of warm coke.

‘Ah. Right.’ I thought.

Never mind. Helen had the same, as did the rest of the boys, and the two Swedish girls bought some toxic-looking and exceptionally overpriced cocktails. I believe they were called Mother Fuckers.

Standing around the pool table that took up 60% of the floor space in the establishment, and was seemingly only available to members of staff rather than customers as we got snarled at if we looked interested in playing, we met a further seven or eight people from all over the place. We began chatting about our various, and invariably identical, trips around south-east Asia.

After about 45 minutes or so, a couple more free drinks and a couple of expensive ones, we decided that, once everyone had finished up, we would all set off up to the only other bar, about 600 yards up the road.

The bar had not filled up. It was so deserted in fact, that when Jon and his mate Dan (who, ironically, wasn't drinking that evening as he was on antibiotics for a horrific septic blister that he had on his heel) rounded everyone up to go down the road to 'The Sleepy Gecko’, we at least halved the population of the bar.

Perhaps it was this that infuriated them. Perhaps it was that, as seemed to be the case, they thought Jon and Dan worked for the other bar and had poached us, perhaps it was because we'd had a free drink or two and only half of us had actually bought one and then left, but something had, to say the very least, got the staff of the Happy King Kong Bar's goat up that evening.

So, into the valley of death walked the fourteen of us. A narrow mud path that had been turned into sludge by the now utterly torrential storm. The tempest had taken out the electricity on the island and so we were trudging along in almost pitch noir-ness.

About 300 yards down the track, a motorbike had caught us up and we moved across to either side of the path to let it through. It slowly drove through the middle of us, and we realised, rather than just being loud, the man and girl on the bike were hurling volleys of abuse at us. It was the man with the Mohican and the girl that had been driving the English lad around on the moped.

They seemed to be picking solely on Jon and Dan, which was what led us to believe that they thought they had pilfered us from their bar to take us up to the Sleepy Gecko, the only other watering hole on this shithole island. After a lot of confused smiling and ‘OK, OK’-ing at them, asking what the problem was and trying to sort it out, we got fed up and started to carry on walking past them and up to the other bar.

The man drove the bike up, through and past us, and stopped about 20 metres up the road in front of our gaggle, turning his bike to block the narrow pathway. The girl crooked down and selected a large rock.

'Ah. Right.' I thought.

We were intimidated enough not to make any silly aggressive moves to get past them, but not so much as to turn on our heels and run. (Which, as you will see dear reader, would have been a very bad idea anyway.)

So, walking slowly down the mire path in an attempt to get past, the Vietnamese girl turns her attention to Helen, who, in good Coventry style (and luckily not parlance), held her ground. The girl took offence to this and, quick as a flash, hit Helen just above her left eye.

Well, the whole scene erupted, with the girl jumping off the bike and pushing Helen away onto a wire fence. I was trying to get to her from the other side of the path but almost couldn't see her through the other load of boys that were trying to do the same.

We just about managed to pull the girl off and separate them. Helen had blood streaming down her face and the little Vietnamese lady had blood on her fists and rings, and huge clumps of Helen’s hair in her hands. Whilst this was happening, we only just noticed that another four motorbikes were speeding their way towards us from both directions, each carrying two men clutching either a bamboo staff or a snooker cue.

'Ah. Right.' I thought.

This was when snap decisions started to be made by members of our assemblage. After an assortment of threats from the mob that now surrounded us - all in English, which was nice of them - ranging from the timid: 'You're barred!' (weren't really planning on going back there now) to the more significant: 'I'll kill you!’, it all kicked off again.

The girl evidently thought she had unfinished business with Helen and rushed at her again whilst I was trying to calm down the situation with Jimmy White, Hurricane Higgins and the Bamboo Boys. I was closer this time though, and grabbed hold of the girl by the shoulder but received about three or four blows to the side and back of my head for my troubles, as I twisted to try and get them off me, I got a stick across my hip bone. Ouchy.

Helen was getting the beating of her life, as this girl could fight. This was palpably not the first time that she'd had a scrap. Knees and elbows were flying, and Helen was incredibly lucky not to get her nose smashed, with blows raining on either side of it.

One of the other boys managed to pull the girl off her, and the men on bikes took a few pot shots at us with their sticks. It was at this point that I realised that everybody else had made the bright resolution to fucking peg it. The quandary was, however, that Jon and four or five other bodies had disappeared one way, and everyone else had vanished in the other, including Helen.

I was now in the middle of an alley, my bleeding girlfriend heading one way - back in the direction of the fucking bar we'd come from - and my bloody mate going the other way - into the black void of the night. The gang had dispersed that way too, and I was worried for Jon's safety - but I obviously couldn't leave Helen, either.

I was pretty shaken up and my stomach was tender from an expert teep kick that I'd received from the only man that I had managed to thump back. (I was just about to write 'I hope I got the right one' but I think that I could probably have justified twatting any bit-part actor in their gang of ten pool-master maniacs.)

This didn’t do much other than shatter the illusion that I held that if I punched someone as hard as I could in the face their head would explode in a mess of brains, gum and bone.

So, sprinting - as much as you can sprint in flip flops in a flood - after Helen and her motley crew of folk we didn't really know, I was also shouting in a Hollywood style: 'I've got to go back for Jon'. Daggers, understandably, wasn't having any of it.

We turned away from the direction of the bar and, still in the electrical blackout and hammering downpour, made our way up to what appeared to be a hotel and started banging on the door. 

After about two minutes a man answered and we implored him to call the police. He didn't want to. So we begged him to let us use his phone. He didn't want us to do that either. After five minutes, and me gnashing my teeth like a demented Andrex dog, he rang someone. But it wasn't the police. For all we know it was probably the King Kong Bar.

By this time, I was losing my mind with a cocktail of worry about Jon and anger about Helen. Her face was in a mess and I felt revolted with myself that I couldn't have stopped it from happening and now couldn't help her again. Almost in tears I waved down a man on a moped (which, on reflection, probably wasn't a good idea considering what had just occurred).

This Vietnamese Good Samaritan volunteered to take Helen and I to the police station, which, we hadn't realised, was only about 400 yards over the bridge. We hopped onto the back of his bike and sped off after telling the rest of the group to stay at the hotel and that we'd be back very shortly.

We arrived at the station and had to wake up the three policemen that were there. The friendly man on the moped translated - perhaps very badly, who knows? - what had happened to us. The police seemed pretty nonplussed about the whole affair, but I was determined to take them out to help find Jon at least, as I was convinced that there would be a gang of ten people on bikes versus four boys with suspect nipple rings.

Leaving Helen at the police station (what was I thinking?) I went on the back of the nice man's moped again, and we went back to hotel and picked up two other boys who, I think, were both German, who rode on the back of the policemen's bikes. As we approached the alleyway, I signalled to the policemen to go down it as that was where my friends were. They ignored me and, lo and behold, drove on to the King Kong Bar.

'Ah. Right.' I thought.

This was one place that I didn't want to be. But, in a moment of madness and/or curiosity I went into the bar, which was empty apart from four random people, whilst the others waited outside talking to an old man. I asked a couple of Scandinavian sounding people if the staff that were on now had been there the whole time that they had. These lads were pretty drunk and even more foreign and didn't really understand, or care about, what I was asking them.

Thus, walking out of the bar again, I was stopped by the head policeman, who pointed at the old man standing by the large table outside the bar. Turns out he was the owner of the bar.

'I see you I kill you.' He said.

'We've been atta- What?!' I blurted.

'I see you agai' I fucki' ki' you!' The older man said.

I almost laughed! I turned my head with a semi-smile of disbelief to the policemen in a 'has he just said that in front of you?!’ way. One of them was looking away, one was looking at the floor and the other was looking at me in a ‘What…?’ way.

'I see you again I fucki' KILL-YOU! I KILL YOU!' He continued to shout, drawing a neat line across his own throat.

I looked again at the policemen; one of whom was unbuttoning his baton holder, the other tapping his hitting stick against his thigh. I was surrounded by the old man, three policemen and a table and the only way I could go was back into the bar.

I looked down at the two German guys who were stood by the bikes in the rain.

'I want to go now.' I said in my calmest possible voice to the head policeman. He looked away and ignored me. 

'I want to go - NOW.' I repeated as sternly as possible. He pulled up his trousers by his belt and sat down. The other two looked at me and one of them smiled. I looked at the old man who was still bowling beamers of abuse at me.

'Ah. Right.' I thought. 'I'm going to get killed by the fucking police.'

I barged through the two standing policemen and shouted to the two Germans to get on the back of the bike - the Samaritan knew what was going on as he had already started his bike and turned around.

Thank glorious fuck he hadn't just driven off. Luckily - as the water was about four inches deep on the floor now - one of the German lads was wearing trainers, so he ran alongside the moped as we sped off into the rain, leaving the policemen with the smiling old man.

Getting back to the hotel where everyone was waiting, I thanked everyone for their help and told them I had to go and get Helen - FUCK! HELEN!

The Calm Before the Storm

We jumped on the night bus out of Nha Trang to make the journey up to Hoi An. A pretty restless night stuck in the pram-sized bunks was followed by a rude awakening at the crack of dawn when we reached our destination. It was too early, we were too tired, and the hotels were too poopoo.

The usual occurred - as I'm sure you're bored of reading by now - as soon as we got off the bus we were surrounded like Bonnie and Clyde. Rather than bullets being lobbed at us, business cards of hotels and offers for 'free ride' were spat at us.

Holding out for some time, scouting around by foot, we checked out a few hotels. They were all pretty awful, and twice the price that they had been in Nha Trang. We eventually conceded defeat and jumped on the back of two tout's mopeds and sped round the corner. These were even worse. Perhaps we had set the bar too high with the previous hotels we had chanced upon?

Tired and fed up, we eventually ended up back next door to where we had been dropped off by the bus in the first place. We stayed there for one night and then moved on, like touring comedians, but with no jokes. We certainly weren't laughing.

The morning after the night in the second hotel, we had a walk around the little part of the town we were located in, and got a fuller picture of why the town's famous for its tailors. Apparently you could get anything you wanted made here. Literally every other shop has a person calling you in to look at their merchandise; it was like being in India again.

I had absolutely no interest in buying any clothes. Helen even feigned disinterest for a further two days, but I knew she’d break eventually. During these two days we scooted around, over the famous old Japanese bridge, down to the main part of town and the markets and spent a lot of time in a café over the road from our hotel. This place, along with having a very good pho bo, also had a funny puppy and kitten combo.

On the third day I received a message on Spazbox from Jon Howe, a young man that I'd played football with at university, famous for his lack of any sort of attention span, his jittery hands (that I always forget is a medical condition and ask him why he’s got the shakes) and his giant windsock of a scrotal sack.

I like Jon, he’s funny. But he doesn’t know how to use punctuation. Here's the message he sent me:

'yo buddy i am arriving in hoi an today where are you at the mo do you want to meet up lets get boswolloxed i love tour x'

Well, I could barely control my excitement, and like a rat up a drain pipe, got back to him explaining exactly where we were, our predicted movements for the next 24 hours and told him to get in touch as-soon-as.

Three days later he emailed me again asking me if I was in Vietnam. Turned out he'd been round the corner from us the whole time.

During this time we had somehow been convinced by one of the tailors to buy a suit for me, and a big thick green winter coat and a black dress for Helen. This caused stress all round, nothing fit right, they kept changing the prices and, above all, they're all a bit shit anyways. Check out the mid-nineties Freemans catalogue modelling though. Can't teach that.

Whilst we were having mild complications, Edward and Nicola were having monumental problems up the road in a different tailor’s. Ed had had a suit made, from the looks of it, by a blind man. Using only his eyelids.

When Ed and Nicky kicked up a stink after they had gone back four times to try and adjust it, the shopkeepers threatened them with the police - which Ed and Nicky almost welcomed. They were then threatened with 'The Boys'. They were told that they knew what hotel they were staying in and they knew what room too.

Luckily, the Boys weren’t called either, and eventually some days later everything was almost ironed out. Not without a considerable amount of shouting from both parties, however.


We eventually met up with Jon and went to the beach with him, also meeting a few of the people that he'd been travelling around Laos with. We had a nice day excitedly romping about in the waves like we were some Bournemouth schoolgirls that photographers ‘from The Sun’ convince to get their wabs out on the first hot day of the year.

After some time swapping old tour stories, we got a bit hot and bothered and rode our rickety bikes back to our hotel. We decided we'd meet up for dinner and a few beerios later on at the café opposite our lodgings.

Jon Howe of 'Squirrel' Sack Fame

That evening, Jon bounded round to our hotel with the news that a few of his other friends would also be joining us for dinner. Jon and I went over to the café for a beer whilst Helen tried on her new coat, had a shower, did some knitting and thought about kittens. Or whatever.


Whilst we were sitting having a beer, an English lad pulled up on the back of a moped driven by a tiny Vietnamese girl and showered us with leaflets advertising a bar called the 'Happy King Kong Bar', although apparently it's usually only referred to as 'King Kong Bar'.

I explained to Jon that they'd done this at roughly the same time for the last three nights, each time imploring us to come to this bar for the 'happy hour' between ten and eleven, where you could treat yourself to 'as much rum and coke as you can drink'. Every night I'd asked him what the catch was, and every night he'd said that there wasn't one.

That particular evening, I told him that we would probably take him up on his offer.

Within half an hour, Helen was down and Ed and Nicky had joined Jon and I at the café. Shortly afterwards a couple of Jon's mates and two young girls from Sweden popped along too.

During dinner and getting to know each other, we started to make a campaign plan for what we were going to do later that evening. We resolved that we would take the short walk over the bridge onto the small 'island' (which I believe is called Kam Nam), and head to this King Kong Bar.

This was our first mistake of the evening.

Mud, Sweat and Tears

We got into Nha Trang on the same sort of funny buses (here modelled emphatically by Ed Wellard) that were popular in Vietnam, that are only any good if you're under 5ft 5in.

It's the sort of place that if you aren't careful you could spend a week in and do nothing but try and find the pizza restaurant you ate in on the first night. Which is pretty much what we did.

Although, like a troupe of midget prostitutes, that may be selling ourselves short.

We actually just did nothing of any cultural relevance whatsoever. But fuck it, I am well past caring about that.

We let our sun-bleached hair down in Nha Trang, not least by going to some mud baths for a dip in some warm filth, and also to a place called Vin Pearl - an island that was probably once so beautiful it would bring a tear to your third eye, that is now a plastic theme park.


After a couple of days easing ourselves into a state of decadence that would befit a Grauniad-endorsed travel blogger - slinking around town, ripping into husks of bread with our bare teeth, slurping back cheap beer from frozen glasses and chatting with strangers whilst dancing with our mouths full - we met up with the dastardly duo of Edward and Nicola. We accompanied them to the mud baths, where we bathed in mud and ate more pizza.


Nothing of any real note happened here, apart from pretending to be Arnie in Predator, and Daggers getting in a slanging match (and nearly a fist-fight) with a Vietnamese bloke who kicked a cat, like it was some kind of dog, about eight foot in the air.


This muddy emasculation was just the beginning of the water-based fun.

The next day, full of beans and covered in spots (was I supposed to wash the mud off?), we decided to make the trip over to the Vin Pearl resort.

After talking with the hotel lady that had booked our tickets, we decided to completely ignore her advice of getting a taxi to the crossing point. 45 minutes later, more tired and burned than an insomniac protestant in the Spanish Inquisition, we arrived at what we thought would be the entrance to the cable car station.

That it wasn't. We had, in fact, stumbled into a military base, and were getting increasingly stern and confused looks, especially from the black Alsatians guarding the ammunition store.

We did not falter however, and continued to walk through it and onto the street, whence a little further on we found the station. We slipped our four sweaty bodies through the gates and entered the cable car to take us over.


After what was a reasonably hairy ride - the pictures don't do justice to Helen's abject panic - we safely docked and took our first steps into our new world of fun.


The whole place was deserted. We knew that there was a water park on the island, which was the main pull in the first place, but Helen, Ed and Nicky also fancied, much to my dismay, going on the rides in the amusement park.

For the first ten minutes we walked around we did not see another soul - but then we spotted a Vietnamese man and his girlfriend putting their belongings into a locker by a giant boat suspended in the air. Growing some testicles, I refused to be a jacket holder and braved a go on the big swinging pirate ship.

My own feelings of queasiness and horror were fantastically disguised by the Vietnamese man, who squealed like a pig having sex with a saw.

This hilarity masked my own cowardice, so much so that I actually began to enjoy it - and was soon encouraging everyone to go on the decidedly dodgy looking roller coaster. Again, our joy on this ride was completely overshadowed by the joy we had watching the same bloke cling on for dear life with his face in his girlfriend's lap. White knuckles all round.

The next ride was a big spinny-roundy thing that did this to us.

Before

During

After

I didn't enjoy this one as much, not only because at one stage Helen went so quiet in comparison to mine and Ed's guffawing and death cries that I thought she'd fallen out, but the bastard injured me in the gonads. I wouldn't have been surprised if Helen had plummeted to a squidgy end, as the thing was so loose that I was flying about - thus causing the monkey brains injury.

We shakily moved on to the water park, which was a riot. If an incredibly understaffed riot that was closed half the time, meaning we couldn't go on what we wanted when we wanted.

However, if you've read this blog previously, you'll realise that Nicola Carrol's powers of persuasion are a force to be reckoned with. Thus, with the only language non-English understand, that of impending violence, we got to go on nearly everything we wanted to, including 'Kamikaze' (which was gum-dryingly rapid) and a half-pipe style thing that you go down in two's on rubber rings called 'Tsunami'.

This merriment was followed up by an equally enjoyable, and somewhat safer, period in a big pool with a wave machine in it. Ed and I reverted to five-year-olds (and actually made friends with one too) and spent most of the time trying to drown each other in the part of the pool we named ' the Vortex of Doom' that was a little narrow passage where the waves were particular unpredictable and big.

On leaving the pool we realised the importance of wearing suitably water-resistant sun cream. Ed was more sunburned than the Rusky's nuclear bomb at the end of Superman II.

(That's the second Superman II reference in the last ten or so posts. Odd. DOn't even like the Superman films.)

I WISH I had some kind of photographic evidence. If you can imagine Alex Ferguson's nose combined with Postman Pat's van, multiplied to the power of infinity you get somewhere near the hue of the poor bastard's skin.

After these fun times, Ed and Nicky went back home and caught a bus out of town, and we stayed on to watch a laser and water show. Underwhelming.

Did get to have a Cornetto though.

Mui Ne No Object

Our room that we found in Mui Ne was a veritable palace. 

We seemed to be the only people in the little (loosely described) 'resort' apart from a German family who spent all of their time shouting at their youngest child about something. God knows.

Mui Ne is a beach-side town that I think hides a dark secret. 

Down on the beach there were hundreds of fish who had jumped to their deaths up onto the sand, including big fat and fetid puffer fish. A 24 hour investigation was launched, but we found nothing and soon forgot about it. (Until just now.)

After a day pissing about on the beach we brokered a deal with two moped drivers to drive us down to the White Sand dunes, which we had been told you could slide down them on a plastic sheet. Exciting stuff, eh? 

Unfortunately, the ride there was probably the most exhilarating part of the day, with us narrowly avoiding death and also being able to catch a glimpse of the fishing village up the road.

When we arrived in the scorching midday sun, a young lad tried to expunge thirty dollars out of us to hand over a plastic sheet. This wasn't going to happen, although his bargaining posture obviously worked in some way as I did part with five dollars - why? It's a bit of plastic! He charmed the pants of us though, taking some decent photos of us in front of a little oasis in the scrub-land and picking Daggers a big pink flower from the middle of it. 

Cocky little bastard.



Once up on the dunes and after our first go at sliding down them, we realised we'd wasted quite a bit of money and time getting there. You slid down them at about two miles an hour, and then you had to walk back up the fucker. Why we hadn't thought about this before I still don't know.


But, ever the optimist, I got the best out of the day, and ticked one box that I hadn't managed to do in the deserts of Jaisalmer.

That evening Helen and I went to a posh looking place called SNOW. This looked like the sort of poncey bar you'd find in Bournemouth, full of white laminate and blue lighting, but it actually turned out to be dirt cheap and lots of fun. 

Run by a one-legged Russian man, we enjoyed a few drinks here and played a lot of pool. I was disappointed however, when I had the 'Special' cocktail...

False advertising

Helen and I essentially had the bar to ourselves, until...

Come eleven o'clock, this place would fill up with what can only be described as the Vietnamese branch of the Russian mob. 

HUGE skinheaded men with tiny trophy wives would come in, order champagne and then dance like demented ten-year-olds for hours. And hours. (Maybe their special cocktails worked.)

All good family fun. A family with a capital F that you would want to steer well clear of.

The morning after, we set off again up the road to a town called Nha Trang - Disneyland on crystal meth.

Crash, Bang, Wallop: What a City

Halfway around the roundabout we heard a 'BuMP, sssscRRRRAAAAaaatch-scrAAAPE' signalling that, yep, we'd arrived in Saigon, and yep, the twat in the Merc had tried to swing past us.

Trying to remain as cool, calm and collected as possible whilst everyone else rushed to the port side of the bus to have a look at the reasonably irate and veritably rotund Vietnamese chap, I realised that we were only about three minutes from our destination. We'd nearly made it without a crash. But not quite...


If there is a statistic that Vietnamese people - especially tour guides in buses - enjoy sharing it is Vietnamese 'Road Incident Fatalities'. Apparently there are upwards of 60,000 'accidents' a year (a figure which has been consistently on the up for a decade), with a horribly large amount of these being the last accident that the poor bastards will have. But for some reason, they love telling you this.




Jumping off the bus into the warm rain of Ho Chi Minh City, Helen and I walked down through a maze of backstreets and found a great little family-run hotel. It had hot water, white tiles EVERYWHERE and free internet. Super. We liked the fact that we'd found a place that was in the middle of a residential area as it gave us the impression that we were finally starting to see a bit of indigenous culture and lifestyle.

The fact that our room was roughly the same size as the couple of rooms that the average resident would sleep, eat and shit in was irrelevant. Palin was a pussy.
The next day we went on an exploration of the city, watched England play in the evening, and organised a tour for the following day to the Cu Chi tunnels. These were the tunnels that the guerrillas used in the Tet offensive. They're pretty staple for the backpacking hordes that visit Saigon every year, evident by the hundreds of people that were in our group alone. (Sort of an exaggeration.)

This trip was interesting and infuriating in equal measure. First off, there was a small group of Irish girls that were sitting behind us on the coach on the way there. They had obviously only rolled back from a nightclub about an hour prior to the journey, and they were like the Seven Dwarfs of Stink.

There was Sicky, who had obviously been doing some serious throwing up, and presumably using her t-shirt as a bucket. Sweaty, who had, it would seem, been at a rave for a year and boasted the armpits of Andre the Giant. There was Boozy, who unquestionably stored whiskey in her cheeks like some kind of well-prepared hamster tramp, and finally, and most potently, there was Shitty.

Shitty would, without warning or remorse, release silent wafts of gas unlike anything I have ever smelled before, with the moxie of mustard gas and the longevity of a year 8 changing room's quantity of Lynx Africa.

Here's me, without irony, complaining that other people were there

These fuckers, completely uninterested in the tour, would join the rest of the motley crew of stupid fucking tunnelees in, quite literally, pushing and elbowing you to get a better view of the holes in the ground just so they could ignore it to a greater degree.

Even with all of my famous patience with the general public, I soon gave up and waited until the tour had moved on before having a look at what we were meant to see. This also meant that I could make up my own uses for the series of ditches, flaps and traps, rendering the Viet Congs's (sic) set up with a gym, heated swimming pool and table tennis room. Like a militarised Butlins camp.

Our tour guide, the pushiest proponent of the seemingly fantastic amount of crash-deaths on Vietnamese roads, seemed to be personally hurt when we informed him that we had absolutely no interest in going to the shooting range that was also 'part of the trip'. So much so, that he wouldn't allow us to just walk around the rest of the tour on our own and make our way back to the bus. We had to wait for an hour so a load of stupid wankers could fire AK47s.

Why anyone would want to do this, let alone in that particular setting, is utterly beyond me.

Resuming the tour, after two Cornettos, we got to actually crawl through some 25 metres or so of the original tunnels. This was really good, made even more amazing by the fact that they have actually heightened and widened the tunnels so that fat tourists like us can do it too. How the guerrilla armies navigated around them is astonishing. 

Helen, to her delight, realised that she would have been quite a handy little tunneler too. She could almost touch the ceiling of them...


This trip is recommended, but I'm sure there must be a way of getting around the tour without having to be in a group of fifty people, which is a waste of time unless you're a selfish prick that's prepared to stamp over everyone else to use your little camcorder.

The next day we went to the War Remnants museum, which I personally thought was the most interesting museum we've been to so far.

It had a whole exhibition on journalists that were present during the war, and contained some amazing photography too. Once again, my patience was tested by the general - non-indigenous - public. Most notably some American lads laughing at the pictures of deformed babies as a by-product of the Agent Orange 'experiments'. There was also a bell jar containing a foetus that one of them commented on, saying it was 'like a retard aquarium'. Words fail me.

Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon - which pretty much everyone still calls it, was probably our favourite city in Vietnam, and maybe in the whole trip so far. This was despite the ever present drug dealers (I was offered one form of contraband or another 21 times in 8 minutes over 500 yards - we counted) and general hawkers that would try and rip you off at every turn. It's to be expected though. I would if I was in their position.

We even had fun sitting outside of a bar that blasted hardcore German rave music whilst dirty old men would try and chat up the owner, who looked like one of those mums that tries just that liiittle bit too hard.

It was in Saigon that we finally put our finger on the downside to South East Asian hospitality; people would rather tell you the wrong answer rather than not being able to tell you anything at all.

A tip, never suggest a direction that something might be in if you don't know for certain, as they'll just agree with you and you could keep walking for hours. This sort of thing was evident when we went on the search for Ed and Nicky's hotel. 

After finding what we thought was it, we entered and, giving their names, nationality and describing Ed and Nicky, asked if they were staying there, which the hotel manager confirmed. We subsequently left a message for them to meet up later on. We didn't see them, and they didn't get the message, as they weren't staying at the hotel.

Before we left I did see one more crash. 

A moped buzzed across a crossroad and got clipped by a car, scattering his cargo and careening off into a shop-front full of fruit (it was only missing two men carrying a pane of glass). Luckily no one was hurt, the tragedy was that the cargo of twelve crates (on a fucking moped!) of beer was lost forever to the thirsty hot tarmac of Saigon’s quietest crossroads. A tear I did shed.

So, after a very enjoyable few days in the capital of Vietnam, we ventured North to a place called Mui Ne, home to red sand dunes, white beaches and half of the Russian mafia.