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.