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.