Bad day, good night in Hoi An

We met some fun English people on the bus to Hoi An, and all stayed in the same hotel. We scored a massive room with a double bed each, with the others down the corridor.

Hoi An is famous for its 200+ tailor shops, so Plan A was to go to our previous night's waiter's friends' shop and bargain a good deal for some fancy clothes. A couple of hours later, and Libra Debs had ordered a pin-striped suit (how ironic, the non-worker!) and a yellow dress which the 3 of us designed in about 3 seconds.

When my bank card rebooted the ATM software and almost got swallowed, I should've known there was bad luck in the air... Phalang I was plotting revenge.
Nevertheless we stocked up on some rum and started a spontaneous fines meeting. Spot the fines master!



Our English friends joined the party and brought the rum bottle count up to 7. Which means the smashed glass bottle count was probably about 5. By the time we had finished dancing, doing headstands on the pedestrian crossing and waving the police past, we'd totally trashed the room.


















The next day we decided to hit the beach by hired motorcycle, via our friends clothes shop for our fitting. To cut a long story short, the one bike's brake was hanging by a thread so we refused to take them, and the hotel refused to give us our money back. After about an hour of fighting, we got 2/3 back and just wanted to get the hell out of there. 2 mins from our fitting i remembered leaving my iRiver (mp3 player) charging in the wall in the hotel room, so I hopped on the back of our tailor's friend's bike and zoomed back to the hotel. But alas, the iRiver had mystically disappeared. Thank goodness the clothes turned out pretty well, so I got over the iRiver saga and decided to claim from insurance!
So we went to the police (well we think it was the police) and gave them our story kindly written in Vietnamese by our new best (tailor) friends. We're not quite sure what happened because we met 2 guys who ouldn't speak english and one of them stormed off on his bike. Sue and I needed some peace and quiet time so we hopped together onto another mate's bike and hit the beach for an hour to calm the nerves.


Our perfect clothes were ready 20 mins before our overnight bus was leaving, and on returning to the hotel we discovered that my iRiver had miraculously reappeared!

Good Morning Vietnam

Another earlier-than-scheduled departure, on our Fokker jet which I think was THE smoothest flight I've ever had ever ever! We flew into Hanoi in an hour (instead of a 32 hour bus trip) and were hit once again with the in-your-face stick, but much harder than Thailand! We were too scared to cross the road. Scooters flew from all directions, hooters blaring... We scored a posh hotel and basically didn't want to leave it, but we had to, to go and get food and also organise our next few days in Vietnam.


We took an organised day tour to Halong Bay (once again we were the only 3 on the bus!) and spent the day cruising around the bay with 3000 limestone karst islands. We also checked out a couple of caves, had authentic Vietnamese lunch, and met an extremely interesting family from the UK who had been traveling around SE Asia for 4 months (children were 12, 10, 8).

That night we sleeper-trained it in style to Hue. We took a bottle of vodka to help put us to sleep but it was so comfy that after about 20 mins of moving we all passed out and slept like babies till the morning! We did one bad thing though.
We lost Phalang somewhere between the sleeper train and our hotel. We think we were punished because 2 days later in Hoi An we had the worst day ever ever. Story coming later...
We bartered our way at the river and scored a cheap trip to some of the tombs and pagodas (yawn) even though it kept getting more and more expensive with all the add-ons, like having to buy beers for our motorbike drivers!

Laid-back Laos

We went against Lonely Planet's recommendations about flying with Lao Airlines (cos they don't have electornic navigation or something, and can't if there are clouds cos they can't see) and took our lives into our own hands to save time - the only alternative was a 3 day mission via bus and slow boat. I was counting the people in our check-in queue to try and guess the size of our plane, so when more than 6 people (including us) turned up I was very stoked. It turned out to be a rather nice little plane, much bigger than we'd thought, but we nevertheless still kissed Laos soil on landing!!


We only stayed one night in the French town of Luang Prabang (bring on the tuna baguettes!!) and thoroughly enjoyed the slower pace of Laos compared to in-your-face Thailand.

At the night market you could actually go and look at the things without 836 people coming up to you to buy their stuff.

Braving a Lao Lao Cocktail!
The next morning we left EARLY (one of three trips that left early, including our next plane trip!!! Where else???!) on a private minivan for a hair-raising up-and-down the mountian bendy bendy roadtrip to Vang Vieng. Once again we managed to find the bus with NO other tourists on it, but it was cool cos we had a few seats to ourselves, and the driver spoke very good english and was very helpful. We did have a mini breakdown where the engine overheated and didn't have any water left in the cooling system, so we filled up at the next town where I was busting for the loo and had to find a secluded spot in between the huts!

The trip was well worth the mission once we had checked into our corner riverside bungalow for the equivalent of 90p a night each!

That night we had dinner at a cafe which sold weed and opium openly on the menu! We met an english guy working there who does tours on the river, so we signed up with him for the following day.
Anyone going to Laos, I highly recommend you meet Richard and get him to take you!
Because the river was quite low, we took kayaks instead of tubes so that we didn't get tired trying to paddle (with arms) our way down getting stuck on the rocks. It turned out to be a good call cos towards the 2nd half of the day we passed many exhausted tubers who had given up trying! Not even 1 hour into the trip, and we'd pulled over to a spot with a foofie slide and beer! I was a bit chicken to try it at first, but it looked like fun so I just ran up, grabbed the bar and jumped without pausing. Then nobody could stop me! I did it over and over and when we got to the next spot, the jump was even higher and you had to swing back and forth before letting go otherwise it'd be too high to fall. Loving it!! Sue and I were doing Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks in the air!






We stopped for a bit to visit some random cave ("Sleeping Cave") where the Lao people hid during the war (I think). It was fun, except for the 50 bites that I got within 2 minutes. Not great.




To end of a superb day we dragged some fellow bungalowers out with us, met Richard and Sam (another guy on the river with us) and tested out the Buckets at the bar. I think we were expecting to bounce off the walls, but it just kinda brought a nice buzz to the evening and woke us up a bit after a very energetic and boozy day.


Richard took us down the road and around the corner to the "Air Strip" (the American built it back during the war when Laos was bombed the most) where the locals were holding a massive fair and concert. We got some beers and drank Lao Style, and picked up a mascot for the trip called Phalang (meaning "Tourist" to the locals). Phalang joined us on the dance floor, dancing in lines opposite the boys - so polite! I was even asked to dance by one of the locals who was so shy it took him all night to ask me to dance! Of course I dragged everyone else onto the dance floor for moral support!


We ended up in Jay Dee's bar playing pool and trying to steal the owner's cool T-shirt ("SuperMao" meaning Super Fucked). Then we missioned back towards our bungalow, detouring to the Island Bar in the early hours of the morning, listening to the Pulp Fiction soudtrack around the campfire - I was in heaven!