Vietnam

A floating market on the Mekong Delta - the products on sale hanging from the bamboo pole













Not exactly heeding the sign - sitting at the war room desk of President Dien (ex-President of South Vietnam). The whole 'palace' is maintained from when the North Vietnamese broke through the gates in tanks to end the war. (The President was quite unpopular and his own army bombed the original palace to try to kill him - the current one is a rebuild study of 1960's architecture and design).



Sunset - looking over the South China Sea in Nha Trang.












Lantern festival and Lunar festival in Hoi An


















The historic inner citadel in Hue (most buildings lost in the French and American wars).












Rice farmers - Nimh Binh - cemetary in background with the shadow of another large limestone karst.











Attempted arty - near floating village of Ken Ga













Being rowed through caves and paddy fields - Tam Coc.












In Halong Bay. There are more than 2,000 limestone karsts - most of which look a little more dramatic than this one behind Sam.












Halong Bay - The boat looks similar to the one we stayed on (and to every other boat carrying tourists).











More attempts at arty - Sapa













Hard not to be arty - Sapa again.













Dzao hill tribe kids on the temporary (for Tet) swing in Sapa.












Anything but total disinterest brings a lot of attention - here from Dzao and H'mong tribe members in Sapa.











The annual (a week before Tet) flower market in the Old quarter of Hanoi.












In bygone days the British apparently had a distorted sense of scale and believed the world to be much smaller than it actually was. A scale of measurement was needed - a way of comparing the world to something recognisable. Choice by consensus was that 'the Wales' should be the standard to use ....

...... Vietnam is 14 Wales in size - a little bigger than Italy - and has a population of over 83.5 million people (14 times the population of Wales is 42 million). Vietnam is the twelfth most populous country in the world, it's GDP ranks it 38th in the world - however the GDP per capita puts it down to 141st place. There are a lot of poor people, the competition for the tourist Dong is stiff, and, though in a communist Vietnam, the people are very committed capitalists. Though they have no say in matters of politics, they have plenty to say in their efforts to lighten the load in rich westerns wallets and they'll gladly go many extra miles to say it.

And we found ourselves walking many extra miles too - because negotiating with the locals for a cyclo / taxi / moped proved more tiring than walking to our destination.

A walking westerner is cue for the queue of drivers to enquire where we may like to be taken, so we walked down the long line of transport purveyors chanting "no, no thank you, no" to each person. Any pause to consult a map leads to a group huddle of the pavements' local transport vendors enquiring whether they may be of assistance in some way - perhaps with their moped, cyclo or taxi. This meant too few stops for map checks and thus longer walks, and many more opportunities therefore to converse ('no, no thank you, no').

The attempts to become best friends with our wallets wasn't at all limited to the people carriers. Tour group operators, hotels owners, restaurants and frankly just random people who were happy to point us in the right direction, and equally happy to then ask us for money for the service.

In Vietnam only the food from restaurants has published prices - everything else seems to depend on their perception of your wealth (your age, clothes, and any trace of a US accent). Everything else therefore we had to be bargained for. If a conversation involved money, then all facts and figures were discretionary. (If the conversation didn't involve money then it was pre-amble). On top of all this we found that selling the correct product was sometimes secondary to just selling something.

Being overpriced and misled about a product that turns out to be different to what we'd asked for could be irksome. People's thirst to liberate us from our cash is of course understandable - on just a few occasions the methods used weren't greatly enamoring.

It doesn't take long to become attuned to the nature of things and, in an effort to bung the hole in the dyke that was money flowing from my wallet (floods of ten or twenty pence notes) for the various small (but annoying) scams and misinformations from the agencies, we started the extra tedious business of finding things out as much as possible for ourselves. This meant, for example, via the non-English speakers at the train or bus station, or by shopping for half a morning for a good tour.

Of course the various different people on a tour had all booked via different agencies and paid very different prices. Slim reward for shopping around, or for 'getting what you pay for' and after a couple more days we got tired of finding out the truth for ourselves and started to accept the price of convenience and booked things through the agents or hotels.

This meant travelling primarily via the tourist bus that ploughs up and down highway number one (the coast road between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (or Saigon as most Southern Vietnamese still call it)) stopping at only the places the photocopied (pages falling out) Lonely Planet tells backpackers to stop at. Happily it's cheap, with a 100km journey costing around $4. Also making our way by local bus alternatives would have been a bit of a nightmare.

In fact transport generally is a bit of a nightmare. In Hanoi - in the week leading up to Tet - there were thousands of scooters on the roads, many of them wielding the whole family, or a tree, or vast amounts of shopping (or all of the above). Crossing the road meant waiting for a gap large enough for the first footstep (after which the exercise was to walk steadily, predictably and slowly across the road allowing the sea of scooters (none of whom slow down) to wash to either side of us).

Scooters account for an estimated 95% of Vietnamese traffic and although the law states helmets are mandatory - people don't. There are reportedly an average of 36 people per day dying on the roads (lots more injured). On our first day driving from the airport to the centre of Hanoi we only saw three scooter crashes (later on we took to hiring scooters ourselves as cheap fun transport- but only (mainly) on the country lanes through villages and paddy fields).

On Highway One the tarmac is only notionally divided into two opposing lanes. Everyone with four wheels wants to overtake everyone always, at maximum speed, with their horns set to 'on' and 'loud', with their left indicators on and whilst flashing their lights in synch with the indicators. This applies equally to traffic from both directions. Head on collisions are common, scooters having to move off the road to avoid oncoming traffic is more common.

The trains were safer .... though it's hard to see how they couldn't be at the speed they travel. In the 1930's the average speed of the fastest train between Hanoi and Saigon was 43km/h. Nowadays the re-unification express is faster - averaging at 48km/h. We didn't take the train often as it wasn't quick but was expensive (compared to the bus). On one of the occasions we were on the train we were kept amused by the small mouse that scampered around.

In the north of Vietnam the countryside was spectacular. In our first week we visited Sapa in the mountains bordering China in the north west (colourful hill tribe markets and mountain views (and fireworks (as we were there on New Years Day (Tet))). Next we took a two day boat trip (sleeping on the boat) in Halong Bay where over 2,000 limestone karsts jut vertically from the sea. Following Hanoi and 200kms south saw the same limestone karsts jutting here from the paddy fields (we were rowed through these fields on a river that passed through long caves along the way).

Across the Demilitarised Zone and into the old South Vietnam - Hue was mostly about the architecture, or the promise that the area was very historic before the French and American wars. Hoi An is home to the tailors - and we didn't disappoint them, buying a suit, two shirts, two blouses, two pairs of trousers and a long silk dress (all tailor made). The postage, sending them back home, made up a large proportion of the total costs.

In Hoi An we watched the Lunar Festival (a monthly event, but this one biggest to mark the end of the New Year paraphernalia). All street lights of the old and small colonial town were turned off and the place lit only by the many colourful lanterns. In addition there was big communist style show, viewable across the river. After seemingly hours of introducing the various State (Honourable Communist Party) guests the proceedings began. Boats were used to launch floating candles on the water - and then used again to help retrieve the candles that were setting the stage alight. The firework finale saw only a few fireworks disappear into the crowd, and the fire around the launch area was soon put out.

Na Trang is a beach resort town - but nonetheless quite nice. Using an alias of someone who knows how to dive I set off on a boat (my PADI qualification was from eight years ago). When they asked me to test my gear I earnestly put the mouthpiece in upside down and put my wetsuit on inside out. In the water I subconsciously held my breath, thus managing not to sink for an embarrassing while, and then underwater I got a horrendous bout of acid stomach from my pineapple breakfast. We dived into a cave (of sorts) which was fantastic for all the fish hiding inside - but otherwise it was like being in a washing machine (probably).

The second dive was thoroughly enjoyable.

In Saigon I again got my hair cut. Initially I'd been led into the kitchen for a hair wash. The hair wash quickly turned into a slapping game from the pretty, but surprisingly strong, Vietnamese lady. I was happy on this occasion that Sam wasn't with me as, with the lady vigorously slapping my forehead, I'm not sure we wouldn't have both had a giggling fit (it was hard to supress the giggles during my previous haircut in Bangkok). The hair wash and subsequent head massage (of sorts) lasted a great deal longer, and proved to be a lot better, than the haircut.

From Saigon we took a three day tour of the Mekong Delta, ending in Phenom Penh. It was half by bus and half by various different sizes of boat. The boats chugged or were rowed around as many floating markets and floating villages as could be squeezed into the time (together with the inevitable trips to see how rice, noodles, coconut candy etc are made). The bus was equally pleasant for different reasons (the air conditioning)!

So for my Birthday on the 21st I was on a slow boat up the Mekong to Cambodia. The temperature felt like 40 degrees. We both drank four litre of water - but didn't go to the toilet all day .... Happy Birthday to me, I'll remember it for sure.