In sight of the finish line
G'day again. It's been a while.
You'll be variously relieved or disappointed that this is probably going to be one of the last of these mails. Including today, I have 5 days left on this odyssey, so soon your Inboxes will be molested no longer.
So, back to what I've been up to. The quick summary would be: socialising, shopping, sweating, soaking up the beer and sailing around on a boat.
The train journey up from Nha Trang to Da Nang was actually pretty good - I got chatting whilst on the platform with a group of fellow backpackers who, it turned out, were on a trip with Intrepid, the company that my big sister Zara toured SE Asia with a few years back. I was a few compartments down from them but ended up sitting chatting with them for quite a bit of the evening. Turns out that two of them were from Huntingdon, about 20 minutes' drive from where I grew up, and that another was from the same suburb of Canberra (Yaralumla) as my cousins out there, and knew them from school. When I bumped into them again a few days later, it also turned out that one of the couples had recently done a trip through Africa with Acacia, the same company I used last year, and had had both my driver and my guide from that trip as drivers on their trip. It is, as they say, a small world, particularly when you're backpacking. So, that accounted for the initial socialising (which was more lucid than sometimes given that I'd decided I really needed a night off the grog).
The shopping bit was at Hoi An. That was pretty much everything I was expecting it to be. The Old Town was really quite picturesque, the weather was hot and sticky, and the tailors' shops were omnipresent and ridiculously cheap. By omnipresent, I mean that literally every other shop through the centre of town was a tailor's, and many of those inbetween were cobblers' places. Well, that's not 100% accurate - the shopfronts would take your order, including selecting fabrics, and measure you up, but the actual cutting and sewing went on elsewhere in town. As a result of this, I was initially quite cautious and ordered one or two things each at 3 different shops, as well as getting some replacement sandals and some sneakers made at one of the shoe-shops.
One slightly surreal aspect of the Hoi An tailor experience is that, possibly due to the overwhelming presence of British travellers (or Aussies/Kiwis returning from living in the UK), nearly every tailor's has a few years' worth of back-copies of the Next catalogue, from which they will cheerfully copy anything, making it to your size. Another thing that takes a bit of getting used to is the fascination that the staff in the shops (mostly girls) have with Westerners and their pale skin. In contrast to the sun-worshippers of most Western countries, who would sell their granny for a good tan, many Southeast Asian peoples value pale skin. It seems to be a status thing, as darker skin is associated with performing manual labour outside in the fields whereas pale skin indicates a job indoors (probably better-paid). Whatever the reason, it means that one of the sights I will indelibly associate with Viet Nam (and to a lesser extent with Cambodia) is that of the local girls, riding their scooters, with wide-brimmed hats, masks to cover their faces, long-legged trousers and long glooves to cover their arms, all designed to keep them as white as possible.
At any rate, this means that one of the first questions many Western guys here, if apparently unaccompanied, get asked is "Where your wife?" or "You travel with girlfriend?". An answer in the negative tends to then result in much giggling and sometimes an offer to be introduced to a friend of hers. You also get a lot of comments on the line of "You so pale! You so handsome!". It would all be quite flattering were it not for the fact that most of it is blatantly part of the sales pitch - the girls in those shops are VERY well-practiced at persuading tourists to buy far more stuff than they originally planned to. I must admit that I ended up spending a little more than I had planned, though I didn't get overly carried away - my "No thankyou" routine got plenty more workout in response to the perpetual "You buy one more shirt?" entreaties.
In the time I didn't spend wandering around soaking up the atmosphere or getting fitted for clothes, I hung around with a Dutch guy called Arjan. We had met briefly in Nha Trang but, given that this was in the aftermath of the drunken boat trip, I couldn't actually remember where I had met him until he reminded me. Anyway, he had also been on the train up to Da Nang (though in a seat rather than a sleeper) and we got chatting on the minibus down to Hoi An and then ended up staying at the same hotel there. Given that we were both travelling solo, we also ended up meeting up for some meals, and having a few beers in the evening while he repeatedly thrashed me at pool (at one point I was on a 10-game losing streak...). However, Hoi An being rather less of a party-mad place than Nha Trang, most evenings there were a bit more restrained (our last night in town, as per usual, turned into a bit more of a party thanks to an American, two Aussies and a trio of Swedes).
From Hoi An, we were both headed up to Hue (that should have an accent on the e, but I can't be arsed working out how to get Gmail to do that - it's pronouned "hooway" rather than "hoo" or "hyoo"), which entailed another of the ridiculously cheap "Open Tour" buses - $2 in this case. This is the old Imperial capital of Viet Nam from the 19th Century, but nowadays is a relatively quiet stop on the tourist trail. It's also one of the places that make you think "if only", as it contains what is left of the Imperial Enclosure and the Forbidden Purple City. What is still intact (and what they've restored) is beautiful, but much of it was destroyed during the fighting around the Tet offensive of the Vietnam War, so you have the slightly incongruous sight of the restored throne/reception room next to bombed-out ruins that are now home to vegetable gardens.
Hue was notable for me primarily for being crazily hot and sticky, which made walking over the bridge to see the Citadel and Imperial Enclosure into a seriously sweaty venture, and discouraged me from doing much more exploring beyond that. The only other sight I saw much of was the DMZ Cafe/Bar, where I ended up meeting up with the Intrepid crew again, as well as several of my drinking companions from Nha Trang, and spent a certain amount of time losing to Arjan at pool again.
From there, it was another overnight train up to Hanoi, this one a much longer affair (about 13 hours), and again in the company of the Intrepid lot. This gave me the opportunity to finally drink up some of the duty-free vodka I'd got when crossing the Cambodian border (and carried around pointlessly for the last few weeks), but again it wasn't too late a night given that we were arriving at the ungodly hour of 5:30am. Luckily, I had contacted the Hanoi Backpackers' Hostel (my intended destination) in advance and they sent a bloke down to the station to meet me off the train, saving me the hassle of arguing with moto and taxi drivers at that hour in the morning (they're infamous in Hanoi for taking you to places that pay commission rather than necessarily to where you asked to go).
Once settled in here in Hanoi (for that is where I am now), I got myself booked on to a 3-day trip to Ha Long Bay, and then got on with the important business of getting to know the other denizens of the hostel - it is SO nice to be back in a hostel/dorm-based system, as it makes it so much easier to meet new people. It's not ideal for my liver, given that the combination of me and a bunch of other backpackers tends to result in drinking, but I only realised when I got here how much I've missed having this kind of atmosphere around me. The Ha Long Bay trip itself was pretty good fun. I had a decent group, the food was pretty good (apart from the miserable excuses for breakfasts), it was just a pity the weather wasn't that great - overcast much of the time, and pretty chilly, with mist on the first day that was dramatic for a while (rocky islands rising out of the mist) and then just irritating as it stopped you getting much of a view. We saw various caves, as well as climbing a hill (felt more like a mountain to me, but then we all know I hate hills) to get some lovely views across Cat Ba island (the biggest one in the bay), and seeing a hospital from the war which was built in a cave to protect it from American bombing (which was in operation for 10 years, yet another tribute to Vietnamese stubbornness and ingenuity).
So I got back to Hanoi a couple of days ago, and have since just been having a laugh here. There's a really nice bunch in the hostel, and I'm enjoying not moving on and not having to pack/unpack my bags all the damned time. Having talked to people who recently came back from there and informed me the weather is shite right now (= little visibility), I've decided not to make the run up to Sapa in the mountains, and just enjoy myself here.
And that's enough e-mailing for now. I'll probably write one more before I leave on Friday, but for now I need to go try and get a ticket for the water-puppet show.
Hope all is well wherever you are. Take care and have fun,
Pat
You'll be variously relieved or disappointed that this is probably going to be one of the last of these mails. Including today, I have 5 days left on this odyssey, so soon your Inboxes will be molested no longer.
So, back to what I've been up to. The quick summary would be: socialising, shopping, sweating, soaking up the beer and sailing around on a boat.
The train journey up from Nha Trang to Da Nang was actually pretty good - I got chatting whilst on the platform with a group of fellow backpackers who, it turned out, were on a trip with Intrepid, the company that my big sister Zara toured SE Asia with a few years back. I was a few compartments down from them but ended up sitting chatting with them for quite a bit of the evening. Turns out that two of them were from Huntingdon, about 20 minutes' drive from where I grew up, and that another was from the same suburb of Canberra (Yaralumla) as my cousins out there, and knew them from school. When I bumped into them again a few days later, it also turned out that one of the couples had recently done a trip through Africa with Acacia, the same company I used last year, and had had both my driver and my guide from that trip as drivers on their trip. It is, as they say, a small world, particularly when you're backpacking. So, that accounted for the initial socialising (which was more lucid than sometimes given that I'd decided I really needed a night off the grog).
The shopping bit was at Hoi An. That was pretty much everything I was expecting it to be. The Old Town was really quite picturesque, the weather was hot and sticky, and the tailors' shops were omnipresent and ridiculously cheap. By omnipresent, I mean that literally every other shop through the centre of town was a tailor's, and many of those inbetween were cobblers' places. Well, that's not 100% accurate - the shopfronts would take your order, including selecting fabrics, and measure you up, but the actual cutting and sewing went on elsewhere in town. As a result of this, I was initially quite cautious and ordered one or two things each at 3 different shops, as well as getting some replacement sandals and some sneakers made at one of the shoe-shops.
One slightly surreal aspect of the Hoi An tailor experience is that, possibly due to the overwhelming presence of British travellers (or Aussies/Kiwis returning from living in the UK), nearly every tailor's has a few years' worth of back-copies of the Next catalogue, from which they will cheerfully copy anything, making it to your size. Another thing that takes a bit of getting used to is the fascination that the staff in the shops (mostly girls) have with Westerners and their pale skin. In contrast to the sun-worshippers of most Western countries, who would sell their granny for a good tan, many Southeast Asian peoples value pale skin. It seems to be a status thing, as darker skin is associated with performing manual labour outside in the fields whereas pale skin indicates a job indoors (probably better-paid). Whatever the reason, it means that one of the sights I will indelibly associate with Viet Nam (and to a lesser extent with Cambodia) is that of the local girls, riding their scooters, with wide-brimmed hats, masks to cover their faces, long-legged trousers and long glooves to cover their arms, all designed to keep them as white as possible.
At any rate, this means that one of the first questions many Western guys here, if apparently unaccompanied, get asked is "Where your wife?" or "You travel with girlfriend?". An answer in the negative tends to then result in much giggling and sometimes an offer to be introduced to a friend of hers. You also get a lot of comments on the line of "You so pale! You so handsome!". It would all be quite flattering were it not for the fact that most of it is blatantly part of the sales pitch - the girls in those shops are VERY well-practiced at persuading tourists to buy far more stuff than they originally planned to. I must admit that I ended up spending a little more than I had planned, though I didn't get overly carried away - my "No thankyou" routine got plenty more workout in response to the perpetual "You buy one more shirt?" entreaties.
In the time I didn't spend wandering around soaking up the atmosphere or getting fitted for clothes, I hung around with a Dutch guy called Arjan. We had met briefly in Nha Trang but, given that this was in the aftermath of the drunken boat trip, I couldn't actually remember where I had met him until he reminded me. Anyway, he had also been on the train up to Da Nang (though in a seat rather than a sleeper) and we got chatting on the minibus down to Hoi An and then ended up staying at the same hotel there. Given that we were both travelling solo, we also ended up meeting up for some meals, and having a few beers in the evening while he repeatedly thrashed me at pool (at one point I was on a 10-game losing streak...). However, Hoi An being rather less of a party-mad place than Nha Trang, most evenings there were a bit more restrained (our last night in town, as per usual, turned into a bit more of a party thanks to an American, two Aussies and a trio of Swedes).
From Hoi An, we were both headed up to Hue (that should have an accent on the e, but I can't be arsed working out how to get Gmail to do that - it's pronouned "hooway" rather than "hoo" or "hyoo"), which entailed another of the ridiculously cheap "Open Tour" buses - $2 in this case. This is the old Imperial capital of Viet Nam from the 19th Century, but nowadays is a relatively quiet stop on the tourist trail. It's also one of the places that make you think "if only", as it contains what is left of the Imperial Enclosure and the Forbidden Purple City. What is still intact (and what they've restored) is beautiful, but much of it was destroyed during the fighting around the Tet offensive of the Vietnam War, so you have the slightly incongruous sight of the restored throne/reception room next to bombed-out ruins that are now home to vegetable gardens.
Hue was notable for me primarily for being crazily hot and sticky, which made walking over the bridge to see the Citadel and Imperial Enclosure into a seriously sweaty venture, and discouraged me from doing much more exploring beyond that. The only other sight I saw much of was the DMZ Cafe/Bar, where I ended up meeting up with the Intrepid crew again, as well as several of my drinking companions from Nha Trang, and spent a certain amount of time losing to Arjan at pool again.
From there, it was another overnight train up to Hanoi, this one a much longer affair (about 13 hours), and again in the company of the Intrepid lot. This gave me the opportunity to finally drink up some of the duty-free vodka I'd got when crossing the Cambodian border (and carried around pointlessly for the last few weeks), but again it wasn't too late a night given that we were arriving at the ungodly hour of 5:30am. Luckily, I had contacted the Hanoi Backpackers' Hostel (my intended destination) in advance and they sent a bloke down to the station to meet me off the train, saving me the hassle of arguing with moto and taxi drivers at that hour in the morning (they're infamous in Hanoi for taking you to places that pay commission rather than necessarily to where you asked to go).
Once settled in here in Hanoi (for that is where I am now), I got myself booked on to a 3-day trip to Ha Long Bay, and then got on with the important business of getting to know the other denizens of the hostel - it is SO nice to be back in a hostel/dorm-based system, as it makes it so much easier to meet new people. It's not ideal for my liver, given that the combination of me and a bunch of other backpackers tends to result in drinking, but I only realised when I got here how much I've missed having this kind of atmosphere around me. The Ha Long Bay trip itself was pretty good fun. I had a decent group, the food was pretty good (apart from the miserable excuses for breakfasts), it was just a pity the weather wasn't that great - overcast much of the time, and pretty chilly, with mist on the first day that was dramatic for a while (rocky islands rising out of the mist) and then just irritating as it stopped you getting much of a view. We saw various caves, as well as climbing a hill (felt more like a mountain to me, but then we all know I hate hills) to get some lovely views across Cat Ba island (the biggest one in the bay), and seeing a hospital from the war which was built in a cave to protect it from American bombing (which was in operation for 10 years, yet another tribute to Vietnamese stubbornness and ingenuity).
So I got back to Hanoi a couple of days ago, and have since just been having a laugh here. There's a really nice bunch in the hostel, and I'm enjoying not moving on and not having to pack/unpack my bags all the damned time. Having talked to people who recently came back from there and informed me the weather is shite right now (= little visibility), I've decided not to make the run up to Sapa in the mountains, and just enjoy myself here.
And that's enough e-mailing for now. I'll probably write one more before I leave on Friday, but for now I need to go try and get a ticket for the water-puppet show.
Hope all is well wherever you are. Take care and have fun,
Pat
posted by Pat at 7:58 am
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