Leo and Sonny on Tour - Vietnam

Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City

Our first stop in Vietnam was Ho Chi Minh City which the locals still like to refer to as Saigon, although you have to be careful who's around when saying this. We arrived there in the evening and were pleasantly surprised to find that the weather was lovely despite all the news reports of heavy rainfall and typhoons. We spent four days in this incredibly busy but fascinating city. We discovered on our ride into town that the driving was probably as mad as in China, the only difference being, over in Vietnam 90% of the population seems to get around town on mopeds and motorbikes. As our cab sped through the busy streets it felt as though we were playing some kind of game, desperately trying to dodge traffic that seemed to appear out of nowhere and from all sides. Once we were brave enough to open our eyes we noticed that a lot of the mopeds carried more than the favoured safety-limit of two people. Some of them were actually carrying a family of four on the back. With shopping! We were amazed that these things could actually fit so many people on them. Our hotel was near the riverfront and very close to one of the busiest and most popular streets aimed at tourists. The hotel however, recommended by a friend, was a very old colonial style building and had a hell of a lot more character and history to it than the more modern places springing up around town. This was one of our treats along the way. We discovered over our few days there that the guys at the reception desk had a great sense of humour and liked a good a giggle. On our last night they came over to Leo and told him that he looked like Nicholas Cage, we actually thought they were joking as they like to tease, but this was the only time they were actually serious.
Our first proper day in town we took a walk through the city to get a feel for the place on foot. Due to the heat and size of the place we were only able to see a few of the sights. Mainly the old cathedral called Notre Dame, after its sister in Paris, the old presidential palace, a beautiful old post office with original phone booths that would be hooked up to an operator and of course the main shopping area which was also the old colonial part of town. We got so into the walking that we completely forgot about lunch until about three when we realised that all restaurants stopped serving at 2:30. However, we did walk past a little place that still seemed to have some staff clearing up. We had our first Vietnamese meal and it was great. We had a seafood crepe which apparently are really popular thanks to the French influence. We also had a few little dishes of pickled spicy vegetables and some noodle soup, all really tasty. The nicest part of the meal was how friendly the waitresses were. They were really smiley and giggly and we could tell that they wished they could speak more English. We walked off our lunch through some of the markets and then headed back to the hotel before dinner. We thought that the city was busy during the daytime but it was pretty hectic and rammed in the evening but there was a lovely relaxed feel to the place and you almost felt like you were walking around a seaside resort. We walked quite a way to a restaurant that had been recommended in the guide, called Mandarine. At first we thought we were lost as we headed down a pretty dark and quite deserted street but eventually we found the place and it was definitely not a disappointment. We had the most incredible set menu, we started with some vegetable and crab spring rolls, some amazing prawns steamed in a coconut shell and served with a lovely spicy sauce, followed by slices of duck breast cooked in a sweet and sour sauce and not forgetting pudding,a fab crepe suzette and some vanilla ice cream that was served on a bowl made of ice in the shape of a heart! Our waiter was really friendly and saw us struggling to pick up the spring rolls with our chopsticks. He immediately came over and showed us that the right way to eat them was by wrapping them in some salad leaves and eating them with our hands. All round, an amazing and incredibly friendly experience and so so cheap. We really couldn't believe we had only spent relatively little on such a fine four course meal with a bottle of wine and a couple of drinks beforehand, and this was one of the top end restaurants! You would spend more for a rubber pizza and lukewarm water in Soho.
Despite the amazing views from our room, our first night's sleep turned out to be quite restless as we found out that the flow of traffic didn't actually peter out as the night progressed, it pretty much continued throughout the night til about 4:00am. We finally thought we were going to get some sleep and were woken up again by large trucks, buses, cars and cyclists hurtling passed our window honking their horns at 6:00am. On our way down to breakfast we decided that one sleepless night wasn't bad at all but seeing as we were going to be staying for a few, we decided that we would ask our nice guys at reception if it would be possible to swap to a quieter room. It was going to be kind of difficult seeing as they had randomly decided to upgrade us on our arrival (probably because of the Nicholas Cage thing) and gave us a HUGE room with an amazing view over the river. So we explained that as nice as the room was, we would be more than happy to settle for a normal sized room away from the road. They were really lovely about it and told us to go out and enjoy ourselves and they would arrange to move us to another room that afternoon once the other guests had left. We spent most of the day exploring other bits of the city and stopped off for lunch at a restaurant that was set up by an organisation that employed former street kids with the aim of giving them some training, a job and a roof over their heads. The restaurant itself was a funky little loft with views towards one of the large squares in town. Somehow our meals seemed to get cheaper by the day, we managed to have a two course meal with drinks for 10 dollars, including a very well earned tip! We had a great fish dish cooked in a clay pot and a spicy pork dish and of course the very popular deep fried spring rolls to start with, which were delicious.
After our lunch we were heading towards the famous war museum but black clouds appeared out of nowhere and we were caught in the heaviest downpour we had ever experienced and had to head for shelter, unfortunately this came in the shape of a large and pretty un-inspiring department store. Whilst standing by the entrance we noticed that Within half a minute of being in the rain people were completely soaked through, so making a run for it was probably not a good option seeing as the museum was quite a way. When the rain calmed down a little we decided to walk back towards the hotel which was a good 20 minute walk. On the way back the heavy downpour started again and we ducked into a tiny art shop which had some really beautiful oil canvas paintings created by a local Vietnamese artist. The lady in the shop got talking to us and very kindly offered us some seats when it looked like the rain was not going to stop for some time. By the time we left we had fallen in love with a small but very colourful piece and decided we couldn't leave without one, very naughty of us but our reasoning was that everytime we looked at it, we would remember our time in Vietnam! We finally got back to our hotel and got taken to our room and to our HUGE embarrassment, they had not only moved us to a quieter part of the hotel facing the courtyard but it was also on the top floor and this time they had given us an even bigger room which to be honest we thought couldn't be possible as the last one had been enormous! This one to our amusement had a piano and a dining area!!! Why and how they had decided we deserved such a place was beyond us as we had arrived looking pretty scruffy, sporting massive rucksacks on our backs and had phoned last minute to make the booking and had cheekily asked for any possible discount!!!! But, we didn't complain. After a much needed siesta, and a tinkle on the old Joanna, we went out for dinner.
One thing you have to get used to in Vietnam is the number of people who approach you to sell you their goods, anything from post cards, t-shirts, and souvenirs to massages and cigarettes! You actually can't go very far without someone coming up to you. Motorcyclists are also keen to drive you anywhere for a fee and desperately try to find out where you are heading to try and get you to catch a ride with them. One thing that we had promised ourselves to do which we never did, was to hire a cyclo for an hour or two. We had read about their story in Lonely Planet and were determined to give these guys a helping hand. Apparently most of these guys were scholars, doctors, lawyers and teachers during the war and had sided with the South and ultimately, the Americans. When the new government took over they were all sent to "re-education" camps for a couple of years where, once out, they were not allowed by law to own property or a business, and to this day they still aren't. Many of them for this reason are not married and apparently are not legally allowed to be in the city. One day we were followed by a boy who must have been no more than 10, selling postcards and desperately wanted us to buy a pack. We tried to explain that being the lazy buggers that we are, buying postcards would be useless as we didn't like writing (the truth was we had already bought a million). He kept asking why we didn't like writing and he insisted that we should go to school to learn to like writing, he was hilarious. On one of the streets about 10 minutes from our hotel we discovered a great restaurant called Lemon Grass. It was a cosy little restaurant and once again we were not disappointed with the food. We had some amazing noodle and beef dishes, one of which was a little spicy but became incredibly spicy and practically impossible to eat once Leo got carried away with the other spicy sauce that came with the dish. Only too late did he realise that he went a little too far with the old seasoning. Earlier that day we had decided to try and take a day trip to the famous Cu Chi tunnels which had been built by the Viet Nam Cong San (which means Vietnam Communist - Viet Cong or VC for short) during the Vietnam war. We booked it through a travel agency and were being picked up the following morning at 7:30...NICE!
Cu chi tunnels
The trip started with a pick up of a couple of other tourists, a young Aussie couple called Brad and Kaylee from Melbourne. They were really nice and easy-going; Kaylee very chatty and Brad eating anything which looked edible, or not (more on that later). Sonny was really grumpy as she didn't sleep much in the night so we hid in the back of the bus hoping we might get a bit of shut-eye on the road. Fat chance. The highways were like swiss cheese - more potholes than tarmac. The bus did crazy Mad-Max driving for 2 hours, playing chicken with other, larger vehicles. Lonely planet claims that the number of head-on collisions between large vehicles has increased dramatically other the past few years - it seems truck drivers are getting territorial over which side(s) of the road they are allowed to drive on: it should be the right, but many think it's both. On the way to the area where the tunnels are, we had the main US Army base pointed out to us which is abandoned now. We heard mentioned of a few town names which are ubiquitous in Vietnam films, such as 'Trang Bang' (begin Sylvester Stallone/Rambo style flashblack to 'Nam). We stopped off for a visit to a rubber tree plantation which was kind of interesting. The views of acres and acres of perfectly lined-up trees was pretty stunning. The rubber is extracted by slashing the tree with a machete in a spiral pattern so it oozes out and pours off into a half coconut shell mounted below. The stuff is pure white and not very rubbery (think they vulcanise it later on to make it more rubbery - vague memory of school lessons). Brad bought some necklaces (or Necklarses as they are pronounced in the Melbourne dialect), made by local children out of fallen rubber tree nuts which we all had to wear to mark us out as tourists. Brad was very generous - he bought something from everyone he met without any haggling or anything. Aussies are pretty generous people.
Anyway, next stop tunnels. Our tour guide ushered us into a kind of 80s multimedia den, with plastic models of the local area showing the tunnels and entrances lit up by small light bulbs, most of which had blown. We were shown a brilliantly anti-american black and white video obviously made soon after the war, describing with great pride how guerilla-trained local fighters had outsmarted the lumbering American soldiers and killed many. A particular massacre by the americans which is alluded to in various Oliver Stone movies is described more than once - village women and children being killed indiscriminately by the enemy. They were pretty pissed off about this understandably enough, although I am trying to find out the accurate details of what happened on the internet as either sides story is going to be biased.
The main part of the presentation was about the tunnels - the number, size and layout. It was amazing - the total length of tunnels went to kilometres from the outskirts of Saigon to the river and they are all really, really small. Because many of these were constructed quite far below ground, small air vents were created and to the untrained eye looked like little mouse holes. The Americans would have had to look pretty hard to spot these in the jungle! All the tunnels were constructed like small villages with hospitals, military headquarters and kitchens. We discovered that the kitchens had fires with special chimneys which would let the smoke drift out towards the surface in small quantities very slowly but a number of metres away from the actual kitchen so that the Americans would bomb the wrong area. We were also told that the tunnels were built over a minimum of three levels, the further down you went, the narrower the width of the tunnels became. They would literally be big enough for a VC to crawl through lying down, which means that many of the GI's got stuck underground. If the enemy did manage to get down further than the first level, trap doors were also built on the floor with some pretty nasty spiky traps set, aimed at injuring or killing the intruders. Our guide explained that marriages between the VC's troops took place in these underground tunnels as well as births. It was incredible to think that entire communities lived underground for so long.
We set off with out tour guide (his name was 'An' - a graduate of tourism studies from Saigon, a very popular degree at the moment. Lots of cash in tourism although An seemed to genuinely enjoy what he did and was a fountain of information if pushed a little). First up was demo of how damned small these tunnels were - the Viet Cong used their small stature to great effect and made sure your average GI Joe could not get into any of their tunnels. You were lead into a small clearing with some leaves on the floor. Suddenly a small section of the floor rose up with a grinning local tour guide (who were all dressed as VC soldiers) popped up from a hole I couldn't get one leg into. It all suddenly came together - the video had described all this and how effective it was, but to see a guy pop out of nowhere, you can understand why the US soldiers were pretty spooked by the whole thing. They offered for me to try and get in, which was obviously impossible - point made, but it was doubtful that even Sonny could get into the hole or at least she may not have made it out again, so we didn't try. Later on, An explained how an American tourist had insisted on getting into the entrance hole and to everyones amazement he actually made it. Unfortunately he got stuck and couldn't get out. It took four guides to twist him out and apparently his skin was all scratched from the squeezing through which took some time! We were relieved we hadn't tried.
Next up was a demonstration of the various gruesome man-traps the VC had installed to maim or kill the U.S. soldiers
. These were rotating spiked affairs which used gravity to impale the legs and other bits so they would have to be sent home. The VC had a signalling system so they would know where these traps were when running through the forest. Not sure how effective these things were in reality - they are in various 'Nam films.
Once the US Soldiers had realised that the VC troops weren't actually ghosts and were using a network of underground tunnels to wage their war, they started using sniffer dogs, trained to recognise the smell of Vietnamese soldiers over US soldiers (presumably using VC prisoners) to search out the tunnels. THey would then tip nasty chemicals into the air holes the dogs found, or flood them with water. The flooding did not have an effect as the tunnels were finally connected to the Saigon river to counter such things (and the massive amount of rain which falls in Vietnam I suppose). To counter the dog threat, the Vietnamese used a mixture of Garlic and chili around the air holes so that the dogs would just sneeze and couldn't smell the VC soldiers. We were told this was very effective, so I guess the Americans never worked out why their dogs suddenly started sneezing all the time and that this meant they had found a tunnel air-hole.
On other occasions the VC's would use uniforms from dead GI's and bury them near the air vents so that the dogs would be thrown off the scent.
Next stop was a demonstration of how they used one of the many unexploded bombs from the original unsuccessful air campaigns to wipe out the VC soldiers (i.e. before they realised they were underground) to make anti-tank mines. They were very simple and effective. By way of example there is a mangled US tank which you can get into and see how powerful the bombs needed to be to ruin 2 inch thick iron.
Then we moved on to an opportunity to fire some genuine Vietnamese automatic rifles. We did not fancy it after all that (and I have fired a machine gun before on a stag do - never again). These were big rifle like guns, very heavy with a long barrel and huge bullets. They were so loud when fired on their own that you wonder how anyone could hear anything when they are all firing at once.
Brad had a go though and came back with a big grin on his face.
The only thing remaining to do was to actually go into a tunnel and see what it is really like. This sadly wasn't quite possible as westerners could not fit in to the real ones. Instead, they had widened one of the shorter, less historically important ones to fit the increased western bulk. Inside it was hot and stuffy, the floors sandy rock and walls realistically lit with flickering-candle light bulbs to give you an idea of how gloomy it must have been, These guys spent months at a time down there, babies born, couples married. Incredible - 'no one else would have put up with it' is an easy thing to say, but you really believe no one on earth would consciously choose to do this rather than just run off and hide somewhere else. But to their credit - it paid off. The US were effectively defeated by the North Vietnamese communists (despite many times more loss of life on the North Vietnamese and VC side), signed a treaty and pulled out in 1973 leaving the south Vietnamese on their own to be rapidly defeated, and the country unified under communism.
One final stop was to try some food they ate during their times in the tunnel - a root which they boiled up with tasted like a very bland parsnip which they dipped in salt and crushed peanuts. It was OK, but I wouldn't like to survive on it for months on end in a small tunnel. Brad actually found a whole bucket of these things but they were raw. When our guide began explaining that these were the staple diet of the VC's during the war, he wasted no time in grabbing one and taking a bite to the utter amazement and horror of our guide. An explained that if eaten raw these would give you a bad tummy. Brad soon changed his mind and spat out the rest of it and waited to taste the cooked version.
We returned to the coach, looking forward to getting out of the heat - by then our shirts were wet and I was getting grumpy - but not to more road time, bouncing around in the back of the bus. The drive of about 2 hours brought us to an area of the Mekong Delta where we hopped on a wooden boat where the driver hacked us 4 coconuts with straws to sip on the ride over to an island. The island people made everything they feasibly could out of coconuts (no bra's though for some reason). We were shown a coconut candy shop where they squeeze out the juice, boil it with sugar and some herbs to make a syrup, mix it with nuts and chop into cubes which taste very much like snickers without the chocolate. We tried some liquor, some candied stips of coconut and ginger (yeeuch). They kept bees for honey which they mixed with their tea which was a local speciality sold in every cafe. We were invited to pick up the honeycomb structures, covered in bees, and sample fresh honey from the cells...a nervewracking experience but the bees do not sting when they are making honey apparently. Not as bad as what followed - the pet python. It was only a baby, about 5 kilogrammes and over a metre long, but it was our first snake and it seemed to know it too. He was pretty keen on wrapping himself around my neck and crawling up my t-shirt sleeve. The locals thought it was hilarious that we could be scared of a non-venomous, small and very friendly baby python. Sonny was in spasms by this point. The only thing they convinced her to do was to give it a squeeze. The local girls found it hilarious to see her reaction when it began moving. She literally jumped about a metre in the air.
What followed was an invitation to the local Sunday entertainment. All the village was gathered in a large hall - no walls, just a roof - with a kind of compere on a megaphone and a small band. They all cheered and laughed when we turned up. The compere was singing songs which sounded quite fruity from the way the teenage girls were giggling - all sounding very strange to us in the very strangled pentatonic scale they use and the one stringed instruments which mostly go 'TWANG'. Our tour guide got up and did a little number half in Vietnamese, half in English. We were petrified that this was all a set up and he was going to invite us up there and do a turn so they could all have a good laugh at the foreigners. We even had a hurried conference to figure out what we might do to, 2 pommes, 2 aussies, to entertain the crowd. Our fears proved unfounded though and we were off the hook.
What followed was a spectacular cruise on all-woman-powered sampans through very authentic looking waterways, straight out of any Vietnam film. We half expected Martin Sheen's head to appear out of the water and wondered if Colonel Kurtz was taking home visits. It was peaceful and beautiful though - we glided (glid??) along under a jungle canopy for about 20 minutes, occasionally coming across children playing in the muddy water until we drifted out into the main river to meet our boat. The trip back was uneventful but still bumpy so we got back tired and ready for a siesta. Before going out for some nice dinner, I had a quite tinkle on our piano and found I could still play chopsticks and axel-f. Excellent.
The evening we decided to try out one of the French restaurants which are well known to be quite good and you can sample fine French cooking for a fraction of the price of Paris or London. It did not disappoint, although it was by no means cheap compared to the Vietnamese restaurants. We both needed a red meat fix, so went for the entrecote au poivre which was delicious and very filling leaving us bloated and reminding us how much westerners eat compared to most of Asia - they eat about the same in volume, but it's mostly rice or noodles which fill you up, but quickly disappear and leave you with no mid night gut-ache from bad digestion.
The next morning was another early start, we had booked the standard tourist bus up to a place called Mui Ne Beach. We'd decided a bit of 'check in and check out' was well overdue following all the city visits so far, and running around visiting all the historical sights.
The bus was OK - they never get over 50km/h in Vietnam as the roads aren't up to it and the traffic doesn't permit it as it's 97% mopeds with a family and cargo on each. We saw a family of four on a 75cc moped with shopping, the mum on the phone, baby perched on the handlebars. Take this and multiply by 1 million and you get an idea of navigating around, in or out of Saigon. It's a big computer game - everyone seems to believe they have a multiple number of lives and that they can pretty much take outrageous risks in the hope that they will win some points - in this case an extra metre or so ahead of the next family.
Annnyyyway, back on the bus, it took about 4 hours to reach the place and to find out that despite promising to drop you off at your hotel, it's all a bit of a kickback scam and you go somewhere else. The bus is very cheap (about 7 dollars each) because the bus is 'sponsored' by a range of restaurants and hotels along the well trodden tourist/backpacker route from Saigon to Hanoi. This means that they have a destination in each place which they will go to first, then the driver will get you out and say he's off for lunch for a couple of hours and then he'll drive you where you want to go. He tells you to leave your bags on the coach and wait for him and the bus to come back. This didn't sound like a good idea, and luckily ours were in the centre aisle of the bus, so we grabbed them before getting off. This was all very confusing though and lots of fellow travellers who didn't quite get what was going on, watched in dismay as the the bus disappeared with their bags. We were just as confused but seemed to have come out OK - with our luggage.
So basically we sat around with a load of other disgruntled folk-who-just-wanted-to-get-to-the-beach, and ate crummy overpriced tourist food
at the only place there (the one which provides kickbacks to the bus drivers of course).
Tourguides and hoteliers swoop into the place like vultures and start picking off the backpackers with promise of party bus tours for 2 dollars (heavily subsidised again) and idyllic beach hammocks with fellow weary travellers. In the end the bus came back, but by then we had got pissed off with waiting and called our hotel who gladly came and rescued us in a car! Wished we done it sooner - it cost us two overpriced beers and 2 limp cheese toasties, but we met some nice Kiwis who were super-chuffed to see their bags come back.
We had booked a hotel for 2 nights called
the Victoria. It was one of the 'relatively' pricey ones in the area, but we had got a tip off in Saigon that if we booked through the local travel agents, you can get a hefty discount. This proved true and we got a beautiful bungalow by the beach in a stunning, amazing, superlative-busting
complex built out of wood, stone, rope and coconuts. Hammocks strewn casually along the pristine private white sandy beach of about 0.5 KM in length, erm.... massive pool etc etc. Cost 40 dollars a night with an enormous buffet breakfast (which we used and abused to skip lunch by eating late brekkie in the morning and early dinner in the evening). A lot by travellers standards I know and you can live fairly well on about 15 dollars a day in Vietnam at the moment (am doing so at the time of writing), but it was only for 2 nights right? Well, at first. Obviously we ended up staying a few more nights than scheduled as staring wistfully at sunsets from a hammock strung between coconut trees, one toe in the sea, is something that needs to be savoured at least once on a round the world trip.
Sue me...
The place was run by French people so the food was very good. The staff seemed a bit bewildered, as if the place was going through some major changes. They had a spunky new manager who we chatted to and, hearing that Sonny had been to school in Switzerland, introduced us to a team of hotel-management proteges who he had just inherited from a swiss school of, er, hotel-management. They were all very nice and reminded us how bouncy and wide eyed we were when we left university.
Reluctantly, we booked our next leg of the journey on the rip-off bus (the only way to do it unless you arrange a private thingy for about 50-100 dollars).
Dalat
We had read in the guide book that Dalat was a beautiful town that was definitely worth a visit if we were in the area, hence our decision to get back on the road and see some more of the country. Dalat was one of the very lucky parts of Vietnam that was not actually affected by the war. Both sides had decided that it was so beautiful that they would have to make it the neutral zone in order to preserve its natural beauty. Also, because of the French influence during the colonial period, many of the original buildings had been preserved. The bus ride up through the hills definitely gave us some promising signs as the countryside was stunning and the land very fertile. We had originally started off on our bus journey feeling fairly confident that despite the very early start (7:00am), we would be there by lunch time...WRONG! Our bus turned up outside the hotel and the first sign that it might be a long day was that it was a tiny minibus that really did look like it was on its last legs. We had tried to book a ticket ourselves over the phone but unfortunately the people at the cafe didn't speak any English, so the very friendly guy at reception offered to give us a hand. He told us that we would need to pay the bus driver when we got on board. So we got our bags on board and squeezed into two very small seats and waited for our grumpy driver. When he asked us for our tickets, we desperately tried to explain that we were meant to pay him for a ticket as we had not been to the cafe in person but had booked over the phone. We got very blank expressions and nothing else. We then had to head back to the reception desk with the guy and after a good 10 minutes trying to explain to the equally confused staff behind the desk what we were trying to say, we paid the guy and were on our way.


The bus stopped off at a couple more hotels to pick up more passengers, two of them, a really nice couple from Stoke. By this time the minibus was rammed and the driver was a nutter on the road. He very rarely drove on the right hand side, especially when taking very sharp corners and we honestly wondered how this lump of metal was actually going to get us to Dalat. After a couple of hours on the road, we made a stop at a cafe in a small town. Parked next to the cafe was an already crowded normal sized bus. We were told to get off and take our bags to the larger bus. This actually made more sense. We got on and it was rammed, so rammed that all the bags that were loaded up from the small mini van had to sit in the aisles. On the map, the distance from Mui Ne beach to Dalat was a fraction of the distance between Saigon and Mui Ne, so we figured that at the most it was going to be another hour.hmmmmm 4 hours later we actually arrive in Dalat. Exhausted, dying for the loo and extremely hungry. Not the best way to arrive at your next destination if you were hoping to do some sight-seeing on arrival. All the passengers got off and were told by an English speaking guide that the bus was going to stop at the various hotels everyone had booked and unfortunately the one we had booked was back at the beginning of town. The mere prospect of having to get back on the bus and do another 15 minutes was hell, so we decided we would much rather walk 20 minutes with our packs on our backs. We headed off to find somewhere to eat before checking in. We had probably walked 50 metres before we heard a very familiar "Hello my friends, where are you from?". Not wanting to be rude and say "look mate we've had six hours on a rammed bus, we are dying for a wee and some food so would you mind if we just got on our way?!", we turned round and smiled politely and said England. He was a really cool looking dude on a massive motorbike. He got off and gave us a huge smile and said that we looked like we had had one of the standard hellish tourist bus journeys which we nodded in agreement. He offered us a lift to our hotels and told us he was an Easy Rider. We had heard about these famous Easy Riders as the Lonely Planet had raved about them. Apparently the Easy Riders are as famous now as their home town. These guys apparently earn a living from taking tourists on day trips around the Dalat area and farther afield. Most of them have a good level of English and are really interesting people to get a proper view on the country and its history. We had kind of hoped we would run into one to see what they were like. We decided to take up his offer and he and his mate grabbed our packs and strapped them to the back of the bikes. The ride through town was amazing and I guess we both got the bug. When they dropped us off they told us about the day trips they offer and proceeded to bring out diaries with written testimonials of previous travellers from all over the world. Having read some of them we decided to give them a go. They told us to be downstairs the following day at 8:30.
After our check-in we went and had a lazy lunch at the cafe opposite the hotel. A really nice little place in the style of a French bistro and the food was great and very cheap. WE had a little walk around town before dinner. During the day the main streets were really busy with traffic and it was pretty hard to enjoy the sights without worrying about getting knocked down by oncoming traffic so it was a great relief to find that at night the main streets are closed off from traffic, allowing pedestrians time to enjoy the place. We noticed that for some bizarre reason, the only locals out and about were kids. Ranging from 6 right up to early 20's but no adults in sight. We later found out from our Easy Riders that it was because the schools were hosting parent evenings, all on the same night!!!! We had decided to go to a tiny restaurant recommended in the guide for great food and great prices, Cafe Des Arts. Apparently it was a restaurant run by a local artist who had many of his works on display. The restaurant was lovely and cosy, all the walls were made of bamboo. I had some great minced pork with chopped mint, stuffed in green peppers and Leo had some stir fried spicy beef with steamed rice. We also had a couple of starters, the deep fried spring rolls also known as Nems and some soup. Earlier that day we had realised that the painting we had bought in Saigon had been left on the coach but Leo had managed to contact the booking office and had found out that the painting had been found and was being kept in the local office. So before dinner we went to pick it up. We arrived at the restaurant sporting a tube which obviously contained some sort of artwork. We wondered whether the owner thought we were a couple of nutters coming to his Cafe Des Arts with a piece of artwork. He kept looking over at it so eventually we explained what had happened and he took a genuine interest in what we had bought. He had heard of the artist and told us that he was really good and that it was a good buy, which was nice. After dinner we strolled back to our hotel as we decided that getting hammered the night before a day spent on the back of a motorbike was probably not the best thing to do.

Day tour of Dalat and surrounds with our easy riders:
Ok, so we thought that our first day in Dalat was pretty exciting. After all we had met some really cool dudes, hitched a ride with them on their massive bikes and had wondered about a really pretty city and had eaten some great food, very cheaply. The one day tour with the Easy Riders was absolutely amazing and to be honest, having done it on the back of a bike, we don't think we could have really seen what the place was about any other way. Our first stop was an old pagoda built by Buddhist monks using old broken china and old beer bottles. The effect was actually quite striking as a dragon made out of thousands of pieces of china and old glass was constructed around the small garden leading out onto the street. The walls of the pagoda were colourfully decorated witht his stuff. Apparently the monks had decided to adopt their own local style when building it, instead of adopting the Chinese or traditional Vietnamese architecture. We were then driven to a very old train station which had been built during the colonial period by the French residents wanting easy access to the higher part of town. Unfortunately during the war it became too expensive to continue running it so eventually it closed down. The old trains are still standing by the two platforms. We were told by our guide, Chuong, that engineers from Sweden were originally called in when building the railroad as the tracks needed to work on steep hills. He also explained that if the government wanted to get the trains moving again, they would need to get foreign engineers to come in and help them rebuild some of the tracks that had been destroyed by the bombing and this would cost a fortune. So for now it's just a quick tourist stop-off in the area. We continued through town and into the countryside and were taken to this beautiful waterfall. It was a bit of hike down some steep steps and in the heat it was quite hard going but definitely worth it once we got there.
Our other driver, Ba, stopped off at a minority people's village outside of town. Because Vietnam borders so many countries, over the centuries a number of tribes from different countries moved into the country, today there are 54 different tribes dotted around the country. Mainly these tribes are found in the central highlands. Many of them have attempted to stay away from civilisation, much preferring to stick to their customs and what they know but the government has tried to relocate them and provide them with education as they seem to have very large families and are incredibly poor. Ba knew quite a few of the villagers and was so cheerful and playful with all the children who came to admire the bikes and the very strange looking passengers. There was a very small local shop in the village and in order to help them we decided to buy a few bags of sweeties for the kids. We had never seen children move so fast at the sight of the bags, it was practically impossible to hand them out fairly but it was nice to see them enjoying them. Ba also told us that for many years people from different minority villages were not allowed to marry unless the leader of each village agreed to the marriage. Normally the agreement would come in the form of the parents of the girl having to provide a number of buffalo or cows as a dowry which was presented to the village as a whole to host a big party. If the parents were not able to meet these demands, the marriage would not be allowed. Unfortunately some couples were desperate to marry and went against the wishes of their parents and ended up having to settle in the forests nearby where life was pretty hard. After our introduction to the minority people, this by the way is the way the Vietnamese call them, we were then taken to a beautiful lake where we were dropped off for a 10 minute walk to stretch our legs, take a few piccies and admire the view. Our last stop of the day was a place in town called the "crazy house" and it literally was crazy. The owner was the daughter of the second president of Vietnam. She obviously had a love for psychedelic Disney like buildings as her house was built in the shape of a massive tree. Each bedroom was decorated very differently, one was named the Kangaroo room because when you walked in there was a massive concrete kangaroo in the corner that had red fairy lights plugged into its eyes, giving it a really creepy feel to it. Another one was on the ground floor and the bed was built into this little tiny cave and there were huge concrete ants that were built around walls and the floor. All the rooms were really tiny and the beds were built into corners and there was very little light so it felt quite claustrophobic. The living room was a shrine to her parents, there were pictures and newspaper clippings and books that had been written by them. The house is still under construction and she lives with her toy boy in another part of town until the place is finished. We had read about the place in our guide and for 20 dollars you can hire one of the rooms but the description was somewhat different and gave it an artistic and cosy feel to the place. On seeing it we were kind of glad we had gone for something more traditional as the rooms were quite creepy and weird. Over lunch our guides talked to us about some of the longer trips they had undertaken with other tourists and they showed us some of the routes that they could take. We had been thinking about asking them about the ride to Hoi An as we didn't really fancy taking another long bus journey. As it happens they had done this route many times and we read some of the testimonials and were convinced that this was the way to go. They drove us back to our hotel so that we could spend the remaining few hours of the day relaxing before our big journey.

On the road
We woke early at 7.30am, had some quick brekkie and met Ba and Chuong outside our hotel. Ba was interested in what it had cost to stay in the hotel we had been in - a Novotel which was the only one we could book over the phone and very last minute. They said it was a very elegant hotel and I suppose it was - it had a nice colonial feel to it but the rooms were quite ordinary and smelled of cheese (probably our feet by this point). I told them it cost about 40 dollars and they nearly fell over in shock. Whoops. I had kind of expected a reaction and I didn't want to lie to them (we got a MASSIVE discount on the rack rate so I thought they would be pleased with our bargaining skills!), but they were really quite perturbed. Ba asked why on earth we would want to pay that much for a hotel room, what was so special and I thought I might try to explain why - that it was a brilliant bargain compared to back home and seeing as food and drink were so cheap, why not?!, but decided this would be a bad idea and they probably would think I was an idiot anyway. In fact, that's what I told them - I just said we didn't know how much a place should be and we were stupid. They promised that on the road we would never pay more than 15 dollars to which I said great and privately thought at least I will be able to find out what you really get for 40 dollars as I really didn't know what the difference was. Maybe I could answer their questions a little better afterwards.
You might wonder what they do with our large and heavy backpacks on a motorbike. Quite simple and effective really - they have a bunch of strong rubber ropes which they use to sit the packs up on a small ledge at the back of the two person seat. The passengers, us, can then use the packs as backrests which are really quite comfortable and make you feel a lot safer than the previous day where we were just riding around town. The drivers themselves pretty much wear what they are taking. They had one set of clothes for the road and one clean shirt for the evenings (driving stuff gets really dirty as we found out later). I felt a bit like we'd overpacked at this point. We set off heading south initially to circle around Dalat and eventually wind up heading north towards Hanoi (about 800K to 1000K north). The journey was to take us through the central highlands and then on the the Ho CHi Minh trail which all sounded rather exciting but we hadn't actually read about in L.P. yet so we did not realise what incredible sights we had in store - just thought we were getting a ride to Hoi An!. Vietnam is/was a bit like that for us - just get up and go, ask questions later, which has worked fine up to the time of writing.
The initial realisation of what we were going to see happened about half an hour later as we climbed a hill in the bright morning sunlight and swooped down the other side into beautiful farm fields with coffee plants, coconuts, flowers and the whole road to ourselves. Within an hour of leaving we had stopped twice to visit farms where Ba and Chuong laid on full guided tours with extensive details of how the farm worked
- what they made, when they made it, where it went etc. We realised after the 2nd stop that we had actually booked a full on and personal guided tour of half of Vietnam and wouldn't be just sitting in a bike seat for 5 days. This was a bit of a revelation - these guys really knew their stuff and study all through the low season to prepare for the high season (when we were there) when they spend every day on the road earning their keep. What a bargain!
Most of the farms we came across grew coffee like the ones we had seen the day before, but on we stopped at kept silkworms and the leafy plant they eat, and they have to grow a ton of it to feed the worms to the uber-fatboy size they need to be before they produce the silk.
The worms sit around in trays for a 30 days eating most and sleeping the rest, then they hit a final binge period where they eat continuously for 5 days, in the process increasingly their weight by a factor of about 5. They then weave a cocoon around themselves and this is the point at which they are whisked off to a silk weavers, boiled and the carefully woven cotton of their cocoons is unwoven to make kimonos and the like. At least they die after a good meal. Some of them are allowed to live to become the silkworm equivalent of butterflies so they can lay some more eggs, but most don't make it. The silk is spun out on a bunch of looms controlled by women, then spun and either shipped off to other factories, or woven right there into various patterns on ancient machines which you feed punch cards into and make a lot of noise. We bought a small shawl (or pashmina if you like) of freshly woven silk and had some artichoke tea with some other English tourists.
On with the show and we visited a few other bits and pieces - a flower farm where they grow huge tulips
and roses for export to China, Japan, and even Europe. The Dalat flowers are famous for longevity - lasting for 10 days before starting to die and the land is used for flowers as there is too much fertiliser from growing vegetables and nothing else will grow. There seemed to be quite a lot of new methods promoted by the government on how to use the land properly (but what do I know as a computer programmer) - diversification of crops, organic vegetables etc.

Towards sunset we rode over the peak of a hill revealing a classic Vietnam vista - a wide plain of rice paddies being farmed by people in pointed sun hats. Water Buffalo were everywhere, either grazing, or being used to pull the ploughs to turn the earth over for new rice planting. There was a hill in the middle with a building on the top which we realised we were heading towards - we had been told we were staying in a room which kings and queens used to stay in so this must be it. A spiral road leads up to the top to reveal a large swiss-chalet style house with incredible views over the plains. It had been used by the last king of Vietnam as a hunting lodge during the summer months and was now run by the government. Even though the place was a little tired, the views were spectacular and the people who ran it were really friendly. Our guides left us to settle in for a couple hours so that we could shower and rest a while after our long day on the road. They came to get us at 7:30 and took us to a floating restaurant. It was literally a massive wooden raft floating on a huge lake that had loads of lotus growing. The bridge to get onto the restaurant really did feel like it was on its last legs. We had a great dinner, the guys ordered some local specialities, including the famous rice wine. In fact we got quite pissed and had a good giggle, especially when we got talking about the type of music we all listened to. Our guide Ba, was a bit of a cool dude and he surprised us when he explained that in his opinion there three types of music: Red, Yellow and Green. He did a little dance to demonstrate the difference - Red, being a very communist style with lots of fist-in-the-air posturing and marching, Yellow being a kind of in the middle version that normal adults listen to, and green being kiddies music with no communist overtones.
Ba was really funny actually as he was quite attractive in a rugged kind of way, and wore jeans, biker t shirt, fingerless leather gloves and (fake) ray bands. We realised after a few stops that he got quite a bit of attention from passing ladies (after they had stopped staring at us that is). We'd go off to see something with Choung and come back to find a young girl (he was 43) leaning on his bike with 'that' sort of smile on his face. After a couple of days we teased him about how he had a girl in every town (the Vietnamese love to tease eachother and tourists), which made Choung laugh a lot. Ba smiled knowingly. From then on he was the Dude.
Day 2
Having ridden mainly over the hills the previous day, we arrived in the flatlands and rode most of our way through beautiful picturesque countryside, comprising mainly of rice paddies surrounded by beautiful mountains. Many of these rice paddies were being farmed by ladies sporting the traditional Vietnamese straw hats. This type of view was exactly what we had picture Vietnam looking like based on all the war films we had seen and it really was breathtaking. Most of the day was spent on the back of the bikes but the guides would stop frequently to let us stretch our legs, admire the views and take a few piccies which was really nice. The ride was so peaceful that you almost hoped that the stops would be spaced out quite a bit, that's how comfortable it was and how intoxicating it was to just watch the world go by. One of the stops we made was alongside the road to see stone masons carving out of huge slabs of granite, perfectly triangular stones used by locals to build houses and offices. Apparently the government was keen to find people as many jobs as possible and as the country is rich in granite and other types of stone, they have invested quite a bit in getting people trained up. In order to avoid people just carving up the countryside, the government actually designates the areas and sends the masons to work alongside the roads for days on end. Once a day a truck will pull up, estimate how many bricks have been made and pay the masons accordingly. They are then transported back to Saigon and other large cities to be sold to customers. It was amazing to watch these guys carve out of massive boulders perfectly formed triangular shaped stones using different sized chisels and a very large scary looking hammer. They worked so fast, it actually made you cringe every time the chisel would hit the stone as you were positive it was going to chop one of the guys fingers off instead!
Ba and Chuong told us that the main part of the day was going to spent trekking through the jungle to see some waterfalls which were supposed to be beautiful. On the way there we stopped very briefly at a town which during the war against the Americans was used by armies of the North as a base. We stopped by a memorial where two of the original tanks used by the communist army which actually did quite a lot of damage to the enemy, were on display. The captains' names were engraved on a plaque on the side of each of the vehicles, in honour of their achievements against the enemy. Our next stop was to a bakery where we to buy a picnic for our trek. Lots of nice looking stuff but everything was in Vietnamese so we just picked out a few things. Ba was a major cheese and every stop he made he actually managed to get the attention of one or a few of the local girls and would be busy impressing them with his cool motorbike. We continued our ride towards this national park where our trek was to begin and made another stop in one of the fields. We walked over to this hut where a guy was busy operating this scary looking piece of machinery that was sawing large bits of bamboo into chopsticks and kebab skewers. These were then piled up in the field to dry before being sent to Ho Chi Minh city where they were sanded down and polished, ready for export to other countries in Asia such as Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Singapore. One thing we did find out on this trip was that the Vietnamese try to avoid wasting anything, if possible they will find a use for everything. On a tiny farm they were making tofu, the residue was actually fed to the pigs to fatten them up much quicker than the conventional way of feeding animals which can be quite costly.
We drove through the park which was absolutely huge and the guys dropped at this path that led into the jungle. They told us that it would only take a couple of hours and the path was clearly marked out so there was no reason to get lost. They told us they would be waiting for us on the other side where we could have some refreshments before heading off to our rooms for the night. Ba drew us this map in the soil and with his very tricky English told us how to get there. It all seemed pretty straight forward...until we actually got lost!! The actual walk through the jungle was amazing, we saw some of the hugest trees and plants, some really nasty looking spiders. Leo unfortunately kept walking straight into their webs and he did get a little narky. Ba had given us a stick and told us to tap it as we walked along if we wanted to scare off snakes so I was busy tapping away and thankfully missed walking into the webs. We seemed to be doing really well on this path and we walked passed various landmarks they had told us to look out for, so far so good. We even managed to get to the two of the three waterfalls which really were amazing. Ba had told us that after the waterfalls we had to walk back across a suspension bridge we had walked across to get to the waterfalls. Seeing as we had seen two waterfalls we thought we would skip the third. What Ba failed to mention to us is that if we didn't walk far enough past the second waterfall we wouldn't actually see "the" suspension bridge he was referring to. So we retraced our steps, crossed the suspension bridge (muppets that we were didn't click that the bridge we had walked across was not technically a suspension bridge, just a few planks nailed together and suspended across a little stream, hmmmm). We turned right at the bridge as he told us and walked passed a few farm houses and some fields where they were growing little chillies. One of the farmers called out to us and tried to encourage us to bight into one. We politely declined and continued walking. We finally got to the end of this little dirt track and were on a main road, this was a good sign as the guides had told us that we would end up back on the road. We waited around for a bit as we were early but eventually we realised that something was amiss as the guides were late. We decided to walk up the road towards the main entrance to see if they were busy looking for us as we thought that it probably wouldn't be a good idea heading back into the jungle as the search could take forever. We got to the cross roads and could see the main entrance in the distance so we decided to stand there for a bit to see if we would spot them driving around looking for a couple of tourists who were useless at directions! Finally there were some bikes that turned up but these were colleagues of theirs with passengers on the back. They told us that they were looking for us and to walk down the road a few minutes and they would see them. When we turned up at the resting point they were totally confused as to how we had ended up on the road by the entrance. We tried to explain to them what we had done but it was kind of lost in translation. They then proceeded to take us down to the waterfalls, a mere two minute walk from the resting point where we saw the massive suspension bridge they had mentioned. We now realised how easy and how close we were to the end. Very annoying!
Our stop for the night were a few bungalow rooms near a small waterfall. When we got to our room we realised that there was a massive hole in the tin roof and once the lights were on our welcoming committee arrived, flying cockroaches! No matter how many we managed to kill, they just kept on coming. Thankfully we were safe under our mosquito net but these things were GUGE! We were reading our books for a bit before dinner and suddenly there was loads of noise coming from the roof. Obviously some animal or animals were busy running up and down the roof making scratching and scuffling noises. Our guides had told us when we arrived to watch out for the frogs as we walked into the room, but no sign of any when we were taken there. We joined everyone for dinner, this was Ba's last night on the road with us as he had to go back to Dalat to sort out insurance for his bike. It had caught fire the day we were leaving Dalat and had to rush over to a mate's to borrow one. The insurance company had phoned to tell him he needed to fill out some forms and as insurers are notorious for not paying up very often he decided it would be best to head home and try and sort it out. We had a few too many rice wines with our dinner and got introduced to our new driver Hao. He was a friendly loud guy who came and had a few drinks with us. During the meal another of their easy rider colleagues got into a massive argument with some local guys at another table. He was pretty pissed and could barely stand up but he came over to our table and apologised and then kept pointing at the other table and yelling out how **** their government was. I don't know why as their government is his government.... I think that Ba and Chuong were a little on edge and suggested we turn in for the night. As we opened the door to our room around five frogs leapt out of the way. We had a whole eco system going on in there. One animal outside our window made the strangest noises and we couldn't figure out what it was but it sounded hilarious. When it first started making this noise we thought it might be one of our guides playing a practical joke on us, but when we were woken up in the middle of the night by the same noise, we figured it really couldn't be a joke. Unfortunately we never found out what the mysterious animal was.

Day 3
We woke early on Day 3 to see what new pets we had inherited overnight. There was a frog sitting impudently on the toilet roll, actually inside the holder. If you tried to pull a sheet off, it would make an annoyed ribbit and just walk around the roll. It wouldn't budge. We set off in search of breakfast and stopped to see how they made the Vietnam moonshine - rice wine. Anyone can make it to varying degrees of tastefulness and hangover-level the next day. As with any booze, the better ingredients you use, the less pounding your headache after a heavy night on the stuff. Sitting next to, quite literally the largest pig we have ever seen - 6 feet in length, with it's belly so big its spine was bent in a creaking 'U',
was a wood-fired still. The rice is boiled slowly all day, the moisture produced condensed in the top of the still and funnelled off to a bottle- FUNNEL. I am not sure if that is 'it', but the final product is a pretty fiery 30% proof and warms your cockles on the coldest night in the jungle (about 15 degrees). In fact we had indulged a little in some of this the night before and were feeling a little buzzy this morning. It's dead cheap and does the business. You repeat the process with the same rice to produce wine of decreasing strength -the first 50%, then 30%, 20 etc. They mix the different strengths to produce 30% overall. The over-over-boiled rice left at the end of all this is then fed to the pig-o-saurus, hence the farm can presumably produce tons of bacon every year too.
Breakfast was at a stop along the highway - more stares from the locals and confusion over just what were we doing there. Our guides sorted us out with some beautiful beef noodle soup. It's called 'Pho Bo' but all Vietnamese words are adorned with one of about 6 accents I can't type here, the effect of which is that it is pronounced something like 'Fur Ball'. The language is pretty difficult to read and pronounce much the Chinese 'pinyin'. You pretty much have to take pot luck when reading words out of lonely planet and hope you are not saying something really nasty about their mother, instead of asking for some coffee. The noodles came with plates of herbs - mint, of which there are 5 kinds in Vietnam, and some others which we couldn't name. Also, and the biggest revelation for myself, you are allowed and actively encouraged to eat chili with you breakfast - ALRIGHT! You chop up the fresh herbs into the bowl and put in the supplied chopped chillies which are 'Mexican strength' with nasty seeds, then you can even add some chili sauce found on every table in the same way brown sauce is in greasy spoons. Excellent! I am a convert and have eaten this for breakfast (and lunch) for most of the remainder of the trip. DOwn with cornflakes! No self respecting Vietnamese biker misses out on morning coffee and a cigarette so they have a little ritual involving these mini cafetieres which they put on top of your glass and allow to drip in. The top is filled with Trung Nyugen coffee (the countries favourite and a popular export) and hot water. The bottom of the glass has a dash of condensed milk - milk and sugar in one hit, which you stir in after the coffee has finished filtering from the top. It is delicious and potent. I didn't realise the condensed milk was there and drank it black and the guides made faces like sucking lemons. Maybe the strength is inherited from the French occupation.
After breakfast we set off on the longest day of actual riding - we had to travel 250km so were going to spend a bit of time in the saddle. We were on the way to a place called Kontum which got completely bombed to nothing, like most places in the central highlands. The first of our little stops then was where they made noodles which is achieved using a highly satisfying squeezy thing like the playdough barber shop. You put the dough in one end, wind the handle and watch the hairlike noodles ooze out of the end. They are then hung up on washing lines in the sun to dry out, They are the translucent vermicelli-style ones you see in the specialist section of supermarkets. They are far nicer that the yellow egg noodles which everyone seems to use in the UK when making Chinese/Thai/Vietnamese/anything-with-black-bean-sauce.
Next up was a pepper farm where they have to grow the goods on cut down tree trunks as pepper is a vine. This is obviously not too good for the countryside and initially caused quite a bit of deforestation as the VIetnamese realised the demand for pepper export. The government put a stop to it and replaced the tree trunks with concrete poles, not quite as pretty as the trees, but once the vine grows, looks the same. The pepper smells wonderful - very fresh, but we saw it quite early in the growing season so it was green.
We also stopped to see a curry-fruit farm. A what? Curry fruit, we eventually learned is just the fruit of a plant which has a reddish colouring and can be used as a replacement for the artificial red colourings they use in curries throughout the world. We had no idea which curries, but it was the same red as tikka massala so maybe that was it.
On the more historical stuff: we were really getting down to it now. We arrived in 'Death Valley' which is next to 'Death City'. The names are well earned - this is where there was the most bombing, in particular some really nasty big new american ordinance (which I forget the name of now, but recognised from some horrific film) which basically kills everyone within a 10 kilometre radius. Sounds like a nuclear weapon, but it isn't. It works by rapidly burning oxygen in the explosion, presumably by some special chemical reaction, which just sucks the air from all around and people and animals just suffocate where they stand. There are many stories about american troops evacuating the villages before dropping these but not being completely successful. I'll not assume outright that all of these are 100% reliable but there must have been some cases I suppose. The whole area was also subject to a new form of american attack - Agent Orange. The whole area for hundreds of kilometres was sprayed with this chemical to deforest the hills and valleys so that NVA (North Vietnamese Army) and Viet Cong had nowhere to hide. This was just one of the measures they had used to achieve this - firebombing with Napalm being the most highly publicised, Agent Orange doesn't get mentioned much in Vietnam war films. Unfortunately the effects of Agent Orange were far more long-lasting than just burning the trees. Nothing would grow back afterwards for a long while, and then only very stubbly useless grasses which the cattle couldn't eat. With the help of the Australians, they found that gum trees would grow so they have been planting these in copious amounts but I do not actually know if the gum trees serve any purpose other than to make the countryside look less barren, and to hold the soil together to stop desertification - there is masses of still-bare hillside from Agent Orange which looks like it's almost desert.
At all of the stops offs on this day, we were in view of the famous 'Charlie Hill'. Charlie was the nickname the american troops gave to the NVA and VC. The hill itself is quite large, very bald, and visible in the distance from the road we were on. It is right next to the Cambodian border. The NVA would follow the 'Ho Chi Minh Trail' which is a route all the way from the north through the mountains, then crossing into Cambodia, which they had partially occupied - presumably for strategic purposes to attack south Vietnam, although the Vietnamese have tried to get their paws on Cambodia at various points in history I believe, including in the late 70s. So the NVA would cross the border and mount Charlie Hill which was, at the time, covered in dense jungle, ideally suited to their sort of warfare and not the Americans style at all. After a long bloody time of successful attacks from the excellent strategic position on the hill, the chief warmonger of the US army, MacNamara, ordered a comprehensive fire and chemical bombing campaign of the hill and reduced it to it's sorry hairless state today. The smaller hill next to it was not used and you can really see the difference - it is covered in dense, lush jungle.
The next stop turned out to be one of the two 'Hamburger Hills'. Our guide Hao explained that there were two hills which were given the nickname by the Americans, the main one being up near the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), about 400km north. At first we were not completely sure why they were called this, but we speculated that it might be something to do with carnage, blood and guts. That turned out to be (probably) true when Hao explained what had gone on upon this hill. It was a highly strategic point with 360 views of the surrounding valleys and border to Cambodia so neither side wanted to concede it. Hence there were hundreds of troops sent towards it in a series of battles to gain the hill at any cost. Some days it was occupied by the US, the others by the NVA and VC. The results is that there are thousands of corpses, bullets, shrapnel pieces and bomb craters peppering the hill and surrounding valleys. Today, scrap metal merchants comb the countryside looking for piece to sell on the foundries for re-casting. We stopped off at a few off these and were quite dismayed to find piles and piles of bullets, bomb casings, army hats, and very few of the 'normal' things you find in the ground - old bikes, cans, supermarket trolleys etc. Macabre.
Another major sight in the area is the enormous forests of perfectly parallel
rubber trees. The French during their occupation discovered that Vietnam had the right kind of soil and a
nd climate to plant these. There are literally tens of kilometres of roadside plantations lining the route through the region. They are so perfectly lined up that you get trippy visual effects as you race through on the motorbikes, it was really disoriented. Although we had already visited one near the Ch-Chi tunnels, we stopped and got a lot more information about it all from our well-versed guide, Chuong. The most surprising thing he told us was that rubber trees actually don't breathe carbon dioxide and output oxygen like all other trees (as far as I know - we now have cause to doubt all that), but the opposite. Workers are told not to sleep in the forests as they may never wake up again. THe forests go as far as the eye can see in some places, so it is quite plausible! So despite seeing all these lovely new trees and feeling good about the environment, they actually do the opposite and contribute to CO2 emissions. The amount of greenhouse gas from rubber trees in Vietnam will be absolutely dwarfed by emissions from the zillions of motorbikes zipping around. MOre and more each year, and that day had announced new laws allowing each person to own more than one.
At dusk, with sore arses, we finally approach
ed Kontum. This is a nice looking small town and we saw our first tourist in 3 days (except for two others who were doing the same Easy Rider route as us who we bumped into occasional). We drove straight through town to a large wooden church built by the first French settlers. It was a full size church, not just some little wooden shack, which made it look strange - almost like a 5 story swiss chalet. It had stained glass windows, and organ, the works, as well as special seating for all the catholic minority village people who came down to use it from time to time. I am not sure why they had special seating for these people - sounds a bit like some sort of predjudice, apart from the fact that the whole thing had been specially built upon stilts to make the minority people feel at home (all their places are on stilts to keep out tigers and other toothy animals.
It was nice because it was unexpepected I suppose.
Round the back was an orphanage of which we had heard a lot on the trip so far. As we had arrived in the various minority peoples villages on the route, the guides had dished out either old clothes they had bought with them, or some sweets for the kids. We had asked whether we could help by buying something on the way to give them and they said not to worry - they would take care of that, but we should save our money for the orphanage. Fair enough I suppose - the minority peoples are extremely self-sufficient and turn down the offers of help and education from the Vietnamese government anyway, and orphans could probably really use the aid. At this point you should steel yourself for one of the saddest stories you may ever hear in you life and I am sorry to do this. After we had been taken up into the play area of the 2-9 year olds and had a lot of fun picking them up, swinging them around, letting them play with the velcro on our jackets, taking pictures and showing them to absolute hysteria, our guide quietly told us what the story was with these kids. 90% of them are from the minority villages of which there are many around Kontum, and the reason they are there is that the Minority people believe that when a mother dies during childbirth, that the child is an evil spirit. They will then bury the child alive with the mother.
This was pretty much more than we could bear. Sonny went off to meet some of the babies - I found her holding a 2 month old girl who had fallen asleep in her arms, fresh from the village that had tried to kill her. The guide was keen to point out that the orphanage had many children up for adoption and it is absolutely heartbreaking to stand there and feel like you should just abandon your own plans and try and bring one of these kids back to the UK. Heartbreaking. After some more playing we made a donation
and got a banana and a cup of tea with the matron who was very grateful. The rest of the night we tried to discuss the reasons why we should adopt children (not just Vietnamese) instead of having our own. This is a difficult topic with lots of intangibles, suffice to say we couldn't just adopt one then and there, but it's something everyone should consider. You start with 'why should you have your own kids when there are kids without parents all over the world', and see where it takes you. Interestingly, the Italians obviously discuss this more than most as they have the highest adoption rate in the world.
Good on them.
Finally we made it to the hotel, had a top dinner in some small cafe which served pancakes filled with barbecued items, which you then further wrapper in wet rice paper and dipped in a terrific sauce of some kind. Sleep came quickly after our butt breaking ride.

Day 4
Before travelling across the Ho Chi Minh trail we were taken to a few Rong houses which reminded us of Si and Hannah's emails. These were huge thatched roofed houses built on stilts and were used by the minority people as the town hall. They were constructed on stilts to protect them from the animals in the jungle, that's when they still lived in the jungle! The houses are still used for village functions such as marriages, meetings, school room and general get-togethers. There is a ladder on the left for the men, a ladder on the right for the women and two in the middle used by the elderly. At one of these visits we were taken to the house of the village chief who invited us to sit down and have some tea whilst he played some music on his bamboo that resembled a xylophone but with pedals. He invited Leo to have a go who turned out to be quite good, the chief was pleasantly surprised and gave him a massive pat on the back. Back on the road we were shown various views of the famous Charlie Hill which compared to many of its neighbouring hills was completely bare. Our guide Hao took us to the runway that was used by the Americans to transport troops in helicopters to the hill and other battlefields. By the side of the road there was a little shack where a lady, surrounded by chickens was busy making sweet potato and banana fritters. We sat down on some incredibly small stools and had some of these to keep us going as we were planning on having a late lunch as we had to cover so much in the day. Later that morning we stopped off at the burial sight of many unknown soldiers. This was because they didn't have dog tags like the Americans, they only had I.D. cards which very often were blown to bits when the men came under attack. This was the region where most of the action had taken place during the war, so dotted all over the place were memorial sights, cemeteries and army bases.
Before we got to the foot of the mountains we were going to cross we stopped to get a view over the Indochina triangle. The borders to Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. The border to Cambodia was only a 15 minute drive away and from our viewing point we could see the small military settlement based there to control immigration. During the American war this area was of huge importance to both sides and subsequently came under fire a lot. Part of the Ho Chi Minh trail was constructed very near Cambodia so that the soldiers could easily take refuge in the neighbouring country so the Americans were keen to try and keep the area off limits as much as possible. Unfortunately we didn't have time to drive over to the border as our guides were keen to get to our final stop before nightfall. They explained to us that driving at night was not such a good idea as there were huge and dangerous drops and the drivers were nutters. Along the way we were told about a mad suspension bridge that had been built by one of the minority villages and was a pretty scary looking thing. Nothing quite prepared us for what we saw, it was literally a few very thin and very flimsy looking planks of wood which were nailed together at intervals. The villages apparently would travel across this rickety thing using bikes and mopeds as well as on foot!!! Before daring us to go to the middle of the bridge we saw one of the locals, a guy in his teens carrying on his bag these huge bags filled with rice. Each of these must have weighed around 30 kilos. He had to make the trip across the bridge four times in order to get all the sacks across. Having watched this guy make his way across carrying such a heavy load we felt we couldn't really turn round and say no as we weren't carrying anything so it was likely to be a lot easier to get across. Walking across to the middle of bridge made us both feel like Indiana Jones, we were never quite sure whether the bridge would finally collapse after so many years in use and there was a scary drop down into this massive river. Once in the middle, you then had to carefully turn around and head back again. Not such an easy thing when the whole thing started swaying in the wind and you had to try not lose your balance!

The remainder of the day was spent travelling through some of the original Ho Chi Minh trail which was secretly used by the communist armies of the North to travel down south to fight against the Americans and the armies of the south. The Americans and the armies of the south had wanted to find the trail in order to cut the enemies' supplies off but most of it had been hidden by dense jungle. A new road has been constructed alongside some of the original trail to improve travelling conditions as most of it is just a dirt track alongside huge drops and these bits of the road can no longer be used. We were told by our guides that the Americans would send groups of soldiers from the south to the jungle areas to explore the land and try and find the trail. These groups were changed over every seven days and because the soldiers from each company were so worried about getting killed and were not used to travelling through the jungle they did everything they could to travel as slowly as possible before their shift was over. This meant that very little of the land was actually explored. The Viet Cong and the armies of the North spent most of their time hiding in the jungle and travelling on the trail at night in order to avoid detection. During the wet season the Americans and armies of the South would go back to base to wait for the weather to improve. The armies of the North and the Viet Cong spent this season in the jungle so they were pretty hard core and eventually got used to living in very harsh conditions. We were travelling through the area during the dry season and it was pretty hot so the wet season must have been unbearable with the humidity, the heat and the rain. We were told that the Viet Cong were always able to detect the enemies' presence in the jungle as they wore aftershave and smoked posh cigarettes which had a distinct smell. Apparently the Americans would leave lots of equipment by the jungle when moving back to base in order to make it easier to pin-point where they had to begin searching for the trail when they came back. Once they had left, the Viet Cong would move all the equipment to another location to throw them off their scent. They also always travelled by night, their vehicles were camouflaged using young sapling trees which were cut at their roots, the roots were then covered with fresh soil and watered in order to keep them alived and growing. They would then cover the vehicles with them and from the air they would be un-detectable. They also had squads called "human bridges". These guys would literally line up one in front of each other and would have to hold large planks of wood and create a bridge for the convoys of vehicles to cross the rivers.
The scenery around this trail was stunning, it was nice to see that so much of the jungle in this part of the country was still very much untouched and apparently the government is trying to protect it from further destruction. There were huge waterfalls, dense foliage and rivers everywhere. It was a scene out of "apocalypse now". The trail actually went over the mountains, the highest point in the country and when we stopped for some lunch the clouds were already beginning to appear and the temperature was dropping. For the first time in ages we actually felt chilly! After some laughing cow cheese slices and baguette and some scary looking pink sausage that had to be squeezed out of a tube, we got back on the bikes. It was really windy and foggy and we were beginning to feel quite cold and wondered what the weather was going to be like at our last stop. Chuong said that on the other side of the mountains it was likely to be really sunny and warm which was a relief. Having learnt so much about the famous trail the guides stopped th bikes and told us to take a walk along some of the original bits. According to them it was just a simple short walk following the natural path. They would be waiting by the main road on the other side. This all sounded pretty simple so we headed off down this really muddy track in the rain, through the trees, feeling pretty tired but quite intrigued to be walking along a piece of history. Having walked for a few minutes to a clearing where there was a huge electricity pole but no sign of our main road we decided that maybe the directions were not as clear as they could have been and we could have possibly gone a little too far so we headed back. On the way back as we got to a smaller clearing I felt something sting me near my ankle on one of my feet. I couldn't see anything so decided to keep walking but then felt another sting, this time on the other leg. I bent down to have a look and I saw what looked like a little black worm crawling further into my shoe and I had a sneaky suspicion that this had been the thing that had stung me. It was a little strange that worms could actually bight but I did remind myself that I was walking through the jungle in Vietnam so anything is possible. I started panicking a little as the sting was getting more painful and I had no idea whether there were more of these things on my clothes so I called out to Leo. He came running back having found a turn in the clearing, the main road and our guides having a cigarette break. Leo found another of these little worms crawling on my trousers and thought I was over-reacting a little. This was until our guide Chuong came down to check we were OK and told us they were leeches and we should get out of the clearing up onto the road. This time real panic set in and I was off at the speed of light up this rocky and muddy bank where I could have easily fallen and hurt myself. Once on the road I got my socks off and found that two leeches had got me and there was another one moving up my trousers looking for somewhere to settle itself for dinner. I was almost hysterical. Poor Leo and Chuong had to spend about five minutes checking my trousers, socks and shoes before I was convinced I could put them back on. They also found a couple of leeches on Leo's waterproof trousers. Having experienced a little jungle action we got back on our bikes as it was beginning to get dark and we still had a way to go before we got to the town where we were going to spend the night. All I kept wondering was whether there were others lurking around undetected and was desperate to have a shower and change into some clean clothes. We arrived at our little town and having spent a couple of hours showering and resting we met to meet the guides for our last dinner with them. We were taken to a local little restaurant in town and had some really nice food. A local spicy beef dish and some steamed fish and rice. we were all a bit quiet as it was our last night and I think that I was kind of sad at the thought that we were parting company the following day.

Day 5- On our last day we were allowed a lie-in, we were to check out at 8:00am, hurray!! Had a quick bowl of our favourite spicy noodles with some green tea and then hopped on our bikes for a short ride to a little village where we watched a lady making incense sticks that were then sold around the country and also exported to a number of countries in Asia. Back on the country routes our guides took us to a sight where apparently the communist armies of the North secretly stored their fuel supplies underground. The Americans weren't exactly sure where they were storing it so the area was heavily bombed throughout the war. Chuong told us because the fuel was stored in the area many convoys would travel through to pick up supplies and they would therefore have to enlist the help of local guerilla fighters to keep track of where the unexploded bombs had fallen to avoid as much damage as possible. The guerilla fighers in charge of this mission were girls aged between 14 and 18 years. They would camp out in the area and during the bombing raids would have to count out accurately how many bombs were dropped, how many of these had exploded and then locate the ones that had not yet exploded. They would then leave small red flags around the area to mark out a safe route for the convoys. This task was obviously not the safest and many of them were killed marking out the areas. During this stop Chuong also explained to us that many of the Southern Vietnamese armies were from middle class backgrounds and had gone through the university education system whereas the communist armies and the VC guerrillas were from the working class background. He said that the working class background obviously helped them through the war years to survive harsh conditions and to make do with the equipment that they had and survive by outwitting the enemy but once the war was over they became lazy and were not trained to be political leaders. Many of the policies passed by these new leaders made the country suffer enormously from an economic point of view and it is only now that they are beginning to recover from this setback. He also explained that the armies of the North were better equipped than the communist North and the armies of the South were paid for their military service whereas the north were fighting for their country. One of the last stops we made before entering Hoi An was an old Champa temple dedicated to the gods of fertility. They explained that this old civilisation built these temples in the shape of a penis, they looked very embarrassed when they had to tell me. Our guides took us to a great little hotel about a 10 minute walk from the old quarter and the room was only going to cost us 10 dollars a night including brekkie which was brilliant. We were then taken to a tailors shop they recommended as they were supposed to be very good and great value for money. The parting was incredibly sad and unfortunately I had got very attached to Chuong and ended up bursting into tears. We did promise that we would be back in the near future to do another amazing tour of his country and we exchanged email addresses.
Hoi An

After Chuong and Hao left us we wondered around the old quarter, feeling quite weird about being in a massive city full of other westerners and felt like running back and finding them. That evening we went for a pizza in true tourist style and immediately after ordering felt like we were bailing out on our great experience. The food turned out to be bland.
Our second day in the city we decided to go on a walk around the historic part of town which was a UNESCO world heritage sight. Unfortunately the weather was miserable, it rained all day and all night! But the actual walk was fascinating and we went into a small ceramic museum housed in an old Chinese merchants home which was interesting. We also visited one of the oldest colonial town houses which had been owned by the same family for three generations. The current owner, a retired Mathimatican teacher was really friendly and told us all about his family and the history of the house. He had obviously lived through the French colonial period and the war with the Americans. He had so many interesting antiques and showed us his family album. Having been disappointed with the pizza meal the night before we stopped off at a local noodle bar in the middle of the market and it was nice to feel like you were amongst the locals again. We got stared at lots, this was obviously one place that was not really frequented by many tourists. The noodles were really lovely and it made us think about our guides and the days we had spent on the bikes with them. We headed back to the tailors where we had been taken the day before for our first fitting. It was amazing to see the results, the clothes were amazing and fitted perfectly. We were told to come back the following morning to pick them up. That evening we decided to go to a restaurant that had been recommended to us by a Canadian couple. It was a restaurant run by a local and there was only one thing on the menu, whatever he was able to get hold of at the market that day. But according to this couple the food was brilliant. It was a nice little cosy place on the waterfront and the owner and his family were really friendly. The place was packed which was a good sign. When the food came, it lived up to expectations, it was amazing. We had some shrimp roses, a local speciality. Shrimps steamed and covered in rice paper, some nice nems (deep fried spring rolls), followed by a really nice fish stir fry with steamed rice and some grilled spicy pork with steamed mushrooms. The only thing was that there was far too much food so we had to leave some.

On our second day we got on a bus early in the morning rammed with other tourists bound for the old temple site of My Son about a three hour trip out of town. We were once again reminded of how nice our trip had been on the back of the bikes, having lots of time to stop off and see things and to sit comfortably. We got to the entrance to the sight and took a nice 5km walk up to the main sights. we were asked to sit down and watch a traditional dance by some locals. Some of the girls were sporting hats with candles on their heads which was different. The actual sight was really interesting and stunning, apparently it was a smaller version of Ankor Wot in Cambodia. Unfortunately the weather turned rubbish and we ended up having to walk around the place in the rain so taking piccies wasn't that easy. We headed back on the bus just before lunch and stopped by the river to board a small boat which would take us back to the city along the scenic route. It was really nice to be out in the open air again and we stopped off for a little wander round a pretty non-descript local pottery village. Lunch was served on the boat, it consisted of some congealed yellow rice and some stale and cold tasting deep fried spring rolls, yuuuummmmmmmy! The ride back was really nice and the views of Hoi An and the old quarter were really stunning. We strolled back to the hotel as it had started to rain again and spent a couple of hours watching HBO. The best meal we had was at a local restaurant in the old quarter which was famed for its steamed fish cooked in a banana leaf. When we got there it was rammed and we had a feeling we had definitely picked a winner. The dish was absolutely amazing, it was so nice that we were almost tempted to order another portion of it. The red mullet was cooked in a banana leaf with garlic, fresh lemon grass, butter and black pepper. Accompanied with some steamed rice, it was absolutely gorgeous. If anyone heads out to Hoi An in the not too distant future, definitely go and have a meal there, it's not expensive and the food is incredible. We found out that the dish was so famous that they had introduced some cooking classes for tourists so that they could take the recipe home. Unfortunately it was our last night in town so we can only guess as to how they make it.

Hanoi
Our next stop was the capital, Hanoi, up in the North of the country. The easiest way to get there aside from flying which was fairly pricey (50 dollars!) was the night train, so our hotel booked us the tickets. They got a local driver to take us to the train station in Danang to catch the 3:30pm which was due to arrive in Hanoi at 4:30am, a nice sociable hour to turn up! We just hoped that we were going to get some sleep, fat chance! We turned up at our compartment to find that we were sharing with three Vietnamese, two of which were going to share the same bunk. No idea how they managed to get some sleep but they all did. The ride was actually OK, we had loads of time to read our books and watch the scenery from our bunks. At about 8:00pm the Vietnamese guys went to sleep and we eventually decided to turn the lights out at 10:00 and try and get some sleep. Unfortunately one of the passengers on the lower bunk kept his mobile on throughout the night and someone kept calling him, and he made no attempt to keep his voice down as the Vietnamese have evolved by necessity a way of sleeping through any noise. They were obviously all related as they all had to talk to the person who was on the other end of the line. For some reason the guys who were on duty throughout the night kept opening the door to our compartment and would stand there staring at us for a few seconds before closing the door again. It was sort of disturbing, you almost felt like they were looking for someone. At 4:00am our fellow passengers woke up and decided that regardless of anyone else they would just carry on conversations as normal, i.e. very very loud. Particularly the little old lady who must have been deaf. Half an hour later our train pulled into Hanoi. Having nowhere to stay we decided to go to one of the larger hotels where reception was likely to be open at that hour. The guy behind the desk was really nice and spent some time phoning around town looking for some availability. We finally did find somewhere reasonable, but the room was only available from noon. The guy who answered the phone had agreed to open the place up to let us drop off our bags before walking around the city. We had hours to kill so we started off by walking over to the famous lake and found a bench by the edge of the water and watched the locals arrive for their morning Tai Chi sessions as the sun came up. It was a lovely time of the day and even though we were knackered it was amazing to see all these people up so early and doing exercise and it was people of all ages. After this we found a little cafe on the lake and filled our tummies with toasted cheese sandwiches and some of the nice strong Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk. (Mark - we found a sandwich made of pineapple, ham and banana which we thought you would appreciate!). We spent some of the morning exploring the streets of the old quarter which were still quite deserted. On one of the little streets in the old quarter near the main food market, We stumbled across another little cafe where the croissants looked inviting, so we stuffed our faces again and then found an internet cafe to pass some of the time catching up on news from home. By the time we finished in the internet cafe it was 9:00am and we still had three hours to kill and couldn't face eating more food. We decided to find out what sort of tours we could go on around the area so we popped into a couple of travel agencies to see what the prices were like and what was on offer. We found out that most of the tour operators offered a two day trip to the famous Halong Bay which was a UNESCO world heritage site full of huge stunning caves and some very large rocks sticking out of the sea, made famous by a couple of films including James Bond's "The man with the golden gun". After some thinking we decided to book one up. The clock was finally ticking away and we realised we only had another hour to kill so we decided to go back to the hotel to see if by any chance the room was available. Unfortunately it wasn't but by then the little cafe which also served up breakfast was open so we sat down and read our books for a bit. When we finally got our room we were exhausted and had little energy to start walking around some of the markets and shops or museums so we decided to have showers and look for somewhere for lunch before having a nap. We found a lovely little cafe that served up traditional Vietnamese food but in a lovely restored old colonial building that had a beautiful courtyard full of gorgeous plants and some lovely little bistro style tables. By normal Vietnam standards the food was quite expensive, we later discovered that the restaurant was actually listed in our Lonely Planet as one of the top end gastronomic restaurants in town. By UK standards it was really cheap at 25 quid for two main courses, some cheese and biscuits and wine. After our long awaited nap we went out to explore the city at night to find somewhere for a bight to eat. The city was really lovely but we had almost forgotten what it was like to try and walk around a busy city with so many mopeds and cars everywhere.
We had decided to try out one of the French restaurants as they were supposed to be some of the best in the country. In our Lonely Planet there was a small bistro style restaurant run by a French guy which was supposed to be worth a visit. The place was really lovely and cosy and the staff for very friendly. We actually met the owner who was doing the rounds and checking that everyone was happy with their meal. The food was delicious, I had the special which was pork fillets stuffed with cheese and serrano ham and some dauphinois potatoes, very very filling so unfortunately I had no room for a pudding. Leo had the steak and fries which was supposed to be one of the best things on the menu and boy, was it niiiiiice. After a very filling meal we strolled back. On the way to the hotel we stumbled across a procession, lots of people dressed up as dragons, turtles and some ancient looking Chinese men. There was a band and some girls all dressed up in traditional costume. Not sure what the procession was about but it was colourful and good fun to watch. One of the hundreds of rickshaw drivers stopped us and tried to get us to take a ride to the hotel even though we explained about 50 times that we needed the walk after such a massive meal. In the end we agreed to get him to give us a lift to a couple of the museums the following morning. We had read it was quite fun to do and an easy way to see the city and it was one way to get him to go home!
Day 2
Our cyclo driver arrived in the morning and cycled his way through the busy and very narrow streets of the old quarter with two of us sitting in the seat. No idea how these guys actually manage to get these pretty heavy things to move with two massive westerners on the back. The drive through town was interesting, on a number of occasions we thought we were actually going to plow into an oncoming bus or car and narrowly missed doing so but he kept telling us not to worry and enjoy the sights as he was used to getting around town. We were taken to the war museum where we were able to walk through various exhibitions dedicated to the war against the French in the 1940's and 50's and then the American war. There were lots of original photos, letters from soldiers to their families, original propaganda leaflets written by Ho Chi Minh himself and equipment used by communist armies in both wars. They also had a model of the famous tunnels we had been to see in Saigon, this one was a better version of the one that had been on display at the real tunnels. There some disturbing photos of local Vietnamese women and children in small villages being threatened at gun point by American troops, some elderly and young teenage boys stripped to their underwear kneeling on the ground with their hands held behind their heads looking petrified. They also had a glass cabinet full of instruments of torture apparently used by the Americans against the guerrilla soldiers, not very nice looking things. In the courtyard they had an incredible selection of figher plane wreckage that had been destroyed by the Vietcong, a couple of well used tanks that had belonged to the communist armies, listing how many platoons and American helicopters they had destroyed. It was an interesting place to spend a couple of hours, especially after all the sights we had seen en route to Hoi An with our Easy riders. We decided to say goodbye to our cyclo driver as he was charging us by the hour so we headed over to our next stop on foot, the history of Vietnam museum which according to the lonely planet was a good choice. The building was beautiful, an old colonial style structure with some beautiful gardens. We wondered round the floors dedicated to the ancient history but were also hoping to find some more details on the colonial period. Not sure whether they had recently decided to discontinue this particular exhibition but we never found it. We spent most of the day just wandering around the city and then ended up in some aussie bar and decided

Can't agree with Dave on Baros.
Yes he's shit but not as bad as a couple of former toon players. Marcelino, our former £5m centre-back, spent months out injured with a bruised finger and when he did play combined the concentration of Titus Bramble with the all-round ability of Robbie Elliot.
Tony Cunningham, from the dark days of the 1980s, had the first touch of Carlton Palmer, the workrate of Smart and the finishing ability of Geoff Thomas. And he was a striker.
Got me thinking, what is the all-time Premiership worst select 11? For me, it'd have to include Marcelino, George Weah's cousin that Souness signed for Southampton and a strike force of Jason Lee and Ade Akinbiyi.
Any other nominations?

I am watching us currently lose to Man Utd at the moment and I just wanted to say we are rubbish and going down. The other thing I wanted to add is Milan Baros is the worst footballer I have ever had the misfortune to see. I am not saying that I am a good player but I wouldn't even let him polish my boots, I would rather have blind one legged nun up front for my Villa than that limp twat. He is a miserable, slopey shouldered git, he has little to no first touch, he can't pass, head, finish or do anything that could be fit in the category as football. He mopes around the field, he needs a backbone replacement. 7.5 millin quid for that shit, O'Leary out, Ellis out, sell every one off our mediocre crap overpaid, ball-less idiots. Apart from Steven Davis (who will go to Man Utd).

arses

Temporary members of staff.

What is the point? We have had a temp here who left on Friday and she has "improved" one of my databases. Well, I say improved, I mean she has totally knackered it up. She has also freaked out the email account with her "logical" filing system. Instead of creating folders for sent mail, received mail or mail relating to this and that she created folders for each correspondent. We are left with 483 separate folders with unread mail in all of them, boy am I glad I don't have to sort that out. Doh!!!

Ah well, it gives me time to sort the database out which I quite like and it looks quite techie even when I am just moving fields and labels about just to make it look nice so people leave me alone.

Newcastle 1-1 Aston Villa

This is a brilliant written piece I think you toon fans will also agree.

If points were awarded for masochism, the followers of Newcastle United and Aston Villa would propel their misfiring teams into Europe. Only in the mad world of football would so many be so obsessed with so much mediocrity. This was an excruciatingly poor game, exceptional only in the loyalty of two sets of supporters who packed out St James' Park.

Black and white, claret and blue, these devotees have been left black and blue by recent failings. Humiliated in midweek cup combat, the disciples of Villa and Newcastle turned out on Saturday almost in a mass show of defiance, proclaiming an undying love for their clubs despite reservations about their management - deep ones in the case of Gallowgate with Graeme Souness.

Dissatisfied with unremedied defensive frailties, lack of progress and entertainment, Toon hearts and minds swirl with doubts. But, despite some flurries of protest, they refuse to vote with their feet. So in thrall to that black-and-white shirt, Newcastle fans are loth to berate under-achieving individuals within. Even Jean-Alain Boumsong and Titus Bramble, £13 million worth of ineptitude.

Villa, similarly, resemble a large stalled vehicle, patently requiring stronger boardroom leadership and investment. Yet still their fans woke early, donned club scarves and shirts, and headed off to the North-East in their thousands. Those Holte Enders who travelled up by rail even endured the indignity of one train dithering at Doncaster, scene of the team's midweek embarrassment.

These dreamers follow their team because it is in the blood and because hope springs eternal. Nirvana is 90 minutes away. Their besieged managers certainly hope so.

"There will always be somebody under pressure, then it moves on to somebody else," reflected David O'Leary on his turn in the public stocks. "I was in the office with Rafael Benitez [of Liverpool] four weeks ago and the radio people were asking people to ring in to say whether he should be sacked. I heard the same radio people praising him to the hilt after their game today [against Wigan], saying he's absolutely brilliant.

"I've got a club with massive expectations who believe they should be challenging up there. But I inherited 16th place and had a little bit of money. If I was to leave tomorrow, I've left them with some good players." The fans might disagree. O'Leary inherited three of Villa's best players - Gareth Barry, Lee Hendrie and Steven Davis. Where O'Leary, like Souness, is culpable is not spending well.

The JCB Song - Make it the christmas number 1


Go to this site, watch the video, be blown away, buy the track and make it number one.

Listen to the lyrics, think about a christmas number one which wasn't produced on the magic PC formulaic crap software

Britain faces big freeze as Gulf Stream loses strength

Bush, with all the hurricanes, floods, severe weather and now us starting to lose the Gulf Stream are you going to admit that there may be (just slightly) something called global warming

Doncaster 3-0 Aston Villa

David O'Leary has asked us fans for patience!!!! Why, I had hoped we would be able to beat a team two divisions below us. Or does he mean with Doncaster 9th in League 1 that they may go up and we should be patient because we may meet them again next season when we are in the championship.

I think it will be Sunderland, Villa, West Brom going down this season.

I wonder what other shite overated player we buy for far to much money this January. The rumours that we are going to buy Kewell are brilliant, just who we want, another crap prima donna who is overated, too expensive and can't be bothered to play for the club.

I have also heard that Man Yoo are thinking about buying Steve Davis, if he goes we are in even worse trouble