Sihanoukville

We've just crossed over into Cambodia and wow, what a difference a line in the sand makes. At the border post, the Vietnamese building was a huge imposing fortress, while the Cambodian side had a spirly 8 storey pagoda.

We're on the beach right now - well, as I type this I'm 3m from the sand. A nice little 8km beach of whiteish sand, largely empty. This is the first day it hasn't rained for a month aparantely. We're staying in Faulty Towers, a $5 guesthouse that includes a private dvd player and 200 movies. Food's more expensive, isn't quite as nice but its still good.

I didn't bring an ipod clone because I thought there'd be nowhere to get new music for it. I was wrong! Every country has had computer shops selling mp3's very cheaply. The one here is particularly organised, with 2,500 albums and they've even got their own compilations. Oh well, it all works on my MP3 cd player which is much more loseable.

The people here are so much friendlier. Their culture appears to be slightly Indian - statues of Ganesh, Shiva, Brahma etc, and an alphabet that's very pretty but unreadable. Their English is much better than Vietnam, I'm guessing here, but I spent 10 minutes trying to get a Vietnamese woman to say "child" (she kept saying it as 2 syllables with a glutteral stop chi - uld) but here, I've had an entire conversation with a 12 year old kid.

Anyway, getting hot in here so its back to the beach for a dip.

Matts travels

Coming to a shop near you, soon.

Vietnam

This is the end of Vietnam, we're in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon, even by the locals - renamed after the liberation war in 1975 for the revolutionary dear leader). Its hot and sticky, I've been in cooler saunas. Phnom Penh tomorrow, in Cambodia.

Have a look at Sitemeter world report. Some of this is spooky. Would the latest visitor from Bluefrog internet in Rochester, New York take a bow please. Anna - you're not reading this from work (corbis.com), are you? Kalmar.lan in Sweeden, that sounds like Johan, bris.ac.uk is Loren? (Anyone curious, these reports are free from sitemeter.com, they also do some premium stuff.) Erm, forget about the Australian reader, he seems to have been looking for something else.

Take Dalat for example. We visited two incredible cafes in Dalat, one with amazing architecture (about 23.5 floors), art work, sculptures - aparantely it was supposed to represent the Vietnamese creation story with the sea goddess in the basement rising up to the sky goddess at the top. The other cafe was owned by a wispy bearded, beret wearing 70 year old calligrapher who serves you himself in his living room, all kinds of poems and artwork throughout. Then there's the Chun Ly falls, with fake Vietnamese cowboys, plastic mushrooms and alligators moving house. And Bao Dai's (last emperor of Vietnam) summer palace, a tacky 1930's B&B or at least we've stayed in better places on our budget. Then again, we did go go-karting for 60pence. Oh, and the hotel ripped us off by claiming with a smile that $16 was 293,000 dong (go on, multiply 16,548 by 16 in your head at 6am), then denied that we'd paid them that much.

Thoughts about Vietnam:
The national sport is badminton, there are courts chalked everywhere on pavements and car parks. They even have a football variant, with a springloaded 6' shuttlecock they kick around.
Motorcycles are everywhere, no one owns a car. All the streets are chock-full of 2-5 people perching on a honda 50cc (forget high occupancy vehicles, these people know how to do it). Pavements are reduced to motorcycle parks and street vendor stalls, you have to walk in the road. Crossing the non-stop roads is an act of faith, you walk calmly, slowly and steadily and trust the drivers want to miss you as much as you want to miss them.
The entire culture rests around the concept of face, of saving embaressment. I blame the rice (extremely high population densities- a rice field generates an incredible amount of food). So a Vietnamese will see nothing contradictory in saying "same same but different" if you ask is this the same price as that- first agreement to save face, then the money negotiations. As always, never ask the question "do you know the way to..." because any answer other than yes will lose the askee face.
You really have to watch the money, the rip-offs are endless. One problem is that everyone who speaks English is in the tourist trade, you just can't speak to locals (Vietnamese is an incredibly hard tonal language, completely different in the South as well). In South America it was different, people looked at you as if they themselves could be European (except the Bolivians). Probably coincidental, but everyone here now supports Chelsea!

We ended up taking the tourist buses everywhere, the local buses all seem to go from out of town bus stations. The tourist buses are cheap enough ($5-7), slow, and have a huge comission culture - every hotel, every cafe stop is baksheesh.

Possibly the hardest thing to take is the mosquito like beach/city sellers: you want book? You want manicure? -at least one every 5 minutes. I can't blame them too much, I would do the same in their situation, but it is damn anoying.

There are good points to Vietnam. The food is excellent and cheap. Mini-hotels with satellite tv, bath, air con are $10 a night. There are some good beaches, and dive sites (weather permitting)- Nha Trang, at $30 for 2 dives including equipment is the best I've seen. It'd be a lot better in the cool season (nov-feb), and as always, if this post came after a long cold drink in an air con bar. Hoi An did have marvelous tailors (of course, they said yes to everything even if they didn't understand what you said, so we got a few surprises) and was very good value.

Its a shame really, if the people smiled, didn't rip-off and were friendly, they'd have a lot more return custom. At least some part of me wants to believe that. Its not as if Vietnam is particularly poor, but this short term focus on screwing foreigners does put me off a country.

Nha Trang

Congratulations to Lizzie, who's now a certified open water diver after taking a course in Nha Trang. Nha Trang has a reasonable beach, great restaurants and cafes, and that's about it. Its a shame that there were only 2 dive sites going, the other 18 had very heavy seas - tropical storm 10w was to blame. In case you're wondering what we're doing in Vietnam in the extremely hot, monsoonal wet season, err, that's a good question. Everywhere in August is pretty nasty, either winter for South America, horribly booked up for Europe, majorly monsoonal in India, permanently foggy in Nepal and we had to be somewhere! Its not too bad.

We're now in Dalat, up in the mountains and its blissfully cool. Dalat makes "authentic" Melbone Autraslian wine (no, that's how they spelt it), candied fruits, has lakes, mountains and lots of kitsch. Haven't seen too much of the kitsch yet. We've got to get a move on, our visa expires on the 24th. We see so many travellers staying 2 days or less in each place, we're taking more like 4 or 5 days.

Halong bay

Halong bay
Originally uploaded by matthewharrup.

Too slow a computer to do a proper post, so here's a mini-Halong bay between tropical storms.

Halong bay photos

Floating shops
Originally uploaded by matthewharrup.

Halong bay has lots of limestone karst rock islands, its famous for it. Oh, and floating shops that get everywhere.

Photos from Vietnam

The landscape of Hue:



From the motorcycle tour around Hue, a Buddhist monastery. Kids come here, they become full monks after 10 years of chanting and studying. Very solemn place.


The kind of food out here;


The tailor shops;

Hoi An

Hoi An is a city of tailors. Every other building is stacked full of cloth, silk and assorted fabrics. Everything is incredibly cheap, from $10 for a silk shirt (tailor made of course, an extra $3 to have it embroidered) to $30 for a full length winter overcoat to $70 for a 100% wool suit in any style you like. We've spent far to much money.

It all feels a bit bizarre, you have so much competition -you can't walk down the street without 10 calls of "you buy something?" but doesn't register as expensive. There's a real separation between westerners and Vietnamese here. Oh, and they're really, really pissed with the use of agent orange in the American war by the way - we've seen huge barren hills due to it, and lots of really nasty birth defects. (Sorry. This blog isn't supposed to be an anti-American rant, its just we haven't been in a country yet that hasn't suffered bombing intervention. That's power.). At least the south of Vientam is friendlier than the north, even if every encounter with the locals seems to be mercantile in nature (aka the "walking ATM syndrome").

On to Nha Trang, where I've promised Lizzie a diving course.

Hue

Still in Vietnam, we did consider cutting across Laos which we've heard is really friendly and basic, but we've decided to stick to the coast. Hue (I'm not even going to try to use Vietnamese accents) is a hot, small, ancient capital of the Nguyen dynasty. Full of crumbling remains of tombs, citadels (including the Forbidden Purple Palace) and temples. We took a motorcycle tour to out of the way temples, a covered bridge etc, the main attraction was really the journey across gorgeous scenery.

The food in Vietnam has been excellent, perfect stirfries, one decent Indian restaurant, all costing about a pound a meal or less. Vietnam also wins the Cheapest Beer award from Argentina, with 6p a glass at a cheap cafe, and 50p a 500ml bottle at an expensive bar.

Tomorrow, Hoi An, the city of silk where they'll happily chase you down, size you up and cut you a tailor made silk suit very cheaply (I've heard 20gbp a suit). I may have to send some stuff back if its that cheap, we might as well make use of international price differences if we've spent all this money on the plane ticket.

Vietnam

Its always a nice feeling when the most valuable, hard to change note in your pocket is worth a mere 3.60gbp (a 100,000 Dong note). The huge numbers are still a bit of a shock, we're wandering around with miltiple million dong (40ish gbp each).

Actually, in every country we've been to, the prices have reflected the currency. I'm sure there's a name for it, in America everything was 5 or 10 bucks, in Japan 100 or 1000 yen etc. There's a pyshchological edge to it as well, I'll quite happily pay 11 soles for a meal and think that's cheap, but force 2360 won out of my wallet and I'll be sputtering.

Cat Ba island has really been hit by the tropical storm last weekend, we'd had a tour cancelled due to it but had no idea it was that serious. The beaches are covered in gravel and big stones, the walkways have collapsed in several places and everywhere big healthy trees are uprooted through the pavement. It'll be about a month before it gets back to normal, so time to find another beach. We went on a boat tour of Halong Bay, which is nice - lots of limestone karst rock islands (hundreds of them) on an emerald sea, a few private beach stops along the way (beaches that weren't facing the storm).

Vietnam is definitely high on the hassle factor. Already we've had people lie directly to us for minimal gain - e.g. "there's no more boats today, you'll have to stay the night" when there were 2 more boats.

Back to Ha Noi tomorrow, overnight train to Hue. We're passing on Sapa, a great trekking area in NW Vietnam- done tons of trekking, give us the beaches.