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Day 120 -
The bus ride ahead of us was something ridiculous like 14 hours so we were travelling through the night.
Today the rain was just so heavy it was unreal. I started panicking about the bus ride early on in the day and by the time we were due to board the bus I was a nervous wreck!
Fortunately the bus was picking us up right outside our hotel, unfortunately, the distance from the front of the hotel to the bus was a few metres, and therefore we were bound to get soaked! The first thing we had to do was load our bags under the bus. The lad from the hotel offered to take my bag and just before he loaded it he bloody dropped it in a great big puddle!
Once we were on the bus we had literally found a free bunker when the bus stopped and told everyone to get off and onto another one! Why? Don't ask me?! So Anth and I had just taken our shoes and wet jackets off when we had to put them back on, get off the bus, try to find our bags which the Vietnamese had kindly taken off the bus and put them on the pavement in the rain. Anth found his bag straight away and loaded it onto the new bus but my bag was nowhere to be found! Anyway poor Anth told me to get onto the bus whilst he would look everywhere for it. Eventually we realised that somebody had picked my bag up by accident and loaded it on! What a nightmare!
Well the journey was just horrible! Really, the worse time of my life. The brakes screeched on every corner, we were sliding all over the show and the bus driver had no mercy whatsoever. The only bunk free was a top bunk so I felt the bus sway more than if I'd been on the bottom. There was one point where we were at the top of a whopping hill and to get down the otherside, we had to drive down turning on at least 10-12 hairpins. The bus driver I don't think realised this and really was going far too quickly around each bend on the wrong side of the road too! We missed large trucks coming up the other side by inches! Even Anth was a little timorous, which certainly didn't make me feel any better!
Only a few hours left, well that's if we make it!
Day 121 -
Fourteen hours later we eventually got to Hoi An and it couldn't have come at a better time! First thing I did was vow that on our next bus journey I was going to be heavily under the influence of some strong sleeping pills!
As we had not really slept through the night we found a guesthouse sharpish and went to get some sleep.
Most of my clothes in my bag were wet through so we had to hang them out to dry firstly then managed to get a few hours rest.
When we eventually woke up we were starving so went off in search for food. We found a sweet little restaurant on the main sort of strip in Hoi An.
The roadsides here are just laden with shoes and clothes. Hoi An is famous for making tailor made garments for cheap prices. There was a huge market that sold nearly everything. You can't walk anywhere without merchants shouting and screaming at you to come to their stall and try on their clothes!
Food was more on the mind today than shopping anyway so we had a really nice meal. The restaurant ran a cooking course and as we enjoyed the Cambodian one so much we thought we'd have a go a Vietnamese cuisine too so booked ourselves in for tomorrow.
At night we didn't nothing but sleep!
Day 122 -
Our cooking class started at 1pm so we had a lazy morning. The bad weather seemed to have followed us from Nha Trang and the rain was squeezing through which put the beach out of bounds again.
Once we got to the restaurant to start our cooking course, we realised that we were the only ones taking it today which suited us just fine! We headed to the local market to buy the produce. We saw two Vietnamese woman scrapping with each other, they were screaming like mad! Oooh wonder what it was about?!
The course took about 2 hours. Between us we cooked spring rolls, vegetable soup and chicken with cashew nuts. The chef taught us how to make decorations out of chillies, tomatoes and carrots so when we had finished cooking, we presented our dishes with lots of different vegetable flowers!
We ate the food afterwards in the restaurant and it was delicious!
We walked around the place looking at different shoes and clothing after the meal but then the rain came down in buckets and we headed back to the hotel.
And the rain didn't stop. Once.
There was a power cut later on in the night and apparently the hole town was out of electricity for at least an hour. We just sat in the foyer in the hotel for this hour chatting to different people who we couldn't see and having a drink! We met a right ecstatic character who was so amazed that we were from the IOM I thought he was going to have a heart attack! He was from Oz and his surname was Kneale which is obviously the Manx spelling and he said he has been trying to track his ancestors back to the IOM for ages and 'CAN'T BELIEVE I'VE MET PEOPLE WHO MIGHT KNOW MY FAMILY!!!' Ha mental....
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