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DAY NINE Today's plans were to peruse the historic sites around Hoi An in the morning, then hit the beach in Cue Dai in the afternoon. The first port of call was the 1000 year old Chinese covered bridge, which has two dogs guarding the southern entrance and two monkeys at the north end. History tells the tale this was because construction started in the year of the dig, ending in the year of the monkey. Good a reason as any I suppose.i would've preferred something like the dogs were there to prevent the marauding chimps if the south from entering the monkey town, and the monkeys to prevent the dastardly chiauhauas of the north from laying dog tod on the monkey lawns! Just mt thoughts on the matter... A succession of temples, pagodas, stately homes and memorial gardens provided a stroll through the ideals of the Vietnamese and the heavy Chinese and French influences. The Chinese can be seen in the types of Buddhist temples and praying areas, and the French most definitely in their architecture. Walking down the street, there are definitely similarities to how New Orleans in the U.S, albeit they don't have an extortionate amount of oriental style lanterns everywhere. Their beliefs are based around ying/yang, and that the respect of the natural world is promoted. Everywhere you look there paintings of man and dog, man and horse, man with mountain, man with tree and so on. I think you get the picture. Alot of these places are all very colourful and scented with 6 foot tall cone shaped spirals of incense, which apparently take 1000 days to burn. Ideas men these VIetnamese - value for money, and don't have to go shopping every week for more incense. Imagine getting home every night and the misses says ' we have run out incense, can you pop down the local pagoda and pick me up some'? I think it would wear pretty thin after a while! A spot of lunch was followed by a trip to the beach. Considering that between us we had probably lost 10 litres of water from our bodies, it was time to cool down. Well, I cooled down by throwing a bottle of water on my head, as the water was 31 degrees!! The deeper you swam out, the cooler the under current, so needless to stay I spent a good period of time with my breath held. I did a bit of snorkelling, which opened up a whole new world! Absolutely thousands if fish swimming around in schools( if that's the right terminology...brain fry from the sun).you can watch that kind of thing for ages, hopefully in NhaTrang we will go snorkelling around the reefs there. A spell on the beach bored me as I need activities to do... Got to love activities, so the Dutch fella, Tom and I spent a good hour throwing a frisbee until disaster struck... I went for a classic catch (a full length diving stunner- which I took with such elegance and grace...) but upon standing up..where were my Oakley Frogskins limited addition gold iridium sunnies gone?!!! I'll tell you where, to Davy Jones locker, that's where. 4 of us must searched a 30 square metre area of clear water time over time without joy. My life actually depends on the use of sunnies, so this was particularly hard pill to swallow when I called off the search. They were a good friend, see you again old friend, or at least make someone else happy.... A period of me lamenting, was made slightly better with ice cold can of coke. The evening was spent at a Vietnamese banquet style restaurant, and all I can say was that it was utter garbage. Jasmin was really disappointed, but I alluded to the fact that not every single restaurant was going to serve a la carte cuisine. The next two hours was spent on a boat drinking drink as many spirits as you want for 100000 Vietnamese dong, which is about 2 quid. Good times, and we even took over the sound system, so anything from the Rolling Stones, to Creedance to faith no more and the chilli peppers featured, but my favourite was Steven Seagulls version of thunderstruck. Bluegrass meets AC/DC. Please view it on YouTube- pure genius. This blog was dedicated to the Limited Edition VR45 Gold Iridium Oakley Frogskins...
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