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I love travelling, it's great to experience the big wide world and see what it has to offer. Crazy people sunshine, beaches, mountains, trying to understand the languages and making a tit of yourself! It's great to meet new people who see things from a totally different perspective, experiencing new cultures and understanding new religions and then there's the incredible culinary delights to experience, the amazing array of gastronomic………. alright I lied about the last bit. God I miss mash potato sausage and beans, steak and kidney pie and chips, battered cod and chips wrapped up in newspaper!!!!! But I think most of all I miss a proper cup of pg tips with real semi skinned cow's milk!! I mean they call themselves civilized these countries but not one of them can make a real cup of tea. To be fair they came pretty dam close in India, the only thing that let them down was the milk. I'm not sure if it's because they heat it up or because it was milked from a bloody monkey but whatever it was it caused it to form a thick skin on the top so that when you took your first sip it stuck to your lip like someone had thrown a used condom at your face! In Malaysia it seemed to be coffee everywhere, it was difficult to find tea, the coffee was a rancid cross between tarmacand road kill put through a blender. Finally here in Vietnam things have only gotten worse. It's difficult enough to get anyone to understand you at all, when you finally do get them to understand the word tea, nine times out of ten they bring you a can of iced Lipton tea. When you do actually get a cup of hot tea it comes with its own fresh pot of semen!! Well that's what it looks like anyway, there excuse for milk. It slides out of the pot in a big slimy dollop and slowly settles in the bottom of your cup in a nice thick layer. It takes a good few minute of frantic stirring to mix it into something that looks drinkable. It has a sweat sickly taste a bit like marzipan, I hate to think what animal could have produced this mess and what orifice it I might have been discharged from!! In a road side café we stopped at a couple of days ago the tea was a no go so we thought we'd try a coffee as the waitress seemed to understand that. A few minutes later we were served up what I can only describe as a slush puppy that looked as though it had been made from dog s*** but was in fact iced black coffee. However it tasted more like the former!! So if there's one thing this travelling lark has taught me it's that when it comes to food and drink Britannia rules the world, long live mash potato, long live chips and long live bloody PG tips!!!!!!!!!
Anyway that's my rant over, apart from the food and drink problem Vietnam is great, plenty of hustle and bustle , nice scenery and every woman in the land is hot and 9 out of 10 of them where hot pants on a daily basis! We landed in Saigon and took a taxi to a hotel in the heart of the city; everywhere you looked there were scooters. Looking out of the taxis it was like a sea of scooters, millions of them and hardly any cars in site apart from a few taxis. Crossing the road in Saigon is very scary, after a while you realize no one is going to stop and there will never be a gap in the traffic so you just have to slowly inch your way across so that everyone can avoid you. If you panic and try to make a run for it you'll end up under a pile of pissed off scooter riders! Saigon is one of those places you can happily sit and people watch all day and not get bored, there's always something going on. From scooters transporting everything from double mattresses to a family of five, to midget woman with a lampshade on her head offering to polish your flip flops!! (Who the hell polishes flip flop!) We stayed in Saigon for three days, on the second day we went to the war remnants museum. After we went I watched the top gear Vietnam special on my iPod and discovered that they started their trip from the museum which was cool. Outside are tanks, planes and helicopters, including a genuine huey! (I love the smell of napalm in the morning!!) The inside however is a bit grimmer and quite an eye opener. Normally when I've been to war museums they have always been in western countries and therefore more bias towards our own glorious heroes and the enemies are portrayed as evil tyrants. In most cases this is more or less right. I knew the Americans weren't exactly whiter than white but some of the atrocities written about in the museum were horrendous. One in particular involved a group of navy seals that attacked a village and killed everyone there, they were alleged to have gutted pregnant women and even killed all the children! The worst section was the chemical warfare display, hundreds of photos of deformed men women and children. I had heard of the chemical Agent Orange before but didn't really know a lot about it. It was and still is one of the worst atrocities ever committed in a war and to make it worse it seems quite clear that the Americans new exactly what they were doing and went against all the Geneva conventions. The chemical itself was supposed to stop all the crops growing to starve out the enemy but they knew that Agent Orange was the most toxic chemical known at the time and people are still being born with hideous deformities today. It's like being at school this in it! Anyway you should all Google it, it will make you want to puke, and it certainly put me off buying an American made nam zippo in the souvenir shop!
So from Saigon we got a coach to a place called Mui ne on the coast. We booked in for a few days and started looking around for some bikes, it didn't take long. We hired a couple of scooters first to look around and it turned out the guy renting the bikes said he could sell us some scooters. So we ended up buy two 100cc scooters and what a pair of weapons! There pretty basic but so far seem a lot more reliable than the Enfield's we had in India. Max cruising speed is about 60kph but they will go to an arm wrenching 70kph! To be honest though nearly every person in the country has exactly the same scooter so everyone does the same speed. You very rarely see private cars over here, there are plenty of Lorries and in the tourist areas a lot of taxis but apart from that it's just scooters ox and cart or home made vehicles. They are quite ingenious when it comes to working transport; you see a lot of scooters pulling trailers loaded up with incredible sized loads, the sort of thing you'd think twice about pulling with a discovery at home. They also build their own three wheelers by cutting the front end of a scooter and build a sort of pickup truck front end; they attach a bar onto the truck bit to steer with. It's amazing what these tiny little motors can be used for especially when you think that in England the only thing we would use them for is the lowly monkey bike! The first two days on the bikes were pretty easy going, the roads outside the towns are a lot less busy than India and generally they seem to have a bit more road sense. You still have to watch out though there are no real rules on the road people just go wherever they want, including the wrong way up a one way street. I nearly got mowed down by a buffalo running down the street towards me last week. We made our way up the coast for the first two days and then we headed west into the mountains, that's when the real fun started. We headed for a town called De Lat, it was about 170k but we didn't really have a clue what the road was like and were a bit concerned when Google maps seemed to direct us around the road we chose even though we could clearly see the road on the map. The first part of the journey was without a doubt the best scenery I've seen since we've been away, perfect mountain roads winding higher and higher along the into the dense jungle. Every corner was breathtaking with waterfalls, canyons and all the time the road snaked its way around the steep mountains, the drops over the side of the road just got higher and higher, unfortunately it got colder and colder too! We kept stopping to take photos and to add extra layers of clothing, it's a shame but photos never seem to do mountains justice, well not with my camera anyway. As we neared the top of the mountain it started to get seriously cold and we weren't really geared for the cold so it wasn't ideal. At the top we were in the clouds and couldn't see more than about ten foot in front of us, we slowed to a snail's pace and then the road started to deteriorate. There were landslides covering half the road every half a mile or so and because we were in the clouds the roads were soaking wet. It was starting to get a bit worrying as the fuel gauge was getting pretty low and we hadn't seen a petrol station since we headed up the mountain but at least we had the roads to ourselves!!
Eventually we started to descend back down through the clouds and things warmed up a bit, unfortunately the roads started to get worse. They would go from smooth tarmac to gravel track in the blink of an eye and I was getting more worried about the petrol situation. We started to come across some small villages but just farmers and certainly no petrol stations. The scenery was still amazing and although I didn't want to run out of fuel I wasn't too worried as I'm sure someone would have given us a lift on their cow to get some fuel. Luckily it didn't come to that, just as the needle dropped below empty a petrol station appeared on the horizon like an oasis in the desert! Happy days!
The next day we moved south down to a place called Boa Loc, the scenery was just as spectacular but not as high or as cold. Boa Loc itself wasn't a lot to write home about but we did manage to get our bikes serviced, which took all of ten minutes. We had been studying the weather on the internet as when we were in Nha Trang it rained nearly every day. It seemed that the north of Vietnam was colder but dry and the south was hot but wet so we were a bit torn as to where to go. We decided to head back down south and if the weather looked ok we might head in to Cambodia. So we headed for Vang Tau just south of Saigon. The trip there from Boa Loc was about 150k but unfortunately about half that was on the worst road I'd ever been on. The best way to describe it was it was like riding on a road made of hardcore form a building site, miles and miles of gravel and boulders, oh and dust, lots and lots of dust! This won't mean much to most of you but it was like riding the road down to ash ponds for about fifty miles! (I don't think the gradg would have liked it!) It seemed that as usual one minute you'd have a few miles of tarmac and then the road had been ripped up for resurfacing, there are no diversions for road works over here you just ride through them, swerving around diggers and bulldozers! Every time a lorry went past you were engulfed in a storm of dust and had to hold your breath until you came out the other side.
We decided to stay in Vung Tau for a few days, partly to try and decide where to go next and partly because the hotel receptionist seemed to fancy me and she was pretty smart! Vung Tau was quite a nice place on the coast about eighty miles from Saigon; while we were there we took a hydrofoil up the estuary into the city for a day out. We spoke to an English guy we met who was travelling with his girlfriend, he had been up north and said it was definitely colder but not too bad and seeing as the next weeks forecast had been thunderstorms in the south we decided to head north all the way up the coast to Ha Long bay. Also it's what the top gear boys did so I thought it would be cool! The receptionist seemed to keep giving me the eye so I asked her out for a drink and she seemed very pleased (makes a change!) She seemed like a nice woman, she spoke pretty good English, well better than my Vietnamese anyway! We went for a drink and then went for a tour of the town on the scooter. At first I thought she was quite shy so she surprised me when she asked me completely out the blue when the last time I'd had sex was. I thought at first that she was trying to gauge weather I was just after her body so I thought I'd play it down a little bit and say a year. She then looked at me like I was insane and said "why you no sleep with massage girl?" obviously I was quite shocked by this, she had gone from being quite a shy woman to suggesting that I should sleep with a hooker in the blink of an eye! She then pointed to the row of hotels in front of us and said" you get massage girl in all hotels" with a look of pity in her eyes for me that said you poor man not having sex for a whole year! It all worked in my favor in the end though as she obviously thought this was a terrible wrong that needed righting. Can any man reading this imagine going on a date with an English girl and have her suggest that you should be actively sleeping with prostitutes? If so I'd like their names and phone numbers please! I'm really starting to love Vietnam know and to make things even better we had a KFC opposite the hotel!! Happy bloody days!
We moved on from Vung Tau back to Mui Ne and then on to Nha Trang where we are now. My dates assurance that all hotels in Vietnam have hookers in were confirmed a few days later when the cleaners in the hotel were in at the moment asked dad if he wanted a jump. It was ten o'clock in the morning and he was on the balcony having a smoke and three cleaners walking by with mops and buckets were outside cleaning the corridor, they stopped to ask if he needed the room cleaning to which he replied no she then looked at him and winked "you want me?" he politely declined at which point she gestured to the other two women and they all smiled! Shame I was in the loo! I told him you should never look a gift horse in the mouth.
So tomorrow were off a bit further north to a place called Qui Non once again against the advice of Mr Google so well see what adventures that brings.
Hope everyone reading is well back in blighty, see you all soon.
- comments
Kristie Uncle Lee, you keep those dirty ladies away from my Dad! x x x
benny boy ah shavers well done for working the old mercy shag. although bit strange she asked you when you last had some. perhaps she wasnt sure if you still had any action left in the tank! you go carefull tho last thing you want it to pop a hip and have to come home early! peace out good blog
Mamfa Very good blog uncle Lee!!! Made I laugh!!! Must go, got a nice cup of PG waiting for me and pie and chips!!! Be safe xxx
Didler From now on can you lable the photos better I can tell if it's you or your dad in the photos
Didler Shaverssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss!!!!!!
Mr foot long dong You stay way frum Mrs foot long dong you cweep
Mrs foot long dong Auh haarow wee ig nor my huwz band me cum oome wid Jew wike we agwee we hwad a dweal wats why the swex was fwee!