This morning we both slept in because we'd got thick heads from the Dalat wine we'd drunk last night. The Ven Ven hotel is quite nice really for the trivial amount of money we're paying. There's a short path into the forest and a shady bench and table, the buildings are all surrounded by trees and bourgonvillea. I think we had a civet on our roof last night - something with scrabbling claws woke us up. But the restaurant is just a pain. We're still the only guests here and the family that own it outnumber us 3 to 1, which just feels really awkward as the two young boys who serve (shouldn't they be at school?) stand staring at us as we eat. This morning we ordered bread and omelette for breakfast, then the girl came back and said they have no bread. OK, just omelette then...but bread came out with it, very stale and hard.

When eventually we got moving we walked along the road behind the hotel into the forest until we found a track into the thick of it. It was very, very hot, humid and sticky by now, and the birds were all keeping out of sight. We found a stagnant pool in a dried up creek bed full of marooned fish. A Chinese pond heron flew away from it, and we could see huge trotter prints of some animal in the mud. A giant wild boar? There was the usual rubbish dumped along the roadside and even into the forest, and we couldn't stand much walking in such heat, so we came back to the hotel and had a siesta under the room fan.

Later on we walked into the massive posh resort. It stretches along the coast for about a mile with 4 restaurants, bars, pools, flower beds, an ostrich farm (!?) and we discovered walking home in the dark, a crocodile breeding pool rather like that one in the James Bond movie. We had a drink and an ice cream and lounged in their shady deck chairs since nobody knew we weren't staying there, but there were no other guests around. It was spooky, like a tropical beachside version of The Shining. Of course the beach was covered in rubbish. They had a tractor going along it with a sand sifting device attached to the back of it to sieve out the rubbish, but even that was fighting a losing battle when each wave brings more plastic up onto the beach.

Surprisingly, we saw more birds than in the forest. There were little sanderlings scuttling all over the beach, and large-billed crows were the first corvids we've seen in this country. We got a great view of a great thick-knee on the beach margin, with it's large yellow unblinking eye. And there were blue cheeked bee-eaters on the beach following some pipits around. Still haven't seen a sea gull though, which is odd.

Further along from the resort there were some traditional fishing boats pulled up on the sand, hulls of brightly coloured fibreglass over a framework of woven reeds. There were round coracles too, woven reeds on a wooden frame coated with some sort of tar. A man was dredging the sand along where the waves break with a big net, and filtering out lots of small shellfish. We saw many crabs: little ones scuttling sideways out of our path, and great big ones with eyes on stalks that peered out at us from burrows in the sand.

We ate dinner in one of the restaurants there. It was a huge wood-constructed cathedral, and we were the only diners. A French family we'd seen on the beach came in for drinks and left again. I think they are the only guests there. Robbie got a good plateful of steamed veg but my chicken and mushroom stew was all skin and bone and very tough. I'm still having to go for the blandest sounding food I can see because my lips are a torture chamber of ulcers. Something in this country doesn't agree with my mouth.