Baddest English of the week competition winner is:
"We will be most glad to sever you in our restaurant"
-- Seen on the menu at a sea food restaurant in Nha Trang

The world beer review, #2
Bia Hanoi (Vietnam): 3.5% alcohol, alright, good for breakfast.
Bia Hoi (Vietnam): ?% alcohol, homebrew sold on every street corner for 10 cents a glass. Good way of meeting locals and buying everbody a drink will not require you calling the bank manager first.
La Rue (Vietnam): 4.2% alc, don't remember.
Bia Saigon (Vietnam): 4% alc, mouthwash.
Tiger (Singapore) : 5% alc. The only really decent asian beer available in Vietnam. To be taken 3 times daily to avoid all illnesses.

Saigon

Day 4 (I think) in Saigon and it is like Hanoi on steroids, more people (ca. 5 million) more bikes (ca. 10 million), more pollution, more skyscrapers, just more of everything.

The only touristy thing here is the War remnants museum (formerly called "The American War crimes museum", recently changed to be a bit more PC) which was tough on an empty stomach at 8am - photos of agent orange victims, napalm victims, mine victims, the massacre of women & children in My Lai etc. There are still new UXO (unexploded Ordnance) victims in Vietnam every week and this is 30 years after the war ended.
The other big attraction is the Cu Chi tunnels, which the Viet Cong started building in the 40s (against the French) and by the end of the Vietnam American war there were literally hundreds of kilometers of tunnels all over Vietnam. You could actually travel underground from Saigon to the Cambodian border (ca. 150km). They are brilliantly designed - the entrances are only about 40 cm by 20 cm (remarkably, I managed to get in), the air holes were built into ant hills, so that when it rained the water didn't flow down, the kitchens had three sucessive smoke chambers so that the smoke was only barely visible when it reached the surface and there was an emergency exit which went underground into a river.
Basically the Viet Cong used brain & manpower to defeat the vastly better armed Americans - unexploded B52 bombs were reused to make homemade bullets, old tyres were used to make shoes and every bit of metal they could find was used to make fiendish booby-traps in every size & shape imaginable.

Other than that Saigon is just a place to sit at a Cafe, drink coffee and watch the world go by.

Off to Cambodia tomorrow for new year in Phnom Penh.

Hoi An, Nha Trang

Vietnam got a whole lot better after arriving in Hoi An. The bus journey from Hue was rather impressive - down the coast with hairpin bends and views of palm trees and empty beaches.

Hoi An itself is titchy, but has an atmospheric old quarter which is protected by UNESCO. The other claim to fame of Hoi An is its tailors. They are everywhere, are dirt cheap and amazingly good. One of my travel mates went in on Monday morning, ordered 3 shirts, 4 boxers, 3 pairs of trousers. He went back that evening and they were ready - all excellent quality and for the astronomical price of 72 dollars... You can get shoes made, suits made, whatever you want. You can even bring in an existing suit / shirt and they will copy it for you. As I still have many months on the road I had to resist the temptation.

Vietnam has also got the best price / quality accomodation I have ever experienced. My hotel in Hoi An had a swimming pool, a large bedroom, great bed, marble bath, balcony, cable tv and all that for 6 bucks a night. The equivalent in Europe would be at least 150 Euros.

Night bus down to Nha Trang, which is also great. Directly on the beach, lots of nightlife, great seafood. All the body & soul needs. Spent today in a hot spring, with mud baths, thermal pools and a great massage. My super-intelligent, extremely well-travelled father always said that he needed a nubile japanese girl to walk up and down his spine when he had back pains. A great saying, but little did I know that it is actually possible. Not only does she walk up and down you, but she massages you with her feet, her knees and whatever other body parts come to hand. All this with Vivaldi's four seasons playing in the background... Beats turkey & crackers anyday.

Oh yeah, merry Christmas to one and all!

My Christmas present list

Erick: Some new deo. Come on man, 10 years Axe Alaska is enough!
Mikael: A steady girlfriend. You know it is time to settle down... And I can't stand all your wild drinking stories from around the world anymore.
John Clynes: Aluminum hub caps for his super duper go-faster pram.
John Cummins: His very own Hedge Fund and 100 million US starting capital (and 10% of the profits to me)
Popovich: A DJ course
Johann: A freestyle snowboard and softboots, lose the raceboard.
Shura: 100 free bungy jumps in New Zealand.

Halong Bay, Hue

Halong Bay is stunning, ca. 2000 limestone islands situated in the middle of a huge bay, fishermen who live in floating houses and subside solely on fish and trading with others. Sprinkle some fine teak boats cruising around and some great sunsets and hey presto, instant tourist attraction. Still worth it though. Slept on the boat the first night and found myself playing drinking games with Aussies, Frenchies, Swiss, Canadians & a New Zealander. Ended up getting hugely pissed and diving off the boat with 2 other guys (a party trick of mine). The big surprise was though a) it was quite warm & b) with every stroke you took the water turned green - phosphoric plankton. Very trippy.

Vietnam is getting slightly weary - you have to bargain for frigging everything here, even a loaf of bread or a can of coke. Oh, and it's raining. Bugger. And there's no Beerlao here. Oh well...

So, finally, some pictures from Laos

Hanoi, Vietnam

There are some terrible stereotypes about Vietnam, things such as they eat dog, that the women are gorgeous and that they are excellent con-men. As with all stereotypes, it is all completely true. 10 minutes after arriving in downtown Hanoi, two bicycles went by, each with two dogs in bamboo cages... There is a vague possibility that the bike owners were transporting their favourite pets across town, but I think not. At a cafe this morning, there was "hot fried dog" on the menu, which is not to be confused with "fried hot-dog", one is fried pooch with lots of chillies and the other is something you eat downtown Cleveland after the baseball game... I asked the hotel manager (girl, gorgeous) about it and she told me it was a delicacy and is always eaten on business occasions. I ironically asked if they also ate cat. She smiled, shook her head and said "oh no... it is much too expensive...". Fine.
The girls are disgracefully attractive, enough to make any red-blooded man get whiplash as they whiz by on their mopeds. They also have a more european fashion sense, so skirts and high-heels will be seen more often then elsewhere in Asia. Must stop now. Cold shower. Think of Margret Thatcher.
Although semi-communist, haggling is ingrained in the culture here, but as opposed to Turkey or Morocco where the seller will start with a price that is between 2 to 5 times the standard price, the Vietnamese will start with a price that can be up to 50 times the final price. Great fun, but it takes about 2 hours to settle on a price for a motorbike ride across town, which is also better than any Disneyland ride. Imagine 5000 mopeds all driving on the same road, where there is only space for about 500. Now imagine no traffic lights (or at least no adherance to their meaning) and now imagine sitting on the back of a moped which is dicing through all this traffic at 50kmh.

It is certainly a complete culture shock after three super-relaxed weeks in Laos. Vientiane international airport was also highly amusing - the department of civil aviation sits beside the runway, there are chicken coops beside the terminal building and a sum total of 3 gates. It knocks Luxembourg off the top spot in my "Cutest airport" list.

Joke of the day: Nguyen is romping around with a dog on the street, then his mum calls out to him "Hey Nguyen, stop playing with your food"... Well it was funny when I first thought of it.

Off to Halong Bay tomorrow for three days on a boat.

Si phat don (4 thousand islands), Pakse, Vientaine

Where do I start?? The beginning is always a good idea...

The four thousand islands were magic - like the south pacific except with the Mekong instead of the Pacific. Palm trees, lovely islanders, lots of herbal amusements, waterfalls the size of small countries and mosquitos the size of rats and rats the size of ... well, eh... rats.

The Laos tourist trail is also quite small, so I keep bumping in to the same people. I have met one Dutch guy on 4 seperate occasions - all the way between northern Thailand and southern Laos - about 1400km distance in total. Knowing the backpacker trail I will no doubt meet him in Koh Phangan in 3 months time...

The bus journey back was also quite amusing, once you think things are normal, something happens which would just not happen in the first world. In this case a guy gets on the bus with a small monkey, which proceeded to jump around the place - hopping from seat to seat and bouncing on peoples' heads. This was fine until the monkey took a liking to the bus driver, and naturally, jumped on the drivers head as well. There are some things in life which are generally a bad idea. One of these is letting a nervous primate jump on a the driver of a bus which is carrying 50 people and doing about 100 kmh. Luckily, our driver swatted the monkey off without losing any speed at all. He must be used to that kind of thing...

The other national sport of Laos is Water-Buffalo-Avoiding. These creatures lie all over the roads of southern Laos and seem to be completely oblivious to all forms of motorised transport and their horns. Therefore the bus drivers just swerve around them. This is hilarious for the first 10 minutes, but after you have been woken up for the 30th time because the driver just copied Keanu Reaves out of Speed 2 and swerved a 20 tonne bus at 120 kmh, breaking all natural laws of gravity, thermodynamics and quantum physics etc.

Ok, anyway, I get back to Vientaine, Vientaine (so good they named it twice) at 6pm (only 2 hours late) and hop in a taxi with 2 girls. The natural travellers question is "so, where you from". "Ireland", I replied. "Me too" one of the girls replied. "Dublin", I say. "Me too" is the answer. Ok, so far we only have 1 million possible people in question. "Whereabouts" she says, "Blackrock" says me. Yeah, you guessed it - "me too" she says. "Which street" I ask, "Waltham terrace" she replies. This is the next parallel street to mine in Blackrock... Ok, to cut an incredibly short story even shorter, it turns out she is the younger sister of one of my best friends from primary school. Small world etc.

Bureacracy

Anyway, get to downtown Vientaine at 7pm to collect my passport and ticket to Hanoi. The travel agency is closed. Go back the next morning and the nice lady tells me with horror in her face, that my flight was at 8am Saturday and not 8pm as she originally told me. So I am ready to fork out another 100 dollars for a new flight or at least to pay for a change of flight, but no, she just runs across the street to the Laos Air office and comes back 60 seconds later with the same ticket but with the old date Tipex'ed out and the new date written in Biro. Now that's what I call service.

War and peace

Laos is a relaxed place, very relaxed. Not to mention unbelievably friendly (you nearly get a pain in your arse saying hello the whole day long). It is therefore all the more difficult to believe that the Laotians are the most bombed people in the entire history of warfare. During the Vietnam war (another aside: In Asia what we call the Vietnam war is called the American war) the US dropped more explosives on Laos than it dropped on all its Second World War targets put together: half a tonne of explosives for every man, woman and child in Laos, the equivalent of 10 tonnes for every square kilometre. This all despite the fact the Laos was officially neutral during the war!

As an ultimate fingers up to the US, the Lao people have a nifty way of using bomb casings to make flower bed containers, fence poles etc. In Muang Ngoi they were even used as steps up a small hill...

Bitterness is not a Lao word.

Vientiane

I haven't been to Ulan Baator yet, but I am taking a bet that Vientiane is one of the sleepiest capital cities in the world. Berne is also up there, but people still seem to do stuff there, here everybody snoozes, drinks beerlao and swats flies from their faces. I had the pleasure of going to a Lao nightclub on Saturday, quite funny being the tallest person among 500 people. There is still a slight curfew here, so we were all thrown out of the disco at midnight... Most disappointing.

Off to Pakse tonight, 10 hour bus ride - excellent, I was getting too comfortable here. Then on to Si Phan Don which is called the four thousand islands and is the widest point of the Mekong (14km across). It is also famous for the ugly-assed Mekong Dolphin of which there are only 80 left in the wild, so chances are I won't see one. Thanks to the Cambodian fishermen who had more grenades then fishing nets after the civil war.

Flying in over Hanoi (always wanted to say that) on Saturday night. The bus ride is only 23 and a half (not 24!) hours which is far too short to be a real bus journey.

Oh yeah, happy December etc. Where's my Advent calender?? Lazy b**tards.

Nong Khiaw, Muang Ngoi, Vang Vieng

Mornin'. Back to civilization. Spent 2 days in Muang Ngoi which is about 200km (or 4 bum breaking hours) north of Luang Prabang. Stop off at Nong Khiaw for some Noodle Soup with water buffalo meat. Muang Ngoi is completely cut off from the rest of the country - there are no roads leading there, there is no electricity supply or telephone cables. In fact the only contact with the outside world is a boat which belts up the Nam Ou river and coughs out its passengers on the beach landing. As you can imagine the place is absolute magic - situated in the middle of craggy limestone hills covered in thick jungle and a crystal clear river which runs by the town. The only accomodation is bamboo huts to be had for 1 Euro a night... The generators kick in at 6pm for 4 hours so people have a couple of hours TV and the Falangs have light by which they can drink their beer. Everybody is tucked up in bed listening to the crickets and assorted wildlife by about 10pm. Bliss.

Spent the second day tubing down the river with a Canadian, a Swiss and a French guy I met on the bus. It was MTV extreme sports weekend with the extreme parts being: Extreme slow river speed, extreme lack of air in the tube and extreme hypothermia towards the end of the 2 hour float. 4 Beerlaos later and the world was already looking better and my fingers had turned back to being white again.
Left Tuesday morning and took the fish finger express back to Luang Prabang. I call these pick-up trucks such because once you get off them you feel like a fish finger - coated in a layer of crispy orange dust. Then straight on Vang Vieng on the night bus, the driver of which is my new Top Trump favourite crazy driver, all I can say is that I am glad it was dark... Arrived in one piece like a James Bond Vodka Martini @ 2am.

Vang Vieng is the hang-out capital of Laos, stuck in the middle of some beautiful hills, littered with caves and every restaurant will offer to make your Milkshake / Pizza / Beer a "Happy" one. Which basically means they either sprinkle some weed or some magic mushrooms in to them... All for 30 cents more... Mmmm Green Milkshakes. Walked to one of the caves yesterday which was huge and right in the middle of it was a reclining Buddah, very spacey. Down below the cave was a beautiful blue lagoon, which was just what the doctor ordered after the walk. Spent last night on the roof of a restaurant ("Give Pizza Chance" - great name) lying on some cushions, hanging out with some people, looking at the stars and generally drinking lots of Happy Beerlaos :)

Fact: 20% of the Irish population is currently in Laos. I counted. Comment of one English guy: "Are there any Irish left in Ireland and did the last one turn the light off?"

Off to Vientiane tomorrow. "Top Trump Crazy Busdrivers" update to follow.