Day 70 - 72: Dalat - Arrival and countryside tour

We left for Dalat at 8:30am, and stopped for breakfast less than an hour later where I ordered a Tiger beer for no other reason than I could.  I didn't even want it really, but  this is a voyage of discovery, and I have now discovered that a beer isn't really the best thing to drink first thing in the morning, especially with a 4 hour journey ahead of you. I guess hair of the dog only works if you’d had enough hair the night before to justify it, which I hadn't.

Gilly was in charge of finding us accommodation after our original hotel plans fell through due to being booked out and not replying to emails asking if they were full. We landed at the Peace Hotel in a spacious, if not particularly warm room.  After grabbing a cheap, tasty meal in the attached café, we decided to explore Dalat.

Home of the famous Dalat milk, I’m almost ashamed to say I didn’t drink any whilst I was there. I guess my milk craving had been sated back in Nha Trang, and now that milk was everywhere, the excitement of finding it just wasn’t there.  Dalat is a city which I was quite looking forward to seeing, but ended up feeling a bit disappointed to. Maybe it had been hyped a little too much by some of the people we’d met, but it was no Chiang Mai, and no Luang Prabang. It wasn’t even Hanoi. As cities go, it was small in comparison, but there was a decent sized lake in the centre which had swan-shaped pedaloes.  We decided to give them a go, and jumping into the hastily named “Cedric” (Gilly’s choice) we pumped our legs for the best part of an hour in order to get a river view of the surroundings. It turns out that an hour of pedaling against a stubborn current is bloody hard.  It got to the point where we almost beached ourselves against the bank, much to the bemusement of a local fisherman whose waters we disturbed.

Back on dry land, we strolled through the hilly streets, taking in the usual assortment of rstaurants and art galleries. One gallery in particular had some spectacular palette knife paintings at crazy cheap prices – well, compared to what you’d pay back in Blighty, anyway. I vowed that if (when) our lottery numbers come in, I will be on the phone to Mr. Phuong immediately and getting some paintings shipped over to decorate my new castle-mansion.

It’s fair to say we use TripAdvisor a lot. Some may argue that part of travel is in exploring the unknown, seeking out new life and new civilization, and boldly going into the culinary world where few westerners have gone before. I agree, to a point. That point being: if a boatload of people recommend a western restaurant and I’m in the mood for western food, then I’m damn well going to eat there if I can. Sometimes though, TripAdvisor gets it wrong. The “Wisdom of Crowds” doesn’t necessarily hold if people a) are being paid to write good reviews of a place, b) have lower standards of what merits “good” or c) are idiots. Such was our experience of V Café, which promised a wonderful mix of excellent food and live jazz music. On our arrival, the latter didn’t transpire as the musician had buggered off for the day elsewhere. The former was a disappointment. Quesadillas and green curry aren’t particularly time-consuming dishes to make, or even get wrong. When they finally arrived 45 minutes later, we were expecting the culinary equivalent of Mozart but ended up with a Hans Zimmer rehash.  Only the homemade chocolate pie - ordered on a whim since I was still hungry - managed to get everything right with delicious shortcrust pastry and a divine chocolate mousse topping. It was the saving grace of the restaurant. On our way back, we stopped at the Les Sapins hotel next door to ours to ask about rooms. It was a spotlessly clean place, double-glazed, and almost certainly new – there was plastic still covering the wall sockets.  The bed was firm but after some discussion with the very odd girl running the place, she agreed to match the price of next door’s room.

The next morning we moved our stuff over, and walked to the outskirts of the city centre to check out a couple of Dalat’s sparse sights. We contemplated getting either bicycles or a motorbike, but decided against it after seeing some of the insanity on the roads. If there’s one impression present-day Vietnam will leave me with, it’s the chaos you have to deal with when crossing a street. You need to be 18 to have a licence for a lot of bikes, but for scooters and mopeds under 100cc, a licence isn’t required.  People of all ages take to the roads, texting whilst riding, calling whilst riding, loading their bikes up with planks of wood, sacks of rice, live animals, sometimes 4 people to a bike. Apparently, Ho Chi Minh city (our next destination) makes Hanoi look like a fairly quiet town and Dalat an abandoned wasteland – 10 million people, 6 million bikes.  Can’t wait.

We decided not to get ourselves killed, and walked to Ga Da Lat – the city’s old train station; it only runs one service to Nha Trang and back from what we could gather. Gilly’s dad loves trains so we thought we’d take a few photos of what looks to be a steam engine which is no longer in use, both for his enjoyment and also so he can tell me that it isn’t a steam engine. These are for you, Steve:

After grabbing a decent-sized lunch at a nearby café whilst having the “pleasure” of listening to Michael Bublé murder a dozen Christmas classics on his cynical new cash-in album,  we moved on to the excellent Lam Dong museum.  The main building housed the usual collection of pots and other excavated gubbins, but also a bizarre gallery of taxidermy and some interesting musical instruments. In the surrounding grounds there were a couple of traditional tribe “longhouses” which gave us an idea of how the various tribes lived, a house dedicated to the former king and queen of Vietnam and a huge gong placed next to the longhouses for reasons unknown.

Food that night came courtesy of Tu Anh’s, the proprietor of the same name being what can only be described as “a bit nuts”. Lovely woman, talks incessantly at a machine gun rate, takes care of her customers, a real dining experience. The food, mostly western, wasn’t bad either.

The next day we decided to take a tour with Dalat Easy Riders Club. This was essentially a day trip around some of Dalat’s sights outside of the city, riding pillion on a motorbike being driven by one of the 26 club members who make up Easy Riders. They must be doing something right, as we had seen dozens of copycat tours during our travels through Vietnam; the bikers do anything from day trips to month-long bike treks up and down the country.

We were introduced to our riders, Mr. Bin and Mr. Ky. The former had been in the club for about 4 years, the latter only a couple of months. Whilst Bin spoke fantastic English,  Ky had barely half a dozen words, which he made up for by a number of energetic and often hilarious mime actions. The day tour was jam-packed, and we crammed in a whole host of visits including:

•           A huge Dragon Pagoda with a massive dragon statue which snaked around the courtyard

•           A silk workshop where we were fascinated by the way the workers took silkworm pupae and stripped them of their threads via some huge machinery, before using cardboard templates (not dissimilar to those of a pianola) to weave them automatically into rugs, sheets and rolls of silk fabric

•           A coffee farm where we saw farmers harvesting millions of coffee beans from the acres of trees in the countryside (Vietnam is the second-biggest coffee exporter in the world)
  
•           Thac Voi waterfall, which left us drenched and happy

•           Chua Linh An pagoda, which hosted a very happy (and large) Buddha statue

•          A rice wine farm, where we got to see how the locals brewed fermented rice liquor and tried some 60% ABV wine / turps.
•           A flower farm where we saw thousands of roses, lilacs, gerbera, tulips and more all growing under tarpaulin greenhouses. Dalat is known as the Flower City for good reason – they are everywhere, beautiful and cheap. Farmers drive 10 hours to Saigon to sell them in the city, such is their popularity.

We ended the tour in the afternoon with a trip to the Crazy House. Built by the daughter of a former Vietnamese president, it lives up to its name, looking like the lovechild of Tim Burton and M.C. Escher. It feels completely organic, with paths and corridors intertwining and going off in a hundred different directions, and a variety of themed rooms such as the Kangaroo room (complete with kangaroo statue with glowing red eyes), the Bear room, the Tiger room, and so on. It was a fascinating place to explore, like a Disney house would look if Uncle Walt had taken a rather nasty LSD trip. A 20-year labour of love, the architect Dang Viet Nga had to overcome a lot of opposition to the house, mainly from the local community who considered it an eyesore. Happily, the reaction by most visitors appears to be positive. It’s certainly unlike any place I’d visited before, and was probably the highlight of the day and a great way to end the tour.

Once back at the Easy Riders office (handily located next door to our hotel), we talked to Bin about doing a 2-day tour and exploring the “real Vietnam”, as he put it. We wanted to be in Ho Chi Minh for Christmas Eve, so he arranged a tour that left on the 22^nd December, finished on the evening on 23^rd December, and would have us on a sleeper bus which arrived at about 7am on the 24^th. We thought it was an opportunity too good to miss, so decided to go for it. The tour would take us up to the central highlands, and en route we would see a plethora of authentic Vietnamese sights which aren’t generally covered in the guidebooks.

We ate at Tu Anh’s again that evening and, excited for the tour ahead, got an early night ahead of an 8:30am start.

Happy Christmas!

Ho! Ho! Ho!

This is going to be the most bizarre Christmas we've had. Away from much-loved and much-missed family and friends, we wanted to let you all know that whilst we're having a great time, we can't wait to catch up with you all again next year.

In traditional Vietnamese fashion, we're going to celebrate Christmas by going to a water park. Don't let the turkey burn!

Hope your Christmas is amazing, and 2012 is a year to remember for all the right reasons!

love Rob and Gilly xxxx

Day 68 - 69: Nha Trang

If anything, I slept worse on the sleeper bus to Nha Trang than on the one from Hanoi to Hue. After trekking for about 30 minutes to find "Hotel Alley", we checked in at An Hoa and I got a couple of hours kip. We headed out for lunch on the recommendation of the hotel staff to Mecca and had some great seafood (swordfish for me, fish in a clay pot for Gilly).

Feeling a little more with it, we wandered along the beach. The weather was warm but overcast and it drizzled periodically, but it was a refreshing walk. There isn't actually that much to do in Nha Trang; it's a fairly small beach town with a couple of historic sites and a huge stretch of beach, and is inexplicably popular with Russians - so much so, that many of the menus have Vietnamese, English and Russian translations.

We decided to take it easy on the first day, and treat ourselves to a pizza at Olivia - the second best pizza we've had since Vientiane.

On the second day we walked up toward the Long Son Pagoda, whose claim to fame is a huge white Buddha on a hill behind the pagoda itself. It's adorned with memorials to a number of monks who killed themselves through self-immolation, including Thich Quang Duc, mentioned a few posts back. There is a large cathedral in Nha Trang and we saw significantly more Catholic artwork and trinkets in the town than anywhere else in Asia until now.

We got a motorbike taxi to the other main historical site - Po Nagar Cham Towers, which was a fairly interesting diversion, but nothing particularly spectacular. A motorbike taxi back to town brought us to our lunch destination: Lanterns. To be honest, we couldn't see what all the hype was about on Trip Advisor, as the food was distinctly average and we much preferred yesterday's meal at Mecca. On the upside, Lanterns hands out free meals each Monday to the locals and also does a lot of charity work in the area, so there are definitely worse places to spend your money.

In Nha Trang, I also found some fresh milk for the first time in 2.5 months. Needless to say, I was pretty excited:

Nha Trang has the world's longest over-sea cable car, but the weather just wasn't worth us taking it - the visibility would have been appalling. On the upside, we did see some spectacular waves on the beach.

We ended our last day with some excellent seafood at Cafe Des Amis, followed by a quick drink at Why Not? bar.

We have booked an early morning bus to Dalat tomorrow (7:30am) which should take 4 hours - not too bad. We also need to try and book accommodation for New Year, as we are hoping to be in Sihanoukville in Cambodia, and it looks like hotels are selling out all over...

Day 62 - 67: Hoi An (Suits You, Sir!)

Hoi An has a reputation for being the place in Vietnam (and indeed, SE Asia) to go for tailor-made clothes. There are literally hundreds of tailor shops packed into a radius of about 2 square kilometres. With so much choice, it's pretty difficult to know which are good and which are awful. A mere glance at one of the items outside a shop will cause one of the staff to come rushing out to accost you and to try and drag you into their store. The majority of stores are actually just fronts for a factory service; you pick the item and the fabric/colour you want; they measure you up; they send the measurements and the fabric to the factory; it comes back and you try it on; you ask for any adjustments; it goes back to the factory; it comes back and you try it on; you're hopefully happy with it.

I already knew I was going to get a suit or two from Yaly. They had a reputation for being the best tailor in town, and we'd also had recommendations from other people who'd been there. It also turns out that this is where the Top Gear guys came on the motorbike tour to Vietnam. Think I missed that episode.

After being dropped off by the bus outside An Phu hotel who was offering $10 rooms in 3-star accommodation (result!), we were fortunate enough to find that Yaly was on the same road. The place is massive. They do all of their tailoring on-site, and the range of materials on offer is mind-blowing. They can do anything: you have a favourite dress/shirt/pair of shoes? They can replicate it, and probably with better quality material and stitching. You see something you like in a catalogue or online? They will make it for you. When our lottery numbers come in, I'm going to come here for a month and get an entire wardrobe or two made up. The materials are all clearly marked with prices so there's no need for haggling as you'll get in many, many other stores. You can spend anything from $78 to $500 on a suit, and from $17 to $150 on a shirt - with everything in between. We arrived and were greeted by a lovely, smiling girl named Genia. She took us around the shop, pointing out the fabrics for shirts and suits, and then left me to make a decision.

I own two suits. One is an off-the-rack ill-fitting thing that I got from Burton around 12 years ago and have used for everything since: interviews, funerals, weddings, you name it. The other is a dinner suit with a 28" waist that I can just about squeeze into. I thought it prudent to buy two suits here - one for work stuff, and one for more casual events and whatnot.

I picked out a grey material for the work suit, and opted for a $200 blend of cashmere and wool. For a black suit, I went for a wool, cotton and polyester mix for $100. I also thought it worth getting some shirts - three Italian cotton shirts for $34 a piece seemed reasonable: one navy for evening wear, one white for all-purpose events, and one white with blue/pink stripes to go with the grey suit. Genia measured me up, and told me to come back for the first fitting the following day. They work fast in these places.

With that out of the way, it was over to Gilly to try and find something she liked. Genia freely admitted that women's clothes would be cheaper elsewhere, and probably of a similar quality. Unfortunately, the amount of clothing on offer around Hoi An short-circuited the shopping lobe in Gilly's brain, and she wandered around the town drooling. By the next day she would have adapted to the situation, but the first day was a write-off.

For dinner we went to the fantastic Miss Ly restaurant to try some of the specialty Hoi An dishes. The main treats are Cao Lau (noodles mixed with pork, pork crackling and lettuce in a sauce), White Rose (steamed dumplings containing a mix of prawn, chilli and lime, with crispy onions on top), and fried wontons with some sort of salsa with hot prawns on top. We ordered all three, and they were superb. In fact, we didn't manage to find a place that did all three dishes as well in the entire time we were in Hoi An.

Wontons:

White Rose:

Afterwards, with room to spare, we decided to take Julie and Lev's advice and head to Cargo. They had been talking up the desserts here, as had Tom and Holly, so we thought it would be rude not to. We weren't disappointed:

Mango pavlova:

Chocolate brownie cheesecake:

The next day we had lunch at the interestingly named "Lame Cafe" (fantastic rice pancakes, and a glass of draught beer is 3000 dong....or about 11p) and then wandered about town. Hoi An is a lovely little place, with lots of French influence apparent in all of the buildings, and a nice view over the river. It's like the word "quaint" was invented for this place.

I went for my first suit fitting, and was pretty impressed with their first attempt. The jacket for the grey suit was perfect, but the trousers were a little loose. With the black suit, the jacket was a little tight but the trousers were great. Genia got on the microphone and summoned up a tailor, who then went around me marking places on the clothes in chalk, before disappearing downstairs again. And with that, the first fitting was complete. This outfit of tailors is very professional.

Gilly plucked up the courage as we traversed the narrow streets to have a look at some dresses. She found a lovely purple dress in one tailor for $25 and got measured up; then she found a place that did both a great evening dress and a work suit for a total of $40. Find me a place in the UK that does tailor-made clothing at this price, and I will be a happy man.

Fittings over, we met up with Scott and Hannah for dinner at Faifoo and had a lovely meal in the evening. Of course, we had room for more Cargo desserts:

Chocolate mousse cake:

Chocolate Truffle cake:

On our third day we decided to explore the town a bit. Hoi An has a ticket scheme where you buy a ticket which gets you into 5 different places out of a possible 18 around the town, over the course of three days. On our first day we went to Tan Ky House (one of the oldest houses in Hoi An), the Handicraft Workshop (which hosted a traditional music and dance performance) and the Museum of History (a fairly limited selection of exhibits with some bad translations). Hoi An, we learned, used to be a prosperous port town, but the advent of other towns and cities along the coast doing better business coupled with a tendency for the river to flood each year meant that pretty much all major trade ceased to the town. The height of the floodwater was staggering - Tan Ky house had measurements of the water levels over the years:

The chalk mark just above Gilly's head was from a month ago(!) whilst the very top yellow label is the height reached in 1964. Unsurprisingly, when the floods are expected everyone moves all of their belongings to the top floors....

After a morning of sites, we went to Bale Well for lunch. They gave us a mountain of food: pork satay, rolled pork with rice paper, rice pancakes filled with shrimp, and spring rolls. All with an amazing sauce and about 3kg of salad to go with it. It was a tremendous meal, and we were thoroughly stuffed.


The afternoon saw us back in Yaly to check the adjustments on the suits. Everything fitted superbly. I felt a bit like James Bond. Getting back into my backpacker clothes (t-shirt and convertible trousers) was a little depressing. Still, we were cheered up by the news that a couple of our Canadian friends - Cayleigh and Patrick, whom we met over all-you-can-eat ice cream in Hanoi - were in town, so we arranged to meet up for dinner along with Scott and Hannah.

We crossed over the Japanese Covered Bridge and went gift shopping. Hoi An has a massive array of shops all selling a huge variety of presents. Chopsticks, lacquerware, fans, linens, coasters...pretty much anything you'd like to send home. The constant pleading of the owners (pretty much all female) to get you to go into their store can wear after a while, but you soon learn to zone it out. "You buy something!" and "Looking!" and "Come in here you!" seem to be the stock phrases most employ, as if the town was some sort of cartel who agreed to restrict formalities to three greetings with which they can entice the punters. Woe betide the maverick who branches out to learn a politer introduction.

Gilly picked up her dresses, and everything looked tip-top for both of us:

We headed to White Sail for dinner; I fancied something a little more Thai so opted for chicken with chilli and garlic, whilst everyone else tried the Hoi An dishes. None of us came away disappointed. Cayleigh and Patrick recommended a great bar to head to afterwards: the Sunshine Cafe, run by a lady who embodied the name of the establishment. She advised us that every hour was happy hour, so we got a few 12p beers before moving on to mojitos. We may have been the largest group of people to visit her little cafe for some time, bless her. After a few rounds of Uno, time had slipped by unnoticed and before we knew it the clock was hitting 11pm. The walk home was wet, but deathly quiet. The entire town shuts down at 11, and it was refreshing not to get offered a bicycle or some food as we trudged back to the hotel.

The following day we packed up all our gifts and new clothes along with some odds and ends we had picked up in our first two and a half months on the road, and went to the post office to ship them home. An hour later, and they were packaged in a box that was taped within an inch of its life and ready to head back to Blighty. My wonderful sister will be taking good care of the goodies until next October.

We had a couple of visits left on our tickets, so we went to a couple of Assembly Halls. Essentially, these are courtyards mixed with temples which are used for special events and are decorated in the style of the country who owned the hall. For instance, the Cantonese Assembly Hall had dragons and Chinese script all over.

We went back to Lame for lunch. We weren't as impressed with their wontons; I think we'd been spoiled by the quality elsewhere. After a few beers, we wandered around some of the galleries in town as well as the Museum of Folk which, like the other museum we'd been in, didn't really have much to offer. We fancied a change from Vietnamese food so went to Ganesh in the evening. It had the exact same menu as  Omar's in Hue, and we later found out that the company who runs them have a Ganesh or Omar's in pretty much every town in Vietnam. The food appears to be consistent though: it was as good, if not better than our meal in Hue. After a few games of cards in Cargo over dessert with Scott and Hannah, we walked back to the hotel in a downpour, the like of which I'd not seen since Bangkok. Luckily, the hotel supplied us with an umbrella in our room - a nice touch, which Gilly had sensibly thought to grab on the way out.

Tiramisu:

On our final day we met up with Patrick and Cayleigh in the morning and said goodbye, as they are heading over to Thailand for Christmas. They've kindly offered to host us when we hit Toronto though, so it wasn't a sad farewell.

We decided to go to Miss Ly and end on a positive note for lunch with the best Hoi An food in the town. A trip over the bridge to Cham Island was uneventful and there was none of the charm, ambience or indeed activity of the old town, so we headed back half an hour later. A final dessert in Cargo rounded off the afternoon, and we opted to share the awesome Gourmet Chocolate Plate:

A sleeper bus to Nha Trang awaited us at 6pm, for another 12 hour journey. Nha Trang is a beach town. The weather in Hoi An ranged from cloudy to bucketing down, possibly due to a tropical storm which may be sweeping the area, so we have no idea what the sky is going to look like when we stagger off the bus in the morning.

Day 59 - 61: Hué

The sleeper bus from Hanoi to Hué was the first we'd taken on our trip. It wasn't an unmitigated disaster, as we managed to get something like 5-6 hours sleep. It involved lying down on an adjustable seat stacked in three columns one behind the other and slanted so that your knees down were underneath the headrest of the seat in front. Ingenious, but not particularly good for moving around. Essentially, you are in a lying down position for over half a day, unless you wanted to bring your knees up to your chest. On top of this, the chairs are arranged bunkbed-style so there is an upper and lower row, and in true Vietnamese style the two aisles were filled with sacks of rice, live birds and for at least part of the journey, Vietnamese people.

At 6am though, a little brat of a girl decked out in denim, gold bracelet, gold necklace and gold earrings who couldn't have been older than 3 decided to scream every 15 seconds. A piercing, persistent shriek that served to wake up anyone unfortunate enough not to have bought earplugs. I'd wager that they'd have disintegrated even if they had, such was the sonic force generated by this spoiled shit. Her step-father was an English guy wearing similar attire to the kid, her mother was Vietnamese, and it was clear that neither of them had the ability to shut them up. An hour of this later, and I had concocted several ingenious methods of doing so myself, the best of which involved the child, a pane of glass and significant velocity.

We arrived, cranky and hating children even more than usual, 15 hours after setting off. It was raining. We hadn't experienced rain over any significant time period for at least a month. Hué soon made up for that; it rained consistently for the first two days, rained intermittently for the third day, and typically dried up on the morning of the fourth day when we got on a bus to Hoi An.

Hué itself, then. I imagine it's quite a quaint little city when you can walk around it without feeling cold and wet, but even with the drab weather we tried to make the most of it. On arrival we were taken by a free minibus to a hotel I had earmarked for potential by a guy who told us we'd be staying a luxury room with breakfast chucked in for $10. The photos looked stunning, and there was no obligation. Just as well really, as the room was $12, breakfast wasn't included, and the room looked nothing like the picture. The chap with the leaflet had obviously scarpered after dropping us off. We politely declined and walked across the road to Ngoc Binh Hotel where we were given a comfortable room for $8 (no breakfast, but that was fine).l When I say comfortable, I mean it was the softest mattress I have ever sat on. I imagine that if they'd made a bed out of marshmallow, this is what it would feel like. Bags dumped, we walked over to the Family House Restaurant opposite and had a hearty lunch (an excellent spicy fish casserole thing that is just the right side of "blow-your-head-off" hot) before setting off to find the main cultural hotspots. A Contemporary Art gallery we came across consisted of a house containing a number of vaguely-formed sculptures and little else. Across the road, we spent an hour or so at Ho Chi Minh Museum (apparently every city has one), and soon found ourselves faced with many of the same photos and excerpts from his speeches as in Hanoi. I have vowed not to go in another one until Ho Chi Minh city...if anywhere is going to enlighten us on this fellow, it's surely the city that's got his name. Right?

In the evening we went to Nina's Cafe, also on our street about 4 doors down. Somehow we'd managed to get a hotel in the road with the best restaurants in town, all serving up authentic local specialities. We tried Bang Khoai - a yellow pancake made from egg and rice flour, containing shrimp and pork - and some delicious pork which was wrapped around a spring onion for cooking, and then served with beansprouts, lettuce, cucumber and an amazing peanut sauce which you then roll up into pancakes using supplied rice papers. All of the food was fantastic.

The next day we checked out of Ngoc Binh in favour or Thai Binh 1 next door (the wi-fi in the former was playing up and we needed to get some photos uploaded) and braved the relentless drizzle and biting wind to head into the citadel and Imperial City. The citadel is the "old" city, whilst the Imperial City is a collection of buildings - a lot of them ruins - from the time of emperors in the early 19th to 20th centuries. It contains things like a theatre, palace, pavilions and ornate gates, and would make a lovely walk on a warm sunny day. We were not there on a warm sunny day. 4 hours later, dripping wet and freezing cold (where did the cold come from? I didn't order this on our trip until New Zealand!) we'd explored about as much as we wanted to, and were now ready to go back to our lovely hotel room. After getting dry, we went back to Nina's Cafe for an evening meal and saw a Geordie couple who had racked up 20 empty bottles of Huda Beer between them for the paltry sum of 200,000 dong (£6.60). That would barely get two pints in Bristol. The food was once again superb - we had more of the pork from the previous night and some speciality shrimp and fish spring rolls, then retired to the hotel.

On our last day in Hué, we decided to charter a motorbike taxi for the day. The Geordies had told us not to bother getting a tour - all of them took a dragon boat along the brown, murky Perfume river, with various stops at shops where the locals aggressively hawked their wares. With the weather as it was, we went for the "fun" option of getting on the back of a moped whilst a guy called Lop who didn't speak a word of English buzzed us about the various mausoleums in the area. This was my first time on a motorcycle, and despite my previous misgivings, it wasn't bad at all. Mopeds look fairly simple to ride, especially the automatics. We wandered around the three main mausoleums the tours spin you to but with the bonus of a) not being crowded with tourists getting in our shots and b) being able to take our time rather than the 15-minute whistle-stop visits you usually get. Despite our gesticulations, we ended up with one helmet between us which I gave to Gilly. I figured we'd be going slow enough with three people on a moped for it not to be too dangerous if I fell off.

We'd experienced the near misses from a distance in Hanoi. Actually being part of the "fun" and almost getting broadsided by bikes, cars and trucks whilst actually on a bike is completely different. Firstly, you have to have confidence in your driver. I did, completely. The guy was 60+, so had obviously been doing this for a while. Secondly, it helps not to stick out any extraneous body parts. On a number of occasions, Lop's tarpaulin raincover actually hit the moped handle of another driver coming in the opposite way. This is how it goes on a moped in Vietnam. People swerve all over, come close to hitting you, and at the last second turn away. After the third time of it happening, I became a bit blasé about it. It was just another ordinary "oh-my-God-we're-going-to-crash-oh-wait-we've-somehow-survived" scenario.

So we trundled around the entire day, hopping on and off at a total of three mausoleums and a pagoda. Lop had to ask for directions on a number of occasions to find these places. It was pretty obvious that when he'd yelled "motorbike!" at us, he wasn't expecting us to present him with an itinerary, and so proceeded to blag his way (via a helpful interpreter friend) from then on. The mausoleums are the "afterlife palaces" of the old Vietnamese emperors, and are sprawling complexes of buildings and grounds, littered with statues, ponds, temples, and so on. The three we went to were Minh Mang, Khai Dinh and Tu Duc. Khai Dinh was probably the most impressive, and had exceptional mosaic work in the walls inside, as well as a grandiose series of steps and platforms to climb to reach the main temple.

The other two were interesting as well, but not in such good condition.  Thien Mu Pagoda was last on the agenda, and was a working temple complete with chanting Buddhist monks, a Bonsai garden and, in a garage, the Austin car driven by the venerable monk who drove to the centre of Saigon and set himself on fire in protest at Catholic oppression of his faith. Sobering stuff.

Thankfully the weather in the afternoon diminished to cold, rather than cold and wet. We arrived back at our hotel at about 4:30pm, then went for dinner with Scott and Hannah - two Australians we took the Ha Long Bay tour with. We fancied something a bit more western, so ate at Omar Khayyam's Indian Restaurant which was possibly the best Indian meal we've had since leaving the UK. Still not a patch on home, but a damn good effort nonetheless.

We had explored Hué as much as we wanted to given the miserable weather, and were happy to head on south, so we booked a bus via the Family House Restaurant for the next morning to our third Vietnam destination - Hoi An.