north to south the rice paddy tour

ok so trying to carry on the story things are all getting a bit complicated with I.T. between repeated viruses on camera memory sticks fast internet connections with keyboards that keep randomly changing back to vietnamese or the alternative of slow internet connections that stay in english and cost a bomb added to the fact that my main route for contacting fellow travelers, facebook, appears to have just been blocked throughout Vietnam.

My current status is on a slow internet connection with my memory card trying to copy 1.7gb of photos across to the local hard drive on a USB 1.0 port.  The hope is that i can then copy back to my portable hard drive which can be connected in the fast internet places.  Hopefully one of them will have something that can batch process photos as i was using the facebook uploader to upload photos at a manageable resolution.  All fun and games.


So where am i now? i am in a town called Hoi An which is a sleepy little old town on a river near to the beach about 30km south of De Nanag (or the more well known location of china beach)  The plan was to spend a couple of nights here hanging out on a push bike going to the beach etc.  Unfortunately it started to rain about 3am this morning and is forecast to continue to rain for about 1 week so i am thinking i might just get out of here tomorrow afternoon.  Soinstead i am enjoying the local food which is particullarly good

Hoi An town it is built around a quaint little river with restaurants and stalls everywhere

 

Hoi an food very nice they specailise in a type of noodle soup and dumpling and spring rolls

Back to where i got to in my last post I think I was talking about the walking in Sapa.  The walking wasn't too hard but it was still quite steep and most people had trouble dealing with slippery muddy patches etc.  Most fun was the local women who walked the whole way with us trying to get us to buy things. The art of having fun with while not encouraging touts too much seem to be one that is requiered everywhere in the world except NZ but i am getting quite good at it.  Of course the good healthy lifestyle aimed for was slightly marred by the homestay we were put up in for the night pulling out a few bottles of "happy water" and insisting we drink with them.  Happy water in this case is the local version of fire water apparently made from fermented rice and called rice wine.  In summary it is strong very alcoholic and the closest i can come to describing the taste is that it was very similar taste to when in the past i have had to resort to siphoning petrol  and sucked for a second too long and hence got a mouthful.  Basically a major component of drinking this stuff is to be able to subdue your gag reflex, luckily years in South America have honed this skill to a high level.

Rice Wine notice it is strored in a bottle that used to have drinking water in it the potential for a mistake is huge

So after the first day wandering around in the warm sun across rice paddy and dirt tracks i was looking forward to more of the same on day two when we woke there was a little fog around which just made it more atmospheric. Of course we didn't actually start walking till it had started to rain properly and the cloud had dropped so we were in the middle of it.  Hence day two's trekking was more an exercise in trying not to slip over on the muddy paths while pairing into the mist trying to imagine the beautiful view that would be there if only we could see it.  Mid afternoon we were picked up to be taken back to Sapa town a fun trip in itself as corners and on coming traffic suddenly appeared out of the foggy gloom by the time we arrived back in Sapa the mercury had dived to around 15 degrees (don't forget i brought no warm clothes with me as i was heading to hot places) at this point sightseeing around town was getting perilous as you couldn't actually see to the other side of the street to check for traffic before crossing the fog was so thick.  Eventually we did make it back alive to Hanoi after another overnight train trip.  My body was starting to fall over by this stage as previous sleeps going backwards in order had been;

1. train trip back to hanoi (we arrived at 4:30am) 
2. night in homestay (happy water and sleeping on thin mats on the floor in a room with 17 others)
3. train trip to Sapa (beers on the train with some english blokles i meet till mid night then train arrived at 4:30am)
4. 2 nights on the party boat trip to Haulong Bay

So in true traveller tradition arrive back in town rather than book a room to recover for the next night i booked a 14hr bus ride out of town starting at 8pm that night.  As i was now at the point of having to stop every time i climbed two stairs to cough up a lung (then spend five minutes trying to get my breath back) I thought it was probably only fair to my fellow bus mates that i go to the chemist pick up some cough medicine and finally lose the last of my dignity by donning one of these ridiculous masks you see asian people everywhere wearing.


The next morning i arrived in Hue, (an old town that used to be home to a number of dynasties that ruled Vietnam prior to the french being around), a little tired, and for the first time in a number of days, actually collapsed into a real bed on solid ground.  Unfortunately my timetable didn't allow for Hue to be a place to stop and relax rather a quick rush around to see the ruins of the dynasties then onto the next stop.  In the event i managed to see what i wanted to see in two half days sightseeing saving a bunch of time by taking motorbike taxis rather than hireing my own pushbike.

Ok i have been to the Ice Hotel in the Artic made of ice, and the Salt Hotel in Bolivia made of salt but what exactly have they made the beds out of at the Movenpick hotel in Hue?

Brief summary of Hue is a citadel that had the heck bombed out of it by the yanks but is still very nice and some tombs from the old emprors that were well worth the vist for the pomp and granduer of it all (my favourite was the lake and island the king had dug out and populated with rare birds because he felt it would help his poetry writting).  Other than this the DMZ (former border between north and south vietnam is also near here but like most old borders physical remanents are pretty well all gone so the tour apprently consists of looking at fields and being told what used to be there (hence the reason why i didn't bother with this tour)

Thien Mu Pagoda in Hue

Part of the complex of the tu duc tomb

So we arrive to where i am now Hoi An I arrived approx 6pm last night and figured after a number of nights on the road i deserved somewhere a bit nicer, of course the first 20 places that i went to did not have any rooms nice or not, so when i finally found somewhere with a free room i took it.  It is amazing how in the space of one hour looking for a room you can go from being certain that you will accept nothing less than a nice room in a place with a nice pool and attached bar to being happy with a room without an external window.  In  retrospect the whole pool thing has been rendered a bit pointless by the rain so probably just as well i didn't splash out.

Movement from here; if i can get on tomrrows bus (18hr hell ride) i will head down to a place called Delat in the mountains close to Ho Chi Minh City (known to everybody other than the leaders of the communist party as Saigon) then after a couple of days in Saigon up the Mekong to Cambodia.  Having cut Hoi An short i now am not soo pushed for time to get out of Vietnam before the 25th when my visa runs out so there maybe time to go and hang out somewhere down on the mekong delta for a day or two.