Back home, back to school, back down to earth.

Well, that’s it. The end of my combined 34 days of overseas vacation, neatly coiniciding with the end of my long school break. It’s back down to earth and back to school on Monday.

The past 16 days have been a decidedly mixed experience. In general, Saigon excepting, Vietnam was drab after the north. Sapa was stunning and Halong Bay fully deserves its august reputation. Hanoi did not reach such heights but was a decent place to sightsee in itself. But after that? Disappointment and boredom – Hue was an exorbitant bore (especially after Angkor, as we have already mentioned) and Hoi An pleasant enough but dull for a stay of two full days. Nha Trang, however, was the worst. Hyped as Vietnam’s “biggest, loudest beach resort” (Lonely Planet), it turned out to be a pale copy of Sihanoukville. Instead of open-air beach huts serving delicious seafood on the beachfront, we got a congested main road. How surprising, then, that the beach failed to relax us in any way at all.

Fortunately Saigon was around as a saving grace for the southern leg of our trip. Blessed with a spot of surprisingly good weather, we walked much of the city in the couple days we were there. It has everything – loud, crowded markets packed with prime local produce, oodles of history and traffic that at least makes sense some of the time.  It was not boring, it was not exorbitant (no, not even the Cu Chi Tunnels) and it was a good place for us to end, making up for the disappointment of the three cities that came before it.

Overall, then, to anybody (foolishly) looking at this site as a potential guide for a future trip, I would suggest the following itinerary: fly to Hanoi, proceed around Halong Bay, hike about Sapa, return to see Hanoi, then fly straight to Saigon before you go home. That’ll expose you already to everything Vietnam has to offer. I swear it.

And for me personally, I’m glad to be back home and to be staying here for the foreseeable future. Twenty-seven days of dodging anarchic traffic, clambering about sometimes-unsafe ruins, turning down touts, determinedly ignoring beggars, getting diahorrhea, guzzling Fanta, haggling with hilltribespeople, enduring pathetic air-conditioning, anxiously watching taxi meters, breathing in refreshing thick smog, sliding up and down muddy hiking trails – it’s certainly been a heck of an experience. Now, I’m ready for experiences which I’m far more familiar with.

So – till familiarity once more turns to boredom.

sheraton saigon

Does Cholon sound like Sheraton Saigon? The taxi driver who was supposed to take us to the Cholon Area of Ho Chi Minh City (or to adopt the local name for it, Saigon) ended up bringing us to the Sheraton Saigon. Sadly we are not customers there. We took the long roundabout route to Cholon in the end, with the taxi driver pausing several times during the trip to ask other drivers for directions.

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Nha Trang has been incomprehensibly sedate. This was not supposed to be the case. After all, the place looked enticing enough from the guidebook pictures. And Miss Universe 2008 was held here.

Perhaps some of the loveliness left with the ladies. Nha Trang lacks the uber-chill out vibe of Sihanoukville. In any case, I now have half a day to burn and nothing with which I can burn it. This explains the existence of this post at this moment. It would otherwise be fermenting somewhere in my mind, until I find myself sufficiently bored enough to post something.

So, here’re some of the observations that I have thus far made. As much as I hope they are pithy and blindingly insightful, I realise that I am hardly a paragon of anthropologic brilliance. Neither have I conducted any  studies that can prove my observations true. Thus I sadly cannot say that I write authoritatively. Please forgive my trespasses should I have offended anyone or anything.

Hoi An, food paradise

Apart from the number of tailors there, Hoi An also boasts a large variety of food, a large proportion of which is unique to the area itself. We tried out the food there and the Chinese influence is apparent.

random (& not so random) photo-shots

a picture speaks a thousand words… and i’m lazy to type

hot bods, cool powder

boat on halong bay

feasting like a king

basking in the sun/shade/semi-shade

Tito island bay

sweaty, stuffy, stinky

kitchen of hanoi restaurant

mid-trek break in the highlands

our homestay family in Sapa

new-age lingas amidst ancient ruins

enigmatic ruins, the route next and food watch in Hoi An

The Lonely Planet guide described the Cham ruins of My Son as “enigmatic”. This is the exact same word used to describe the Bayon in the Angkor Wat complex. However I feel that the word’s meaning is different for both ruins.

well it looks real enough and Hoi An is an anagram of Hanoi

Hoi An is a place for three things: tailors, shoes and tourists. There are probably 49328590328 tailor shops lining the narrow streets of Hoi An and if you threw a stone, it will probably land on several sewing machines, 10 sweat-shop tailors and a handful of tailor shop bosses calculating Hoi An is so small we can walk it in a day. The only reason why we are staying here till tomorrow evening is because Roger and I have tailored two suits plus gazillions other articles of clothing at a tailor here in Hoi An. We are officially seriously fucking broke; I need to draw cash from an ATM soon and Roger has to borrow money from Zizihaohao.

The Ill-Made Knight

I’ve been reading T.H. White’s The Once And Future King in my spare time here in Vietnam. It’s a nice retelling of the Arthurian legend, and funny in it’s own way. I find Sir Lancelot to be a very interesting character. It’d be nice to be Arthur – he’s such a simple character. Lancelot’s more complicated.

The Once and Future King