Wednesday, 12 December 2012

Nha Trang, Hoi An & Hue...



Middle Vietnam and the first stop, Nha Trang.

Kind of like Benidorm but with way more Russians, all the signs are in Vietnamese, English and Russian; they should call it Little Russia or Russian Town. Anyone who has visited the delightful Slough in last 5 years will understand the feeling, except in Slough its Polish. I’m fairly sure I am not being racist when I say they are exactly the same; shiny clothes, peroxide blonde hair and kids spouting off in foreign wearing Reebok Classics.

The beach was mediocre and the water brown so we looked up good places to go in the area. Near the top of the list was a beach “untouched by man”. This seemed like the ideal location for a couple of lads just looking to have a can of Coke, a chick burg and a lie down followed general wave based activities; so we took a 30 minute cab down the coast. When we arrived at said “untouched by man” beach we were a little disappointed:

Some of the items we found on the beach “untouched by man” included hundreds of flip-flops and sandals, mattress innards, arm chairs, wood, empty bottles, general tat and an abandoned army barracks!

The night life in Nha Trang was your usual backpackery scene mixed in with locals hovering. One place called Why Not Bar offered a bucket like I’ve never seen for just 800,000 Dong or £20ish:

In one of the bars was a pool table, a kind of winner stays on set up with the option to play doubles. It was the turn of the J Bird and T Money to take the cues and rinse some local douchebags for control of the table. As it stood our success in doubles matches had been non-existent, losing all around the world to Brazilian women in Florida whose breasts were so large that they knocked the balls out of position and old men in Sydney who literally couldn’t have been any drunker chatting up truly horrendous looking women.

Two chaps rocked up and they seemed like…. Oh no wait… hang on… is that geezer… yeah… yeah bloke is wearing a glove! One of the two men had a 2 fingered, 1 thumbed glove on. As in he has brought it to the bar to play pool at midnight, who does that. Anyway he was shit, but his mate was good so we lost and added it to our growing tally.

Hoi An further up the coast offered a better setting for our planned laziness with a much nicer beach, warm town feeling with plenty of decent food (fairly difficult to find in ‘Nam) and an outrageous amount of tailors.

To get there we had to voyage on our first sleeper bus, named as such due the strange set up of 3 rows of collapsible beds for you to sleep in on the treacherous journey around the mountains.

This would end up taking 16 hours instead of the advertised 10 due to typical Vietnamese mis-selling of tickets and the driver hitting something (possibly an animal) and having to change some part of the coach whilst he left the door open and lights on; allowing 95% of all Vietnams insects into the cabin feast on my delicious skin! The view in the morning however was rather nice.


Our hotel was lovely offering a huge room with two double beds, two balconies and two bathrooms for just £10 a night each. We also had to opportunity to rent mopeds and go exploring around the town and off towards Da Nang.

We scooted over to the Hyatt to see if we could use their beach. So we strided in like a couple of likely lads and made ourselves at home. We noticed that the fuel gages were on empty but I convinced Jack that the gages were broke because they went further than zero and why would someone rent you a moped and not put fuel in it so we continued. Jack had mention earlier that the bloke in the hotel had said that we did need to fill them up with petrol but I again convinced Jack otherwise claiming that he must have misheard the man.

We reached a mountain just sticking up in the middle of flat land, apparently this was Marble Mountain.

A network of Pagodas and caves used by Buddhist to do they’re praying shit or whatever they do. It was rife with school kids, some found Jack very interesting for some reason and insisted on having pictures with him, bare hilare.

The view from the top was lovely, able to see the coast and other good stuff in one. You could also use the binoculars except for one slight hitch. There are no coins in Vietnam, and if there are they are rarer than a good meal… which is extremely rare!

We also go this snap:

This was taken by a ladyboy. Some lad with tits said that he would take the pic for us as I was struggling with the timer. For some reason the tranny decided to squat to take the picture. Jack later informed me that the ladyboy had had all the bits removed, when I asked how he knew this he simply said “no bulge”

We headed back to town… oh wait… shit. My moped started spluttering. The unimaginable and unbearable had happened. Jack was right about something.

We abandoned the scooter at the side of the road and went twosies for some ten minutes to a shack that sold us 2 liters of petrol in a water bottle and got back home.

The next night we just had the one moped and went to town. After a food we returned to where we parked it to find it had been nicked! Apparently you can’t park there and the police had moved it. I was super annoyed but a local helped us and we got it back free of charge.

At night Hoi An has a good array of places to drink with some offering beer for just 12p a glasses and 6x Vodka cokes for £1.20. This obviously resulted in drunkenness but I was able get a couple of pics of this lad:

And this graffiti which was approx 4ft in length:


 Next was Hue, the former Capital. Rubbish. Went to a tomb, looked really nice and we were going this is in good nick. Then we read it was made in 1930s, all of a sudden if wasn’t in good nick it was just cack. Tombs need to be at least 1000 years old to be called a tomb imho.


x

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