Singapore

Melaka

Kuala Lumpur

Pulau Perhentian

OUR beach, WE found it. No fucking fire pong OK?

Top of our monitor lizard size chart. He was as big as me.

Mister Skink

Colonel Monitor

Senor Gecko

Don’t know what this is, but is has a cheesecake for a head.

Koh Tao

Koh Tao had changed a lot in the 7 years since I visited it last. Recent additions included a bowling alley , a 7/11 and an ‘exclusive‘ spa resort which had privatised the best beach. It was certainly not the isolated paradise I remember, but thankfully it’s basic geography remained unadulterated, so the relentless juggernaut of progress had only managed to plough a thin strip of land along the three main beaches, before realising it was more profitable to build less and charge more. Just so long as people still have access to Pringles and M&M’s though. ‘People may come for the breathtaking scenery and the chance to swim with whale sharks, but they stay for western confectionary’, is the basic rule, applied liberally, throughout the Thai Islands.

But anyway, once we’d paid the 400 baht for a pick-up ride across the island to Tanote bay, we couldn’t afford to go back to civilization and it’s monosodium glutamate-rich fruits until we got the ferry out of there a week later. Which was a shame, as pick-up rides on Koh Tao’s roads are probably just as fun as swimming with whale sharks. The island is about as tall as it is wide with a dense rainforest interior and only rutted dirt tracks for roads, so the 400baht cost is relative to the odds of the pick-up truck actually making the journey. With each incline, the vehicle would wheel spin and snake wildly until it reached the crest of the hill, before skidding down the other side and doing it all over again. On the way back we even saw a girl on a quad bike, brakes fully locked, sliding down the road at increasing speed. We didn’t see how it ended. We had a ferry to catch.

Our second stay in Bangkok just prior to Koh Tao had not so much dented our budget, rather, driven it to an old industrial estate and shot it in the back of the head (Those Birkenstocks from the Khao San only lasted a week too). So our daily schedule was filled only by breakfast, lunch, dinner and the hours between them in which we would snorkel, read in hammocks, sleep in hammocks and ponder such decisions as, ‘fruit or pancakes for breakfast?’, and, ‘Pad Thai or noodle soup for lunch/dinner?’.

To break such backbreaking monotony, we changed accommodation half way through the week. Although it was actually because the bungalows were cheaper at the other end of the beach, and they had better hammocks too. The nightly walk back to our first bungalow was also strewn with giant millipedes, spiders, frogs, tockay geckos, cockroaches and a bright green snake, which was an adventure when our torch worked, but a gauntlet of fear when it broke. However, on downing our bags in our new bungalow, I went to open the shutters and a black cloud of ants flooded out of the window frame to greet us. We moved to another one.

Hanoi and Halong Bay

We had high hopes for our over-night bus journey to Hanoi. The bunks were roomy and comfy, and the air con didn’t make us feel like we had a terminal illness, as it so often does. Then came the Bony M DVD, played on repeat for all but three hours of the journey. I never realised that guy was so bad at dancing. It wasn’t until we got off the bus that we discovered it was also infested with fleas, and they’d really gone to town on us.

We booked a three day tour of Halong Bay almost instantly as our hotel room reeked of mold and the bedding was like sleeping on a warm wet wipe. The pictures we were shown of our $88, ‘superior’ tour, including two nights accomodation, all meals, sea kyaking and cycling around Catba National park, were a little too good to be true, and so the wait for our boat at the port in Halong City was tense. There was little water, just a sea of semi-traditional looking junks, ranging vastly in appearances, and an even bigger sea of tourists. Luckily ours was a fine vessel, with Asian pirate ship detailing and something verging on luxury. In fact the entire three days were amazing and far more luxorious than we had ever imagined. The only point we found to bemoan were some of the other guests and their ridiculous expectations. They really were a bunch of whinging little princesses. Although I concede most of this blog may appear to pick up on the negatives a bit, they’re always the funny parts. It’s the differences between our cultures that makes us want to visit these places, but most of the tourists in Vietnam don’t seem to want experience another culture. Instead they are content just to take their countless photos of a culture that no longer exists in the parts of the country that they visit.

Hanoi seemed to be teeming with gangs of yet more middle aged to elderly tourists in cyclo rickshaws. These pretty much look like wheelchairs with a bike welded on the back. Their appearance combined with their slow pace, make any passenger look mentally handicapped, as they slowly move their head from side to side, vacantly gawping in amazement at everyday vietnamese life with awkward grins.

A floating house, with floating dog.

A floating town.

Cat Ba National Park

Water Puppets.

The Temple of Literature. There were no books.

The Kelly prepares for take-off.

Hoi An

We actually went to Nha Trang before travelling to Hoi An. A place not worth mentioning if it weren’t for the fact that lobster was 12 dowaar a kilo. Lobster is pretty sickly though so we only stayed two nights, and besides, the place just looked like Bournemouth.

Being a UNESCO World Heritage site, Hoi An was ripe with sight seeing potential. But unlike places such as Fort Cochi in India (which it very much resembled), Hoi An’s charm seemed more than a little contrived. Touted as, ‘ a living museum piece’, it was exactly that; Although the buildings remained, there was little left of any ambience other than the faux-rustic fairytale being played out for the countless tourists. Like a kind of Disney Land for middle class psuedo intellectual suburbanites, desperate to pump some culture into their kids before they hit their teens.

Hoi An is also famous for it’s tailors, which occupy about four out of every five shops. Two of our good friends where getting married just after we arrive home, and I had nothing to wear. I had grand ideas of a Gram Parsons number, embroidered with a portrait of the happy couple riding swans in a heart-shaped frame across the shoulder blades, but settled for a simple linen one, somewhere between a geography teacher and the man from Del Monte. Twenty five quid. For that price, I got two. It only took them a day to make them, and then about two hours to convince us to take part in some big festival the next day, me in my new attire and Kelly in a traditional Vietnamese outfit. Despite our concerns that we were simply to be paraded around town by ourselves, looking like a sex tourist and an internet bride to drum up some bussiness for the shop, it turned out to be the highlight of our Vietnam trip.

Turns out the festival was really rather huge, as Hoi An had just been given city status, and every business in the city had enlisted a foreigner to sit in their respective, brightly decorated cycle rickshaw. For the next two days we were treated as part of the family, and constantly presented food, beverages and smiles. The food was amazing, even the little snails we all ate while we waited for my mail order bride to be completed. The Kelly came back looking more like a ladyboy, which meant I still looked like a sex tourist though…and a lecherous old queen.

We never did get to see any of the ‘sights’ of Hoi An, but by spending time with and getting to know a real live Vietnamese family, we actually got to see some of the real Vietnam.

Dalat

And lo, where there be a view, there shall be a fibreglass animal….or ten. It would seem nature didn’t quite get it right with all the misted peaks and waterfalls, and thus, in a purely charitable act, the good people of the Dalat Tourism Board gave the old bird a helping hand. As with many a boardroom discussion though, the concept must have just got lost in a haze of cocaine and ego;

‘ Sure, that mountain’s beautiful, but how are people going to the top of it?’

‘a road….yes, and a carpark at the top…just all over it…yeah yeah, just tarmac everywhere….and a cafe, one of those nice flat roofed concrete ones. My wife loves those.’

‘wouldn’t that kind of ruin it? I mean that’s not going to be too pretty. Y’know…the idea’s great, I’m just playing devil’s advocate here.’

‘Fibreglass animals. Yeah, just loads of them..everywhere’

‘ Guys dressed as cowboys… with ponies’

‘Really?’

‘Loud speakers playing music…and..and a rollercoaster!’

‘Great. Can we get a price on those somebody?How are we going to pay for all this?

‘Well we just fence off the mountain and charge people to get in.’

‘Genius. Is someone writing this down?’…

The rollercoaster down through the rainforest to Datanla falls was fun though. The rest was just bemusing. Dalat was also awash with, ‘Easy Riders’, a much famed group of motorbike guides that everybody seems to reccomend, and nobody can escape, due to their unwavering persistence. The whole biker thing just wasn’t for us, as I stopped pissing in my jeans when I was four, and Kelly kicked the crystal meth years ago. We hired our own scooter to outrun them and experience the mountain roads and pouring rain by ourselves.

It was always more than just a job for The MilkyBar Kid.

The Kelly succumbs to overwhelming romanticism of The Valley of Love.

Brere Rabbit-esque, but concrete bridges are also big in Dalat.

The rainforest roller coaster.

The Hang Nga Guesthouse. Part Gaudi, part Brothers Grim, part Disney, all concrete, but amazing none the less.

Bottom of Liang Biang mountain

Top of Liang Biang mountain

The actual top of Liang Biang Mountain. You know it’s raining hard when you can photograph it.

Fixing a puncture for15p. What a sucker.

Mui Ne

After one week of solid perspiration,we were looking forward to a few days of breezy, beach side r&r. It wasn’t to be found in Mui Ne. Turns out the only access to the limited, and frankly average, beach is through the more expensive hotels. All we got for our thirteen dowaar were a few concrete steps leading down into the sea. The nearest thing to a palm tree were a few old coconuts and palm fronds amongst the flotsam soup at the bottom of the seawall. We just pretended it was one big swimming pool. One that we never used. We hired a jeep for the day with Max, a real live German person, to take us around Mui Ne’s other natural wonders; the fairy spring, the sand dunes and something called The Red Canyon which was closed for ‘rennovation’. I can only assume it was being repainted, or it was finally getting the obligatory collection of fibre glass animals – the highest honour the Vietnamese can bestow on any area of outstanding natural beauty.

The fairy spring and sand dunes were, nevertheless, impressive and void of fibreglass creatures . We got professionally hustled by a ten year old into hiring sand sleds ‘for use on the dunes, you go many time you like mister’. Even on a 60 degree incline, the flimsy sheets of plastic did nothing but make us curse the little shit.

We did get some amazing photos though. None of which are on here as all it took were a few grains of sand to get into my camera and it died. Worse still, in a wholly selfish and pointless act, it wiped the memory card of all our photos from the last two weeks, leaving us with nothing but the limited, low resolution versions that I had already uploaded. Thus, the next day was spent doing it all over again with Kelly’s camera and our own scooter to at least claw back some memories. We got so sunburnt on the scooter that we had to stay an extra night. That place was just bad luck.

Ho Chi Minh City

We only had one day in Saigon and it was mostly spent on our guesthouse steps playing with the two resident Chihuahuas whilst Hen, the owner, and his wife gave us ice lemon tea and mangos and attempted to teach us basic vietnamese. The Chihuahuas were a particular highlight, especially when dressed for bed. We couldn’t pronounce their names, but we just called them both Gunther as we could easily imagine them dressed in miniature leiderhosen. We want one.

Autumn is a minefield for someone of The Kelly’s Stature.

Kelly with The Gunthers

Tom with The Gunthers, just prior to their bedtime.