Hello everyone - we're a bit behind on our blogs so my humble apologies.Iin a toss up between lying on a white sand beach or sitting in a sweaty internet café, there's only one choice. We're actually now in Thailand again, but I'll continue with the story in central Vietnam…..

So after our trip around the DMZ in central Vietnam, our next journey was a 4 hour bus journey to Danang.

The journey itself was made by public transport, and although it reminded us of the wild west, with the bus ticket collectors hanging out of the open minibus door shouting at people asking if they wanted to go to Danang, the trip wasn't actually too bad, that was until we arrived at Danang bus terminal…….

Arriving at nighttime (night arrivals are always much more stressful than daylight arrivals) the minibus pulled into the bus terminal and we were surrounded by men pointing at us (and our fellow passengers) and shouting though the windows, pretty scary in itself. As we jumped out, we were grabbed and pulled here there and everywhere by men who couldn't speak a work of English except 'Motorbike, Motorbike' (as with most places in South East Asia, anyone on a motorbike can suddenly become a motorbike Taxi and take you anywhere your brave enough to travel too).

So with not a single westerner in sight, and surrounded by guys who spoke non of the queens, we tried to show them a map of where we wanted to go, and that we wanted a car - the blank looks in return of showing them the map, the continual "Motorbike?, Motorbike?" response was starting to aggravate yours truly to the point where I frog marched one away from us, and we picked up our bags and set off walking down a street in no particular direction with about 6 or 7 guys on bikes crawling behind us.

Bearing in mind this carnage had lasted about half an hour, and with the little person getting very upset and frightened, I recalled the new found language little belle had demonstrated earlier in the trip and directed a torrent of aggressive abuse in their direction from point blank range - luckily most got the message and left.

So with me now thinking that soon there would be an army of Vietnamese returning to exact revenge on the red faced white man, a taxi showed up from nowhere (and I still now don't know where it came from - I can only assume that the shop owner who's premises we were hiding in, recognized our plight, and phoned a taxi for us). Although we probably paid 3 times the going rate, we were so glad this young chap knew where our hostel was so we could get the **** out of Dodge!!

Danang itself - 4th largest city on Vietnam, and in our totally biased [of course] opinion, is the one of the worst places we've been. The only good thing about it is they have left the American airbase [probably a it was left] so on the road out there's not only the hangers, anti-aircraft points etc but also the odd US military vehicle on the beach.

So enough said, definitely an experience, but not the fondest and one which we now look back on with the casual statement when in a circumstance of slight difficulty of "well, it could be worse, we could be in Danang!!".

Hope all is well.

Over and Out

Nige/Huddy/Slippy - saw the game the other night, bit disappointing but rest assured our performance was only below par due to a lack of depth in the squad - with a reported 140Million to spend in January, our woes [and the likes of mid-table 'going nowheres' like Tottenham) will be a distant memory!