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Our bus is making a noise like a walrus working his way down the beach and the driver is forced to pull over. Most of the passengers crowd out looking for a bit of excitement on the boring journey. The bus has four tyres on the back axle and one of the inside tryes has disintegrated and become jammed in the wheel arch. Most of us sit on the road side watching the driver and his mate crawling under the bus pulling out segments of the tyre. Luckily the inner tube is still in-flated and the driver looks at the problem for a minute before kicking the tyres and announcing we will continue on with three good tyres and an inner tube propelling us forward at an elderly pace of 20kph.
We change buses at the next town and then continue onto the Vietnam border and into Ho Chi Minh city, which we arrive in during the 6pm rush-hour and furiously beep our way through the traffic. The first thing you notice in the city is the huge number of motorbikes, like ants they are everywhere, swarming the streets, pavements and back alleys. The newspaper I read the next morning ran a front page story on the spiraling motorbike situation in HCM and reported there are 3.5 million motorbikes registered in the city. The population is 6 million.
The next day we leave and take the train half-way up the country to Da Nang. With two and half weeks left in S.E.Asia we plan to make our way back down from Da Nang stopping at several towns before flying out of HCM on the 26th.
Before we arrived in Vietnam it was the country, we were repeatedly told, we should be most careful about getting ripped off. Stories from other travelers were filled with warnings about the constant Vietnamese touts and their ways of extracting the money from your pocket. So as soon as we arrive in Da Nang, we get ripped off.
Outside the train station we want to take a taxi 2 km down the road to the bus station and continue on a regular local bus to Hoi An, an hour away. All sounds simple, not in Vietnam. Taxi drivers crowd around offering prices for the 2km journey. $16 is the opening bid. Walking away, laughing, we find a taxi with a meter and jump in. When we drive off, he decides to explain how he can do things for us that are "same same but cheaper" but this is as far as his English goes and he mumbles more information, but he can't pronounce the words properly. While he rabbits on, he's driving at a painfully slow 15kmh and no shouting at him seems to make him go any faster. When the taxi meter clocks up a distance of 2.5km and there is no sign of a bus station we realise this ride is an excuse for him to make a sales pitch and he has just been driving slowly around the town centre. He doesn't take our one millionth 'no' for an answer, continues to go slow and we are trapped in the taxi getting scammed, all while the taxi fare continues to rise. Finally after 5km the bus station looms and the crazy driver still trying to make his meter rise, makes an annoying loop of the bus station so I open the car door while we are still moving, forcing him to stop. We part company with a dirty look and some angry words and get on the bus to Hoi An.
Hoi An turns out to be a great little town, its a UNESCO world heritage site because it has been a famous trading port for hundreds of years and has loads of history that the Americans didn't bomb. There are loads of cool restaurants serving cheap sea food and some nice bars we hang out in, drinking ice coffee in the day watching the Olympic games. The hotels are all flash packer style hotels at backpacker prices, and we get a roof top room with a swimming pool, mini bar and fridge for $10.
Hoi An is now most famous for being a tailors town, it has no fewer than five hundred tailor shops with tourists dipping in and out all day carrying plastic bags of newly fitted clothes. Kat insists she buys something and we go around all the tailors one day checking out prices. Inside a lot of the shops you can find the assistants armed with the latest copy of a Next catalogue offering you cheap fitted copies of any item of clothing, you just flick through the magazine get measured and the next day, presto a fitted copy for a few dollars. They will try copying anything even a $10,000 complete Armani suit.
We hire a motorbike and drive out one morning 60km to see 'My Son' some ruins of Vietnam's old civilization the Chams. We ride out of Hoi An going in the wrong direction and soon we are lost, just as we are trying to judge the angle of the sun against our intended destination a lorry driver pulls over to help. Even though he cant speak a word of English he draws us a fantastic map in the back of our guide book and we get to to My Son with no problems. The ruins are sadly in ruins, after the Americans used them as target practice during the war. And after seeing Angkor Wat they are probably not worth the visit.
We book an open ticket bus ride south to HCM and our next stop is the holiday resort of Nha Trang. Its a 12 hour over-night bus ride and you can find buses in Vietnam that look like giant dorm rooms on wheels with full beds stacked inside. We are too poor to book a bed and go for a seat but when we arrive at the travel agency we get lucky and the women offers to upgrade us to a bed for a couple of dollars which we jump at.
Cooper Out
Love Dan & Kat
We change buses at the next town and then continue onto the Vietnam border and into Ho Chi Minh city, which we arrive in during the 6pm rush-hour and furiously beep our way through the traffic. The first thing you notice in the city is the huge number of motorbikes, like ants they are everywhere, swarming the streets, pavements and back alleys. The newspaper I read the next morning ran a front page story on the spiraling motorbike situation in HCM and reported there are 3.5 million motorbikes registered in the city. The population is 6 million.
The next day we leave and take the train half-way up the country to Da Nang. With two and half weeks left in S.E.Asia we plan to make our way back down from Da Nang stopping at several towns before flying out of HCM on the 26th.
Before we arrived in Vietnam it was the country, we were repeatedly told, we should be most careful about getting ripped off. Stories from other travelers were filled with warnings about the constant Vietnamese touts and their ways of extracting the money from your pocket. So as soon as we arrive in Da Nang, we get ripped off.
Outside the train station we want to take a taxi 2 km down the road to the bus station and continue on a regular local bus to Hoi An, an hour away. All sounds simple, not in Vietnam. Taxi drivers crowd around offering prices for the 2km journey. $16 is the opening bid. Walking away, laughing, we find a taxi with a meter and jump in. When we drive off, he decides to explain how he can do things for us that are "same same but cheaper" but this is as far as his English goes and he mumbles more information, but he can't pronounce the words properly. While he rabbits on, he's driving at a painfully slow 15kmh and no shouting at him seems to make him go any faster. When the taxi meter clocks up a distance of 2.5km and there is no sign of a bus station we realise this ride is an excuse for him to make a sales pitch and he has just been driving slowly around the town centre. He doesn't take our one millionth 'no' for an answer, continues to go slow and we are trapped in the taxi getting scammed, all while the taxi fare continues to rise. Finally after 5km the bus station looms and the crazy driver still trying to make his meter rise, makes an annoying loop of the bus station so I open the car door while we are still moving, forcing him to stop. We part company with a dirty look and some angry words and get on the bus to Hoi An.
Hoi An turns out to be a great little town, its a UNESCO world heritage site because it has been a famous trading port for hundreds of years and has loads of history that the Americans didn't bomb. There are loads of cool restaurants serving cheap sea food and some nice bars we hang out in, drinking ice coffee in the day watching the Olympic games. The hotels are all flash packer style hotels at backpacker prices, and we get a roof top room with a swimming pool, mini bar and fridge for $10.
Hoi An is now most famous for being a tailors town, it has no fewer than five hundred tailor shops with tourists dipping in and out all day carrying plastic bags of newly fitted clothes. Kat insists she buys something and we go around all the tailors one day checking out prices. Inside a lot of the shops you can find the assistants armed with the latest copy of a Next catalogue offering you cheap fitted copies of any item of clothing, you just flick through the magazine get measured and the next day, presto a fitted copy for a few dollars. They will try copying anything even a $10,000 complete Armani suit.
We hire a motorbike and drive out one morning 60km to see 'My Son' some ruins of Vietnam's old civilization the Chams. We ride out of Hoi An going in the wrong direction and soon we are lost, just as we are trying to judge the angle of the sun against our intended destination a lorry driver pulls over to help. Even though he cant speak a word of English he draws us a fantastic map in the back of our guide book and we get to to My Son with no problems. The ruins are sadly in ruins, after the Americans used them as target practice during the war. And after seeing Angkor Wat they are probably not worth the visit.
We book an open ticket bus ride south to HCM and our next stop is the holiday resort of Nha Trang. Its a 12 hour over-night bus ride and you can find buses in Vietnam that look like giant dorm rooms on wheels with full beds stacked inside. We are too poor to book a bed and go for a seat but when we arrive at the travel agency we get lucky and the women offers to upgrade us to a bed for a couple of dollars which we jump at.
Cooper Out
Love Dan & Kat
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