Soooo its time to move to Nha Trang. Beaches, good weather and finally a chance to have a midday nap in the sun to the sound of the sea, we cannot wait!!! However, between us and this idyllic beach scene, there is an overnight bus journey from Hoi An to Nha Trang, a nice peaceful and to all intense and purpose a cheap and easy trip... Right?Well..... That's an absolute blasphemous lie that could not, and will not be any further from the truth ever ever ever! It was and forever will be the worst journey of my entire life, and yes I do and can speak for myself, Danni and everyone else on the bus! But let me start from the beginning, and if you don't believe me by the end of it, well then I don't care because I'll still have to live with the memory of that journey! It begins with our pick up time, a nice and easy to remember 7.30 pm. So all is well we hop out of the pool at 4, get showered, and after a little bit of internet browsing we're ready to leave for dinner at 5.30. So we're sitting in the lobby and a crazy Vietnamese guy pops up to the window and shouts NHA TRANG NHA TRANG NHA TRANG at us. Apparently he'd been looking for us and we were already late. Our bad! Wait no! Not our bad! Stupid tour woman's bad! So we get rushed to the bus station in a taxi, then the taxi driver tries to charge us for the journey, I think not mr taxi driver, so we run on to the bus and away from yet another scamming Vietnamese person. Now on to the bus and things are looking up. Turns out not! Although its a sleeper bus the damn seats are only big enough for Vietnamese people, or in other words very tanned angry dwarfs. So we get as comfy as we can, being 5.11" and 5.9", and hit the road. The bus driver uses this as a chance to clearly check out his new birthday present, the horn. He jabs his new overly loud and unnecessary toy at anything and everything else on the road! Now i do mean everything, from a lorry to a scooter to a wasp to a piece of fricking dust! I'm not kidding! Ok I get it the Vietnamese roads are different to ours at home, you can overtake someone even when they're overtaking someone else, you can run a red light in front of a policeman, and go figure you can drive the wrong way down the street on your phone as long as you honk your horn when you do these things. So our driver decided he would take this blowing the horn rule to the extreme and would make sure every time he did anything on the road he would honk the horn and I mean EVERY TIME! So for the first 5 minutes this was pretty entertaining, but in the same way that 4 and a half months with me is already taking its toll on Danni, this man after 5 minutes had already got unfunny! Thankfully his honks were soon interrupted by a strange noise and a slowing pace to the bus... The angry, sweaty, horn obsessed driver then began to shout at his co driver, who had been sleeping in one of the sleeping pods since the journey began. So he springs in to action, yet more 'excitement' on this already 'entertaining' bus ride. He throws the doors open and jumps out, by this point we were only doing 5 mph but still funny to see. The bus comes to a stop, the tools are out, the bus is being taken apart, and the Vietnamese expletives are flying everywhere! I think I've stressed enough now that they're an angry little race of people (you'd fit right in Phil). The bus starts again and we crawl down the road at 5 mph, now a chance for every scooter, lorry and car to get back at our bus driver as they wizz past us with their horns held down. Now we get to a petrol station, repairs maybe? Maybe some oil for the engine? We come to a grinding holt 10 metres from the pump. But that's fine, we can't need petrol, they do this journey day in day out, they know to fill up with petrol before a 12 hour journey.... Oh wait turns out I have given them too much credit! They had in fact forgotten!!! So a few gallons later we're ready to go. Now each time the bus stopped a group of typically English girls decided they needed a wee. The bus driver being the polite and considerate guy he was decided surprisingly he was having none of it and they were told to sit back down, not leave the bus, and I think the next Vietnamese sentence he said went along the lines of over my dead body is anyone going to be comfortable on my bus, followed with a laugh. So back on the road again, and the girls are promised a stop in 5 minutes... One hour later we pull in to their version of the happy chef, or as I liked to call it the unhappy chef. Some super noodles later, a cheeky pee and he's shouting at us all again to get back on. This is after he took his shirt off and poured water on his rotund body, because all the stress has caused him to break out in just a little bit of sweat!!! Once again back on the bus and we try to get comfy for the remainder of the journey. I tossed, I turned, I even tried out the floor for a little bit, but it was useless. So iPod on and 2 films later I tried again. Finally I drifted off, not comfy, but slightly content. Then what seemed like 20 minutes later I wake up to his shouts telling us to leave his bus as we had arrived. Thank god, we made it!

Now, reading back over that it doesn't sound as bad as I had maybe led you to believe at the beginning, but I think I was still tired when I began this blog and wanted to vent. So apologies for that, and now normal cheery Adam shall continue to amuse you with anecdotes of our time in Nha Trang!

After the 'bus journey from hell' we get in to our lovely hotel, I can't remember the name but we change to another hotel after two nights because this one doesn't include breakfast (a must have in any hotel or I walk!). So a quick (3 hour) power nap and we check out the town. This place is over run with Russians! To the point that menus come up in Russian, then English, then Vietnamese. The cheek of it! English coming second to Russians, not on my watch! So to get away from them we headed to the beach. The beach did not disappoint, loads to do and if you want water sports or to just chill on a nice lounger, then its all here. So another nap later and a few dips in the sea it's time to head back, with half of the beach in our pockets, ears and every imaginable oraphis! After a nice shower and a bit of telly we head out for dinner and a nice early night.

The next day we decide to hit the beach again, but this time we splashed out on a sun lounger in the very nice Louisiana brew house, on the main beach. Watching the world go by on a private beach where the women trying to sell you crap lighters, old books and weird looking dried fish cant get you is an absolute dream, plus the tan is coming along well. Unlike danni's approach of burn one side one day then fake tan it, then the day after repeat the same motion on the other side (sorry hunny cough* golem* cough), I'm doing alright with getting a base tan. So again another day done, and its back to the hotel for a shower. Then out for dinner at trip advisors number one restaurant in Nha Trang.Yens! Absolutely amazing food if anyone is considering coming to Nha trang, its worth hunting it down! I had claypot pork, which was honestly the best pork I've ever had, and Danni had an equally amazing chicken curry, just incase you were wondering.

Now I know these two days have been quiet ones and not a great deal to read about, but I slept for most of it and to be honest after the early mornings and moving around it was nice to finally get some rest.

After bronzing and burning for a few days we really should get back to being real backpackers, although as a quick interjection here backpackers are some of the laziest creatures we have ever met! After finishing dinner every night we count our pennies and decide we can have some pudding from the supermarket instead of the restaurant as we need to save. Yet on our way back to the hotel every bar is full of backpackers who by this time are already s*** faced, pardon my French! But how? How is it we need to share a Vietnamese version of a snickers to save money, yet they can drink the night away till 4 in the morning and then stay in hostels/hotels with pools? Well readers the answer to this question took us a little while but we cracked it. It's because they literally do nothing during the day! So everyone who claims they are a backpacker, and they're so in touch with the world because they carry around a guitar and have long hair and haven't worked in 10 years, you can do one! You sleep then you drink, we know your secret! Go get a job and eat some god damn meat you skinny unwashed hippies!

Sorry I went on a rant again there. Back to what we got up to. So the next day we decided to hire a moped and go a bit further afield, plus its way cheaper than going on organised tours. So map in hand and a big day ahead of us we hop on and off we head, first stop the mud spa. A few wrong turns later we arrive ready to be pampered. In true backpacking style we buy the basic ticket and even use a discount card the hotel gave us, so for 100,000 dong we were able to go in the mud baths, the mineral baths, the car wash style cleaning showers, the fountain of youth style waterfall, the mineral pool and full use of sun lounger etc. So all mineral'ed out we get showered and head back to the main town. On the way back we visited the two towers of Nha trang, and the giant bhudda, both with amazing views of the city below. After a few more impromptu stop offs we head back to the hotel, and another well deserved meal at yens.

After a somewhat busy day we treat ourselves to another beach day. With the success of the loungers we head back to the brew house and spend a day back with the Russians. Now this night we decided what the hell we are backpackers so if the rest of them are going out and getting drunk then maybe we should join in. After speaking to some guys handing out flyers the day before we new the hot spots, and decided to head to the biggest bar there, Why Not Bar. With happy hour in full swing we order some Why Not Bar buckets. Now given the amazingly cheap price of said buckets I was convinced there was very little alcohol in them (I think you can see where this is going). So first few down and me and Danni are having the time of our lives, and can understand why the backpackers do nothing in the day and just drink at night. Then suddenly from no where 3 Swedish guys appear at our table. Fresh faced and with the knowledge than English people know how to party they decided we were going to be good fun, so with their first ever buckets in hand we instantly bonded. A little while later some Norwegian girls also decide our table is the place to be, so they join too. After teaching each other how to play some drinking games, I decide to order more buckets, now Danni did warn me at this point that they did taste very strong, but I tried to convince her, wrongly so, that is was just the taste of the cheap alcohol and not the amount that made them taste very alcoholic. So with better judgement than my own she decides to pass up the next few. Now I in my merry little state decide we need to all head to the D-Floor (dance floor) to bust out what Danni could only describe the next day as grandad dancing! The Europeans love anything that's from the 80's though so they loved my rave moves. After sweating what can only be described as all the buckets I drunk, me an Danni head back to the hotel and leave the young'uns to carry on. On getting back we realised the hotel, rightly so at 4am, was now shut... Slightly awkward. We politely knock on the shutters and from no where a little sleepy Vietnamese man appears. Now having not paid much attention to our new hotel we had no idea what our room number was, and considering you have to hand your room key in every time you leave, we had no proof we actually stayed at this hotel. So I in my little merry drunk way couldn't stop laughing, and left it to Danni to explain. Now the best way she found was to explain what this little Vietnamese man will find when he opened the door. So with limited English and being incredibly freaked out by us he showed us to the room. As he opened the door Danni frantically ran around pointing out the things she had described, still confused or half asleep, we weren't sure he wasn't quite convinced. So Danni opened up the computer, that was in our room, and showed him the photos on the memory card that was attached to the USB already. Pointing and shouting US LOOK US to every photo he seemed more interested in going back to bed, so he let us stay. Now the next morning I was incredibly thankful for the aircon in the room as I was a little fragile. Danni on the other hand, after realising the pure evil that they put in those buckets stopped drinking them and felt spiritedly, but she very kindly doted on me that day and made sure my sore head was treated well. So a day of lounging was very much on the cards.

Our final day in Nha trang and we book ourselves on to a snorkelling tour. Not the best snorkelling we've been on during this trip but we met a lovely German lad called Yan, and me and him found it more fun to jump off the top of the boat than actually snorkel, and trying to avoid the (harmless) schools of jelly fish made it all the more interesting.

Having had a fun filled time in Nha trang it was time to say goodbye and move on the Vietnamese capital Ho Chi Minh, the motorbike city!

So stay tuned kids x