Hello again guys! Darren and Kerry here in the absolutely beautiful town of Hoi An in Vietnam.

Since last updating you all from Dalat we then travelled down from the highlands back towards the coast and the seaside beach resort of Nha Trang. The drive there by bus was incredible with magificent views across the mountains and valleys of Vietnams lushious green interior. Vietnam really is a beautiful country and I would recommend everyone reading this who hasn't been to put it on their list of places to visit.

We spent three days in Nha Trang, and actually enjoyed them all with out any rain during the daytime! Nha Trang is a beautiful seaside resort with a gorgeous white sandy beach that stretches for a considerable distance and when we there it was never crowded at all. A French gentleman called Yves, who stayed in the same hotel as us in Dalat, got talking to us and made us laugh a lot with some of the crazy adventures that he gets up to around Vietnam either on a bicycle or a motorbike. It's great listening to someone who is passionate about a subject and we ended up getting the same bus as him to Hoi An, our next destination. Being a bit beached out we decided we didn't want to stay too long in Nha Trang but I think we will return there again one day.

The journey from Nha Trang to Hoi An took a tiring 12 hours all through the night on a coach. During the journey Kerry decided to try and get some sleep by laying across the back seats. She ended up being awoken twice by some dirty pervert from the bus company touching her up as she was sleeping. She slapped his hand away and told him not to do it but he did again a few minutes later. When we arrived in Hoi An we went to their head office to make a complaint and their staff were so unprofessional and nearly every one of them laughed and sniggered about it! I was really angry and told them it's not a laughing matter and that if it had happended in England then that person would have been arrested. We wrote a letter of complaint in front of them and we made them sign it personally, informing them that if we didn't hear from their boss within two weeks then we would take it further. It's frustrating when every Vietnamese person we have met has been so lovely and one company has to act like that.

We did however get a great hotel with them once arriving in Hoi An and managed to get them to give us the room for just $10 and it's a 3 star hotel with swimming pool, gym, satellite TV and free interent! Kerry has been making good use of the gym equipment every morning and has been regularly getting a crowd of Vietnamese girls from the hotel gathering around to watch the white girl sweat, ha ha!

Hoi An itself is stunning and is pretty much a living museum that oozes charm and culture from every building. It is by far our favourite place we have been to in the whole of Asia so far. Anyone who hasn't travelled here owes it to themselves to save up and get here as soon as you can. It has so much to offer, a great beach only 3kms away, more clothes shopping than any girl can take and at night the whole place is like a dream! All the buildings look French in design and style and almost every one of them is either a tailors, a restaurant, a cobblers or a chinese lantern shop. The streets have a fantastic cobbled look to them and at night the whole town is sumptiously lit with Chinese style lanterns which just looks incredible especially the section of the town situated by the river. Every evening Kerry and I have enjoyed sitting outside at one of the restaurants enjoying a meal and the cheapest beer in the world (6 pence a beer!!) and watching the world go by next to the river. We have spent nearly six days here and feel sad that we will be moving on to Hue' tomorrow afternoon.

So, the bit I mentioned about tailors and shopping? Well since we have been here we have had tailored 4 suits between us, 3 dresses, 8 work shirts, a work dress, 3 vietnamese style tops, 3 pairs of boots, a PJ set, a winter coat and 2 Ao Yai's (traditional Vietnamese dresses which Kerry looks incredible in!). All this for only a few hundred dollars! The quality of the material is faultless and the tailoring is of the standard to be envied by any of the top stores in London. It's been great fun being measured up for clothes that will fit you perfectly and the lady that has made all our clothes is lovely. We feel a little bit naughty having spent so much on clothes but then we have been smelly backpackers for a year and when we get home we will have nothing to wear except the scars of our crazy adventures!

One of the days here we decided to rent a motorbike and go off on another exploration of the Vietnamese countryside. We wanted to get to a place called My Son, which is the ancient ruins of the old capital of the Cham Dynasty and we only had the most vaguest idea of how to get there and knew that it was some 30kms away. We had great fun driving about and stopping to speak with locals to ask what direction we should be travelling in and bless them I think they tried to send us in the most back-streeted way to try and get us there faster which didn't really help! We ended up driving our bike through a narrow path in the middle of a rice paddy, which ended up leading us across two railway bridges that spanned across a river with just enough room for the handlebars! It was really funny and we ended up finding the main road that we should have been on, arriving at our destination after 2 hours of the most surreal journey!

My Son itself wasn't really worth the mammoth journey by bike but it did feel good to be doing it by ourselves rather than through a tour company. We had a look around at some of the old temple ruins but so many of them had been destroyed by the Americans during the Vietnam War that it didn't really compare to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Despite this fact, the ruins are situated in a beautiful valley overlooked by the Cat's Tooth Mountain, and that coupled with the brilliantly surreal journey made the day worthwhile in itself even if our butts did ache from all that motorbiking!

Today we did a cooking class at the local restaurant that we have been eating breakfast at as the waitress there is so lovely and friendly to us that we wanted her to show us how to make a few Vietnamese dishes. It ended up being pretty good fun and we learnt how to make fish covered in herbs, cooked in banana leaf, a vietnamese chicken curry (spicy just for us!) and also Vietnamese spring rolls. Afterwards we got to eat what we had cooked and it actually tasted pretty incredible and ended up being far too much food even if Hobbits like us do like to eat a lot! We'll let you know if we've developed stomach rot in our next update!

So tomorrow morning we pick up our boots that have been made for us as we have asked the lady to make a few alterations with the stitching design and then we're off to our next destination which is called Hue'. We should only be there for a few days before heading on up to Hanoi, where we will hopefully update you all once again. We'll try and get some our lovely photos of Nha Trang and Hoi An loaded up on here too for you to take a look at. Anyway, this entry is becoming a bit of an essay now and i'm not to sure how many people are still reading this thing anyway, so I shall wish you all a great weekend and we will speak to you soon!

Thanks to people who have left messages on the board recently too, always appreciated!