Vietnam is very silly. They gave two of their major cities almost identical names. I went from Hanoi to Hoi An and keep getting confused between the two. I'm sure Hoi An's name originated with someone who can't spell getting lost on the way to Hanoi and just giving up.

I'm a bit behind again as I'm actually in Saigon or Ho Chi Minh at the moment, so bear with me.

So in Hoi An (not Hanoi) I arrived with my new friends Gen and Stef. I can't get rid of them, they keep following me everywhere We wanted to visit My Son (pronounced mesun), these old temple ruins which were swallowed by the jungle and rediscovered at the time of the Vietnam war (which resulted in them being slightly more ruined). They're similar (apparently) to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, but not as big. We decided it would be a good idea to rent motorbikes and drive there ourselves (well, the others did. I think I always knew it was never going to happen but quite fancied having a go). So we rented bikes from outside the hotel and were given a crash course in how to drive a motorbike. I could tell my guy was concerned from the beginning as I couldn't grasp the concept of which way you needed to turn the handle to make it go, and after several attempts at walking with the bike up and down the road, shrieking every time I went over 2mph and not remembering what I had to do to break, we unanimously decided to instead just rent drivers. Stef wasn't doing much better than me and whilst Gen was confident about the bike part, she wasn't too sure about the driving-in-Vietnam-just-before-Tet part. After a 90 km round trip including driving on a motorway and navigating past a herd of cows, not to mention a billion other motorbikes I was very glad we hadn't driven ourselves as the journey was hair-raising enough. I should have put together the fact I can't ride a bike and have failed two driving tests and concluded that driving a motorbike would not come naturally to me. Still, being on the back is fun, and I have learnt to hold onto the bike and not my driver!

The ruins themselves were quite impressive, and as we went later we had the place to ourselves. Well, not quite. When we got there a dog ran after us and proceeded to not so much follow us around as lead us between the different sites. He was really cute and it was funny to have a "guide dog" show us round, he was very attentive and only got distracted once when he went chasing after some birds.

Hoi An is famous for its clothes shops. This was a dangerous place for me to go to. Luckily I only stayed for a day and a half and I don't have a lot of space but I still managed to buy a dress, some shorts and pair of shoes (but I needed them all, as I have no hot weather clothing!). Everything in Hoi An is tailor made and they can knock up high quality clothing in the space of a few hours. It's also really cheap compared to home. I would have probably bought several dresses had I been on a normal holiday. I also now have 4 pairs of shoes, whilst backpacking, how do I do it?