I haven't written on this for so long that I thought it was about time. i had to re read the last one to see how far we'd got by then so I'll start from there. We didn't actually make in to Phnom Phen in Cambodia the next morning because I got ill that night (I slightly turned into a she devil and insisted on Lawrence going out to get me some medicine at 4am!) so the next four days were just spent in the hotel feeling sorry for myself.

We decided then to head straight to Vietnam from Sihanoukville because we wanted to spend Christmas there so on the 22nd December we made the 14 hour journey to Saigon. To be fair though about three hours of that was spent trying to get through the traffic in Ho Chi Minh! We only had one full day there so we went to this gigantic market that was absolutely crammed and hectic but did have some very nice things hiding away in there. After that we went for a walk aeound the city and went to the War Museum which was pretty depressing and saw the Independence Palace. It was so weird to see a lot of the city had Christmas decorations as we hadn't felt festive at all up until this point.
The following day (Christmas eve) we got the bus up to Mui Ne which is a beach resort to spend Christmas there. On Christmas day we woke up and drank champagne (ok...it was fizzy wine...) and orange juice while watching the muppets christmas carole and then spent the day at the pool. After making a few phone calls to home we went out for a traditional Christmas dinner. It started with champagne, then we had the full christmas dinner with turkey, ham and all the trimmings. It was good, but just not the same as home!! We were trying to escape back to home when they brought out banoffee pie for dessert and it would have been rude not to eat it!! After we were so full we had to have the traditional lie down in front of the telly and watched Stardust followed by some random christmas film. The novelty of having a TV made us overindulge!!
We spent the next day at the beach at the beach and had a pretty quiet day, although in the evening we had a traditional Vietnamese hotpot for dinner which was really good. It was noodle with all sorts of vegetables and prawns which they cooked in front of us. It was probably my favourite Vietnamese meal!
Next day was sight seeing day! We booked a tour that took us to a fairy stream, fishing harbour and some sand dunes. The fairy stream walk was good although absolutely boiling in the midday sun. We had to walk through the stream to get to a waterfall at the end and the walk was really beautiful although we saw some massive clumps of shed snake skin which was quite concerning and a dead rat that had obviously been in the sun for a few days and Lawrence insisted on taking a photo of it!! The fishing harbour was ok, but they basically just stopped and let us take some photos. After we went to the white sand dunes which looked amazing and we had a walk up a couple of them. At the top of the biggest one you could hire mats and slide down them, but we couldn't be bothered with the hassle of bartering the price to do it! On the way to the next sand dunes we stopped at the Red Canyon for another photo opportunity before heading to the red sand dunes for sunset. We were getting a bus to Nha Trang at 1 in the morning so after our day trip went to Joe's Cafe where we'd had the christmas meal and watched Elf. We'd been searching for that film since Kuala Lumpur so were slightly over excited by them having it! The bus we got was amaaaaazing!! It was a sleeper bus and actually had beds in it! We had a good nights sleep and woke up at our destination the next morning.

We spent a couple of days in Nha Trang at the beach and the Lawrence met Tam, a Vietnamese tour guide who takes people on the "Easy Rider" tours by motorbike. We spent the 31st December seeing the sights of Nha Trang with Tam and Hai and they showed us around the local temples and a really cool waterfall. They also talked us into going through the highlands up to Hoi An with them over the following couple of days as well. They also took us to a random Vietnamese karaoke bar to celebrate New Year's eve only the evening ended at 11 pm so by midnight I was fast asleep! Oops...perhaps we're getting old after all.
We left for the higlands the next day and spent the next four days travelling up to Hoi An. We were shown a lot of rubber trees, pepper plants, temples, buddahs, gorgeous scenery and a couple of waterfalls. It was a really good trip although my bum was quite sore after the first day and then prgressively got worse! Lawrence was on the more comfortable bike so his was fine but I complained enough for both of us! One evening Lawrence had mentioned he wanted a haircut so Tam took us to this good place that he uses...Lawrence ended up looking like a convict but I thought it was hilarious at least. On another night we were taken to Hai's sister's house. We had areally lovely evening there with his sister, father and brother in laws and the plied us with food and beer the entire time we were there and looked after us very well. Only our tourguides spoke English but everyone was very friendly and very nice to us and we had a great evening. It was very weird being in the highlands because tourists are still a novelty there so whenever we drove through villages past people they would shout hello and wave and the children would run after the bike which was really lovely. We also constantly got stopped by people who couldnt talk English to ask us where we were from and just stop to have a little chat. We were wandering through a market one day after lunch and turned round a corner to delighted squeals from a couple of Vietnamese women who literally just started stroking our arms and hair just because we were tourists. It was quite odd, I think I just stood there and turned red from the embarrassment of the fuss they were making. They didn't speak a work of English and although we had learnt some Vietnamese none of it came in useful in this situation! They were calling their friend over to have a look at us and chatting merrily away in Vietnamese and we didn't have a clue what they were saying. It was especially annoying when they were blatantly talking to eachother about us...I reckon it was "Cor, have a look at his big nose and her massive bum" but Lawrence thought that they were trying to get him to marry one of their daughters. I wonder who's right...
My favourite part of the whole trip was the morning we spent in an orphanage. It was run by nuns and they let us spend time playing with the under fives as it was a Sunday morning so all of the older children were in church. The children were so cute, I could have quite happily adopted all of them. We were quite surprised by how unshy they were, as soon as we entered the room there were about five of them jumping over each of us all just competing for attention. We also got to have a cuddle with a four month old baby who's mum had died after she was born and because the family were so poor they couldnt afford the milk for the baby so were just leaving her to starve until she was rescued by this orphanage. All of the children had horrible stories along the same lines and some of them had injuries and things but they all seemed so happy in spite of this. It was great to be able to spend some time with them and I think it had made my expectations for any voluntary work I do in India a bit more realistic.

After five days on motorbikes, I was very relieved when we finally arrived in Hoi An. We spent a few days there just wandering around the old town and markets and on our final day there we caved and got some clothes made, as thats what the town is most famous for! I got two dresses and Lawrence got a shirt and we spent about 25 pounds on all of it plus a pair of sandles I got made to replace my broken ones. I was quite impressed, we went in one afternoon and chose the patterns and got measured up and we had to go back then to get them fitted that evening and they were delivered to us the next morning before we left for the next part of the trip! Lawrence also had to have another haircut to sort out his convict chic doo so ended up with mega short hair...he wasn't too happy and I somehow got the blame for it! I thought it looked nice though.

We went to Ninh Binh next, but left Hoi An early in the morning so that we could spend the day in Hue. We just spent the day there wandering around and were pleased we had decided not to spend a night there as there wasn't really a massive amount to do that wasn't costly. We got another overnight bus to Ninh Binh (it had the beds again!!) and arrived at about 6am and to our horror was FREEZING cold!! We hadn't expected it at all so it was a shock to the system! We spent a couple of days there and Lawrence discovered a love of goat meat. On the second day we hired bicycles and spent the day going around all of the temples and saw the limestone cliffs. After lunch we stopped for a drink (our vietnamese wasn't good enough to order one with lunch...and we ended up with beef instead of chicken pho...) and two boys spent the entire time we were there being amazed by our cameras and were quite sweet. After that at one of the temples we ended up at some children called us up a hill to come and see the view and we went up for a look. Someone kind of led us to this cave with a gate at the entrance he unlocked and motioned to go in and tihnking it was truely didgy I refused to go in but lawrence wanted a look so in the went. From outside all I could hear was this guy talking Vietnamese in what sounded like a really aggressive way so had all kinds of images of Lawrence being murdered in there. I wasn't really sure what to do about that so sat on a rock outside and waited! I was quite relieved when they returned unharmed!! After that we got lots and ended up in a village further down the road from where we were staying and on the way back through a man invited us into his house and so we went followed by every single child that lived in the village and half of the parents. i think we caused a bit of a scene! He gave us tea and after about ten minutes brought out the saki wine which he forced us to drink. We also had the beetle seeds that the locals always chew on that turn your teeth red. It wasn't too tasty. By the time we left we'd had quite a lot of saki and were pretty merry and had the ride the bikes back, it was a pretty wobbly return journey.

Our final stop in Vietnam was Hanoi and I have to admit that i didn't like it particularly. The traffic seemed to be even worse than Saigon and every time we wanted to cross the road we just had to wade into a sea of traffic and walk slowly across the road hoping that all the cars and bikes avoided us. We couldn't walk on the pavements because of all of the street sellers so had to walk on the road and constantly got beeped at plus the normal hassle from people trying to sell us their wares. We hid indoors for most of the time we were there and to be honest kind of wasted a few days. On our last night a guy who worked in the hotel asked us if we wanted to eat snake. I said no but as Lawrence had said yes we went and I wasn't given the choice! When we got to the restaurant they brought this snake out and killed it in front of us and then poured the blood into shot glasses mixed with vodka. They then did the same with the stomach bile which tasted like vomit and I couldn't bring myself to drink. The snake was brought out in lots of different ways. There were a couple of different types of spring rolls, the meat just cooked plain, the skin and muscles etc. The skin was really tough and was a bit like eating chewing gum it took so long to have and and muscle had a really horrible texture that was just a bit mushy. Bleugh. Lawrence enjoyed the whole thing but I couldn't get over having dinner killed in front of us and thought it was all very horrible!

And that was the end of Vietnam!! We got a bus to Laos the following day but I'll write about that another day.