We have fallen head over heels in love with Hoi An. Our room was great, with a comfy mattress, a balcony and *drumroll* the Bath, but the place itself is lovely too. Cars and motorbikes are banned from the old town so the usual fear of being splatted or spliced mid-crossing evaporates. Lanterns are hung between buildings, across roads and in trees, and all the buildings look so old and quaint and like they are just crying out for you to go in and drink copious amounts of local wine and home-brewed beer by candlelight. A river meanders alongside the town and there is a beautiful beach lined with palm-trees just 5km away. In short, it is paradise for holidaymakers.

On our first day we walked around the lovely old town, dodging the tailor touts trying to get us to buy custom-made clothing from every other shop. I tried on a stunning floor length ball-gown that could be made up to my exact size in ANY colour for the bargain price of $60 but Mr Practical aka Jak kept asking silly questions like 'so when are you going to wear that then Nic? Clubbing? Round the house?' Apparently 'just in case' is not a valid reason to purchase a ball-gown. People we knew printed pictures of designer clothes off the internet, took them into one of the many tailor shops here and got almost perfect copies made at just a fraction of the price. Not a bad idea.

The next day we hired bicycles ($1 each for the day) and rode to Cau Dai beach. It was an easy 5km with only one teeny little uphill part, which was a relief. We relaxed horizontally for a couple of hours before making our way slowly back. On the way we stopped off at a barbers and Jak got the best and most thorough haircut of his life. For £5 the barber cut his hair, shaved his almost-beard and tache, shaved his cheeks and below his eyebrows, removed the sleep from his eyes and - this is the best bit - donned a headtorch and proceeded to clean his ears with giant cotton buds and some scraping tools. As the barber was working away a promotional truck drove past with a man holding a giant python in it, followed shortly afterwards by a second truck with a black bear hanging out of it. After making some enquiries we were presented with a leaflet entirely in Vietnamese apart from the words 'Vietnamese Circus' and '20hr'.

Thus it was that we found ourselves at a $4 Vietnamese circus at 8pm that night. There must have been at least 6,000 people there and 5,998 of them were locals. We were all squidged onto bum-numbing stone steps, shoulder to shoulder and thigh to thigh with the next person. Everytime we thought that there was surely no more room a spare three inches of space would be discovered and somehow, SOMEHOW, it would be made to seat a family of five. The show itself was quite good: there were acrobats, dogs that could do arithmetic, a girl that could shoot arrows with her feet, cycling monkeys, a magician that pulled a bird out of a young boy's pants (we couldn't believe it when he started rummaging around down there, that would not be allowed in England!) and, of course, the bears. I'm sad to say that we were hugely disappointed with the bears. They were made to shuffle around on their stunted hind legs for the whole piece, looking unnatural and uncomfortable and all too much like slow kids being bullied as they were made to put basketballs into hoops and attempt to ride bicycles and mopeds. We left immediately afterwards, partly disgusted at the treatment of the bears and partly in an attempt to bring some life back into our by now completely numb bums.

Yesterday we cycled to the beach again, where we ended up bumping into some people we met in Langkawi. We sat there for far too long chatting away and not realising we were burning. (The funny thing is that even though it was about 30 degrees Celsius out all the locals were still wearing hoodies, hats and socks. They told us, as we were sitting there perspiring and fanning ourselves, that they found the almost non-existent breeze 'cold'.) In the evening we wandered through the old town, across the Japanese covered bridge and to the waterfront, where we bought little candles in paper waterlilies and sent them off down the river for good luck. The old town is beautiful at night when the hundreds of lanterns are lit and there was a huge full moon too so it all felt very romantic.

Today we are catching a night bus down the coast, to Nha Trang. It leaves at 6pm so we got up late and dilly-dallied in our room until checkout at noon. Another day, yet another bath - that's six in three days now. I could get used to this. After checking out we headed to the excellent Cafe 43 and gorged on white rose (shrimp and pork in translucent white dough), fried wontons, ginger chicken and local beer. Even though we stretched it out we are still back at our hotel with two hours to kill before the bus picks us up. Tum te tum...