Vinh - Tuesday 21/10/2008

Well what can i say about Vinh, We got yet another local bus from Ninh Binh The owners care more about the stock on the bus than the people but luckily we got decent seats at the back with the windows wide open.

After about 3 hours on the bus we could see a massive crowd of people in the road ahead of us. As we got close to them we could see a truck with a big dent and smoke comming from the front of it. Loads of people were standing looking at it scratching their heads

On the floor next to the truck was a cow with at least a broken leg and his back didnt look to healthy. It was doing a little dance as if it was the most energetic cow in the world. People were just standing laughing at it. The person sitting next to us who was leaning on us at this point, just looked at Nic with a big smile whilst licking her lips and said "bo" This means beef. Not sure if she was talking about nic or the cow but she was right in both ways.

Anyway after we got chucked off in the middle of nowhere to get picked up by another bus we finally got to Vinh at around 9pm. The bus station was shut and we were surrounded by local people who looked hungry and as if they have never seen a forigner before. They defenately wanted to eat us.

No one spoke a word of English and Nic was ready to bust out some kick boxing moves when a bloke approached us asking if we needed help. He took us to a little shop that he owned and told us about a bus that comes at midnight that we could get on. He said we could pay 650'000 dong which is about 50 quid and we could get on and off it anytime we wanted for a month. Sounded ideal so we done it.

We went for a walk around town to get something to eat. We were walking for about an hour but all we could see were dead pigs on the side of the road and a lot of angry hungry locals eying us up.

We decided to go into a shop/house/restuarant/slaughter house/boiling pot for English people who were lost

They asked us what we wanted but obviously couldnt understand us so i done a quality impression of a chicken and nic was hunting around the kitchen area for some rice. It was some of the best impressions ive ever done so they understood immediately. They gave us some chicken which was defenately dead dog and then a load of other crap which just looked and smelt like the toilet after an hour of nics abuse. We eat the dog and it was good.

A lady from next door came in who spoke perfect English. She comfirmed the food was dog and then laughed. Still not sure if she was joking. She invited us into her house where i was defenately sure 6 blokes were waiting with nun chucks or something but she was actually a nice lady.

Anyway we got this bus which had beds in i and headed for a place called Dong Hoi, it was 4 hours away so we fell asleep. We woke up some 6 hours later in God knows where. We spoke to a girl next to us who said we were on our way to Hue which is miles away from where we wanted to go At no point was this bus ever going to stop at Dong Hoi it just went straight to Hue.

Brilliant we thought, we got mugged off with our tickets.