Vietnam

From Hanoi, after the Air Asia flight (I hate those Bastards!!) from Bangkok, I had a JetStar flight booked to Danang where after a transfer to Hoi An I would have been staying in a nice 4 star hotel. I think there was just over two hours between the connecting flights, easily enough time right? Erm, not if the Air Asia flight is 1 hour 40 mins late and the Vietnam immigration process suffers from inherent retardation disorder.

Air Asia have a policy that they will compensate you if your flight is delayed by over 1 hour 45 mins but as my flight was 5 minutes under that their policy didn´t have any room to offer help to stranded passengers. Even though there is an advertisement at check in at Hanoi stating something along the lines of ´if we´re late we´ll offer you 1500THB cash back´, that still translates to any delays over 3 hours´. Those bastards have cost me a fortune in the last few months. They don´t let you make any changes to flights after they´re booked unless it´s just a date change and their customer service is awful - it´s Easyjet in Thailand and if you know me well enough you´ll have no doubt heard me rant on about how much I hate Easjet too!

So there I am in, Hanoi airport, missed my JetStar connection, hotel booked and paid for in Hoi An, awful Air Asia service, shit loads of luggage, no phone and a shit load of Vietnamese people staring at me constantly. I was kind of expecting Vietnam to be similar to Thailand in that people are generally used to and friendly to travellers, I was a bit wrong on that score. Even worse, my Maestro card wouldn´t work in the 10 ATMs that I tried, fortunately mi tarjeta credito came in very handy. Again a decision had to be made similarly to the one in Bangkok. I was feeling less rough but still had the remnants of a Singh hangover bouncing around. This was was a bit more straightforward - either stay in Hanoi for the night or wait for the next JetStar flight the following morning.

The only remaining chance to get to Hoi An that night was Vietnam Airlines and their last flight was fully booked and they could only but me on standby. That meant I had to hang around the dullest airport in the world for about 4 hours while they see if any passengers didn´t turn up. At that time they conveniently only had business class seats left so I accepted their kind offer and boarded, rather speedily, the 1 hour flight to Hoi An. That flight was painless and the service wasn´t bad although I was a bit pissed off that I didn´t get any Champers for my 100 pounds, even worse NO alcohol was being served, I mean for goodness sakes!

On arrival in Hoi an, the area outside the airport was awash with taxis. There´s quite a bit of information in the guides about taxi scams in Vietnam, such as locals accosting tourists and robbing them or escorting them to an unwanted hotel, so I was pretty dubious about the whole affair. But, as in all of these situations a decision is required, so I chose the taxi driver who looked the most honest and professional, negotiated a price and took a risk. The weather was a sharp contrast from Thailand. I had received news ahead of my journey that there was extensive flooding in most parts of the country and that was realised during the landing into Hanoi, all you could see was water, I´ve never seen anything like it. That was part of the reason that I chose to take a risk and take a flight to Hoi An. But unfortunately, the weather in Hoi An was even worse.

It was torrential rain, rain that some how penetrated the car and soaked me through. The taxi driver couldn´t speak English at all and had to check the map about 7 times for my hotel. Most people would pull over to check the map but this guy just slowed down a little and took his eyes off the road, quite a worry. But one thing about Vietnam is that they drive a lot slower than most other countries, which is why their road regulations actually work, meaning their non existent road regulations! All I could do really was try to look out for signs to check that we were heading in the right direction and fortunately we seemed to be heading for Hoi An although I´m not sure he managed to reach a speed exceeding 60 kmph. About 40 minutes later we arrived in some sort of civilisation after miles and miles of run down looking areas. Originally picking the wrong hotel, we finally arrived at the hotel which turned out to be far less than 4 star.

The short trip from the taxi to reception got me soaked to the skin, I´ve never seen rain like it. Greeted by less than enthusiastic staff and a huge restaurant area with no guests in there whatsoever, I was sure that either the information on the internet was a little misleading or I´d picked the wrong time to visit Vietnam. After advising the receptionist that there was a fresh cat poo near her desk I was taken to the room which was pretty basic which would be fine under normal circumstances but not when you´re expecting 4 star. After check in, I wasn´t exactly sure what to do considering it was lashing down. That´s one thing I´ve learnt, no matter where you are, it´s difficult to make the best of things when it is raining like that, especially when you´re expecting to top up your tan.

The location I´d picked was on recommendation from a few people that had visited before and had defined it as paradise with it´s glorious beaches, ridiculously cheap prices and great weather! Some friends had even been there the week before and had raved about the weather - typical! It´s also really close to China beach which is part of the massive beach that runs for miles up the East coast of Vietnam, China beach is the one out of Apocalypse now! But let´s be fair, beaches are no fun when it´s raining although I managed to have a bit of fun on the beach before moving on to pastures new! So, on the first evening it was decided to have a bite to eat at the hotel which turned out to be pretty dire considering that there was no-one else in the restaurant and most of the staff just wanted to sleep in hammocks or just disappear the scene altogether.

The next day I had a look into Hoi An town to check things out and do some laundry. Laundry negotiations were a bit different than what I was used to in Thailand and quite a lot more expensive but to be fair I think a couple of switched on locals took the opportunity to rip off a ill informed travellers in dire straits. I had a coffee in a local bar after buying a poncho and headed a bit more central to check out some bars, bars which were completely non existent. One of the local cafe owners tried to persuade me to go on a trip with him a bit further inland as he could see I was pissed with the weather and was chasing the sun. I even considered going back to Thailand because the weather was that bad but the outlook for that week was dreadful all over South East Asia. Fortunately I decided to sit it out and had about 4 days of glorious weather and had one of the best weeks ever courtesy of a few things besides the weather!

I ended up staying in the hotel from hell for one more night before moving to another 4 star hotel close by, although this one truly lived up to its 4 star reputation. That day the weather picked up and 4 days of bliss followed and I ended up finding out why people rave about Hoi An and Vietnam so much. The new hotel was lush, I walked along the massive beach with the sun blaring down, spent time by the pool and found the real Hoi An old town with some really nice restaurants and bars. I met up with a friend from back home too and dutifully got very drunk and had a good time for a couple of days before she buggered off back home to the freezing cold and Orange.

There´s far too much to say about that week, loads happened and it ended up being the best so far during this trip. At first I had a major culture shock as things are so different in Vietnam than Thailand, that may sound a little short sighted, but it´s only a short flight from one capital to the other. The people are far less sure of tourists and being stared at was a common occurrence. Some of the people selling goods in shops were plain rude and other locals were very untrustworthy. That said, I met some great people, seen some great sights, topped up my tan and overall the positives far outweighed the negatives - not sure that was entirely to do with Vietnam but that´s another story.

After Hoi An I flew back up to Hanoi to meet Kev and ended up spending about 4 days there while we organised the next step of our trip. Beyond Kev´s holiday with Laura, we had nothing planned so it was back to the drawing board. After chatting for about 10 seconds we both agreed that the best plan would be to get to South America as soon as possible. That was quite a big change to the plan as were were intending to travel in for another 3 weeks in Vietnam before moving onto Cambodia. For Kev, it was pretty straight forward as he wanted to cut his trip short so he could get back to Laura sooner but he wanted to see South America first. For me, I would rather have seen the rest of South East Asia accompanied and I wanted to spend as little time in Australia as possible so I could save money and try to see out the ten months I had planned to stay travelling.

So after a a couple of days we had cut down our Australia trip from 6 weeks to just over 2 avoiding the expensive Christmas period and we had booked a flight to Buenos Aires for 24th November. To summarise Vietnam, to be honest I didn´t enjoy it as much as Thailand. The culture is completely different and at some times unfriendly and a bit unnerving. I had one of the best weeks ever in Hoi An and I would love to go back at high season when the weather better. Hanoi was a complete shit hole, let´s be honest. The traffic was mental, even worse than India, and the city was just dirty and quite unpleasant. There were a few nice bars and cafes to chill out in and a few good areas to visit but overall I think Hanoi should go down as a place to pass through. I haven´t written off Vietnam completely and I would really like to give it a second chance very soon.