Welcoming the Year of the Goat

Travelling around most parts of South East Asia is much easier that I'd anticipated in the sense that you have a plethora of places to find advice and information i.e. guide books, travel agencies, Trip Advisor and most importantly, other travellers you meet along the way. Plus let's not forget pure curiosity as you wander around a new place looking for restaurants, rooms and undocumented spots to hang out. On this occasion, in Hoi An, we'd been recommended a hostel called Sunflower. Most cities have a hostel where 'everyone goes' and this was Hoi An's - it is famous for its incredible breakfast buffet that's included in the $8 a night price. The downside is that we were crammed into a tiny dorm room with eight beds, three snorers (that sounded like they were from the pits of hell), one cougher, one horrifying sleep talker who I'm pretty sure was possessed and therefore one very crabby Jenny Louden.

Nevertheless we had a ball in Hoi An; finally in warm weather again after two weeks in the chilly north of Vietnam I whipped out my bikini and chilled by the pool, visited a little beach, went for runs amongst the rice paddies (the world is now my treadmill!), had a couple of nights out, visited a Chinese temple and had possibly one of the best massages I've ever had. We also tried out the local culinary delights on offer, my favourite of these were the Báhn Mì (pronounced 'ban me'); Hoi An is renowned for these unbelievably tasty Vietnamese pork baguettes stuffed with about fifteen different ingredients, undeniably the Superman of sandwiches!

A blossom tree outside a Chinese temple.

Each Báhn Mì stand looks like this with lots of little plates full of ingredients.

The roads are lined with row upon row of plants and flowers for the Vietnamese New year where every family and business buys plants to celebrate (not unlike our use of Christmas trees).

All the streets in the old part of the city are adorned with colourful lanterns.

Hoi An is probably most known for its tailors and the talented craftsmen can custom-make you anything for a fraction of the price it would cost you back home. Most people opt for suits but when I heard they could make anything my imagination went wild; a carnival headdress, a dragon costume and a patchwork ball gown all came to mind...all highly inappropriate of course, considering I'm carrying my life in my backpack at the moment, so instead I opted for a tailor-made purple pineapple bikini. Much more sensible (ish).

We were in Hoi An for the welcoming of Tet, the celebration was much akin to our New Year's Eve traditions with street parties and fireworks as well as floating lanterns, traditional performances and street food - it was a lot of fun and very festive, no post-Christmas blues for us because we got to do it all over again! I was chosen to be interviewed by a Vietnamese news channel and, having started 'welcoming' the year of the goat in early with copious amounts of shop bought vodka and Sprite, I babbled away into the microphone and have to apologise to you all now for being a representative of England on Vietnamese news...

Post-embarrassing interview photo.

We realised that we'd never watched fireworks without being bundled up in warm clothes before!

Vietnamese performers. 

Sending floating candles out into the river for good luck in the New Year (with the offending Vodka and Sprite).

The Jezza Clarkson Experience

The next stop on my journey from north to south Vietnam was Phong Nha national park; a stunning expanse of mountains and caves snuggled amongst lush green fields and rice paddies. Tourists only started coming here four years ago so there are only a handful of places to stay; we'd been recommended to go to Easy Tiger hostel however they didn't have any room because our visit coincided with the run up to 'Tet' which is the name for the Vietnamese New Year (this is the same as the Chinese New Year which follows the lunar calendar). This national welcoming of 'the year of the goat' turned out to be quite a disturbance for our travels over the course of the next few weeks as it's very important to the Vietnamese; they prepare for it for weeks, party like crazy, close their businesses and increase prices. Imagine Christmas time back home without the presence of big businesses and chains who pay their staff extra to work over the holidays (the vast majority of businesses in Asia are small, family run operations). The mind-blowing scenery of the national park just screamed at us to explore it so we rented motor bikes and navigated our way up and down the winding roads of the Vietnamese countryside whilst pretending to be Jeremy Clarkson and Co. (nailed it).

We arrived by bus at 4am and this was our view of the sunrise from our balcony once we'd finally found a place to stay at 7am.

Phong Nha. If you look closely you can spot locals with their trademark conical hats working in the fields.

Top Gear: eat your heart out!

I'm not sure we've got the hang of how to sit on bikes...

The number one activity on the agenda at the national park was to visit the caves. There are several on offer but we'd heard that some, such as Paradise Cave, simply involved walking through artificially lit caverns and paying through the nose for the privilege - no thanks! Instead we opted to visit Dark Cave, exactly as the ominous name suggests it is pitch black and full of adventure! We donned life jackets and head torches and began by zip lining into a turquoise lagoon at the cave mouth, we then scrambled through the cave and swam in the cool water of the dark cavern - wow!! Next we were led through a series of narrow passage ways deeper and deeper into the cave; we asked ourselves why the ground and walls were getting increasingly slippery and slimy, what was it?? It turned out to be mud! We were led to a big pool of thick mud where we plopped right in and proceeded to float and roll around; this was probably one of the most bizarre and fun experiences of my life, I imagine the weightless feeling we had was similar to floating in space! Afterwards we kayaked in the lagoon outside to another set of zip lines...serious fun, people!

Zip lining selfie.

I took my waterproof camera but I wasn't sure if it was mud-proof!

Washing off after the mud bath (that water was clear before we got to it).

Walking into the unknown.

We'd booked our ticket (with a massively inflated price - thanks for that Tet!) to get to our next destination however the bus didn't leave until 5am the next day so, being stingy travellers, we decided not to book a room for the night and instead stay awake and hang around in the communal area of the Easy Tiger hostel. Crabby and tired we made our way to the booking office and waited for our ride. A bus finally rocked up an hour late and the driver was extremely rude pushing us out the way as we tried to board saying there was no room despite us having booked in advance! We deduced that because of Tet the bus had picked up extra locals; we had to wait an additional two hours for an alternative bus which then kicked us off a few hours later at the wrong town where we had to wait three hours for another bus. The drama didn't end there. An hour in to the journey we stopped in the middle of nowhere where everyone was kicked off again and told to swap with the people from yet another bus for no apparent reason! It was 9pm when we finally arrived in Hoi An (we were told we'd arrive at 11am) and I hadn't slept for thirty eight hours plus I'd previously had a succession of sleepless nights due to barking dogs and rock hard beds; yes, travelling is an unbelievably incredible experience but it does get extremely frustrating when you constantly have no control over basic things like sleep, food and transport.

A Fake Tour?

For all those years and months I spent dreaming about my travels and planning where I'd go I'd always thought of one place when I'd picture Vietnam: Halong Bay. For those of you who haven't been (and for those who didn't watch the Top Gear Vietnam special!!) Halong Bay is a collection of nearly 2000 limestone islands and islets off the Northeast coast of Vietnam where pillars of rock steeply protrude out of the water creating an almost mythical quality to the area's outstanding beauty. Any visitor to the area must comb their way through the multitude of tour groups and travel agencies to avoid getting a 'fake' tour; companies in Asia don't often strive for originality, instead copying whoever is doing best at that time resulting in ten hostels in one city with the same name, restaurants with identical signs right next door to each other and an awful lot of confused travellers scratching their heads whilst standing in the street scrutinising their Google Maps apps. We'd been recommended the three day 'Castaway Tour' by many people our age along the way and scoured the streets of Hanoi for what we were sure was the real deal. We took a bus from the capital to Halong city where we boarded a boat and headed straight for a limestone cave inside one of the islands that make up the UNESCO world heritage site. Our guide didn't explain the cave to us very thoroughly so we proceeded to make up wild stories about its possible history, much to the amusement of other groups who overheard!

When we arrived the mountains were shrouded in mist which only added to the mystical atmosphere.

We kayaked through a tiny eroded archway in the rock and into an echoey, secluded cove; it was flanked by giant pillars which were peppered with trees.

On our first night we had a lesson on how to make spring rolls. In fact, we were informed by our tour guide, Jeff, that Vietnamese men look for good spring roll-making skills when choosing a wife!

Halong bay is a popular tourist attraction however the uninhabitable shape of most of the mountains means that the majority of it remains untouched.

The next morning we were woken up early by Jeff who announced he had a day full of activities planned for us. Let me paint a picture for you - we'd had a free bar for three hours the night before, we'd had only a few hours sleep, we were hungover....we did not feel like activities. Nevertheless we dragged our weary bodies out of the boat and to a pearl farm. There we saw oysters being gently cut open and stuffed with tiny white objects or 'irritants', nobody offered us an explanation as to why they were doing this but we later found out (thank you, Google) that the pearl is formed as the oyster tries to protect itself by forming layers of nacre over the foreign object and cultured pearls only have about a 10% success rate. Next on the agenda was a four mile bike ride and I could almost hear the mass *groan* from everybody however this turned out to be incredible!

It was fascinating to watch the oysters being cut open however we left the farm with more questions than when we arrived.

We biked around an island past mountain goats perched on imperceptible ledges, rice paddies, wild puppies and tunnels. 

What a great way to clear out all the cobwebs!

Halong translates as 'descending dragon' and the legend is that a mountain dragon created the bay with its tail.

Finally, we were taken to 'Monkey Island' to do some rock climbing. Yes, this paragraph is somethingaboutmonkeys! Wahey! I had one flip flop on and one trainer (a cunning footwear plan designed to allow one foot to get wet and the other to climb over sharp rocks) and as I was posing for a photo on a high part of rock a monkey came along and swiftly grabbed the bag I had with the other two shoes in; luckily I was able to snatch it off him and run away otherwise I'd have been stuck with my strange choice of footwear for a while! That evening we docked at Cat Ba island, a large, inhabited island, where we stayed for the night before heading back the next morning. The trip was lacking a bit of information and organisation here and there (at one point the boat drove away from an island leaving two people behind accidentally...) so we can only speculate as to whether we got a 'fake' Castaway tour or not. That aside we had an unforgettable three days and who can complain when you're surrounded by such incredible scenery?!

Scaling the side of the cliff.

Something about monkeys following you (check out who's lurking in the background of this photo).

Our climb was rewarded with amazing views - we plonked ourselves down at the top and had one of those completely contented moments you only really get when surrounded by breathtaking scenery.

Our boat passed a fishing village, these people live and work on these floating platforms which are loosely arranged into streets and some even have pet dogs.

Deep Fried Cow's Nipples and Weasel Poo Coffee

Our first taste of Vietnam was a few days spent in the capital. Hanoi hit me like a brick in the face; the biting cold weather after so many months in hot countries, the potent smell of coffee and the smoke from men squatting on the street with their bamboo pipes, big-eyed and beautiful tots waving hello from behind their dust masks, red-toothed grandmothers sitting in doorways chewing euphoria-inducing betal nut, thousands of shops and stalls spilling out on to the street, women in conical hats selling colourful food from the baskets on either side of a pole slung over their shoulder, trays of roughly chopped up and cooked animals on the street, puppies bouncing around, colourful lanterns and shop signs adorning the buildings and of course, let's not forget the traffic....wow, the traffic! Walking across a road in Hanoi is like playing the ultimate game of Total Wipeout where the punishment isn't being thrown into water, it is...being wiped out! Scooters and motorbikes zoom in every conceivable direction without an ounce of worry about who they are going to hit. If you look into the traffic and pause they'll fly right by you within millimetres, we learnt that the best way to navigate this death match is to look straight ahead, plough through and pray to Buddah that you're not going to get mown down.

The infamous Hanoi traffic, this is a crossroads completely lacking any lanes, lights or organisation - a motorist free for all.

Hard working women roam the streets all day and night selling their wares.

We watched a beautiful water puppet show where tiny wooden dragons and fish danced around in the water to Vietnamese music with the odd interjection of fire and smoke.

Hanoi has many new experiences to offer its visitors. We saw numerous coffee shops with tubs of coffee beans outside bearing the label 'WEASEL' - curious and assuming a mis-translation we tried a cup and it transpires that the coffee beans are fed to weasels, collected from their...ahem...waste, and then made into coffee! Verdict on weasel poo coffee? Actually, it's very delicious (albeit quite strong, not weasely at all I promise!). Another Vietnamese delicacy we dared to try was deep fried cow's nipples. They were fatty. They were rubbery. They may have put me off beef for a long time!

A standard menu in the roadside restaurants of Hanoi: fried frog, boiled pig's ears, grilled dog meat and deep fried cow's nipples.

Yes, it's dog.

Vietnam has the best coffee I have ever tasted. Both the weasel and non-weasel kind. 

Aside from shivering in my newly bought jumpers and coat we managed to pack a lot of things into our time in the city. We visited the mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, the communist revolutionary leader, where we stood just inches from his perfectly preserved 46 year old corpse in his glass case surrounded by military guards; the embalmed body gets sent to Russia for three months every year for maintenance and they're obviously doing something right because he looks just as though he's sleeping. We whiled away the evenings sitting on minute plastic chairs in the street on top of a sea of sunflower seed shells sipping 5000 Dong beer which is about 15p - no complaints here! A large amount of our time was spent walking amongst the streets of the old quarter that's riddled with shops; each 1000 year old street, or 'Hang', is dedicated to a particular product so for example every shop on 'Hang Bac', with 'Bac' meaning silver, is brimming with every type of jewellery you can imagine in gargantuan proportions.

The mausoleum (no photos allowed inside) was once ranked the sixth most ugly building in the world.

Live owl on a keg. Standard. 

This is Hang Duong aka 'sweet street'. It's also the location of a primary school (cunning design right?!) and when the parents collect the kids at hometime the streets get 'chockablock'!! (I'm sorry...I couldn't help myself).

Although Hanoi is most definitely not for the faint-hearted, easily offended (or easily run over), I have to say it is one of my favourite cities in Asia so far. The culture is immensely rich and interesting, the hard working people are unrelentingly friendly and to have fun and experience the real Vietnam you just have to get stuck in and do as the locals do!

Good Evening, Vietnam

After we'd accomplished 'Tubing Mission: Round Two' we toyed with the idea of doing something else that we'd decided was out of our budgets on our previous visit to Vang Vieng - a hot air balloon ride! At around £40 for an hour's flight it's the cheapest place in the world to do it however that's a lot of money considering I'm on a budget of around £15 a day; we decided that we'd justify the spend by trying to skip meals here and there for a few weeks plus at this point I gave up buying bottled water and instead opted for luke warm Asian tap water dun dun duuuuun.......don't worry, I've been drinking it for a few weeks now and I'm not dead yet - wahoo! Thank you, India for my stomach of STEEL. So yes, we talked ourselves into the hot air balloon ride at sunset over the magnificent Laos landscape of rivers, rice fields, villages and jagged, sharply protruding mountains. Stunning. The flight took off with us three and five strangers just as the sun was setting, casting amber-trimmed shadows across the vast rural land. At one point we went so low - almost touching the tips of trees - that we were concerned there was something wrong however the pilot couldn't explain as he didn't speak any English so, in between screams, we all promptly whipped out our iPhones to video what could have potentially been our demise so that future YouTubers could watch in delighted horror. Thankfully we were ok in the end (otherwise I wouldn't be writing this) and we landed safely albeit none the wiser as to what had happened (sorry YouTubers).

We watched the balloons being set up.

The breathtaking view of the sunset from a very unique angle!

Bird's eye view of the river we'd been tubing in.

It was more adrenaline-inducing than I'd expected (yay!) as there was only a thin floor between us and nothingness!

The balloon ride was our 'going away' party for Victorine, our crazy Dutch travel buddy for the last month, as she was Myanmar bound before returning to her home; when I came travelling I thought the only goodbyes I'd have to deal with were those involving my pretty excellent family and friends in England however what I didn't expect was to find it so hard to part with those special people I've met along the way that have truly made my trip so spectacular. After meeting for the first time in Thailand in November and then rejoining in the south of Laos for a month of ridiculous fun, Evie and I were so sad to say goodbye to Vic but it was time for us to go to Vietnam. All over South East Asia we'd heard rumours about the notoriously hideous bus journey from Loas to Hanoi in Vietnam so it's safe to say we were dreading it like an Asian dreads western toilets (and that's A LOT, tell tale clues of this are muddy footprints on the toilet seat...). Ready for hell we boarded the sleeper bus that we'd been promised would be proper lay down beds - we even payed extra for it - but it turned out to be sleeper chairs that only come in Asian sizes i.e. nowhere near big enough for us cumbersome westerners. A bad start. As we drove out of the bus station - aka pandemonium central - we gratefully realised that the bus was only half full, got talking to some Ozzies and other fellow English people and all promptly commandeered the upper level of sleeper chairs meaning we had room to watch movies, play UNO and chat. Yes, the bus broke down about five times, yes, it took 37 hours instead of 19, yes, we all had to get out half asleep at 4am because a lorry had jackknifed across the road and yes, I chipped a tooth on stale road-cafe peanut brittle however the journey really wasn't as bad as it was fabled to be, mainly because of the extra space and the company. Asian buses don't tend to have toilets so they stop regularly and on one of these stops we realised the cargo hold was full of bags of live piglets which the Laos men were kicking and dragging around; I despise seeing this sort of thing, however usual it is around here. I've found that there's a fine line between respecting the culture of the country you're travelling in and standing idly by whilst unnecessary cruelty takes place and I ask myself - at what point does one step in?

There was just enough time for a farewell face-paint.

It's not a legit Vietnamese bus if it doesn't have disco lights.

One of the small pigs stuffed inside a sack, it was squealing and screaming, I didn't know what to do!

The bus couldn't drive through the roadside ditch to pass the jackknifed lorry with us inside so we stumbled out like zombies and hung around in the road for ages.

We arrived in Vietnam very late the next evening at the 'bus depo', which was actually a deserted patch of dirt behind someone's house, and waited for a taxi. We were trying to negotiate a price for the cab but the driver didn't speak any English - at that moment a man with rolled up carpets slung over his shoulder emerged out of the darkness and got involved in the negotiation, he babbled away to the driver and then got 350,000 Vietnamese Dong (£10) in notes out of his wallet to represent how much we had to pay for the journey to our hostel (showing the notes is a common way to handle the language barrier when paying for things). We haggled them down and they eventually agreed to 250,000 Dong so we followed the driver into the taxi but were stopped by the man with the carpets who was demanding the money from us?! We were extremely confused but....it turned out that, unbeknownst to us, we had actually been 'buying' carpets and not the taxi!!! Choking on our own laughter we politely declined and got into what we then found out was a strictly metered taxi anyway! FYI the taxi turned out to be a lot cheaper than the carpet!! Asia travel...enough said.

Right on Trek

The long, bumpy and winding road to Luang Probang further north of Laos finally ended and Evie, Vic and I traipsed around trying to find room. Everywhere was fully booked so when we finally found somewhere it was a dingy hole with grimy paper-thin walls and no glass in the windows that not only led outside but into an adjoining room; that night we laid in bed listening to an hour long drunken conversation between the residents of our neighbouring room - it would have been interesting if it wasn't all in French. Early the next morning we left for a two day trek through the local villages, fields and mountains of the northern Laos countryside. Exhausted and starving we arrived in a small bamboo village, belonging to the Kmhu ethic group, in the foothills and as we waited for our food to be cooked by the locals we were taken on a tour of the village; they are completely self sufficient and we saw whole families mucking in with the farm work and we even helped some young girls collect some of their sticky rice crop that had been drying on a tarpaulin. The children took a particular interest in us and were excited to show us all their tricks such as jumping off the tables and in return we gave them some of our dinner which they wolfed down.

Thankfully we had our pointy hats as the sun was fierce. We wanted to fit in with the locals who we'd see squatting in the fields working.

This man was crafting incredibly professional chopsticks out of bamboo, each one taking only a few minutes.

This is the Kmhu village, some houses were surrounded by a thick 'fence' of cacti and all had dogs, chickens and children running around them.

This young girl had her baby sister firmly planted on her hip all afternoon and evening, the little one was fascinated with us and wouldn't let go of my finger.

They spoke no English and we didn't know much of their version of the Laos language but a heart is an international symbol!

Laos gets extremely cold in the evenings and that night was made even worse by the fact that we were sleeping on very thin mattresses on the floor of a bamboo hut on stilts (we also saw a rat right next our bed). We left at the crack of dawn and trekked through the jungle to the most stunning waterfall I have ever seen; we waded through the shallow top where the stone in the ground had been shaped in never ending ripples and the trees were growing through the water. At the bottom we jumped off a tree into the turquoise abyss feeling slightly guilty that we were contaminating the crystal clear water with our sweaty-trekky-can't remember our last shower-bodies!

The north Laos countryside.

Top of the waterfall.

Magical!

Just chilling under the waterfall!

Underwater tree root.

We walked through a sanctuary full of bears that have been rescued from their captors that cruelly cage them to harvest their bile for questionable Chinese fertility medicine.

Real travelling - mission accomplished. After a night of violently shivering next to a rat - maybe too much real travelling...? With this is mind we decided last minute to go back down south for a cheeky extra tubing session - the allure of floating down the Mekong to be dragged up the river banks to bars was just too much so as soon as we finished the trek we got straight on a night bus to touristy Vang Vieng. We arrived at 3am and kipped in a freezing seating area in the hostel surrounded by half finished rum and cokes, soggy playing cards and overflowing ash trays - a regular occurrence and quite an accomplishment for me considering that before I came travelling I was the fussiest sleeper alive!

Tubing!!! 

Bars surrounded by mountains: perfect!

A girl requested that I knight her.

Dog in a night club. Standard.