Last chance

Last chance pho for breakfast, last chance for bottom shower, last chance of drink 2 coffees as we waited for the train because 1 of us doesn't drink coffee but to get front row viewing, you have to buy 2 and tea is impossible to order.

Last chance looking for fabric, last chance to find some tshirts because you didn't buy them at the markets for some reason. Last chance to get lost and last chance to have banh mi on a street corner.

Last chance to pig out on a giant frappacino and finally got a tea that Annette liked.  

Waiting for flight 1 of 2 and unless something spectacular happens,  I'm signing off. Hope you enjoyed it.

29 seconds

Up at 6am, to breakfast by 0630 before they finished preparing. One last adventure with the hose and bucket toilet and onto the bus for a 4 hour and something bus trip, which I suspected would be over 5.(at the time of typing, my prediction is spot on). One of the ladies was charged extra at checkout for having a dirty towel. I'm guessing they hadn't found ours that was covered in mud from yesterday's waterfall swim. 

Anyway, in a long bus trip, what else do you do between Spotify and Netflix but time the longest distance between a banana tree sighting. Is the banana a fruit or herb? Good question Mark, but let's leave it up to anyone who cares to look up the answer. Oh, 29 seconds is the result outside of the Hanoi built up areas.

We stopped for a brief break where to my delight they sold Helicopter Coffee. 280,000 dong first 4 boxes. Bargain.

My first actual big whinge about the tour is the last minute changes to the plan with no consulting of the group. We had our afternoon planned, but because our rooms are not ready, we are stopping at some place that is supposed to take half an hour, which may mean closer to 90 minutes. I get the feeling we will be extra rushed to finish our planned day. If we could dump our stuff at the hotel lobby and go, we would have been a lot happier. Tam our guide has been excellent but this has been the only problem. 

It's nearing 5 hours on the bus. I will be sure to continue later.

So finally after 40 minutes in the lacquer painting shop we finally backtracked to our Hanoi home away from home, the Skylark Hotel, dumped our bags and headed out for one last afternoon of traffic chaos. 

We visited the jail known as the Hanoi Hilton. A good place to go if you're too happy and want to bring yourself down a bit.

We then wandered until we found the area called Silk Road and judging by the lack of shop entries and purchases, it did not live up to any hype I may have heard.

It was nearing 530pm, and apart from some lollies, we hadn't eaten real food since breakfast at 0630. 

Somebody had recommended a little place called Chops that did hamburgers 🍔.  As a matter of fact, all places are small and mainly skinny structures. Anyway, the burgers were good and I think we are glad to have gone Western.

Surprise surprise, the night markets were on, so we did a wander, spent $75 Australian on what are surely totally authentic Hoka and Air Jordan shoes, because I'm sure there are no fakes sold here.

Back through our last battle with night traffic and just a day of travelling to finish off the trip. 

Not sure it counts as a waterfall, but....

A 10:30 start to the day has never before happened whilst on a holiday. So of course I woke early. Not so big breakfast today, but still enough local food to justify eating lots. And they carve food all right too.

A one hour drive through roadworks, with not enough space for 2 cars, was interesting when semi trailer and bus met, but Elvis was spectacular so no worries. 

We got to our stop and took a gentle 800m walk to a nice little waterfall where we both had a dip. It's the first day on tour that the sun has completely come out, so it was quite nice.

Back in the bus we backtracked our morning route, checked out how good the brakes worked and did some extremely good reversing to keep traffic flowing, and then it was off to lunch. 

We were scheduled to eat after our waterfall dip but the restaurant was closed due to a funeral. It was going to be another set menu and to be honest, I'm a little bit tired of food right now. We rebooked to a nice place where they tried hard to speak English. However we did get our food, once we finally ordered. Annette had the sizzling honey chicken, I had the sweet and sour pork, and half a million dong later we were both happy. Sweet and sour with tomato is a game changer.

Back to the hotel we did a nice walk through some rice fields, and then back to hotel for a get together  before getting a round beef patty with my burger from the Western menu. The pumpkin soup was reported to be excellent as were the spring rolls. 

We packed for our departure tomorrow and realised that we didn't really miss having a tv for 3 nights. 

Hail to the bus driver man

Without Elvis (I don't know his real name, but because of his jet black hair and jewellery, some have noticed a similarity to The King), we would not be able to navigate these bike, cattle, bike, people, one way sized two way roads. Today's efforts of navigating the mountain roads was impressive.

Anyway, first stop was at the top of a long walk down to a nice little Vietnamese real life village. 

It was a nice walk through and then up a fair amount of steps to some huge caves. 

Awaiting at the bottom of the steps was the local taxi service, or the not very tough local motor bike gang. They had just transported a tour group of immaculately dressed Asians with the women dressed in their most sensible high platform shoes.

Of course, the way back was uphill, and a few of the group opted for the taxi service.

At the obligatory lunch stop, the sweet and sour pork soup was huge, as was the rice it came with.

Praise the Lord, as Annette finally ordered something she didn't complain about. (Editor's note: Annette feels this is an unfair representation)

We then headed for another local village, got to visit inside a local house and just meandered our way through to meet Elvis at the other end. Just lucky to be edging past 10,000 steps to burn off some of the calories. 

When is a fish not a fish?

So the staff at breakfast were a little concerned this morning. It seems as though a grown man circling the rather large buffet numerous times is worrying. A staff member came up to me to see if she could help me with anything. All was fine I explained.  

First up, unlike all of the Australians in the restaurant I choose to slowly circle my prey. A large buffet is a problem-solving game where you have to precisely decide on what foods will be eaten and in what order. It so happens that today, congee, which I believe is a rice soup, was the first choice. I guess this took maybe 4 full circuits to decide. The next were for trying to find a bowl. Anyway, salads, fruit, yoghurt, more soup, lots of chillies were consumed.

Did I forget to mention that after night 1's failure of hot water at The Reed, and Annette's obsession with hot baths, the constant boiling of the jug to up the temperature of the bath, seemed to blow up the jug for future use. I discovered this, after attempting to turn cold water into hot in order to drink my new favourite, Helicopter Coffee.

I came out of the bathroom to see a strange Vietnamese workman attempt to fix our broken jug. Then there is a knock on the door. A much cleverer female enters the room with a brand new jug. That's one for the ladies. Although there is a lack of milk (it's hard being obsessed with tea and milk), a lesser tea was had by the addict, and it was hot, as was my helicopter coffee.

Anyway, the trip to the mountains was due to be 3 hours, but for some unknown reason, half of our group decided it was a good idea to travel here with little or no foreign currency,  so every day there is an ATM stop. Except they don't all work so today we had 3 stops. At least being late for lunch gave breakfast a bit more time to digest. 

Tam, our very knowledgeable and funny guide, advised us that in these areas, they are still getting used to hospitality and that there may be some confusion in restaurants. Step up Annette to prove the point. Grilled fish with lime butter is what she ordered. She was wondering if it may be a whole fish from head to tail. What arrived looked like 4 meatballs in a row. I watched in amusement eating my enormous curried vegetables and rice, whilst the "is it or isn't it fish" conversation was held.

Tam was called in as both interpreter and referee. Seems as though the English translation on the menu was different to the Vietnamese, but it was fish and not meatballs (small fish bones were found as proof, or were they an elaborate trick to fool Australians who insist on eating seafood)? We even got a discount, which we feel bad about. Oh, I believe the fish that was not a fish was delicious and it was filling. 

Ten minutes up the road was the Puluong Bocbandi resort.

The welcoming lemon tea with cinnamon was spectacular. 

The resort is on the side of the mountain. The weather had closed in and the mist was heavy.

We found our cabin and had the last 3 hours of daylight as our own time. 

There are 2 sides to everybody's brains, the good and the evil. Today, not that long after demolishing lunch, our bags were loaded onto the back of a motorbike and we were escorted to our cabin at the furthest part up the hill. Upon entering "the happy room", I was confronted with this sign:

Evil brain started plotting. 

Then I saw this.

Put curried vegetables, the sign and the apparatus together and evil brain was the happiest it's been in years. I won't go into too much detail but my biggest fear was having a similar look to what you would have after a good outing at paintball, only all the paint is brown. I wonder if I should have put a warning to not read this in case of squirmishness. 

Even though the mist was heavy, we checked out the pool and cafe, I got my swimmers on, Annette got hot chocolate dong, and I went for a mountain swim. In the 10 minutes it took to get the cash, the cafe had closed. 

We met the rest of the group at 6pm for dinner and the nightmare on seafood street continued. I was over local food so opted for chicken tenders and chips. Annette got the prawn stir-fry, foolishly thinking that the prawns would be large, just like all of the other prawns that had been served.  Nope. Small prawns, not shelled, which is how they eat them in these parts. 

She better not edit this.

Some hours after I finished, she was finally done. I must say that the randomness of when you receive your meal in relation to when you order is quite a mystery. 

Back to the cabin for a fun night of watching Netflix downloads. 

Welcome to our new readers. I hope I am promoting Vietnam as a good place to visit.

Adendum

Cause - Eating the largest bowls of rice and curried vegetables for lunch that have ever been created and finishing the lot.

Effect - Sitting down to this sign.

Your son looks like shit

As far as traditions and customs go, this is my new favourite. In Vietnam, if you say a child is cute, this is very bad as they think that monsters will come and take that child away. So instead, you say they are ugly or look like shit etc, and the parents will be happy. Imagine in Australia when you see an ugly baby, but are compelled to smile and say they are beautiful. Under the new custom, you say "your baby looks like shit". No lies, no feelings hurt, and the monsters go childless.

Anyway, back to the day. You all know about breakfast. How good is noodle soup with lime juice and chilli? Do I say it tastes like shit, or is that just a child thing? It's delicious. The rest of the group thinks it's strange, but you have to try the local food. It's also good that everywhere has a designated egg station to cook them however you want.

To the bus for a 9am kick off. First stop some temples in the side of a mountain.  Some big steep steps were involved and a woman tried to help Annette up, not for kindness, but for cash. She was shooed away quickly. 

Meanwhile down at the start of the walk, one of the older guys was being massaged by 3 locals for 15 minutes before the Police made them leave. They did eventually get paid. Not as touristy as yesterday's temples and quite enjoyable. 

I have to be honest, I have forgotten the order of things, but once again lunch was too big and today's meat was kind of bouncy and tough. It's maybe the first time I haven't left bloated. I didn't even go back for more goat.

Despite being a communist country, the Catholics have infiltrated some areas and we visited a very old cathedral with a nun as our guide.

Before or after this we did a nice 1 hour boat trip through some nice scenery. We got a good rower who stopped for us to take pictures of bats and pigs. Did I mention that they were rowing with their feet?

On returning to the hotel, I jumped in the freezing pool for some laps, followed by 4km on the treadmill. Most of our group went to a restaurant that was reported to be excellent, but I had chips and a club sandwich and exercise which makes me a winner. Annette did do a Les Mills class whilst I swam and ran. She will be paying the price tomorrow.