travels with an ageing punkrocker/publisher
Was a little sad to say goodbye to Vietnam: for all the heat, chaos, hawking, and haggling, it’s now elevated to a home away from home, a place where there is much good food, friendly people, and a general good time to be had. It’s also proof that a country can bounce back from being screwed over by the US […]
Read moreAs our last full day in Vietnam draws to a close, I’m sipping freshly squeezed sugarcane juice, nibbling on a banana pancake, and throwing words at the screen in a bid to entertain my reader. Our day kicked off with a cooking class at Goian Homestay/Restaurant/Cooking School/Evil Villain Lair for all I know, with the incredibly friendly Vinh. She dragged […]
Read moreStill in Hoi An, today was even slower paced than previous. We did pretty much all of our final fittings, and picked up orders today. I now have a new pair of shoes, and many new shirts. Our extra batch of custom gifts, ordered at 25% lower than the lowest price, came through, strangely enough (or not really strangely at […]
Read moreToday certainly had marked similarities to the last couple of days: shopping, eating, sweating. A chunk of the day we spent outside was doing various fittings. Trying on shirts and pants and jackets and shoes and dresses (L for the last two). All of our clothes are looking pretty good, some are even finished. I had one of those moments […]
Read moreToday was pretty much a repeat of yesterday: shop eat rest shop massage eat. It’s a tough life. Hoi An turned on another typical hot season day, high 30s but somehow feeling a little less hot than yesterday. After breakfast at the hotel we headed to a Be Be, as visited on the last trip where I got an amazing […]
Read moreFor the right price, I’m not sure there isn’t anything that Hoi An can’t make. Clothes like business and casual shirts? Sure. Leather shoes and bags? Not a problem. Jewellery? We got that. Possibly the world’s best sandwiches? Come back tomorrow and I’ll probably have a post then. A house? Hoi An can probably make that too, possibly with an […]
Read moreToday was, simply, a travel day. We hit the hotel breakfast at 7am, just to get something into us before the day kicked off. Our goal was to get out of town before the various streetsellers, who we’d been telling that we were leaving Sunday so we’d be shopping Saturday, caught on and swamped us/set the car on fire/whatever they […]
Read moreMt Phan Xi Pang, at 3,143 metres (or, depending on the source, 3,174.3m) is the tallest mountain in Vietnam, and taller than anything in Australia, Cambodia, Laos, or Thailand. One nickname for it is the “roof of Indochina”. At times it can be covered in 60cm of snow. It is also probably the easiest 3,000+ metre mountain in the world […]
Read moreFolk art. No matter how cool or talented you think you are, you’re never going to be at the same level as an ancient lady in a house on a hillside surrounded by chickens and buffalo. Fortunately I know that I’m about as talented and artistically blessed as a Billy Joel concert, so a morning creating a batik design was […]
Read moreIt’ll likely be a short post today (I can hear the sigh of relief over the rain and the rampaging children from here) as, well, we didn’t do much today. Managed 14,500 steps of not much, somehow. We kicked off with the hotel breakfast, nothing too fancy but al least this way I get my daily ration of pink dragonfruit […]
Read more“Smile, you’re travelling!” is what my alarm would have said at 6.15am had I not already been awake. For all the mumbling I make about early starts, and we’ve had a few on this trip, to be able to just get on a plane with a minimum of paperwork and fly to another country, spending money hard earned through many […]
Read moreSummer in Vietnam. It’s hot. Very hot. If yesterday just about knocked me over and all I did was queue, today proved that I am quite possibly congenitally unable to learn from the past. We’d booked a day trip out to the south, Ninh Binh, the first capital of Vietnam. I at least got a bit wiser, taking every opportunity […]
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