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Vietnam the third: day 11, Hoi An
Today 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 jacket that I haven’t had much opportunity to wear. This time the plan was for a slightly less elaborate, but still amazing jacket, that I might be able to wear more often. Hopefully in a few days I’ll be able to post a pic of me in it. To accessorise,…
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Vietnam the third: day 10, Hoi An
For 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 extra charge if we need two scooters to transport it. Make this paragraph’s first sentence with all the multiple negatives make sense? They can probably make that too. Our first stop this morning was a regular haunt, Yaly Couture. We’ve been getting clothes made here since our first tour in…
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Vietnam the third: day 9, Sapa-Hanoi-Hoi An
Today 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 do in this town. Our car picked us up at about 7.45am, by which stage a few streetsellers were around, but not ones we’d encountered before. We were close to getting away clean, but our driver had another pickup right in the centre, and while the new passengers were being…
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Vietnam the third: day 8, Sapa
Mt 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 to ascend. After picking up our laundry, we set off from our hotel base camp at approximately 0930, walking up the street, climbing the stairs to Fansipan St. The last couple of mornings we’re stopped there to pick us a couple of extra bottles of water, but today we figured…
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Vietnam the third: Day 7, Sapa
Folk 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 never likely to produce a work that had any more than occasional moments of accidental competency. Batik is a method of creating designs through first applying wax to cloth then dying, then removing the wax leaving the design where the wax was. It is recognised to have been first practiced…
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Vietnam the third: Day 6, Sapa
It’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 and lychees, along with what is best described as coffee flavoured mud — they keep their pot going strong, but sadly I didn’t find any condensed milk to give it what it really needed. It’s probably the first sign that I’m starting to go bamboo, actually looking to put sugar…
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Vietnam the third: Day 5, Hanoi to Sapa
“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 long hours of work, is a privilege. So many people in the world will never know this, instead are focussed on their next meal, or maybe even next week’s meals. So for all the mumbles and whinges and minor inconveniences — and they are all exactly that, minor, I mean…
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Vietnam the third: Day 4, Hanoi, Ninh Binh
Summer 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 to stash a few drinks in my bag, and making sure I imbibed frequently, as the weather forecast was for slightly warm. 36 degrees and humid kinda warm. Not at all comfortable for any known living creature I’d care to associate with kinda warm (even the roadside cows were unhappily…
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Vietnam the third: Day 3, Hanoi
Summer in Hanoi. We’ve had a few conversations with locals, like hotel staff, tour guides, and they’ve all had one thing to say, “It’s a shame you’re hear in Summer when it’s so hot, the best time really is October”. And in fairness that is probably true, but our day jobs don’t always provide the luxury of travelling at the best times, so here we are in the heat and humidity. Today was a walking tour of Hanoi, with the aim of ticking off a few of those boxes for things we haven’t seen in previous visits, as well as something we love to do. So it was Ho Chi…
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Vietnam the third: Day 2, Hanoi
Coffee. Vietnam grows and exports a lot of this, though it’s over 90% robusta, the unfashionable cousin to arabica. It’s also starting to drink more of it and develop a bit of a coffee culture, with all manner of chains and little cafes springing up around Hanoi. I don’t recall seeing so many on previous trips, my impression from the first trip in 2014 was that tea was still the king. Coffee, where available, involved a tall glass of ice and a mix of evaporated and condensed milk. Now coffee comes in many varieties. Want a glass full of coconut icecream and coffee? They have that. Want your coffee topped…
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Vietnam the third: Day 1, Transit Day
Who doesn’t like a 3am start? Me for one, but when the mobile starts beeping and calling out that wonderful catch phrase, “Smile, you’re travelling!” then it’s just a case of sucking up the entitlement and hauling my white arse out of bed. An added bonus was pissing the cat off by having the audacity to get up before she’d had a chance to get in my face about her breakfast. So it was last minute run around, make sure animals were sorted, recheck the notes for the house sitter, and drive to the airport. Being generally prepared and seasoned travellers, we aimed for 2 hours pre-flight and weren’t too…
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Vietnam the third, Day -1
And we’re back, just about ready for the next trip. This time it’s back to Vietnam, and a few days on the way back in that Disneyland with the death penalty, Singapore. Our first trip in a post-COVID world. The packing is almost done, just the few basic bits like electronics and toiletries to pack. Nothing fancy is needed on this trip, as it involved Hoi An so there will be many more clothes joining us there. It’s an early morning flight, so I doubt I’ll sleep much tonight, but L has done her magic on the bookings so it’s business class all the way to Hanoi. It goes without…
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Day 22: Hoi An we’re flying
Sitting in the business class lounge at Changi’s terminal 3, we’re half way home. One more flight, one more lot of customs, one more car ride and that’s it. Our own house, out own beds, doing our own washing and cleaning. Three weeks doesn’t seem like a long time in the whole scheme of things, and there are times when it certainly feels longer than others. It’s been a great trip, but we’re also glad to be heading home. Today started way too early, we had a car to the airport booked for 8am, so of course we slept badly. From around 6am there was music coming in from somewhere,…
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Day 21: Hoi An today, gone tomorrow
Our last day in Hoi An, and L’s birthday (age unspecified). We kicked off with our standard hotel breakfast, though I had to stop and post a picture as it seems, following yesterday’s pic, a significant amount of dragon fruit envy out there. I hadn’t realised as, other than looking absolutely alien on the outside, the inside edible part is somewhere between kiwifruit and watermelon, not a strong taste, and lots of little black seeds. We’ve been having it almost every day on our trip. We took a boat ride along the river, paddled by a woman who was certainly no spring chicken, but I’m not game to arm wrestle.…
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Day 20: Hoi An by a thread
Today we got our clothes. My masterpiece of a jacket fits great, and looks pretty special. It’s probably safe to say it’s a one-of-a-kind, as I doubt anyone else has been “inspired” enough to get a jacket in that material. Now I just need it to get cool enough to wear it. I also got a tie in the same fabric to match, and some awesome shirts, and a decent pair of pants. L also got the bulk of her clothes today, with just a couple of dresses coming tomorrow. This included the huge skirt, which the store owners have gone from incredibly dubious about to incredibly proud of (like…
