Downstairs, on the first floor of the Thai Son hotel, there is a restaurant where the tables are set up on a split level around the railing, and you can look over the edge into the lobby, and out the front windows to the street, which is already incredibly busy.
We were the only people having breakfast there, although my omelette was very good and Alice’s pineapple pancake was quite good but not so good that she didn’t look longingly at the omelette and wish she had ordered that. We had taken our laptop down with us to see if the video we posted last night was still in working order, and check we had put the right pictures in the right galleries, and so forth, but the internet was running unfeasibly slowly, and it was at this time that we were glad we stayed up later than usual.
Just after 8am we eased our four people into the 10-seat bus, and journeyed off up the road. We journeyed through vast wide wet fields, like swamps, and we saw a man standing on the back of a buffalo, and a woman pedalling a large armoire with glass doors on a cyclo, and then we journeyed into the hills.
Road works made the occasional passing of a slower vehicle almost carelessly dangerous in places, but it was OK because the driver beeped the horn before going around blind corners. Down the hills we came into a town and pulled over at a beachside restaurant. Tuan and the driver had a coffee and we went straight out to wander around on the beach, which was not lacking in ladies trying to sell you every type of thing they had in their basket, but they were going to be unlucky because one of them asked Alice if she was pregnant.
‘I’m not buying anything from that lady. No way,’ she said.
We were soon joined on the beach by the other larger Intrepid group, which despite leaving ahead of us arrived after, although I don’t recall passing them anywhere; I suppose that’s their business, really. The beach was nice, and fairly clean, and flat, but we had a bus trip to attend to and could not stay all day wandering occasionally back to the restaurant for a drink.
Out of the town we came upon hills again, and we drove up the Hai Van pass, which would seem, according to how narrow and windy the tarmac was and how spectacular the drops were, to be the Vietnamese version of the Great Ocean Road. It was awesome.
At the top we stopped to look at the Old French bunkers and suchlike, for only 7 minutes (according to Tuan), and to see the view on both sides; south was Danang and around the bend Hoi An, north the beaches and hills.
The ride down the hills was far quicker than the ride up, and in Danang we stopped at the train station to get tickets for later on, and petrol while the driver left the van running and probably talked on his mobile phone and smoked a cigarette just to make sure. Danang is actually now the third biggest city in Viet Nam, and very modern as well, but we’ll have to get to that in another future trip; all we did this time was stop on China Beach (for 9 minutes this time) to have a look around and take some pictures, and then we got back in the Air Conditioning.
Not that much further down the road, at about 1.30pm, we got out of the van in front of our hotel in Hue. The heat had graduated from sweating level to grunting level, the whole town had no power because of floods a few days ago, and they thought it would be back on this afternoon but couldn’t say, and we couldn’t set up the video call we had planned for Simon and Bronwen’s wedding, so there was nothing left but to go across the road to a cafe for lunch.
They had fish and chips on the menu and that was a strong selling point. It reminded me very much of sitting on the beach at Noordwijk in Holland, where we asked the waiter what the kibble was, as it came with chips, and he said ‘Kibble is fish.’
‘Oh, so it’s fish and chips, then?’
‘Well, yes.’
And that was the last time we had fish and chips. I didn’t think fish and chip deprivation would be possible, or that it would be fish and chips which we would be most pleased to discover unexpectedly. I mean, we had a list of things in our heads that we would like to eat when we got home, having not been able to find them very often for four months; turns out fish and chips has now been added to that list.
OK. Enough about the damn fish and chips already. In the lobby we came across Tuan who, just like us, wanted to know if the orientation walk could be made to happen at 4.30pm instead of 3.30pm. Yes, yes it could. No problem.
About 3pm the power came back on, sometimes between when we gave up on the video call and got in the pool, but before the clouds came over, cooled everything down, and made the pool less of a paradise than it had seemed, and more like a mirage, not full of plump dates and 40 virgins at all, but instead full of twittering anglo tourists. Meanwile Tuan sat on his own at a table in the hotel restaurant, next to the pool, eating some kind of noodles and checking figures.
The orientation walk took us along the main road into the old town, to the ticket booth to buy the pass which helps maintain the Aged Buildings and also gets you into one each of four types of attractions, and then down the hill to the main street of the Old Town. Past the market and a plethora of shops, restaurants, tailors, trinket stalls, restaurants and tailors we came across the Old Japanese Bridge. It used to be that one side of the river was occupied mainly by Japanese traders, and the other side by Chinese traders, and in the 1600’s the Japanese traders thought it would be appropriate if they paid to build a bridge between the two sides. It’s no bigger or more ornate than the bridge we saw on our motorbike tour yesterday, but it’s older and as a symbol it’s quite a beautiful thing.
And there’s always kids fishing near there.
Turn left and you get down to edge of the river, which is more like a canal now, with concrete banks and so forth, except that it’s about 25m across, and wider than some of the other canals we’ve seen on this trip. There was a minor debacle when I stopped to change camera batteries and lost track of the group completely, and had no idea where they were going next, causing Alice to double back and come find me looking up this street and down the next one.
‘Georgie wanna picture’; so goes the all-purpose excuse.
Along the waterfront are many more restaurants and space to display cultural shows like drum music and dancing and what-have-you, as well as the restaurant of the people who would be running our cooking school tomorrow, which Tuan kindly pointed out. Only the restaurant was shut, and the front doors were locked.
We had dinner at Mermaid cafe, headed back to the hotel, and stopped at an ATM which refused to work, and then went on a major-league wild goose chase looking through town for an an ATM, eventually cajoling the machine near the ticket station to work by asking for slightly less money than we wanted; then we found an ATM further along the road back to our hotel. Which is always how these things are. The ATMs must be in town, right? Wrong.
The other thing we couldn’t find was a reasonably priced bottle (or even glass) of champagne to celebrate the wedding; but out the back of the hotel, next to the pool, there was another little beach hut type enclosure, which was home to the pool table and bar. Here we found half of the other Intrepid group, who were staying in the same hotel, and we had a couple of beers with them before they left to walk down to the beach.
The rest of the evening was uneventful; we might have written some travel journals that night, but we probably didn’t. I’m writing this in Phnom Penh and can’t remember.
Greg
