Hanoi and Hue

We've had an excellent last few days in Hanoi, the place is really beautiful, very quaint, and also the cheapest tailors in the world. The girls have all bought an obscene amount of clothing which they now have to lug around asia for the next couple of weeks. Hanoi is a small riverside town that is a world heritage site and it also sells beer (home brewed that day) for 12p.

We went out yesterday on bicycles and cycled to the becah, 5km on a bike was pretty much the closest thing that has approached exercise for quite some time. After having an hour long battle with the women from the shoe shop who have made me a new pair of custom made Nike 'Fucking Bay's' and saving myself a whopping 5 bucks (if I could take back that process I'd pay 50 bucks for thge privilidge, words cannot do the frustration justice) we went for a beer and bumped into a couple of lads that I travelled Thailand with and arranged to meet them later.

I have discovered recently that I'm quite good/lucky at cards, until we put a drink on it. I lost 3 out of the first 4 games of chase the ace and had to drink a yummy local vodka every time Then we went on to another bar where things started getting interesting. At some point I tried to do a flip off my back onto my feet on top of the pool table, which was a pretty good idea considering I have fucked up ankle ligaments. The last point of the night had louise doing the splits and then everyone else dancing on top of the pool table. So I had to get up at 7am to cath the bus to Hue. The girls have decided to fly from Hue to Hanoi but richie richardson decided on the 24hr bus journey, with a 6hr stop in hue.

I had exceptionally low expectations for Hue, and when I was greeted off the bus by 20 men on mopeds I didn't think that I was going to be disappointed. I got hassled all of the way to the travel agents, one guy called Vinh was particularly persistent in his pursual of my business. When I got to the travel agents I discovered that my bottle of shampoo had leaked out of my bag and all over my stuff, which put me in a pretty good mood after a lovely 5hr journey, and Vinh was not helping the situation. (I spent the 5hr journey speaking to some fucking beanface called alex, who wouldn't shut up and had a face shaped like an actual bean, which was distracting on a hangover)

Vinh rolls some strange joints

So I had about 5hrs to kill and Vinh was still sat there making me awkward so I asked how much he'd charge to take me to the sights and I got him down to 5 bucks. So off we went on his motorbike, went to a temple and a tank museum, and by that point I had to stop Vinh and ask him if there was anything fun to do. His face lit up and within 10 minutes we were on our way to his uncles to buy a bag of weed. He drove us out to a beach about 15km out of town (pretty slow motorbike driver too) and we sat at a local bar drinking beers and smoking joints all afternoon with a bunch of local motorbike riders. The beach was beautiful and completely deserted. One thing still confusing me is that Vinh is 29 years old but was born in 1983. He was equally perplexed that I'm 29 and was born in 1981, but I hope not to give it too much thought.

Yeah, you can smile Vinh

The nice woman at the bar asked if I wanted some food, and Vinh said happy hour, don't worry. I thought for the first timein Vietnam that I was getting treated like a local and someone wasn't trying to rip me off. So the woman bought out an absurd amount of shrimp (I don't think there was even electricity there, let alone a fridge), boiled rice and some veg. Me and Vinh had had 4 lrge bootles of beer each and I had begun to think about how safe the drive back was going to be so I asked to go back into town and get the bill. Bearing in mind last night we got 3 jugs of beer, 4 shots of vodka, two meals each and desert for 100,000 dong, I was thinking that even if I pay for Vinhs beers it still won't cost me much. The nice lady approached me with what looked like an apologetic smirk on her face she landed me with a bill of 305,000 dong. For fuck sake. So then we had to go back into town after drive had consumed 4 large beers (paid for by me), a couple of joints (paid for by me) and some shrimp (paid for by me). I am currently sat at the computer hoping that some blood will drain back into my knuckles soon. I was holding onto the back of the motorbike and leaning so far towards Vinh that when he had to break hard to avoid a cow in the road I headbutted him with my helmet. I was so rigid that it took me about 5 minutes of stretching to get myself out of the motorbike position. It has been a really fun and interesting day, I managed to get my daily ripping off and it was topped of when one of vinh"s old timer boys got out the guitar.

So now I have a lovely 14hr bus ride and I'm fairly sure that I have the onset of shrimp aids, dengue fever or perhaps TB (I have had some sort of whooping cough for the past week). I get into Hanoi at 7am and the girls arrive later on that evening as they are flying in and can leave a day later, mother fuckers.