I Love The Smell Of Napalm In The Morning!

Good Morning (from) Vietnam!

Here we are, in the land of Apocolypse Now, actually we're higher north than any American GI ever came. They were fighting here for 8 years and they never got close to Hanoi, I just had to take an hour flight from Bangkok and voila, here I am. If only the Americans knew about Air Asia!

Now Bangkok was cheap, I think I already established that. But compared to Vietnam it's as expensive as Tiger Tiger on a Saturday night!

I'm going to say this slowly......beer costs.......six (yes six, one after 5 and two before 8) pence. Now I'd read about that before coming, but it hadn't quite sunk in so I'll say it again to make sure you understand me fully. A glass of beer costs 6p. That's 100 glasses for 6 pounds. Or 666 glasses for the 40 pounds I usually spend on a night out! Or 1500 glasses for the 90 quid I spent on the last day of lectures!
Unfortunatly the closing time for bars around here is midniught, which means that although you get a lot of beer for your money, you don't have much time to drink it! Not that that's much of a problem here, they have a custom where if one person in a bar proposes a toast, everyone must down their drink. And once they see us white folks in the bar they want to show us how better drinkers they are and therefore insists on a toast every 20 bloody seconds!

We're staying in a hotel which is undoubtedly dodgy. It has the same name as a real, posh hotel in the city. They try and lure people there, pretending to be the real hotel. They even get taxi drivers to pick up the real hotel's customers at the airport and bring them to theirs! To be honest though I don't really care. It costs less than 3 quid a night, we get a clean bed (double bed though so have to share with my flatmate) a shower, cable TV with English channels and a free breakfast. Oh and a toilet.

Now, if you're eating a sandwich while you read this, take a little break and finish your food. Because, and I never thought I'd say this line, I think it's about time I talked to you about toilets.

Now I consider myself a little world wise. I've been to France with their holes in the floor and I've sat on a pile of bricks in Zambia. But the first time I used a Thai toilet, I was terrified! Now it looks like a normal toilet, it's only when you've finished what you came for that the panic sets in. There's no toilet roll. What's more, there's no toilet roll holder even. It suddenly becomes clear that Thailand is one of those countries where, when they first built their sewer system, they employed pretty stupid plumbers. The result is that bog roll would clog the pipes. Therefore there is only way to clean yourself up, I think the best way to describe it would be a bathroom-sized car jet wash. Believe me now, nothing will ever compare to the horror that you feel when you first work this out! (Oh and before anyone gets the wrong idea I'm not going round taking photos of toilets! You an find a picture of anything on the internet!)

Tomorrow we're off to Halong Bay. We're getting a bus over and then spending an afternoon, evening and night on a traditional junk boat. Next morning we're going sea kyaking round caves, sunbathing and doing some swimming in the crystal blue sea. Of course, since we've booked this through our dodgy hotel it could end up as going there in the back of a van, spending an afternoon, evening and night on a piece of junk and paddling over to the caves on a wooden raft. Whichever it is, it will be an experience!