Vietnam

Can anyone tell me how the WAR ON POKIES is going? Have the one-armed bandits been ceremoniously wheeled from the Casino and deposited in the Yarra? I can't believe this happened and I wasn't there to see it...

We spotted this news-stand in Ho Chi Minh City, retailing the world's leading newspapers: the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, the Wall Street Journal...and the Herald Sun. Apparently the ex-pats can't get enough of it. Given the quality of the Vietnam Economic Times, the English-language daily digest vetted by the commo's, that's perfectly understandable.

Vietnam was an assault on the senses, particularly the senses used when traveling on roads. With the deepest respect to cut snakes, Vietnamese drivers are as mad as cut snakes. We saw the aftermath of about 4 or 5 accidents where dudes and dudettes on motorbikes appeared to sustain some nasty injuries (I couldn't tell if it was blood or oil on the road).

The highlight though was seeing a real accident happen just in front of us, when a cyclist cut off a motorbike and they whacked, legs, arms, plastic containers and hats flying everywhere. We were in a taxi behind the carnage, and just as both Bron and I were about to ask the driver to stop so we could apply everything we learnt from Doogie Howser M.D. and E.R. to the situation, he steered around the broken bikes and bodies and laughed, before flooring it all the way to the airport.

Trains are way better. Look at this:

That was on the journey from Hoi An to Hanoi, out the carriage window, just before the city of Hue. This serene part of the journey went for about 2 hours, then our Vietnamese cabin neighbours put on an extraordinary double-act. The first part was the lady eating about 40kg of the most vile-smelling beef jerky, and making some techno-like racket with her aggressive mastication. Following the interval (a dinner of rice and two beers), her husband punched out about 8 hours of snoring so loud it seemed he was intent on spitting out his oesophagus in the morning.

Later on, we took a two-day trip out to Halong Bay, east of Hanoi, despite some concerns about the weather this time of year. It's a pretty place with lots of limestone peaks jutting out of the water, but en route you pass the industrial revolution, Vietnam-style: a massive power plant supplied by trucks hauling coal from 50km away, leaving towns along the way blackened beyond belief.

Our concerns about the weather were well-founded; it was pretty cold, as modelled by B. Jennings:

But as the trusty guidebook said, the mist and cloud in the colder months have their own appeal:

The relaxation of sight-seeing was punctured by a very stupid boat collision. Our rickety old junk boat had lost the ability to reverse and couldn't stop in time when another junk sailed across. The resulting t-bone was a bit of a jolt but fortunately nobody was injured. Our guide said "the engine lost control", which I think was a generous way of saying the captain reacted too slowly when the engine shat itself. But at least the bingle prepared us for the next day, when despite having patched up the engine and gearbox overnight, the crew managed to notch up another point on the wall of boating shame as we collected another junk.

This paragraph's a quick summation of Vietnam highlights, because I'm getting lazy and hungry: being approached by a boy in Ho Chi Minh City who offered to polish my Dunlop Volleys (canvas, for the uninitiated) and thinking of that wonderful expression about polish and turds; eating Cha Ca (fish cooked on a charcoal stove) in Hanoi; and watching Bron being cajoled into buying some artwork from a girl who adopted a pretty good British accent to say "C'mon, dahhhrrrling".