Sunday 14th November
I finally got to witness Paulines amazing negotiating skills first hand and it was certainly worth the wait, in fact I should encourage her to perhaps go on the road and teach the uninitiated her revolutionary style.
Bascially, so as not to jeapordise any future earnings that could be forthcoming from this venture, I will only provide here a very high level synopsis.
Firstly, you have to choose your establishment very carefully so as to ensure the best chance of success, this is no easy feat as practically everyone on the streets of Hoi An is trying to sell you something.
Then when you spot your target you enter the premesis looking supremely confident with your head held aloft as if to insinuate that you could easily buy up their entire chain along with all of their neighbours outlets as well.
From there and this is the real tricky bit so pay close attention, when they tell you the price that they want, you adopt a stupid grin, dive into your purse and pay them the full amount.
You can then be content as you leave the shop with your bag of badly tailored tat that you have probably just put their entire family through college and made the community a better place.
I will be adding an application form for the full course in a few days so make sure that you sign up early to secure your place, I may even through in some partly fraid, slightly smelly Vietnam cloth for the first 200 to take the plunge.
So, anyway now that I have got that off of my chest, what can I tell you about Hoi An, hmm, well its wet, very wet, and apart from a few shops that can now afford a decent education, there is little to tell it apart from many of the other places that we have visited.
Having said that the food there was exceptional, so much so that Pauline asked the chef of one restaurant to teach her how to cook one of the dishes we had just eaten and the next day off she trotted in the early hours of the morning to cook her first vietmenese dish.
It was a win win situation for Tyler and I as not only did we get a lay in and could doss about for a bit, but we also got a free lunch.
We also decided that we couldnt be arsed to make the 20 minute walk down to meet her so we hired a moped and ripped up the streets looking super cool, well maybe not but it beat walking.
She did a good job and the food was great and she was obvioulsly so jealous about how cool that Tyler and I looked that she hired her own moped and we rode out to My Son, a very silly name for a pretty vacant place with a load of ruins but give Tyler time :-)
It was a great day and for once the rain had laid up for a while so we actually remainined pretty dry on the 30 mile drive there (30 miles on a bloody moped, what were we thinking).
There is something about being on a moped that instantly makes you think you are cool, that is right up until the moment you fleetingly glance at yourself in the reflexion of a shop window and realise you look like a complete idiot, with a smaller idiot holding on for dear life on the back.
Still it was a fun day and we still had another day of torrential rain to look forward to before we could once again savor the delights of the overnight sleeper bus.
Just before we were going to board the bus, Pauline discovered that the hotel I had booked in Nha Trang was notorious for theft and generally a bad idea, so with a minute to spare and not a lot of thought we through caution to the wind and booked a nice hotel instead.
We had heard that the further south we went the worse the weather would get so we may as well be holled up somewhere nice for a few days.
I think I have covered most of the points of the over night bus that people should be aware of, the only thing left to say is that you should absolutely reserve your tickets and obtain allocated seats in advance.
This isnt in fact done so that you will receive those seats, ohh no that would never work in Vietnam, this is purely so that you can see the smile on the drivers face as he tells you to shut up and sit wherever is available.
I have a feeling that this is one of the very few pleasures that he receives during his day and we all have a responsibility to make him happy before he attempts to stay awake, while drinking coke and smoking, without crashing into anything or careering down a ditch.
This particular bus had 5 beds next to each other at the very back of the bus, seperated only by very hard metal girders which I think was a relief for the two dutch guys that we ended up sharing with.
The beds are precisely half the average humans width wide and dont lie completely flat so that you can see the oncoming traffic getting dangerously close to taking out the driver.
I think the key to taking one of these trips is to set your expectations unbelievably low and then expect them not to be met in any way.
After two very near crashes and having lost any will that we had left to live, we finally reached Nha Trang.
Ohh my god, it is gorgeous, the hotel is a second from the beach, the weather has been magnificant all day and they have a breakfast buffet.
Those two words alone now bring tears to my eyes and as we gorged ourselves on more food than is strictly healthy for human consumption we had a look of contentment on our faces that had been seldom seen over the past weeks.
We have just come in from jumping over waves for a few hours and it has honestly been a perfect day, still rain is forecast soon so I guess we will have to see what tomorrow brings!
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