Vietnamese Engine Tuning!

Saturday 20th November

There is a strange phenomenon within Vietnam that I don't recollect ever encountering in other countries. For some reason the powers that be thought that it would be advantageous for the country to equip large vehicles with melodies when they reverse instead of merely just beeping.

The thing is that the last thought that crosses most people minds when they hear "Happy Birthday" is to dive out of the way of a reversing HGV as it careers down the path towards them.

Also rather
 We have now made it to Ho Chi Minch City (formerly Saigon) on another memorable bus journey, this time however our luxury air conditioned sleeper bus with toilet, turned out to be a ford transit mini van.

Tyler and I had the misfortune of claiming the front seats for the 7 hour journey, an experience that could only be equalled if you were willing to swap places with a crash test dummy for the day.

In the UK if you were to have a near miss on the roads you would be having heart palpitations for the rest of the day.

On this single journey we must have had at least 20 and the driver didnt even raise an eyebrow yet alone react in any other physical manner, it just seems to be a daily occurence.

By the end of the journey there were very large imprints of my hands visible on the dashboard and I am pretty sure a large dent in the floor where I was trying to break every other second.

In between trying not to watch our kamikazee driver trying to accomplish his mission I thought I would make a note of some of the things we spotted on the back of peoples mopeds, please bare in mind that these are just standard mopeds no different from what we would get back home:

One large dead pig
One cage with 15 dogs
20 birds in seperate bird cages
3 goats
4 cages full of chickens
Stack of 20 ft Bamboo poles strapped to the back of the seat with an ingenious wheel at the other end
10 ft x 6 ft billboard advertising "OMO" Washing powder
10 ft wooden ladder held vertically

This helped to take our mind off of impending carnage for a while and unbelievably somehow we made it relatively unscathed once again.

Da Lat had been an interesting town, the weather wasnt great but whilst we were there we organised a jeep tour of the countryside with one of the couples from our hotel who shall now forever be known as "those germans" because we always forget to ask peoples names.

The tour took in 6 of the sites that were near to the town including the elephant waterfall which was incredible, if only for the complete and utter lack of health and safety.

The waterfall itself was an amazing site to behold, however in order to get there you had to walk down a series of very muddy, very wet rocks that looked as though they could cut you alive just by touching them.

The path lulls you into a false sense of security for the first 20 meters because someone has very kindly added a metal railing, however after this disappears you are on your own and its a very long way down.

My advice though for what its worth is dont give up, the views are spectacular and you can actually climb through a cave and get right underneath it which is awsome and very very wet indeed.

We also got to savor the local rice wine which apparently you are only meant to sip it but I had downed mine before anyone mentioned that bit, which was about the same time they informed me that it was 65% proof and my mouth went numb.

I was suddenly overwheled with a desire to go and drive a sleeper bus a high speed but managed to resist the urge for now!
One cant help wondering if the funeral Herses play "Another one bites the dust" by Queen but this is perhaps taking it a little too far and probably explains why I wasnt involved in the decision making process.
bizarrely the garbage collection vehicles all play "Its a small world after all" from Walt Disney, perhaps there is a deeper meaning to this song that I am unaware of but either way I would have loved to have been in the board meeting where that one was decided.