Strike a Pose in HoiAn

We headed still further south to the touristy tailoring town of HoiAn. We both made quick steps towards the tailors, of which there are an overwhelming number, and had a fun time getting measured up for a few frocks (me) and a three piece (Tom, obvs). We picked out the fabrics and styles we liked and the tailors created them with speed and ease. We returned for a few alterations over the course of the four or so days that we were there which all seemed rather glamorous.

At the tailors for a second fitting: Tom striking a pose in two of his three pieces

We took a day trip to My Son which is apparently the Vietnamese version of Angkor. Hmm, optimistic! The countryside ride there though was of course beautiful and super chilled with rice paddies dotting the landscape.

Ruined Hindu temples at My Son...not so Angkor

Views over to the Old Town

The town itself was easily navigable on foot and by bicycle and it was a lovely relief to find that no motorised vehicles were allowed within the Old Town which took the edge off strolling along the quaint roads. On our last day we cycled over the bridge to view the pretty Old Town whilst dining alongside the river. And at Chips and Fish Tom had possibly the best fish and chips of his life. I am a big Brits fish n chips n mushy peas fan but these "chips and fish" were perfection! The batter was mixed up with herbs to coat the super fresh fish chunks and the condiment was a super divine lime juice, salt and pepper combo (super simple and super delish). This fresh dip may very well overtake my mayonnaise condiment obsession! (Although out here mayo is a rarity which my arteries are probs most grateful for!)

Chips and Fish and Fresh Lime Dip

The Humid City of Hue

Oh my life! So incredibly humid in Hue! Sweatnation! We did the touristy thing around the Imperial City of Hue for a morn and hotfooted it out of there asap. Before hastily departing we (deservedly) treated ourselves after our sleeper bus from HaNoi trundled into Hue six hours later than scheduled. We grabbed a dip in our guest house pool, Tom wolfed down an interesting eight course Vietnamese menu (of which I could have barely any due to my new veggie status) and we sampled a sweet streetstall delicacy of Chè: a sweet gloppy dessert in a glass with some sugary rice, purple jelly cubes, banana, a few kidney beans and tapioca thrown in. It was an odd combo of flavours and as I hate to see food go to waste I dutifully finished it off. Interesting but I won't try it again!

Big urns in the Imperial City

An oldy building in the Imperial City

Pots of bananas and beans and jelly and other syrupy bits and bobs that make up a che glass.

Crazy Cat Ba Jive

APRIL - MAY 2011
We arrived at Cat Ba Island on Liberation / Reunification Day, the weekend that ALL Vietnamese in HaNoi set off for the coast on their hols. It was absolute mayhem when we arrived. Hundreds of Vietnamese strolling the Cat Ba promenade with barely another tourist insight. I had made a bit of an error in assuming it would be easy enough to find accommodation during the hols. It was not. We, accompanied by two Dutch boys, scoured the few streets of Cat Ba in search of a free room. Hotels were either full or owners were shouting for crazy amounts of dollars for one night! Eeps! Eventually Tom and I found a room in a moto taxi driver's sister's house for a crazy price but after two hours of searching we gave up. I usually just rock up to a town, even during national holidays, and find a budget room, this time was a HUGE exception. I have never seen anything like it! So if you're in Vietnam around 30th April book a room otherwise you will be faced with stress and near homelessness!

Bowls of different seafoods to purchase live and eat later. A few endangered species available, alongside geckos getting their throat slit at the time of purchase. Yuk! Scorpions and various snakes also for sale.

Floating market, seafood wares, and a conical hat.

A beautiful view over Halong Bay.

We took a glorious boat tour from Cat Ba Island via The Amazing Cave to Halong Bay and a few secluded beaches. Halong Bay is made up of stunning, huge, and beautiful limestone karsts that litter the sea around. We kayaked alongside some floating fishing villages and through tiny openings amongst the karsts to near seclusion. I used my intuitive navigation skills for an hour to guide us through the maze of the bay, leading us between the huge karst islands to remote spots and right alongside the fishing villages and over their fishing cages at the bottom of the sea. It was so wonderfully beautifully scenic.

Paddling to the Perfume Pagodas

Tom joined me for a few weeks of my travels starting in the north of 'Nam. We took a daytrip to escape the hectic traffic and general hustle and bustle of Ha Noi and headed out to the calming countryside towards the Perfume Pagodas. To reach the foot of the perfumed mountain we took a small boat paddled by a tiny Vietnamese woman who didn't even break a sweat and casually chatted to other oarsladies nearby. I was very impressed with her skills. The boat ride was extremely scenic as we passed along the base of many a limestone mountain and rice paddies, naturally.

Boat view across the mountains with the threat of rain overhead. You can make out an oarslady and her conical hat paddling on ahead of our boat.

Tom and I on the cable car ride up to the top of the mountain. It was quite bizarre and a bit like we were off on a skiing holiday.

Inside the Perfume Pagoda cave.

The perfume pagoda is nestled in a cave at the top of a mountain and inside are many Buddhist shrines with burning incense filling the air and nose. In peak season, when there's a festival on, the place is smoked out with burning incense and hundreds of worshippers which would have been a sight to see! Unfortch there was no such fest that day but it was still great to marvel at the scale and location of it all. The slippery walk down was slightly traumatic as we realised that we were running late and as our tour guide had threatened to leave behind any stragglers we were worried we'd be stranded there. Tom stormed that last stretch to see our tour group leader rallying the others on the trip to get up and go! We made it back just in the nick of time! Phew!

Cool Sapa

It took me three days to get from Luang Nam Tha in Laos across the border to Sapa in Vietnam via four buses and one small boat through the rain and past a mudslide. It was on this journey that I decided to become veggie, the defining moment was seeing a super squealing pig having its legs tied up, plonked on some scales, tape over its mouth to stop it from squealing, then dumped in the back of a minivan and off to market it goes via a very bumpy and wet border crossing. No more traumatised bacon for me!

One of the many glorious views of the terraces in and around Sapa

Anywho, Sapa was gloriously cold! I wrapped up in a duvet at night and even had the opportunity to get out my very rarely worn hoodie, socks and Converse. The valleys around Sapa are incredibly huge and stunning, and the women of the hill tribes wear simply the best and most colourful outfits around. I walked down to Cat Cat village and then stormed up the steep slopes back to Sapa town on one day and jumped on the back of a small motorbike and got chauffeured around other villages the next.

Two of the hill tribe women who invited me have a poke around their house. Great headwear! And I loved all of the hand embroidery on their outfits.

An Indigo woman sewing away. All the folk of Cat Cat village dye their clothes indigo.

Laos Breast Milk In Eye!

Taking a small break from our kayaking

Me and Dutch veggie vet Esther journeyed to Luang Nam Tha for a spot of trekking. We did a days worth of exhausting research to find the most ethically conscious and eco-friendly trekking operator in town. On day one we kayaked downstream. The captain of my kayak was one of the guides which made my kayaking easy as we easily navigated the shallows and tight rapids, and even though I thought I was working quite hard my arms didn't feel the pinch the next day. In the time it took me to find a spot to pee my guide, Ped, has set up a barbecue for our fish! Impressive foodie skills. We laid our food out on two huge banana leaves and feasted on lots of sticky rice (which we ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. No complaining from me mind as I love the glutinous stuff!) and other bits and bobs including tofu, barbecued pork, barbecued fish dipped in a simple chili and salt dry dip... Yum yum!

Ped preparing the fish and our kayak

Eventually we reached the village where we stayed the night in a basic, single-roomed wooden hut on stilts with an outside toilet and the river as our bathtub! After another delicious meal a thunder storm whipped up and threw dust in my eye. This pesky dust would not budge and continued to plague me well into the second day of trekking. My right eye and nostril were just streaming. A woman from the village who made our lunch thought I was crying because I missed my boyf and carried my water for me in sympathy. She was pretty old, I felt so bad, but she was very insistent, plus a lot more sure-footed than me on the slippery rocks and leaves!

The village on the second night. We slept in similar accommodation.

At one point the pain got so bad and the vision so blurry that we all had to stop and try and resolve my eye situ. Esther and a Frenchie trekker fashioned a contraption with a water bottle and pierced lid and shot water into my eye to dislodge the dust. No luck. And so I trundled on with water tears streaming down my right eye as my tear ducts tried to dislodge this foreign body. I looked and felt a mess and was having a miserable time and for most of the second day that I barely saw the jungle. Although I did spy a few tiny leeches trying to burrow their way through my socks with sandals (definitely a look to be kept to the jungle, for sure!!). I picked a few off but a few wriggled through to suck my foot blood. But surprisingly I was the least squeamish of the trekkers despite having the most inappropriate footware for a leech invasion!

We reached the Lan Tan village late afternoon and they presented their handicraft wares before us. I really couldn't see at this point and kept my head down and my eyes covered. One of the older women in the village noted my state and asked our guide what was wrong. She then offered to sort my eye out. She grabbed my eyelid and turned it inside out and saw the glob of dust then grabbed at her stringy, fabric necklace and dabbed at my eyelid with one of these threads. It worked!! The dust was all gone!!



Action shot! Cleansing breast milk being dripped into my eye!!

 For extra measure she asked, via our guide, if she could drip some breast milk into my eye to soothe the pain...I was hesitant. But in these few seconds of thinking that it would be the most gross and weird thing to have breast milk dribbled into my eye versus the desperation of being in so much scratchy pain for such a long time, she had already grabbed a villager and pumped out a few drops of her breast milk and collected it in a handy scrap of banana leaf. She then tipped my head back and dripped the milk into my eye!! It was warm! It was hilarious!! A trickle made a road towards my mouth but that would have been too much and I swiftly wiped  the milk away. I was saved!! It honestly felt like I had got my life back after being in so much pain for so many hours and fearing blindness (it was in my one good eye after all...I know, I was internally being somewhat of a hypochondriac!). I obviously repaid the woman who saved my life by buying a bracelet off her which will forever remind me of this bizarre, lifesaving event!!

Souk Dee Pii Mai!

Esther and I on the beach covered in water and flour!

Happy Laos New Year!! Possibly my best and most favourite new year of my life. Laos celebrates its new year with lots of water, colours, and flour, oh and some religious and family elements too. The families of and around Luang Prabang team up and gather outside their homes to throw water at any passersby. They are very well prepared with water guns, hoses, big buckets, and even evil ice buckets to make the water super chilled. Each little suburb or family group get matching tshirts printed up to mark out their gang and create a bit of extra competition. The water symbolises cleansing before entering into the new year, and then coloured paint and water gets thrown into the mix for fun. This lasts for days and days, and when you finally think they must have got bored of it, oh no!, you get soaked again!!

Making the sandy stupa on the beach

The owner and family of the hostel I was staying at invited us hostel guests to join in with the merriment and so we all headed over as one big team through the town and to the beach on the other side of the river for further new year festivities and traditions. We made it to the beach side completely soaked, covered in paint and flour (the flour and water made a grim paste in my hair but still a great lol), then we helped the family to build a sandy stupa decorated with flour, flowers, and flags. It was so lovely to be part of such a special and personal moment of the Laos people. We then cracked open an obligatory Beer Laos and danced along to a local band in the sandy mud under a sprinkler. Good times for sure!

A Laos family enjoying a feast at the Kuang Si waterfalls on the eve of the main, watery, new year, beach event.

Kuang Si waterfalls. Just divine.