Transportation

from that i hope you all realise that i am in Hue, sort of central vietnam ish.

after i last wrote in hanoi, i didnt manage to buy the posters i wanted because someone stole in there before i went back and bought the two i wanted, so i had to settle for 2 copied rare oasis cds from down the road. i have alot to thank these boys for, as they recently stopped me going insane.

the bus down from hanoi was packed to the rafters, although with alot of locals and not many backpackers. it was pretty uncomfortable but i have had worse trips, the main problem was the weather. we drove through a thunder storm for the first 3 hours, the display of forks across the sky was impressive but the rain made the crazy driver even crazier and he appeared to speed up rather than slow down. this led to a couple of near misses with the on coming traffic and one of these left me with a sizeable lump on my head as i smacked into the window. after that any small chance i had of sleeping was removed and i preceeded to listen to every single oasis track, in release date order no less, for the majority of the trip.

this gave me alot of time sitting in the dark thinking. i have come to the conclusion that you should never miss an opportunity to take a leak, stretch your legs or get wet when travelling. i also came up with some business ideas - ymca dolls which dance and move, patent pending, and a service which scans in and copies your family photo albums to disk, so that they can be stored in alot of places, in case the house burns down. the last one got me quite excited at 3 in the morning and i think that is how i willmake my first million.

when i got into hue, after the 14 hour trip the usual carnage greeted me. as you attempt to get off the bus people grab you and your bags and try and take you to there guesthouses. dont what you need after 30 hours without sleep. did manage to find a decent cheap one and me and lucy have both got a double bed and air-con, plus fan at a good price and the first air-con i have had for a week or two. both are bags had somehow managed to get wet in storage and smelt lovely, another batch of washing was dispatched.

i didnt really want to waste the day so i went for my now traditional wander around a new town, without a map, in order to explore. ended up going to the citidel and the forbidden city which were nice but alot of it was destroyed in the war. for you war buffs out there - the movie 'full metal jacket' was filmed here. after that went and got some bait (blame the geordies in leeds (you know who you are) for that, after a while it rubs off on you) in an empty bar and got them to put the recently acquired cds on, while we played pool. we had a couple of drinks and chilled out, glad to be out of hanoi. got talking to the owners and there little 20 month old son showed up. now i am not a baby person, but this little guy was cute, no question and funny, so we stayed there pretty much all afternoon baby sitting.

on the way back to the hotel i spotted a tour operator and for some reason i booked myself on a 13 hour tour of the area for the next day leaving at 06.00 - whats the O stand for for? O my god its early. after which we spotted the bar which is suggested to go in the lonely planet (why is it called the lonely planet?) and headed inside. the DMZ bar is good and there was a healthy mix of locals and travellers. the walls are covered in the scribbles of travellers and the management encourage you to join in. i found a suitable spot and left my mark - nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, rob jude '05. we ended up staying in the bar playing pool and to be honest my memory is slighty faded, but i am assured that i did manage to win 7 games in a row - i was so good that people came in and watched me beat the locals and clapped my every shot. people who know me will know that, that doesnt happen very often, if at all.

i have no idea what time i went to bed but the alarm the next day at 5.50 didnt do me any favours. i went down and got the bus - which was late (shock). the trip was good, although it involved alot of sitting on a bus, depressingly going back north on the same road i had come down on the previous day. the tour took in all the major war sites of the area, apart from a cemmentary, which i really wanted to see but no one goes there.

after the halong bay tour and problems, it was apparent to me that the operators just put you all on the same tour, no matter how much you paid. so i booked the cheapest one possible at 7$, it turned out that other folks doing the sametour paid well over double that.

the first stop was at war site, where the americans had 6000 people based, before they were overun by the viet cong. there is still the airstrip behind the display hall - which was very graffic, people dead and dieing. a local man was walking around selling war junk - i couldnt help myself and purchased a original viet cong medal, which every solider got and an american dog tag, a R.E Powell of the USMC, who i assumed lost his life in the surrounding hills.

after this we went to see a bridge built with funding from cuba, the site of the trail, the dmz zone, the bridge which split north and south and then the vinh moc tunnels. as they were just used for hiding and not fighting they are quite big and i could just about walk through. 300 people lived down there during the war in an attempt to avoid the bombs, it must have been horrible and the 400 metre section which you allowed to view was enough for me.

got back at around 7 and met lucy who had done a different tour to me - of the perfume river - which she said wasnt very good. went for a drink and something to eat at the DMZ bar again and met a few interesting folks - an AC milan fan who i had a good laugh with about the football. i added another note to the wall in this honour -'JC IS MY HERO'. we stayed in there till closing and then wander back and i fell alseep fully clothed on the bed. today i am doing nothing much and i am glad ofthe fact. tomorrow i head south to hoi an, which is supposed to be really really nice so that should be good.

first things first - the irish lads turned up safe and sound - they hit a rock and had to wait to be found and brought down stream by another boat. we went out (dan, lucy and myself) with them to celebrate the night after the fact that we all made it and lucy's birthday.

i have started to do a little travelling with dan and lucy as we were basically doing the same thing in laos before everyone goes to do different things (dan is a helicopter pilot in the raf and has been based outside shrewsbury for the last year - random or what). its nice to travel with other people for a bit as it makes it alot easier - tickets etc and you dont have to do every little thing yourself.

since i last wrote i have moved south from luang prabang in two, eight hour journeys by laos public bus. the first being to phonosvan to see some 'massive jugs'. the journey was a bit of a nightmare as it was on a dangeours route through the centre of country. not sure if i was relieved or frighten by the sight of a 'guard' on the bus carrying a ak47 over his shoulder! this is due to hijack attempts and bombings by rebels in recent times, although not for a couple of years. i thought at one point that we would need it......... a load of local men got on the bus in camo gear and one sat next to me on the bus, we were pretty high up and driving through cloud so you couldnt see much, as we came round a corner there was a truck parked across the both sides of the road with men shouting and waving there arms. straight away all the men who had just got on stood up and moved towards the bus - i promptly had my heart in my mouth thinking that something bad was about to happen to us. anyway the guy had just broken down and the men standing up turned into a regular thing.

the route itself was very slow due to a unreasonable road surface and the fact that we were going into the mountains. the previous nights activities with the irish lads ( came back to are hostel and had a little party in a spare room ) came back to us all and made us feel ropey. by the time we got there it was again raining and pretty miserable and we went to the first hostel that offered us a room. it was pretty good and i had a bungalow to myself, very nice with a huge and i mean huge double bed in it. we arranged a trip the next day to see the attractions and they put a video on about the secret war in laos, to give us a little history. i didnt realise that the trail from the vietnam war came so far inside laos and the fact that the usa dropped more bombs on laos than they did in the first and second world wars combined, crazy. the problem being that millions of tonnes of bombs that didnt go off are in the fields and surrounding countryside - killing thousands of locals a year. although the locals use the disarmed bombs for all sorts of things - signposts, fencing, ash trays and hanging baskets to name a few.

the trip was good. we went to visit a field of bomb craters, a russian made vietcong tank and then the plain of jars. this is three different sites of massive stone jars, which no one knows how they got there or what they are for. it was pretty impressive and the largest one was 600 tonnes. went out for an indian meal before an early night as they was a curfew in place on the town at 10.00 crazy or what. started to pack my bag singing along to the ipod when the lad who lived in the hostel came in and offered me a beer free of charge, in return for me teaching him some english words. so i sat there for an hour or so getting drunk and teaching a kid english while he teached me laos.

this morning had to be up and at the bus station for 6.45 to catch the bus to vang vieng, i wasnt feeling to great after the nights antics. the bus was a bit better than the first although we had live animals in crates with us this time and a pyscho bus driver who loved to play his local music loud over the speaker system. all the locals were being sick out of the window and i thought when in rome...... so i did, twice and felt a whole let better for it. arrived at around 2ish and got a pretty good hostel at a bargain price of about 1 pound 50. this place is nice and chilled out and there seems plenty to do - mainly caving, tubing and hire motor bikes. all of which i reckon i will do in the next couple of days. unsure of my plans for the future - want to see southern laos but it will involve four 13 hour bus trips and i would only have 2 days there. so i might attempt to bring forward my vietnam visa a week and head across to hanoi and then visit southern laos when i am in cambodia in a couple of months.

hope everyone is fine and dandy wherever you may be

rob