Savile Row

Mr Hung Internet, Hoi An

It was still raining the following morning when we woke early to catch the 2-hr train to Hoi An. Our four-person carriage was populated by ourselves and two Vietnamese girls of no more than sixteen, dressed-up-to-the-nines, who spent the entire journey draped all over each other in platonic slumber while a procession of fawning men came in to try their luck. This was entertaining in a variety of ways, and made up a little for the fact that the spectacular coastal scenery out of the window was barely visible through the drizzly gloom.

We arrived in Hoi An (the rain had, mercifully, not followed us south) - the tailoring capital of Vietnam - and walked around the streets which are lined with literally hundreds of near-identical tailors' shops. We picked the one that looked busiest, and was recommended by our hotel, and I ordered a suit and Tweedie a dress. Over the course of the next couple of days, happy with the initial results, this snowballed and we ordered more and more stuff, so that in the end we had 8kg of clothes to mail back to the UK (Mum, Dad, expect a parcel).

Two days ago was the 'international renowned' fireworks festival in neighbouring Da Nang (described by one local, not knowing the English word "fireworks" as "hot flowers in the sky"), accompanied by 'Earth Hour' in which all electricals had to be turned off for an hour between 19:30 and 20:30, and the river was lit up entirely by candles and hand-held lanters, which are placed in an open cardboard box and float down the stream in a sort of candlelit duck race. Considering we had no idea this was going on until it suddenly went dark, this slightly magical experience counts as a huge stroke of luck.

Yesterday we learnt how to make spring rolls, hot & sour soup, yellow curry and steamed fish in banana leaf (you don't eat the banana leaf - I checked) at Goi An cooking school on the river - a really fun lesson given by a charmingly insane Vietnamese who insisted on singing everything she was doing ("chop, chop, chop", "slice, slice, slice" etc). Even if I do say so, it was one of the best lunches we're had.

Due to our hotel buying us the wrong train tickets and a protracted argument which finally and unexpectedly resulted in a full refund, tonight we embark upon a 23-hour bus trip to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). We are told that this is a sleeper bus but this remains to be seen. Will update later.

Over.

Top Gear

DMZ Bar, Hué

The next morning we set off on a 3-day boat tour of Ha Long Bay (the place with the floating bar where the Top Gear Vietnam episode finished up). Although the weather was decidedly cool and a little misty, the bay was spectacular, full of randomly shaped bits of jutting mountain, and the water transparently turquoise. On the first day we stopped at a floating dock, rented a two-man kayak and paddled around the bay for an hour or so before returning for a beer sold by a passing canoe. I got wet, but Tweedie got wetter, mainly because I was in the back seat and it is easier to flick water forwards than backwards with an oar. We had dinner on the boat with the other 12 people on our trip (mainly Aussies and Brits, plus my first Luxembourgian), and some beers on the top deck before bed. On the rest of the trip we saw some big and capacious caves, a little island full of wild monkeys, and generally sat on deck floating through Ha Long Bay. Memorable.

We got back to Hanoi in the evening and caught an overnight train over the 400 or so miles south to Hué (pronouned as in "Who a-te all the pies?"), where the temperature was immediately restored to its previous South Asian swelter. Hué was the capital of Vietnam many centuries ago, and has some impressive old buildings within its historic citadel, as well as a picturesque river and some buzzing nightspots. It is also used as a base for tours to the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ), an area five kilometres either side of the old North/South border which was officially 'demilitarised' during the war but was in reality bombed to buggery, and some of the military bases and results of the destruction wreaked are chillingly preserved. We did a long, long bus tour yesterday - the DMZ itself is 3 hrs from Hué, and is 100 km east to west with no particular clustering of tourist spots - of which the undoubted highlight was scrambling through the Vinh Moc tunnels the North Vietnamese built to protect themselves from American bombling. They are 25m underground, at best sparsely lit and no more than 6 feet tall or 2 feet wide, not to mention muddy and stinking hot. Fascinating though.

We did all of this with a lovely and really fun Australian couple, Paul and Gillian, whom we met on the boat. As well being some relaxing and enjoyable company, this has meant our alcohol consumption has increased approximately elevenfold, and has given me a new audience for my ever-expanding repertoire of Dong jokes.

Today it is raining really rather hard, so we have holed up in a bar with free pool and internet, hoping it clears after lunchtime (locals think this is highly unlikely - "tomorrow also" they inform me, laughing). We have purchased tourist-friendly cagoules, or whatever the correct name is for a sheet of plastic with holes for arms and head, and will probably brave the elements if necessary, although that is easier to say from inside.

Tomorrow is the 35th anniversary of reunification, and various military processions to mark this and celebrate the glory of communist Vietnam are being rehearsed in the old part of the city, over the river from where I write. Their uniforms will be very wet.

Over.

Good Morning Vietnam

Hanoi Guesthouse, Hanoi

Spent a further afternoon and evening doing not much in and around the Khuo San Road, with the exception of an hour-long boat trip around the city's canal network which was an absolute treat.

The next morning, after a minor mishap involving a malfunctioning snooze button and a hurried taxi ride, we arrived at Bangkok International Airport a mere 45 minutes before departure, and at the gate just as boarding was beginning. Disaster averted.

After a bustling taxi ride to our hotel, Tweedie neglected to look before opening her door to get out, and an elderly Vietnamese motorcyclist went flying. He looked throughly shocked and clearly did not understand a word of her mortified and profuse apologies, but after a minute's sit down he was back in the saddle with only a grazed knuckle for his troubles. Tweedie was more scarred than this, and spent much of the rest of the day being as nice as possible to everyone in the hotel and surrounding area in an attempt to regain some half-decent karma.

If this represented an inauspicious start to our time in Vietnam, it didn't take long for the auspices to feel different. Hanoi is an instantly charming capital city full of leafy streets, interesting shops, atmospheric streetside bars and pavement restaurants, and friendly, trendy people. The impression of the last three days is that the Vietnamese are an effortlessly cool bunch, though not too self-involved not to help a lost-looking tourist or explain in broken English the origins of an ambiguous meat. In short, I love this place.

Yesterday we visited the understandably propagandist National Military Museum, but apart from this burst of activity we have spent the last 60 hours meandering through aforementioned streets, poking our noses into shops and galleries and stopping for coffee/beer/noodles as appropriate.

As if this wasn't enjoyable enough, each time we have had a bill to settle in the Vietnamese currency it has been immense fun to ask "How much of my Dong do I need to take out?" or variants on this hilarious theme. I don't see how this joke can ever get old. We have three weeks to find out.

Over.

Premier League

Peterpan Internet, Bangkok

It's been ages, so bear with me.

From Panjim we moved on to Arambol for five days on the beach. This was as uneventful as it sounds- suffice it to say that lounging around reading, playing Indian scrabble, watching films in big-screened bars and going for occasional strolls up the beach to the next resort for lunch was reasonably pleasant. After five nights in a bamboo shack, however, and with sand everywhere imaginable, we were definitely ready to move on.

This we did, via a 12-hour train journey, to Mumbai, where the glorious sight of what a westerner might call a 'proper' hotel room (clean sheets, toilet, television) greeted us. This was particularly pleasing for Tweedie, who by this stage had contracted some relatively minor but nonetheless unpleasant illness which kept us holed up for the first of our three days in India's most cosmopolitan city.

Thankfully she was well enough the next day to take a trip to the Brabourne Stadium (Cricket Club of India) to watch the Mumbai Indians play the Rajasthan Royals in the Indian Premier League. Having failed to source tickets in advance (my failure) we turned up at the box office a couple of hours before the game and were delighted to be issued with two tickets at a cost of approx 20 GBP each. After a bit of lunch we went into the ground more than half an hour early in order to properly absorb the rousing atmosphere, and after negotiating with an obnoxious security guard who tried to stop Tweedie taking her camera into the ground, we made our way into a spectacularly decked-out stadium, only to find that our designated seats did not exist. J1-14 existed, but J16 and J17 just were not there. Failing to spot the longer term consequences of a box office issuing more tickets than there were seats, the ushers instructed us to "sit somewhere else". We asked what we should do when the owners of those seats arrived, and were told that in that event we should also "sit somewhere else". After having moved around our block half a dozen times in the first five overs of the game we briefly left to demand a refund, only to realise the futility of such an exercise and ended up with seats almost as far away as possible from the action, and with a big screen obscuring one-third of the pitch. However, we were undisturbed from then on.

The backdrop to all of this was sweltering heat and humidity, unbearable noise (Tendulkar is the Mumbai captain- the chants of "Sa-chin, Sa-chin" were, I think, incessant), and an attitude of faint amusement from any stadium employee from whom we requested help. As an attempt to turn Tweedie onto cricket the event had not been a complete success - she called this opening sequence "definitely one of the worst hours of my life". The game, as it turned out, was a cracker - Mumbai made 212, and Rajasthan (whom I've always sort of supported) came close, mainly due to a quite insane 100 off 37 balls by Yusuf Pathan, but Dimi Dimi Dimi Mascharenas failed to hit a six off the last ball so the Mumbai crowd went home happy. By this stage in the day this last fact was a major irritation for Alex and I.

The shambles continued the following day. It being our last in India, we planned to get up early and do a load of shopping to mail back to England. We went to Crawford Market at 8.30am -nothing was open. We caught a taxi to a different market - things were being set up but it hadn't got going. After a fair bit of waiting around (details later) we managed to do some of the shopping we had in mind and eat a McDonalds. My bag was searched on the way in - when I asked why the moustachioed gun-toter pretended not to understand.

Later we went back to Crawford market with the intention of spending some money, only to be accosted at the entrance by a horrible little man who said we weren't allowed in until we had read the 'Dos and Don'ts' board in full. When I said I had done this he said he didn't believe I had read all of it so quickly. I decided against telling him I have a degree in reading and opted instead to leave without spending a rupee. This was sadly typical of the Mumbai I experienced - although the place is in parts prettily leafy and architecturally impressive (although of course impoverished elsewhere), the people were unfailingly unhelpful, unsentimentally unfriendly, overtly aggressive, deliberately hostile and unapologetically charmless. It is certainly my least favourite place in India, and perhaps the least welcoming place I have ever been.

Earlier in the day we had killed time by walking to the Gateway of India, the great arch by the bay that greeted arriving shipments. This was a lovely thing, and sitting on the steps in the surrounding courtyard with a view through the gateway was a fitting place to reflect on six weeks in India. Mumbai had been an anomalous place to finish, for in the main the lack of material attractions had been offset by the charm of locals who on occasion went out of their way to help us, although this was by no means the case everywhere or in every instance. The experience overall had been bewildering: fascinating and frustrating in almost equal measure. I'm not sure I will ever return to India, and despite the many wonderful memories I shall take with me I am not sure I will be in a hurry to do so. Once in a lifetime is probably enough.

A parting gift from Mumbai was the taxi we booked to take us to the airport failing to turn up. We made our way to the airport, however, and landed in Bangkok last night in time for some food and a walk round the Khuo San Road, which most people reading probably know since everyone has been to Thailand these days. Our taxi driver from the airpot was very impressed that I knew who Taksin Shinawatra was- I didn't tell him that any Englishman who reads the sports pages would be similarly knowledgeable.

We are here today, gone tomorrow - we fly to Hanoi at 7am to begin a loop of South East Asia that will bring us back here again in five-and-a-half weeks. This we like to call Stage 2.

Sorry to my mum for leaving it so long since my last entry, and to everyone else for the length of this one.

A belated happy birthday (apologies) to George and McMahon, and a pre-emptive one to Mama Tweeds.

Love to everyone.

Over.

First-class

ISO Internet, Panjim (Goa)

We spent a couple more days in Bundi of which a highlight was hiring bicycles for a jaunt into the surrounding countryside, giving me, as expected, a better impression of the city to take to our next stop - Kota. This was not a pleasant place as far as I could tell, seemingly a town with a chip on its shoulder over the fact that everyone uses it as a portal (the train station is a major intersection) to somewhere else. Anyway, we stayed one fairly uneventful night in a disgusting hotel and caught the train in the morning.

This was a significant train - 25 hours and 1024 miles - taking us from northern India (Rajasthan) into the south of the country (Goa). As a treat, and because we wondered what it would be like, we decided to take this journey in first-class. This was a wise investment (the price was comparable to a London-Winchester open return) as it afforded us air conditioning and comfortable bunk beds, as well as an excellent window view of the changing landscapes as we traversed the subcontinent.

Stepping off the train in Goa immediately confirmed that if one travels one thousand miles towards the equator one will probably get hotter. With this in mind we headed straight to a resort called Anjuna and hit the beach for a couple of days. Welcome changes abounded - beer more readily available, meat and fish that looked edible (the fish is particularly excellent) and locals more accustomed to the sight of white faces. Our hotel had a big beachfront screen that showed movies in the evening - we saw Pulp Fiction and Casino Royale during our stay. The Bond was a particular treat since I had read the book on the afore-mentioned train trip and I enjoyed both versions immensely.

Other notes from Anjuna - our hotel room was so hot and humid that when I hand-washed some clothes and hung them in the bathroom to dry they were wetter when I got back from the beach than they had been when I hung them up. This made for a particularly unpleasant couple of sleeps, so we cut short our stay in Anjuna after two nights and came to Panjim, basically a Mediterranean enclave carved into the Goan coast.

This has made for an enjoyanle change of pace. Last night we took a boat cruise up the River Mandovi for an hour, with something approximating a bar mitzvah going on around us. It seems the Indians who holiday in Goa like to be entertained with loud music, a dancefloor, and an enthusiastic but humourless MC whose main line is to encourage everyone to "get up on the dancefloor" (I did not comply) at every available opportunity.

Today we took a bus to Ponda (about an hour) and visited a spice plantation. This was enjoyable, but not quite on the farm scale I had imagined - it was basically a bit of woodland with some herbs growing sporadically. The free lunch was good though, and enhanced the view that Goa has worked out the idea of creating tourist-friendly experiences like this and the cruise much more quickly than anywhere we saw in north India.

We've been here a month now, and I'm about to begin my sixth book of the trip. If I'd thought of doing this when I was at university I might have done more than scraped a 2.1.

Dinner time.

Over.