Good night Vietnam

I really wanted to like Vietnam, and I did start off liking it.

We blitzed southwards down the east coast armed with open bus tickets as we didn’t have much time to get off the very beaten track before our visas ran out. In Hue we walked around the ruined Citadel, took a boat down the river and visited crumbling tombs and pagodas. In Hoi An we wandered the sweaty but picturesque streets, ate the delicious local dish, Cau Lau, and got tailor-made dresses, sandals, shirts and shorts. Beautiful China beach was only 15 minutes up the road so we lay under wizard-shaped umbrellas and swam in the sparkly sea. Nha Trang was more of the same with a drunken beach party thrown in.

It was all lovely but it was all starting to blur into one. Everywhere there are hordes of tourists, identical tall, thin hotels and little ladies in cone hats and face masks begging you to buy something, anything from them. Everywhere felt a bit tense.

Up in the highlands, Dalat stood out a bit – farmy and cool with an immense market that swamps the town centre. We joined forces with Dan, a New Yorker we’d met in Nha Trang and Brooke, a New Zealander whose wonderful swallow tattoos caught my eye, for a day with the Easy Riders. The Easy Riders are friendly, crinkly-eyed old locals with motorbikes who will whizz you around the surrounding highlands. Our day was clear blue and glorious. We drove around with the wind in our faces, taking in the lush scenery and stopping off at little workshops, flower-gardens and dramatic waterfalls. The best bit was a silk factory where we watched the whole process, from worm to cocoon to fluff to shiny patterned fabric.

After that brief respite we spent a couple of unremarkable days in Saigon before heading into the Mekong Delta. This wasn’t as nice as I imagined it would be. In Can Tho city we sat down for some fresh local fish by the river, got driven into the makeshift kitchen by the rain and sat for over an hour watching all kinds of fragrant dishes being cooked – none of them the ones we’d ordered – before leaving, hungry and cross.

We got up at dawn for a boat ride round the famous floating markets, which was all very nice until we veered off into the smaller canals, expecting tranquil backwaters and finding murky channels strewn with litter and floating dead pigs. We headed to the bus station that afternoon to discover the only bus with spare seats in the direction we wanted to go was a rickety rust-bag with a weasely little conductor determined to charge us double the price printed on the ticket. We arrived in Mytho, the border town, cramped and hungry at 9pm, only to discover the only places serving food were the kinds of stalls with barbecued rat out front.

By this time I was kicking to get out of Vietnam. We juddered across the border to Cambodia.