It's been a while....Cambodia came and went in about a week- a few days at Sihanoukville, Phnom Penh, then Siem Reap to see the temples at Angkor Wat before getting the bus to Bangkok. I liked Cambodia as a country, rough and ready in an exciting and genuine way. Thailand is a tourist haven. I decided to take a trip into the jungle before going to the islands, and spent a couple of days playing in caves and lakes and trees, which may or may not have helped me to overcome my irrational fear of bats. I have to admit they do look quite cute when they're hanging upside down but I wouldn't have liked it so much if I hadn't been wearing a hat. The full moon party on Koh Pha Ngan was all it was hyped up to be, no disappointments there. And now I'm in Koh Tao, learning to Scuba dive. I never knew what scuba stood for before. I do now. I can't wait to go on a proper dive tomorrow, I've been learning the skills the last couple of days and now I get to try them out...

The last few days have consisted of a medley of boat trips, big blue boats, small blue boats, rowing boats, canoe things, ferries, a white boat with a blue roof....all in the name of a Mekong Delta tour and a border crossing to Cambodia. The delta tour took us to some islands and villages and included a homestay in which we were outnumbered by french people and were persuaded to drink lots of homemade rice wine, the second night we went to a karaoke bar and i cycled my cyclo driver back, but still had to pay for the ride which was a bit unfair but worth it for the enjoyment of wobbling all over the road....the border crossing I don't want to talk about.....we arrived late in Phnom Penh and left for Sihanoukville the next day where I am currently. Last night we got drunk on mekong whisky by the sea and then squeezed 3 of us on a moto to go home, which wasn't the intended plan but the moto driver seemed to think it was a good idea....

Saigon has the craziest traffic I've ever seen, and today I saw it from an interesting angle...from perched on hannahs knees on a cyclo. I can't begin to imagine the pain the guy must have been in pedalling us two fat british girls around...I visited the Cu Chi tunnels today which as Sally put it so aptly was 'interesting but boring', a well organised trip but the group was big and the tour guide spoke too fast. The tunnels are all reconstructed which is a bit disappointing too.When we eventually got under the ground I felt a fairly strong sense of claustrophobia, they were about 10 times the size of the original ones though. We then visited the war museum, which was impressively amazing, but not in an enjoyable way, some of it was pretty disturbing, but there is some truly astounding photojournalism.

I've spent the last few days in Nha Trang, which has good beaches and good bars and not too much else besides. No complaints here though, I thoroughly enjoyed a few days of lying on the beach, getting thrown into the sand by crazy waves and getting random drinking injuries. There are loads of islands just off the coast but as the only way to visit them is on a tour where you inevitably get ripped off and bored, I decided to prioritise and just visit the one that sounded best...that being Monkey Island, inhabited by wild monkeys. I got a rip-off taxi to the rip-off boat with Sally and Kelly, as they have moto fear and bikes were out of the question as it was up a big hill, then spent a few hours waiting for the boat, sat on the boat for quarter of an hour and reached the island. It was good to see monkeys, they're cheeky little buggers....but then we were subjected to a show with dancing bears and suchlike which none of us could endure for more than 2 minutes. The idiot french people who had been on our boat seemed to find it hilarious though. I had intended to visit a pagoda and some towers which were meant to be acceptable tourist attractions but instead found myself on the beach most of the time eating cheese baguettes as a hangover cure and wondering how I had managed to get a big gash in my leg. And laughing at Tom who had been wrestling with moto drivers and had no recollection of it. We had an interesting hotel moment when we came back to find our room flooded the day after we arrived. I think it wasn't the first time it had happened however, as the staff were remarkably good at mopping up the water with their feet. I decided to stop over in Dalat for one night on the way to Saigon. It's a bit strange, it has a kind of out-of-season british seaside resort feel about it, even though it's not near the sea, and is definitely not in Britain. I arrived quite late so have no time to go out to see the surrounding waterfalls which I'm guessing are the highlight of the area, as I can't see too much charm in the city itself. The bus journey was interesting though, I though for some time that the driver was actually taking us to the end of the world, and that the end of the world was at the top of a neverending hill. It wasn't the end of the world at the top though as it turned out, it was Dalat. The mountain scenery was pretty spectacular I have to say.

I cycled to the beach a few kms away from Hoi An this morning in a friendly and benevolent mood, which made for an amusing time, I soon found myself surrounded by Vietnamese women of all demographic groups chatting to me, stroking me, massaging me, and trying to sell me things. Anyone who can say 'simple but funky' and 'don't be lazy,be crazy' in perfect english gets my custom. I learnt a lot about Vietnamese women and their babies in the process and am apparently going to be some kind of imaginary godmother to various small children who I will never meet. My favourite lady was an old woman called Lula who kept saying Lula number 1! in a way which made me think of that song mambo no. 5. They're so sweet and genuinely friendly it's hard to say no, because you always leave smiling and so do they. I've been hanging around with a random asortment of english people in the evenings lately and am getting back into the ancient british customs of talking about the weather, bitching about french people and taking the piss.

After a long sleepless night with the constant noise and sensation of mosquitoes in my ears and on my skin respectively, it is now possible to play join the dots on my face and construct a pretty respectable abstract work of art. I look and sound like I have a contagious tropical disease so am conducting a social experiment to see how many people run away screaming. Bizarrely perople who are trying to sell me things have told me I'm beatiful, proving once again that they actually don't look. Before I kew what was going on Igot dragged to the market and ordered loads of clothes, then some shoes, then had a pedicure. The things sleep deprivation does to my mind. And my purse.

Took a boat trip today, it cost just 2 dollars including lunch, taking in a few tombs and temples on the way. Which I discovered each cost 55,000 dong entry, plus 20,000 for the moto ride to get there, and lunch was green beans unless you paid for more. Bloody tours. Vietnam is ridiculously easy to travel in, too easy in fact, theres no challenge. If you try to make it a bit more difficult it seems like you get ripped off AND fail to get to where you want to go. Had a nice day though, they were the best green beans I've ever had and the one tomb I could afford was pretty impressive. Met a couple of english girls who are very english which may explain the slightly moany tone I'm writing in...

First flip flops and first beach of 2005 today..Hue took 12 hours to get to from Hanoi, thats an extra degree an hour I reckon. I hired a bike and didn't get lost despite not having a map, luck was on my side today. I'm not too well prepared for heat though, ended up buying a hat with a string on the way, it did the job but I look like I'm on safari now. The cycling took me through a number of villages by the riverside, and provided me with a good few 'hello's' but they can say it more normally here instead of the annoying 'helloooo' in China which sounds like what your grandma would say if you suprised her on her doorstep. There's a dog AND a small child under my chair. There are conical hats everywhere- Hue is famous for producing them so it's a possibility I will be coerced into buying one..

Who should I bump into on a street in Hanoi but Mike, a guy I met 5 months ago in Yangshuo...admittedly, of all the people I was going to come across in Vietnam, he wasn't the least likely candidate, as he has been teaching close to the border and has finished his contract now..but still, one of those small world moments, and so soon after establishing that Helen, the girl I had spent the day before with didn't know James Ashton, whom I had previously been convinced was known to everyone. So Mike decided he wanted to attempt riding a motorbike in Hanoi, and he wanted me to be his passenger. I hesitatingly agreed on the condition that if anything happened to the bike he would take responsibility and that he wouldn't go too fast. It scared the shit out of me- mainly because Mike's sole source of information telling him where he was going was a wooden compass, and because he is pretty clueless and kept trying to drive the wrong way onto roads with concrete barriers in the middle to stop you from switching sides. I decided that walking was my best option before too long.

I was wondering last night if it's possible to liken travelling alone to getting someone to open a bag of revels and pour the contents down a hill towards you. Its not a great analogy but sometimes it seems like that, everyone that rolls into your path is different but they usually have a pretty similar flavour to the ones that look like them. Except the misshapen ones, they're just odd, and they usually appear at train stations...
Hanoi is a crazy place with streets whose names change at every junction...the roads are buzzing with motos and cyclos and people, I love the craziness. I feel safest on the back of a moto as long as I have a nice sober driver like my guide Tuan, probably the first genuinely helpful guide I've ever come across. I visited most of the temples and pagodas in Hanoi with him, including one with a big turtle in it. Apparently the lake is full of big turtles. They seem to be a recurring theme in my life lately...
This morning I saw Ho Chi Minhs dead body, it didn't smell at all. He looked pretty peaceful. Uncle Ho was a great man.