Around The World With 30 Litres On My Back

The Typhoon Cometh…

Vietnamese night buses are a true test of traveller strength. How will you cope with drivers who overtake zooming HGVs in the face of oncoming traffic? How will you react when you’re barked orders to take your goddamn falang-xa ass off the bus and get thrown with your backpack onto the streets in the middle of the night? And that’s before we get into the issues of Vietnamese music being blared loudly when you are trying to sleep, dealing with feeling very hot, and then very cold, and being too tall to fit into the sleeping cubby (not an issue for me but very much so for every dude I’ve spoken to about this over 5’9″)

We were woken up at 5am or so and commanded off the bus. We werent meant to arrive for another 90 minutes! The town was awake however, but in the dark I couldnt tell if I was seeing people on their way to work, or people traipsing home from a late-night bar. I stood in the middle of the pavement, dazed and confused. 2 French women and a trio of North Americans who’d travelled with me from Hoi An huddled with me; we’d made the 12 hour journey despite being chucked off our first bus because it was overcrowded and there was nowhere for us to sit, (and then sitting in the road for half an hour waiting for another bus) constant weaving in and out of traffic lanes and then trying to sleep whilst travelling over bumpy roads. And that’s before I get into the puker at the back whose vomit was well stinky!

The American and 2 Canadians were heading to the same hostel as me so we grouped together and haggled for a taxi, got them down to 40,000 for all of us. We later heard of a guy who jumped on the back of a motorbike to the same place and got ripped off for 200,000 VND. Duh!

Dawn came quickly and we sat outside the hostel waiting to be allowed in. I considered going to get breakfast but decided I was actually too knackered and as soon as I could get into my room, at about 7, I did and slept through until the afternoon. My dorm room had a widescreen TV, computer and hair straighteners in! Not bad. Bed was real comfy too.

Now, remember I haven’t seen the sun since leaving Laos. Things were about to get a whole heap worse… The dawn had been bright, but I woke up after 12 to the sound of… rain?! Is that rain?? A girl came to join our dorm. She told me she’d been in Nha Trang for 5 days and had had a great time on the beach but it was now raining. Great. Id come to Nha Trang to relax on the beach and lie in the sun. Maybe there was something else I could do? The girl told me there wasnt a heap of stuff to do but she could show me around town if I liked? So off we went. I saw the beach and the bars and a good place to get ice cream. But there really wasnt a lot to do so I agreed to meet the girl later for dinner then went and sat in the gelateria for 4 hrs.

The rain continued. Sometimes soft and drizzly and sometimes hard and heavy. But it continued.

I later met the girl for dinner. Her name was Denise. When you travel alone, a friendly face, a good conversation and a sense of fun can be all that matters. Though conversations generally start with exchanges of names and where we come from, they dont always and sometimes with conversations that dont, you know you’ve made a good friend; those little things like what you do at home dont matter much. We joined up with a lovely girl called Hannah who was on her way back to the UK after 2 years living in Oz and working in the Outback. Her stories fascinated me.

A girl bounced into our dorm the next day (and who I also shared a dorm with in Mui Ne and helped find her hostel in Saigon) and announced that a typhoon was on the way (hadnt stopped raining). Immediately, Hannah and I logged on to find out more. Indeed. A rogue typhoon. How bad was it going to be? Would we be stranded? Was it going to be dangerous? Rather than get annoyed that my plans for this part of the coast were ruined, I just conceded that I was in a tropical country and these things happen. They just do, so deal with it.

Nha Trang really had very little to do so we spent our time partying! It’s not historically interesting or anything. I did end up at a very small art gallery in Nha Trang, run by a French photographer and his Vietnamese-born wife. They were really interesting and I enjoyed having a coffee and chat with the wife about Vietnamese culture and how travellers are looked upon and so on.

On the plus side, I had a couple of great evenings meeting new people who Im very sure Ill keep in touch with. On a night out I met a guy called Stephen who was immediately familiar. He said I also looked familar. Turned out we both work in TV and I went to uni with his best friend! Small world…

Water, Water, Water Everywhere!

I got the taxi to Dalat on less than 3 hours sleep. Worth it but boy, did I feel like shit! It was still raining and the typhoon was due to hit the coast that evening. Best make it inland before then and just hope it disperses. Not enough people had booked on the bus so 6 of us ended up in a taxi. The mountain was road was awesome!! Luckily there was so much low-lying cloud that I couldnt actually see the steep drops or sharp bends so that was one less thing to worry about, but the sheer volume of water travelling down over the rocks was spectacular, creating roadside waterfalls. Vietnam had obviously experienced this type of weather before and I remember there was one stretch of road that they’d built a bridge over to cope with the force of a waterfall should it be created by rain. And there were drains so that the roads didnt get flooded but with this much rain it didnt always work and I was a bit worried when we drove up a road that was basically flooded. The car glided slightly and I noticed the huge cracks in the tarmac between us and the edge. Yikes! So I didnt sleep during the mountain road drive despite us having a super-careful driver.

My introductary views of Dalat were of the flower garden and the big lake; this was a very pretty city, even in the rain. It reminded me of some places Id been to; Wanaka in New Zealand and Puerto Varas in Chile, except there was a little quirkiness to Dalat. The flower garden had massive swans made of flowers and there was something kitschy about the cafes. In any case, i felt at home. My hotel was fab, with a rooftop jacuzzi which came as a welcome relief after time spent soggy and cold sight-seeing. However, Dalat was significantly cooler and the constant rain had me feeling a little less than my best and unable to fully enjoy the town’s charm. I spent my time wandering around under an umbrella eating cake and drinking coffee. I visited the Crazy House. Ha, not like that, its like this Gaudi-inspired house with lots of twists and turns, a bit weird, a bit unnerving and some of the walkways between the themed houses were steep and very high up which didnt inspire confidence in slippery conditions.  It was during my journey there that I experienced something else.

I had got really bored and a bit fed up of walking around in the rain with wet jeans so I went back to my room and put some light trousers on. By the time Id got there to change, Id got a bit lazy so resumed my wandering with a cab to the Crazy House. Now, I dont really remember whose fault this was but my taxi collided with 2 guys on a motorbike. The guys on the motorbike started shouting at the taxi driver and sped across the front of the car and stopped. A guy got off the back, came straight over to my driver, whose window was open and grabbed him and started hitting him. Really hard! I gulped in the back and told him to stop. The driver didnt really react; he didnt say anything, he was just calm. He wound up the window a bit and then this guy opened the door to grab the driver by the throat. At this point the taxi driver pushed him off, shut the door and locked it. The bike guy came round the other side of the car and tried to open the door. It was locked. Just as my driver was about to pull off, the guy came back round, leant into the still-open window and tried to take the ignition keys. The driver was too quick, sped off round the motorbike, causing a few people to beep and off we went. Cor, drama!

Meanwhile, the typhoon had hit land, a little further south of Nha Trang, at Mui Ne (my next stop!!). It was now being classed just as a tropical storm. Weather forecasts indicated rain for the rest of the week and we were hearing that Saigon had had non-stop heavy showers. Ohhhhh great.

After The Rain…

I slept most of the way to Mui Ne. My jeans were still very wet when I packed them. Even if Mui Ne was rainy, it was bound to be warmer than Dalat so hopefully my wet things would have a chance to dry. I woke up to the sight of sand dunes and… what was that? a blue sky? Really? Maybe? Yeah.. it wasnt raining, in any case. We got to Mui Ne and I was immediately hit by the heat as I got off the bus. I think this was going to be good. By the time I got to the hostel, the sun was well and truly out! I met my dorm-mate, a Canadian girl called Erica, chucked my bikini on and ran off to enjoy the beach! Sand, sun, heat! Marvellous. I was so, so happy. I laid on the beach for hours, finally able to enjoy the feeling of sun on my face. I spent my whole time in Mui Ne on the beach, it was great! I enjoyed it so much that I wandered into a cafe in just my bikini and didnt realise til I started getting strange looks from people. That beach was full of very sunburnt Russians.

In the evening, Erica and I set off to have dinner with some boys from Brighton she had met the day before. We had a tasty barbecued dinner – all kinds of fish, it was really good and a welcome change from rice and noodles. A turtle of some kind was on the menu. I was sad for it and asked the chef how much I could offer him to rescue it – 700,000 vnd was the answer – about £20. I was like… naaah, sorry turtle, sorry. Some of Erica’s Canadian friends came to stay too and a girl from Edmonton turned up. I mistook her for Rachel, a girl Id met in Nha Trang. It wasnt her but the girl was stunned because her name was Rachel too. Weirdness!

Mui Ne was also a good place to go out and in many ways I preferred it to Nha Trang but Im not sure if my view of it would change if it hadnt been so rain-soaked. When I left Mui Ne with a handful of new Canadian friends and a tan, I was very happy.

We had no problems getting a Grand Taxi from Essaouira to Agadir but all the way on the walk from the medina to the taxi rank I just hoped we’d meet someone who would offer us a ride in their camper van. This did not happen and instead I was subjected to possibly the scariest taxi ride ever. And not enjoyable scary like a tuk tuk ride. Really scary, like almost crying scary!!

Our Grand Taxi charged us 70 dirham each and it filled pretty quickly but with men, not like our previous experience. This instantly changed the mood in the taxi I felt and I was already tense before we set off, especially as the old man on the other side of Ben, who was sitting next to me, just kept staring. And staring. And staring.

I felt that our driver was OK to begin with and the first 15 minutes or so of our journey seemed OK although I could sense that this driver was not really paying attention to the road. Soon enough the road became windy and the driver felt confident enough to speed around corners past farmers with their donkeys and goats. The road started to become hilly and it was now that I was starting to feel a bit panicky as by this stage our driver was driving on the wrong side of the road whenever he saw fit!! I could see the men sitting in front glancing at the driver but not saying anything. I tried to stay calm but he just kept swerving between lanes, sometimes doing so before a blind corner but it really came to a head on a hill with no barriers to stop a car hurtling over the side. he took a bend very fast, braking into the bend rather than before it and, swerving on the wrong side of the road, I swear the back wheel just touched off the side of the road. At this point I … dont remember exact words but must have said something to express that i wasnt happy and the driver just looked at me in his rear view and started laughing and asked in English, “What’s wrong?” I asked him to slow down please. He muttered something about the roads being too small but he did slow down although he didnt keep to his side of the road.

We stopped about an hour short of Agadir for a toilet stop and the driver did come up to me and cheerfully asked if I was OK. I said that I really didnt like his driving. This didn’t break his good humour and he told me he did the same 3 hour trip 4 times a day. WHAT?!?!?!? And he was still alive?! Oh well, I just gritted my teeth and got back in the car. I asked Ben if he wasnt scared too and he said he was but I guess girls just get more emotional.

We drove through Taghazout and saw our Aussie friends’ red transit van parked outside the Cafe de Tenerife and finally we came to Agadir. The taxi driver dropped us off in the centre of town, still in high spirits and off we went, grateful we were in one piece. Seriously, you won’t believe the trauma til you get in a long-distance grand taxi for yourself and they are known to be fairly dangerous. Furthermore there are no seatbelts. I dont think I will ever, ever get in another one again.

Once in Agadir we had a most needed lunch at Cafe le Printemps opposite the petit taxi stand and headed into the Nouvelle Talborjt to find a place to stay. We could have stayed at a resort on the beach but we hadnt really come to Agadir to be package tourists. Im not sure what we were doing in any sense. We were a bit stuck and like true travellers really had no idea what we were doing next. We checked into the very clean Hotel El Bahia and explained to the owner we didnt know how long we would stay for and he was fine with that. If anyone ever stays there I would also like to recommend Patisserie Moderne on Rue Allal ben Abdellah for breakfast!

Agadir was really warm and sunny. We had travelled about 9 hours south now from our starting point so teh heat was most welcome. The fleece stayed in the hotel room. We headed down to the beach for sunset. What a lovely beach! We decided to spend the following day sunbathing there. Dont know what Agadir is like in the summer but out of season its really pleasant and if anything, very chilled out, more so than Essaouira! Hardly anybody stared or gave us hassle. It was so far removed from the Morocco we’d seen though so its not the best example of this country but it really was a welcome stop from the craziness.

We spoke to a few tour operators about what to do about a desert trip. Most people go from Ouarzazate which is better to get to from Marrakesh but the risk there was that in winter the snow on mountains between the two cities can cause people to get stuck! Also, Ouarzazate from Agadir was a good 8 hour drive and then some. So we settled for a day trip out to the Massa desert, south of Agadir. The man we eventually booked this mini trip from, Driss, was a very friendly person and keen to talk about life in Morocco and also in England. he had lived in Finland some years before and named his travel company, Kauhava Tours in honour of that. We spent a couple of evenings talking to him over mint tea. We also found Khatidja from Cote D’Azur Travel to be very helpful.

Our day sunbathing was a good, relaxing day. At one point Ben left me alone to get some lunch. A few men walked past me and sat near me and when I slyly glanced over I could see they were watching me, but having said that they were never threatening. they would look for 10 minutes say, then get up and leave. Nothing was said, nothing was done.

We visited the fish market, some 10 minutes walk from the beach. Now this really was a piece of real Morocco with hustlers urging you to eat at their stall and beggars striking from every corner. Kids were asking for money and their mothers came after them in mock horror (we found later on in our journey that its these kids mothers who are the perpetrators). A boy asked for our half-finished bottle of Mirinda and we gave it to him.

We got a petit taxi back into town and it wasnt until the driver started trying to sell us a tour that we realised we had got into an unmetered cab! We were almost at our destination so we let him go on and when we stopped he turns to us and asks for 20 dirham. 20 dirham is less than £1.50 but honestly a journey that short should have been perhaps 6 or 7? I told him we would be paying no such amount, that we had been in Morocco for almost 2 weeks and we knew what the rates were. Ok, he said, 15. 15?? I say, no way. Then he says its after dark and the rates double. I told him not to be so silly, we know the rates dont double until after 8pm (it was only just past sunset). Ben gave him 11 dirham and the taxi driver didnt argue. he knew he’s got a good cut anyway! But how many people must get ripped off like that who think 20 dirham is nothing anyway..??

Our desert tour was heaps of fun. We started out on a foggy morning and drove down with 4 others in a 4×4. Lots of other tour groups were also out and about so it was like the Paris Dakkar, all these jeeps off-roading, lots of fun! We drove on sand dunes and saw almond trees and scorpions and sankes. We had lunch with a Berber family and I poured mint tea for everyone and we banged some drums! We also went to Tiznit and tried to buy some silver but we just got laughed out of the shop 🙁 We went to Souss Massa National Park and drove back to Agadir via the coast and saw where fishermen hide out in caves carved into the cliffs. We also had the chance to buy some pottery for the folks back home from a factory en route.

We both really enjoyed Agadir, possibly because we hadnt really thought we’d spend much time there but we did end up staying there for 3 nights in total. Id recommend it but like I said before, it might be a different story in peak season.