Vietnam - same same but different!

Hello and welcome to another fanschmabulous edition of my travelling tales!

Having spent several days hopping from place to place down Vietnam at a rate so fast it should carry a government health warning, I'm now nearing the end of my whirlwind trip. It's like something off a speeded-up Benny Hill sketch - I get on a bus, I look round, I get on another bus, I look round somewhere else, and on it goes. Sadly there's no birds in lingerie for me to chase around in a comical sea captain's uniform, but you can't have everything.

12 days is nowhere near long enough to "tick all the boxes" for Vietnam but I've done my best. I've seen some amazing places in this immense country, that curls round the eastern reaches of Laos and Cambodia on the map like some sort of sleeping topological dog.

I was in Hanoi when we left off. When you're travelling you start to lose track of what day of the week it is, and this causes the weeks to fly by faster than ever. That was several days ago. Since then I've been living a safe and pompous existance on air-conditioned tourist buses, staring out like a wistful dog at the endless rice fields zipping by. Travel is relatively cheap in Vietnam and it's been easy to get from one end of the country to the other, even on my limited budget.

I frittered away my last evening in Hanoi sat at one of the city's many streetside bars. The rain held off and I had traversed the maze-like streets of the Old Quarter to find 'Bia Hoi junction'. This is an intersection of busy shopping streets where you perch on children's patio furniture to enjoy incredibly cheap glasses of beer direct from the barrel! At 3000 Dong a glass (about 9p), Bia Hoi is quite possibly the cheapest beer in the world! (Does anyone else not find the fact that the Vietnamese currency is called Dong hilariously funny?)

Hanoi is famous for this tradition of amiable boozing on the street and rightly so. The convention always employs inappropriately-sized plastic chairs, presumably for ease of storage. It was great to sit (well, crouch) there on the pavement and watch life go by in this strange and exotic city. Tourists and locals mingled together, surrounded by flocks of conical-hatted street vendors and motorbikes streaming past in the warm and humid night.

Bia Hoi had a fresh but rather rough and ready taste, perhaps due to them not cleaning the pipes on the barrel. After a few glasses (and the usual 'where I'm from, what I do, am I married' conversational rounds with some inquisitive Vietnamese chappies) I could feel my stomach slowly rising up, like the Irish in the 19th Century. By ending the drinking here I avoided a major bacterial infection but I suspect I imbibed enough dodginess to do marvels for my immune system!

The next day we went to look at a museum about hill tribes, a few kilometres' bus ride out of the city centre. It was immense. The museum's grand central building was surrounded by a number of fantastic and outlandish looking replica tribal houses built in its capacious grounds.

Hill tribes in SE Asia worship a bewildering array of animalistic gods, and they aren't shy about graphically depicting fertility scenes! We saw some kind of burial shrine with carved figures copulating on top of it. They'd have to pixellate some of it out if they ever showed it on TV, let's just say that!

Once we'd got an eyeful of wooden tits and genitalia and whatnot, it was time to check out the museum's mammoth collection of ceremonial exhibits and photos. There was an exhibition of photos and writings from some French anthropologist bloke who'd studied the hill tribes closely in the early 20th century. We used up our whole day looking round. It's a very good museum, don't get me wrong, but there was just too much to see and take in. Spending that long in a museum can make you feel physically tired! I had to get out, and get back to killing my brain with beer.

The same evening we caught the sleeper bus to leave Hanoi. Vietnam's transport system is geared up for tourism in a big way and we were shuttled out of the city in a gleaming new coach kitted out with two levels of upholstered reclining beds. Each bed was housed in what I can only describe as an individual plastic pod, making the interior seem more like the sleeping quarters of Red Dwarf than a bus!

After spending the night contorting myself into a comfortable sleeping position in my space capsule and re-acquanting myself with Bill Hicks's album 'Rant in E Minor', I awoke the next day as the spaceship with wheels ground to an unexpected halt in the town of Hue in central Vietnam. We were now near to the old DMZ (de-militarised zone), which ironically was home to some of the most intense fighting of the whole Vietnam war. Nowadays it's a hub of Vietnam's tourist industry.

With a few hours to wait till our connecting bus to Hoi An we decided to go for a look round. Hue (pronounced Hooay) is a quiet little place with lots of old temples and pagodas which are quite pretty but rather expensive to get in. It was once the medieval capital of Vietnam (if I remember right), so it's got a load of history, but little stands out about it today.

Perhaps the pallid overcast weather cast the town in an unattractive hue (no pun intended) but it didn't offer any new thrills for us, apart from watching a coachload of Chinese tourists cavorting round and cackling excitedly inside a temple. I was glad I chose going to Vietnam instead of China - the Chinese culture seems so inpenetrable and alien.

After some travel-weary temple-spotting we caught our next bus, travelling a few hours further south to Hoi An. I stepped off the bus to discover a beautiful little river town trapped in a different age.

Hoi An is one of the must-sees of Vietnam. The afternoon sun bathes the sleepy streets with golden rays and illuminates the harbour waters a brilliant blue. Pagodas jostle for space with ancient French shop buildings in the crowded streets. A cluttering of small boats bobs peacefully up and down on the quay, while the adjacent street market throbs and hums with activity, the covered awnings reflecting all its sound and energy back inside.

The streets are lined with tailors' shops where you can get any item of clothing knocked up for a bargain price. A good quality suit would set you back about 50 quid, which is bloody good value whatever way you look at it. The tailors could probably make you something as outlandish as a P Diddy-style pimp suit or a taffeta ball gown if you asked nicely. Much as I was tempted by the idea of owning a taffeta ball gown, I had no space to carry it in my bag.

The next day I hired a rickety old bicycle and painfully creaked my way towards the coast. Cua Dai beach lies a couple of miles away from Hoi An; a stunning vision of blue sea, palm trees, white sand straight out of the tourist brochures. You can even buy a coconut and sit there and drink it like you're on a tropical island or something!

I sat there and read my book, a solemn story by Bao Ninh called the Sorrow of War. Some Vietnamese office workers in smart shirts kept trying to speak to me in Vietnamese, laughing at me for not understanding. I don't know what's up with me, I just can't be arsed interacting with the locals at the moment. That's what the joy of travelling is supposed to be all about - and I'm too jaded to enjoy it!

Travelling from country to country, you notice certain cultural differences. Vietnamese folk can seem a bit abrupt and rude at first, but then they generally warm to you if you make an effort with them. It contrasts with Thai and Lao people, who are automatically smiley and friendly with you even if they don't know you from Adam.

Vietnamese uses the European alphabet, but it is no easier to master than Lao, Thai or Akha. Again I tried to learn a few phrases but it just wasn't sinking in. Hearing someone talk in fluent Vietnamese is like being buried under an avalanche of syllables; an incomprehensible deluge of sing-song vowels and constanants. Everyday conversations sound like furious arguments!

The next day I went on a trip to see the ruined temples at My Son. That's right - My Son! You pronounce it 'mee sonn'. It was a bit of a disappointment, because the ruins of temples had been further ruined by American bombers back in the 60s, leaving just a few jaggy brick columns carpetted in weeds and moss! They date back to the 7th Century though, and that is very old.

Having got that over and done with, it was time to make another coccyx-numbing overnight bus journey, heading straight through Nha Trang (Vietnam's number one scuba-diving tourist trap) to another beach town called Mui Ne. After travelling together for a while, Sonia and I had to go our own separate ways here.

The Lonely Planet portrayed Mui Ne as a sort of deserted seaside fishing village. My expectations were confounded when I discovered it to be nothing more than a long strip of hotel resorts lining the coast, stretching on for miles and miles! Strange. It would take three or four hours to walk from one end to the other.

It was an immensely likeable place nonetheless, boasting more of the palm trees, blue sea, perfect beaches and relentless sun that the southern Vietnamese coast is dripping in. I saw fit to stay a full day here and chill out. Beer + sun lounger + a photocopied Nick Hornby book I bought in a Hoi An bookstore = good times!

Mui Ne is noted for its sand dunes, which are different colours, red and white! The next day I paid a man to give me a tour of them in a jeep. We drove south of the town to see some giant white sand dunes, and I tried sandboarding down the side of one, but it was expensive and crap. It was worth going to see the spectacular views of a lake and a forest of pine trees that exist rather improbably right next to the dunes. That was a pretty unique sight. Then we drove back north to see some red sand dunes, which were sort of red and dusty, but interesting also.

Later that day (7th April) I descended into the pandemonium of Ho Chi Minh City, but I'll have to leave it there as I'm running out of time and mourn for my dinner like the wolf pines for the full moon. Tomorrow I fly to Hong Kong. Goodbye for now and don't be a stranger! I will promise likewise.