Vietnam - Skyfall

Traditional chicken heads, just like at Morrisons

Late last night we stopped off for some street side snacks, and even though we avoided the deep fried chicken head cuisine, the consequences were still as expected and Tim has lost a lot of weight and also condemned the bathroom. They seriously need to open a branch of King Kebab over here or it's only going to get worse.

Getting up was easier today mainly because neither of us could sleep despite necking Vietnamese sleeping pills. It turns out that our body clocks aren't easily fooled and that we do need to get smashed every night! Either that or we stop drinking four pints of vodka & red bull every night!

We needed to book our trips up today so we took our plans to the concierge to sort it out. This involved booking some motorbikes for a few days, a speedboat tour and hopefully a flight to Cambodia.

Shortly after booking the bikes for 3 days and finding where to stay out of town, the concierge gave us an invite to their NYE BBQ. When we explained that she had just booked us out for that period so we couldn't go she looked like she was going to top herself so we've changed our plans to make sure the staff have a good party.

Panorama goodness

We visited the tallest building in Saigon and went to the sky deck, it was quite impressive,you could see for so far that Tim tried to call in an air strike on the murderous American embassy.

On the way back we stopped regularly just to abuse the Aircon as the humidity is energy sapping. It was then time for an afternoon kip to sort ourselves out.

Our plans for Cambodia seem to have been scuppered, we have two choices, either pay a ridiculous amount of money and fly or spend 12 hours on a coach each way. It's a no brainer really, screw you Cambodia!

Later in the evening we went to JJs for food. It was good, and suspiciously American. We asked for some onion rings which they didn't understand so we described them and they had a go. Fair play to them, they were some kick ass rings. Upon leaving, our suspicions were confirmed and it was owned by a capitalist bastard American, so Mark pushed the tables over and Tim torched the kitchen.

The usual bar crawl followed and we decided to watch the Chelsea game. All of the ozzies are typical glory hunters where Mark is just rooting for his fantasy team which seem to be doing terribly.

On the way home we stopped by the cheap bars  where you sit on six inch high plastic garden furniture not even suitable for gnomes (although the been there is about 40p/bottle). The guys next to us were complete idiots, the one thought he was a cached version of Trip Adviser and basically told everyone who would listen about how well traveled he was and how he was an expert and his mate had just imported a yellow Ferrari etc etc. His mate was wearing a dressing gown because apparently he'd been "kidnapped" from Hanoi earlier in the day. Tim said that he looked like the karate kid...only gayer. They stopped talking to us then.

No more beers now, time to go back to the hotel, although Tim decided that he needed to stop off for some noms at a guy with a cooker attached to the back of his moped selling some baguette/pate/pork/ham/dog sandwich. It's only a matter of time before we have to evacuate this floor of the hotel.

Vietnam - Walking

Mark did some research and found some bars in another district that are meant to be good so we took a stroll across town. It turns out that the bars are nice but they're empty and expensive, nearly English prices! So we hot footed it back to the land of sub £1 beers double time.

On the way back we found some bars with people in, but it turns out that they're all prostitutes and we are in that district again. Saigon is split into districts and we're told that one is best for tourists, another best for living and another best for crime. Tim wants to know which is best for monkey knife fights but apparently there isn't a district for that.

He's got money to burn

We walked past someone having a little fire in the street, on closer inspection he was burning money. We asked him why and didn't quite understand him, but it was something about the afterlife. Stupid Vietnamese, he's still alive!

It's extra humid tonight and still 28c at midnight. After a lot of walking it's time to cool off with some cold beers.

We're jammin'

After several beers and cocktails which included drinking vodbulls from jam jars we met a guy from England. We investigated further and he was also from Birmingham, where abouts? Kings Norton. Really? Which road? Burford Park. You're shitting me. He basically grew up in the road next to where we did. Small world!

We spent the rest of the night with Robin, our new Brummy mate and rolled in about 3am.

The next morning we woke up to find that it was actually well into the afternoon, we'd just missed breakfast by half a day.

As a hangover cure we decided that a KFC was in order, so Google Maps was in order. So we found out that no wonder the murderous Americans had trouble getting lost, Google Maps is wrong, maybe we should have tried Apple maps instead but we'd have probably have ended up in Cambodia.

After a long long walk and asking many people we finally found the hallowed ground of KFC, which was good as Tim was ready to kill someone as he hadn't had his regular food intake. Vietnamese KFC appears to use smaller chickens than the rest of the world and are also scared of giving you more than 3 chips each. Still we were good and didn't complain like the good brits we are.

Fed and watered we walked to the war remnants museum. This has entire sections dedicated to what bastards the Americans are and how they are war criminals. Next time I see an American I'm going to spit in his face!

After playing with the rocket launcher and mini gun we took a long walk back to the hotel as dusk dropped, very nearly getting run over several times.

We are local celebrities though as people stop to have their photos with us. We think it's because we're tall but it might be because it's because we're so good looking :)

After all the walking we decided to have a massage, not that sort of massage, we weren't in the prossy district! It lasted an hour and involved them walking on our backs cracking vertibre with their toes.

A quiet night followed involving more walking, this time to the night market where there are hundreds of stalls all selling the same crap. Tim was very disappointed that there wasn't a donut stall like the markets back home.

We've only been here 3 nights and the street peddlers know us by name now. I think by the time we go home we'll have put their kids through college. 

Vietnam - First night & tunnels

We headed out for our first night in Saigon fresh from a power nap. We stopped outside a bar at the end of our street and that 3 second pause was enough for an army of waiters to surround us, move two chairs behind us and Jackie Chan us into the seats. A guy from the bar next door gave us a leaflet which nearly started a bar vs bar fight, and the leaflet was quickly ripped from our hands and thrown away.

After a couple of local beers we had a game of pool. Bars of England take note, the pool tables are free to use. We both played pool about as well as Steven Hawking on a trampoline, as the games went on for hours. Some other people asked for a go and our game took so long that they'd ordered their food and were halfway through their meals before we'd finished.

Despite us having to be up at 7am in the morning we decided to start on the cocktails and swiftly worked our way from bar to bar, although saying that, the cocktails are served in the world's smallest glasses.

All the bars play 80s and 90s rock, Spenno would be right at home with his air guitar here.

As we went further down the street the bars got seedier, the bars marketing reps had offers such as "one beer, one punani, two beers, two punani". After that every bar had a bunch of local girls calling you in.

We carried on until we found a prostitute free bar and sat down for a drink only to be immediately surrounded by prostitutes!

We fled the scene after a couple of quick drinks and made our way back to the normal bars where Tim got talking to a guy about knives and Mark got leached by a visa hunting girl. Tim found out that they sell switchblades here with torches on them so that you can see who you're stabbing properly while Mark called the embassy to arrange the necessary paperwork for his new wife to travel back to Blighty.

A few more cocktails and we had to call it a night to ensure we would be alive in the morning.

Eating soup on the back of a bike

Six hours later the alarm woke us and we were very much not alive, Tim drunkenly staggered to the shop for supplies which involved him getting a few cans of fake Red Bull. It wasn't great but it did the job, so we had a quick free breakfast and got on the bus to the Cu Chi tunnels, our first excursion of the holiday.

After a two hour journey we arrived at the tunnels with our guide and he made us watch a propaganda video about how the evil Americans murdered women and children, blew up hospitals and fought a losing battle, you know, a bit like Afghanistan. The tunnels were tiny but we crawled through them on our hands and knees, got a little bit lost but emerged safely. It's a good job we'd laid off the pies!

War preparations

It was then time to shoot stuff, we both had a go at shooting evil bastard Americans with an AK47 and a fully auto M60. The other thing we learned was how to make deadly traps, we both can't wait to get home and build some protection around our homes, although we must remember to inform the postman.

It was good fun and very interesting, they should make a film about the war... 

Vietnam - Day 1

Today, me and Tim started our much awaited trip to Vietnam. Enough of all this Christmas stuff, we're in pursuit of some warm weather, and if we can help stop the spread of communism and free some POWs while we're at it then all the better.

It was an early start, 5am on Boxing Day as we headed to Gatwick, we'd paid to park on someone's drive which turned out to be a field (I didn't think they had fields in London either!). Tim's nice new shiny white trainers are no longer shiny or white.

Once at the airport Tim asked everyone remotely involved in the operation of the airport for an upgrade. It did work though and a pair of legroom seats were ours for the 12 hour flight ahead.
Mark had his last meal at the airport taking the opportunity to grab a burger before starting his two week diet trying to find something other than noodles and rice to eat.

Our pilot was a bit of a ninja and made up an hour by utilizing some shortcut or something, so we touched down after 11 hours of not sleeping properly which made it 6am local time, we were a little tired to say the least. We went through passport control first which was lucky as it seems that the customs man decided that he'd let his family through after us, and he has quite a lot of family! At the carousel we waited for ages for Tim's case, in fact we were starting to panic a little and then Tim realised that his case was one of the first off and it had been going round and round for about 15 minutes.

We'd done a lot of research into which cab firms to use as quite a lot of people will try to rip you off, we knew what firms to use, how much to pay and how to handle it. This all went out of the window as as soon as we walked outside we'd agreed an extortionate price with some old dude to get in his clap trap of a car that would give Rover a run for their money on shitiest car ever made. It looked like it would fall apart.
2 minutes down the road, it fell apart. After a crunching noise on a gear change, the car slumped to one side and we looked out of the side window to see one of our wheels rolling off down the road, we officially had 3 wheels on our wagon. The cab driver didn't see the funny side so much as we jumped out and hailed down one of the proper cabs that were on our white list.

The rest of the journey to the hotel was just as interesting as the rules of the road that we're used to went out of the window. Traffic lights don't mean anything, one way roads are not one way, and no one has right of way!

We made it alive to the hotel by about 7:30am, but we couldn't check in until 2pm, so the ridiculously thin woman on reception recommended all of her families restaurants for us to go and eat in to kill the time. We decided to see the sights and went for a stroll. This however meant crossing the roads, which is no easy feat, we'll do a video on this over the next few days as it involves a blind leap of faith. You sort of wait for the traffic to thin a bit and then step out, don't look at the cars and bikes flying towards you, so long as you maintain a constant pace then they'll go around you. If you stop or change direction however, you're dead.
By 9:30 we'd seen all the sights of Saigon, some church thing, a post office, Reunification Palace and so on, but that was ok, the next 4 hours would be spent fending off the street peddlers who try to sell us sunglasses despite us already wearing a pair each. There are also a lot of shoe shine people who constantly want to clean Mark's once white trainers, one look at them and you can see the shame on their faces and they really have a need to clean them!

We stopped for our first authentic meal. Tim had some spring rolls in a sauce and Mark ordered some bread and chips, well at least he would have but they decided to ignore his order and just kept bringing him forks instead while Tim stuffed his face. Eventually after reordering, his food turned up (with another fork) so we tucked in.

An interesting theme throughout the day has been how Mark has been treated like a second class citizen compared to Tim. Taxi cab drivers, hotel staff, waiters, etc immediately rush up to carry his luggage or pander to his pretentious needs while Mark is left standing there and has to fend for himself

Back at the hotel we were finally allowed into the room which is ok but a little small with no space for clothes, so we'll be living out of our cases for two weeks. The towels are also so small that you can't quite wrap them around your waist, although after Mark's diet, that shouldn't be a problem - on a positive point it will prevent Tim from indulging in his hobby of towel whipping anyone in the vicinity.
Sleep is needed now, it's been a long double length day, so we're allowing ourselves a couple of hours to catch up before having the traditional first night out which involves getting completely smashed.