Movin' On...to Hai Phong

Trip Start Nov 01, 2006

179

Trip End Oct 31, 2007

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Flag of Vietnam Hai Phong (Haiphong), Vietnam
Monday, March 12, 2007

The problem with having a few days in a row where you are travelling a bit each day is that you suddenly find yourself with lots of blog entries to write to keep upto date. I say 'problem': its not nearly as hard to solve as the problem of third world debt or the troubles in Sri Lanka, but it certainly keeps me exercised. The obvious answer would be to do just one entry to cover each of the places to which you've traveled over that period of time. My response to that is a somewhat irrational "no, no, and thrice no!" (the person who woke up one morning and decided to invent the word 'thrice' did a great service to the English language, in my view). If you just do one entry to cover more than one place then you can't get the Travelpod map thingummy to work properly to show all the places you've been. Also, the total number of entries is less; and I'm a volume man - quality means nothing to me.

These then are the kinds of worries that keep me occupied as we boarded another bus, this time to take us from Ha Long City to Hai Phong

01 Pineapple lady

. The upside is that if you roll into town at 2.00pm and you're planning to be on the next bus out in the morning, there's a limited amount of trouble you have time to get yourslef into and so there's less to write about. (Two paragraphs so far though - so not bad at all...). Once we'd found somewhere to rest our heads and had a nice cup of tea in our room, we went to see if the Hai Phong Opera House had any opera on - having struck out in Hanoi where there was 'just' Vietnamese folk music. It didn't, but we took a photograph anyway. Then we had some pineapple from a street vendor. And we took a photo of that too. We wandered round the fairground and squealed together on a very tame train ride that only went downward at a gradient of 1:200 and was probably designed for childeren under 2 feet tall. Erm - yes, we took a photo of that as well. Lastly we had a coffee in the stadium-like Corner Cafe and I got a wee bit drowsy from all those more potent coffees we'd had on the Ha Long junk. So we had a bit of a lie down back in our room; then did some internet; then went out to a jolly nice Thai restaurant called simply BKK. (Keeping to the newly agreed spirit of saying there's no 'should' about eating local food if we don't fancy it, we decided just to go for the best looking place in town which happened to be Thai.) I had a tasty red curry with beef and Rach a delicious broccoli and shitake mushroom stirfry. Some excellent 'homemade' rum and raisin ice cream finished the meal nicely so we decided to push our luck and hit one of the cafes which promised 'live music every night'. It was live alright, but not music as we knew it; the most god-awful dreary mediocre elevator music imaginable. So we drank our cocktails as quickly as possible, (judging by the taste of them, the cocktail menu had been written by the same hopeful as the 'live music' sign, as Rachel's strawberry Daiquiri tasted of a lime Margerita and my lime Margerita tasted of salt), and then headed to bed. (T)

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