The Minnelli room

Ciao bella! And ciao everyone else too.

Hope you’re all flourishing. Any news?

We had a less annoyingly sun-kissed day today, so you can all come back. Really, it’s fine!

The explanation for our sun-shyness may be predictable to regular readers – we got properly sun-burned yesterday. The burns were localised entirely to the leg regions and were entirely our own fault, but they remained sufficiently nippy this morning to dissuade us from further sunbathing for at least one day.

Instead, we Did Some Backpacking Admin.

But first, breakfast. We returned to the ex-pat place again (authentic Vietnamese scran is genuinely thin on the ground here) and managed to eat just as well as yesterday for half the price. We also noticed something amusing at the back of the venue. You know how some restaurants and pubs like to distinguish the ladies and gents toilets with photos of John’n’Yoko or similar popular cultural references? Well this pub has a painting of 90s-era Michael Jackson on one door and (we think) Liza Minnelli on the other. They were very amateur paintings too. Selecting a bog was an unusually delicate exercise.

Suitably sustained by our breakfasts (and having evaded legal action for our respective choices of cubicle) we sought out the Nha Trang branch of Vietnam’s finest travel agent, Sinh Travel, to book our trains to Saigon/ Ho Chi Minh City. We leave early on Saturday morning. It’s just a seven-and-a-half hour journey this time. That’s nothing to us hardened travellers! (Ahem).

In case you’re wondering (as we were), the name Saigon remains in use, at least at the popular level. Technically it refers to the centre of Ho Chi Minh City, but apparently the Vietnamese mostly still use it to refer to the entire metropolis, while the train network uses the old name exclusively. We will henceforth use the name Saigon, because it’s less annoying to type.

We then went back to our apartment and spent a few hours working out where we go from there. Following some frenzied googling we’re pleased to report that we have now arranged travel to Saigon, accommodation in that city for three days, a bus thereafter from Saigon over the border to Cambodia, accommodation in Phnom Penh for another three days and a fair idea of onward flights to Bangkok.

We are good at backpacking sometimes.

Speaking of our backpacks, we then headed north to the main Nha Trang post office and spent an hour organising some exciting parcels. With the help of a fantastic post office worker, the remainder of our western clothes will soon be floating in a boat back to Glasgow, while Charlie’s lovely new dress is winging its way in a plane to America for her brother’s wedding. The latter parcel is stuffed into the packaging from an old router. Excellent recycling.

Our backpacks will be markedly lighter after this. This might not sound massively exciting but our lumbar regions think it’s well worth a paragraph of anyone’s blog.

With a spring in our step (especially Ian, who had lugged the contents of our heavy parcels to the post office in his ‘hand luggage’ auxiliary backpack) we then collected our train tickets from the travel agents and went for a couple of beers. Regular readers will recall that we drew a blank earlier in the week when trying to find the pubs recommended by the Lonely Planet. We found them tonight and they’re all rubbish. Lonely Planet – brilliant for everything except food and drink recommendations. They really do seem to curse every venue to which they offer their blessing.

Luckily there were many, many other options so we had a pleasant evening regardless. And we were surely the only people in Nha Trang going home after three pints. We’re so controlled! (If you happened to read the blog from Saturday in Hoi An, please keep schtum at this point).

It must be said that the pubs in Nha Trang play some shocking music and perhaps tonight saw our soundtrack reach its nadir: Against All Odds by Phil Collins.

Phil Collins, man.

You should see the video for that one – he’s wearing a frightening spotty suit jacket and it makes his head look even more weirdly small than usual. Actually, avoid this video.

Do Russians like this stuff? Surely it’s not being played for the English holiday makers?

On which note, this place is completely different from Hanoi or Hoi An in the sense that people are actually on holiday here. No one was on holiday in northern Vietnam! Yet the north was much more fun. As such we’re content to be moving on soon. But not before another day at the beach tomorrow, all being well.

But we digress. We only took one photo today, of Ian’s fresh coconut breakfast drink. Our mental image of coconuts has been transformed by the reality here. They’re usually a bit like the one in our photo but green. We haven’t seen any brown hairy ones yet. Settle down, class.

The post office and the travel agent were fun but not the most photogenic of venues. We’ll try to take more snaps tomorrow.

Until then, make us proud.

Love xxx