Whilst the bacteria from Neil and Emma's chicken currys were busy festering and reproducing inside their tummies, we caught the evening train to Agra. They mustn't see many white people at Agra railway station because we spent our entire two hours there (waiting for our late train) being gawped at by mass crowds of Indians, having our photographs taken and being hounded (and attacked) by grubby street children.

Our Indrail Passes allowed us to travel in 2AC class, a two-tier air-conditioned sleeper carriage with surprisingly comfortable bunk beds hanging by chains from the ceiling. Clean bedding and good food were provided; it was all very civilised. The train had to go slowly because of the thick fog and we didn't arrive in Agra until 4:30am, four hours behind schedule. We reached our hotel at 5am and fell into bed exhausted.

Neil started vomiting at 10am. And other things. And Emma too. They spent the whole day in bed, and in the bathroom. I spent the day chatting to other travellers on the rooftop terrace, chortling at the antics of the monkeys climbing on the surrounding buildings, and squinting through the mist at the Taj Mahal nearby.

The next day Neil and Emma were still very poorly but they managed to get out of bed for our one-day tuk-tuk tour of Agra. First we visited the Taj Mahal, an exquisitely beautiful mausoleum rendered in white marble and semi-precious stones. The entrance fee was a con; 25p for Indians and 9.75ukp for tourists. The freezing shroud of early morning mist made it impossible to take any really good photographs but it heightened the mystique and deadened the din of the traffic buzzing and peeping around in the streets outside the perimeter walls.

From the Taj Mahal we went to see the so-called "Baby Taj", a smaller and older, but in my opinion more satisfying (cheaper and less crowded) mausoleum on the other side of the river. We had a foggy look across the river at the back of the proper Taj Mahal and I had a go at driving the tuk-tuk (great fun), then we visited a carpet factory. Neil and Emma came over all poorly again so we headed to the railway station for our night train to Bombay, with a connection at Matura Junction. Predictably, the connecting train was two hours late, which caused us more than a little stress, especially considering Neil and Emma were still rather loose in the toilet department.

I didn't see much of Bombay but the bits I did see seemed quite nice. We'd only been there a few hours before it was time to catch yet another night train to Goa. We arrived at our (pre-booked) hotel in Candolim at 11am on the 23rd. Time to relax at last.

I have to say, Christmas away from home/clip was absolutely rubbish. I won't be doing it again. I'm sure it would have been better if clip had been here with me but, and nothing against Neil and Emma, it was very lonely. Christmas might as well not have happened. Christianity is a minority religion in India so Christmas is not celebrated to the same extent as it is in England, but for those that do celebrate it, it is much more about goodwill and sincerity than about present-giving and over-indulgence. We spent Christmas day sunbathing on the beach and paid 7.80ukp each for Christmas dinner. We built a sand snowman and the puzzled Indians stood around staring and asked, "What are you doing?"

Neil had only booked us into our (old people) hotel for five nights so after Christmas we had to find somewhere else to stay. We chose Anjuna, a more traveller-orientated beach village further north. It took us a while but we managed to find a decent room with a double bed and a single bed for 250rp (3.16ukp) per night.

Lying on the beach in Goa is not as relaxing as you might think, because you are pestered by a steady stream of fruit sellers, trinket sellers, henna tattooists, drum sellers, sticker sellers, nut sellers, masseurs/masseuses, cheap tat sellers, drink sellers, icecream men and ear cleaners who pretend to be able to see soap or wax in your ears from ten yards away. The ear cleaners are particularly amusing because they always carry a notebook of accolades, supposedly written by satisfied customers, but the comments never seem quite genuine somehow.

Typical examples include

"My ears were so clean I could hear a mouse fart from three hundred miles."

and

"This was the most beneficial biological enquiry I have ever had performed on my head."

Ha ha ha god that makes me laugh.

To all those of you that celebrate Christmas...

Merry Christmas!

and to those of you that don't...

Happy Holidays!


love clop xxxx

I have been home now for six days and I am just starting to settle in. I felt very much like I did the last time I popped home. Very floaty, as though I didn't fit in anywhere, just visiting. I have had a bit of trouble chatting with friends and family. I feel as though I have lost my ability to chit-chat. But, that too after a few days is starting to come back. I think I probably chose the best time to return home. It's Christmas time and everybody is happy and friendly. A lot of people have already finished work so I have plenty of people to see. And of course there is Christmas food shopping to do, and that sort of thing, that I love.

I was less excited about coming home this time than the last, probably because it is the end and I now have to settle down and find a job, somewhere to live etc. And that is a bit scary. I have grown to love not having to work, and the thought of having to wake up early every morning to go somewhere I don't really want to go, for not much money, just seems rubbish.

It is strange being without clop but I am really pleased he's spending Christmas with his friends, away from all the things he hates about this time of year (presents, false friendliness, over-eating etc.), in fact all the things I love. It seems like a long time till he gets back. But it's much more bearable than the last time.

It feels a bit like the trip never really happened, because I don't really have anybody to talk to about it. Friends and family ask questions but it's not like fully discussing where you've been and what you've seen. I've tried but it ends up sounding really dull or as though I'm a bit up my own arse. The only person I've come close to talking about it properly with was a taxi driver who had travelled to a lot of the same places. It was nice to swap stories. I'm looking forward to chatting properly about our trip with clop when he returns at the beginning of January.

In order to annoy me as much as possible, the air traffic controllers at Delhi International Airport specially arranged for my flight (which was packed full of Indian people who complained about everything and never said thank you) to land a few minutes behind two other immensely-full passenger jets. As a consequence the queue to clear immigration was wrist-slittingly long. It wound back and forth across the entire width of the concourse eight times, then right back to the far end of the immigration hall, then right back to the bottom of the staircase and then all the way up the stairs and into the arrival gates. I was worried about keeping Neil and Emma waiting too long. I needn't have. The traffic around Delhi was so bad that their 17km taxi ride from the city centre took them an hour and a half, and they walked in almost as I walked out.

Seeing my friends again was strange but not as strange as I had been expecting. Things between us weren't much different to how they had been a year ago (though they did seem rather white).

Once into town our taxi ran out of petrol in the middle of a busy street and we had to walk the rest of the way along the Main Bazaar to our hotel. It was 12C and misty and I still had my shorts on from Singapore. It was perishing. After a chat and a beer and some dosas we went straight to (triple) bed.

The next morning our priority was to go to New Delhi Railway Station to try to buy me a ticket for the evening train to Agra (Neil and Emma already had their tickets) and to reconfirm all our Indrail Pass reservations (Agra-Mathura, Mathura-Bombay, Bombay-Goa, Goa-Bombay) which Neil had cleverly organised from Leeds.

In the station two Indians stopped us from going up the stairs to the official ticket office. They said the office was closed and "proved it" by pointing to a Danger! sticker on a nearby lift. They said we should go to a different (ie con-artist) ticket office outside the station. We ignored them and went upstairs to the official ticket office which was, of course, open.

With over 1.2 million employees, the Indian Railway company is the biggest employer on the planet. Given the size of the country and its incredible population (over 1 billion) I can well believe it, though the term 'employee' must be applied in the vaguest sense - there were a dozen staff present in the ticket office but only three of them actually appeared to be doing anything and it took us over an hour to get served.

I managed to get the last remaining seat on the train to Agra, which was handy, and then we had to go to a different desk to sort out our Indrail Pass reservations. This second desk was cluttered with tickets, teetering piles of paperwork and battered record-keeping books. We handed over our passes and looked on with considerable skepticism as the clerk uncovered one such knackered book (seemingly at random) and started thumbing through its torn and ragged pages (some held together with yellowed sellotape) as though he knew what he was doing. It was therefore a shock to suddenly see our names and all our details handwritten on a fresh page in the book, and even more of a shock when the clerk quickly extracted our pre-printed tickets from several whopping great bundles he produced from the depths of a chaotic drawer. We were very impressed.

We spent the rest of the day walking around Delhi city centre. It is the filthiest, busiest, most appalling, disgusting place I could ever have imagined. The streets are very narrow and they are full of workers, touts, beggars, cripples, rickshaws, cars, hand-carts, cyclos, mopeds, horse-drawn-carts, cow-drawn carts, cows, pigs, dogs etc. There is no open space, just people shoving to get through any possible gap. There are many open street latrines (which stink to high heaven) but everywhere you go there are also people urinating or defecating along the sides of the road so that urine flows across the pavements. The air stinks of piss and shit. Nobody gives way to anybody at any time - everyone pushes only for themselves. The road junctions are all snarled up and nobody can move but nobody will give way. We had to climb through vehicles to cross the road. The buildings are literally crumbling all around. Piles of rubble everywhere. People living under tarpaulins along the road-sides. People shouting and pushing and touting. And the constant stink of piss and shit.

We managed to walk as far as the Red Fort and back before we were too exhausted by it all to go any further. We decided to eat some food before we had to catch our train to Agra. I chose vegetable noodles. Neil and Emma chose bowls of tasty chicken curry. This unfortunate decision was to have catastrophic consequences, as they would discover fourteen hours later.

Vietnam Immigration Officer: "Your passport and boarding card please."
clop hands them over.
Vietnam Immigration Officer stares disdainfully at the documents and his little screen for a while, with a face like a half-sucked lemon.
Vietnam Immigration Officer: "What was the name of the hotel that you last stayed in?"
clop: "I have no idea."
Vietnam Immigration Officer: "I need to know the name of your hotel."
clop: "I have absolutely no idea what it was. It was in Vietnamese."
Vietnam Immigration Officer: "Well, what was the address of the hotel?"
clop: "No idea. I have no idea what the address was."
Vietnam Immigration Officer: "You've no idea at all?"
clop: "It was in Saigon."
Vietnam Immigration Officer, making a face as if he's doing something in his pants: "OK. Through you go."

Vietnam and its pathetic bureaucracy. Why even bother asking questions when it doesn't matter what answers you get?

Looking down from the plane as it roared up through the Saigon skies gave us an uninterrupted view of a surreal flat landscape of tiny pale pastel-coloured concrete buildings stretching in every direction as far as the eye could see.

Landing in Singapore was like being transported forwards through time to a squeaky-clean, super-efficient, futuristic space colony. Three months in the less-developed countries of Southeast Asia make you forget what Western civilisation is like. Everything is so neat and quiet and clean and easy and smooth and unfriendly and expensive. It's amazing.

Our last few days in Singapore have been horrible. Like waiting for your own execution, it's very hard to enjoy yourself when you know the axe is about to fall. We tried sunbathing but it started raining. We went to the Asian Kennel Association Championship Dog Show at Expo 3 - the little dog agility events were very entertaining but the show was essentially an exercise in avoiding puddles of dog urine. We visited Orchard Road to see the Christmas lights (it's very weird seeing Christmas trees and Santas and fake snow and reindeer and hearing carols when it's 32C - impossible to feel Christmassy at all really) but it started raining. We went to see a laser-light show at the Fountain Of Wealth at Suntec City, supposedly the biggest fountain in the world - very nice. We went to hear some carol singers at Downtown East Resort which was also very nice but again weird because it was hot and humid and I was sweating throughout the performance. Their rendition of "I'm Dreaming Of A White Christmas" seemed particularly futile. We visited Little India and ate dosas off banana leaves. We watched television. We played Boggle. We waited. We waited.

And now clip has gone home. I do not feel as bad this time as I did the last time she went home, because this time I know I will see her again quite soon, but I feel bad all the same. We have spent every minute of every day of the last six months together and it is quite a wrench to lose something so intrinsic to your everyday life.

Today is a traumatic day for clip, more traumatic than I think her friends and family might appreciate. It's the end of her adventure and she has to go home (it's impossible to convey the stomach-churning emotions of this event), she's flying all the way around the world on her own (quite a feat for someone who still can't go through car-washes on her own) and she's having to leave me behind again. She was the best travelling companion I could have wished for. I hope everyone is nice to her when she gets back.

Tomorrow I fly to Delhi.

We're famous!

We're being featured on the homepage of http://www.gapyear.com and there's an interview with us here

w00t

Posted by clip

I feel very strange. It is very nearly time to go home and although I am excited about seeing my family and friends, and there isn't anywhere I'd rather be at christmas time than with my family, I am very nervous about it too. Travelling has been our life for so long and going home doesn't feel like going home; it's like planning to go away from what we know all over again.

I too am very proud of what clop and I have done. It's surprising how you can get used to living out of a bag, moving on every few days and learning new languages, and after so long it doesn't feel strange anymore. It also doesn't seem like a year since we were planning it and packing our bags. We've seen and done so much and I don't think people at home can fully appreciate what it has been like. It's just been clop and me together as a team and it will be odd mixing with other people I know and including them in my life again.

I am worried that I will get home and everything will go back to how it was before we went away. I don't want to fall back into old routines but I do think it will be difficult not to. I am worried about getting a job. The easy thing to do is to go right back to what I was doing before we left, but I don't want to. I need for this trip to have changed my life, not just while I was away, but at home too. Otherwise, it's just been a nice long holiday.

I think I would feel a little bit better if clop and I were returning home at the same time so that we could get used to being at home, and try to fit in, together.

In an ideal world I think I would rather be going home for a two week holiday, and to see friends and family, and then return to my life travelling. I never expected to feel like this a few months ago.

Today's blog episode nicely illustrates the continuous perils of travelling.

It was Monday morning. My passport had already been at the Indian Embassy for five days but would not be ready to collect until Friday evening. Singapore Airlines had kindly arranged for us to fly for free to Singapore on the following Monday. We had booked accommodation in Singapore for Monday night. Everything seemed to be under control.

Hmm, almost a week to kill. What should we do? We've seen the local sights. How about a few days sunbathing on the beach at Mui Ne, three hours north of Saigon? What a great idea! And why not see if we can collect my passport on Monday morning instead of Friday evening and spend even longer on the beach? Another great idea!

And so we walked to the Indian Embassy and were made to wait for fifty minutes before Mr Murli Nair deigned to see us and answer our simple question. We walked into his office. There, lying in his desk drawer, untouched since the day I'd handed them over, were my passport and visa application form. Does this man have any idea that he has already ruined our travel plans in Cambodia?

"Yes," says the unlikeable Mr Murli Nair, "you can collect your passport on Monday morning."

Oh wow, thanks Murli.

So, on Tuesday, we got a bus to Mui Ne, spent half an hour finding a nice beachside guesthouse, chose a room, haggled a reasonable price, left our rucksacks on the bed and went to reception to check in.

Check-in Woman: "Can I have your passports please?"
clop: "This is (clip's) passport. My passport is at the Indian Embassy in Saigon having a visa processed. This is a photocopy of my passport and this is a photocopy of my Vietnam visa and this is my immigration form."
Check-in Woman stares blankly at the photocopies and speaks in Vietnamese to a surly bloke drinking beer at a table.
Check-in Woman: "Sorry, we need your passport."
clop: "It's at the Indian Embassy in Saigon."
Check-in Woman: "You can't stay here."
clop: "Why?"
Check-in Woman: "You no passport."
clop: "It's at the Indian Embassy! Look, here is a photocopy of my passport and here is a photocopy of my Vietnam visa and here is my immigration form.... and here is my driving licence.... and here is an identical copy of my passport photograph."
Check-in Woman: "Sorry, you can't stay here."
clop: "Fucking hell."

And so we had to leave. What a stupid rule. Where are foreigners supposed to sleep while they wait for visas to be processed?

After a while we found another, cheaper beachside guesthouse and checked in with no problems.

Then we realised, somewhat belatedly, that our Vietnam visas would expire on Sunday, the day before we were due to leave the country. There would be no time to apply for extensions. How would be able to get accommodation on Sunday night? Would we be fined and/or arrested at the airport on Monday? Immediately we rang Singapore Airlines in Saigon and asked if we could change to a flight on Saturday or Sunday; they were already full. We asked to be added to the waitlist for Sunday's flight.

A day later and we were still waiting. In desperation we sent an email to the Singapore Airlines staff in the UK, asking them to help. They wrote back within an hour to say they had confirmed two seats for us on the Saturday flight. Michelle Dee and Iona Payne are brilliant.

As we were leaving Vietnam unexpectedly early we tried to extend our accommodation in Singapore to include Saturday and Sunday nights. The hostel was already fully booked. It was a struggle to find a room in a different hotel for Saturday.

After a couple of relaxing days on the beach we returned to Saigon to collect my passport on Friday. We arrived at the Indian Embassy at 4pm, the time we had been given by Mr Murli Nair nine days earlier. We walked into his office. There, lying on his desk, untouched since the day I'd handed them over, were my passport and visa application form. We could not believe it.

The Unlikeable Mr Murli Nair looked up at us as though we were imposing on him, opened his hands and gestured towards the pile of passports: "Well it's not ready yet."
clip and clop, gobsmacked.
The Unlikeable Mr Murli Nair: "Which one is it?"
clop, gobsmacked: "That's me on top."
The Unlikeable Mr Murli Nair: "Can you wait ten minutes?"
clop, gobsmacked: "Right."
clip and clop return to the hot waiting room, speechless.

Ten minutes later we went back into his office.

clop: "Is it ready?"
The Unlikeable Mr Murli Nair, working on someone else's passport: "No. It will be ready at 4:30pm. I will call you."
clip and clop return to the hot waiting room.

Ten minutes later he came and gave me my passport with the Indian visa stuck in it, but turned his back and walked away before I could ask him why he'd kept my passport for nine days, ruined our travels in Cambodia, wasted the money we'd spent on our Cambodian visas and even then not had it ready on time, when it took him less than ten minutes to process.

We do not like you Mr Murli Nair.


We fly to Singapore this afternoon. Dam biet Vietnam and good riddance.

"This table ok? Sit here yes? Scramble egg? Vesheytaybull? With noodle? Vesheytaybull with noodle? Two bottle Spite?"

This is the sound of a person who can actually speak English perfectly well but is ordering some food from a foreign waiter and thinks that by adopting an extraordinary accent, making everything into a question and talking as if they're addressing a three-year-old they will help the waiter to understand the order and allow him to improve his English for the future.

The 22nd SEA (Southeast Asia) Games are well underway here in Vietnam, this year's host country, and the football tournament is attracting a lot of attention. Vietnam are doing quite well. Minutes after they had beaten The Philippines the roads of Saigon erupted with mopeds ridden round and round and round for several hours by a million over-excited, hooting, peeping, bandana- and cap-wearing, pan-banging, flag-waving, ecstatic screaming Vietnamese citizens. We sat on the pavement and drank beer and watched everyone zipping past. A waitress said, "It's funny. It's not that they like football. They just like riding around and making a noise."

Just south of Saigon the Mekong River completes its 4000km journey through Tibet, China, Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam as it spreads out across the Mekong Delta and drains into the South China Sea. Continuing our recent lives as package tourists we did the only decent thing and signed up for an all-inclusive organised two-day tour of the delta. I had expected a rural paradise of green rice fields, narrow waterways and earthy tracks. In fact the delta was more like a vast industrial estate studded with decaying cities and criss-crossed by ridiculously-wide muddy rivers and busy highways. We went to a rice noodle "factory", drank some snake wine (yes, it did), walked around a rice-husking mill and visited a floating market (pineapples were 8p each). We sailed up and down rivers in a variety of boats and saw the delta people going about their daily lives - mainly washing clothes, swimming in the water, lying around in hammocks and cooking. We saw riverbank petrol stations with their watery forecourts.

Everywhere we go in Vietnam we see many people with facial injuries, or with arms and/or legs missing. This is the legacy of the mines that still lie scattered around much of the country. The victims beg from tourists but not from Vietnamese people.

Our adventure is rapidly drawing to a close. The end of our trip is looming like a horrible sickening wall. clip flies home in just five days time. I fly to Delhi the following day to meet my friends Neil and Emma for our three-week Christmas Bamboozlement Tour of India.


I am very very proud of what clip and I have done together this year. All the incredible places we've been, all the amazing things we've seen, all the people we've met, all the things we've done, all the risks we have taken, all the problems we have overcome; there is enormous sense of achievement and I am proud of us. Well done sweetheart xx

When we first made the decision to leave home people said, "oh you lucky things!" and, "wow! I'd love to do that!" and, "oh I wish I could do that!" But whenever I asked, "well why don't you do it then?" they replied, "oh I can't afford it," or, "I'm too old, it's too late," or simply, "I can't."

Absolute rubbish!

We are not particularly young or brave or rich or lucky people. If you want to do it, you can do it; it really isn't difficult. And it's not as expensive as you might think. Our average spend during the last three months in Southeast Asia has been 8.89ukp each per day. This includes accommodation, food, drinks, beer, clothes, toiletries, insect repellant, internet, phone calls, entrance fees, tours, trekking, bicycle hire, motorcycle hire, motorcycle petrol, maps, books, games, laundry, haircuts, medicines, batteries, train fares, bus fares, taxi fares, boat fares, country visas and all other day-to-day living expenses. Two of us could travel comfortably for a whole year here, staying in hotels every night and eating in restaurants every day, for just 3240ukp per person. Start saving up!

As a life experience it must be hard to beat. This is the best thing I have ever done! If you are considering going travelling, I urge you to take the final step. Anyone can go. There are thousands and thousands of other people out here doing it right now. Some are 18, some are 30, some are 60! Nothing has happened at home while I've been away. I haven't missed anything. What did you spend your money on this year? What on earth are you waiting for?

But after a whole year of travelling, travelling becomes normal life. Going home will not be a return to normality because normality has become constant sunshine, 34C, living out of a bag and moving on every 2.03 days (our average this year so far). I am typing this into my palmtop whilst sitting alone on a beach in Vietnam at 6:30am, quietly watching the sun rise over the fishing coracles in front of me. I can hardly believe that I ever lived and worked in the UK at all. It's like a dream of somewhere that doesn't exist anymore, and I am scared to go home. I feel that I won't fit in when I get back. I expect to be bored and fed up. I don't know what I will talk about with my family and my friends. You can't appreciate the feelings of alienation unless you have travelled for a long period of time yourself. I am more frightened about going home than I was about coming away.

The other morning clip woke up with a look of relief on her face and gasped, "Thank goodness you woke me up! I was just about to have to do a tumbling skydive for Noel's House Party. And the worst thing was that there was only half an hour left before I had to do it and they still hadn't shown me how to work the machinery!"

Women eh?

I'm pleased to say that Vietnam is slowly growing on us.

We've had some extremely bad news and some extremely good news recently, and there have been a number of both frustrating and facilitative developments. On to those after a round-up of our travels through Vietnam so far.

Call us Mr and Mrs Lazy but, having struggled more than two thousand miles through Southeast Asia on public transport and with only a few weeks to go before the end of our year away, I think we deserve to relax and let somebody else do the hard work for us. In Hue we gleefully purchased two Sinh Cafe open tour coach tickets and have since been whisked around Vietnam in convenient air-conditioned comfort.

Moving south from Hue we spent a couple of hassle-rich days in Hoi An, a quaintish (if you screw your eyes up and wave your fingers about in front of your face as you might do for a scrambled porn channel) seaside city stuffed with cobbley streets, colonial-style buildings and hordes of irritatingly-persistent street vendors. We looked at the Japanese Covered Bridge and walked to the beach and back. Sheer adventure.

Next stop was windy rain-swept Nha Trang, another, slightly less quaint, seaside city. We attempted to walk to the market but got lost and spent half an hour staggering around lost in the heartbreakingly-poor riverside slums area. The people living there were very surprised to see us but were friendly nonetheless. Having said that, it was still a relief to finally find an exit (via some rotten planks bridging a stinking watercourse between two shacks) and clamber up a riverbank to the main road. We stood for a while and watched all the huge rats scurrying around the slums, then caught a cyclo back to our guesthouse - me and clip sitting on top of each other in what is essentially a pedal-powered pram!

From Nha Trang we tracked inland and upland to a place called Da Lat, a city originally founded as a mountain retreat by the French in 1893. Along the way we stopped at a lookout and bought fruit from some street vendors (surprise surprise) - I was disgusted to see fellow travellers bartering the vendors down from 3000D to 2000D for a bunch of bananas and still complaining that they were too expensive. 1000D is 4p. I sometimes think people take haggling too far.

Da Lat was very nice indeed - there were many man-made lakes and lots of beautiful alpine scenery. It was sunny during the day but chilly at night. The region is well-known for flower horticulture. By a stroke of luck we arrived on the penultimate day of Da Lat's 110 Year Birthday celebrations - there were fireworks and bands and crowds of people in the streets. We paid to go on a day tour of some local sights - a Buddhist meditation monastery (where we saw a hundred-year-old bonsai tree), the Flower Gardens (where we saw nine snakes basking on the grass between the plants), the Valley Of Love (where French newly-weds traditionally spent their honeymoons), the Crazy House (a guesthouse of bizarrely shaped and furnished rooms designed by an old lady who was too poorly to speak to us), the Last King's Palace (where we had to wear slippy shoe-gloves and where clip lost her jumper) and an ethnic village famous for its gigantic cement statue of a cockerel (the statue is to commemorate two local lovers who starved to death in nearby woods because they couldn't find a chicken with nine toes).

And then to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon until it was renamed at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Nowadays only the central area of Ho Chi Minh City is known as Saigon but it's shorter to type so I'll use Saigon instead.

Saigon is a vast sprawling low-rise metropolis with a population of ten million people. There are three million mopeds. There are lots of crossroads and junctions and roundabouts but there are few road markings and there are no Give Ways. People drive aggressively on whichever side of the road they like. The result is absolute bedlam. The traffic on every single street is a cross between the Stoke-on-Trent Easter Egg Run and the start of a GP500 race. The only way to cross the road is to shuffle forwards with your arms squeezed in and grit your teeth while the mopeds (hopefully) dodge around you.

Soon after arriving in Saigon we walked to the Indian Embassy and applied for my Indian tourist visa. The sign in the hot room said it would take four working days to process. We handed in the application form and the application fee and were told to ring a Mr Murli Nair the next morning to find out when the passport would be ready for collection. When we rang he told us, "Next Friday." This means that the visa is taking seven working days to process, a farcical total of nine days including the weekend. And this means that we will not have enough time to visit Cambodia unless we fly in and out, which we can't afford. Recently we have been in regular contact with the Public Relations department of Singapore Airlines in the UK and they had offered us a discounted fare on a SilkAir flight from Siem Reap to Singapore. Had the visa been ready earlier we would have taken them up on their offer but as it is we have had to turn them down. The good news is that they have agreed to let us exchange the voided/cancelled/unused sectors of our Round-The-World tickets for two free seats on a Singapore Airlines flight direct from Saigon to Singapore. This has saved us 360ukp! We are very pleased with the airline but sad that we cannot see Cambodia this time.

We visited the War Remnants Museum and learned about the Vietnam War. Most of the museum displays were galleries of black and white photographs taken by various wartime photographers. We saw photographs of American soldiers laughing and holding the heads of decapitated Vietnamese men. We saw photographs of Vietnamese men tied to the backs of American army vehicles and being dragged along until they were dead. We saw photographs of children burned by napalm and phosphorous bombs. We saw photographs of the massacres of South Vietnamese villagers. We saw pickled foetuses malformed as a result of the defoliant dioxins sprayed across the country. It's difficult to see how the museum can be biassed when the photographs show the evidence of what really happened. It was horrible.

We spent a day visiting the Ben Dinh tunnels near Cu Chi. This 200km network of interlocking, three-levelled tunnels was built during the French War and expanded during the Vietnam War. They were used by the Viet Cong when the Americans were trying to approach Saigon. We looked at some gory home-made traps and crawled through a 100m tunnel and a 60m tunnel. They have been widened so that big Western tourists can get in them but they were still very hot and narrow and claustrophobic. The Viet Cong sometimes stayed underground in them for months at a time. We don't know how they did it. Near the tunnels there was a shooting range where you could pay a dollar a bullet to fire any of the guns used during the war, but at distant cardboard animals rather than at innocent villagers and children.

Vietnam is a major disappointment. We won't come here again.

In Vietnam many people capture wild monkeys and keep them locked up in tiny bare cages or chained together in the open so that they spend every minute of every day of the rest of their lives fighting each other, trying to hide under rags and rocking back and forth in frustration.

By Southeast Asian standards Vietnam seems to be quite a rich country. Almost everyone is well-dressed and lives in proper brick buildings rather than wooden huts. The roads are all surfaced and in good condition. Mains electricity is supplied twenty-four hours a day.

From Vinh, route one runs all the way south to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon), just north of the Mekong Delta. The main places of interest to tourists are Hue, Hoi An, Nha Trang, Da Lat and Mui Ne. There are several tour operators offering open tickets along this route, so that you can get on and off the coach when and where you choose to. This is a very convenient way to travel but the constant stream of wedged-up tourists passing through and staying in these towns has now made spending time in them almost unbearable. All we get is constant hassle from street traders. Cyclo riders, motorbike riders, taxi drivers, photocopied-book sellers, hammock sellers, cigarette sellers, sunglasses sellers, flashing-lighter sellers, sweet sellers, newspaper sellers, chewing gum sellers, fruit sellers, camera film sellers, tiger balm sellers, postcard sellers, bracelet sellers, drink sellers, picture sellers, map sellers, shoe shiners. It is impossible to sit down or walk anywhere without being hassled. The traders even come into restaurants and queue up at our table to badger us. It wouldn't be so bad if they went away when we smiled and said, "no thank you," but they don't take no for an answer and stand there for ages showing us things that we don't want. It is fantastically irritating. Whenever we do buy something they try to rip us off.

Another irritating thing about Vietnam is that there are two fares on public transport - the Vietnam Fare and the significantly higher Foreigner Fare. Coming from much poorer Laos, where everyone pays the same price and where travellers are respected as people rather than being seen solely as easy targets for salespeople, Vietnam seems greedy, racist, tedious and actually quite dull. The only redeeming feature is that, unlike in Thailand, the Vietnamese people are not lying to us at every available opportunity.

Most Vietnamese people speak excellent English. In Hue we were approached by a straight-backed, toff-dressed, umbrella-twirling teenager who started thus in a plummy English accent: "Excuse me sair. Are you looking for some accommodation? My family runs a hotel near here. If you would care to take a look at our rooms I think you'll find that they compare very favourably."

It seems that every Vietnamese male chain-smokes cigarettes. Seeing as everybody smokes there is no need for a No Smoking rule anywhere. Of course this is entirely shit for non-smokers like us - we cannot eat or use the internet without people smoking all around us. Western smokers evidently love this state of affairs and are happy to puff away in places which would be considered anti-social back home. Thanks guys.