Stormy Weather

We had a fab time in Hoi An, despite the weather. We managed to squeeze in a cloudy morning on the beach on our first day, before the "rainy season" started living up to its name. It rained heavily for the rest of the day, the whole of the next day and most of the day after that. On the plus side, it did cool things down a bit - it was actually quite pleasant to be drenched in rainwater rather than sweat for a change! Also as a Yorkshire lass, I'm used to wet leading to cold leading to miserable, but it's just not a problem here. The rain would have been heavy enough to cause flash floods back home, but they didn't have any problems in Hoi An at all, apart from the power going down for about 15 minutes at one point.

Hoi An - very pretty!

We visited the ancient Champa ruins of My Son, which was particularly atmospheric in the rain. We didn't have much time there; on the way there our tour guide placated everyone by explaining that this was because it was very small and most of it was just rubble anyway, so there really wasn't very much to see! It was a great place to hang around though - all very Indiana Jones and well worth hanging around until the last minute to get a glimpse of the place without loads of tourists, even if we did nearly miss our ride home.

Jo getting wet at My Son

Hoi An was just a great place to hang out and I'm not quite sure where all the time went (although quite a bit of it was spent in several of the fantastic restaurants, bars and patisseries). We took full advantage of our one (semi-) sunny day by spending it all on the beach or in the sea, and even in the rain we managed to go swimming at least twice a day, either in the sea or the hotel pool. The beach at Hoi An was great - really big and long, lovely sand and very clean. We camped out on a couple of loungers at one of the sea-front restaurants, with drinks and snacks on hand from Ms Man and her family, and then fantastically fresh seafood for lunch, caught by her husband that morning. The sea had great big crashing waves, great fun for playing around in for 5 minutes until a particularly big one comes along, crashes on top of you and sends you gasping and spluttering for the shore. Josh described it as like being sick backwards, but that didn't seem to stop him!

Strawberry Mojito and wifi - what more can a man want?
Sea, sand and sun
Restaurant workers and hawkers digging for crabs while trade was slow.

The train journey from Hoi An to Nha Trang was pretty hard work. There are only three trains a day and none of the times were very good, so we ended up spending 10 hours in a soft seat during the day rather than taking a sleeper overnight. The whole 'overland' idea is starting to feel a little tired now and I'm really glad we've only got one more long train journey left. The train was quite comfortable really, but it was pretty grubby and they had TV on really loud for at least 6 hours. I spent 2-3 hours trying to ignore some really bad play, which seemed to consist of some annoying girl constantly breaking into ear-splitting cries and thought the next one couldn't be any worse. They then played a video of small children singing songs and dancing for about an hour. The only way to get through it was to thank our lucky stars that we weren't trying to do the journey with a hangover.

Train departure board, Vietnam-style.

We're living it up in Nha Trang at the moment. Spent most of yesterday hopping between pool, sea and bars. Luckily they're all pretty close to each other. We were supposed to go on an islands and snorkling boat trip today, but the weather looked too wet and stormy so we pulled out. In fact, I think it might be the end of our beach-going for this holiday as tropical storm Ketsana (soon to be Typhoon Ketsana) makes a bee-line for Vietnam. It's set to hit Hoi An, so we're glad we're not there any more. Looks like Nha Trang will see nothing more than a few storms, but probably enough to stop us hitting the beach. Fortunately there's a spa nearby :)