'nam

After 5 months of teaching, our term (finally) ended and I was on holiday - well, for a week anyway as we do have summer school so unlike most teachers, we don't get the whole summer off!
I decided to go to Vietnam, as my uncle and cousin are travelling in SE Asia and it seemed a good place to meet up.

Nanning is a good point of departure for Hanoi.  There's a Vietnamese embassy here, for visas, and regular direct buses.  So, after 4 hours on a nice Chinese bus, and then another 4 hours on a more rickety Vietnamese bus, I made it to Hanoi.

After dumping my bag, I decided to look around the 'French Quarter' area where I was staying.  Almost immediately I bumped into my family and we decided to have a drink at 'Beer Corner'.  They had been travelling for a few weeks in Thailand and Laos, and had lots of stories to tell.

We planned to leave Hanoi (and its manic traffic) almost straight away. 

Vietnam is a big (long) country and we had a lot of ground to cover.  We tried to book a sleeper carriage on the 'reunification express' train but all the trains were full, due to the Vietname school holidays starting.  We were lucky enough to get 'soft' seats and sat on them for the next 13 hours, to Hue, beyond the DMZ (demiliterized zone).

Hue was the old capital of Vietnam.  Now it's a very peaceful town with a few old reirlics but not a huge tourist pull.  This was nice, we'd been inundated with people trying to sell us things from copied books to rayban sunglasses in Hanoi. 

We visited the old Citadel

and took a boat trip to a pagoda, which had beautiful views.

Our next stop was Danang, to catch a flight to Nha Trang.  Again the trains were full, with only hard seats available.  An alternative was a sleeper bus but we managed to find affordable flights instead.  Danang was a popular place for US soldiers to spend their R&R time and the China Beach there was sometimes used as an airstrip during the war.  Now it's a bustling industrial town with minor tourism.  Again we enjoyed being away from the touts and spent an enjoyable evening playing pool and cathing up.  My cousin had just learnt to play pool so she was very keen.
Early the next morning saw us on a Vietnam Airlines flight out of Danang.  Nha Trang is on the coast and one of the places in Vietnam where you can go diving.  I was keen to go there for this reason.  My uncle and cousin were just happy to stay put somewhere for a few days as they'd been on the go for so long.  The diving was fun, and we introduced my cousin to it.

She was a natural and became hooked immediately.  I would not be surprised to see her become a dive master when she's a little older.

Vietnam has a french history, pre-Communism and the US war.  I expected to hear more people speak french but this did not prove to be the case.  English was the 'tourism' language, like in so many places in the world.  However, Nha Trang did have a number of french restaurants and cafes and I must confess I enjoyed going there, rather than indulge in the Vietnamese food.  I find the Vietnamese food very similar to the chinese food that I have here so it was a nice change for me.

After a few days in Nha Trang, I flew back to Hanoi, from where I was taking the bus back to Nanning.  My uncle and cousin carried on to Saigon - I know, Ho Chi Min City, but everyone called it Saigon over there.  I was sad not to see Saigon, or Phnom Penh, the island south of the country, but these are reasons to return one day.