Around The World In 80 Waves

Vietnam and much of the South China Sea are largely sheltered by the Philippines, Borneo and Brunei.

It was for that reason (and I’m sure a degree of hostility to all things from the USA so soon after the war) that Colonel Kilgore’s quote of “Charlie don’t surf son” in Apocalypse Now was actually filmed in Baler in the Philippenes.

The surfing scene in the movie is entirely down to John Milius the screen writer who went on to write and direct the legendary surf movie Big Wednesday.

A surfer himself he could not resist adding some larking about in the water into the screenplay.

If I had my own squadron of Huey helicopters I would be up for making a dash down to Da Nang to the sounds of Flight of the Valkeries by Wagner, but sadly I don’t.

They do get good waves there as you can see, but it will take me at least a day to reach whatever is available, along with all the associated expense and grief and then the same for the return journey so I am going to pass on the opportunity.

It is a shame but I will shortly be in the Indian Ocean again and can gorge myself on the waves available there to make up for it. Charlie might surf in Vietnam, but Rob doesn’t look like he will on this trip.

As soon as I returned to Ha Noi I had to get changed before heading straight out to join the stag night drinks one of my surfing buddies Tom. Before I go any further I will state that the stag in this picture is not Tom, and in fact looks nothing like him, but I wanted to give you some flavour of the sort of mischief which the groom’s friends can get up to.

Tom’s brother and several of his friends from back home on the Surf Highway in New Zealand have flown in for the festivities and it isn’t long before the beer is flowing and the tone of the chat between the Kiwis and myself is heading towards the gutter.

I didn’t take any pictures of the night’s events and even if I had I wouldn’t display them here in line with the code expected from a stag do. However I can at least recount one of the nights event involving myself which at least will not incriminate anybody else.

At one stage I had perhaps taken the concept of trying to pick up women too far and a bit like the farmer you see here carrying two new born lambs, I had scooped up a diminutive local girl under each of my arms. I then proceeded to dance around the bar with them dangling down. Safe to say they were not impressed, even if I and the rest of the chaps found it very funny.

It was not long afterwards that we decided to wind up the proceedings. Most of the others opted for a taxi back but I decided I would go on a magical mystery tour to see if I could find my hotel on foot. As soon as their cab disappeared I wondered if this might be a mistake, but armed for the trek with pockets full of the beer bottles I had sensibly stocked myself with in our last venue I staggered on with the bottles clanking together.

Hanoi is normally an endless racket of moped horns, music and all kind of madness in every direction so it was quite creepy to be wondering around the place so deserted at 4am. I thought if ever there was somewhere I would get myself into more mischief than I bargained for then this was it, but managed to find my way back unscathed.

Then having managed to find my way home I was somewhat disappointed to discover the door to my hotel was chained shut when I got there, and that a message had been placed on the window saying that I should have been back before 3am.

After failing to get a response with the doorbell I could have taken the option to sleep on the doorstep until somebody woke up. However I decided correctly that kicking the door very hard and making as much noise as humanly possible might result in a more comfortable time in the land of nod. The person who let me in didn’t look too impressed but there haven’t been any repercussions since then, so I think I am allowed to continue my stay here.

Despite all the time I have spent at sea on this adventure I realised that this was the first time I had actually slept at sea.

Waking bleary eyed the following morning I was delighted to see this sight out of my cabin’s window. The silence is only broken by the wailing of the old ladies trying to sell you packets of Pringles and sweets from the row boats that they are moving from ship to ship. It could be worse!

Our fierce tour guide takes us all of to see a pearl farming operation in one of the secluded coves after breakfast. (Having exhausted all the possible variations of pearl double entendres in Tahiti I wont repeat them again here.)

The floating operation was not that impressive but it was interesting to see them implanting the impurity into the oysters to start the process which results in a pearl. I did ask Louisa if she wanted a pearl necklace while we checked out the jewellery in the shop but think the joke was wasted on her.

After the pearl farm all there was left to enjoy was the slow cruise for a couple of hours to get us back to the port. The scenery really is staggeringly pretty here and I have loads of pictures, none of which will do it justice.

I watch a few DVDs on my laptop to break up the journey back to Ha Noi. Traffic is a bit of an issue once we arrive and our tour guide Hao practically throws us out of the door at each drop off point to avoid creating a traffic jam. This means that everything is a bit manic and all the goodbyes to new friends made on the trip are somewhat rushed, which was a shame.

I have a few days spare before I have anything planned so I decide to take advantage of the opportunity to go out to Ha Long Bay where Top Gear’s Vietnam special ended up.

The three hour journey on a cramped bus is only broken up by being sent into a tourist shopping centre for twenty minutes. Although why they thought I might want to pick up some five foot high marble statues is beyond me. I also suspect they might use up more than a fraction of my weight allowance on the remaining flights I have before returning home.

When we arrive at Ha Long City I am a tad dismayed to see how many boats are going to be heading out to the bay. There are hundreds of them so the chances of getting a secluded spot to ourselves are rather slim.

While we are ferried over to our ship by its launch, I enjoyed all the sea eagles which were in the sky and diving down to pick out some lunch from the South China Sea. There was a cosmopolitan bunch of tourists on my boat from the Netherlands, Spain, Brazil, Germany and the UK.

I am staggered by the quality of the room I have been allocated once we get to the boat. It is better than most of the hotels I have stayed in world wide.

there isn’t time to enjoy its luxury for long though because we are fed a banquet for lunch and I gorge myself on the vegetables on offer. All too frequently I have to make do with junk food because it is easy to source on this trip so the chance to stock up the vitamin bank is too good to miss.

The only other single person on the boat is Louisa who you see here ejoying the view of some of the two thousand islands that we are cruising eastward through on our first day.

We had sat next to one another on the bus to Ha Long City and I discovered that she hails from Sao Paulo in Brazil. The two of us got on well and spent most of the next couple of days together.

The first stop for our cruise is the Surprise Caves on one of the islands, which are huge.

Our tour guide is quite a fierce local lady and Louisa and I are quick to ditch her and the rest of the group so we can explore the caves on our own without being ranted at.

Immediately after leaving the caves we are transferred by the launch to one of the floating villages in the bay so we can be let loose on a kayak.

Despite an inexplicable tendency to veer towards the right, Louisa and I had a lot of fun finding a little beach with it’s own cave to explore. I am not fond of sitting in enclosed kayaks as a rule but really enjoyed the hour of meandering around the limestone rock formations.

Our launch collected everybody and took us to another beach towards the end of the afternoon. Not having been in the water since Japan I couldn’t resist taking a swim in the bay there.

The sun went down while I swam and I was able to get a few pictures with my GoPro all the while paying attention to the eagles circling overhead in case one of them got ambitious and though they might try and drag me out!

We were picked up and then ferried back to our boat to enjoy drinks on the top deck before another feast for dinner.

The number of boats here wasn’t a problem in the end, and as I downed a few beers I got this picture of all of their reflections at night time, shimmering in the still water. A fantastic day

After arriving in Hanoi last night I did go out and enjoy a few beers as well as a great conversation with Jeremy and Bridget, a couple who work in conservation work here in Vietnam. However I was done in after all the drama of the day so it wasn’t a huge night enabling me to get started quite quickly today.

After a delightfully painless, albeit lengthy upgrade to my computer to Windows 8.1 I can now start the Vietnamese leg of my adventures. Keen to turn the frowns of the last two days upside down I say Good Morning Vietnam and am keen to get out and in amongst it. The first thing I am surprised by is the lack of Huey helicopters flying through the air upon arrival here.

For anybody of my generation who grew up watching films like Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now, Rambo, etc. you would be expecting a squadron of the attack helicopters overhead at any moment based on the one sided impression of the country that all portrayed.

However I should point out that my usual reconnaissance mission on foot to get the lay of the land around the old quarter of town where I am staying does actually leave me feeling like I have just been involved in urban combat.

All the pavements are taken by the mopeds which have been parked upon them leaving pedestrians to walk in the road. Anything you can imagine, and plenty of things you would have thought impossible for a moped to carry, will then whizz past your ears and legs leaving you anticipating a deadly collision from some unseen assailant at any time.

I took this picture trying to cross a road and whilst I wouldn’t condone larking about with photography in the middle of the road in front of oncoming traffic as a rule, I would say that taking the snap was only marginally more dangerous than just crossing the road itself. 

It is an experience I can best describe as stepping out into a mechanised swarm of moped bees all of which act independently and without any correlation to those around them.

Somehow it all works and I haven’t seen anything close to a collision, which is probably due to the sensibly slow speed with which everybody moves about. However the Green Cross Code Man would be having a fit. (As an aside on him, did you know that David Prowse who portrayed him also acted as the physical character of Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy. His voice was dubbed in later by James Earl Jones.)

Another day has been wasted because British Telecom locked me out of my email account and insisted I must change my password, which took two international phone calls on hold even to just discover that fact. I really don’t understand the point of setting up security passwords etc if the company is able to just ignore you using it all correctly and lock you out. I am always told it is with my best interests at heart, however it frankly feels like unwanted attention in affairs that are nobody’s business but my own.

I am already staggered that to maintain my email address with BT (vital for a number of administrative tasks such as banking, amending plane tickets, etc) I have to pay a fee when hotmail, gmail, etc are free. The alternative is changing passwords and emails on every system I have ever logged into since the start of the internet, which brings tears to my eyes just thinking about it!

That I also have to put up with them (and gmail, microsoft, vodafone, … the list goes on) meddling with my account at considerable inconvenience and cost to myself each time they decide to ruin my day, has me ready to kill somebody. Don’t think I am joking about this either. I sit here conjuring up slow and painful deaths for the morons who set up systems so badly that they are of no use to anybody, usually at the point when the poor sod at the rough end is absolutely depending on it. Wankers is all I have say beyond that. I’m sick of them.

I am tired of all the technical problems on this trip now, they are just a boring waste of my life that regularly costs me the ability to be doing something so much more worthwhile. That they are almost always caused by companies interfering with things that I have set up perfectly, just because I happen to be signing into systems from a different country is infuriating to say the least.

So it is with mixed feelings that I am about to attempt the upgrade from windows 8 to 8.1 using the long overdue service pack which should do sensible things like replace the start bar and give me a computer that I at least recognise, even if not actually enjoy working on all the time. Downloading the update will be problematic enough, but if there are any issues installing it I have already decided to enjoy smashing this PC to pieces. I came on this trip to escape this rubbish! Wish this laptop luck, it may need it.

Unusually for me I actually arrive a few hours early at the airport, but in a scene that resembles far too much of my existence on this planet things don’t go according to plan from there.

Keen to check in early and ditch my cumbersome baggage I rock up at the check in desk and am immediately asked for my Vietnam visa documents, which of course I do not have. I soon discover that these are only available from Vietnamese embassies or via an online process that takes two days. Bugger doesn’t quite cover it!

I should have investigated such things I suppose but after having been warned of the visa requirements of other countries when buying my round the world ticket if they were required, I incorrectly assumed that sorting one would be possible upon arrival in Vietnam like most of the other countries I have visited.

The upshot of this lack of key information in my planning was an extremely manic three hour period which entailed international calls, texts and emails, payments to an agency in Vietnam and a bloke screaming around Hanoi on a moped on my behalf (in a very unlike Jeremy Clarkson way) trying to get the necessary documentation together on the slim chance of getting it all done in time for me to board my flight.

Throughout my life I have repeatedly told bosses, family, etc that I don’t mean to be such a walking disaster zone with regard punctuality, but that in fact I am blessed with a talent for chaos in this field which has meant that I have missed planed, trains, boats, etc when really there shouldn’t have been any likelihood of me doing so.

On this occasion I feel that because I managed to get this document sent to me from Vietnam and printed off in Hong Kong in under two and a half hours I deserve a medal. That it was achieved communicating with people more familiar with two languages that are not my own is bordering on a miracle!

I run through the airport and get on board the flight with little more than seconds to spare. However all of this nonsense then means I arrive in Hanoi a couple of hours later not having had any opportunity to book a room or even know where I should be going upon arrival. I have no choice but to sit on my bags on the floor of the airport whilst speed reading my guide book and trying to factor in the arrangements for a wedding I am attending here next week. I manage to get a room and a cab to take me there, but by the time I arrive you could certainly argue my fuse has been a tad burnt down by the days events. I needed a beer…

I have run out of time in Hong Kong, which translates to Fragrant Harbour in Cantonese. The smell hasn’t done anything for me though so I pack my bags for Vietnam, which is up next on my itinerary.

It is time to say goodbye to the Ibis hotel which has been my home for the last few days. It was lovely to have allowed myself a modicum of comfort and I enjoyed having my own space whilst staying there

I just have time before heading for the airport to offload another postage parcel full of souvenirs that need to go back to the UK.

It certainly lightens the load I have been carrying on my back so far through Asia, but I am sure it wont take long to find other tat to replace it with!

Not far from Bruce Lee’s house in Kowloon I spotted this Liverpool Football Club themed kindergarten. I know the Premier League clubs are always looking to nurture young talent, but I fear a Kindergarten may be taking things a  bit far.

As a consequence I am hoping this has been set up by an ardent fan who just suffers from a limited imagination.

As I walked back down the hill towards the harbour my path took me through the night markets which spring up all around temple Street

I am sure you could pick up just about anything you might want as well as plenty of thing you probably never will desire too whilst shopping here. Lots of fun to wander through the market though.

The priceless experience however is seeing Hong Kong Island from Kowloon after nightfall.

The skyline is magnificent and so many of the buildings have had light shows added to their standard construction it actually compares with Las Vegas in its extravagance.

Bruce Lee was a Hong Kong American who is fairly credited with helping to change the way Asians were presented in American films, because his films and TV characters were one of the first to bridge the gap between the east and the west.

Although his training was in the Wing Chun style of Kung Fu he felt it was too restrictive and went on to develop his own martial art called Jeet Kune Do, which can be seen as a forerunner of the various types of Mixed Martial Arts that have exploded all over the world in recent years. 

He was undoubtedly one of my heroes when I was growing up as a result of watching all his martial arts films, so I had to go on a grail quest to explore the areas of Hong Kong where he had grown up and gone to school.

This building across the other side of Victoria Harbour in Kowloon is his former house. Try to imagine me in a pair of shaolin pajamas practicing Bruce’s famous one-inch punch outside paying homage to the great man. (Optional sound effects can be added)

There is also this fantastic statue of him on the harbour side in Kowloon.

A few random Bruce Lee facts for you:

Bruce kicked the backside of Chuck Norris, Jackie Chan and Batman on screen.

Steve McQueen and James Coburn were pall bearers at his funeral.

Most martial art films of the era were sped up to make fighting scenes appear fast, but Bruce’s moves were actually too fast to be captured on the regular 24 frames per second film. As a consequence they had to film him at 32 fps, and run the film slower so you could actually see more than just a blur.