Canned

Making sure to get every dongs worth out of the hotel before we left we jumped on a couple of their bikes, free to rent, and headed into town for breakfast. Feeling a banana pancake craving we went to the same place we had dinner last night. About 10 minutes after ordering the little girl that took our order reappeared explaining they had no bananas, dunno why it took them 10 minutes to realize though, and before we could get out a word she quickly apologized and ran off down the street. Just as we began to think she perhaps took her job a little too seriously she reappeared running back through the restaurant smiling from ear to ear clutching a handful of bananas, at least we knew they would be fresh bananas in the pancakes.

Hoi An

After a quick wander around the old town in Hoi An we soon gave up as the sun was blisteringly hot (yet so many of the locals were still completely covered up from head to toe) and headed back to the relative coolness of the hotel to sit in the shade and take a dip in the pool while waiting on the bus.

Long Day

It appeared we were the last ones to be picked up by the bus as just about every seat was full not that it would make much difference as I would not get any sleep anyway with the bus seats I'm sure being designed by the same evil people that brought Vietnamese pop music into the world. Typically whenever I was close to dozing off the bus would make a routine stop which did allow me at least to get off and let the blood flow to the lower parts of my legs for a short time.

At one of these stops we encountered a pretty distressing situation where Dylan and I were standing drinking some cans of coke when a little girl comes up tugging on our clothes and pointing to the can meaning she wanted it when we were finished. Almost immediately after though another 4 or 5 other equally small girls who could not have been older than around 6 or 7 years old appeared, all of them crowding round staring up at us expectantly waiting for our 2 empty cans which unfortunately do not split 5 ways. It was a sudden reminder of the levels of poverty still in existence in Vietnam which being stuck on the government run tourist trail is sometimes not always in full view.

Old Town