Dragons and Waves, Indonesia

Kanawa Island, about an hour out of Labuan Bajo by boat, was our base for Komodo exploration. Approaching the jetty in mid afternoon the shallow water was luminously turquoise - the kind of effect you normally only see in enhanced framed photos from Ikea. The island is tiny; you can walk the entire circumference within an hour; and is surrounded by an amazing shallow reef, home to hundreds of bright tropical fish, starfish, and anemones with resident clown fishies. The water was so clear that you could see creatures even without snorkel masks. A few times we even saw baby sharks swim by!

The first thing we did after marvelling at the island was sort out a tour to the Komodo National Park. A small boat took us out to Rinca island, where we were greeted with a 'beware of crocodiles' sign and a bunch of guides armed with forked sticks. They seemed very knowledgeable and chilled - only later did we hear that one had been bitten by a dragon a couple of weeks back and was still in hospital at the time! Oo-er...

Thankfully no-one got ambushed while we were there. I wasn't expecting to see many dragons but we were very lucky and saw several 2-3m long adults (huge enough when they're in the wild, can run faster than you and have poisonous saliva), plus a couple of younger, more active ones which loped about flicking their tongues and looking sinister. It was like being on the set of walking with dinosaurs, with added scaliness.

Incredible as the dragons were, our next wildlife encounter was even more awesome. We were taken to a snorkel site a little way off where we saw black fins sliding in and out of the water. I jumped off the side of the boat and was immediately face to face with a massive manta ray! Its body was almost completely flat with a wide mouth, long thin tail and a wingspan of 3m or more. It took me a while to start breathing again, during which time the ray glided silently up to me then pirouetted downwards and away. After that I saw a few more, once swimming with two together. Jon was with a group of three at one point. Being in the water with something that big and strange-looking was one of the most surreal and beautiful experiences I've had. Swimming with a family of 3 giant green sea turtles swimming in some coral later that day was nice too.

Kanawa Island has a PADI dive centre and given the massive variety of sea life it seemed the perfect place to give scuba diving a go. We were put in a group with fellow islanders Jos and his son Bjorn from Holland, kitted out with wetsuits and seriously heavy scuba tanks and waddled with some trepidation to the shallows for our lesson. We practiced breathing through the respirator, a very strange thing especially as the bubbles are so loud, and then swopping to our buddy's emergency supply. When we went to deeper water, teeming with fishies and coral, I found it quite tricky to get the buoyancy level right and had to be helped a couple of times when I started floating inexorably upward (I hadn't thought being unable to sink would be my primary concern).

After Komodo, we went back to Bali for our final week in Asia. En route we passed through Labuan Bajo, which is a small port town mainly serving as a transport hub for Komodo and Flores island - however it has the best Greek restaurant In The World (in my experience anyway). Why it is there is beyond me, but we just shrugged and enjoyed our chicken souvlakis. And drank local speciality Kopi Ende, which is brewed from coffee beans roasted with ginger and is fiery and wonderful.

Back on Bali we felt we had to stay at Kuta beach, where surfing came to Asia and the backpacker tradition pretty much began. As you might expect, it is now mostly up-market resorts and malls mixed in with tat-touting souvenir stalls and a lot of boisterous (but friendly) Australians. However, the surf culture side of things does continue and it was cool to see people wandering up and down with their boards. Plus, Balinese Hinduism is in evidence all over, with temples and houses festooned with bamboo decorations, offerings and incense. In the sky there are always kites, which sometimes have loud whistles or buzzers attached. It's a very lively place!

As always we wanted to get out on mountain bikes, so booked a day with Infinity Rides. Our guide took us high up above Lake Batur to ride some lovely sweeping single-track down volcanic foothills. It was good to get out of the city and go back to high-fiving farm kids again like in Vietnam. The trail was the most challenging we've ridden since back at x-biking Chiang Mai, Thailand (which is kinda another level), and reminded me a lot of some of the most fun bits back in Sheffield. There was a tricky soft sand section through a dry riverbed and some very technical rocky gullies. At one point I was riding slowly along a narrow track across a steep slope, and managed to hit a root and go straight over the handlebars. Jon was behind me and thought this very funny.

We were riding with an Australian chap called Bernie who videoed us all with his Go-Pro helmet camera - think I may need to get one of those. We kept riding short blasts and then stopping to chat about it, or eat guava fruit off a tree, or once to try and find a snake eating a frog (which was making a lot of noise but remained hidden). It felt like a proper Sunday ride out.

In Kuta there is a water theme park called Water Bom, where we spent a very fun day trying out all the water slides. It was very impressive - kind of like a water based Alton Towers, with pools and a 'lazy river' to tube between all the brightly coloured rides. Lots of them had rafts to sit in as you zipped along through rapids and drops, some of which were rather scary. For one ride called 'Climax' I had to get into a launch chamber which counted down from 3 before dropping me down a near vertical chute... that was my favourite. It was great to wander about getting wet outside all day and not be cold!

Odd pictures on the left from the trick 3D art museum. No fights with octopuses or sea snakes actually happened.

I wanted to have a bit more beach time in a quieter bit of the island, so we went down to Uluwatu on the Bukit Peninsula for a couple of days. It's the Southern-most tip of Bali and juts into the Indian Ocean. The waves are bigger and so the surfers are more experienced, and it was particularly fun to clamber between little surf shops down to a cave which opens to the sea, then back up the other side to watch them all from a cafe terrace (I know lots about surfing now. Apparently it is customary to dismount by quickly extending all limbs outwards and leaping back into the water).

We rented a moped to visit a couple more beaches, one of which was so secret that we had to go down a narrow track signposted for a hostel and then find some steps round the back which led down the cliff face to the sea. There was no-one else around except some shell collecting locals. Next we visited less secret but if anything harder to find Bingin beach, which is accessible only via a maze of footpaths stemming from a maze of back roads with very little signage at all. For a while we had a train of other people on mopeds following us, evidently hoping (despite evidence to the contrary) that we knew where we were going. When we did find the beach it was worth it - it was sandy, had a great ramshackle collection of buildings stretching across the cliffs and there were excellent smoothies to be had.

Uluwatu temple is perched on top of some very high wave-battered cliffs right on the tip of the peninsula. We were a bit dubious about it at first as it is home to some monkeys of bad reputation, which we'd seen about enough of back in Ubud. However they didn't trouble us and it was a good place to go for a bit of a walk and see some culture. The temple was originally built for Bali's animist religion, which was later absorbed into the current Hinduism. It is one of seven all built within eye sight of one another around the coast to worship the gods of the sea.

Our flight out of Bali was in the late evening so we had chance for one final Southeast Asian meal, at Jimbaran Bay close to the airport. The restaurants on the beach front all serve the same style of grilled seafood, and are all quite expensive. However we had a tip off the internet to try asking for a discount, which we tried at two places before they gave us a reasonable offer. It involved lots of dramatised whispering and going to see a pointed-out member of staff who took me aside and explained that they could perhaps do us a deal for exactly the budget I'd stated. The end result, though, was that we had a brilliant meal of grilled white snapper and marinated prawns with rice, veg and soup, while sitting at a table on the sand watching the sunset serenaded by a mariachi band.

The final, somewhat fitting end to our Asian Adventure was negotiating the final leg to the airport, only a few of kilometres away. We tried asking taxi drivers but everyone was determined to rip us off, telling us that it was 'impossible' to get a cheaper price after dark and that the airport was 'very far' (despite the planes thundering overhead for take-off and landing). Somewhat frustrated we decided to go with our typical walk-for-ages-carrying-all-our-luggage technique which always works out, even when we get a bit lost on the way. I don't think many people foot it into Denpasar International Airport but we did. We arrived sweaty but in time for a celebratory matcha milkshake and a coffee bun (Asian specialities both, which will be sorely missed), paid a very last minute fine for overstaying our visa (rather worrying being taken to a back office at a foreign airport) before finally catching our flight.

And so ends the tale of our mostly un-planned, fantastically exciting, rich-beyond-all-expectations 8 month voyage across South East Asia! We are basically coming back with a much longer list of places to visit than we set out with, but that's no bad thing. It has been a marvelous, fun and surprisingly cheap experience and we will definitely be going back! Someday.

- Kath

Island Hopping Indonesia

From Yogyakarta in central Java, we travelled to Mt. Bromo, an active volcano in the east. On the bus, our scam radar should have been blinking as the driver smiled at us a little-too-much... but instead we got off when we were told to at a "tourist information centre" which tried to sell an onward travel ticket for some obscene amount of money. Why did we get off? The last onward minibus was to leave for Mt. Bromo at 4pm, in 15 minutes time (!), so we hurried through the afternoon heat, laden with bags; a pack of taxi drivers stalking us. It turned out we weren't far from the terminal, and arrived just as the minibus was pulling out - but even as we tried to get on, we were stopped and told we needed to charter another minibus. Not likely, we thought, and finally elbowed our way on! Phew!

We had a few hours kip in a ragged little hotel in the village of Cemoro Lawang, some 1700 meters above sea level, and rose at 2.30am to meet with a couple of people for a torch-lit hike up to a high viewpoint. As the sun came up, the view was astonishing - not just for the sunrise, but for the early morning clouds which form a strange lake within the giant caldera from which Mt. Bromo protudes smoking away. Mt. Semeru sits in the background occasionally spitting out gas. A few hundred other people had taken jeeps another way up to the viewpoint, but that's cheating really - and on the hike back down we watched the cloud lake evaporate slowly as the day grew brighter, even if we were a bit surprised in daylight by how dangerous the hiking route actually was.

Cloudy Caldera

As we got back to the village, passing Tengger tribe-people who make a difficult living from farming in the uneven landscape of a volcano, we made our way down a path on the steep-sided caldera and crossed the fantastical "sea of sand" - now free of clouds - to the steaming Bromo crater. The sea is a little spaghetti-western with poncho-garbed tribesmen on horseback offering lifts, and becomes surreal as you pass a blocky Hindu temple and take a path enscribed into a lava flow. The crater of Mt. Bromo sounds more impressive than it looks; sounding like an enthusiastic kettle and looking like a sauna - but the sulphur is a veritable assault on the old nose.

The Sandy Sea of Sand

We took the afternoon bus out to Surabaya airport, but our plans went a little awry as the flight we wanted to Flores island was fully booked - so we instead had to get another few hours sleep in a nearby hotel and be up for a 6am flight east to the famous island of Bali, which gave us an aerial view of the ring-of-fire, a landscape of active volcanoes which make the tiny towns and cities that sit on them look a little silly.

Next stop was Ubud, the "cultural capital" of Bali, a town (or really; a series of villages) where homes look like tiny temples, full of carvings and decorative architecture and many with family shrines. Each morning the streets are dotted with banana leaf trays of rice and burning incence to avoid while walking. The island of Java was predominantly Islamic with amped up daily prayers from mosques at all times of day and night, but Bali is Hindu - which seems to mean less beef, more pork and nearly everything is the cause for a ceremony or celebration.

Java from on high and Ubud passing by

The home stay we stopped at for a few days was like lodging in a palace. It was nice to start the day there with fruit and jaja giling-giling (mini rice crepes with coconut shavings). The gentleman owner was, like most residents of Ubud, a musician - and we were invited to see him play in a 30-strong gamelan orchestra for a series of dances. The dances were a kind of shaking paranoid shuffle, with elaborate costumes and masks, and the music was a riptide of percussion and strong pentatonic tones with looping melodies. Many of the timbres were unusual, with some bells sounding like guitars and ringing bamboo instruments giving warmth. It was so wonderful. So much so we actually had a little lesson on Balinese percussion elsewhere in town - not that they will be letting us join the orchestra anytime soon.

Another great show is the Kecak fire dance. It looks as tribal as things get but was only actually created in the 1930s by a German painter to tell a story from the Ramayana to the groovy tune of a ritual trance chant. No instruments, the first two acts are just 80 voices in complex patterns of chanting, singing and shouting. The fire dance comes in the third act and features a guy with a broom kicking around some embers. Still fun - but a little worrying on the front row.

Music!

Around Ubud

To the south of the town area is the Sacred Monkey Forest, which is a forest with lots of monkeys who may or may not be sacred. They are very naughty. One minute in and a monkey had stolen my water bottle - failing to grab it he just stuck his teeth in and drank! The forest is full of broken temples and ancient carved bridges - all of which are a big violent playground for the critters... monkey babies were stolen and new baby monkeys probably conceived without even the semblance of shame. A couple of lady monkeys took a liking to Kath, and climbed over her dress to look for tasty morsels in her hair. I tried to persuade them off but one bared her teeth, and neither of us fancied rabies so we just pretended to calm down. The monkey must have found few morsels as she did jump off, thankfully, and we scampered out of the forest sharpish.

Little furry balls of evil

A short bike ride to the north of Ubud is the less violent phenomenon of "The White Herons of Petulu" where every sunset thousands of herons fly back to roost in a tiny village called Petulu. We got there with a little time to spare, and watched wave after wave of birds returning home. It's not so much spectacular as just strange how many birds try and fit in so few trees when there are plenty of other trees outside the village. Anyway, if you do visit then take an umbrella as things get a bit messy under those trees.

For an adrenaline fix we thought we'd try something new - white water rafting! It's a little like teamwork kayaking in unsuitable water, and for this the cascading river Agung around Ubud was perfect. There were more than a few meter high drops and our guide kept 'accidently' leading us under waterfalls. Great stuff! To remind us we're in Asia, the porters then carried all the gear and deflated rafts upon their heads to the van.

Herds of birds and daft rafters

Still needing a tad more adrenaline we booked a day of mountain biking with Bali Bikes, and ended up on an epic ride. It turns out that much of northern Bali is in a giant caldera. We were given a lift up to the rim and then rode around the edge for a little while, the sound of a joyous ceremony drifting up from a town below, the ocean to our left and the giant Mount Batur in roughly the middle of the caldera to our right. Soon, we were on gnarly single-track and I realised how rusty I was with technical riding as I skidded down on my knees. I took it a bit slower after that as we passed chilli, choko and coffee plantations. As the ground flattened out the surface became slippy with volcanic dust and ash, and then we were riding over lava flows from 50 years ago. The ride was only about 35km but was pretty rough and finished beneath the mountain at Lake Batur.

Bicycle!

And then it was time to move on, so we took a flight east again to Flores island. The plane was small and the airport at the little fishing town of Labuan Bajo wasn't much bigger. The town is a gateway to the Komodo national park, famous for it's dragons, and we stopped one night before shipping out to a nearby island to see how jurassic things could really get...

- Jon

Labuan Bajo

Indonesia - Racing across Java

Finding a smidgen of money left after Vietnam we decided to head to Indonesia based on glorious photos on the internet. For visa purposes we needed to book a flight out of the country before we arrived, limiting us very firmly to one month of traveling. The trouble is, Indonesia is a huge sweeping archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, and there was no way we were going to see it all. With some difficulty, we narrowed it down to three areas: first Java, the central most populated island; then the iconic backpacker destination of Bali; and lastly the Komodo national park.

Arriving in the capital Jakarta we were instantly hit by the tropical heat, even coming from Hanoi's humidity - neither of us have been anywhere this equatorial. The city is a massive 290 square miles and famous for its traffic jams. The old port of Sunda Kelapa was our first stop. It is the home of a magnificent fleet of huge wooden junk ships, the last such working in the world. Their masts and bows loomed over the harbour, which was busy with sailors loading and unloading cargo and cats strolling down gangplanks. It was dusty and noisy; nice to see when so much stuff is just put on for tourists.

Jakarta

It was my birthday while we were in town, so for a celebratory adventure we set off to Taman Mini Indonesia theme park, 18km from the city centre - by public transport. It certainly was an adventure! The well-organised Trans-Jakarta bus systems allowed an easy first 3 transfers, but then we arrived at a huge and hectic terminal full of buses, coaches, taxis and angkots (brightly coloured minivans) everywhere and no clue as to where our next bus (a T-15 mini-metro) was. Dodgy taxi drivers hassled us, we were pointed in 3 different directions and then a tropical thunderstorm broke over us! We sheltered in a noodle stall, wondering if we'd ever make it out of the terminal never mind to the theme park.

The noodle shop people pointed to an angkot and 15 minutes later we found ourselves dropped off at a mall called 'Tamini'. Maybe we got off too early? Another angkot stopped and we asked for 'Taman Mini Indonesia' - but the driver told us we were already there! We went back to the mall looking for some kind of secret back entrance but there was nothing. We must have looked very worried by this point because a passing family took pity on us and invited us to share their taxi. It must have just been the name similarity that was making everyone send us to Tamini mall!

Taman Mini Indonesia, when we finally got there, was amazing. The idea is to showcase the multitude of Indonesian cultures, environments and histories by condensing as much of it as possible into one park. Sounds a bit nuts - which it is - but in the best way. It's fantastically well put together, with full scale representations of island architecture, brilliant museums filled with art and information (all in English too), working temples for each major religion, gardens, cable cars, a Disney-esque castle(!), full costume parades with traditional music and mud-covered dancers, and a huge map of the archipelago terraformed in a lake!

We had a great time exploring, particularly the large dome-roofed exotic bird sanctuary which housed peacocks, owls, hornbills and cranes among hundreds of others. Jon posed with an extremely affable Brahminy Kite, and I tried to take non-blurry pictures of it all, with limited success. We were at the park for 3 hours and didn't see half of it - maybe we can go back sometime.

Taman Mini Indonesia

The next stop after Jakarta was Bogor, the city of afternoon rainstorms (get inside!). Our hostel had dirty sheets, a cold shower and cats fighting the rats for the scraps in the hallway bins. Still, the view of looming volcano Mount Salak's sloping sides was worth it.

Bogor - The looming Mount Salak and slow moving traffic

There is a world famous botanical garden, right in the centre of town, founded in 1811 by unusually forward-thinking British colonial type Stamford Raffles. You can easily spend a day there walking about (which we did). The zoological museum was a surprise - it's got a full blue whale skeleton plus taxidermies of some of the other local wildlife - including leopards, mongooses, bear-cats (?!) and a worrying number of venomous snakes (apparently 'abundant in our rice fields'). The garden itself features over 3000 species of mostly-tropical plants, has an orchidarium - I never knew vanilla was an orchid before - and is home to a colony of flying foxes (a type of big fruit bat) who all roost noisily in one tall tree. Really cool!

Bogor Botanical Gardens

Getting to Mount Salak proved a little challenging - internet information was sketchy to say the least, but with some notes we caught two angkots to a village near Mt Salak, where we popped into a tiny nasi padang place (rice with a buffet style selection of different toppings). The lady there was quiet at first, but then started chatting in broken English. We told her our plans, and she told us we were heading to entirely the wrong village and got us on the correct angkot to the hiking trail. Good job we met her!

From the start of the Mt Salak trail it was easy to find our way past a popular waterfall and towards Kawah Ratu ('Queen's Crater'). The track was steep and slippery at first, climbing through thick forest, but it widened after a kilometre or so. We saw lots of pearly insects but nothing bigger, although after the Bogor museum we were very cautious so as not to step on any leopards.

The path, or stream, started to go downhill and the jungle began to look distinctly primeval. There was the occasional whiff of sulphur on the breeze, but it took us another half hour to reach the crater. There, the jungle suddenly died away leaving a bizarre hole, full of columns of steam and strange blue-ish water from loudly bubbling pits. It was awesome. The smell of sulphur was so strong we started to get headaches, though.

The Kawah Ratu, me and a pearly insect

Moving fast across Java, we caught a night bus to the city of Bandung, caught 4 hours sleep in a dorm, then caught the early morning train to Yogyakarta - unwittingly ending up with first class tickets to enjoy the spectacular mountain scenery.

Yogyakarta is Java's cultural centre and base of operations for many ambitious art students, who cover the walls with elaborate graffiti. Batik is famous here and there are studios and shops down most main roads. We had a go at making some - it involves carefully drawing your design on cloth with wax, using a rather awkward little tool with a tendency to drip hot wax on your arm. The design is then tidied and painted with bright ink, which the wax blocks. The piece is then varnished and washed in boiling water to reveal the bright white lines in the final picture. Fun, but very labour intensive!

Learning to Batik and first class scenery

Yogyakarta also has a lot of music - some traditional, some street performers (particularly on the main shopping and youth hang-out street Malioboro), and some enthusiastic rock cover bands. We saw the latter at Grin Cafe which asks people to draw while they're there and then exhibits the best work. The Malioboro street performers range from buskers playing homemade guitars to groups playing xylophones and full-on bands with drum kits, singers and bamboo percussion. It gets very crowded along there in the evenings, especially with all the rickshaws and horse and cart taxis!

In the heart of the town is the old sultan's palace, the Kraton. We went to see the section called the 'waterkasteel' (the Dutch name for water palace), which is partly ruined but still has two bathing pools filled with water in a strangely Romanesque enclosure (apart from the exotic carvings). Apparently the sultan's concubines used to bathe here while he surveyed them from a tower... *ahem*. Surrounding the waterkasteel is a pleasing array of twisting backstreets with colourful houses and kids playing with kites, which was great to get lost in.

Yogyakarta

A local very odd speciality is a coffee called kopi joss. This is prepared at stalls near the train station, which lay mats down for their customers to sit on the pavement. They put local ground coffee into a glass, top up with hot water and quite a lot of sugar, and then finish by dropping a red-hot ember from the fire into the brew. This creates a dramatic hiss and (as you might expect) a strong smoky flavor - although it's best to remove the ember before drinking! Not quite as refreshing as an Indonesian avocado and coffee smoothie, mind.

- Kath

Coal and coffee.  Mmmmm.

Three Farewells to Vietnam

Farewell 1 - Sapa

The sleeper train from Hanoi to Sapa was a truly Orient Express esque experience - except with a shirtless snoring guard propped outside our cabin instead of champagne deliveries and murder mysteries. The train doesn't get quite up to Sapa - only as far as the town of Lau Cai on the Chinese border, as Sapa is a further 1,600 metres skywards.

The winding connecting bus takes you into a beautiful mountain range. The iconic image of Sapa, which doesn't fail to amaze in person, is the countless carved out rice paddy terraces down every hill - a staple of livelihoods of the local hilltribes along with herding mountain goats, and, in recent years, tourism. In fact, it seems tourism is becoming the ever more prevalent money winner - as you find out by stepping off the bus into a scrum of brightly garbed women, with babies snoozing in back-baskets as they argue and jostle to be the one to take you on a trek to their village.

A trek seemed like the thing to do, and we managed to go a slightly less traveled route; traversing a 14km slippy mountain path that veered slightly into the jungle but mainly skirted rice terraces and trout farms, passing some shy villagers and kids playing with machetes. Our guide was a quiet 17 year old called Sa from a local Hmong village who rocked up with Converse trainers and a sports jacket over her traditional dress.

Sa called a car and bundled us in to see the Love waterfall, which didn't look very passionate but is in the shadow of Vietnam's highest peak Fansipan (apparantly not pronounced "fancy pants"). Also we had a gander at Heaven's Gate which is the majestic nickname for the highest road pass in Vietnam (2,083 meters) and has amazing views of mountains across Laos and China - when there isn't a thick layer of fog between them and you. Ah well. We hired bicycles to have another try - and after an exhausting 2 hours climb we could make out the shadow of a mountain-like thing (maybe). So we had a doodle about on the alpine roads and explored some fun little tracks. Not many people cycle here as it's crazy steep.

Weirdly, Sapa has a very Christmassy feel. As it's notably chillier, especially in the evenings, hearths roar away in the corner of cafes, hot mulled wine is the tipple of choice and roasted sweet chestnuts are dished into bags in the town square - even the Red Tzao hilltribe women wear red and white hats not unlike Santa's own. Maybe Father Christmas comes here on holiday...?

As usual we tried a little bit of food prepared in the local style - a favourite being juicy ash-baked trout wrapped in banana leaf. Definitely one for a future barbeque. However, it's hard to compete with surprise cafe Sapa O' Chau - who do straight up fish and chips as genuine as Scarborough's finest, with imported mugs (well, imported teabags) of Yorkshire tea to wash it down!

A small festival was meant to be happening during our stay, which seemed quite fortunate - but an epic storm drove us indoors. We could actually hear the rain coming down the road towards us! The storm knocked out the electricity to the town, and by the time we dared venture out, the stage for the festival had collapsed. I don't think anyone was hurt, thankfully, and some festivities continued including flute circles and a captivating show of hilltribe women with umbrellas spinning on the spot as fast as possible!

We tried sewing our fave hilltribe patterns - the snail and the elusive cucumber seed

Farewell 2 - Hanoi, again

The old quarter of Hanoi dates at least back to a time when roads were not built for Range Rovers. Shops and houses, often 5 or 6 stories high, tower above the tight maze of roads and alleys - yet the buildings are very narrow - an unusual consequence of a time when tax was based on street frontage. Some buildings, called "tube houses" can therefore be a bit Tardis like and extend far back in a tax-avoidance architectural frenzy. A good example of this is a, now heritage, guild house on Ma May street which doubles as a museum, and has very kind attendants who will teach you the rules of Chinese Chess if you pester them.

Each street in the old quarter is traditionally for a different trade, and this is still somewhat evident. All the bamboo ladder shops are together, as are shoe shops, toy shops, etcetera... One thing they have in common is bustle and noise - a rare moment being the one without any motorbike horns - and all have hazard-course pavements of sitting people drinking lemon tea.

A great little show in Hanoi is at the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre, where puppets controlled from under the water get up to all sorts of sychronised, humorous mischief to live Chinese style music - with the occasional bit of fire to keep things spicy. A much more serious show is at the Hanoi Cat Tru Club which is a very avant-garde mix of warbled vocals and off kilter drums for a difficult but rewarding listen. At the beginning of the show they brought out a huge 1.7 meter long guitar and said hardly anyone can play it - and then didn't play it!! Rude. They let me have a go afterwards. I couldn't play it.

On the 11th of April, an eclectic electronic music showcase called the Hanoi Sound Stuff Festival kicked off at the National Museum of History. We went to to see Micachu (a UK alt-pop artist) but her set was fairly tame compared to the sound manipulation of Vietnamese group Dom Dom - turning live harp sounds and percussive noises into a violent soundscape. After their sets things went a bit awry with a train wreck of a show by Belgian singer Benjamin Schoos who led an over-enthusiastic wedding band - the singer climbing through the audience and rolling on the floor screaming "China man versus China girrrrrrl!!". OK, actually it was pretty amazing.

And lotsa good food here; bún chả (cold rice noodles with grilled pork and sweet sauce), chả cá (fried fish with salad to roll in rice paper) and the strangest... insects! We heard about a restaurant called Quan Kien (143 Nghi Tam Street) which serves creepy crawly cuisine so had to try. The fried white crickets and locusts in kaffir lime leaves were actually lovely. After the disconcerting initial crunch the taste is somewhere between crab and duck. Good news for the future of the ever expanding human race.

Farewell 3 - Cat Ba Island

Almost missed the bus here as we were busy snaffling noodles round the corner when the driver decided to leave 5 minutes early (surely a first for South-East Asian buses). Glad we didn't as Cat Ba Island is wonderful.

The big draw is that one might have a chance to spot one of only 70 golden-headed langurs (frizzy monkeys) that are left on the planet - all of whom are in the national park that takes up most of the island. We looked but didn't see any. There is plenty of other life, a lot of which is unique to this ecosystem. In our modest trek through the park we saw some crazy stuff like a tree covered in furry caterpillars, butterflies as big as your face, long spindly spiders that float through the air like a jellyfish (I kid you not) and a giant injured centipede being eaten alive by flies. Isn't life lovely?

A little further exploration on both a bicycle and, finding the island was bigger than we expected, a motorcycle - we saw some of the mangrove forests that line the North-West of the island and forested karst towers like fiercer versions of those seen back in Ninh Binh.

These formations also transform the seascape, most famously in Halong Bay and Lan Ha Bay which we visited in a wooden passenger boat, and kayaked through caves and lagoons under the stone structures. I gave into peer pressure and jumped off the 20 meter high boat into the jellyfish infested waters below (checking everyone jumping before me had survived intact). Our tour of the bays included a quick peek at a fish farm which floats in the bay keeping scuttling cuttlefish and a 60kg monster fish under the floorboards (much like a James Bond villain keeps a shark).

Elsewhere on the island is Hospital cave, so called as it's a cave and was used as a hospital during the war. Chock full of bats - the cave has some rather spooky acoustics and an indoor swimming pool (now unfortunately drained). Also used during the war was Cannon Fort (again, appropriately named) which stands above the town with astounding views over the harbour (all the better to keep the Americans at bay). On Cat Ba there are always birds of prey circling above and geckos scampering past below - the island being full of life as it is.

- Jon

Vietnam Cycle Tour - Vinh to Hanoi

Day 40 - Vinh to Quang Binh (125km with baby hills)

Out of Vinh, the land became hillier but maybe not for long as intensive quarrying is cutting away the landscape. We stopped at a petrol station to go to the loo and when I came out it seemed like Jon had wandered off - but it turned out that the petrol station attendants had invited him for tea (as you do). We ended up having a lovely conversation (in body language), drank several cups of green tea, guessed each other's dates of birth (a strange game) and exchanged a US dollar for dong to aid one of the guy's foreign currency collection.

All over rural Vietnam we were constantly being cheerily hello-ed and waved at by children, teenagers, grown men and the occasional toothless granny. One instance today was particularly memorable - a boy playing with his friend turned excitedly to shout with perfect timing to get a football to the crotch. The poor kid folded to the ground still trying to wave, and Jon's eyes were still streaming with laughter a few hundred meters later.

We pushed on an extra 20km thanks to a Cu Do sugar rush (a delicious rice cracker-ginger-peanut-toffee snack), and pulled in to Quang Binh village in a golden rice paddy sunset haze.

Day 41 - Quang Binh to Ninh Binh (75km with baby hills)

It was a good job we covered the extra distance the previous day as we slept through the alarm and set off about 2 hours later than planned. Breakfast was in the city of Thanh Hoa, and involved a sort of steamed rice-batter pancake rolled with herbs, pork and crispy bits (bánh cuốn), plus some mini burgers and fish sauce. Another new meal. I'm really going to miss Vietnamese breakfasts.

As well as cuisine changes as we moved further into to northern Vietnam, we noticed the cafés now had special smoking tables for customers, including tea pots in wicker cosies and large, intricately decorated bamboo tobacco pipes. We decided it best not to partake before a strenuous day of cycling however!

The previous day Jon had got a puncture from a pesky shard of glass so we'd changed the innertube. His bike now felt particularly rumbly, and after a bit of fettling we decided it was due to the slightly-incorrect size of the spare. We fixed the first tube and switched it back - drawing an interested crowd, who helpfully poked things and explained stuff in enthusiastically rapid Vietnamese.

We'd bought some pineapple from a cycling pineapple vendor (!) in Thanh Hoa - and ended up having a quiet break on a bridge over a rice paddy irrigation channel, looking like a scene Turner might have painted had he gone on holiday to Vietnam.

Days 42 to 43 - Ninh Binh

In Ninh Binh is a quiet neighbourhood between the bus and train stations which has become a minor hub for backpackers. It's still predominantly Vietnamese - students hang out in cafés and kids play in the street, but everyone is used to confused foreigners.

We went to a restaurant serving goi ca, a meal of fish wrapped in leaves with herbs and dipped in thick sauce, but initially staff tried to direct us to a Western style eatery. They were still wary as we tried to assure them that we weren't after pizza (on this occasion) - however they'd cheered up by the time we were ordering seconds.

One of the main reasons we stopped in Ninh Binh was because of the famous riverine karst formations there - sometimes referred to as 'Ha Long Bay on land'. The area is very popular with domestic tourists, as we discovered on our visit to Trang An grottoes. We cycled out to the entrance, a restaurant -come-harbour complex on a wide green river where we bought our tickets (something of a scrum - there isn't quite the same queueing culture as in the UK) and boarded a tiny boat along with a Vietnamese family. Our captain was a grinning lady who encouraged us to pick up the paddles provided to help her row. The boat was one of what seemed like a hundred, all fully loaded with tourists who seemed almost as interested in the few foreigners as the surrounding, breathtaking cliffs.

The trip was excellent, taking us beneath the mountains through six or seven river caves (or grottoes), many times very low and narrow. We had to duck to avoid hitting our heads on stalactites. In between grottoes we rowed through lush vertically sided valleys.

Day 44 - Ninh Binh to Hanoi (92km pretty much flat)

Our final day of riding. A guy at our hotel had offered to buy the bikes already, saying we could catch a bus to Hanoi, but we explained that having come this far, we kind of wanted to see it through.

The road was flat but busy. We were glad when we peeled off the new noisy dual carriageway onto the old lesser-used road, which passed through several towns and villages and was still busy but minus the big lorries and coaches. After a while there weren't really any gaps between the villages anymore, as they blended into the suburbs of greater Hanoi.

Arriving in the capital at last we were greeted by ferocious traffic, one-way systems and a very carefree attitude towards which side of the road one should drive along. Saigon may have been crazy, but Hanoi's older, narrower streets are on another level. I think our expressions probably looked a little manic by the time we were fighting our way through the hectic Old Quarter, the oldest and most squiggly part and also Hanoi's tourist centre.

Day 45 to 47 - Hanoi

After celebrating the completion of our cycle tour sub-adventure with a lavish mushroom hotpot, we turned to working out what to do with our bikes. We couldn't take them home, so decided we'd have to sell - the problem being our short time remaining in Vietnam. We would have to advertise quickly, but we still wanted to visit a couple more places so wouldn't always be on hand to speak with buyers... Tricky! Thankfully, Hanoi has much more of a bike culture than Ho Chi Minh City, perhaps because cycling around the many lakes is a popular pastime. We decided to take our bikes to a shop called the Hanoi Bicycle Collective to see if they could help out.

The Hanoi Bicycle Collective is part bike shop, part tapas cafe, set up by a Spanish expat to spread his love of electric bikes and cycling in general. The staff were friendly and immediately offered to hold our bikes for us until they were sold, which certainly took the onus off us. All we needed to do was give them a final clean, assemble all the various accessories we would be selling with them and say a teary goodbye!

Being relegated once again to pedestrian status felt pretty strange at first. We distracted ourselves by starting to explore Hanoi's Old Quarter maze of cool little streets and visiting its many cafés. We were only staying there for a couple of days though before heading off to Sapa, a mountain town in the far North. There would be more Hanoian exploration on our return!

Overall, our Vietnam Cycle Tour took us a month and a half, during which we rode over 1700km and saw an amazingly friendly and varied country. Every province had its own local food speciality, products and cultural peculiarities. The landscape went from mega-urban to pine forested mountains, palm-fringed beaches, epic coastal passes and green rice-paddy plains. There were no crashes, only two punctures and on the whole we actually felt safer on the roads here than cycling back in the UK. Plus we saw so much more than we would have stuck on a tourist bus and we enjoyed every day of it. We will definitely be going cycle touring again!

- Kath

Elevation profile from Vinh to Hanoi

Elevation profile for the whole journey - Saigon to Hanoi!