on to nha trang

the food in hoi an was some of the best we found throughout vietnam, and the remainder of our stay was largely spent flitting from feast to swimming pool back to feast, with a spot of night markets and window shopping before finding a pleasant bar on the river bank to finish the day off with a few ice cold larue beers.

several days passed and it was time to continue down the coast, in an overnight sleeper bus, to the coastal town of nha trang.
the transport in vietnam is pretty impressive: far exceeding what you'd expect from a country still clearly licking it's war wounds.
we've since found ourselves on several sleeper busses - which have aircon and comfy chairs that recline all but 180 degrees into an almost flat bed.
with a good book and a charged ipod the 14hr journeys are doable - so long as you don't look ahead at the driver's lack of adherence to anything resembling road safety.
much like the motorbikes, the rules of a 'nam road say,
"you can drive anywhere you want to, in any direction as long as you let everyone know you're there by constantly honking your horn."

for overnight busses this rule can be extended to overtaking three trucks on a blind corner of a mountain pass with your headlights off ("to save petrol").
thankfully the angels, st christopher, my gran and my mom's ring that I wear for good luck all ensured that we made it to nha trang (and every other destination to date), in one piece.

they say that if you travel with your partner it'll "make or break" your relationship. luckily for us, it's doing neither - as i figure we're already "made" and our good times far outweigh the bad ones.

i can tell you this, though - the occasional bad times are as predictable as the tides:

when you spend 14 sleepless hours being jiggled about on a bus, and arrive in a new town at 6am with a desperation for the bathroom that causes blindness, and the driver chucks your expensive backpack into the road mud, and as you battle to maneuver your arms into the day back on your chest and your big bag on your back, ten men surround you with their guesthouse flyers and another seven hound you to get onto their cyclo and all you want is a cup of coffee and a wee ... you will have one if those bad times.
but post-caffeine, and with some guidebook time-out, invariably we orientate ourselves and send one person out to scout for our new home.

this, like many more, was how we spent our first morning in nha trang.