Fuck me it's hot here. And humid. Jesus. Fuck. Bollocks.
Fucking loving being back in south-east Asia though, although we nearly didn't quite make it. To enter the country I had to get a visa before leaving Australia, but as Kaori is from Japan, under the Geneva convention section 2.11b that makes her technically 'Asian' and so she didn't need to get a visa beforehand. What we didn't realise until we were on the plane here is that she should have had a flight out of Vietnam booked as well, so the ugly bitch with acne in Saigon airport's passport control wouldn't let her in. I got involved and all was well in the end though. I'd liked to say I used my good-looks and charm to persuade her, but no, it was the $20 bribe that did it. Typical woman.
Saigon is a crazy crazy place. The traffic is just something else - thousands and thousands of scooters flying down the roads with seemingly no road rules whatsoever. My guidebook advises you to "cross the road calmly and without stopping as this confuses the scooter drivers". Fuck me sideways - STOP?!?!? The last thing that's on my mind as I do a kamikaze run across the road and bounce of the scooters like a fucking pinball is stopping. Jesus Christ.
As for the question I left you all hanging on last time - what's the beer like in Vietnam? Fucking cheap, that's what it's like! It's about 45p for a big fuck-off bottle. It's called BGI and I've never heard of it before - my guidebook advises me that it is full of chemicals. It says 3.8% on the bottle but when you start hallucinating after half a bottle you know it's good shit.
The final advice from my guidebook is not to drink tap water, not to have ice in your drinks and watch the local food. So yesterday I went to a local cafe where I had an iced-coffee and drunk as much as I could of their complimentary cold green tea (made with tap-water no doubt), then went to the night market for a seafood dinner, had a few more bottles of chemical Ali's BGI and then stopped off down some dark alley to eat a mixture of raw pork and yet more seafood from a local street vender. I just hope I don't get the shits until I'm on that hot stuffy 5-hour bus journey I've booked for tomorrow.
Went to the War Remnants museum yesterday. That was right up there with the Cambodian torture camp & killing fields trips in terms of happy days out. They had photos of people affected by the agent orange chemical used by the US to kill forests so the Viet Cong couldn't hide during the war. There were men with no arms or legs, woman with their faces hanging off and children with two heads and all kinds of weird shit. It was like being back in Chorley I tell you. Kaori even thought she saw a naked child with a tail in the street yesterday...
He was actually just having a shit.