We both slept like a log lastnight, we were so tired. The bed is massive again and we were both so tired we were asleep as soon as the lights were out. I woke up when the alarm went off, no sooner...and Liam was about a meter away from me! We both really struggled to get up today but we'd booked onto a tour so we forced ourselves down to breakfast.
Breakfast was all you can eat buffet ( we really need to stop doing that because I can't resist stuffing myself for the sake of 'getting my money's worth'). We also took some food for lunch including..wait for it....laughing cow cheese triangles! Amazing!
We caught the tour bus at 8am and collected a load of other people, there were 20 people in total. The tour guide was a proper full on German guy, he was really fat, shaved head, combat shorts, shirt with his belly button hanging out of the bottom and big boots. He spoke like zees Yar? And Liam couldn't stop staring at his stomach for the 1st ten minutes!
We were so tired we slept for about 40 minutes on the way there. We got to my son holyland, and it was blisteringly hot and humid. Sweat was dripping from every single one of us the whole time and a lot of people, including me, actually had wet clothes by the end. Apparently it was only 32 degrees but we don't believe it could have just been that it felt so much hotter.
My son is a unesco site now as of 1990 something, it was a centre for worship during the reign of the 'champa kingdom'. The cham people were influenced a lot from Indian culture. A lot of the buildings were also built for the kings, to be closer to god or shiva. There were some odd stone bowls with smooth rocks in the middle dotted around the complex, apparently the women would go there and pour milk over the stone and wait for it to pour out of the bottom before drinking it and wishing for fertility. Themilk was supposed to be impregnated with shiva sperm or something weird. The guide had a weird accent, said a lot of foreign words, said sperm a lot, and in general it was quite difficult to grasp the full history of the place. Its a big area of ground covered with temples, pillars and the ruins of lots of religious monuments. It must have looked fantastic but most of the buildings were destroyed by american bombers in the war which is a real shame because you can tell the place was wonderful.After spending only about an hour or so looking around we slowly made our way back to the bus, which we then had to sit and wait for for nearly half an hour. It was a bit irritating because we paid to get into the sight and cold have spent longer looking rather than coming out after a relatively short time and sitting around doing nothing.
We again slept practically the whole way back. We went up to the hotel for the sake of the air con more than anything and sat eating our lunch with an episode of the walking dead on the iPad. We then went down to the pool hoping to catch some sun but by the time we got down there it was actually really overcast and about to rain! I got in the pool and had a swim anyway before heading back up to get changed then head out to the old town.
A few streets down we spotted a barber shop and Liam went in for another cut throat shave. The little man in there didn't just do his beard he did a full on cleaning up of his entire face, he shaved bits that didn't even have hair, from his hair line, round his ears, nose. Then he got out these weird instruments which I didn't like the look of and started poking around in his ears. When asked apparently he was cleaning them, and there were a few pictures around of him doing it with other people. He scraped and prodded for a couple of minutes, liam liked it at times and was a bit uncomfortable at other times, but then in he went with some big tweezers and pulled out this massive chunk of earwax from right inside his ear. He did the other ear and didn't get much out really. I was persuaded to have a go despite not being too sure if I wanted to or not simply for hygiene reasons. I didnt think the tools were sterilised, god knows how many ears they had been in. He didn't clean anything after it being in Liam's ears before poking in mine! He only got a tiny bit out of my ears, not even worth it really but whilst he was doing my left here it popped 4 times which felt wonderful because they've not been quite right since the plane journey!
Afterwards we found a nice little cafe and sat trying to figure out where we're going next and how we were going to get there over a couple of drinks. We then decided to move on and try another cafe, but we stumbled across a part of the river that was just lovely. We walked through lots of fruit and veg stalls, then suddenly we were on this stretch of river with restaurants and cafes all the way along. There were boats and people on the river banks selling various things or watching the world go by. We found a little restaurant with an upstairs section, we were the my ones up there and it as nice looking out over the balcony and watching the boats and the people in the street. We each had a different type of spring roll for starter, I had grilled fish cooked in a banana leaf with rice, Liam had rice with sautéed beef and onions. Then he had icecream and I had flambé banana...delicious food yet again and for not too much money.We walked down the river and couldn't believe that we had said we liked the town yesterday when we had hardly seen any of it. Just 5 more minutes of walking had taken us to a completely different area even nicer than the previous lot. It was dark by then so all the lanterns were lit and they were all reflecting off the water. It was so beautiful, so much so that we're considering spending an extra night just to have a good chance to eat at a couple of the restaurants and get a proper look at the whole place. We heard some music so went to investigate and there was an art and cultural performance going on with dancers. I absolutely loved watching them, we watched for a few minutes but then decided we would make sure to go back tomorrow at the right time and get some of seats to enjoy it. On our way back to the hotel we saw some bars that were potentials for tomorrow as we'd like to go out for Halloween night, and I was very happy to realise that we had many many of our own kind of lanterns for Halloween with them all being hung up around the town. We also saw loads more places with gorgeous art work. Everywhere we've been in vietnam has the most gorgeous art that I want all of the time, we will probably end up buying something and having to pay to send it home.
We got back, and I'm currently waiting for my Skype session with the girls and have my strawberry milk at the ready for my 'pink drink' to have with them. Tomorrow we're having a lie in until 9am before hiring bikes and exploring on the bicycles for the day.
