Singapore - Is a FINE city

Singapore will kill ya (if you deal drugs) and will strike you down (with a huge fine if you litter). Finally some order to this madness that is Asia... who says that nanny states are a bad idea? bring back some discipline, like hangings, into England that's what I say!.

We arrived in the city at 11pm after a two-hour trip down a river and a ten-hour trip on a train, that stopped at every station for about 15 minutes... why why oh why did it do THAT!!! The only reason we could see was so that it would be the only train in Asia to get in on time. If you build in 3 hours of waiting time at every station any train will arrive on time.

The train, to add insult to injury, dropped us off in the middle of nowhere with not a tube line in sight. We finally got a taxi by a very nice man who ripped us off for the fare.. still in Asia then! Or maybe that is just taxis drivers the world over (dad you can confirm or deny).

Our hostel is Uber hip and cool and it says so on its website so that you know it. They do have free coffee and pool and Internet which is cool, but I am not sure about the uber hip bit. We stayed in a dorm for the first time last night (very expensive here) which was fine, a bit strange sleeping in a room with strangers and not sleeping together but we will have to get used to it from now on.

Our first hostel

We only had the energy to walk up the street to the main shopping centre on Orchid Road yesterday. Loads of signs saying "litter and we will kill you" everywhere and yes, you guessed it, watched a film (great way to make you think you are doing something when you are in fact sitting in an aircon room on your arse). "Knocked up" was very funny along the same lines as 40 year old virgin. I think that El took me to see it to make me / her broody but I think it might have done the opposite ;-)

The city has a similar mix of races to KL but a lot more cosmopolitan. On first impressions I really like it here, like Hong Kong without so much energy but with more open green bits.

A traditional Singapore Chilli crab

Off today to the botanical gardens to give El a dose of flowers, as she needs it now and again, and then off to a island so we can ride on a cable car, and then to Raffles for a Singapore Sling.

Terren Negara - the Rainforest of Malaysia: how many leeches did you get?

A 7-hour train ride, and a 3-hour boat trip saw us arrive in Terren Negara, the town at the edge of the jungle national park, a hugely popular place for trekking and wildlife-spotting in real rainforest, thought to be the oldest rain forest on the planet!

El was still pretty bunged up so we stayed in the first place that looked nice and headed out for dinner. Once again we were faced with pokey restaurants selling fried rice and fried noodles and little else so realised that the jungle was not going to be a culinary treat!

We were too broken to get up early so we had a nice lie in and after a leisurely breakfast, headed into the jungle for a walk. There are thousands of square kilometres to explore but around Terren Negara there are well-sign-posted trails that become sparser as you head away from the village.

We headed to the main attraction - a 450m canopy walkway , "the longest in the world!" where you walk up in the trees. It was a lovely path to the canopy, albeit a bit muddy in places and we were very amused by the number of people walking around in inappropriate footwear. I mean, imagine you're in the jungle, there are leeches and mossies and mud and hills - what are you going to wear on your feet? We made lugging our trekking trainers all round the world worth it by wearing those, smeared in insect repellent and long trousers. We met people with normal trainers (ok), pumps (hmmn), suede moccasins (rather dirty now), sandals (what?) flip flops (really!) and even a few bare-footed women who'd obviously bought high heels that they'd completely given up on!

We got to the canopy all hot and sweaty (a mere 1.2km walk - it's humid in the jungle) (My shirt was going see through, I was sweating so much, I think that El liked me like that, K) and paid our entrance fee. The guidebook says to go early to avoid the queues so of course everybody goes early and (on the advice of a fellow traveller) we waltzed in at 1.30pm and had the whole place to ourselves!!

Leaves as big as your arm!

In the jungle live Rhinos, elephants, tigers, and other less-exciting animals, but, let's face it, you NEVER EVER EVER see them. After our canopy walk (by the way about a third of it was no closed so it's not really the longest in the world anymore!) and our walk back to the village we'd seen a giant lion squirrel, a giant black and white squirrel (about the size of a large cat), the back end of what we think might have been a wild boar, a gazillion MASSIVE ants (2cm long) and El saw a 2-foot bright green snake (although Kieran doesn't believe her cos he didn't see it) so we consider ourselves to have been quite lucky.

On the rest of the walk we tried to scale a hill but it was just too high and steep and after 10 minutes El's aspirin wore off and we just couldn't manage to go any higher. We did meet some people who Had been to the top though and we took a photo of their photo - it was good enough for us!!!! (We are so LAZY!!!)

All in all we spent about 3 and a half hours in the jungle, and Kieran also had 2 leeches (El found hers on a sock before it managed to bite!) and we spent the rest of the afternoon in a shack watching TV!!! El's cold was abating a bit but we really weren't inspired by Terren Negara. The jungle was nice but after spending 3 hours walking about 4.5km and being exhausted and dripping with sweat, we figured that we weren't really up for the 9 or 12 km treks on offer so decided to head to Singapore a day early.

After a 2-hour boat ride back to the train station we realised we'd actually spent more time travelling to and from the jungle than actually walking around in it. Oh dear, we are getting a bit weary of travelling and just need a break - to sit down on a sofa (a sofa!!!) and eat nice home-cooked food (mum, we fantasize about you every day), and have a bath (a bath!!!) and just ... do... nothing.

Kota Baru - bit of a disaster

Our next destination was the Malaysian Jungle but as the train left at 6am we had to spend some time in Kota Baru - the nearest town to the station.

It is not a tourist town and, in fact, is rather dull and concrete and has no ...life. There is little in the way of town centre - although we did spend a fun day in a mall getting kitted out for Australasian winters (we'll go from 35 degrees to about 10 in one day...eek!). Again, we found it hard to find good food anywhere (what do these people eat?????) and because it is a very Muslim area, there are no bars, or off-licences or any way to be sociable in the evening. Luckily our hotel did have HBO so we settled into a crap film.

And then at 11pm (no joke) some dudes started digging up the road outside our hotel. Actually the main noise was the generator but it sounded like a drill in your head, and went on until about 5am. Suffice it to say we got zero sleep (and El was still suffering from a nasty cold, and Kieran had sympathy pains) so although we had to get up at 5.30am to catch our train, we completely slept through the alarm and woke up half an hour after our train left. Bollocks. Although, in 8 months this is the first connection we had missed so not too bad but a real bummer for our plans.

After trudging around the town for a couple of hours looking for a bus (non-existent) or a place to change our train tickets (also non-existent) and finally a hotel (hard to find but we got one in the end - away from any noise) and basically spent the whole of the rest of the day in bed, drinking hot tea, eating aspirin and watching TV (AXN, HBO are Godsends sometimes!).

Basically don't bother going to Kota Baru! But we did get the train the next day (phew!!) and were off the the jungle!

Perhentian Islands - back into the water: lots of turtles

We have been recommended, throughout our trip, to go to the Perhentian islands in Malaysia as a beautiful spot to chill out, and also a great place to dive. Our flight took us to the nearby town and after an hour's taxi ride, and an hour's boat ride we arrived at the twin islands, just off the north east coast.

We stayed at the smaller island, on the smaller beach - Coral beach - on recommendation of Carolin, and went straight to the nicest resort. It had chalet-style rooms which were quite nice, although the whole place was rather marred by the unearthly stink of raw sewage. Mmmm, nice: reminds us of India.

The diving was really cool, especially the wreck dive that we did. There's something amazingly cool about swimming around a sunken ship (sunk in 2000) and looking up to see sunlight streaming through the mast...very eerie, but also very cool. A momentary panic when we swam on the deck (the boat was on it's side so the sides overhung the deck) - we've watched too many James Bond movies - but it was very cool and there was even an air pocket left over from when the boat sank. We also saw some great fish life including very close contact with a turtle, Lionfish, and Humphead Parrotfish: really amazing (and the snorkelling was good too).

The beach and bay were also very pretty, although for some unknown reason the Malaysian Government had decided to build a Godforsaken, butt-ugly concrete jetty right across the bay, utterly spoiling the view and was currently a noisy building site from dawn until well after dusk. Even the locals were disgusted!!


The beautiful new jetty...nice

Also sadly the food on offer was frankly rubbish. You'd think that fried rice is pretty hard to make awful, but believe me, there are 5 kinds of ways it can be rubbish - each worse than the one before. You may detect a hint of obsession about the food but in the week so far the most edible thing we've had is Mac-D's - SOMETHING IS WRONG HERE! With a culture made of Malay, Chinese, Indian, plus Indonesian and Thai thrown in for good measure, you'd think the cuisine would be fantastic. We've obviously been looking in the wrong place!!!

But the diving was amazing and we met some lovely people who gave us some good recommendations for New Zealand (thanks Helen and Jamie, plus some great underwater photos of our dives), and the Malaysian Jungle (the 2 Jo's). We were kinda rested by the time we left although El caught a horrid cold just before we left.

Malaysia - Kuala Lumpur: where's the great food?

After a smooth flight from Hanoi we waved goodbye to Vietnam and started our Malaysia leg of the trip. Kuala Lumpur was full of expectations for us as civilization at last, as so many people have raved about it.

We found a reasonable but still expensive hotel in Chinatown and had a wander round. It is a very new city with lots of sky-scrapers and Islamic-style buildings. Lots of traffic. Chinatown is not very Chinese and Little India is not very Indian so we just headed for the shopping malls.

The Petronas Twin towers - KL's most famous building - was very cool although we simply couldn't be arsed to get up early morning to queue for one of the tickets to go up the tower. So we just had a good lie in and looked at it from below. We also did a short walking tour, encompassing a few buildings of note but after an hour or so we were bored of culture and went back to the mall.

The Petronas Twin towers

Our most notable pastime was, surprise surprise, sitting in the cinema and we managed 3 films in 2 days - a record for us both! (Transformers, Harry Potter and Die Hard 4.0). Oh and we went up the 4th largest tower in the world which was quite cool if you like heights.

We had been swamped with stories of great food but to our disappointment found very little worth eating let alone talking about. We went to McDonald's twice. And the food hall of the shopping mall.

Finally we met up with our German travel buddy, Carolin, for the 6th and last time which was lovely to see her, and headed to the airport to fly up to the north east coast to get to the beach.

Kulala Lumpur was nice, clean, modern, but didn't quite live up to our expectations.

Kieran against KL skyline

Hanoi - India with out the bad smells

We liked Hanoi, we hung out at the Beer hoi street corner drinking 2000 dong (7 pence) beers sitting on small plastic chairs, people-watching.

It was such a noisy hectic place, it reminded us of India with scooters flying around and with no room on the pavements for walking, what with the parked scooters, the food stalls and the building works going on, we had to walk on the side of the road and pray that the scooters saw you before you saw them!

But all this made the town seem better rather than worse and people were so friendly that it was a nice, if tiring place to walk around.

Highlights:

• Drinking Beer Hoi too fast and too early and then not being able to find the hotel, trooping around half drunk thinking it was funny and after the feet started to hurt not finding it funny at all and then the relief of seeing the hotel sign after Eleanor came through in the end... go map reader.


• Eating at KOTO: know one, teach one. A restaurant that teaches street kids to be waiters and chefs, so we got to eat fantastic food and support charity... super!


• Visiting Ho Chi Min's preserved body, the strange thing was the gaurds that looked too young to be holding rifles, strutting around the place, keeping the crowds in line, plus Eleanor thought that the yellow light really did not suit him!


• Getting another couple of things made for Eleanor and them turning out OK with no stress or tears!


• Fanny ice-cream! mmm just what you need at the end of a long day!

Halong Bay (Cat Ba island mark 2) - incredible jagged scenery

We made it back to Hanoi and found a nice enough hotel. Our instincts were right and we quickly found a really good sounding tour at a much cheaper price that included buses, boat and a number of other activities that would pick us up from our hotel and drop us back after 3 days: perfect!

Our boat for the first night

After a pretty good sleep we were collected as promised and took a minibus to Halong City (not far from Haiphoung but much nicer) where we picked up our boat at lunchtime. It was a triple decker: bottom level were AC bedrooms with en suite, middle floor was a restaurant/sitting area, top deck was a sun deck. The boats all have sails in the pictures but in reality none of them ever use them. We started off by having an amazing seafood lunch and we knew we'd done the right thing choosing the luxury trip!

View from the cave entrance

The scenery was fabulous, albeit full of tourist boats, but still wonderful and everything that you imagine it. Again we took tons of pictures and one just doesn't do it credit so do click on the picture and check out our flickr site for more. We stopped after a few hours at a nearby cave - "Amazing cave" - which was interesting but amazing is pushing it a bit! Great view of the bay though. There are 1969 islands in a sort of arc surrounding the Vietnam coast, and including Cat Ba island which is the biggest of them all and the only inhabited one. We had a quick swim as the sun went down and then moored up in a beautiul bay for the night.

Our fellow tourists were a mixed bunch: 2 Italian dudes of whom one spoke broken English, a French couple (broken English), some Korean girls, some Vietnamese boys and a group of very stuck up English students (Cambridge Med students). We tabled with the Italians and despite us not being able to speak each others' languages, they proved to be fun companions (Francesco and Deluca)!

El gets some R&R

The next day had us up early to be picked up by a smaller boat and taken to Cat Ba island (but the nature reserve side of it) for some cycling, a short walk, and then a bit of kayaking. It was incredibly hot but it was quite interesting to see a local village and have a coke while being amused by a mud hut next to a concrete house complete with the compulsory cable TV!


We ended up back at Cat Ba town but at the nicest hotel. Well actually although the room was ok the bed seemed to have some kind of crater in the mattress so it wasn't as comfy a night's sleep as we'd hoped. The hotel also had a DVD system where you could choose a DVD and they'd play it for you. Out of their crappy selection we choose Pride and Prejudice and it came on as expected then after 2 minutes stopped. White noise! After about 2 calls to reception it was replaced by "10 years of Celine Dion" AAARRRGGGHHH noooooooOOOOOOO!!! In the end, after the 5th phone call we gave up and had an early night!

The 3rd day had us go back to a big boat via the small boat, and then back to Halong City. Kieran had accidentally left his swimming trunks on the previous big boat and our tour guide, Chien, was dubious that we'd get them back as they never know which boat will be used. We rolled up to the big boat and Lo and Behold but one of the crew was wearing the shorts! We told Chien and the guy disappeared and a still warm pair of shorts were pressed into our hands as we boarded! Typical!

The landscape here is totally amazing: really the stuff of magic and legends. You really do expect dragons to rise up out of the water, and the bay is actually called "Descending Dragon" in it's original name. No photos can do it justice as you can never fit it all in but we certainly had fun trying! It was good fun with lots of relaxing, some drinking, and El even managed to speak proper French to the French couple for over an hour on the last day: and even managed to remember a sentence using the subjunctive so all in all a great trip. We were deposited back in Hanoi with plenty of time to do the city before leaving Vietnam.

Cat Ba island - mark one (stinks of fish)

We got up at 6am and caught a bus to Hue airport. A wonderful, easy and quick flight later we arrived in Hanoi before 9am. We jumped straight into a taxi which took us to a bus station. We should have realised we'd made a mistake when we had an argument with the taxi driver about where he was taking us, but nevertheless we had decided to get to Cat Ba island (in Halang Bay - the coastline with all the jagged rocks that you see in postcards) on recommendation from Rob and Meg, under our own steam, rather than take a tourist trip.

We then caught a bus to Haiphoung then a motorbike to the ferry, but missed the ferry in front of us as we didn't have enough cash on us (no ATMs on Cat Ba) and had to get some money out. Not to mention it was lunchtime and we were starving and all there was to eat was a pot noodle stall selling vastly overpriced water and noodles, that tasted like a pot noodle back home. So we eventually got another bus to a different ferry after being stung for about 50% more than we should have paid and got a ferry to Cat Ba island, then another bus ride to Cat Ba town itself. Sadly, half the island has been designated a national park so they have utterly devastated the other half by quarrying half the stone out to make a road for the ferry terminal.

View towards the ferry
It was horrid. It was firstly reminiscent of the backside of Hong Kong island - with little mountains surrounded by high rise hotels. But Cat BA was at the height of its tourist season - it is like Costa del Vietnam: jam-packaged full of Vietnamese package tourists. It was almost impossible to find a hotel under $25 which is daylight robbery ($10 should get a pretty damn nice room anywhere else in Vietnam).

Finally we found a reasonable hotel and wandered the streets looking for a nice place to eat. We were met with the stink of endless seafood in crummy and dirty-looking places, and surly looks from locals who clearly weren't interested in our money.

We did have a lovely day the next day chilling on the beach, although we did get a bit sunburned...silly silly...but the 2 and 3-day boat trips we had expected to find were vastly overpriced and on really shitty boats with no beds and no shade for the daytime.

The nice part of Cat Ba
When our hotel manager threw us out of the hotel after the second night we cut our losses and bought a ticket back to Hanoi. We were so close to Halang bay you could almost see it from the beach but we realised that all the good trips were arranged in Hanoi and we frankly couldn't wait to get out of that shitty little town.

Hue - for a day

Hue is also a world heritage town but we were only there for an afternoon and a night so not much to report. It is situated a bit further up the coast than Hoi An, inland a bit on a river. It was roasting when we arrived and so checked into a hotel right where the bus dropped us and headed into town.

The citadel - OK for a while but frankly it's too hot for culture!

There is an old citadel that we wanted to visit and made our way there through the incredibly hot street. It was quite interesting but much of it had been bombed in the Vietnam/American War and although it was "undergoing restoration" much of it was left to your imagination - quite literally as there weren't even any maps or pamphlets to tell you what might/should have been there. In any case after an hour of that we couldn't take any more culture - we were still a bit zapped from all the tailoring in Hoi An - so found a cafe with yummy mango shakes and a pool table and wiled away the afternoon there.

We found a nice restaurant for dinner and had an early night as we'd decided to get a flight up to Hanoi - to save both time and effort - an had to be up at 6am to get a bus to the airport.

Hoi An - tailor-made hell!

We arrived fresh from the night train to a nearby town - Danang - and hopped straight into a taxi for a half-hour ride to Hoi An, a beautiful historic town near the coast which is famous for it's tailor shops.

We found a nice enough hotel and headed out to get some clothes made. We had already tried to get some stuff made in India - Kieran got a suit and a few other bits and bobs, but for El it was a total disaster and she came away empty-handed. You are faced, in Hoi An, with a choice of Tailor shops: cheap and cheerful, but probably not excellent quality, or vastly overpriced but with a much higher level of service and quality.

In the end we hedged our bets and placed orders with 4 different shops with varying quality levels. It took all day to decide the designs we wanted, what type of fabric, how much it should cost, and getting measured up but at the end of what turned out to be a fairly stressful day we had high hopes for our new wardrobes.

El gets measured up - does my bust look big in this?
The second day was a nightmare. We had to retrace our steps from the day before for our first fittings - with not a single item actually fitting correctly. In some cases it was clearly evident what was wrong, or perhaps the tailor had purposefully not finished the item so as to tailor it to our specifications. However, on more than one occasion you end up having to figure out exactly why the suit/shirt/dress/top/etc. looks wrong and convince the tailor what needs to be corrected. This is incredibly tiring and stressful and half the time the people in the shops then have to translate all the new measurements or alterations to a 3rd party anyway so your high hopes crash down pretty quickly and leave you feeling totally anxious.

Kieran just can't take it any more
You'd think that having a wardrobe tailor-made would be really good fun but, as with most things in Asia, it is not the pleasant and simple experience you expect it to be. We ended up with a bottle or red wine on that night drowning our sorrows and vowing never to get more clothes made. Of course in the course of the day we had seen more things that we wanted so ended up ordering more!!!

A small aside to mention about Hoi An. It is a beautiful French-style city (well, the old part anyway) and I think it is also a world heritage site. The streets are filled with pretty yellow houses with plenty of trees for shade and is a wonderful place to soak up the atmosphere. Of course the abundant traffic does get in the way somewhat, but nevertheless it has a charm unmatched by many cities we've visited in Asia. It's a bit like a more hectic version of Luang Prabang!

So on the third day we retraced our steps again and, bit by bit, acquired some clothes, had more fittings, more alterations and more stress. By midday we'd practically had it but managed to round up everything we needed and dropped it off at one of the shops who kindly packaged the lot up and sent it home for us. In the end we got 45 pieces of clothes (a suit being 2 pieces) between us and spent a grand total of 650 quid, including postage, so we think that all in all we got a good deal, even if it put 10 years on us.

Finally a note on the amazing food in Hoi An. Their local specialities were numerous but included "white rose" a sort of rice pancake filled with shrimp and steamed, and a noodle/veggie combination that outshone everything we've eaten here!

Definitely a great place but a shame to discover that I'm not cut out for this tailoring business!

Vietnam - Nha Trang

View from the train


We got our first train in Vietnam, the first class air con was a room with two bunk beds, and they were very clean and comfy, the station was also clean and it was minimum hassle to get on the train. I was really impressed until the train started to pick up speed and started to sound like a wailing banshee. I thought that there was the biggest thunderstorm going on outside - I think that they desperately need some WD40 on the rails here! Anyway the view coming into Nha Trang at 5:30am was very beautiful, see above.

El and I got a cyclo each (cycle rickshaw with the seat at the front, you feel like you are in a pram) and raced each other to the hotel, I even made my poor old driver get out so I could beat her!

We again met up with Carolin here, our biggest travel buddy, 5 times so far we have met up and we might catch up in Kula Lumpar to make it 6.

Choosing the lobster


Nha Trang is one of the strangest towns we have ever been too. The trucks play "happy birthday" when reversing and the ice cream trolleys plays some kind of Xmas tune, You can get lobster on the beach for $10 and every 5 minutes some kid drives up in a moto to sell you a fake photocopied book, first time ever for that in Asia, could be a really good service if the books were real.

The place has a massively high level of tourism which we did not like but on the flip side 5 mins out of the main area we had a great night, eating on a street stall and drinking the local brewed beer with a big crowd of locals who keep telling us 1-2-3 YO! (cheers) and kept on asking "you drinking - yes!" they even bought us a plate of vegetables and one of them came up to me to apologise for his drunk friends, lovely people and a great night out.

The first day we took a cable car over the sea to an island off the coast (very cool) where they have a water park. Eleanor had never been to one (Francis and Celia, you are bad parents!) so I was really excited to see her face after a big slide.

First off we all went down a multi-slide slide all together, they had mats with a stiff curve at the end with handles, so you could only go down head first. The stupid designers of park had the slide end up right at the end of the slide in a foot of water. This meant that the mat met the water first and was pushed up into your face, I thought that I had broken my nose and El did not look too happy but we tried a few more out with the same result. Last off we tried a slide that shot you into a large cylinder that then dumped you into a pool, it look very cool and did not use the mats so we thought that we would be ok.

I went first and the guy told me to grasp my head as I went down, no problem I said, all was OK until it shot me into the cylinder, the force tore my hand from my head and smashed my head into the wall, then it dumped me into the pool...nice. We all had headaches for the next hour and decided to give the rest of the park a miss :-)

Not happy at the park


We went diving with the sailing club the next day, our first fun dive after our divemaster course, we had to take a picture of the diving rosta board: Kieran and Eleanor Divemasters!!! The first dive was really good and we got to see a lot of things that we have not seen before, but are both looking forward to other places now.

We are now off to Hoi An a world heritage city that is known for its tailors, yay shopping!!!!! We had to get the tickets on the black market as 4000 students are traveling up and down the country taking their entrence exams, bless them.

Just finished the Time Travelers Wife, really good book if anyone needs to get a present for someone :-)

Goooood Morning Vietnam!!! Ho Chi Minh City

El really hates bus journeys
You can sense a definite distinction between Cambodia and Vietnam as soon as you go over the border: Vietnam is much richer and things like the quality of tarmac on the road, and the scooters that people ride all point towards a society which is in a very different economic place. Laos is poor, true, but they farm or fish or make their living. In Cambodia the people seem much more desperate for money. In Vietnam they just realise how much there is to be made from the tourists (and make money they do!).

We had a reasonable bus journey (just 6 hours) from Pnomh Penh to Ho Chi Min City (previously Saigon) and arrived just after lunch. We debated whether to stay but there's not a lot to do in HCMC other than go to War museums and visit the tunnels used in the Vietnam War (here called the American War).

We manged to get an overnight train ticket for that evening and spent the afternoon wandering round, drinking an very expensive cup of coffee while overlooking HCMC's "Notre Dame" Cathedral, and ended up at the War Remnants museum.

The garden is full of US warcraft: planes, tanks and the like, and contains mainly photographs of the Vietnam/American war. One gallery shows photographs taken by journalists who were killed during the war (all nationalities, including Vietnamese) and other shots from various sources. What made them really compelling is that instead of a random picture of corpses with a generic caption, they had captions likie: this is Mr John Doe (or whatever), who lived in this village who was killed aged 30 at 4pm on July 1978. It really personalised the images and made for quite haunting reading. Unlike the killing fields at Pnomh Penh - implemented by their own Government, this was real war: horrific and brutal.
It's built like a tank...er, hang on...

A few beers later, we'd shaken off the sadness and caught our sleeper train to Nha Trang, a bit further north up the coast where we hoped to meet up (again) with our companion from Koh Tao, Carolin.