Yesterday I went market crawling. The markets in Hong Kong are cool because they all specialise in something. There's a Flower Market for flowers, a Bird Market for pet birds, a Goldfish Market for Goldfish, a Ladies Market for...not ladies but I suppose stuff that ladies would be interested in buying, and so on. Obviously I skipped the Ladies Market but I did stroll down the colourful Flower Market, breathing deeply as I went. The Goldfish Market was just a few shops with racks of plastic bags full of water and little fish sitting glumly in them. The Bird Market was the best. It was a really surreal experience to walk down a little lane lined with loud cages filled with hundreds of species of birds from the ugly to the gaudy. They were all screeching or twittering away and many of the bigger, smarter ones were trying to use their beaks to unfasten the door of their cage. Several of them gave me a guttural "Hello!" as I passed. Some of the tiniest birds looked like wild birds but they could sing sweetly. I left the market nearly deaf.

Last night Leah took me to an excellent performance in the Hong Kong Cultural Centre called "Shaolin in the Wind" which was half ballet, half Shaolin kung fu. It was a sublime fusion that dispensed with the need for spoken language to tell a story. It dealt with many themes; love, war, religion...but I think it was essentially a story about finding dignity through suffering. Now that my Leaving Cert English days are over, that's as much detail as I could be bothered providing. At the intermission, Leah snuck me up a back stairway (she knows the theatre like the back of her hand because she goes there so often.) We ducked through a room of ventilation ducts and found ourselves in a tiny dark broadcasting booth in the ceiling of a huge auditorium. Right below us was a full chamber choir and an orchestra in the middle of a spellbinding performance in front of hundreds of paying audience-members and we had a birds-eye view for free! Nobody could see us up in the ceiling but we could see everything! We stayed there for the whole intermission and then tiptoed back down to our own concert hall for the second half. I felt like I had just stuffed my face with the entire contents of someone else's cookie jar and got away with it! Sweet!

Today I went to the horse racing track. There's always been plenty of horseracing at home and I'd never gone before but I figured I might as well go while I was in Hong Kong where they're seriously into their racing and there's racing every day of the week! Each race is over very quickly and then you have to wait nearly half an hour before the next one - plenty of time to study the form and get your bets in. Study certainly is the operative word here because the place was full of men with furrowed brows, lost in racing programmes, making mental calculations in their heads. For them this was not a form of entertainment - it was just a job or an obsession. I don't think anyone else there was there just for the spectacle. In fact there really wasn't much of a spectacle - none of the upper class glamour of Irish horseracing. I might have won the best-dressed woman prize had there been one. There were no overdressed women with hats big enough to boil a chicken in - just desperate men cursing tired horses with poetic names and tearing up their betting slips. Twenty minutes of their careful deliberation and calculated cunning is all erased in about two minutes of thunderous hoofbeats. I couldn't stay to watch their personal tragedies unfolding for very long - it was too depressing. The whole sport existed only to steal money from broken men.

Hong Kong has been a very good city to me. Here, I have already found many of the home comforts I have been dreaming of for months...Earl Grey, hot showers, public toilet paper and the ready availability of toilets you can actually sit on rather than offensive, anonymous holes in the floor that you are presumably expected to squat over! I can now dispense with my bowel training and stop regulating my intake of food so as to postpone the need to excrete faecel matter until such time as civilised facilities become available. Hurrah!

So I suppose given that I only have one more day on this continent, it would be proper to summarise what I have learned from it and draw some simplistic conclusions about it. Well I have learned how to say several essential phrases in a variety of languages and I can now read about three Chinese characters. Ordering food in Asia has taught me to accept fate contentedly without longing for what I cannot explain that I want...because such futile desire only leads to suffering. Finally I have learned that I can never be Marco Polo no matter how much I want to be. Everywhere has already been discovered. The steady march of globalisation goes on unimpeded and threatens entire cultures. However, I do believe that with sensible regulation, we can enjoy the little conveniences of globalisation without eliminating diversity. McDonalds and Starbucks are not eliminating people's love of local food and putting local restaurants out of business. They are in fact merely contributing to multiculturalism and the diversity of the global palate and I have been very happy to have them here in Hong Kong. What really threatens to wipe out local culture is foreign media such as MTV selling a western pop culture that has no place in the east.

So...dare I give some kind of verdict on the vast array of cultures I have seen on this continent over the summer? Well I can certainly say on a very general level, with some exception, that Asia is, at least to me, some kind of crazy bizzarro world where everything is inside out. People who are poor seem happy. People smile at me despite my no doubt alarming countenance (or at this stage possibly because of it...I am badly in need of some grooming.) Women are unaggressive, unintimidated and curious despite my aforementioned appearance. Communist really means capitalist and illegal really means widely acceptable. Taxi driver means pimp/drug dealer and often policeman means the same thing! It has been a journey of contradictions, paradoxes and dichotomies between progress and preservation, prosperity and politics. It would seem that progress and prosperity are the goals and preservation and politics are stumbling blocks to be avoided. Nothing will stand in the way of these young economies, even if it means sacrificing everything that defines these ancient nations. In all of this Hong Kong and Singapore are the notable exceptions where progress and prosperity have already won. It certainly has been a totally excellent adventure but I can't help but imagine how much more totally excellent it would have been had I done it about a hundred years ago.

I will fly home on Monday morning and I'll be in my own bed on Monday night. It still amazes me to think that all this time I have only been one day's journey away from home. When I recover from my flight and gather my senses, I will write some kind of short epilogue to let you all know what it's like to finally get back. In the meantime here are some new photos for you to gawk at:  http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Hong%20Kong/

This city is a tropical metropolis the likes of which I've never seen. The British influence is all over the place; they drive on the left unlike China, Queen Lizzy is still on the back of some of the coins, they have British plugs and sockets and most people can speak some English. Most of the streets have English names which makes it a lot easier to get around although many have irritating names such as Queen's Road. There's a Connaught Road too though! The Brits brought many previously unheard of conveniences to the place such as double-decker buses, a good education system, lovely cups of tea, capitalism and Christianity. This all blends together with the Chinese culture to create somewhere that is comfortingly familiar while still being reassuringly exotic. I suppose then it is not as absurd as I first thought that most Hong Kong folk would rather still be under British rule than Chinese rule. For all intents and puposes the so-called "Special Administrative Region" of Hong Kong is like our old "Free State". They have everything that a real country has including a government, except that every law passed by the so-called Hong kong Legislative Council has to be approved by the Chinese government. Unlike China, the members of the Hong Kong government are voted in by the people but the Chief Executive [FEN: Taoiseach/Prime Minister/President/Chancellor/Supreme Buttress] is voted for my the newly elected government members, much to the chagrin of Hong Kong citizens. Almost everywhere where the Hong Kong flag flies, the Chinese flag flies beside it...higher than it. I always thought that when Hong Kong was handed back to China ten years ago, it was an occasion for much celebration...in fairness they did have a big celebration. Turns out they never wanted to say goodbye to their English buddies. I always thought the UK had no business opportunistically sneaking in and milking that prosperous colony called Hong Kong but I found out that when the Brits took over in 1842, there was nothing here. Hong Kong was just a few fishing villages. The British diplomat who actually convinced China to let them have Hong Kong was promptly fired for getting them such a crappy remote, unpopulated, God-forsaken island. i'm not even kidding. So the Brits actually built Hong Kong from the ground up and made it the burgeoning commercial behemoth it is today, and it's really China who's opportunistically sneaking in and taking away all their hard work. Wow - I never thought I'd feel sorry for the UK! I think this is probably the only colony they really treated well though and didn't burn and pillage their way through. There was the small matter of pushing Brittish opium onto an unsuspecting Hong Kong populous but this is a trifle when compared with the prosperity Hong Kong has recieved in return. At the end of the day, it really doesn't matter which government is pretending to control Hong Kong, the real power lies in the banks and major corporations who actually own this country. Just look at the skyline - all the skyscrapers are owned by banks and financial companies. What has the government got? A tiny little old-fashioned two-storey building cowering in the shadow of several contemptuous skyscrapers.

Anyway Hong Kong is a beautiful city - way nicer than New York and the people are much more polite than New Yorkers. I cannot abide discourteous people! You know what makes Hong Kong better than New York?...one word: neon. All the skyscrapers are festooned with neon so that the city looks like a forest of giant festive Christmas trees at night. I'm staying with a Hong Kong hospitality club girl called Leah here and she took me to see the skyscrapers by night from Kowloon. At eight o clock there was a big light show and lasers and searchlights started swinging from the tops of the towers and each building was given a light solo where they were introduced over the PA and the lights on them flashed dizzily. One of the skyscrapers here is the fifth tallest in the world. It was as if the whole show was a performance where each skyscraper was a dancer and I gave them a round of applause at the end eventhough some people probably thought I was weird.

The climate here is pretty nice. This is the nicest time of the year. It's hotter than it ever gets in Ireland without being uncomfortably hot - high 20s to low 30s. They have an air-con fetish here though and they turn them up way too high which is not good for my cold! When I got to Hong Kong, there was another step up in the standard of living (and a massive step up in the cost of living although it's still nowhere near Irish prices) and I realised that now, I was REALLY back in the first world. No strangers here have come up to me on the street offering me drugs or prostitutes. In fact, apart from the African/Middle Eastern area of city where I've just come back from, nobody has come up to me trying to sell me goods or services that I didn't ask for. Hong Kong is a far, far, far safer city than New York, possibly the safest city I've been to yet although the African/Middle Eastern part did seem slightly dodgier at night - but not as dodgy as many parts of Cork at night. You may ask why I am comparing it to New York. It's because it has that really big, big city feel that only the major cities of the world have. The only other such cities I have been to this summer are probably Bangkok, Singapore, Sydney and Melbourne. It's also quite a cultured city. Wednesday is free museums day, so on Wednesday, I spent all day in the Museum of History, Museum of Art and the Space Museum. Tomorrow night I am going to see a dance/kung fu play at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre. I visited the Avenue of Stars which is like that street in Hollywood with all the actors' handprints in the cement. Jackie Chan has bigger hands than me. I spent today out on the rural Lantau Island, wandering around monasteries and little fishing villages where a lady on the street pulled out a page and asked me to correct her daughter's English homework - the standard was very good, although I pointed out the use of American slang. Anyway, the bottom line is I love this place. You can see all the amazing photos of it at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Hong%20Kong/ You will notice the remarkable speed at which they appear thanks to my cool new Chinese photo compression software.
Later!

Yesterday I went on a very long and wet hike with the English school. We spent several hours walking through the area depicted on the 20 Yuan note and got soaked to the skin by the heavy rain, pretty much guaranteeing us all colds. The enthusiastic camaraderie of the English students and staff more than made up for the inclement weather though and the scenery was beautiful when we could see it.

       One of the girls I was walking with confirmed my theory about the curious juxtaposition between the unsentimentality of Chinese life and the cheesiness of Chinese art. She said that life in China didn't leave any time for romance and that Chinese people had to use some fantasy outlet to express their repressed emotions. Presumably, really corny karaoke singing is the most popular form of this outlet.

       China gets a bad rep for human rights abuses and rightfully so but being here has made me realize that trying to present an alien idea like human rights to the Chinese on a silver platter with an air of righteousness and self-satisfaction and expecting them to dispense with thousands of years of tradition by adopting it is like trying to convince an Irishman that his house needs volcano insurance. A rights-based society where every individual has rights that conflict with other individuals' rights just makes no sense from a Chinese perspective. To them this sounds like chaos. While most Chinese people seem to agree that the current situation is far from perfect, the western model of governance does not seem to appeal to them either. Better the devil you know that the devil you don't know. While some of the human rights abuses here are undeniably appalling regardless of where you're from, I think the west hasn't got a hope of "fixing" China because it just doesn't understand how it works, and this is a job best left to China even if it means it will never be done. I don't know anything about cars so I wouldn't try to build one. That is better left to the car manufacturers. Having said that I'd rather die than let Ireland become a country based on anything other than the rights of the individual.

Today I leave Yangshuo. I have been here for about five days and I already feel so at home. I walk down the streets of this small town and I already see so many people that I recognize and who salute me. I think I could happily leave in this little town for a year. It's far more international than Guilin and plenty of people speak English. Tomorrow I will be in Hong Kong and this time next week I'll be on a plane home! It's so hard to believe that my totally excellent adventure is nearly over already!

I don't think I'm going to have technical difficulties with my photos any more because I have now found a way to compress my huge photos to a miniscule size without much loss of quality. If you check my latest batch of photos on http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/China/ you will find that they appear almost instantly now with no annoying delay which means they should now be perfectly viewable even with a 56k modem and a dial-up connection. Enjoy!

I'm writing this in the staffroom of the English school I'm volunteering at. For some reason there's always a dog and two puppies in here and they're chewing up some lesson plans and chasing each other around the room at the moment. Yesterday I spent the day cycling around the Yangshuo countryside in between huge mountains. I saw many gap-toothed country folk with crinkly eyes. I also commandeered a bamboo raft and ran around inside a giant hamster ball on the river for a while. I saw a 1500 year old tree and some evil monkeys with sticks who were wearing clothes and behaving a lot like humans. I spent today paddling a kayak down the river and gawking at some more mountains. Villagers led their water buffalo down to the riverside to wash them and wrinkly old men squatted on bamboo rafts waiting for the fish to bite. I passed several large duck farms and enjoyed chasing the ducks down the river in my kayak. I ended up in a tiny middle-of-nowhere town where they obviously never saw any tourists. There was nothing but dusty unpaved streets, dying dogs and astonished pensioners there. I was very glad I had the opportunity to see this part of China that other tourists never did.

       Last night I had a really amazing experience that I know I will never be able to fully explain in words but I might as well try. I went to this so-called light show. I thought it would just be lasers, neon and loud music but it turned out to be a very elaborate and charming musical with hundreds of performers and amazing special effects. I have never been so affected by a piece of drama in my life. I think it was quite possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I know I've been saying that a lot recently but this wonderful continent just keeps raising the bar. This was like a Chinese Disney movie only it was a live musical with hundreds of performers, and billions of watts worth of sound and lighting. What really made it so remarkable though was the fact that it deceptively blended fiction with reality by having a real-life location as its backdrop. It was performed entirely on fleets of little boats on a huge lake with those strange mountains all around lit up with spotlights. I cannot describe how spectacular it was in words because it was a subjectively emotional experience and the blurry tripodless night shots I took of it certainly don't do it justice so I deleted most of them. The show affected me deeply and I couldn't understand why. I psychoanalyzed myself and slowly figured it out. What I saw last night was essentially the China I dreamed of as a little boy and seeing it again, this time in front of my very eyes, allowed me to become a child again for just one hour. I had an idea of China in my head that featured simple country folk leading simple happy lives while wearing exotic clothes and beautiful girls washing their long black hair in mirror-like lakes under weeping willows while birds serenaded them. I didn't realize I came here looking for anything until I found it. I think I had a subconscious need to come here to either confirm or disprove the existence of my idyllic imagined China and seeing this show made me feel very happy because I had finally found it and at the same time very sad because it didn't really exist with the same purity in the real world. In the real world there certainly are simple country folk leading simple happy lives but they don't wear beautiful exotic clothes and their lives are not accompanied by enchanting traditional Chinese soundtracks. In the real world there are also other far less appealing things that I never even considered as a boy such as bus exhaust fumes, constantly hooting horns, hard-nosed twelve-year old hagglers, desperate ruthless prostitutes and leering, vest-wearing men with ragged mocking voices and long white cigarettes hanging obscenely from the corner of their snarling lips. It was to this compromise-world that I returned with a heavy heart after the show. The beautiful side of China is disappearing every day and in a few decades I think it will be gone entirely as culture acquiesces to the all-powerful force of progress and the global economy. I love China as it is now but I love Vietnam a lot more because it has preserved a lot more of its culture and will still have buckets of it in years to come. Of course ironically, Vietnam could never have put on a show like this because no director could get enough money to pay for these kinds of special effects.

It's funny how something as trivial as a play can trigger an epiphany that suddenly brings meaning to a whole summer of travel. I had been trying to come up with some conclusions to end the summer with for when I got to Hong Kong and nothing was really coming to me and then I saw this play and all of a sudden I have my conclusion a little earlier than expected. It's also funny how in all of their art - drama, music, film and architecture – the Chinese are unashamedly romantic and breathtakingly poetic, but in real life, they all seem painfully practical, horrifyingly unsentimental and utterly consumed with their pursuit of prosperity and success at any cost. I'm sure there are exceptions and I am of course always open to explanations but I think my generalization is largely accurate. The stereotype of the single-minded, hard-working Chinese is completely in conflict with their taste in art. I think there must be a terrible internal dichotomy in every young Chinese person when they're growing up and learning the ways of the world but I'm hardly in a position to psychoanalyze an entire nation whose language I cannot speak and whose country I have been in for a week! But enough of this intellectual jibber jabber! I need to eat now! The most recent photos are at: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/China/

The rain has cleared up and so has my mild culture shock. My second day in Guilin was spent exploring another beautiful mountain park. It really is a beautiful place now that I can see it. It feels like you're in a fairy tale that you were never told because it was just too exotic and really did happen in a land far far away and so never reached our side of the world. The translations on signs though are the worst I've seen anywhere in Asia. One sign that I think wanted to ask me not to walk on the grass instead asked me to "Please mould your temperament with true feeling"…what?! I got a tour of a cave with a tour guide with limited English who would point at a rock formation with her flashlight and blather on about in Chinese for about two minutes and then for my benefit, she would turn awkwardly to me and simply say "It is dragon…" It is not dragon! It is a big lump of rock that resembles nothing apart from a big lump of rock. Some of the other formations were apparently a little white rabbit from the moon and a fairy's palace.

       I'm now in Yangshuo which is even more beautiful than Guilin. Guilin is a big city bigger than Dublin so it inevitably has lost some of its charm. Yangshuo however, is smaller than Cork. You can't walk anywhere in Yanshuo without being watched by a huge mountain. I spent the day today climbing them to get eagle eye views of the place and I wasn't disappointed. You really can't describe in words what this place is like. It's totally surreal. It's difficult to believe that such a place exists on earth. Just take a look at the photos. Some of them are up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/China/  and the rest are up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gctrionaem/sets/72157601886388004/ I'm staying at an English school where I spend two hours a day just chatting to students in English over free drinks and I also get to eat and sleep there for free! It's great because it also means that I have people who can speak to me in English. It's a really relaxed place and I'm enjoying my time here.

       I've also been thinking about going home though and I must admit that now that I have begun preparing myself for the reverse culture shock of returning to Ireland, there are a few things I am looking forward to; Jaffa Cakes, Earl Grey, Mars Ice Cream, Heinz Spaghetti Hoops, Denny's Gold Medal Sausages, Galtee black pudding (not Clonakilty!) and a big feed of spuds and mincemeat. I am looking forward to eating all of the above in the week between my return to Ireland and my return to college. While I am still here though I plan to soak up every second of the experience while I still have the opportunity to do so. Tomorrow I'll spend the day cycling around the countryside and gawking at mountains and lakes like an American in Killarney.

PS. Can all the food manufacturers listed above please send me cheques ASAP for my endorsements of their fine products.

Well I'm finally in China! It was a fifteen hour bus journey but I'm in Guilin now. It was immediately apparent that I was crossing back into the first world when I saw the size of the seats on the bus – they're not even that wide in America! The next giveaway was the sudden appearance of advertisements for weight loss programs – obesity is not a big problem in the 2^nd world. I find myself in the astonishing position of being under the effects of culture shock – so shocked that today I finally gave in and ate at McDonalds after months of resistance. I know it's wrong but it felt so right. I expected China to be pretty much the same as Vietnam…it's very very different. NOBODY speaks any English plus all the signs are in Chinese writing and usually don't have the Roman script version under it. I arrived in Guilin last night after midnight and stumbled around the dark streets trying to find a hotel to stay in. The only problem was I didn't have a penny. I had plenty of Vietnamese money but no Chinese Yuan. I expected there to be a Bureau de Change at the border but there wasn't! Turns out you can't even exchange Vietnamese money in any bank so I've got about 60euro worth of useless paper. What a waste! I don't think there's anywhere in the world apart from Vietnam where I can exchange it for anything. A little Chinese woman without a word of English who was trying to get me to stay in some hotel helped me to find an ATM after I managed to explain my predicament with the help of a Chinese phrasebook I had picked up off a backpacker I met in Vietnam who had just come from China. The second ATM we found accepted my Irish card. Then she took me to the hotel which was clearly way out of my budget but it was too late to go looking for anywhere else in the rain when I didn't even have a guidebook or a map of the city, so I forked over the equivalent of nine euro. Because nobody in the hotel spoke English it took about an hour of charades to get me checked in and explain to me about a deposit etc. China is not a good country to come to without a guidebook and it is the first country this year I didn't have a guidebook for. Thankfully, I am now staying with a French lad from Hospitality Club in his apartment. He's been living in Guilin for over a year and speaks Chinese, English and French so he was able to explain everything to me and show me how to navigate the buses. Because all the signs and maps only have Chinese characters on them I can't even attempt to pronounce them in order to ask for directions. Therefore it is imperative to have someone like my saviour, Jean Christophe, to write down the names of places in Chinese characters so you can show them to bus drivers.

Guilin itself is like a big limestone Las Vegas nestled amongst the unlikely looming mountains. I thought Vietnam liked neon – China REALLY likes neon. It's the standard method of illumination. My arrival here was supposed to mark a cathartic climax to my adventure because I have always wanted to come to Guilin ever since I saw a picture of it in my geography book in school years ago and couldn't believe my eyes. However, having now seen the similar but superior scenery of the more obscure and poorly marketed Ninh Binh I am now relatively unimpressed by the views here. It probably doesn't help that most of the scenery is obscured by an oppressive September drizzle. As for China itself it seems a lot more subdued than Vietnam and feels less Chinese than Vietnam did. Most of the buildings are big rectangular functionalist high-rise apartment blocks or small flat-roofed cuboids and there is little oriental architecture to be seen. The Chinese themselves are taller on average than the Vietnamese and less charming. The women don't smile at you just for walking by while being white like they did in Vietnam. There's a noticeably higher standard of living and with it a slightly higher cost of living. The amount of rice fields has decreased and there are more fields full of tall waving sugar cane with hills lurching upwards out of it. There are forests of tall, skinny identical trees like the ones in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and a lot of bamboo. The money bears the image of Mao instead of Uncle Ho and is a bit more sensible with roughly 10 Yuan to the euro. Tomorrow evening I will make my way to the smaller and reportedly more charming town of Yangshuo and spend a few days there. I hope to live and eat for free in an English college in return for spending a few hours a day talking English to the adult students in informal conversation classes. I can only hope that the rain will go away although the fact that this province has been suffering from flooding recently is not promising. The last photo from Vietnam is up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Vietnam/ and the first batch of photos from China is up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/China/

Wow! It's been so long since I've written but It's just been all guns blazing for the past week and I haven't had time. I've been to four different cities and seen so much and I know I won't be able to tell you everything but I'll do my best. I've got a feeling this could be a long entry. Before I dive right in let me make two random observations about Vietnamese people; A: they wear underwear under their swimming togs and sometimes they wear clothes over their swimming togs…what's up with that? B: siblings' names often rhyme…bizzare!

Anyway Hoi An was a nice quiet little town along the lines of Luang Prabang. The night I was there just happened to be the mid-autumn festival and traffic was kept out of the city and all the streetlights wer turned off so people could stare at the moon and there was some kind of play going on in the square. The river was full of candles floating in coloured cardboard flowers and little rowboats full of revellers negotiating their way between them. It was beautiful.

Next stop was Hue which was a biggish but ulimately chilled out city. I stayed with a hospitality club guy there called Long (eventhough he was about as short as myself). Him and his friend Thuc Quyen took it turns to drive me all around the city and show me the best sights which means all I had to do was relax and enjoy. I didn't have to worry about hwere to go next because Thuc Quyen had made out a little program of activities for me. I visited several pagodas and a royal tomb. At a monastery I saw some young monks engaged in a game of soccer, some others were practising kung fu, some other were chanting, prostrating themselves or gently banging big deep bells. I ate lunch with Long's family on their kitchen floor. The evening was spent driving around the city on mopeds. We went to an ice cream parlour and a coffee shop and everyone we passed stared at the white guy with the three Vietnamese kids. The next day we went to see a neighbourhood of houseboats on a canal and sat in an orchard eating huge green citrus fruit kind of like giant oranges called Tantha. And I learned how to say Ireland in Vietnames: Ai Lan! I also discovered that Vietnamese folk take a siesta during the hottest part of the day. And there was I struggling away in the sun this whole time! That night we went to the Purple City in the citadel. There were some kids practising break dancing in the huge square outside under a massive Vietnamese flag and we went up to them and watched for a while. Then the sun set and drums began to beat at the city gate. We witnessed a colourful noisy show involving pairs of acrobats dressed up as lions and then we followed the dancing lions through the city gates into another world. The city was resplendant in its relaxed royal glory. The paths were lined with colourful paper lanterns and people stood around in traditional dress. The atmosphere created by the laid-back beauty of the place was indescribable. We strolled around until we came to a courtyard where old gambling games were being played with sticks instead of money. I won one game and got a scroll with calligraphy on it as a prize. There were poetry readings, horse-drawn carriages and a bohemian air about the place. The day before was a church holiday (Buddhist) so everyone was visiting pagodas to pray. It was a day for praying for your mother and people wore a red rose on their lapel in honour of their mother if she was alive and a white rose if she was dead. Thuc Quyen had a red rose for me to wear. The next morning Long and his friend, An, took me to the beach which was deserted. We had the whole beach to play football on and the whole sea to swim in. Then we went to a karaoke bar for an hour and then to a dog restaurant where I finally ate a dog. The restaurant was full of live dogs and puppies running around barking and waiting to be killed when they got fat enough. They taste a bit like pork but not as nice.

I was invited to attend a party that evening. It was one of the lad's friends who was having a going away party before he moved to HCMC to go to college. It was actually kind of a dinner party in a restaurant. The host came out to meet me and shook my hand. He greeted me in French and it was in French that we conversed for the rest of the evening as his French was better than his English and it was a rare opportunity for us both to practice notre Francais. He introduced me to his mother and challenged me to guess her age which I cautiously and correctly guessed as 36. A whole gang of them came to the train station with me after the party to wave me off and waited on the platform with me until my train to Ninh Binh arrived and I reluctantly got on board. They were such a nice bunch of people. I think I had more fun in Hue than I did anywhere else on my travels. I'm beginning to realise that I will really miss Vietnam when I leave. It has made more of an impression on me than anywhere.

The countryside around Ninh Binh may quite possibly be the most beautiful place on earth. The only drawback is the suicidal driving and deafening horns on the highway. Dodging death is a daily activity here. I rented a motorbike for two days to explore the countryside and I was astounded by the magnificent sights I saw. On the back roads, young girls in conical hats drove cattle with bamboo whips and I had to weave in between ponderously plodding buffalo. Farmers on their way to the rice paddies laughed at the white boy taking photos of jagged mountains they had lived under their whole lives and found wholly unremarkable. I hired a strapping young fellow to row me around the partially submerged landscape in a little boat. We passed women selling bananas off their rafts and they rowed with their feet. Other women did needlework on boats in the shade of a cave and other women slept on their rafts in the cave with their conical hats over their faces. I climbed up to the top of one of the karst behemoths until I heard a little old lady at the bottom who referred to herself in the third person as Mamma shouting at me to come down before I broke my neck. It was quite treacherous up there. Millenia of glacial erosion had turned the mountain into a heap of razor-sharp flint knives and one wrong move could be quite painful. The sweat was actually falling off me like rain by the time I finally got to the bottom. It was worth it for the breathtaking view though.

I spent the next day trekking through the jungle on my own in search of a thousand year-old tree I'd heard about. I decided that I would be good idea to attempt this without water. Six kilometres later I staggered triumphantly back into the clearing where I'd parked my motorcycle with my clothes plastered on to my skin and the tongue hanging out of my mouth like a rabid Irish girl deprived of alcohol for several hours. Why do I put myself through this you ask? Why indeed? I also explored a dark cave on my own with only the light on my phone to guide me. It was pretty big and went way back although the ceiling got very low in places. I found myself in a cavern full of sleeping bats at one point and quietly made my way out again as quickly as possible. That night I got on a bus and went to Hanoi where I am now.

Hanoi is probably my least favourite place in Vietnam. It's ok but it's another big city and it lacks the nightlife of Saigon. I was wandering the almost deserted streets last night with a Canadian lad searching in vain for a pub. Several pimps drove slowly beside us on motorbikes offering us drugs or their girlfriend who sat smiling innocently on the back of the motorbike as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth…but nobody could offer us somewhere to sit down and have a drink after 11PM. Cops with sticks stood around and gave us dirty looks as if it was illegal to be out late. Maybe it is – I don't know. In fact there's not even that much to do during the day. Last night I went to see a performance at the Municipal Water Puppet Theatre which was very nice. For those of you unfamiliar with water puppetry it's a Vietnamese art where wooden puppets perform on a stage made of water and the puppeteers stand in the water behind a curtain and manipulate the puppets with rods under the water. My greatest achievement in Hanoi today was to visit Ho Chi Minh's preserved body in his Masoleum. It was really weird. He's been lying there in the half-light of his air-conditioned monument for years and queues of Vietnamese people go all the way down the street and around the corner and around the next corner to see him. You're not allowed to take photos of his ghostly white face. You have to check any electronic equipment before you get near the masoleum. His body gets sent to Russia every year for three months where expert communist embalmers do maintenance work on him. They really really like Ho Chi Minh here. He's almost like a god. Everything is named after him, even a whole city! Everywhere you go it's Uncle Ho this and Uncle Ho that. There really is no equivalent Irish patriot because he is way more popular than any patriot Ireland ever had. It's all a bit strange really. I also visited the house where Ho Chi Minh used to live which was crap because it was just an ordinary house with way too many annoying people staring at it. I spent most of the day in Hanoi seeking refuge from the heat in a waterpark. Tomorrow I go to Halong Bay and the day after that it's off to China!!! We're getting near the end lads! I'm going to have to start having some epiphanies soon so that I can write some kind of deep profound "what I learned on my travels" entry. Most of my new photos from Hoi An, Hue, Ninh Binh and Hanoi are now up at the usual: http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Vietnam/

I'm now in Nha Trang but I'm leaving on a night train in a few hours to go to Hoi An. In case  you were wondering, the karaoke went down a charm on my last night in Dalat. Our warbling was accompanied on the screen by totally random imagery of pleasant country landscapes and the like. Unlike other karaoke places I've been to (two to date), this karaoke machine actually scored your singing, and guess who got a 100% and two 97%s? Damn straight! I particularly enjoyed singing Billie Jean complete with spasmodic Jacksonesque yelps. The Vietnamese kids weren't too bad either and I was quite sad to say goodbye to them afterwards.

Nha Trang seems like a nice beach town. Most of the tourists here are actually hardworking Vietnamese folk from all over the country on a break with the family for a few days. My time, however, is running short and so I can ill afford to spend more time lying around on another beach. By getting a night train I can save time which would otherwise be wasted sleeping in a stationery position and I also save money by not having to pay for a hotel tonight. I spent the day on a boat exploring the islands of Nha Trang Bay. I went snorkeling over a coral reef and jet skid around a bay at break neck speed. We had a bit of a party on the boat with a live band and people dancing around the deck and everything! Then we had a floating bar with free booze. The floating bar was a donut shaped shelf on top of some bouys in the sea with a Vietnamese lad hanging on in the middle serving drinks to us when we swam up on our ring bouys. It was a fun day. There were two lads from Mayo there who informed me that the Cork football team was in the All-Ireland final much to my delight! I probably won't be home in time to see it though. There was also a Japanese exchange student there who I hung out with learning important Japanese vocabulary such as cheers/sláinte. Since it had two syllables I have now forgotten it. The Vietnamese word has only one syllable and it is one I am already familiar with and is therefore much easier to remember: "yo!" It occurs to me that when I write here where I am and where I am going next, most of you have no idea what that means in reality or how far I'm travelling so to put this final leg of my odyssey in context for you, I have marked out a rather rudimentary map of South East Asia with a green line indicating the route I have travelled so far and a red line indicating the route I will travel over the next three weeks…hopefully! I have uploaded it along with the remainder of my photos to http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Vietnam/ and the direct link to the map itself is http://i209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Vietnam/South-East-Asia-Map.jpg Hope this helps to put my ramblings into a cartographical perspective for you.

Dalat is a pretty sweet place to take a relaxing holiday. Unfortunately, yesterday I took a rather boring tour of the surrounding farmland. Most of the tour was spent examining coffee plantations and being educated on the finer points of getting a good cup of coffee from the plant right to your mug! Naturally I couldn't care less. We also learned about silk making from the silk worm right to your tablecloth! Once again...I was uninterested. In fact it was actually a little disconcerting to see a factory running on insects. We went to a silk worm farm and saw all the nasty little caterpillars eating mulberry leaves. Then we went to the silk factory and saw all the nasty little silk cocoons with live moths inside being unravelled by machines. Nothing is wasted here and they eat the moths after they've taken all their silk from them (I'm not even kidding). The only fun part of this tour was using a rollercoaster as a method of transport to get to a huge waterfall. The best part was you actually control the rollercoaster yourself – you can increase or decrease your speed at your whim. Naturally I didn't touch the brakes so when I got to the end I was stopped so suddenly that the seat belt actually tore a sheet of skin off my sunburned left shoulder which is now hanging there in a flap. Hardcore!

Today was much more fun. I decided to explore the countryside on my own so I rented a motorbike, and with a rudimentary map in my pocket, I took off into the chaos of the little town's traffic. Once I got out of the town the scenery was beautiful and the roads wound around hills and valleys. Motorbike is the only way to travel – with the wind blowing in your face and the environment close enough to touch. My destination was Lang Vian Mountain which I found with surprisingly little difficulty given that it was about 20km out of town. I had to park the bike at the bottom of the mountain and hike the whole 6km uphill on foot. The sky was blindingly blue and the sunlight filtered down through the pines gently. On the way up the mountain I met a big group of Vietnamese students who invited me to join them on their hike because it would be "more fun for you together with us"! Plus they wanted to practice their English. They were terribly nice and told "funny stories" which were essentially Paddy Irishman, Englishman, Scotsman jokes with the characters bizarrely replaced with the President of Vietnam, the Prime Minister of Japan and Bill Clinton. They couldn't believe I had actually come to a place like Dalat on my own and was actually single and suspected that I was up to something. They obviously thought I had left my girlfriend locked up in the hotel room while I went out to enjoy myself. They asked me to sing my national anthem to make the journey shorter which I agreed to do in exchange for a rendition of the Vietnamese national anthem which they happily provided with great gusto. I was quite pleased with my own delivery of Amhran na bhFiann as I took it in quite a low register and still managed to reach "chun báis nó saol". When we got to the top, the panoramic views of the rolling Vietnamese countryside were well worth the long hike. They were going to hang out on the top for a few hours but I had lots of other places to see and I could see the afternoon rain clouds loitering in intimidating gangs on the horizon so I bade them good morrow (as you do) and agreed to meet up with them in the evening to go to a karaoke bar. Sure enough the surly clouds bullied the innocent blue sky into submission with sharp cracks of thunder and lightning. They moved en masse over unsuspecting mountains which impaled their dark underbellies. Somehow they managed to hold in their rain though and I made it to my next destination: Dalat Flower Garden. There was an excellent collection of ancient bonsais here and I totally dig bonsais, especially ancient ones. Then I drove to the Valley Love which proved to be perfectly tolerable. I rode through the valley on horseback and took everything in. I could see the romantic attraction all right – the natural scenery looked like it was straight out of a fairy tale. So that's Dalat! There's a brand new batch of photos up at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gctrionaem/sets/72157601549952373  and the most recent few are up at http://s209.photobucket.com/albums/bb178/gctrionaem/Vietnam/  And guess what? More technical difficulties mean I am unable to upload the last 30 photos but I'll get them up when and if aforementioned difficulties resolve themselves. I must go and do a vocal warm up now in preparation for tonight's karaoke performance. Mmmm, an Abba medley followed by a Bee Gees number methinks! La la la la la la laaa. Lee lee lee lee lee lee leeeee. Lu lu lu lu lu lu luuu…

I'm now in Dalat, a quiet mountain town. Yesterday in Mui Ne, I got a windsurfing lesson. I thought it would be another weird thing to do. I don't know anything about windsurfing. The only association I have with it is our French teacher in school telling us we should say we enjoy windsurfing in our exam to show off that we knew the French word for windsurfing. "Moi, j'adore la planche a voile. C'est chouette!" she would hiss. Of course this was utter nonsense to a class of suburban teenagers from Ballincollig, all of whom I suspect had never even seen a windsurfing board in their lives let alone go on weekend excursions to the south of France to ride the wind or whatever it is windsurfers do. In any case I can confirm that the activity was an overrated disappointment and that windsurfing actually sucks. "Moi, je n'aime pas la planche a voile." I say this not because I happen to suck at it (which of course I do) but simply because there's far too much physical exertion involved. Trying to balance on the board is the easiest part. Then you have to remain on the board while you lift the whole mast and sail out of the water and point it at the wind and then remain standing while the wind tries to blow the sail back into the water. Unlike regular surfing which involves several minutes of swimming in return for several seconds of exhilaration, windsurfing involves about an hour of pulling and heaving in the hot sun in return for a disappointing "that's it?" kind of drifting. Most of that time is actually spent on the board rather than in the water which means, in the space of one hour, my beautiful milky complexion had turned an alarming burning red. This means that I am unable to wear a backpack and today I carried it in my arms rather than subject my tender shoulders to the agony of chaffing straps. The experience of windsurfing was not helped by the instructor who was an uncouth, highly-strung eastern European man of indeterminate nationality with a well shaved head and a poorly shaven face, from whom a string of hilarious obscenities were emitted in broken English at anyone who happened to be in his vicinity. He couldn't understand why I kept falling in the water and would scream unhelful, unintelligible and ultimately distracting commands at me constantly, most of which I wisely ignored, much to his frustration. Bottom line - don't bother windsurfing.

Far more enticing is the location in which I am currently perched, namely Dalat, a town with such a high elevation that my ears popped several times before I got here. It's so high that the temperature actually feels like August in Ireland and is far more comfortable. Air conditioning is unnecessary and I can finally wear long pants and a long-sleeved shirt again! I've even seen some children wearing coats! Coats! The shady cocnut trees have been replaced by even shadier pines and I am astounded once again by the veritable cornucopia of landscapes that is Vietnam. (I've been waiting to use veritable cornucopia all summer.) The roads to get here were very steep and windy and narrow and the bus had to labour all the way. The buses here like to drive in the middle of the road even when it's a perfectly wide road and sometimes they even like to drive on the left just for kicks. They also like to hoot arrogantly at any traffic brazen enough to actually want to travel in the opposite direction. I am so sick of the hooting here. Drivers of all vehicles hoot their horns constantly and for no reason whatsoever. It's not like their horns make a pleasant noise although many of them play a merry little tune which is even more annoying. This habit makes sleeping on buses rather difficult and as soon as I get to the next city I am switching to trains. I was very glad to finally arrive in Dalat after six gruelling hours. The alpine environment is favourably reminiscent of beautiful Cullowhee in North Carolina only cooler and with a resort town smack bang in the middle of all the forests and mountains. As I write this in my hotel lobby (which has TV in the bedrooms with English channels and a hot shower for only $6 a night!) the rain fizzes outside and the receptionist sings a little song to herself. She has quite a nice voice. One downside to Dalat is that it is apparently a bit of a honeymoon destination and full of couples and could be quite a sickening place to be single. With local tourist attractions bearing nostalgic names such as "The Lake of Sighs" and "The Valley of Love" it remains to be seen whether I will be regurgitating my breakfast tomorrow when I go out to explore the countryside. A friendly waitress with rather poor English in Mui Ne who was attempting to make small talk with metried to warn me about this and asked if I was going with my girlfriend. I, thinking she was just flirting, explained jocularly that I had left that position vacant as having a girlfriend in tow made picking up pretty Vietnamese girls intolerably inconvenient. Naturally she didn't understand what I said which was just as well because she was merely expressing surprise that someone would go to a place like Dalat on their own and trying to prepare me for the kitch to come. I haven't encountered any such kitch thus far, not having actually explored the town yet but tomorrow we'll see whether it's really as soppy as she made out. In the meantime, here are two more photos for ye: http://www.flickr.com/photos/gctrionaem/sets/72157601549952373