Vietnam!!

Sa bai dee!! As you can figure from the title (and from the fact that I am writing just a week after I wrote last!) I have been to Vietnam and have lots of stories to tell :-)
Last Tuesday morning at 7am about 45 Sunlabob and LIRE people tumbled onto a huge bus (along with about 400 cans of BeerLao - I kid you not!) and started on our way to Vinh, Vietnam (the closest beach to Vientiane). Everyone was very excited, although tired - so half the bus was singing Lao/Thai karoake and drinking beer (I got offered my first beer at 7.30am!) and the rest of the bus was sleeping. After a stop for a bowl of noodle soup for breakfast (yummo!) we were back on the bus - and driving in the rain. Not long after we turned inland to head towards the Vietnam border, we encountered a traffic jam (not something you would usually encounter in Vientiane, let alone in the middle of nowhere!) so we all got out to have a look - it turned out the road was flooded. We moved all our bags into the bus from the underneath compartment and headed on through the flood in the bus. Not long after this, the bus had to cross a fairly dodgy bridge over a flooded raging river (this bit was particularly scary)! And then, not long after that, we encountered another traffic jam - this time for a landslide. We didn't have any hope of getting past this one, so we turned the bus around. I was worried that Andy would cancel the whole holiday after this (it was about 1pm when this happened), but instead we headed down to the next border crossing - not a trivial thing, considering it was several hundred kilometres away (about in line with Savannakhet on the map of Laos). We arrived at the border at about 8pm (12 hours on the bus!) to find that it was closed, so we found a guesthouse and stayed for the night.
The next morning we were back on the bus at 7am. The border crossing took a very long time, but we were through at about 10am. About 10 minutes we passed through Khe Sanh (made famous - for Aussies of my generation anyway - by Cold Chisel's song) - little did I know that the beach were heading for was formerly part of Vietnam's demilitarised zone, or the former border between North and South Vietnam, and was the site of many of the Vietnam War's worst battles (I had no idea where I was until Saturday when I came back and looked at a map!) A few hours after crossing the border we stopped abruptly - we had found a nice beach called Cua Tung, and so we decided to make our holiday there :-) It was a lovely beach - noone else there, little huts with hammocks in it stretched all the way along the sand (run by entrepeneurial Vietnamese - although not clever enough to differentiate themselves from each other!), and beautiful water. Me and my roommate Sugandha (one of LIRE's interns from Nepal) nabbed the best room with a seaview on the top floor, and then we all had a fantastic lunch (prawns!!!!!!!!!!) The afternoon was spent relaxing in the hammocks, swimming and playing frisbee, and crawling over some ruins at the end of the beach. In the evening many people got drunk (as was the way for the entire holiday) and we all danced to some very loud Lao/Thai music (the Lao girls have this linedance that they sometimes do, so they tried to teach the falang girls...)
I woke up the next morning for the sunrise on Ek's request - the sky was crystal clear. I then spent the next few hours sleeping in the hammocks and learning how to count with Ek in Vietnamese (it was funny watching the Lao guys trying to communicate with the Vietnamese - now they know how I feel every day!!) before everyone else woke up and we had Vietnamese drip coffee together (strong stuff - needs a lot of sugar!) The day consisted of much of the same relaxing that had happened the day before - except I had a stomachache in the afternoon and so spent most of the evening in bed :-(
The next morning was our outing to the market - I had images of buying lots of lovely shoes and lacquered objects like I did in Hanoi, but it was really just a general purpose market. The most amusing/annoying thing was that all the Vietnamese kept grabbing onto me and touching me - I think my white skin was very different. They're definitely very different to the Lao people in this respect! The afternoon saw us get our Sunlabob photo taken in our new Sunlabob shirts - it was really special to be a part of this, and I really felt like a part of the 'family' in that moment :-)
The next morning I woke up for sunrise again - but only because we were leaving at 6am to go home. We didn't get back to Vientiane until 8pm that night - so we literally spent as much on the bus in the holiday than we did at the beach! But still, I had a great time - not many people would get the opportunity to have a holiday like that, and it was a really good opportunity to get to know my Lao and falang colleagues :-)
In other news, one of the AYAD's who arrived in Laos in March had a bad motorbike accident while I was away and had to be flown to Bangkok and get a toe amputated. It definitely scared me, and reminded me that I have to be far more cautious on my motorbike than I currently am - because things like this can happen in a instant.
One final thing (exciting this time, I promise!) - my roommate from PDT Lisa (the one who lived in New College with Amy and whose first words to me were 'do you have a twin sister?' as I woke up, and who I snuck into the Qantas lounge with at Canberra airport) will be in Vientiane tomorrow, so I will get to catch up with her and all her exciting stories from her AYAD assignment in China. Yippee!!

Sok dee deuh,
Susan