Hello from Hoi An!

Hi All! We made it into Hoi An this afternoon, safe and sound. It looks like a nice little town. Lots of shops, so I'm going to do lots of shoppING! I think that we're going to have a few things tailored while we're here, too. You can pick a style, colors, fabric, and in 2 hours have a new skirt! I'm also going to start this evening with an update of the last week on the motobike, but it may take a couple of days to catch up.

So I'll start with the last 24 hours. Our drivers are dear, sweet, wonderful, nice men. Linda (the Dutch gal)'s birthday is tomorrow, so last night they brought us 2 bottles of red wine, three bunches of flowers, and a card for her. We went to another fabulous dinner where we finished one bottle of wine (the second is being saved), then headed back to our hotel. Our accomodations for this trip have actually been really good (for the backpacker traveler budget), and they were SOOOOO excited about booking the place last night because it has a BATHTUB!! (which is a rarity in SE Asia). Unfortunately the 5 liter hot water tanks aren't quite big enough to fill a bath, and having the bath was not quite enough to make up for the large family of cockroaches that had moved into our room to escape monsoon season. So we returned from dinner, turned on our light, and two roaches (one of which was IN MY BED) skittered under furniture. So we decided to sleep with the lights on to discourage them from coming out of hiding. This is after killing two - one of which was a poor, deformed, "Timmy" roach. Didn't make killing it any harder, though. I should clarify that Vicky (the British gal)is our roach killer - Linda and I sat with our feet up on the beds and squealed like the girls we are. So I finally fell asleep with my sleep sheet over my head to keep the roaches our of my eyes, ears, and nose. We woke up at 1 am because Linda had to pee, the electricity in the entire city was out, there were roaches in the room, and she wanted someone to provide light. So we argued for a bit over who had to brave putting a foot on the floor to find our lamps (thank god for headlamps!) Managed our "business", and fell back to sleep - this time with headlamps on. What a LONG night!!!

Woke up to more rain - rain all day. Heavy rain. When you hear that rainy season in SE Asia consists of the 2 hour afternoon storm blowing through, bear in mind that this does NOT apply to Vietnam. Here, the rainy season is 3 months of nearly continual rain. Fortunately Seattle has prepared me for this. So I found it quite enjoyable - from inside my helmet and happy rain gear. I was a bit nervous about landslides, and there was one point that we had to get off the bikes and walk on a hillside along the new "toll road" that some of the local villagers were building around the landslide. No joke - our drivers had to pay these dudes to let my feet get cut up by bamboo grass (I somewhat stupidly decided to ride in flipflops today). Meanwhile, our drivers were sunk in 10 inches of red mud trying to maneuver through the slop. But we made it all in once peice, and the drive through the cloud-shrouded, jungle-coated mountains is really amazing.

On a last monsoon note - does anyone remember that old Mac Classic game, Oregon Trail? Bad 10 pixel green graphics? When you get to a river and have to decide to ford it, pay for the ferry, or go looking for a bridge? The river here is so overflowed that it's covering the road into HoiAn, and there are actually people with little canoes ferrying motobikes from one side to the other. It was only about 10 inches deep, and fortunately, our motobike engines didn't flood. This time, no oxen, and no family members drowned in the crossing.