Mama, aliens are living in our hotel!

We get used to being stared at when we're abroad (hell, I get used to being stared at home). In Da Nang, it was getting a bit weird. After a couple of days, we gathered it was down to so few white western travellers who actually stayed and walked around Da Nang as opposed to using the bus or airport terminal to get to the more popular towns of Hue or Hoi An. It was breakfast that clinched it. When we walked through the glass doors the young girls waiting the tables took a picture. And laughed a lot. ("Eat your greens child or you'll grow up like that!"). Getting gently hassled in the street for rides is commonplace enough as are kids shouting out "Hello. Where you from?" (I don't tell them any more as all they want to do is talk rubbish about football -- "I'm from Ceti Alpha V!") However, it was when a bloke shouted hello from a building site as we wandered past while his fellows stopped work, turned as one and stared impassively like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Linda said, "I don't think we're in Totton any more, Toto!".

We arrived in Da Nang in late evening. It proved to be a marked change to the bustling cosmopolitan avenues and alleyways of Saigon. During our last night there we had dinner at the Asian Kitchen, a tiny restaurant off An Luc that specialised in crocodile dishes (tempura, stir fried, sauces, you-name-it). I figured they had a bigger problem than the usual rat surplus but it took longer to arrive than Linda's more pedestrian stir fry chicken dinner. Either that or they were fed up with the "Make it snappy" joke. After that we sat on the hotel's rooftop restaurant watching the ever changing Saigon skyline. One building in particular looked like Rimmer's holoship in Red Dwarf. It must have been built with embedded LEDs so that the whole building looked ethereal, changing colours and shape and sometime disappearing altogether. Cosmic, man!

By contrast, Da Nang at night was reminiscent of the more Communist-leaning city of Hanoi. Dimly-lit streets with broken pavements and empty family-run concrete cafes with none of the western flash of the other big Asian cities. By day, however, you get the feel that the city is at the cusp of a change. For example, we were depending on a four-year old Rough Guide to Vietnam to get our bearings. After around four hours of traipsing in the Da Nang gutter (NB: There's two rules in Vietnam -- roads are for driving motorbikes up and down on; pavements are for parking them! Good luck walking tourist!) we found only two out of five of the bars, restaurants and travel agents recommended all those years ago. Most of them had been replaced by holes in the ground advertised as foundations for a new Hilton or some such megastructure or Scotch Whiskey outlet. We have been treated well by everyone we have met, though, (if you discount the frequency of them laughing at us -- or is it just me and my Glasgow World Sci-Fi Convention t-shirt?). All in all, this is very pleasant.

We did find one bar mentioned in our pretty-much-useless guide, the Bamboo Bar. A tiny bamboo-decorated ('natch!) corner establishment on the river front selling cheap bottles of Tiger to a backdrop of Pink Floyd and Pearl Jam. As Sheldon Cooper would say: "This is my spot!" Still, we did find the railway station and successfully negotiated the purchase of some tickets to our next destination on Tuesday -- Hue -- so we achieved something today. For now, my feet hurt and the Bamboo calleth!