After an exhausting four days of, erm, shopping in Hoi An we decided to recharge our batteries and our credit cards with a brief stop at China Beach, since it’s only 18km away on the coastal road to Danang. It turned out to be a great decision and a one night stop over turned into a four day seafood, surf and beer frenzy at what has got to be one of the best beaches ever.

China Beach was a popular surfing haunt with American GIs during the war, but since then it has remained unfathamably, miraculously untouched by development – along a 25km stretch of pristine white sand there are a handful of hotels, one five star resort and a solitary little diamond of a guest house called Hoa’s Place.
We found Hoa’s in our guidebook, where it was described as ‘properly off the beaten track, with some travellers staying for months’, which made me a bit suspicious because descriptions of this kind often seem to translate as ‘doss-house full of scruffy tossers who are too broke/lazy/stoned to move.’ Happily though, none of this applied to Hoa’s: the place is a gem – right on the beach with cheap rooms, food and beer more or less on tap and free surf boards for boys to make themselves look stupid on: best guest house we’ve stayed at in five months.

In the past I’ve never considered myself much of a beach lover – too much sand, too little activity – but on this trip I seem to have become an expert on doing what you’re supposed to do there i.e. not very much. For four days our daily routine was: get up, go for a little trot along the beach (me), faff on the computer (James), have breakfast, lie on the beach, play in the sea, lie on the beach, play in the sea, gorge on seafood, lie on the beach, drink beer, play cards, drink beer, join everybody else for dinner, have a natter, go to bed. No wonder somebody once stayed there for fifteen months.

Eventually we decided that enough was enough and took off to Hue by train – a beautiful journey over the Hai Vanh pass with perfect views over the paddy fields and beaches below us. Hue is the cultural and academic capital of Vietnam and it has a distinctly French look about it; wide tree-lined boulevards, riverside parks and art galleries galore. Yesterday we wandered around the citadel, a huge labyrinth of courtyards, gates, moats and royal enclosures that was built two hundred years ago by a Nguyen Emperor and still dominates the city. The majority of the citadel’s buildings were smashed to smithereens during the war and are now painstakingly being restored by an army of workmen; you can still see bullet holes and mortar scars on the areas that survived. But despite its turbulent history and sublime architecture, the best thing about the citadel is undoubtedly the fact that, for a mere pound, you can dress up as a 19th century mandarin and parade yourself on a throne while Vietnamese tourists to take photos of you. Is it possible to have that much fun at The Tower of London? I think not (see photo section for evidence).