Slowly, I'm reaching my limit on bus journeys in Vietnam. Drivers here have a serious addiction problem with their horns. They just can't give it a bloody rest! If they see a cyclist somewhere up ahead, perhaps 200 metres away, they can't resist the urge to make their presence known with five or six - or on one memorable occasion 15 - toots of the horn. I wouldn't mind if they weren't so bloody loud INSIDE the bus! But that's enough ranting for now.

Hoi An was charming. We arrived during a New Moon festival, marking two weeks since Tet (Lunar New Year) which entailed lots of chanting at the local temple. Which was outside our hotel! But it stopped eventually and sleep washed away nerves that had been frayed by the twelve hours in the bus.

The town itself is not big, but nonetheless we managed to get lost! This had a happy outcome, because it was on our thirsty way back towards the centre that we stumbled across Viet Cafe, owned and run by Viet, a Vietnamese chap. He was really friendly and talkative, so in no time we had heard his life story: how he had been a top chef in a five-star hotel, how he had given all that up (not to mention a very good salary by local standards of some 120 dollars a month) to set up his own cafe. We didn't have the heart to share with him our suspicion that his location is just too far from the centre of town. He really is trying hard, and I wish him success.

Hoi An has over two hundred tailors. We went to one that had been recommended to us by an Australian woman we met in Saigon, and we didn't regret it. The tailoring was excellent, the service fantastic, the name: Xuan. Go there. I bought three suits cheap cheap! (Yes, all you who have invited me to your wedding this year, I will be sporting made-to-measure confections of finest cashmere and Japanese silk!)

We went on a day trip to My Son, to see the ruins of the Champa temple complex that is nestled in a timeless, almost perfectly circular valley, entirely ringed by verdant hills except for one entry point across a small river. Sadly, little remains of the temples that once graced this lush setting; what the ineluctable passage of time could not ravage fell prey to American bombs (okay, the Viet Cong had deliberately put loads of troops into the temples in an attempt to use them as a sort of historic shield, so as always there's two sides to the story).

A boat ride back to Hoi An and we were ready for some coffee and cake. Hoi An has some delightful cafes, not to mention some great restaurants serving (among other things) the local pork speciality, cao lau - mmm! Then we walked out to Viet Cafe and had some unforgettable cocktails, such as the unique Lonely Island: whisky (preferably dodgy foreign whisky that tastes like shit) and chocolate sauce (ditto previous parenthetic remark), served with an enticing slice of carrot as decoration! Poor Viet, he is really going nowhere with that bar, even if he does ever install his longed-for pool table.

Next stop after picking up our tailored clothes was Hue, a mere four hours north. But those four hours saw the weather change completely, to a dank, grey, overcast, wet, rainy, altogether British pattern. Yuk! But Hue itself has lots to offer. Most notable are the many tombs of past emperors who ruled from this city. They are tremendous 19th and early 20th century expressions of imperial splendour and idiosyncracy...