Finally got my arse in gear

Thank you to all those who've nagged me at the end of emails to start doing a blog (especially those whose blogs are perpetually "coming soon"). Anyway figured it sort-of made sense so here goes.

I'm now in Dalat, a town of about 180,000 located in the Central Highlands of Vietnam; it was essentially set-up by the French colonists so they could have somewhere to grow traditional European vegetables, grow grapes for wine-making (haven't actually tried Dalat wine yet but I'm guessing it's a hell of a lot better than the picked-snake-flavoured wine I tried the other day (a few well wrapped bottles of which may be slipping through UK/US/Canadian customs to carefully selected Christmas stockings around the world), and generally hang out. During the American War (as its known here), apparently top Soutyh Vietnamese generals and their VC cadre counterparts planned their military campaigns from (apparently quite grand) bungalows on opposite sides of Dalat (in any military, your life expectancy increases with rank in pretty much direct proportion)...the wtown itself saw no bombing.

By the way, as I'm sure most of you reading this will know, Vietnam wasn't the first stop on this trip...so far travelled from Beijing, down to Xi'an, across to Chengdu...and flew into Tibet . From Tibet went travelling down through Yunnan and Guilin to Hong Kong (where my good friend Charlie Reid left me for the glamour of photocopying for UNESCO in Paris), and from HK took a quick 2 day stopover in Singapore. Can't go back over the whole trip so going to have to make do with Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City)...