SWEET LIME PICKLE

ROMANTIC COMEDY DRAMA. DIRECTED, WRITTEN & STARRING GEORGE BAZ & SAM FOZ.

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HANOI, VIETNAM

Vietnam started perfectly. We whizzed through the visa office and passport control, and were greeted by a taxi driver with my name spelled incorrectly who text on TWO phones simultaneously while he drove us to the guesthouse.

After a good nights sleep we were up for an early explore. It was also a bonus that almost every guesthouse in Vietnam includes a standard breakfast of egg / omelette and French stick.

Hanoi, for tourists, centres around a legendary lake and an old quarter full of all sorts of temples and different architectural styles of shop houses.

It was way more touristy than we had imagined. Possible even more so than Thailand. However, the city centre was beautiful and full of things to look at.

We found a couple of good restaurants that did awesome food and we were set.

On our first dine out in an actual restaurant we met a Chinese expat called Forrest (after Forrest Gump). He was a really nice guy and had been living in the city for a short time so wanted to show us all the sites. He was a little on edge though because, in true Sam and George style, the day we arrived Vietnam hit the headlines because china were kicking off in the South China Sea and there were riots near Ho Chi Minh City. We met him for coffee on a few occasions and he took us for one of the worse meals I have ever eaten at a chicken noodle shop.

We visited the temple on the lake and learned the story of the golden turtle and the returned sword (a king got a magic sword from the lake and, after repelling the Chinese, returned the sword to the legendary giant guardian turtle of the lake). The rest of our time was spent looking round shops, and escaping the 40+ degree heat in cafés.

We liked to get up early, get an amazing Vietnamese coffee at the side of the road (whilst sat on a tiny stool) and then walk around the lake, watching all the characters that come out to do lots of fitness training at the waters edge and walk their tiny, tiny dogs.

We also visited a prison museum, the Vietnam women’s museum and the hanoi water puppet show. The museums were really interesting - obviously the country has an very sad, action packed past, that is hard not to notice when you’re visiting. It’s probably the fact that it was all still happening in very recent living memory.

After 5 days of acclimatising to the city we booked a trip by train up to Sapa, an old French hill station right in the north, near the Chinese boarder. After that we would be back for a few more days in Hanoi to explore more.

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And so, after a 10 day stop off featuring the birthday party of the century, posting some belongings, and our Vietnam visas being approved, the flight was booked. We spent our last day relaxing at the Desa Park City Club (swish!) then it was a short flight to Hanoi, Vietnam.

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Before and after. Visa photo for India followed by the visa photo for Vietnam. The best part, after the lady took our passport photos she coloured us in using Microsoft paint. She mainly just reduced my hair by painting it white. If you look on my left shoulder you can see a chunk that she decided to take out of it. No one knows why

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The rest of the mall / supermarket / pet shop time in KL. We walked past the pet shop everyday and obviously had to stop and have a look… It was pretty grim. Lots of the locals and some of the ex pats have pets and this old school style of ‘doggie in the window’ pet shop is still all the rage in Asia. They sold everything from Sugar Gliders to Alsatians and had a pampering section in the back for pooches. Dog fashion is a serious business amongst affluent Asian society. Some weird stuff you could buy in the international supermarket. And a weird anime / manga shop in the mall. The MJ statue was creepy and the girls statues all had removable clothes?!? The kids dolls George mentioned before were about as sexual as the toys / statues for the older, weirder men-kids. The comic book toy shop was obviously great. George made a new team of Avengers.

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Found this in Malaysian Hamley's while trying to find a birthday present for Sophie. Really wanted it for myself. Best toy ever. I was however infuriated walking round the shop by two things: ONE the distinction between girl and boy toys. There is a clear divide between the pink and blue sections in the shop. The pink section contains glittery boxes emblazoned with pretty little girls playing with dolls and household appliances. Whereas the blue section, the ones where the advertising shows boys assertively pointing a finger down the camera lens, sells things like science sets, electric helicopters and anything remotely interesting. Not only this, but the dolls are so sexualised. Wearing outfits that wouldn't look out of place on Miley Cyrus. It's incredible, and shocking, that people actually buy this crap for their children. Setting kids up for a life dependent on their gender. Disgusting. TWO: Hamely's play list involves not only rap songs full of swearing but also alarming tracks about aggressive sexual intercourse which involve a LOT of heavy panting

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... and how the cake actually looked

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How the cake should have looked...

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KUALA LUMPUR, MALAYSIA

Pit stop, back at our ex-pat home.

The highlight of the visit was Sophie’s seventh birthday. And we were given the task of making the cake.

As Sophie and Holly own over 50 barbies, and love anything remotely pink and barbie related, the birthday party had a pink barbie theme - and the cake needed to match.

After spending some time looking at insanely intricate barbie cakes on the internet. We were starting to get a little worried by the challenge.

Instead of going for a perfectly iced beautiful ball gown we decided to do one better…

We made a mars bar cake and then decorated the top with chocolate and pretty much anything else we could lay our hands on (you don’t get the same level of ingredient choice in Malaysia - as you do from the baking isle in Waitrose).

The cake went down well, the excessive amounts of sugar sent the kids a little wild, but it was all part of the fun. There was pass the parcel which did induce a few tears, swimming in the pool, decorating your own bedroom door placard - involving pink paint and lots of glitter, musical statues - a disaster - and finally singing along to the theme tune from Frozen - which the kids pretended to one another they were too cool to enjoy (but they all secretly loved the most).

The child that stood out as being the most interesting and memorable was a girl called Freya who was actually nuts. Freya had hair like goldilocks and a mouth like a fog horn - she spent the majority of the day dancing, while laying on the floor shaking and making high pitched shrieking noises. It’s hard to describe, but Sam and I found her absolutely hilarious. Unlike the rest of the kids. They spent the afternoon trying to keep as far away from her as possible.

After the kids had gone to bed we finished off the untouched cheese and pineapple on sticks. Actually, I did. Sam just had a bit of jelly and ice cream.

Hopefully no more kids party’s for a while. Ideally, never ever again

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Minutes before we had to check out of the hostel we saw this beast swimming along the river. In the words of Steve Irwin, rest his soul, 'It [was a] big one'. We got right above it while it was in the water but then a boat and another monitor appeared and it was off. Trying to get good photos of them was very hard they are extremely fast, in and out of water.

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Dragons and serpents were our main source of amusement in Melaka.

One evening we watched a python, not far from three meters in length, glide down the river and then scooch up a drain pipe. Sadly the poor bugger had lost the tip of it’s tail. And so with every scooch it made up the pipe, a jet of water squirted out of it’s tail end.

The video is of a water monitor. These dragonesque creatures dominate the waters of pretty much every SouthEast-Asian river, however this one was just wandering around in the drain. Drains in Asia run alongside the road. 90% of the time they are not covered, meaning you can see actual shit pobbing along beside you. And on this day. A water monitor too, lucky us!

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Jonker Walk night market. One of the most over-hyped, collections of the usual rubbish we have been to. When you have been travelling this long and you hear about a famous night market, that hundreds of people turn up to - week in, week out - and they close half a town for it, you think that it must be something special. You like to believe it's going to be an amazing collection of all the best bric-a-brac ever! Unfortunately, all that happened was huge amounts of ignorant- ten-bob- millionaires turn up and push all the prices up for the usual fridge magnets, mass-produced shite and fake Beats by Dre. There was however, an exceptional cruel pet store (everything from hedgehogs to pythons in take away containers), lots of clothes for dogs, 'couples-look' and newly discovered 'family-look', line dancing, big stage karaoke (with old man backing dancer), and, Malaysia's favourite past time, a Guinness world record attempt by the worlds strongest coconut poker. This guy was also an idiot who spent ages warming up his whole body (to poke a hole in a fresh coconut with his manky finger), then spent an hour trying to flog a magic oil that made his finger indestructible, told off most of the crowd for pick-pocketing and smoking, and finally begged for bookings in his three Melaka restaurants. The grand finale was about 2 seconds of him jamming his gnarled finger through the top of four coconuts. So hot, so boring. The Malay tourists loved it though.

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To dodge the heat we did a lot of walking round at night, which is why the photos for Melaka are pretty poor. One bonus of the night walking, however, was the street animals for George to squish and smooch. There was a healthy population of critters that came out after dark - probably why the lizards and snakes were so big in those parts.

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Melaka and the view from our guesthouse common area. Being a port town there are influences from Malay and Indian culture as well as Chinese straits settlers. Obviously, alongside Islamic mosques, Taoist temples and Hindu shrines, there are also monuments to the modern religion of Asia - Hello Kitty, Lego and comic book super heroes.

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Melaka has the ugliest temple lions of anywhere we have been.

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Unexpected claim to fame in Melaka. Dr. Gan Boon Leong - Mr Melaka, Mr Malaysia, Mr Asia and Mr Universe. Stacked.

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Nod to Penang.

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MELAKA, MALAYSIA.

We had really enjoyed the Chinese straits culture in Penang, when we first visited Malaysia, so were looking forward to Melaka. Melaka is another ancient port town that is a mixing pot of Straits-Chinese, Malay and Indian cultures. It's famous for a night market at the weekends and Baba Nonya food. First impressions from the taxi driver at the bus station, and our guesthouse were implying good things. We stayed right on the river in a beautiful Chinese shophouse / guesthouse that left free cake on the kitchen table everyday. Brilliant. Unfortunately, it didn't have the same effect as Penang on us. Outside of the guesthouse, we were a little disappointed with the UNESCO town, sponsored by Mr. Chips - the Malaysian equivalent of Pringles?! The first issue was the temperature. Although it wasn't the hottest place we had been / have been, the heat was oppressive. And the low-rise heritage part of town provided no shelter from the swelter. The whole of the town was really small but even going for a walk to get lunch was an extreme physical exertion. We also noticed that purposely arriving mid-week had set us at a slight disadvantage where being a tourist was concerned. Lots of the shops and cafés and restaurants don't even open when it's not the weekend - when the tourists turn out by the tonne for the Jonker St night market on Friday / Saturday night. Overnight the guesthouses fill to bursting, the streets become rammed to bursting point and the prices on every single menu go up. As time wore away in the sizzling heat we found small consolations in a mental Belgian woman (who owned a book shop full of her own cat/boob-based artwork), lots street cats and dogs, strong iced coffee, fake Lego, an Italian diva, a world record coconut poker, hello kitty everywhere, the night market pet store, the free guesthouse cake and loads of massive, wild reptiles roaming the canal and storm drains at all times of the day!!!! All in all, OK. But not as good as Penang.