Rainbow Divers

The PADI Divemaster (DM) course is taught at Rainbow through an internship programme. This means that we had crossed the line from being a customer and were now staff. Rather than arriving at the boat each morning to see our equipment all ready and waiting, we now had to get up at 5am every morning to assist with loading the boat.

There are a series of requirements you must complete to be qualified as a divemaster and unfortunately this included a bunch of exams! (I distinctly remember celebrating earlier this year the fact that I had ‘No more exams!’ ...clearly I was mistaken.) We had been warned that these were the most likely reason for not completing the DM course in the time allowed, so we put our heads down and worked on these solidly for the first 8-9 days.

With the exams out of the way, we could then get stuck into the more practical parts. These included:

• Making a map of an underwater section (30m x 50m)
• A series of swim tests
• Assisting with a variety of courses
• More rescue assessments
• other stuff!

Being out on the boat every day was excellent and we tripled our dive numbers. For breakfast each morning, we ate ‘street food’ down by the harbour. This is exactly as it sounds... we sat out on the street (on little plastic tables and chairs) and ate spicy noodles which were cooked in a big communal pot. It was delicious! And at only 5,000 Vietnamese Dong per bowl (about €0.25), it was well worth the money :-)

It wouldn’t be right to travel to a country and not experience a proper thunderstorm (we’ve been through one in almost every country so far) so sure enough, before we left, we were greeted with not 1 but 2 typhoons (the eastern hemisphere version of a hurricane). The eye of Typhoon Durian passed just south of our location, and nearly all the boats were taken out of the water so as to avoid damage. This slowed down our progress a little, but thankfully we managed to complete the last of the requirements on 7th December, my birthday :-)

We made some great friends in Rainbow and we were sorry to leave, but my Australia Visa was waiting for nobody (I had to enter by Jan 7th). So we finally packed up our stuff and headed on to Ho Chi Minh City (6 weeks late) and then flew to Singapore (our first flight in almost 5 months). Before we left, there was talk of coming back to do the Instructor Course... We came back once, we might be back again!

'The biggest cup of coffee in Hanoi'

Hanoi is a funny little town - especially if it's your first experience of South East Asia (as it was for me).

First of all, with a population of 4 million it's not a 'little town' at all but this was my first thought after having spent so much time in China (where there are over 160 cities with a population over 1 million). The little narrow streets and the fact that none of the buildings are more than 3-4 floors high adds to this notion.

Secondly, there were an amazing amount of scooters around! It was like being in Finglas only without the tracksuits. This is not that unusual for those who have travelled in SE Asia already, but I found the constant beeping of horns and crazy driving to be overwhelming. In Ireland, someone beeps the horn if they are annoyed (and they want the annoy-er to know about it). In Hanoi, I think it's how you say hello. (It's also how you say 'I want to overtake you' and 'Fair enough... off you go'.) The drivers were crazy and we had already seen one road fatality after only 3 bus journeys!

While we're on the subject of dead bodies... after missing out on seeing Chairman Mao in Beijing, we had hoped to get a peek at the embalmed body of Ho Chi Min but unfortunately he (it?) was on loan to Russia for its annual maintanance.

The Lonely Planet mentioned a place called the Kangaroo Cafe which served 'the biggest cup of coffee in Hanoi'. This sounded like just the trick to take our mind off the mayham so we dropped in. This was the first step in a chain of events which would result in us staying for 7 weeks in Vietnam.

Kangaroo Cafe (as well as serving coffee) also offered a variety of tours. We decided to sign up for their 3 day boat tour of Halong Bay - a beautiful bay with huge limestone rocks jutting out of the sea. The tour was fantastic and we ended up sharing the boat almost entirely with a bunch of Aussies (I think I'm going to like living in Australia!). One night of the tour, we stopped off at an Island and dropped into a Kiwi bar for a few drinks. This one in particular had a flyer for 'Rainbow Divers', a dive centre in Nha Trang (our next destination) and a map of the same town on the back.

After Halong Bay, we took a 26 hour train journey south to Nha Trang (listed as the best scuba diving spot in Vietnam). We wanted to do a dive or two so thought it was worth stopping off before moving on to Ho Chi Min City (aka Saigon).

With the Rainbow Divers flyer and map in hand, we made our way to their shop and were very impressed with what we saw. They had 2 PADI Course Directors as staff (PADI's highest rating) and a pile of other experienced instructors, and could offer any and all courses. We decided to make use of the opportunity (and the very low cost) and signed up to do the PADI Rescue Diver course.

We had the full attention of an excellent senior instructor (and two divemasters) all to ourselves for the whole 5 days and thoroughly enjoyed the course. There were jokes about coming back and doing the divemaster course (6 weeks+) but with Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia & Singapore still to come there just wasn't time (maybe next year, we thought). So we bought our train ticket on to Saigon and were sorry to have to leave the place.

While packing up our stuff, we discussed it a bit more about if and when we would come back and came to the conclusion that there's no time like the present. And so it came that we completely changed our itinirary for the remainder of the trip.

All those other countries would have to wait for another trip, and all because of the biggest cup of coffee in Hanoi.

Good morning Vietnam!!

It took about 2 days of travel to get from Hong Kong to Vietnam. We took a local train from central Hong Kong to the 'frontier' with mainland China and walked back across the border into un-civilisation. (When I first heard that you can walk across the border between China and HK, I pictured something like open plains with barbed wire and signs saying 'No mans land'. As it turns out, it's much less interesting than that - more like passing the security area at an airport - right up to getting your passport stamped.) We knew we were back in China again when we heard that familiar hoicking sound :-)

From the border we took another train to Guangzhou then an overnight sleeper to Nanning arriving in at around 4am. There's not much to do at 4am in many places and there's even less when you're in the middle of China, so you can imagine our surprise when we stumbled onto a 24-hour internet cafe right next to the station (with a surprisingly fast connection too!)

The quality of the trains we travelled on was inversly proportional to our distance from HK until by the time we left Nanning destined for the Vietnamese border, we were piled into the worst train we have been on yet (and we've been on a LOT of trains). It was like a scene out of Oliver Twist, with people crammed onto uncomfortable wooden seats in stiffling heat. It took us over 4 hours to go about 80 miles! Even at EUR 1.70, it was bad value for money!

The train didn't actually go to the Vietnamese border - but instead, dropped us about 10km away. Of course, where there are tourists, there are opportunists and we made this trip on the back of a 3-wheeled motorbike :-)

Unlike the China/HK border, the China/Vietnam border actually IS like I described above! There's about a 1km stretch that you have to walk along between the two borders, each with little huts where people can eye you suspiciously and then grudgingly stamp your passport. I really enjoyed the experience :-) We would later learn that our 1-month visa we got for our planned 10 day visit would not be long enough!

We finally arrived in Hanoi later that night and enjoyed a well deserved rest.