So it's been months since the holiday of the year, but my posts have finally made it from Sydney, through the seedy underworld of Bangkok, and into Vietnam. Well, almost. Technically we are picking up the story in Bangkok.

You see, the morning of day 3 found the three of us a little worse for wear, somewhat dusty and under the weather. This was mostly self inflicted, and to be honest kind of set the tone of the holiday to come. Awesome.

Oh, and to make matters worse, someone had decided to book us flights that were just way too early. So early that sunrise decided to hit the snooze button, twice. And by way too early, I totally mean we had to be up at 5am. Only it wasn't 5am, that was just the seedy hangover talking. But when you feel seedy, and have a 40 minute Thai taxi ride across the city to the airport, you are totally allowed to bitch about it.

Either way, I spent the flight to Ho Chi Minh city, on the other side of the plane with my head in my hands. In what was pretty much the best mood ever. And by best mood ever, I meant "I'm hungover and the two guys next to me think it is funny to keep poking me in the ribs and drawing pictures of me and laughing at me all the way to another country".

In a rather strange co-incidence, as we flew into Ho Chi Minh, my ipod (which was keeping me sane at this point) switched songs and started playing Cold Chisels' "Khe Sanh" - one of my top 5 Aussie songs of all time. Now, one could launch into a rant about how the song is historically inaccurate *Steve*, but in all seriousness, it felt strangely fitting as we flew a graceful arch over the city and into the airport.

Despite the rapid development in Vietnam, and in Ho Chi Minh in particular, there are still so many vivid reminders still standing of the Vietnam war that devastated the country. I haven't been to many airports around the world to be honest, but I'm pretty sure you don't often fly into an airport still surrounded by concrete bunkers and flanked by machine gun and anti-aircraft turrets. Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice was saying "Seriously Will, what are you doing?!"

But that was the same voice that I apparently ignored when I was sexually assaulted by the Lady-boy in Bangkok, so in typical male fashion, I did some pretty complex high level maths calculations and trigonometry, and worked out the following equation around my relative safety levels in each country.

{n00b (-)5EX / THAI} < {pwnage (+) 1337 / VIET}

Yeah. Works out well huh? Now, I could get technical and explain the actual science behind that calculation, but I know for a fact that there are a few nerds out there who could actually translate, or even improve on that calculation for me, and I'll leave it to them...

For the rest of you non leet speakers, the basic idea of the calculation is:

Thailand: A land where packs of wild ladyboys assault naive and stupid travellers such as my self, vs Vietnam : a land of cheap beer, no road rules, and the ability for foriengers to play with war era machinery.

Just quietly, I figured I'd rather take my chances with a bunch of machine gun turrets, non existant public safety awareness, non regulated roads and an inherant lack of quality control on public infrastucture, food standards and pretty much everything else, than with another Wiggly finger ladyboy massage.