Saturday 1 August 2015

Day 276: Giant jelly

Kate and I woke early and went down for a short walk along the beach this morning. Kate had had the forethought to get into her swimming costume, so she went in for a quick swim. After breakfast at the Haven, we all went for another swim, this time coming across an enormous jellyfish on the beach. As we swam, we watched with growing curiosity as a group of locals set up further down the beach – one of them, a woman in what looked like a wedding dress. We eventually figured out that it was a photo shoot, and as the day wore on, the woman and her male partner went through a number of different looks while a young photographer snapped them from every angle. Back at the Haven, I set myself up in the room and did some work on my Mongolia feature while Kate and the girls did some school work downstairs.














We had lunch in the hotel area and then walked into the village to get some fruit and cheap soft drinks and beers (Alex is happy for us to chill them in one of the fridges in the kitchen and drink them whenever – which saves us a bit of money). I did a little bit more work in the room and then received one of those frustrating emails – Paul, who replaced me at Geographical, forwarded me a message from a PR inviting him to send someone for a free stay at a high-end resort in Da Nang, from where we had just come. If the email had arrived a week or so ago, we could have taken advantage of the offer, but now, it would involve backtracking from Ho Chi Minh City. But after joining the others, I emailed everyone involved to see if we could still find a way of making it happen. In the meantime, Alex's son had arrived from Hanoi with a friend and the friend's mother. The kids now had quite a posse, and they all played on the beach together or huddled around various tablets playing Minecraft.



We had dinner in the Haven, engaging in a long chat before and after with the Australian family. As I mentioned, they had already spent quite a bit of time travelling through Cambodia and Vietnam, stopping off at a number of places to which Kate had been considering taking us, and she was keen to pick their brains. Suffice to say that their descriptions of a few of the Cambodian towns were enough to make her change her plans.

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