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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