Day 8 Acting as a Human Rain Gauge in a Vietnamese Theme Park

The day began, as all truly great days do, with a hotel breakfast of epic proportions. It was a sprawling Asian feast, though I did spot a small, deeply lonely sausage and omelette station hiding in a corner, presumably for emotional support. A definite upgrade.

At 9 a.m. sharp, I was ferried off to Ba Na Hills. Ground temp at this time was a blistering 32 degrees and not a cloud in sight, except those hanging around at the top of a distant mountain, in another zip code. The journey up was a showstopper: a cable car ride so long—a full half-hour—that we eventually ascended into the clouds themselves. This sounds far more mystical than it was. The moment we docked, the cloud we were in decided to experience a sudden, violent weeping fit directly on top of me. As every man, woman, child, and distant cousin produced an umbrella, I had the slow-motion, gut-punch realisation that my raincoat was on the bus, patiently waiting for my 3 p.m. return. Why bring a coat, I’d reasoned, when it was a balmy 32 degrees at ground level? The cosmos, it would appear, has a rather pointed sense of humour.

This place is exactly what you’d get if Blackpool and Thorpe Park had a baby and fed it nothing but steroids. It’s gargantuan. They’ve built everything a holidaymaker could possibly desire: pizza parlours, a Starbucks for that authentic mountain-top experience, ancient-looking temples, and craft beer halls. It also seems that the entire population of Delhi chose this exact week to visit, so the place is a swirling, happy mass of humanity.

For lunch, I stumbled into a vast Indian buffet. I tried to capture the scene—seven entire islands of food, groaning with everything from chicken to poppadom's—but the resulting video file was probably large enough to need its own passport. I piled my plate high, sat down with a lovely Indian family from the bus, and took my first bite. It was hot. Not just ‘pleasantly warm,’ but ‘surface of the sun’ hot. Now, my tolerance for spice is famously low, but buffet etiquette dictates that one must finish one's plate. Halfway through, a grim premonition washed over me. This was not going to end peacefully. Let’s just say my confidence in certain… gaseous bodily functions… has been severely compromised for tomorrow.

So now I’m just counting the minutes until 3 o’clock. My back is staging a full-scale rebellion, so I’ve pre-emptively booked an acupuncturist for this evening. The glamorous agenda includes getting back to the hotel, dropping my laundry at a tiny place around the corner, and possibly lying very, very still for a while. I missed you this morning. I’ll check in again later. Tomorrow’s forecast is 'very nice,' a claim I will treat with the deep suspicion it deserves.

P.S. For anyone tracking the cost of living crisis, I thought I’d provide a little data from the field. It might just blow your mind. After my damp adventure, I dropped off my laundry (a few hankies, 10 pairs of skiddies, 10 pairs of socks, a pair of tailored shorts and 6 T shirts, plus something else... who knows) costing the princely sum of 50,000 dong. A 20-minute taxi to the acupuncturist across town was 79,000 dong; the return trip was 82,000. The 45-minute acupuncture session itself, complete with some sort of light electrocution on the needles, was 240,000 dong. Grand total for the laundry, two taxi rides, and having a nice lady zap my back pain into submission? 448,000 dong. In real money: twelve pounds and fifty-seven pence. For the whole shooting match. I’ll let you chew on that.