January to March 2016

The ‘electrician’ had been twiddling live wires for the last hour while I watched and waited for him to suddenly fly across the room or start smouldering when one of the guests in the outer rooms announced that all of his lights had gone out.

We go up and down a flight of metal stairs that descend into the middle of four lanes of traffic a couple of times then decide it must be the right place.

We fly into Siem Reap, Cambodia, in a ATR72. It has propellers – how quaint. The flight from Da Nang lasts one hour fifty minutes and goes without incident.

Hue – pronounced ‘way’ – was the location of one of the fiercest battles of the Vietnam War. The walls of the old Royal Palace bare witness to the action and several buildings within were flattened by US bombing.

The young man from Vietnam Airways very politely told us in a soft voice that without an onward flight ticket we might not be allowed into Vietnam. I argued irrelevantly that we didn’t need a visa but, technically, he was correct.