the long return

I got up at 9.30am on Friday - quite an achievement on this holiday, I can assure you.

Went for my first breakfast of the three week trip (it feels embarrassing to type that) in the hotel restaurant. I had sweetcorn cakes with crispy bacon and sweet chilli sauce. It was lovely, if a little bit rich.

I then had a couple of hours spare to spend in the sun before heading off. As I laid in the pool and looked up at the sun, I felt sad that it would be ages before I saw weather like this again - but vindicated in deciding to take this holiday in February. I had missed almost all of the most miserable month of the year, and it makes sense to break up the winter if you are not reliant on going away during school holidays.

My car was due to take me to Saigon at noon, so I started to pack around 11.30am. I hadn't taken much stuff. As I was doing so, I started to feel more and more unwell - similar to how I had felt after the chundering trip to the cu chi tunnels. I drank a bottle of water, but that didn't help, and then just as I was about to leave, I threw up in the toilet. Just the preparation I wanted for a gruelling journey across the planet.

I was picked up in a nice air conditioned people carrier and thanked the Lord that I wasn't travelling by bus. With me was a big cool bottle of water and packets of mints to try and keep down the vomit. As we set off, I noticed it had become really cloudy, and I suppose it was fortunate that I was travelling on a day like this rather than hoping for clear blue skies.

The journey to Saigon was pretty horrible. I felt lousy, although sat in the front of the car I was never in danger of being sick. The landscape of this part of Vietnam is also depressing and uninviting. There are endless unattractive buildings lining the road south, the occasional dreary little town and a shocking amount of litter everywhere. It was as far removed from the beauty of other parts of the country as is possible to describe.

After about five hours, the mental scenes of swarms of motorbikes indicated we were in Saigon. I said in an earlier blog that this is not a city you want to be in when ill, and that is how I felt again. We got to the airport, and I pulled out from my backpack some imodium I had ironically bought in Bangkok last year to stop me being ill, took a couple and then checked in for the 19.05 Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong.

I spent the remainder of my Vietnamese money on two cans of Tiger beer, which actually made me feel a lot better, and looked out over the darkening Saigon skyline. It was now tipping it down with rain, and I started to wonder if I was attempting too much travel at once. Drive to Saigon, wait at airport, flight to Hong Kong, wait at airport, flight to London etc. Perhaps I should have broken it up with a night in a hotel close to Hong Kong airport, but that would have been yet another expense.

The flight to Hong Kong was awful. It only took two and a half hours, but it was packed full of some of the most annoying people I have ever come across. Annoying because of their selfish inability to see or care about how their behaviour affects others. The guy sat next to me on this plane insisted on invading my personal space by putting his legs and elbow well into my side of the chairs, and just ignored my repeated attempts to subtly let him know that I was rather pissed off about this. In the end I kicked him. And then there was the fat Russian sat in front of me, who just ignored the stewards and sat with his chair fully back and his ipod on as we started our descent into Hong Kong. Now I've always been sceptical that listening to music crashes planes, but what really fucked me off about this guy was that whatever it was he was listening to was total crap, and was so loud that half the plane could hear it. And he couldn't care less. I eventually punched the back of his headrest in sheer fury at the selfishness of this turd of an individual.

When we landed, I told myself to calm down and relax. Trouble was, if a two and a bit hour flight could get me this wound up, what would the 12 hour epic journey to London be like?

Hong Kong Airport. A huge, stunning example of modern architecture. And one of the easiest places to part with your cash. I had quite a long wait until my flight, and so I withdrew £20 worth of Hong Kong dollars to buy some drinks. It got me three pints of Heineken and a bit of change. Even the duty free is expensive, with some drinks costing more than they do in supermarkets in the UK.

We left Hong Kong at 1am, which is easily the latest I have ever caught a flight. Fortunately I had an aisle seat with no chairs in front of me, which was a real bonus on the leg room front. We were served a meal, a stewardess served me two gins when I asked for one, and then I settled down to watch a Bond film. This was more like it. After a few more drinks, I dozed off just after noting we had almost eight hours to go before reaching Heathrow. The next thing I knew the same screen was telling me it was two hours. I couldn't believe it - six hours' kip on a plane. This has never happened to me before and made the journey so much more tolerable.

We landed at around 6am GMT, back where it all began at Terminal 5. Say what you will about airport and runway expansion, this is a very impressive building in which to welcome people to London. Got the tube home to save money and it took forever - partly because most of the lines were suspended. This is not an impressive way to welcome people to London.

I've stayed awake all day today (Saturday) to get myself back into the groove body clock wise. Tomorrow I will post my reflections on Vietnam as a country, and then it's back to work...