Never let it be said that I don’t listen to feedback. Call me a pedantic, stubborn, value for money freak, but don’t call me unhearing. Recent polls have shown that today’s audience is looking for action and adventure – something bordering on the ‘Romancing the Stone’, but with a little bit of ‘Fear and Loathing’ thrown in.

Two nights ago, Joe and I went out to get in trouble in Nha Trang – a place as crooked and mafia-run as your average beach in Thailand. One article says that next to the beach is a set of roads infested with pimps, drug pushers, hypodermics and Trouble with a capital Tee. But to reverse the effects of westerners coming to have too much fun and exploit the local peasants, one Canadian/Vietnamese woman is taking a stand with her bar – Crazy Kim’s. Every drink you have, every plate of bangers and mash or full English breakfast – they all generate a contribution to combat drug and prostitution Problems, with a capital Pee. So we got wangered during the prolonged happy hour, and bought local handicrafts from any impoverished looking street vendor who approached. We felt good – decadent with a hint of altruism.

So to start feeling bad, we went to a few beach discos – merrily propelled by a scrawny looking cyclo driver. In the course of our 5 minute pedal-powered trip, we had been offered Marry Wana, good lady, cheap lady, and the promise of a bar where we could buy aineeeting. Getting to the beachfront discotheque, we proceeded, as Joe would say, to “dance like bell ends”, and investigate the local scene. The second such disco had at its disposal a pretty young lady who would tie menus to the belt loop at the back of your trousers when you weren’t looking. The menu would swing about as you danced around, with muffled guffaws from the rest of the crowd. Standards expat affair of drunk western chaps, and one wealthy looking Japanese fellow, with lots of smiling asian girls. DJ wouldn’t play the Final Countdown however hard we petitioned him. At one point I was convinced I had had my pocket picked when I turned to see a short chap counting notes behind me, I patted my pockets and suddenly forgot that I had spent nearly all of my money on ‘killer cocktail buckets’. I stared at him from a distance that swayed between 2 and 4 inches from his nose for a while before I figured things out.

I left Joe in the clutches of a German girl, and went to the street to stagger home. Greeted by our all-offering cyclo driver, I was whisked off at a snail’s pace to God knows where. I had no idea of the name of my hotel, and by the time I’d fished out the hotel card, our cyclo driver had driven past some kind of cycle-through brothel, and a beautiful lady was sat on my lap, offering her services for a mere twenty dollars for a ‘shaw taime’ or thirty dollars for ‘orl nigh’. Polite as could be, and with all the charm of a man soaked in vodka and gin, I declined her comely advances, and invited her to leave the carriage. She wasn’t in any rush to leave the carriage, seeming quite comfortable on my lap, and since she was keeping said lap nicely warm, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and allowed her to remain there, with the added bonus for her of a free ride.

The cyclo now heading towards my hotel, at the pace now of a lazy snail on beta-blockers, a moped pulled alongside and kept abreast of us. He headed to what he thought was the hotel of my new wife and I at least. And the gentleman on the back of the moped, who I came to assume was my new wife’s pimp seemed adamant that I give him some money for doing unspeakable things to his protege.

In the guidebooks about Vietnam, it tells you to avoid conflict, and always smile in negotiations. Offering around a pack of fags is supposed to smooth any ruffled feathers, and allow any heated negotiations to commence at a cooler temperature. All of these pieces of advice were totally absent from my mind, locked away from my conscious. The pimp on the back of the moped kept on at me to give him some money, and eventually the lady on my lap left the bicycle carriage, but not before telling me to meet her at 10pm the following day. I think that was the message, but considering her command of English was insufficient for her to be able to negotiate her own deals without a cycling chauffeur and a pimp on a moped, she could have been singing ‘God Save the Queen’ for all I know.

Seeing that the pimp still didn’t relent his demands, and was the size and stature of a Gerry Andersen puppet, with appropriately oversized head, and diminuitive dangling body, I decided to jump off the bike and shout at him in the street for a bit. A street which I admittedly didn’t recognise, and that could have been described by a more observant type as a dark alleyway. After a bit of gesticulation, and a fair bit of yelling, the pimp seemed to be reaching into his back pocket for a knife. I jumped back each time he did this, and he looked pleased at the small victory that such a reaction produced in me.

After a couple of minutes of this nonsense, the cyclo peddler appealed to me to get back into his vehicle, and I figured that he wanted to get me back to my hotel, and away from the deranged pimp and his burly moped chauffeur. I got back in, and the pace matching and harranging continued from the Thunderbird pimp. In an offer of reconciliation, I tried to grab the moped driver’s right hand, ostensibly to shake it. He wasn’t having any of it, probably best too.

Arriving at the shuttered-up hotel, I reached between the metal grill and knocked on the window, and after a few minutes, the shutters opened enough to admit me, and I thought my three pursuers would be shut out, and I could safely go to sleep behind protective bars. But I was wrong. The scrawny fellow appealed to the hotel guard in Vietnamese, and he was persuaded to open the shutter. I made for my room, and Mr Scrawn latched onto my synthetic shirt. I pried his hands away. He grabbed me again. The pimp joined in the grab-a-Ron grab-a-thon free-for-all. I was more than a little angry by this point, and let my assailants know this at the top of my voice. I figured out that all three were in cahoots, as the demands for money now came for services of Mr Scrawn – apparently he wanted to charge me for waiting for some 5 hours outside various clubs in town.

Trying a change of tack, I grabbed a packet of fags from his top pocket and threw them on the floor. The hotel guard seemed to be siding with them at this point, and was offering no assistance – why should he, when a wealthy white man has returned at 5am with three men demanding money – surely this western guy has plenty of US dollar and owes these poor downtrodden folk some of them. I pulled all of the money I had from my pockets in a dramatic gesture, and counted it out, amounting to about forty pence. And although forty pence is enough to get a bottle of vodka, a bottle of coke and some biscuits for your hangover, it wasn’t the sum my friends had in mind.

This was all of the money I had, and Mr Scrawn had been cycling me around for a while, giving me a tour of drive-thru brothels, neighbourhood pimps, and had indeed found my hotel rather than leaving me in a dark alley. The moped driver did look a bit tasty after all, and with no command of English at all, I assumed he must be the muscle of the operation, and I wasn’t too keen to find out first hand whether he enjoyed his work or not. I proferred the notes to Mr Scrawn, saying this is all the money I have, but he refused to accept it. More than once, I threw it at the pavement outside the hotel, as I was getting very tired of these games, and the hands that kept grabbing me every time I tried to leave.

I’m not a person that is quick to anger. But I was tired. Words were not working. I stared into Mr Scrawn’s eyes from not very far away. I can’t see very well in dim lighting, so it was best I got as close as possible to see what was going on in his head. He held my gaze for a while, and then looked away. I figured that he wasn’t going to hurt me. I did this to the pimp too, demanding to know who the real boss of the negotiations was. This was a question I posed them both, and eventually it transpired that Mr Scrawn was. He still held my arm, so I convinced him with my free hand that he should let me go. I threw the money at the floor again, and made to leave.

It must have looked pretty comical as I strode off on the hotel’s tiled floor dragging a scrawny baseball-capped cyclo driver behind me as he clutched my shirt. Seeing as he wouldn’t let go of my shirt, I dragged him up a few flights of stairs, and unhanded myself there. From the amount of shouting, I would be surprised if anyone in the neighbouring rooms was still asleep, and finally he relented and descended the stairs. Despite my room being on the ground floor, I walked to the top of the hotel, where I could see Mr Scrawn and the pimp leaving the area. Momentarily distracted by the sunrise in the distance, I figured that this left the muscle behind.

Arming myself with some broken furniture I crept back downstairs. The hotel guard was waiting for me, and told me that everyone had gone and I could put the weapons away. He also handed me the key to my ground floor room, indicating that he knew that I didn’t live upstairs, where I had just dragged Mr Scrawn. I just couldn’t figure him out, so I barracaded myself into the room, and after recording a bit of a video diary in case I went missing in the middle of the night, I set down Joe’s camera and passed out.

I’ve been here about 36 hours since then, and I haven’t seen them again yet. I wonder what tonight will hold?