My God. It’s Hot As Hades!

There comes a point in every holiday where you stop looking like “travellers” and start looking like escapees who’ve wandered too far from the hotel. Today was that day.

We went back into the old part of town to pick up the five pairs of shoes I had made. Five. Apparently I now believe I’m some sort of Imelda Marcos wandering around Vietnam in custom footwear. To be fair though, they’re gorgeous, and when someone can make shoes specifically for your feet while you sit there sweating into your own eyeballs, it feels rude not to buy several pairs.

The Squeeze got some shirts made too, because apparently we’ve both decided we’re becoming linen people now. You know the type. Holiday people who suddenly think they’re sophisticated because they own breathable fabrics and say things like “the humidity is oppressive.”

And oppressive it is.

The heat here isn’t normal heat. It’s biblical. It’s the kind of heat where you don’t walk anywhere so much as slowly dissolve toward your destination. By midday we both looked like damp regret wrapped in cotton. I caught sight of us reflected in a shop window at one point and honestly? We looked like two sock puppets who’d just received terrible medical news.

After collecting our haul, we climbed into what I’m still calling a tuk tuk, even if it technically isn’t one, because at this stage I’m too hot to care about transport accuracy. The driver sped us through traffic while we flapped gently in the breeze like exhausted laundry.

By the time we got back to the hotel we were absolutely finished. Cooked. Emotionally steamed. We collapsed dramatically indoors pretending we’d survived some enormous ordeal instead of what was essentially “shopping with humidity.”

Still worth it though.

Five pairs of glorious shoes!