When you’re in an amusement Park, you, like me, probably often fantasize about rounding up the parks fellow visitors and drowning them in the Log Flume. Having an Amusement park to just you is a futile little, adrenaline filled dream though right? Nope, not if you fly the oh so short hop and skip over to Nha Trang, Vietnam, nestled firmly up in the backside of nowhere. There you can find Vinpearl Land an amusement park on its own island, think Tracy Island minus the strings. Like we did you’ll probably find that once you do have the whole place to yourself and you’re free to wander and explore the rides, waterpark and arcades where everything is set to freeplay and the only downside is that you have to hit your imaginary friends on the dodgems you can have a lot of fun.

Read about that fun in the full post….

To get there we took the Worlds Vietnams at least Nha Trang’s (I think the person who recommended the place might have been exaggerating, all drunk on Vietnamese construction pride so I’m downgrading it) longest over sea cable car! The view was spectacular if you like looking down suspended 100ft from your watery gravy by a fat bit of string in a glass matchbox with no windows, confident in the knowledge that if you did plummet to your oh so wet death, the vietnamese would spend more time covering up the fact that you ever entered the country, than fishing you out before you had anything but water left in your lungs.

Once you do arrive your bravery is rewarded, you’re the only person there! We arrived at mid-day and had the place to ourselves until about 4pm when the suns thermostat dropped below frazzle to aggressive sizzle. We passed the time in the arcade (one of the few bits undercover) where there were about 100 machines and attractions all empty, all set to free play. Even those stupid 3d rides - you know the ones, stupid 3d headsets boring activities like kiteflying, playing golf and only the idea that somehow you’ve glimpsed the lame game playing future comforting you when you realize that they suck and you’d have been better banging you’re 3d head against a 3d wall than spending 5gbp on them. Yes them! I got to play them, for all of about 30secs before I remembered all those things I’ve just you about them. And dodgems! Free dodgems!

I didn’t see Annett much as also they had Megatouch Maxx machines (like Itbox’s) and shes addicted to this towers card game. The entrance to the park was €10, not cheap by Vietnamese standards, but the Towers game vends for €0.50 a game in Europe. So doing some rudimentary arithmetic her 417 straight games of Towers would have cost us €208.50 in Germany, making they day a big financial success, if a minor arthritic setback.

I always wanted to play on the punching machine when I was a kid and the fair came to my poor excuse for a hometown. I never did because big boys always played on the punching machine. Infact they encircled it from the moment it arrived in the field usually reserved for conkers and dog shit, Thetfords answer to a park until it left for its new dogshit field in some other poor excuse for a hometown. In fact the punching machine was base HQ for bigboys, who would compensate their lack of brainpower by bashing things in an ever more impressive display of testosterone filled teenage angst. So as a skinny nerd I never got my go. Today I got my go. Infact I got 100 goes. In Vietnam I’m freakishly tall and have what they would consider a strong, solid physical build. I was their big boy. I bashed my way through 10years of outsider-skinny-geek-wimpdum. I was happy in this place, content and impressed with my new high score record, a clear 1000 higher than anyone on the machine had achieved before…… Then someone pissed on my picnic, a bigger boy arrived and pushed me aside. Then they went and in a moment of David and Goliath-esque against all odds, lucky sucker punching motherfucker - hit a score a full 500 higher than me. Then they danced in my face for a full five minutes. Before in my youth I’d failed without trying, this time I had tried to be a big boy and failed. That hurt, hurt like a punch to the face. Not one of mine of course as that wouldn’t hurt.

That big boy with the new high score was called Annett.

Ding Ding, Round 2. The battle between us would intensify, me hitting and not reclaiming my record, her dancing more victory dances and chanting, trying to bate me, throw me off my game. We broke for lunch, I needed to regroup, strategize, grow some balls and get back out there and beat my girlfriend on the punching machine.

Ding Ding, Round 3. Annett decided to skip this round, confident in her position. I kept at it, sweating profusely, swearing like a seamen, pounding away honing my technique. I’d already explained over lunch that I was a tactical fighter, and all rounder. Speed, power, technique, cunning, arrogance I have it all crammed my locker, no way you could close that door. I’d be moving, ducking diving, like a skinny mist, she’d never see me (aside form the fact that she’s the first human being born without peripheral vision, hence why she spends her whole life bumping into things, so I’d only need to punch her at an angle more than 45′ from the front of her nose and she’d wouldn’t even see it). She didn’t look impressed, or perhaps slightly, with my imagination though rather than my brute strength.

Anyway, round 3 started slow as I was working on my technique, like a snake waiting to pounce and then Bang! from no-where, moving faster than a speeding Tokyo bullet train, with the power and force of a hollywood movie meteor I land the killer blow! The crowd in my head cheers, the machine recoils in horror, I await the surely world beating new high score and start thinking victory dance choreography. The machine begins to total my score and then, abruptly, crashes. Not now, please not now, I need this score, I need to be the big kid, there’s a lot of adulthood therapy resting on this…………………………………Shit, nope, it’s busted. One part of me is delighted, I’ve obviously hit it so hard its self-destructed, unable to numerically summarize the power of my iron fists. In boxing this is called a TKO right? In an empty arcade in Vietnam its called disappointment.

The big winners today were the therapists. I go and tell Annett anyway, she pretends to believe me to humour me and we go do lots of other fun stuff I’ll tell you about in the excitingly named post “Vinpearl Land 2″. Coming up some time after we arrive in Cambodia tomorrow.