Good morning SE Asia!: Dong Hoi - Waiting for Haiyan

We woke up and checked the news to see what had happened during the night. Still the same clips playing but now with more reports of the death toll rising in the Philippines. The storm was heading out over the South China Sea and towards us now. At least the first day we didn’t have to worry too much, our prepping was slightly over-anxious it seems. It looked like today would be the same, just waiting again. We told the hotel that we would stay for one more night and leave on the 11th after it had definitely passed. We spent another day hanging around the hotel and beach. I did a few hours of sweaty bike maintenance on the porch of our room and got a few things we needed done, done. We walked right up the beach to see a different hotel that was a bigger complex right on the point of the spit, between the shore and the river mouth that we had first planned to stay at to see if it was still worth moving, but it had been pretty well damaged during the last storm a couple of weeks ago so we were glad we didn't choose it.

We watched some mad fishermen who were going out into the huge waves wearing life vests and dropping a net, before swimming a circle back in and pulling it onto the beach. The nets were a tangled mess in the strong surf and we didn't see them catch anything. Hard working boys.

Again we sat at the pool and watched clouds forming and the wind picking up a little but nothing special. We checked the forecast online and the storm had dropped to a category 2 now, and was starting to turn northwards before it hit land. It was starting to look less likely it would be such a bad storm.

We went to bed and by then the storm had been calculated to be less again, a category 1 - still a typhoon but not so bad. It was supposed to hit us at 7am in the morning. The news of the Philippines devastation as by then all over the news and we fielded many questions by text and skype from our worried friends and family!

The morning we woke up to see quite strong winds but nothing bad. It wasn't raining heavily. The hotel manager had shored up a few corridors with wood an sand just in case the water made it into the foyer.

After a walk out to the beach in the worst of the wind we decided that not much else would happen. Annoyingly, we went to take pictures of the massive waves (they were 2-3m and powerful in the high winds) but Johanna's camera was all foggy lensed as it had been in the air conditioned room and it hadn't had time to warm up, and when I went back to get mine, the battery died after 2 pics. Oh well, not too much to see anyway if you have been in a big storm in Europe before, this day was nothing special... We couldn't have cycled in it though that's for sure!

We got a bit bored and in the afternoon we used the pool again. Swimming 30 laps in the wind whilst the staff looked on unsure. It was fine, there was a lot of sand and debris that had blown into the pool but otherwise was a good day for a swim! :)