One-dollar beers, cheap guitars, river cruises and exploding amps – MATTHEW SOMERS reports on I Heart Hiroshima’s maiden voyage to Asia in late 2009.

Our plane landed, and it was “Good Afternoon Vietnam”.

After the honkiest cab ride ever, we pulled up to the nicest hotel ever. Strange start but rather apt. The uncovered PA had had been damaged by unexpected rain, so soundcheck was “a relaxed affair”. The next day we relaxed by the ridiculous pool in our ridiculous hotel. By night, we made it to Loreto Fest in Ho Chi Minh City. Cam was a little shaky but we managed to pull off a pretty eventful show. There were people from everywhere. I was stranger-pressured into drinking heaps of wine by a pair of excellent guys from Denmark and Vietnam who were best friends. It was a little odd, but nonetheless sweetly interesting.

Sunday took a little while to get started (expectedly) but I managed to make it up for dinner at Pacharan, a swell restaurant that we’d later play in. Susie and Cam were off checking out the markets. After dinner our manager Paul took some risky (not risque) photos of us standing in the middle of the traffic-swamped street. When I returned to my hotel room I discovered that mini-bar beers are approximately $AUD1. This ended up being both a great and terrible thing.

We had a couple of days off and our lively promoter Rod suggested a trip with the good fellows from Ratatat down the Mekong Delta, a very large river. We met our tour guide in the morning. His name was Chen; a great guy, always kidding around in the proximity of snakes and crocodiles. Here’s how it went: car trip, boat trip, smaller boat, even smaller boat, lunch-in-the-jungle, “motorcyclo” ride, boat trip, baby duck offer – I have to pause there from the memory of the baby duck being cracked from an egg at dinner. I apologise. Chen did tell us that “eating one of these is like one third of Viagra”, but that didn‘t help.

Up early the next day for a long bicycle ride through some stupefying markets and back through the jungle. Fine china, coconut juice, coco jumbo. The next two days were full of fruit consumption and snake zoo/park/cages with gorillas and ostriches. Somewhere in there we fed crocodiles with bamboo fishing poles for 25c. My favourite thing about the trip to the Mekong Delta was that we spent a lot of time laying in hammocks on boats. It’s the perfect combination.

Wednesday, we got the chance to see Ratatat play in a tiny restaurant. It was pretty, pretty, pretty good. That night I met a chap from Brisbane who took Cam and I to crazy cheap guitar shops the next day. Really cheap. We both bought lap steels with fantastically unexpected built-in effects for $30. Thursday night was our turn to play Pacharan. Soundcheck was perfect, but then everything changed course. A Vietnamese/American/Mexican guy named Kimmy begged us to have a drink and it went on. By the time it was our turn to play, my amp blew up and things turned from fantastic to excessive. A girl on the street forced me to buy chewing gum and I took it as an insult to my hygiene. I locked my key in my hotel room and felt terrible for waking the night guard, who had to flip through a million others to find mine.

Friday we played the newly opened Hi-Fi, owned by the same people that own the two in Australia. We blew up two more amps. It was a great show though. Everybody was dancing! There were about 50 staff in that place – it was unsettling to have every cigarette that you put in your mouth lit by someone within 15 seconds. It got to a point where we were all sitting at the bar, and Susie realised that if your drink is not in the centre of your coaster, someone will fix it. The record time for this was 14 seconds if I remember correctly. They were playing Britney Spears in the band room, and The Rolling Stones in the bar. We met some more new friends that night who took us on a motorbike ride through the empty streets.

We took a bus to Cambodia, and arrived in the “tourist zone”, where we’d be playing. It was still crazy enough for me. I was thinking on the way in that I’d be surprised if one person came to the show, but I was surprised by the eventual turnout. Very surprised. Some people told us that we were the first band that’d been to Phnom Penh in the two years they’d been living there. After the show we went to a photography/dance party with loads of seemingly rich people mixed with four-year-old child beggars in a place full of bullet holes. An interviewer told us that you can go to a shooting range and pay to shoot a gun or throw a grenade at a cow, and everything in between.

Had an extravagant goodbye brunch with the promoters, at which point they offered us a trip to the shooting range, which happened to be really close to the restaurant. We had to gracefully decline the exploding cows. Besides, we had a plane to catch. We made it to the airport and, after a fairly intense passport crisis, gradually made it back home. Couch.