With our last day in Dalat, indeed our last real day of touring Vietnam – since tomorrow will start the escapade of the long trip home (Dalat to Saigon to Singapore to Perth) – we set out for an early breakfast at hour villa before our villa operated tour of Dalat. Mustering what little energy [...]

I thought I would take another look at my goals for this trip and see if i have been actually doing any. I will also keep trying to think of new ones to add and revisit this monthly… Goals Completed – Ride an elephant in Thailand (05/11/11; Chiang Mai, Thailand) – Swim naked and/or a [...]

Vietnam on the Real Cheap! Hi everyone, we are off again on another trip around Asia. This time the exchange rate is in our favour – in Vietnam we are getting 22,000 dong to the AUD. When we first started coming to Vietnam in 2003 we were getting 11,000 dong to the AUD! Everything is [...]

Nha Trang was nice, not alot of character to it but te weather and beach means that you can deal with it! Pretty much like a baking hot Blackpool or somewhere else in the UK. Hot enough to give us all sunburn. My lesson that I learnt : get someone else to lotion your back. [...]

While Michelle rests in the other room, having been struggling with a cold for the last day and a half brought about by the rapid temperature flux we both continually experienced in Nha Trang (high thirties on the streets and near sub-zero indoors) I am sitting out on our balcony overlooking the country mountainous vista [...]

We boarded the night train, our 5th so far and 1st in Vietnam, at 8.30 on the 9th, and arrived at 6 the next morning. Unlike the Chinese trains, we were in “soft sleeper” class, which basically means 4 beds to a compartment, not 6. The Vietnamese train was also a bit more upmarket generally, [...]

After my 3-day trip to Côn Đảo archipelago from 16 to 18 May 2011, I must say that this is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen in Vietnam. The archipelago consists of 16 islands and islets in south west Vietnam (40 minute flight from Sài Gòn). Côn Đảo is not only famous [...]

Traffic in Vietnam I don’t think I need to write much about this. There’s a huge amount of people in cities like Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) and Hanoi. And most of them drive motorbikes as cars are very expensive here. There’s traffic everywhere, all the time. To get a feeling of how many motorbikes [...]

Just a quick one today, as the pictures more or less speak for themselves, and to be honest we didn’t do much apart from lie on the boat or lie on the beach on Monkey Island! We spent two nights and about three and half days in Halong bay, drifting slowly on the boat during [...]

We took the overnight train from Nha Trang to Danang Thursday night. This time it was the lower quality train–we had sleeping berths, but no blankets, the air conditioning freezing us out (I know, we should be complaining after the heat we’ve endured the whole trip so far), and many stops, with their attendant announcements–only [...]