OK so its been awhile so a bit to catch up on! So on our last day in Hanoi we went to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum where the body of Ho Chi Minh or Uncle Ho is kept. We rocked up and the line to get in was massive just hundreds and hundreds of [...]

So we decided to cross into Cambodia by taking a 2 day tour up the Mekong river. It was lots of fun. Day 1 included: floating market (although we arrived after the action), coconut candy making (zeroing in on your fillings and doing their best to remove them! – we still have ours at the [...]

The biggest city in Vietnam is Ho Chi Minh City, formally Saigon. It provided the base for visits to the Cu Chi tunnels, Mekong Delta and the War Remnants Museum before moving on to Cambodia. Some people say that Saigon is busier than Hanoi, but as far as I can tell, Hanoi is much more [...]

Like a one-cheek sneak I slipped through the terrible oneway doors and into the no-mans land of the international departure lounge. Almost as surreal as the time travelers’ portal in some scifi movie it transports one into the temporary purgatory wherein all manner of lost souls mingle and wander (along with their bruised metaphors), forced [...]

This blog is written by Miss e from Philadelphia USA, one of the very talented volunteers that has traveled to Vietnam to help Lifestart Foundation this year. Miss e’s blog is about her experience as a volunteer with Lifestart Foundation in Hoi An. We loved having Miss e as part of our team in Vietnam [...]

Travelling with four boys was an interesting experience, and it confirmed for me just how different the two sexes are. The conversations that boys have are totally different to the sort of things girls talk about. For example, the currency in Vietnam is called ‘Dong.’ As you can imagine, the boys had a field day [...]

Checking out of Hien Mai hotel this morning was a hassle. For some reason they made our bill 100,000 dong more than it was supposed to be. Reasoning being that the exchange rate went up… It doesn’t make sense that the hotel room, breakfast, and water bottle prices will increase because the exchange rate changed! [...]

The easyrider I set up for today was MUCH cheaper and bargainable, spoke way less english, drives a moped (much slower than the motorbikes we were on yesterday), but he got me around. With our bus leaving Dalat for Saigon at 1:30, I only had the first half of the day to finish touring Dalat. [...]

Sat Jan 22, 2011 very early On a tour bus in Hue right now for a DMZ tour. Margot and I arrived in Hue last night after a 3 hr bus ride. It was nice to see some of the country side. It’s very wet, misty, rainy – like there has been a permanent gray [...]

Wednesday 1-5 Today we headed into the Cu Chi Tunnels. Cu Chi is a small agricultural city outside of Saigon. During the Vietnam War, the gorilla fighters from Cu Chi set up an extensive underground tunnel system to evade and attack the U.S. military base, which was only a few hundred meters away from the [...]