Vietnam is among 16 other Buddhist countries sending Buddhist art and ritual objects to the International Buddhist Museum in Sri Lanka’s ancient capital city of Kandy. The International Buddhist Museum, the first its kind in Sri Lanka, opened on May 20. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, venerable, monks of the Sri Lanka Buddhism and diplomats [...]

All major monuments of Nguyen Dynasty in the former feudal capital city of Hue and its surrounding areas will be fully restored by 2020 under a plan announced by the People’s Committee of Thua Thien-Hue Province. All structures of the Forbidden City, the homes of kings and royal families that were once off-limits to the [...]

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 [...]

Stuffed Cabbage Soup Recipe – Canh bắp cải cuốn, which literally translates to stuffed cabbage wrap soup is my way of using the leftover potsticker filling I recently made. I stuffed the leftover mixture into whole cabbage leaves that were previously softened by par-boiling. I served them phở-style, meaning that I brought them to the [...]

Mì xao mem, as opposed to mi xao don (crispy egg noodles) is the Vietnamese version of Chinese chow mein. This dish appears in almost every Vietnamese fast food joint.