The Four-H Tour on a backpacker bus. Hanoi, Hue, Hoi An, Ho Chi Minh City. Perhaps the most trecherous stretch was the last. I departed from the scenic, and comparatively serene city of Hoi An for Ho Chi Minh on a 26 hour bus oddessey. This gave me plenty of time to reflect on the adventure ahead, and the path left behind. After arriving at the conclusion that I would apply to the University of Sydney in hopes of making the final deadline, my necessity calculations added up to a BOLT JOB. I would need certified passport copies, a printed CV, [View Full Entry]

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After a gruelling 23 hour bus ride from Hoi An we arrived in Saigon. The first thing we noticed was the inordinate amount of motorbikes in this place! We later found out that there were 3 million in a city of 9 million people! There is nothing particularly striking about the city itself - it is quite western in both layout and streetscape but easy to walk down the footpaths - mainly because they actually exist as opposed to all the other cities in Vietnam. The second day we were there we did a day trip to the Cao Dai temple [View Full Entry]

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We booked into a fancy hotel, the Rex, on the 23rd Dec (which had silk kimono dressing gowns for us in the antique Vietnamese wardrobe!) for a couple of nights to make up for the lack of the presence (and presents!) of family and friends. We thought it was going to be a bit grim being in a country that didn't celebrate Christmas but this city is very festive with fairy lights every where, full scale orchestras playing in the street, and lots of little kids dressed in Santa suits, complete with fur hats, even though it's 90 degrees! They celebrate [View Full Entry]

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As you can see my Vietnamese has developed nicely....that means Happy New Year! Hope you all enjoyed the last of 2004 whatever you did in your various locations around the world! We left Mui Ne and arrived in Saigon on the 30th. New Year's Eve here was out of this world ! They closed off the street where our hotel is, and set up food stalls and outdoor beer bars, Winner! As the hours passed and the large crowd started getting into the swing of things (beer induced) we noticed that family loads of locals were taking trips past the street [View Full Entry]

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Here i am back from vietnam with some pictures, hope you enjoy and that you all had great holidays! [View Full Entry]

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Well, after being in transit for about 30 hours I finally made it to my destination of Ho Chi Minh City last night. At close to midnight the streets were still full of activity but then again you have to remember this is a city of about 7 million people of which about 2 million get around via motorcycles! I reached my hotel in a relatively short amount of time but since I would say I slept the majority of the time I was on the plane (I mean when I was snacking or eating!) I wasn’t too tired. I guess [View Full Entry]

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testtest<i>test<b>test</b>teset</i> [View Full Entry]

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Hi all, I'm glad to report that we are both fine here in Vietnam. Probably like most of you we have been glued to the TV watching the tragic scenes from South East Asia. Luckily, we don't think we know of any backpackers who we met that were going to be in the Phuket or Phi Phi area. Phi Phi island seems to have been completely destroyed so it looks like we won't be going there afterall, although we will see what the situation is in South Thailand when we get there next month. We left Nah Trang last Friday (Xmas [View Full Entry]

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Sorry about my lack of communication - the internet has been unbelievably slow here, we have to play Solitaire while it loads! We got away alright on December 28 despite teary mothers at the airport. We flew into Thailand, where we met up with Angus and Kim for Sarah's 'One Night in Bangkok' birthday party - great fun, although all pretty knackered after Christmas, the flight etc. Everyone we bumped into was talking about the Tsunami - as you can imagine it's had a massive impact in Thailand. The next day we flew to HCM (Saigon) city which was unbelievable - [View Full Entry]

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Hey, First of all, thanks to those who are able to write back. I appreciate the emails and just realize that email is very slow here and I can't respond to every email but I appreciate them just the same. In Saigon until tomorrow when we take a boat up the Mekong Delta (yes, that Mekong Delta) into Cambodia. I have been here 2 days and this is really a great great city. In Hanoi, the excitement was ice cream on scooters and the streets dead by 10:00pm. Saigon is much much different. It's wild and doesn't sleep. When it does, [View Full Entry]

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