SOLO BICYCLING (NON-MOTORIZED) IN HCMC, HOI AN & HANOI..... In early Feb/10 I am planning a 2 1/2 week trip to Vietnam (my first). My planned itinerary is 6 nites in HCMC, 1 nite on the train (soft sleeper) enroute to Hoi An, 4 nites in Hoi An, 6 nites in Hanoi and 2 nites back in HCMC. Then I fly on to Bangkok for 3 weeks in Thailand. My past travels to Asia have included 3 weeks in Malaysia and 2 trips to Thailand (5 weeks doing tsunami relief work in Phuket in Jan/Feb/05 and 3 weeks in '06 vacationing). [View Full Entry]

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Vietnam has not let me down. Each town I stopped in along my way from North to South has had its own character, and it was all surprisingly painless to get from one place to another and find cheap accommodation. The land was pretty diverse as well, and there were more than just tropical beaches to choose from. The mountain town of Dalat was really similar to Portland, with a much cooler climate and evergreen forests. Nha Trang was very much like Thailand, complete with surfer culture and seedy scam artists. Each place had a few sights to see, and renting [View Full Entry]

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I spent about 5 days in Saigon and I stayed with a Vietnamese family in a part where there's no tourists. It was another good chance to see the local culture and try lots of different local food, I went to all sorts of different local places. Saigon was a crazy city though, there's always something going on and I've never seen so many motorbikes on a road at one time before. This was my last stop in Vietnam before Cambodia. Vietnam was a lot of fun and I'm sure I'll come back one day. [View Full Entry]

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Okay so let's begin from the beginning... I left Laos after two weeks for Vietnam, ready to find some adventure in a new country. And adventure is exactly what I got. I left from Savannakhet, Laos and after 26 hours, three buses, a rip off of a taxi, and a sleep outside of a restaurant at the border in the middle of the night, i arrived in Hanoi. It a beautiful city, spotted with lakes and parks, and a constant flow of motorbikes like a river down the streets. Old architecture, stylish cafes, the works. After spending a few days [View Full Entry]

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I spent a couple of days in Mui Ne which is a cool little beach town with some big sand dunes nearby. The beach is so quiet you can easily find a spot where you are nowhere near anyone else. Its a surfing and kite surfing spot when the conditions are right but there wasn't enough wind when I was there so I didn't have a chance to give it a go. [View Full Entry]

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Ho Chi Minh City - the city formerly known as Saigon So we arrived in Saigon early evening and started the dreaded search for accommodation. This already grueling task has been made more uncomfortable with the added load of new clothes and wares from Hoi An. As Rachel isn't back until December she decided to get her clothes shipped back by boat, costing about 23 pounds or so as it takes about 3 months. I however, didn't want to wait 3 months for my clothes as I would need and want to use them before November/December time and the airfreight [View Full Entry]

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14th July 2009 After a long day traveling yesterday we felt we deserved another lie-in. Finally emerging from our slumber we headed to the Presidential Palace. This was "liberated" during the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the North Vietnamese government kept it the way it was on that day. We both though that for a presidential palace it was a little understated, maybe a symptom of 1970s interior design. As we left we were greeted by our first experience of Monsoon rains as we made our way to the War Remnants museum. The museum displayed disturbing photographs of the atrocities [View Full Entry]

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Soooo es geht los. Endlich kommt ihr in den Genuss meine Reise(n) zu verfolgen! Der Blog kommt etwas verspaetet ABER WIR SIND DA!! , das heisst der Treff in Bangkok mit Niels, Dennis, und Lorenz verlief reibungslos. Wir hausten nahe der bekannten Strasse Khaosan Road und hatten unser erstes gemuetliches Thai-Bier. Den Tag drauf (heute) bin ich mit Lorenz in den kulturellen Teil der Stadt gezogen um den weltweit groessten liegenden Buddha (steht fuer Buddhas Eintritt ins Nirwana) zu bestaunen (Siee Bilder), Aber nicht nur das war ein Erlebnis, die Hinfahrt ueber den Fluss Chiao Praja und Rueck [View Full Entry]

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Well here I am, a week and a half into my adventure in Vietnam and there is a ridiculous amount of stuff to talk about. I'm not even sure where to start... The School, ILA Vietnam: I teach at ILA 1 in District 3 of Vietnam, the biggest ILA school in the country. It is housed in a 9 story building, has 100 teachers, tons of support staff, and somewhere between 3-5000 students. So far I can't say enough good things about the school. The teaching support is top notch, there are 5 academic coordinators who are always happy to help [View Full Entry]

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Yes, I’m back. After much deliberating and many hours spent walking around various malls in Bangkok I decided that I really did need a new laptop. I settled on an Acer Timeline AS1810T which is one of the latest in the small pc segment, like the Asus eeepc or Dell mini. Except that it’s slightly bigger so it’s still got a pretty normal keyboard and the screen is 11.1” which is about as small as I would like to go since we also use the computer to watch movies. With a 320 GB hard disk, 2 GB RAM and a decent [View Full Entry]

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