4 hours from Can Tho right next to the Cambodian border is the small market town of Chau Doc. extending from the centre of town is a 4km long road that leads to Sam Mountain, a place of much spiritual importance to the towns people. for on this mountain there are countless temples with more being built (well at least one that i saw), it was also the location of a funeral of a friend of someone i met and no doubt countless others. this mountain was one of the main reasons of my visit here and so i headed for [View Full Entry]

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Final night in Hoi An was the first night of the Full Moon Festival and all the locals were out on the streets and river. Many street performances were on and lots of people were hiring boats to release candles in little paper boats out on to the river. Unfortunately the power failed at the funfair at 9 pm so only those places with their own power supply could continue. Thoughts on Vietnam 1. We preferred the South to the North although there were many more scenic areas in the North. 2. Someone once wrote that "He who wins the war, [View Full Entry]

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After all the trekking, temples and tooting of horns, we needed a holiday within our holiday. A French colonial seaside town, full of tradition awaited us. The lack of involvement in the war means it still has a lot of history, tradition and French, Chinese and Japanese architecture; Plus a swimming pool with a bar! We spent lazy mornings by the pool convincing ourselves we were getting a slight base tan, until we went for a meal and were complimented by the restaurant owner on how beautiful and white our skin was! We went for a stroll in the town where [View Full Entry]

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Seppy wrote the story in the other blog, so here are a few pics to go with it [View Full Entry]

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The train from Hanoi was, in all honesty, something we had never done before. I'm not the kind of person to pretend I've got an overnight train in Vietnam when I haven't really. Each compartment (because we got the cheaper 'hard sleeper' - hard presumably meaning difficult as opposed to solid) contained six people, and there was no sign of curtains to separate one bed from another. I could have made a social faux pas when I decided I was too hot and stripped down to my boxers, despite the locals sleeping fully clothed. I thought it would be ok - [View Full Entry]

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It's been over three weeks since our last entry. We found Vietnam to be difficult, not just the lack of good internet connections, but the entire experience of travel in the country. First, the internet is slow, unreliable, frequent power outages, pirated software, old computers, and so on. It's nearly impossible to find one good computer in the entire country, therefore no blogging. I think we have picked up a virus on our memory stick where we have saved our photos...can't seem to open the files now even though we know the photos are on there! Second, as we made our [View Full Entry]

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The next propellor plane we hopped on took us to Ho Chi Minh City, this place can be summed up in one word... Motorbikes! They are everywhere, the population of the city is 7 million and there are 3.5 million motorbikes. Everywhere you turn you can see motorbikes transporting huge plants 3 metre high panes of glass & families of up to 5 people dodging the traffic and honkin with the best of them! They can be a frustrating part of HCMC but also fascinating. We sat in a cafe and watched them go by for most of the evening and [View Full Entry]

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Currently am sitting in a small (and possibly the only) internet cafe in Hanoi. The only other one I could find was actually a 'Playstation 2 Cafe' that I resisted the urge to enter. The journey here was a long one, but thankfully we made the right choice in getting out of Laos, by flying. Where we made the wrong choice was by choosing an airline that apparently doesn't publish their safety records. Telling the story even more in reverse, we took a third and final coach journey out of Vang Vieng and back to Luang Prabang, for our airport rendezvous. [View Full Entry]

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I managed to pick up a case of surfers ear on our 2nd to last day in Mui Ne, which of course meant no more swimming for a while. I needed to check our bags 3 times before we left to ensure that Jill hadn't smuggled Pedro into one of them! We decided that we wouldn't wait at the Guesthouse for our bus but would walk down to Hahn Cafe to catch it - just to be on the safe side. Once more they upgraded us to a sleeper bus for the trip to Nga Trang and within ½ an hour [View Full Entry]

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After spending most of our time in the big cities we were craving some fresh air and quieter streets, so we decided to head to a little beach resort just nort of Saigon called Mui Ne. This was Nats holiday within a holiday so we decided... eventually to splash out a bit and stay in a posh resort it cost us $30 USD each but it was a fantastic place, the Mui Ne Sailing club . We just basically did nada for three days read swam and ate. I did manage to get one run in on the beautiful empty beach [View Full Entry]

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