Good morning. Yesterday evening after I finished the latest entry on here I went to meet the others for dinner which is when we all realised about the typhoon that has hit Asia. We are all fine and we don't expect to be affected by it. To clear a few things up. We are currently in Laos in the capital Vientiane. We left Vietnam two days ago and seem to have just missed the floods there. We were not aware of the situation because we have had two days of long travelling and have not seen any news until yesterday evening. [View Full Entry]

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Ok so we arrived at the hotel in Ha Long bay about 6 30am. None of the rooms were ready to check in so we ate breakfast, freshened up in the bathroom and then I took a walk down to the bay. Ha Long bay has over 1600 islands and the view from the bay was pretty amazing. There was a lot of mist out on the sea so the islands that I could see in the distance looked really majestic. When I went back to the hotel one room was ready and luckily for me Marta had grabbed it because [View Full Entry]

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I'm just going to repeat again in case you didn't spot it in the last blog that we are all fine and have not been on a glass bottomed boat. It was about a four hour bus ride to Hue and once we arrived we went for lunch. Following this we got in a taxi and a local guide took us for a tour of the Citadel and the Forbidden City. It was very beautiful despite the weather continuing to be drizzly. The tour guide was very informative, we learnt a lot about the monarchy and how it followed along with [View Full Entry]

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Again the due arrival time of the train didn't mean anything as it arrived at 4 30. Luckily we were more prepared as we were woken up by the tannoy - we didn't understand a word of it but guessed that we were arriving shortly. We got a bus to the hotel and unsurprisingly our rooms weren't ready so I went to the roof terrace, grabbed a sun lounger and went to sleep by the pool for a few hours. Once our rooms were sorted and we'd all showered Tim took us on a walking tour. Pretty much everything here is [View Full Entry]

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Hello. I thought I'd mention the group because I don't know if I have really since the other guys left. We are very culturally diverse! One American, two Canadians, one Chinese, one German (this is a new German girl - the other two left), one Norwegian, one Danish, one Finnish, and one Brit. By the time we get to Laos it will be five people representing five nationalities! Anyway Nha Trang was gorgeous! It is a coastal town and after our early arrival at 5am (we mere meant to be arriving later so we had a mad scramble to get off [View Full Entry]

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So we arrived here yesterday after a seven hour bus ride. Once we checked in we spent the afternoon site seeing (the German girls, Sandra and Enis and I). We went to see all the French colonnial buildings such as the opera, post office, independence palace and cathedral. We also had a wander through the market. This evening we went for dinner at the market. It was a special dinner as eight people were leaving and we had four new members joining. Marta my roomate is not going. She was going to leave us after Vietnam but has now decided to [View Full Entry]

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So we left Sihanoukville at 7 30 this morning. It was throwing it down again so much that the power kept cutting out so I don't think there was a boat trip for the other group today either. We had a four hour drive to the border and then crossed over to Vietnam. Once there it was a 45min drive to Caudoc which is pretty much on the Mekong Delta. Once we had checked in a local guide took us to the river where we went on a tour on a local boat. First we went to a fish farm where [View Full Entry]

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We caught a bus in the morning and drove four hours to Sihanoukville. We arrived around midday and after a quick shower in our fancy bungalow we headed to the beach. We as in my roomate and I, Marta from Norway. I think we will share a room all the way round. At the beach we went to a bar to have some lunch and we were immediately surrounded by children and women trying to sell us things. It was very hard to get any peace! They are very persistent although I didn't give in to the children! A funny thing [View Full Entry]

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Today there was also a lot of travelling. I laid in till 11 30 and then had to get on the bus at 12. I was very hungover and didn't feel that great on the bus at all! Luckily by 3pm I was feeling ok again and couldn't wait to get to Phnom Penh. When we arrived we freshened up and then headed off for dinner. This was a really special evening as a tour guide called Ron had invited us to his home for dinner and to talk about the Cambodian genocide before we visited S21 and the killing fields [View Full Entry]

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This was a long day of travelling by bus. Cambodia is a very poor country where the rich are extremely wealthy and the poor are very poor. There is no middle class. It is extrememly corrupt - children even have to pay corruption fees to go to school everyday. There are a lot of street children who bombard you whenever you get off the bus asking you to buy things for "just one dollar". They are very persuasive but you should not buy anything from them as they are usually there because someone else has sent them and they don't keep [View Full Entry]

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