I did get quite a lot of clothes made here... It was too tempting to not. Almost every shop is a tailors and everything is such good value!! I reckon it would even be worth paying for a flight to come out here just to have clothes made. Mind you.. on getting mine back they weren't exactly as I'd invisioned them.. so depends how fussy you are I suppose! There is a really lovely beach about 3km from the town centre so Marc and I hired bikes and went for a visit while waiting for our tailoring. After Hoi An I went to Nha Trang, a beach resort further down the coast. Nha Trang is a quite a fun place, quite a good night life and lots of boat trips to go on etc but I ... read more

My last entry was from Sapa in the far north of Vietnam, after there I went south via Hanoi again to Hue on the North Central Coast. In Hue there are some really impressive ancient tombs of former kings that mostly manged somehow to avoid being bombed during the war. After arriving at about 7am on an overnight bus I met a motorbike guide, Hui. He persuaded me to go to the guest house he was recommending and then also for him to come and collect me again at 9 and go with him for a tour around the tombs. The tombs were really nice to see, still in pretty good condiditon. They were pretty grand as the Kings had them built and then lived in them before they died. Hue is just south of the ... read more

I have missed adding entries for Thailand and have only just added Laos but it really difficult to find internet that is fast enough to upload photos to here so this has taken ages even. I liked Hanoi, it is a really busy, smoggy city, but much cooler than what I have been used to in Laos and Thailand so felt quite freshing. The city has an old quarter with lots of narrow streets and many, many shops selling anything you could possibly want! There is gernerally a street fro each product too which makes shopping easier, so a street full of craft shops, one for clothes, one for toys, one for computers, electronics, paintings.. All the streets look the same so really easy to wander around and 'get lost' in the streets. There are a ... read more

The Stray bus only goes every three days to the South bit so we had to stay that long everytime we stopped anywhere. Dunedin was a nice place to spend the time though. Dundein has a massive student population and we spent St Patrick's Day there with some irish lads so it was really fun. Queenstown is a really really nice place, really fun and picturesque too. There are really lovely views back down over the town and Lake and mountains that surroung it from the top of the Gondola. Kate and I decided to walk up rather than take the Gondola in the middle of a v hot day, not the wisest choice ever, but the views were worth it. I also went Hanggliding from the Remarkables mountains. The views from that were really cool ... read more

The drive to Milford Sound is suposed to be one of the most beautiful drives in New Zealand. Milford Sound is actually a fjord, created by a glacier moving to the sea, and not a sopund which is a flooded valley, it was just wrongly classified by the first exploer that discovered it. It is the wettest place in New Zealand and one of the wettest in the world, receiveing about 7m of rain a year. We saw it in one of these lovely rainy periods.. The fjord streches about 15m inland and the sheer rock faces rises about 1,200m on either side so with a lot of rain this creates a lot of waterfalls! We took a boat ride into the sound but unfortunately because of the rain we didn't get to see all that ... read more

After National Park I got the bus to Wellington. I wouldn't really recommend travelling by bus in New Zealand by public transport. The bus was fine but the timings aren't great. Anita & I planned to get a bus from Taupo to National Park but there are only 2 buses a day so we missed that and decided to hitchhike instead. This was act a much better plan as we got picked up within about 5 mins and got dropped off exactly where we wanted to go, and saved $30 perfect! Wellington seems like a really nice city. I only spent one day here and then got the ferry to the South Island. The ferry passes through Queen Charlotte Sound. The walk around this is one of New Zealand’s Great Walks, so we got to see ... read more