Sorry the pictures are of flooding, but we couldn't be bothered to take any others and the reason for the flooding will be explained through the course of this blog! Also we tried taking the camera out of the hotel a couple of times but it almost got ruined as the rain was very very torrential! So the weather forecasters said that the typhoon would hit Manila on Friday. So we thought that if we arrived into Manila on the Tuesday we could get our Chinese visa at the embassy on Wednesday and a boat to Mindoro on Thursday, leaving a [View Full Entry]

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Saigon's airport is one of the worst airports we have ever been to (apart from Heathrow that is!), everything was overpriced and because you cannot exchange your dong (ha ha) outside of Vietnam, you end up having to pay over inflated prices to get rid of a worthless currency. So a packet of banana chips and a Mars Bar later, we were ready to board our flight to Singapore, the international requirement of not carrying liquids in your hand luggage was ignored by the Vietnamese and we could carry whatever we wanted onto the plane! We both managed to sleep almost [View Full Entry]

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One thing we found ourselves doing in Vietnam - horror of horrors! - was getting up early, so it wasn't too difficult to be up for our 8am pick up for our day trip to the Mekong Delta. We were glad that we had only decided to do the day trip as other people we had spoken to had said the second day wasn't really worth the extra money, with most of it being spent on a bus. We were quite excited to be seeing the Mekong Delta, apparently the rice bowl of Vietnam, but Donna was un-containable as we had [View Full Entry]

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At this point in our journey through Vietnam, we were very aware and sad that our time in this lovely country was coming to an end, there was only Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) left to visit. Vietnam was a country that really surprised us, we had never had Vietnam on our itinerary, but with the change in visa rules in Thailand and so many good reports from friends we had met along the way we decided to give it a go. We are so glad that we did! Anyhoo...we booked ourselves onto the 1:30pm bus from Mui Ne to Saigon (the [View Full Entry]

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Dragging ourselves away from the beer hoi in Nha Trang, we got a bus to Mui Ne, 6 hours to the south. The journey went well for once with no flat tyres and the air con worked this time! Before we arrived we didn't realise just how big Mui Ne was, it turns out it is 6km long and the bus company decided to drop us off at the far northern end of the resort, an area with the lowest concentration of hotels - one of which the bus company owned (which were hideously expensive and snooty to boot) and a [View Full Entry]

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What is with the saying 'same same but different' in South East Asia? Everyone seems to say it, hotels and cafés are named it and backpackers wear t-shirts with it printed on...but no-one seems to know what it means. It's a pointless phrase, it's not even funny and as we spend more time in South East Asia, it's annoying us more and more. GRRRrrrrr!! So now we have got that off our chest...our 12 hour overnight bus journey from Hoi An to Nha Trang was 'okay', except for 2 tyres bursting, the air con breaking down and us being sandwiched between [View Full Entry]

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Wow...you are probably thinking from the title that Hoi-An has it all. Alas, we knew the day would come, we didn't think it would be so soon...we have finally run out of original ideas to call our blogs, so we settled on a particularly random title which made us laugh instead! Our $2 journey from Hue went very smoothly and before we knew it we had passed all the paddy fields with Vietnamese women bent double harvesting the rice, through a huge tunnel which passed under the Marble Mountain range and we arrived into Hoi An to the usual moto driver [View Full Entry]

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Our 12 hour overnight journey on the Reunifcation Express was spent in a soft sleeper cabin (ie 4 small bunk beds with matresses and skanky bed clothes) with a nice couple who had lots of tips on travelling around India and China, something we have been thinking about doing recently. The train was a lot more expensive than the bus but we had been told that the Hanoi to Hue leg by bus was a nightmare and besides for the rest of our travelling down to Ho Chi Minh we would be travelling by bus anyway and we thought the train [View Full Entry]

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The weather had turned from hot to hot and wet in our last two days in Hanoi and so we were rightly worried about whether our decision to do a two day tour of Halong Bay with a night staying on a Chinese junk boat was such a good idea. We had spent two days looking for a reputable and non-fake tour company in Hanoi to book the trip with and found one which didn't have one hundred alias' or duplicate 'branches' which would do the tour for $45 each. The tour didn't start off well, with our pick up minibus [View Full Entry]

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Arriving into Hanoi we were a little dubious that our pre-arranged visa on arrival may have been a scam, but it worked out great and within half an hour we were on a $2 bus journey to the Old Quarter area of the capital. We were both beginning to come down with flu when we arrived and phew was it hot...45 degrees and very humid, it was the hottest we had experienced so far on our travels. Not only was it hot but it was noisy, particularly the traffic which never seemed to stop beeping. This leads us onto our first [View Full Entry]

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