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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Learning our lesson about reliable transport, we decided to carefully choose the bus company which we would travel with for 4 hours to Kuala Lumpur, or KL as the locals know it. We spent a couple of days questioning different travel agents, demanding to see pictures of buses, asking if it was direct and all the other things we have learned go wrong with bus travel and we wanted to make sure the 27 ringgits we were paying was worth it. So on the day we were leaving, we chose the 11am bus, with a 10:30am pick up from the travel [View Full Entry]

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On the day we finally left Langkawi we opted to stay in the bungalow until 3 minutes to midday...just to make sure we got our money's worth! Again, Neil did another fine job of finding us transportation to the jetty so we could catch our ferry to Penang. By now, everyone will know Neil's knack of finding great, reliable transport! If this car had ever been called roadworthy, it was probably in the 1960's and we have made a note that if a taxi a. has it's windows open and b. the boot doesn't open we shouldn't get in it! The [View Full Entry]

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Our journey from Krabi to Langkawi was another nightmare one. We were collected from our guesthouse at 6am, crammed into a minibus and driven around the Krabi area picking random people up. The minibus, which was meant to hold 10 people, ended up holding 12 people plus their luggage. It was pretty uncomfortable, as these minibuses aren't made for foreigners and their long legs, but we put the MP3 on and tried to sleep with our heads lolling around everywhere - no head-rests! In his wisdom, the minibus driver had decided not to fix the suspension, he obviously thought it would [View Full Entry]

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Relieved to be leaving Phi Phi, we caught the morning boat to Krabi Town which again only took 90 minutes or so. Arriving into Krabi, quite a few travellers were puzzled as we arrived into a different port to what we expected. Apparently the local transport cartel had lobbied (sorry bribed) the local government to change the entry point to Krabi as they weren't making enough money from the people arriving by boat. The new ferry port did not have any public buses running from it like the old one did and travellers were reliant on the lying, scheming and cheating [View Full Entry]

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