We arrive in Hoi An at lunchtime after a long and rubbish journey completely shattered, but we soon perk up as we take in our new surroundings. Hoi An has the feel of a small holiday town; lots of hotels, bars and restaurants fill the gaps between the countless tailors. The town is famous for the quality of their dressmakers and you can have a bespoke suit made for you within 24 hours. Heading south you get to the huge outdoor market, past stalls of silk merchants and fake Ralph Lauren and Lacoste. Into the food section, where you can buy [View Full Entry]

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Another day, another long journey ahead of us; this time we're leaving Hanoi for Halong Bay. We decide against taking an organised tour as we want to go at our own pace, basing ourselves on Cat Ba island, the only inhabited island in the bay. So we steel ourselves for the chaos of the bus station. The plan sounded simple...Hoang Long bus company supposedly sell a bus/private fast boat/bus combo ticket that takes you all the way to Cat Ba, no messing. But of course it's not going to be that easy! It starts badly when we get totally ripped by [View Full Entry]

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We wander through the streets in the early evening on our way to dinner, past stages set up all round the Hoan Kiem Lake, which is lit with hundreds of multi coloured lights and lazers roam across the sky and water. Everywhere I look are orange trees covered in fairy lights...the Vietnamese Tet version of our Christmas tree. We've had a few laughs this week watching people wobble up the road with 6 foot orange trees strapped to their mopeds. We eat quickly and return to the streets, where we watch magicians and then a snake man do their thing, before [View Full Entry]

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Once again, we're not really sure if we're on the right bus. Even though we bought tickets from the official desk at the bus station, we're instantly surrounded by touts trying to hustle us onto their buses. We eventually pinpoint the guy who has the right bus code on his log book and manage to get on his bus, but the doubt remains the same. Once again it turns out fine, but the ridiculously hectic technique of the touts leaves you unsure of anything and your head spinning. Minibuses are excellent places for people watching. I can't help noticing that about [View Full Entry]

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We step through customs at Hanoi airport into a chaotic wall of humanity, all shouting "you want taxi?!" at us. We don't, the airport taxis have a bad reputation, and Vietnam Airlines run a $2 minibus into the centre of Hanoi, so we say "no thank you" a hundred times as we set off to find the bus stop. There are scores of touts all trying to get us into their unmarked minibuses, but suspicion at their pushy attitude and lack of ID makes us sit for awhile trying to scope out which is the real one. It's well past midnight; [View Full Entry]

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The bullet train shoots us over 500kms from Tokyo to Kyoto in little over 2 hours. We're staying a short train ride out of the centre, in the north west of the city at Guesthouse Bola Bola where we arrive at about 10pm. We have felt shady all day, nursing our hangovers, but the warm glow coming through the paper screens lifts the gloom. It's a 'Ryokan" hotel...a traditional wooden Japanese house complete with sliding paper screen walls and futons on the tatami matting floor. It's absolutely gorgeous and everything I'd imagined a Ryokan to be, and our host Haru-san is [View Full Entry]

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I've got to say, straight away, that Japan completely blows us away. We start in Tokyo, arriving at Narita airport and being whisked into the centre of the city on a lightening fast express train. I thought hitting the Tokyo subway, tired and loaded with backpacks would be an overwhelming introduction, but it's fine...with signs in Japanese & Roman characters, and a lovely polite sounding lady announcing all stops in English, it's easy to navigate our way to our hostel, Asakusa Smile. In fact from the minute we boarded the Japan Airlines flight everything goes smoothly. There is really no comp [View Full Entry]

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Arriving in New York is like stepping onto a film set. It's so familiar from TV and the movies, and the street names are dropped in so many hiphop tracks that I feel like I know it already. Manhattan Island is also quite small and really easy to navigate with logically numbered blocks, that you can feel at home quite quickly, which is just as well as we only have a few days here. Our flight lands at JFK really early in the morning and we didn't sleep on the awful 12hr American Airlines flight...I'd rather do 30hrs on a Brazilian [View Full Entry]

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Another 20 hour bus journey (and the best sleep I've had this year...but that's not saying much) takes us back to Rio. We have 4 days before our flight to New York and having had our fill of nightlife, we want to see what daytime Rio has to offer. I'm thinking of Copacabana and Ipanema, Sugarloaf and Christ and those famous views. But the drizzle that started as we left the Bahia has become heavy rain, and as we drive into the city it is shrouded in thick low cloud. Again. We wonder if it ever stopped raining since we left [View Full Entry]

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Trancoso has also transformed since we were here 2 weeks ago, but the crowd looks a little older than in Arrial and the atmosphere is good. The town is plastered with posters advertising club nights in the towns 3 nightclubs for every night of Reveillon. We're shocked to see the tickets cost R$100 (30 quid) for a regular night, and between R$300 - R$500 for New Years Eve!!! We wonder who the hell can afford it and what we're going to do. We'd heard that Trancoso was the place for free beach parties run by hippies, in the same vein as [View Full Entry]

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