Alright...well what to say in this post to be honest and keep it PG-13. Vang Vien is essentially the Cancun of SE Asia. And despite what my mother thinks, we haven't been partying all that much since being here. Yes we stay up late and hang out with other travelers, but drinking (even though really cheap) a lot makes it really hard to keep to your budget and we've been waking up by 8 AM most days to go out and see the world, so we've been pretty good. Until we got to Vang Vien. The main activity here is tubing down a river with very loud bars on either side. Most people don't rent tubes (as they are expensive) and simply float on the river from bar to bar. Our first day in Vang Vien ... read more

We arrived in Sapa at about 7:30 in the morning, after the night train and an hour long bus ride. Just the two of us for the first time in a while. We left the British boys in Hanoi and will meet up with them in a couple days in Laos and Maryse was left in Halong Bay to go rock climbing for a week or so before continuing on. I was actually pretty sad to leave her. She's been traveling with us for a while and she is a pretty cool girl. But it is nice to be just the two of us again for a bit. We can be brutally honest, fart in the room, and all that stuff without company around to criticize. So anyway, we got to Sapa and checked into the ... read more

So there's gonna be a few posts here. We've been out of internet access for a while as we were on a boat and a remote island for a few days. I'll finish up our last day in Hanoi, then move on to what we've been up to lately in Halong Bay and Sapa. Hanoi...after the morning walk which you all got a bunch of pictures of, I headed back to the hostel to pick up Aly, Maryse, and the three British guys who were in our room (Josh, Dan, and Rich). Our plan was to explore the city, aimlessly ambling, to see what we could find. We went through the market which was already described and then went a little further. Apparently it is not just the food that is arranged in clusters (all the ... read more

Alrighty...I'm putting up two separate blogs this morning. The first will be just my regular what we did yesterday and the second will be a lame attempt to show you what a morning is like on the city streets of this part of the world in pictures. I'll say more later. So yesterday we arrived off the sleeper bus at about 8:30 in the morning. That's a good 15 hours on a bus without stopping and I slept pretty terribly the entire time. We took a cab to our hostel, checked in, and set out to find some food. Three of our roommates (Brits) had also just arrived, so we joined up and headed out to explore the streets and grab a cheap bite somewhere. The first place we picked looked exactly like a restaurant, the ... read more

So after a long night on the sleeper bus where my one buddy decided to roll over on top of me a fair amount in the middle of the night, we arrived in Hoi An tired and grumpy only to be barraged by tons of people asking to take us to our hotel or to stay at their hotel or to buy sun glasses, etc. We settled for a couple motorbike drivers and arrived at Dai Long Hotel shortly after. We checked in, showered, Aly took a short nap, then we set out for some breakfast and a bit of exploration in the city. Hoi An is not a very large city and it is quite touristy, but it has a nice feel to it. A large part of the city is called the ancient ... read more