I officially hate Hoi-an, and by extension Vietnam. It is 6am and I have been woken up - and am being kept up - by impossibly loud, and also terrible (I mean this; it's APPALLING) music. Cue a very testy PJ-clad trip downstairs to berate and implore reception to get it to stop. Because - I don't know if I've communicated this enough - it's 6 IN THE BLOODY MORNING. I should not be awake. I SHOULD NOT EVEN NEARLY BE AWAKE. But no. Reception man tells me that it is the effing military blaring the music (it can barely be called that; I like music. This cannot be music. But music is quicker to type than cacophany). They are calling the 18 to 25-year-olds to conscript, or something. Well, I hadn't realised they bloody wanted ... read more

Another day, another airport... To our surprise, the tiddly (and a bit dirty...) domestic terminal of HCMC airport has computers (albeit incredibly old and slow ones). But I'm going to learn from my mistake at Phnom Penh and make sure I copy all that I write before I click anything. But, technically, the airport is a day into our future, at least as far as this post is concerned. So I'll let Mike write all about it on his post. Our day in Ho Chi Minh City on the 5th September got off to a slow start. Because we were no longer going on our trip to the Mekong Delta (I was disappointed about this), we didn't have that much more of HCMC to see. So we skipped breakfast in favour of a lie-in, and instead ... read more

Mike is making like a blogging sloth and distinctly not blogging, so I thought that I'd start him off for today. We got up rather later than usual today, at about 9am. By the time we had breakfast and left the hotel it was 10:30am, but that didn't matter because Ho Chi Minh City is not the crazy whirlwind rush of sightseeing that Phnom Penh became. Our first stop was the Ho Chi Minh City Museum. It took us AGES to find the entrance, and when we did, we couldn't get into the museum because of all the wedding photos happening on the steps leading to the main doors. When we finally got inside, our progress around the museum was also impeded by even more wedding portraits. The museum itself was totally RUBBISH. The displays were ... read more

Bonjour from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's capital. Your beloved blogger, Elana, here :) We arrived by air in a particularly painless fashion; the plane took off EARLY and we had landed again within half an hour. We got off the plane, waited all of a minute for passport control and another for cases. When we got to the hotel, we were impressed by the lobby. There's a Cartier right by the front door in the Rex arcade, and a Burberry, and, my personal favourite of course, Marc Jacobs XD When we were taken to our room, however, we were in for a shock. The lobby of the Rex Hotel having been clad out in marble and suffused with excellent, and very expensive shops, definitely belongs to a 5 star hotel, but the room would look ... read more

After our "ïnteresting" journey from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh the day before, we were rested and ready to tackle most of the major sights in PP in just one day. We had planned meticulously the night before to see the sights closest to the hotel first (The Royal Palace, National Museum and Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (infamously known as S-21 to an older generation)). We decided to cover those sights on foot, before hiring a Remork-Moto (aka: Tuk Tuk) to take us to the furthest sight, Cheoung Ek- a surviving 'Killing Field'. I was particularly keen to see the latter two sights having been moved by the Killing Fields film about Sidney Schanberg and Dith Pran. Upon leaving the hotel for our day of sightseeing we were immediately hit by two things. The first was ... read more