November 2nd to November 6th 2009 I cannot quite bring myself to believe that this is the very final day of this trip. The final day of actual trip-ness I mean, I don't count tomorrow, which will be a very long bus trip to Bangkok and my third and final night sleeping in the airport, nor the day after, which will consist of an even longer plane trip home. As always, the whole things seems to have gone in an instant, yet despite this Japan feels like so long ago that it appears to be a (remarkably pleasant) dream. And what [View Full Entry]

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What is it that makes you fall in love with a country? With 4 weeks cut off my intended trip by my stupid Sandhurst pre-commissioning course, I had had to abandon my plans to spend part of my trip in Laos and Cambodia, and restrict myself to a 10 day whirlwind transit through the latter on my way back overland to Bangkok to fly home on the 7th. I had made this revision without too much angst, as I could not have cut off any time from Vietnam and still seen it thoroughly (and even as it was I left places [View Full Entry]

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Saturday 17th October 2009 - Monday 26th October 2009 Time was running out on my time in Vietnam, with my visa due to expire on 27th October, but before I left I decided I wanted a bit more of hill station goodness, (and a bit less humidity) so altered my original itinerary to fit in Dalat in the central highlands. The 'city of eternal spring', it is the honeymoon capital of Vietnam, and thus full of places with names like 'the Valley of Love' and other such kitch offers. It promised to be amusing, if nothing else. However, it was a [View Full Entry]

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Saturday 10th October to Friday 16th October Having descended Fansipan, cleansed ourselves with the vigour of the obsessive-compulsive at our hotel, stuffed ourselves with cake and coffee, and caught the night train back to Hanoi, me and Coop was due to leave the north and start the long journey southwards down the coast of Vietnam, following in the footsteps of many a backpacker before us. Our bus to Hue was due to leave at 5.30pm on Saturday, giving us a further day in Hanoi to mess around in. Coop went off shopping in the morning and then to the Army Museum [View Full Entry]

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Tueday 6th October to Friday 9th October 2009 Because we are apparently masochists and full of destructive self-loathing, me and Coop decided to punish ourselves for our three days of boaty bliss in Halong Bay by setting ourselves to climbing Vietnam's (and, we later discovered, Indochina's) highest mountain, Fansipan. Having arrived back in Hanoi on Tuesday afternoon, me still grey-faced and whimpering with the mother of all hangovers, now exotically spiced with a bubbling cold, we decided to treat ourselves to a massage and some hair of the dog before catching our night train to Lao Cai o [View Full Entry]

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Sunday 4th October to Tuesday 6th October 2009 Halong Bay is one of the premier tourist attractions of northern Vietnam. Meaning 'where the dragon descends into the sea', it is a bay covered in hundreds of limestone outcrops poking out of the water, some small enough to support only a small sprig of greenery, others large enough to double for Alex Garland's epononymous 'Beach'. The sea is warm, the weather balmy, the views amazing. It's a World Heritage Site, and is currently competing for status as one of the new natural wonders of the world. How did me and Coop decide [View Full Entry]

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Sunday 27th September 2009 to Saturday 03rd October 2009 My first impression of Vietnam, and more specifically Hanoi, was that of vibrancy. The city was teaming, TEAMING, with motorbikes, which raced down narrow streets lined with crumbling mustard-coloured French-style houses and shops, past tiny street-side food stalls surrounded by Vietnamese sitting on miniature stools (like the ones you get in infant school) and tucking into bowls of pho, old women in conical hats carrying baskets of fruit, and policemen idling in chairs (not yet have I once seen a Vietnamese policeman actually looking [View Full Entry]

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Friday 25th September 2009 Ok, think of the fattest, most grotesquely ugly rugby forward you can imagine (or maybe the referee from our Edinburgh match. Yes, him). Now dress them in a thong. This is Japan's national hero. Now, in their thong, imagine this person bending down to touch their toes five times, ass towards audience, lift up their leg as high as possible so you get the full view of cellulite, and then slap themselves haka style to get the flesh wobbling intimidatingly. Then get them to launch themselves at an even bigger Michelin-man figure and bitch-slap them until one [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday 16th September to Wednesday 23rd September The home of indigenous peoples. The land of the gods. A geological textbook of volcanic landforms. The brewery of Japan. Home to it's last wilderness. Hokkaido can be described in many terms, but all of them identify it's unique nature both in Japan and in this part of the world. The northern-most island of 'mainland' Japan, it's climate is that of Siberia, which is only a few miles across the water from it - from November to April the land is covered in astonishing amounts of snowfall and the sea is full of the [View Full Entry]

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Of all the places I had been slathering over in my faithful Lonely Planet before I came on the trip, Yakushima was one of the top spots. A small island off the southern tip of the country, it has long been held in reverence by the Japanese for its mystical atmosphere, medicinal plants, ancient cedar trees, and above all, it's mountains - held to be the home of the Gods. Sub-tropical at sea level, its mountains rise formidably out of the Pacific, interrupting the warm wet air flowing in from the south and creating a climate where 8000mm of rain falls [View Full Entry]

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