Blogs from Quang Binh, North Central Coast, Vietnam, Asia - page 4

I have to confess now - Phong Nha is my favorite place in Vietnam. The natural beauty of the national park, in particular the caves is unrivalled and the recent wartime history provides another edge to the place. Everyone I meet that is thinking of going to Vietnam I urge to visit here. Unfortunately Lonely PLanet have also picked up on the place and have the listed both the national park and the farmstay in their top ten lists of places to go to in the recently published edition. The area is already the second most visited place for local tourists - LP featuring it will mean a crush of foreigners. Tthere goes the neighbourhood! When we arrived the previous evening we were graciously recieved by the owners of the farmstay - aussie Ben and his ... read more

K- A rare mistake by our usually infallible head researcher led us to take an overnight train to Dong Hoi in order to tour the De-Militarized Zone (DMZ) in central Vietnam. On arriving at 8am we discovered that a trip to the DMZ was going to be impractical but fortunately our infallible researcher had a back up plan and by 9am we were in a taxi heading to Phong Nha Cave - a UNESCO World Heritage site that no-one appears to have heard of. Or at least no-one we have so far met on our travels here. On arrival we met Tony, an Aussie who was trying to make sense of the rather un-user friendly price board. It was in English but may as well have been in Vietnamese. After some help by our taxi driver ... read more

The sleeper buses in Viet Nam are actually not too bad, depending on what type of bus you get and how far away from the toilet you sit. Thankfully I had a sleeper seat in the middle on the ground floor, which meant I did not have to endure the pungent aroma of strangers poop, nor endure the crumple zone of the bus, more frequently used in Viet Nam than anywhere else I have been as the bus drivers are a bunch of flagrant lunatics with no awareness of traffic laws (I heard one story from a guy I met about two buses overtaking each other, both on the wrong side of the road). So, once settled I tucked myself in for the night, spooning my bag to fend of thieving little shits (again a common ... read more

I know I was impatient to get out of Hue, but BOY I had no idea what was in store for me. Finally, we said goodbye to that hotel in Hue where we stayed for way too long and boarded a bus. This time, not a sleeper like the others, just a little converted minivan where we squeezed in with about 200 Vietnamese people. Before we left we had to sit in this weird bus stop, the first place where no one spoke English, where a woman was so entranced with our wavy brown hair that she just had to sneak up behind us and touch it. The ride was long and stinky. Vietnam is the land of a thousand smells. About 95% of them I could live without, but at one point I swear it ... read more

09/09/10 We have moved on again and are hoping that tomorrow will we see our very first beach a) in Vietnam and b) of our trip. I guess, if we are being strictly technical about it, we have actually already seen beach on one of the islands in Halong Bay but it had the feel of imported builders sand about it and the water was pretty murky so my vote is that that one didn’t count. Dong Hoi is described by the Lonely Planet as a “simple seaside town” from which tourists are wonderfully absent and as a decent place to break up the journey between Hanoi and Hue. So far, I wholeheartedly agree. It has broken up a journey and for that we are eternally grateful. It takes 8 hours on the Reunification Express to ... read more