Blogs from Vietnam, Asia - page 1344

I'm sorry... I fell off the wagon... I didn't mean to. In fact, I did my very best to avoid it, but I couldn't... Hello, my name is Stacey and I'm a resort-a-holic. See, the problem was there is only two places to stay in Mulu - the national park headquarters, or the plush Royal Mulu Resort - and I'd been told by a number of sources that it's not a good idea to just turn up without having booked accomodation, because if it's full you're pretty much screwed. So i spent almost an entire day trying to sort out flights to, and accommodation in, mulu, but I couldn't get hold of the national park, so I had no other choice than to book a deluxe room (there were no standard rooms available) at the resort. ... read more

Ok this is ridiculous. I've done the south of Vietnam and loved it. But I've allready been to Hoi An on my first visit to the country. This is where I had my suit tailored. And now I went ahead and got a shirt and a couple pairs of shorts made. It's so cheap you just get sucked right into it. I'm going to breeze north to Hanoi and fly somewhere. It seems I'm getting a bit southeast asia-ed out. It's great but at the same time I'm totally sick of people thinking I'm a walking ATM. You can't go anywhere without saying, "No thank you" a dozen times. It's getting hard to be polite. I yelled at someone for the first time on my travels. I agreed on a price with a driver and then ... read more

the bus ride from cambodia to the vietnamese border ­­was interesting. the trip, already tainted by illness on dave's part was made worse by the fact that the radiator decided it was time for a massive leak. this left the driver and his friends with the task of fixing it, a job done by filling the gap with cigarette butts and sealing it with super glue. needless to say there were many more unscheduled stops along the way to add more water and further try to bodge the hole. much to everyone's surprise and relief the trusty cambodians limped us to the border where we crossed into vietnam. we were met by the people from "happy tours" who treated us to an incident free bus ride to saigon and the woman collecting the tickets even sang ... read more

It's been a while since we last updated our blog, but we've been so busy soaking up the delights of Vietnam! We flew from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh and spent a few days exploring the city. This southern capital is rapidly being transformed into a southeast Asian western style city. The city moves at breakneck pace, faster than Hanoi! We knew it was time to move on when we got caught in the middle of a huge tropical storm that turned the streets to rivers. We thought the storm would pass pretty quickly but after 20 mins standing in a phone box watching the water rise above our feet with the thunder and lightning getting closer, it was time to run/swim for a cab! From there we braved a night bus North East to the ... read more

14th May (Sun) - We took a bus from Phnom Penh to the Cambodia-Vietnam border. The tiny bus was packed with passengers and the road was damn bumpy. At the Vietnam border, we queued for a long time because the immigration officers were paid by travel agencies to settle the passports of the people in the tour groups... Since we were not in any tour groups, we couly only helplessly watch the tour operators pushing piles and piles of passports to the immigration officers. After sometime, my mum and some fellow passengers in our bus were fed up and they complained loudly in front of the tour operators and the immigration officials... The tour operators, being scared by our loud voices, finally let us go through the immigration first... After another 2 hours, we finally reached ... read more