When I was reading about Nha Trang before, I wasn’t exactly sure whether to include it in my itinerary or not as it simply looked like a party place. With a nice beach that is… Some people were even comparing it to Koh Phangan and the full moon party, with this difference that these kind of parties were taking place here on a daily basis apparently. Since Koh Phangan turned out to be nothing close to a party place – we really enjoyed our stay there and thought of it as a very relaxing and beautiful place actually (maybe because we escaped it just before the full moon? Naaaah… We just stayed away from all the craziness… ;)), we decided to give Nha Trang a try as well. If only to break down the journey south ... read more

Don’t you just love Asian bus schedules? Hmmm… ‘Yes, should be here somewhere between 8 and 9…’ Always so precise! ;) So once we were told that our bus would come between 8 and 9pm, we thought that probably it would come somewhere around 10 or even later… Taking into account that it was coming from Hanoi and we experienced this part of the journey the day before already, well… anything could happen… To be honest it didn’t really matter to us what time the bus would be there anyway… We were tired after the whole day of driving around Ninh Binh, had no room to stay at and relax anymore as had to check out in the morning, so all we could do is have dinner, a beer or two and just patiently wait for ... read more

I have to say that at the time we were booking a bus to Ninh Binh I had some serious doubts whether we would be back on time from Halong Bay to catch it on the same day. After all we had only 1 hour between being dropped off at the office and catching a bus further on. And so far I don’t think any of the buses (or trains) we travelled with in South East Asia arrived on time at their destination…. So I was more than surprised when we arrived at the tourist office in Hanoi right on time! We would be able to get to Ninh Binh on the same day after all! Happy days! :) It was supposed to be only 2 hour journey to Ninh Binh which only made me think ... read more

Waking up to see it was still raining outside was pretty disappointing to say the least… Ah well… Nobody would give us money back for the trip at this stage, so rain or no rain, we were off to Halong Bay! I was really surprised how flooded some areas of Hanoi were when we were driving through the city. Still it didn’t stop all the bikers from moving around! Raincoats on, legs up in the air and speeding through the puddles… I was more than happy to be sitting in a van though… We had 13 people on board and it looked like it was going to be our group for the next days. Good size of a group I would say! And we had quite a mix of nationalities as well which is always interesting ... read more

As much as I enjoyed doing almost nothing during our last couple of days in Laos, I felt I was becoming more and more lazy by the minute. Let’s just say I was getting used the laid-back style of Lao living, I was getting used to it way too fast though, so finally the 1st of August came and we were able to head on to Vietnam. We went to the bus station a day before just to double check whether there definitely was a bus to Hanoi the next day and were told that somewhere between 7 and 9am indeed there would be a bus going in that direction. What a precise timetable! No surprises at this point though… We got to the station before 7am just in case, and of course were there way ... read more

The original plan was to take a usual (meaning sitting) bus to Phonsavan but since we left the booking for the last moment it appeared that we had missed the only sitting bus that day already so we were left with a choice of either staying another night somewhere in Vientiane and leaving the next morning or taking a sleeping bus the same evening instead. We really wanted to move on further so after bargaining on the price a bit, in the end we chose the latter. We were picked up from our hotel and on the way to the bus station we realised that we were missing the best sunset in Asia so far! Every evening I was hoping that finally we would see some decent sunset (as they have been quite disappointing until now) ... read more