Thursday, April 9th This morning we had to go to the train station to see about tickets to Surat Thani, a town on the west coast of Thailand. From there you can take a boat to the islands of Ko Samui, Ko Pangan and Ko Tao. It's about 11 hours by train so we wanted to depart the following evening. We grabbed a taxi and headed to the nearest subway station (they call it the Metro, like the French). Here we took our first subway ride of the trip. The line terminates at the train station so a short walk took us to the booking desks. A friendly official checked for availability but there was no tickets available for the following evening or the evening after that. The only space in the near future was this ... read more

Monday, April 6th Our jeep picked us up just after 7am. Our first stop was at Mui Ne’s fishing docks. There are tons of fishing boats at anchor here (see panoramic photo above). It makes for a beautiful picture. The Red sand-dunes are 3km from Mui Ne, but we first went to the White sand dunes 25km away. En-route we were very glad that we had gotten the jeep. On a scooter we would never have found our way. Also the last part of the road is dirt covered with sand. We might very well have ditched the bike if we’d tried to navigate it. We really enjoyed the jeep ride too. It was great to be moving again, wind in our hair, sun on our skins. At the foot of the White sand-dunes lies the ... read more

We'd like to apologise, especially to Megan ;-), for the April fools joke. We are glad we got so many of you! Wednesday, April 1st This morning we left Nha Trang for Mui Ne on a smallish bus. It had a TV and we could watch a movie. The only problem was that they dubbed it to Vietnamese, but not the way you'd think. Instead of having different voices for each character, they had one female voice for every actor - male, female, young, old. There's no voice acting. The woman merely read the subtitles. It's horrible! We arrived in Mui Ne just before 2pm (it took more than 5 hours by bus, not 3 hours as we were led to believe) and set off to a place we read about in our guide book that ... read more

Sunday, March 29th We decided to take the day off :-) and just stay in, blog, plan and arrange our next move and watch some movies. We ended up not doing any planning, just chilling. We watched movies late into the night. It was great! Mentally we're ready to get going again. In a sense, coming to Nha Trang was like coming home and we've stayed here a long time. Even so, we're both feeling the itch to hit the road again. The next adventure awaits! Today's highlights: 1. Spending the day watching movies. Monday, March 30th After a weak attempt at waking Talita at 6am to go jogging, Ferdi gave up and we ended up sleeping really late. After breakfast we booked our flight to Bangkok. There are no buses that go directly from Saigon ... read more

Wednesday, March 25th On the way to the dock this morning we discovered that our instructor, Tri, is a legend in the Vietnam diving community. He has logged more than 10,000 dives, has a reef named after him (Tri Minh's Treat) and is even mentioned in the Lonely Planet guidebook. We're getting taught by the best Vietnam has to offer. It's amazing how humble he is. We've seen so many divers come swaggering onto the boat thinking and behaving like they know everything because they have logged a hundred dives :-). It just goes to show that you never know who's sitting next to you (or who you're bragging to for that matter). The first dive was at Octopus Rock and we went down to 25.9m, our personal best. We swam through a few tunnels formed ... read more