By the time we had reached Delhi Philippe had caught up to me in the feeling rubbish stakes. Outside the train station we paid wildly over the odds to a taxi driver as neither of us were in the mood for negotiation. He eventually found the Grand Park Inn in Karol Bagh and left us 200rupees lighter for his trouble. Our room was ready, and it was fantastic. Realistically, it was probably no better than a regular business hotel room in Europe, but after the filth of the last few places we have stayed, the sight of a “Sanitized” sign on the toilet nearly made me cry! There doesn't seem to be a middle range of hotels in India. You either stay in the budget places, or fork out over a hundred dollars for a room. ... read more

Father Anthony had invited us to come and spend some time in the seminary that he runs just outside Varanasi. We politely declined, mostly because I was beginning to feel ill, and was in desperate need of a bathroom, but I didn't want to confess this to the priest! He gave us his phone number and encouraged us to ring him if we had any problems while in Varanasi. We shook hands and then he was lost in the crowd of passengers. On the platform we rang our hostel to avail of their free pick up service. We were told to find the tourist information bureau and wait for them to arrive. Thirty minutes later a guy arrived and guided us out of the train station and into a waiting tuk-tuk. The tuk-tuk took off into ... read more

We had heard so many awful accounts of Hanoi that we were almost put off coming here. It is true that traffic here is incredibly dense and chaotic, but we must have grown accustomed to Vietnamese traffic, because we didn't find this too daunting. As is beginning to be the norm here in Vietnam, we were dumped out of the bus on the side of a street that had no obvious street names. After finding one and searching for it in our guide book to no avail, we just hailed a taxi and got him to turn on the meter to bring us to our hotel in the Old Quarter. The Hanoi Atlantic Hotel deserves special mention because the staff in the hotel was without doubt the most friendly we have encountered on the trip to ... read more

Philippe rose the next morning after very little sleep due to a stomach bug. Had we not been meeting my parents that evening, we wouldn't have travelled on. But we were, and so he bravely soldiered on, and we hopped on the bus in Phnom Penh. Our trip across the border was a slow and boring process, not due to any fault of either border control stations. Our bus company representative had decided that it was more efficient to collect up all the passports and get them stamped en masse, but still made us claim them back off him at the Cambodian check point to present them ourselves. He then collected them back off of us as we boarded the bus again, and then the bus moved a short distance to the Vietnamese border. We baled ... read more