The Doans

Friday, April 5th- We woke up later than usual, and headed over to Jim and Kelley's house to make crepes for brunch. I had been having some bad allergies in the morning and they weren't fun. We ate and made crepes for about an hour then decided to take a walk around the area of their house. At this point I couldn't breathe through my nose and I was pretty miserable, so I don't think enjoyed the walk as much as the others did. To make matters worse, after the walk we went to a nature reserve which was almost like a rainforest filled with tons of pollen and mold which happen to be two things that I am allergic to. The nature reserve was cool despite the fact that I felt sick. We watched an ... read more

It has been a long time since my last blog, so I will fill you in on my adventures. On Tuesday we woke up in the morning to visit the infamous kiwi bird. The kiwi bird is an endemic New Zealand bird that is most closely related to the emu and ostrich. In the afternoon, we went to a beach where they also had a trek up a mountain to the mermaid pools, where when the tide goes out, the pools fill with water. The pools are usually very warm because they have the whole day to warm in the sun. The day that we went, the water was probably about 18-19 degrees Celsius. It has been fun switching over to the metric system. I don't know why Americans don't use it because it makes way ... read more

Kaia We started our first day with a breakfast of tea and crumpets. Yum! We headed out for a kayak tour in the Roukaka Estuary. There were a lot of interesting shells that we wouldn't see at home. I collected a few to take back with us. We had a picnic and I tried salmon and cream cheese on crackers and we had fresh pears, passion fruit and feijoa. It is fun to try new fruits that we don't have at home. Passion fruit is my favorite. We spent the afternoon at the beach. It is much bigger than beaches I've been to in the U.S. and there are hardly any people there. On a busy day there are only about 20 people there to share the WHOLE beach! My favorite activity so far was playing ... read more

We left Hoi An on Thursday morning and headed for Saigon. Since we had made a change to our schedule, we ended up flying Indochine airlines. We arrived safely, but the food and service were not what Vietnam Airlines provides. Our driver arrived on time and shuttled us from the airport to the hotel, giving us a brief history of Vietnam on the way. He worked for the Americans during the war and told us that he'd not used his English much in the years since - though as we discovered with most, it was great. Taking our guide's recommendation, we stayed at the "historic five star" Rex Hotel. It was base station for many Western journalists during the Vietnam War (or the "American War" as those in current day Vietnam refer to it). I emphasize ... read more

Hello family and friends! We are so disapointed to share that our promised access to computers has not been what it should be. While we are able to enter text, we have spent over 3 hours in the past 2 days trying to upload photos and updates for Quinn, Kaia, and all of you. We have decided today that we are going to let the blog go quiet until we reach Saigon, and will enter our updates (now having been done by hand) if access permits. For those of you outside of our day to day contact, we will still complete the blog when we get home as a way to share our travels with you - albeit delayed. We have experienced our first morning of sun today and are headed out to enjoy it. We ... read more