The last blog for our trip is finally here.. a month later! But I figured if I didnt do it now it would never get done, and the trip was really not complete without a final blog! Now where were we... thats right.. arriving back in Saigon from Paradise aka Phu Quoc. Arriving back in Saigon we suddenly realised how close to the end we were, and considering that the following day was a full day tour we realised that we only had the afternoon to finish up any shopping we wanted to do.. with that in mind we quickly dumped our bags at the hotel and went across the road for one last feast at our favourite Saigon pork restaurant... after we scoffed our food we headed off to the Ben Thanh Markets. While they ... read more

So our last blog left us packing our bags and leaving for Saigon... I was really stressing as the typhoon has passed over but had left strong winds... I kept looking out at the trees blowing around and wondering how the hell a plane was going to cope! McKay must have repeated the "they want to crash LESS than you want to crash.. think of the bad publicity" speech to me at least 20 times!! Nail-biting flight We'd arranged private transport to the airport in Danang through Mark at Hoi An Motorbike adventures. At the scheduled time, up pulled our car (most of the cheap transport has been via privately owned cars) with a driver and a man in the passenger seat...with a baby on his lap! We thought, well this is special, but loaded up ... read more

Its been a few days since my last blog and I have been struggling to get some downtime where I am not completely exhausted to write the blog... In Hoi An despite my best intentions I think we spent more time IN tailor shops than out of them and definitely had our shares of hits and misses.... Before leaving the train in Danang we had met a couple from Melbourne, Rose and Kurt who were on their honeymoon... as we left the train we ran into them and decided to split the costs of a taxi to Hoi An.. being the expert I am at bartering, I managed to get everyone to stick to their guns and our $18USD taxi ended up at $12USD... Once in Hoi An we checked in to Cua Dai Hotel and ... read more

My last blog was getting a little long so I decided to cut it into a couple of blogs. don't want to give you information overload! Romantic Spa For Two ;-) After a good shower and breakfast we caught a taxi to a day spa which the hotel had already booked for us. The day spa paid for our taxi and we were shown to a romantic massage room for two... we walked in and cracked up laughing.. the room consisted of two massage tables and a lovely combined shower/spa/steam room in the corner... we had booked a 5 hour package consisting of body salt scrub, mud wrap, aromatherapy massage, facials and foot treatment (which consisted of getting rid of dead skin, exfoliation, massage and parrafin wax).. Our massage therapists then told us BOTH to strip ... read more

Soooo I left the last blog with us in our taxi on the way to the train station to catch the overnight train... when we arrived we were ushered through the main gates and given no real direction as to where to go.. it looked like a scene out of some scary movie.. it was like a deserted railyard with a few old trains in it and you had to walk across all the tracks to get to the train... weird.. Yet Another Overnight Train Ride We found our train and were shown to our cabin. We had booked 2 beds in a 4 berth cabin on Livitrans, and from what we could see it wasnt as luxurious as they advertise but it was clean.. we sat down on our bed, anxiously waiting to see who ... read more