We arrived in Hue after a luxury overnight train ride, we had soft sleepers this time, which meant we had actual mattresses, only four people per compartment and a western toilet. It was rather hot in Hue, so our first day we spent wandering round the city and trying to find somewhere for Pete to buy some t-shirts as he had run out of clean ones. After a successful shopping trip and chillout at the hotel, it was time for us to attend our Royal Banquet. The resta...

Today it felt like we were on a proper holiday. We got on our private bus which took us to Halong Bay, where we boarded our private junk boat and headed out to sea, amongst the amazing limestone islands. After being on board a short while, we were served a delicious seafood lunch and sampled some local wine, not as good as a Sauvignon Blanc, but I will have to manage. We then headed for some caves and spent half an hour wandering round, seeing all the interesting...

We arrived in Hanoi early in the morning, so it was straight to be for a few hours, before heading out on our orientation walk. Hanoi is a lively and bustling city, just crossing the road is an event, but a fun one. We are situated in the Old Quarter a strange mix of narrow colonial style buildings with the odd oriental gate way and temple mixed in. It is an exciting place to walk around, with loads of interesting shops and buildings to look at, but you need to b...

After a great breakfast including scrambled egg and almost proper English tea we headed out for an orientation walk and to explore the town, which although small is ever changing with cloud coming in and out, revealing picturesque landscape and then taking it away again. We found a hairdressers and Pete had his head shaved, followed by his face, meanwhile I had a pedicure, which was no ordinary pedicure as you will see on the pictures, the amazing detail of the f...

"Good morning Vietnam!!!" The first greeting we received from our Vietnamese Taxi driver. Today we left China, first we had a long bus journey which took us through some amazing countryside and landscape, but also on some incredibly bumpy roads and experiencing some rather dangerous driving and the worst squat toilets I have ever been in. We arrived in Vietnam at around 8pm and loaded ourselves and luggage into a Ford Transit and headed for Sapa our f...