Hoi An in a sentence: Arty crafty town that brightens up the mood no matter how bad you feel. Thurs 6th Nov Today we started our gruesome journey to Hoi An. So here's how it was supposed to happen: 13:00 bus to ferry, this was fine. Next bus to Haiphong to arrive at 3, was all good. Boring 3 hour wait until 18:00 with nothing to do until our bus to Da Nang, nope! Bus left at 19:00, picked up an unscheduled puncture at midnight (this proved to be the highlight o...

Cat Ba Island in a sentence: Heavenly little island surrounded by mountains, sea and greenery. Sunday 2nd November We found it very hard to get out of bed today after a late night, having to force ourselves eat breakfast because we didn't know when our next meal would be. Got a taxi to the bus station to start our journey to Cat Ba Island. There are many tourism companies around here that offer packages for this sort of thing, but there are also plenty of scam...

Hanoi in a sentence: Lawless roads filled with screaming scooters. Thurs 30th Oct Left Aoi Garden Homes today at 19:30pm for our overnight bus, feeling quite sad to leave such a great hostel and Chiang Mai. We really got to know our way around the place which is great because there wasn't really any need to carry a map around with us. Our transfer picked us up from our hostel and took over two hours to get to the bus station which was supposed to leave at 9pm...

Mon 20th - 26th Oct Woke up nice and early so we could grab a decent breakfast before heading out to help the elephants. While we were planning our trip we became increasingly aware of the cruelty that surrounded the use of elephants (amongst other animals!) for tourism in Thailand. Through our curiosity we came across the Elephant Nature Park which was founded by Lek Chilert. What Lek has done for the elephants here is truly amazing. The park currently has 41 e...

Fri 17th Oct We grabbed a mini bus back to Bangkok from Kanchanaburi to catch the over night train to Chiang Mai. The day felt brutally long, taking 2.5 hours to bangkok, then sitting at the station for a few hours all before our train departed at 10pm for our 15 hour ride to Chiang Mai. Boarded a very, very, VERY hot train to set ourselves up for the night in our 'bunk beds' - wasn't as bad as expected but a little cramped! Our beds were both the upper bunk w...