Wow!!!! That's all that needs to be said for this place. It's absolutely beautiful & a definite must for anyone thinking of travelling to the region. After a 4 hour minivan ride we got to Ha Long city & saw our first glimpse of the bay. Best idea is to grab a look at the photos when we finally manage to up load them... We cruised around for about 4 hours, visited some caves, had some lunch - i even ate fish!!! Then we chugged on over towards the town of Cat B...

OK, so we had an overnight train journey from Hanoi & before the train had even left a guy was trying to get us into his guest house! Somehow he came up with exactly the same problems we'd experienced there (overcharging etc, etc) and said that we will never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever have to go through in Hue... So we gave him a chance.Turns out he was right & we had a pretty good time. We went to visit a war museum (God help any Americans or Fren...

Hanoi. Where do i start.... A guy in the airport in Vientiane gave us a brochure for a guest house & it seemed ok. They would even collected us from the airport (about 25km away) for the small fee of $2 US. So we checked out the room & it seemed ok, up 5 flights of stairs but it was fairly cheap. Then it turned out to be $2 dollars each for the taxi & it went downhill from there! Hanoi has some great sights & places to visit, but we got the distinct impression ...