Arrival at Luang Prabang was quite a relief. Not only was I suffering a tad from a bug and grateful for terra firma but we sailed effortlessly through immigration to a low key taxi booth where a taxi driver awkwardly suggested that we might want to take a songthaow into town and then withdrew for us to make our minds up. This is so markedly different from the up-front in your face style of the place we had come from that it took a few moments to relax the defensi...

The train journey from Hue to Hanoi is a bit bumpy. The train rocks from side to side so that when you wake up in the morning it feels as though your head has been shaken violently for ten hours - which it has and no amount of paracetamol is going to help! Ho hum. We were given an extensive meal in our cabin which we shared with two quiet young Vietnamese guys, which was fairly inedible (lukewarm soup with one limp bit of pork skin, hairs and all, anyone?) aside ...

Greetings all!We are currently in Hue, midway up the coast of Vietnam between Saigon and Hanoi. The weather has turned quite cold (10 degrees or so) so have had to wear double t-shirts and dig out the socks that lurked at the bottom of our bags!It has been a VERY busy two weeks. Will update full in the next few days with more detail!D&C x  **** Text added 13/01/07 ****The trip from Hoi An to Hue was broken with stops at the Marble Mountains and some rand...

Ahhhh now Hoi An is a VERY diferent kettle of fish to some of the other places we had visited in Vietnam. It very much reversed the negativity built up since leaving Saigon and we think it no coincidence that the area surrounding Hoi An/Danang is strongly Buddhist compared to the rest of the country.We ended up staying over a week although the town itself is very small. We made a lot of friends and spent many days cycling around visiting people or going on t...

So we caught the bus in the unhappy village of Dai Lanh to Danang. The bus was due to go further to Hue for a coach tourgroup the next day but made a profitable sideline inthe 10 hour journey to Danang by picking up randompeople on the side of the road along the way. It was a great trip,really fantastic to see the coastal scenery and trackour progress on the map. The driver was a good man andhis sidekick was ruthless in cajoling people onto thebus and ensuring th...