Feeling that we needed to get out of Hanoi and get a bit of peace and quiet we booked ourselves on a trip to Sapa in the northern hills of Nam for three nights and two days. Which actually means two of the three nights being spent all aboard.....the night train! There are several different tickets you can get for the train and we booked the most expensive one which was soft sleeper which is four beds in one cabin. The Orient Express it is not, in fact it doesn'...

Halong Bay is one of Vietnams areas of true natural beauty according to every single guidebook you can read on the subject. It is a UNESCO world heritage site and as our guide kept insisting, it is on the shortlist to be a modern wonder of the world and he repeatedly urged us to go online and vote for it. I doubt either of us will be doing that but it was still good. We only did a day trip out there, you can do longer and stay overnight on a boat but we felt tha...

Part Two. So, after learning to cross the road on day one it was time to actually explore the city and find out if we liked it. We had been told that Hanoi was pretty, but to be honest we didn't really see it. There are some great French colonial buildings dotted about the place and some other more recently built buildings that are certainly very grand but I think we had been spoiled a bit in New Zealand for scenic beauty and Hanoi left us a bit cold on the fro...

Goooooood morning Vietnammmmm!!! I think it is practically the law that we start our first Nam blog with that line and given that this is a commie country who are we not to toe the line. Vietnam is the start of our three and a half month tour of South East Asia which will go on to take in such hot spots as Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Bali before we head back to England. It was a wrench to leave New Zealand (not that we had much choice real...