I'M IN AUSTRALIA! My feet are cold. There are double decker trains. Coke cans are slightly bigger. So much culture shock! ...Not so much, Sydney feels so much like home that it's putting me off a bit: it seems too much like real life. I'm worried I might have to stop looking like a tramp here! So my last few days in Asia weren't too exciting. I checked into a hostel next to Bangkok airport one night cos I was getting in at 2am and didn't want to take the hour lo...

So intrepid provided us with flights between Hue and Hanoi which thankfully cut out the 17 hour journey I'd have to make otherwise! Went crawling back to them in the morning and avoided all talk about the fact that I wasn't actually going to be staying with them in Hanoi until we got there. That was awkward... but I think it was pretty clear to everyone that we didn't actually have hardly anything in common, lovely as they all were. Hightailed it out of the hotel...

The last half of Vietnam has been pretty much the total opposite of the first half, and about a million times more fun, even if pretty much everything has gone wrong! First step of operation escape from intrepid was to book into a hostel, where Hue backpackers is pretty much the only option, and a really nice option at that. Next mission was to actually make some friends so that the whole thing wasn't totally pointless, I'm so out of practice! But obviously the f...

Ok this was gonna be a long ranty post b****ing about the crap time I was having with Intrepid, but since then I've escaped and am in a way better mood so I'll cut out the whinging! It really wasn't good though and I had the most depressing 5 days of my travels so far, most expensive mistake ever! So our first activity with our new group was to visit the Cu Chi tunnels, which the Vietnamese people used to hide from the Americans during the war. Most of this hist...

First stop in Vietnam was Chau Doc, a quaint little seaside town with a rather unhealthy obsession with motorbikes. Every other shop is a bike shop, how any of them make any business I have no idea! I read before getting here that Vietnamese people don't like westerners and are generally rude to them and try to rip them off... which might be the case for the rest of the country (yes I'm just gonna stereotype them all!) but couldn't be further from the truth her...