I am at the moment very proud of myself as I am after visiting Hoan Kiem lake, the old quarter and Dong Xuam Market. All by foot and all on my own!!!! Woohoo!!!! And I did all this using only a map with no help from anybody, well bar one occasion when I got a little bit lost, but still!!! This may not seem like much of an achievement but the streets of Hanoi are crazy and it is so easy to get confused and disorientated. A few people I had spoken to before I lef...

The fear is upon me!! I am at this minute well and truly alone. I have just said my farewells to Lisbet and am on a bus heading down to Chaing Mai. Lisbet is staying in Pai because she has to do a visa run up north tomorrow after which she will head down south to Koh Tao before jetting off to New Zealand. My plans for the moment are a little bit different! I am heading to Chaing Mai in order to go to an elephant nature park tomorrow. This is a park that brid went...

I think I have to take back what I originally said about Pai. Four days here and I very much love the place. The town itself is ok but the surrounding country is just amazing. The best thing we ever did was rent a scooter. The town of Pai is very much in a valley, surrounded by layer after layer of beautiful mountains which really makes exploration by bicycle a difficult if not impossible task. Today myself and Lisbet went on a waterfall tour. In the morning I h...

So yesterday was a complete write off of being sick, sleeping and watching movies. In order to make up for it today lisbet and i wanted to see as much of Pai as we could and what better way to do this than rent a scooter. The scooter was so cheep, 100B or €2.50, for 24 hrs. We got to see so much of the country and the scooter allowed us to go up steep hills that would have killed me on a simple bicycle. Well there was one stage that we went up a road that was t...

So Pai is an odd place. I had heard so much great things about it that I was super excited to get here. People described it as a really mellow hippy town with lots of cafe's where you could sit for hours just relaxing. I would just describe it as a small town full of tourists. I'm not saying that I don't like the place but I think I made the grave mistake of having really high expectations. After arriving last night we picked one of the first guest houses we saw...