Southern Vietnam and Bangkok This entry might seem to be a little broad, but as we didn't do that much in southern Vietnam we figured we could combine the two. So, starting briefly with southern Vietnam. An extremely tedious and hunger filled 24 hour train journey from Hanoi saw us arrive in the beach resort of Nha Trang. Within an hour of boarding the train, our cabin kindly provided us with our first sighting of cockroaches, which, needless to say didn't ma...

Northern Vietnam: Hanoi, Halong Bay and Sapa (Sa-pa) After passing yet another airport swine flu test we entered Vietnam and arrived at our surprisingly nice hotel right in the heart of the old quarter of Hanoi. First impressions were of an incredibly chaotic city where the scooter rules with literally thousands buzzing, beeping and bumping their way around the narrow streets. There are few pavements and those there are, are used for parking scooters leavin...

Hong Kong A straight forward flight saw us arrive in Hong Kong with some relief. We headed straight out to explore this truly fascinating city with many familiar touches, going straight to the waterfront to gaze across the water at the impressive landscape of financial buildings on Hong Kong Island. Discovering that the Museum of History had free entry that day (thanks to my trusty Which? Holiday guide!), we headed there to find an extremely well designed mus...

BeijingAfter a good flight with the excellent Finnair we arrived relaxed in Beijing, both looking forward to a new travel experience away from our 'comfort blanket' of Europe. We were not disappointed in that we received an experience, some good some not so, and it was with some relief that we boarded the plane four days later to Hong Kong.Unbeknown to us we arrived in Beijing in the middle of the 60th anniversary celebrations of communist rule. This involved a n...

6 weeks in Europe: The start of our adventure As we've now come to the end of our European leg we thought it was a good time to reflect on what we've covered so far. So these are just a list of some of our favourite places/things, more as a reminder to us than as an interesting blog entry but this just seemed a good place to store/record it! P.S. We have individual ratings in some categories as we couldn't always agree, also these are in no particular ord...