My final days in Vietnam were spent in Ho Chi Minh City and various locations in and around the Mekong River Delta. Southern Vietnam is quite different than Hanoi and the other parts of north Vietnam that I visited. The traffic is even more chaotic, the street scenes have many more American based stores / fast food chains, and the trash situation is totally out of control. The tour group I joined in Ho Chi Minh City included a retired couple from Istanbul and t...

After leaving Hanoi and Hue, I spent two nights in Hoi An, and am headed to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon). There are so many highlights from these past days, and I'm not sure yet, as I write, whether I'll be disciplined enough to condense, so either settle in or navigate away! As Mark Twain famously said, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." The 30,000 foot view is that I have: met wonderful people, viewed fascinating site...

I said bai - bai to Hong Kong for a bit and flew into Hanoi, where it seems that there are two motorbikes/scooters for every citizen. And no traffic rules as far as I can tell. Cars, buses, bikes, motor scooters and pedestrians all just GO, honking their horns the whole way (except the pedestrians). The chaos is astounding. As prep for this trip to Vietnam, I have almost 40 years of watching movies about the Vietnam War, and not much more. It was hard for me to ...

Lovely to spend the weekend with Jordan! Flamingos are my spirit animal. Perhaps that's because they spend so much of their day with their heads under their wings, avoiding the rest of the world! So, it was exciting for me to visit the flamingos in Kowloon Park with Jordan on Saturday, before heading to Science Park to visit his office. I loved seeing where he works. Science Park is lovely -- it's near the water, and there is a bike path that runs through it. We...

Friday was my first full day with Jordan. We covered some ground, literally. I walked 22,000 steps! Our first stop was to "The Peak," a mountain on Hong Kong Island, which you access by tram. The view at the top was incredible, if you don't look at the mall. There is a mall at the top. There are malls everywhere here! It's convenient if you need a restroom (or, yes, I'll admit it, a Starbucks), but otherwise disappointing. After I took 25,000 pictures of the h...