Is Liz a Magician? "I'll fit it in my bag, don't worry". These were the words of my darling wife as we visited the tailors in Hoi An. We had made a decision, as our money was drying up that what we bought in Hoi An would be clothes we would NOT buy at home. I needed some shirts for work and Liz wanted (having spoken to a girl in Laos who had already been to Hoi An) a winter coat. We walked in to the "recommended" tailors and before we knew i...

Phewy for Hue We had left the brilliant Halong Bay trip behind us as we boarded the bus for 17 hours of driving and a lot of beeping all the way to Hue. We had booked a hotel just for one night to get a nights kip before we headed further south. The sleeper bus was hilarious, a single decker bus but open to the roof as a double decker would be with the narrowest bunk beds we have ever seen. If you happen to be taller or wider than Liz then you are destined for ...

Love you Ha Long time Having left the gripping flip flop incident behind us in Hanoi we made our way to Cat Ba Island where we would be taking a 3 day boat trip around Halong Bay. We were very excited about this - especially the prospect of some quiet sunshine time again. As usual we wanted to avoid the large backpacker booze cruise boats so had settled on a recommendation for Cat Ba Adventrues which offered a smaller and quieter trip. Admittedly we probably cou...

29 hours on the 'hard sleeper' The train journey to the north was as we had hoped - the scenery rolled by, there was actual Vietnamese people in the carriages rather than westerners and there was a food trolley packed with yummy food. It might seem a strange itinerary to travel the entire length of a country just to make your way back down again but somewhere along the line we'd booked our slight out of Saigon as well as entering the Vietnam from Cambodia there...

Got a Hanoi Heeling! So after a pretty easy yet long train journey the entire length of the country we arrived in Hanoi at 5am! We were, as with all SE Asian cities, bombarded with an awful lot of people shouting "taxi". Being 5 in the morning, we jumped in a cab after telling the driver to take us directly to the hotel we had booked. Little did we know at this point that he had his meter on "warp speed foreigner rate" so for the 10 minute...