Aaaah Dali, Dali, Dali, Dali......what a beautiful, different, quaint little town in the middle of nowhere. Imagine this: a fairly small walled off town, each side of the wall having a stunning ornate Chinese gate/pagoda in order to enter the 'Old Town'. We were based around the South Gate in a great hostel called Friends Guesthouse where we managed to get an empty 8 bed dorm for just the two of us for ¥20 (about £1.85) each. The weather is spectacular, sunny, ...

The bus from Yuanyang was another interesting one, we prayed for a coach rather than the previous bumpy minibus and our prayer was answered. After ten minutes of bumping and hurtling down the steep mountainous roads at about 100mph we realised we may have been better seeing what happened without praying! Two girls were sick on the bus (a first from our backpacking experiences unless due to hangovers) one girl was sat next to me so I had seven hours of heated puke...

It was exciting both to leave for China and to be going on our first night train of the trip. We arrived at the train station and were sent walking over about seven sets of train tracks, there were hundreds of people crossing the tracks and it looked like a scene from a film with hundreds of escaping refugees. Our cabin was great, we had four beds in the small room, the other two were empty until 2am when two Vietnamese blokes woke us up with their loud voices an...

Hanoi is party central, we've had a great few weeks meeting people in the brilliant Hanoi Backpackers Hostel. Various celebrations have included watching the Rugby 6 Nations and seeing England win, yay! Although the Eng v Ireland game was played terribly by ourselves. Then we had St Patricks Day, the day of the year when no matter where you come from or who you are it's fully acceptable and embraced by all to dress in green, drink Guinness, be rowdy as hell and...

Bit behind at the moment so sorry for that, I've been a bit lazy. Since we left Nha Trang we took a very rickety 13 hour overnight bus northbound to Hoi An. After arriving we walked from the outskirts into the centre of Hoi An and dumped our bags on the pavement whilst Adds and Ian went off in search of accommodation. We ended up with a nice small double room with all the trimmigs for $12. Hoi An is a beautiful little town mainly run by tourism. There is a sepe...