Our journey from Hanoi to Halong Bay began when we were picked up at our hotel by the tour company we had booked with at 8.15am. The bus journey to Halong Bay was about four hours with a half hour stop halfway there and was fairly comfortable although the leg room on the bus was definitely for Asian people rather than taller westerners and I've got some of the shortest legs in the world! After getting to Halong Bay, we had to board a small boat to get out to ou...

On Tuesday night, we attempted to find an Indian restaurant which we had found on the Internet and which looked good. After searching for about 15 minutes we had to give up and went to our second choice, a restaurant called Restaurant 96. We were glad we did. Beth had a Vietnamese dish which was a load of vegetables and some beef with some rice paper wraps which you use to make beef wraps. She was definitely impressed. I had sweet and sour pork chops which w...

So we have now made it into our 12th country (by our reckoning) of Vietnam. However, the journey here was definitely the worst of our trip so far and far eclipses the 33 hour trip from Cusco to Lima in November. We booked the trip from Vientiane to Hanoi in Vietnam through our hotel in Vientiane, New Laos Paris hotel, as we thought they would at least be trustworthy. How wrong we were. We checked out of our room at 12pm and went and grabbed some lunch in a ne...