We left Hue on Thursday afternoon. We were picked up by a minivan in which there were about 12 of us and all of our luggage crammed into a space big enough for about 6. Luckily this was only for the ride to the tour office where we had to wait a further half hour for the bus to arrive. The bus to Hoi An only took 3 and a half hours but it was a fairly uncomfortable journey due to the air conditioning on the bus being almost non existent and the sleeper beds be...

Our train from Hanoi to Hue left at 7.35pm on the dot on Sunday night. We were at the train station for 6pm and boarded the train at 6.30 pm so we were the first people in our cabin. A porter grabbed our bags before we had the chance to say no and carried them the significant distance from the waiting room to the carriage. The site of him with our two huge bags on top of his head was pretty funny. We tipped him 20,000 dong (about 65p) but this didn't go down ...

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...