I'm writing the final chapter of my Vietnamese blog from Hanoi, the capital city. We arrived here on Friday lunchtime, after taking a 3 hour bus ride from Halong Bay. I thought that Ho Chi Minh City was busy, but this is without doubt the busiest city I've ever been to. The place is at virtual gridlock 24/7, with massive polltion from the millions of scooters and fires being randomly burned everywhere. Even a 'smoggy' can't deal with that level of pollution!...

Today we're in Halong Bay. The trip is coming to an end - it seems to have flown by over the last ten days. We had travelled by train from Hue to Hanoi, which took about 12 hours, then transferred from Hanoi to Halong Bay, where we arrived at the hotel early this morning. I don't think I could get used to travelling by train in this country as it is pot luck as to what it's going to be like. This is the third overnight train we've taken in "first" ...

I'm writing this instalment for Hue (pronounced Hway). It's a city of 1 million people where the ancient palaces are situated. Since my last blog, back in Hoi An, we took a boat ride down the estuary. We had lunch made for us on the boat, then went into the coconut swamps on the river in the small, round bath tub-like boats that you can see on the pic from my previous blog. The significance of these coconut swamps are that the Vietcong hid in them during the...

It's unbelievable how quickly time passes! I'm writing this blog 3 days after we hired bikes for the day and took the coast road from Nha Trang up to the local fishing villages about 15km away. It was scorching and the white English boy caught the sun. I did manage to retain the polka dot jersey as king of the mountains though. It was a great way to get off the beaten track - as I said on the message board, I realised it was the same road that Clarkson, Hammo...

After getting to know the group I'm travelling with over a meal and some beers last night, today we visited the Chu Chi tunnels today - an area about an hour out of the city which was the site of many of the tunnels built by the Vietcong during the war with the US. It graphically demonstrated the amazing lengths that they went to, to defend and attack the Americans during the Vietnam war. We were able to go down the tunnels and travel underground (made bigger f...