Well I was rather glad to leave Saigon and head to the Delta. I booked a 3 day, 2 night tour with a home-stay. One the first morning we headed to one of the little towns near the delta and got a boat across to one of the islands. We then went to a honey cafe place for honey tea and then got on some long row boats to be taken along the winding, though busy, rivers. Back to our boat and to another island for fruit and to see the coconut candy factory (or a few wom...

Hello again, Well I am now in HCMC or Saigon or whatever you want to call it. The place is even more manic than Hanoi but with a lot less charm. Just big wide roads with even more bikes and more people trying to sell you stuff every 8 seconds. It's also really humid here and about 30 degrees, so no escape from the heat. I had hoped to upload my pics so I'm in an internet cafe, but the computers in here are even more antiquated then the temples and 'pavements' ...

Hello again, And can I just say that this site doesn't inform me when I get new messages or comments and they're quite hard to find, so imagine my surprise when I just stumbled across the whole lot of them from you all for the first time and I'm now sitting on the computer in hotel reception with my eyes streaming xxxx Anyway, I'm now in Nha Trang, which a fairly non-descript, soul-less beach town a bit like any other you'd find by any stretch of beach in Europ...

So, blog entry 'proper' number 1.... Well, guess I did feel a bit silly asking for assistance at Heathrow to get me to the gate, but when they bumped me up to the front row of Premium Economy, it didn't seem so bad, especially not with all the burly (though slightly camp) Aussie stewards fussing over me and pulling at my dimples! Overnight in Bangkok was pretty uneventful, ate dinner with a retired Swedish guy who was travelling to Burma for a month on his own,...

Today we went to Ha Long Bay, a three hour hair-raising drive from Hanoi. We arrived at the docks where there were hundreds of big brown tourist boats waiting to take the hundreds of people queuing off the various tour buses. As we headed out into the bay our boat had to jostle through the hundreds of others all heading the same way. We eventually broke free from the heard and headed for a few of 3000 mini islands which dotted the bay. We were served a sea-foo...