Our 5 hour coach journey took us by vast paddy fields, through mountains, across wide river crossings and alongside the ocean, the scenery is stunning in all cases. Hoi An is a small riverside town, famed for its pretty side streets and cheap tailors. Our hotel was about 3kms outside of the main town but a pleasant enough walk along the main thoroughfare found us amid the hundreds of small tailors and restaurants. We had done a fair amount of homework on the the...

The ancient city of Hué was an hours flight away, the journey to the airport was incident free until about 3kms away when a taxi driver flagged down our van. The long and short of it was that the cabbie was scamming his two female customers, he had picked up a friend en route and then drove the two women around the backstreets trying to intimidate them. He finally claimed he'd broken down in the motorway and demanded they pay 1.5 million dong (£45) for a fare t...

We were collected from our hotel in Hanoi and taken 3 hours east to our boat moored in Halong Bay. En route we were asked of we had any special dietary requirements, a couple said they didn't eat seafood, Jan said she didn't eat meat, to which she was asked "but you eat chicken, right?" Uh-oh. The bay is host to over two thousand limestone islands, a handful of which are inhabited by humans. We jump on a small launch and wave goodbye to the mainland for a coupl...

Flying in to Hanoi was a breeze, we even took off and arrived 10 minutes early. In the cab to the hotel it felt like we were back in Mumbai. The constant honking of horns, the weight of traffic on the roads and the chaotic driving style had us clinging to the door handles on more than one occasion. It was a cool and misty afternoon, a far cry from the hazy sunshine of Luang Prabang. As we were dropped off and as my first foot hit the road to get out of the car, ...

The 7 hour journey on the not so bumpy road really was ever so spectacular. The winding road through the mountains took us through yet more of Laos' exquisite countryside. The jagged peaks were silhouetted by the hazy heat of the day and made them appear like sketches on tracing paper. The remote road led us through mountain villages, each was laid out similarly. A row of bamboo and wood huts stretched along the roadside, with their inhabitants nearby performin...