We woke up for breakfast at 7:30, feeling a little worse for wear after only 3 hours sleep and a lot of beer. We smashed breakfast and got ready for the journey to Paradise island, where we would spend another night. On Cat Ba Island we disembarked and took a short bus ride across to the other side where we jumped onto another boat that took us towards our little tropical get-away. En route we stopped off for some rock climbing and cliff jumping. The out crop was...

We were up and about early to jump on the bus to Halong Bay. This is when we first met our guide, Snake. He was a pretty funny bloke and gave a few reasons why he was called snake. He was born in the year of the snake and apparently he is also quite sneaky. He kept us entertained during the hour trip to the bay with various facts and figures about the history and Vietnam as a whole. We got to the bay and boarded a smaller boat to take us out onto our main ship. I...

We woke up early from our nice hotel room to get gone early for a hard days ride so we weren't riding in the dark. Unfortunately due to our short stop over in Hue we didn't get the chance to explore it at all. The imperial palace and tombs sounded pretty good, but we felt we couldn't sacrifice any time to walk around the ruins. We struggled out of the havoc of Hue and soon hit some really nice road on the way to Phong Nha. We had a serious amount of distance to c...

We were up and about early in the morning and first went to see our linen jackets. They had turned out pretty well and we were pleased with the job Mrs Lan had done with them. We decided to send the jackets back to the UK via air mail so that the jackets wouldn't get damaged during the rest of our back packing. In total, for the making and shipping of the jackets, they cost about £25 each. Not bad for my first tailored jacket. Once the jackets had been sorted we...

We woke up early the next day with plans made. The plan was to get our tailored Linen jackets sorted and then have a practice ride out to My Son on our new mean machines. We walked in towards town and stopped off at Randy's bookshop to pick up a map for the journey. We got talking to Randy, who is an American expat who has set up a bookstore in a small street of Hoi An, and found out some good information about routes to take and places to stay. We were on a rela...