We made the best of our short stay in Ho Chi Ming City (formerly Saigon) by taking an organized tour to the Cu Chi tunnels of the Viet Cong a couple of hours north of the city ,then coming back to the city to go to the War Remnants Museum. Both excursions, rather than answer questions regarding the war just posed many more! The emphasis, particularly at the museum is on the damage the Americans did both in casualties and materially to the infrastructure and villa...

Slowly, slowly, slowly, comes to mind when thinking about Hoi An. Sometimes the slower pace was welcome - but not always. We took a Vietnam airlines flight to Danang and had an organized transfer to take us to the ancient UNESCO World Heritage city of Hoi An. We spotted the little card with our name on at the airport and when we acknowledged ourselves to the young man, he took off in a hurry pointing for us to follow. We tried to introduce ourselves and ask quest...

Our day began with a knock on our train door telling us we were about to pull into Hanoi station. Our sleeper carriage had again been pretty comfortable and now it was off on a three and a half hour drive to Halong Bay. Well not straight away. We had organized our Vietnam section of our trip through a Vietnam based travel company Aurora Travel and they had thoughtfully organized a hotel room for us for an hour, to enable us to shower and change our clothes. It ma...

We caught a sleeper train to Lao Cai to get to Sapa in the North of Vietnam right up near the Chinese border. It is quite bizarre that we will be there again but on the China side in several weeks time. The vagaries of cheap air flights mean we will go North to South in Vietnam then back to KL then North to South in China ending up right close at the end of the trip to Sapa again when we are in Yangzhou, China . The attractions at Sapa are the beautiful mountains...

Plenty of advice flies around about how to cross a road in Hanoi. There is only one way - just do it! Walk and keep walking. We settled into the pace crossing many roads on a really long walk, straight after we arrived, to the Ho Chi Ming Complex. The traffic is amazing, but there doesn't seem to be any agro, everybody just weaves in and out and around and everybody does their best to dodge each other. Not always with success!!.We had a bit of a mission in ...