After departing Huế, we drove south for a lunch stop in Da Nang, Viet Nam’s fourth largest city, passing through a new six-mile tunnel financed and built by the Japanese government along the way. (It’s important to note that a time when the US is trying to become more isolationist, China and Japan are investing in infrastructure in developing countries with growing economies). According to Yang, our guide, Da Nang has seen explosive investment gr...

Our Sunday in Huế [pronounced hwě] began with another cyclo ride along the Perfume River and around the ancient city fortress, a 19th Century citadel with thick stone walls and a moat which encircles Imperial City. Huế has an ancient history and was long the center of earlier dynasties dating back several centuries and was the seat of the imperial government until 1945, during the time of the French protectorate, when the emperor abdicated and Hu...

On Friday, after exploring a bit more of Hà Nội, we headed for Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Sight where we embarked on an overnight voyage aboard the Dragon Legend small cruise ship, barely large enough to hold our group of 30. Ha Long, which means “descending dragon,” is an area of about 500 square miles of ocean which surrounds about 2,000 small islands or limestone karsts. Some of the largest islands maintain small communities, but mos...

We arrived in Hà Nội on Wednesday afternoon, 31 October, after traveling for about 22 hours (16 from Houston to Taipei via a route which took us north of the Arctic Circle in Alaska before heading south along the Japan Sea, followed by a layover and the final leg). After a shower and a brief rest, we headed out for an odd stage production which used local musicians, dancing, singing, and acrobatics to tell the story of local rice farmers; it was inter...

11/4-5 Saturday, we headed north on our loop through the towns of Blanding and Monticello before a brief stop at Newspaper Rock and an early afternoon arrival in the southern part of Canyonlands National Park, an area known as the Needles district for its unique rock spires. Again, we stopped at many viewpoints along the way and hiked through incredible wind along an overlook trail before making our way to Moab for the final two nights of our journey. ...