Sunday 13th October 2019 Ho Chi Minh (Saigon) Today we are catching a flight and heading to Ho Chi Minh City. Ho Chi Minh City, which is still known as Saigon by the Vietnamese, is a blend of the old and the new. Its a buzzing modern metropolis, with a scattering of Colonial buildings and…

Saturday 12th October 2019 My Son, Hoi An One of the great things about Vietnam is the fact that this part of the world has an incredibly rich history. Your never too far away from some amazing ruins. More than 1,600 years ago, the Cham people of Vietnam began the construction on dozens of Hindu…

Thursday 10th & Friday 11th October 2019 Hoi An So we arrived in Hoi An and we both got sick…it was bound to happen. Thursday from 3.30 am and over the next 24 hours we were bed ridden. It was definitely food poison from one of the “best chicken curry type dishes I have ever…

Wednesday 9th October 2019 Monkey Mountain & Marble Mountain, Da Nang Last night we got talking to a local on the beach/promenade who asked us if he could practice his English with us. Of course we obliged and it turned in to be a good experience as he told us about some of the local…

Tuesday 8th October 2019 Ba Na Hills, Da Nang Today we were heading bright and early to Ba Na Hills, a famous hill station and resort on top of the highest mountains in the centre of Vietnam. The station was founded in 1919 by the French colonists who intended to build it as a leisure…

Monday 7th October 2019 Da Nang On leaving North Vietnam it got me thinking about the connections we have made so far with people we have bumped into on our travels. There was the American couple in their late fifties/early sixties who we met in Ha Long Bay. I was inspired by their story! Several…

Sunday 6th October 2019 Sa Pa Mount Fansipan offers a type of Vietnamese adventure we didn’t want to miss and this was one of the reasons we came to Sa Pa. We wanted to hike it. When I first saw pictures of this mountain it encouraged curiosity, got our blood flowing, and satisfied our need…

Saturday 5th October 2019 Sa Pa Today we undertook another trek leaving the hustle and bustle of Sa Pa town behind which is a relief. We were heading to Y Linh Ho which took us through the rice terraces and mountains as far as the eye could see and along Muong Hoa Stream to the…

Sa Pa Friday 4th October 2019 Today we left early for Sapa, a town in Northwest Vietnam not far from the Chinese border. We caught a small cramped local bus which transferred us to a large sleeper bus…now this one I liked! Local cramped bus Large sleeper bus The journey should take us just over…

Ninh Binh, Vietnam Thursday 3rd October 2019 At 6.30 am we welcomed a new day. We had some breakfast outside in a beautiful spot. The local chef then decided to enrich us with a ‘cooking class’ or maybe a ‘baking class’. We were going to be making ‘local cake’ – we made pan fried sweet…