February 2012
72 posts
On To Dalat
We are going to start our journey to Dalat. We are sightseeing some rural areas in-between here and there on a 3 day trip so we may not have Internet till we arrive!
Also the previous posts are not formatting properly on the phone app so they don’t look right! Will have to wait till we are near a pc to fix them. Sorry!
What We Thought Of Nha Trang
Pros
The beach
The diving
The seafood
The locals
The islands
Good value restaurants
Cons
Pickpockets
Tourist trap
Spread out
Nha Trang is great however it is more aimed at holiday goers who spend more money than poor backpackers. There are places to eat lunch with the locals scattered around however these streetside restaurants seem to disappear at night. There are decent restaurants...
What We Thought Of Hoi An
This is for everyone we don’t know who reads this!
It’s quiet town that’s nice to stay in and has the expensive hotels and restaurants for holiday goers and cheap hotels and restaurants for backpackers. Perfect. When We Arrived
We arrived late and struggled to find a decent cheap room. We eventually relented and got a $25 dollar room that had a full breakfast buffet. It was...
Nha Trang
We are now starting to plan where we are off to next. We are concious of how little of Vietnam we have seen outside of the Cities so we are heading inland to look for some more exciting hiking. I don’t want to leave and not to feel like I have really seen the proper Vietnam. Sifting through the touristy rubbish is as difficult as ever. It dominates any internet research you do and when you...
Having Fun by the Beach
So we are in Nha Trang still. Internet is a pain here and the computers you can use barely work so updating the blog is difficult.
So far we have been diving. We went with Rainbow Divers and are so glad. If you are booking diving here check for the Padi logo and check that they are registered on Padi’s website. People may be annoyed by this but it’s a fact that many dive companies...
“Sight of the day:
A class of older women doing there morning exercises of...”
“Things That Are Different From Home #1
There’s hardly any plumbing....”
Whilst Getting Off the Boat in Pek Beng
I forgot about this until today and it made me laugh so I thought I would put it up. One you arrive in Pek Beng then people from the guesthouses come onto the boats to get at you first. This was between one of them and a guy on the boat who was with his girlfriend.
Guesthouse man: "got beautiful room for you my friend. Good price, good bed for boom boom"
~ a short pause ~
Guesthouse man: "ok how about opium then
The other guy looks up and makes eye contact with him;
Boat guy: "I've already got a boom boom bed thanks, lots of boom boom... and a big bag of opium so we're all set"
Nha Trang... And Diving!
We are finally in a place where we can do some diving! We caught the sleeper bus last night for the 12 hour journey from Hoi An and it was surprisingly not as bad as I expected. I have come to expect the worst from bus travel but this was ok. We were told there were toilets on board but of course there were not. There were also some pretty loud locals on the bus who pushed everyone out of the way...
“Watching a Japanese and a Vietnamese man talking in English really points out...”
Off to the Beach
A moped with a speaker attached keeps driving past the hostel we are staying in. A dry voice echoes out saying something like Jai Alai over and over again. Googling “man on moped with big speaker broadcasting message in Vietnam” yields as much as can be expected so for now we have no idea what message he is trying to get across.
Today we rented push bikes for a dollar each (!) and...
“59,000 dong… thats like a dollar right?”
– An American we were standing next to that’s about to have an expensive holiday when he realises 20,000 dong is a dollar
“Sitting in a restaurant in Vietnam that has Christmas decorations up. Free pool...”
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A Quick Post
As you can tell by Pippa’s last post, we both love Hoi An. It’s a little up market for us and there are expensive restaurants but amazingly this has been the easiest place to find good value food so far in Vietnam. We walked into the old part for dinner and nearly sat in an expensive-ish restaurant till we came to our senses and escaped still with our money.
We took a walk down by...
“A new first! Whilst eating in a restaurant we noticed outside that a fruit...”
Arrived in Hoi An
So we took a flight from Hanoi as it wasn’t much more expensive than the train and didn’t involve a 14 hour train journey. Our flight got in to Danang at about 9pm and we got a taxi for the journey from Danang to Hoi An. Apparently there is no easy way to get from one to the other. You need to get a taxi from the airport to the bus station if you want to go that way. Then you are not...
WatchWhen we decided to film the traffic the roads quietened! Believe it or not but this is a pretty quiet road in Hanoi!
Took a Wrong Turn
So as you can tell from the last photo update, we are in Cat Ba! Sadly it seems like we came at the wrong time as the weather is miserable and the place is deserted. Being here feels like booking a holiday in Skegness in November so we are getting back on the boat tomorrow and heading south to Hoi An.
The island itself is quite nice looking but at the moment it is undergoing big changes. Huge...
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Sounds in the Night.
The cool dampness affected the smell of the room. Not unpleasant but not fresh. This, however, is soon forgotten as, in the semi darkness, all that was present was the myriad of sounds that plagued the room.
The ceiling above creaked and groaned from the occupant upstairs, only echoed by the occasional cough. The bird chorus of car horns angrily, or at least unharmoniously, rang out outside...
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“Pretty sure the Vietnamese all have tourettes when they get on the road. But...”
Things We Have Seen On Scooters
Sorry. This may not work too well as I didn’t style lists before we left so I will have to fix it at a later date when I am near a computer! A tree (not a small one)
2 girls… BOTH texting
A family of four
Full sized upright fridge freezer
A list in progress. More soon… probably.
“Beep beep. Honk, fwaaarrrpppp, honk honk. Woooooooooop woop. Beep. Hooot, eeeep...”
– The endless sound of traffic
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