pictures – Been there, Dunne that

The Imperial City of Hue

Hue (pronounced Hway) was the seat of the previous emperors and also the nations capital until 1945. Hue has the benefit of being a fairly big city but very much has a non-city feel to it, with most of the it’s sites outside the city. We arrived in Hue after our overnight train from Ninh Binh and…

Ninh Binh

Vietnam isn’t a terribly large country, but it’s super long and going from the north to the south takes ages to do. We started in Hanoi and eventually wanted to fly out of Ho Chi Minh city (previously known as Saigon), but it’s over 30 hours on a train to go from one to the…

A Few Days in Hanoi

We spent 5 full days in Hanoi spread out over about 2 weeks between our trips to Sapa and Ha Long Bay. It was a great way to do it, as most tours of North Vietnam are based out of Hanoi anyway, and we found the spread out, relaxed pace to be a nice change….

New Years on a Junk Boat in Halong Bay

We wanted to do something a little bit different for New Years this year, and we figured just being in Vietnam was a good start to that. Rather then dinner and drinks in the city somewhere, we decided to spent a couple nights on a junk boat floating around Ha Long Bay. I know, I…

Sapa Trekking with Ethos

I have to admit, when we were first researching Vietnam, Sapa wasn’t even on our radar; we just kind of completely missed it whilst looking at other things. It wasn’t until we were in Thailand and met a number of people who had done it and recommended it that we started to actually look into…

Vientiane

After our horrific night bus journey to get to Vientiane (and a nap), we spent 2 days exploring the city. As the capital of Laos, I was expecting a lot more from Vientiane, and I have to say I found it pretty lackluster and boring. It wasn’t bad per say, it was just kind of…

Luang Prabang

Luang Prabang (say that 3 times fast) was our first stop in Laos, and it did not disappoint. Coming from Chiang Mai, there are 3 ways to get to get there, as we spent days debating each one before deciding what one we wanted to go for. Option 1 – the slow boat. This is…

Ayutthaya

As we found ourselves with a few extra days in Bangkok, we decided to get out of the city for a day and head to Ayutthaya. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Ayutthaya was going to be one of the places we stopped for a night en route to Chaing Mai before those plans were derailed…

Exploring Bangkok

We’d heard that it wasn’t worth spending more than 2 days in Bangkok, and after spending 5 days there, I sort of agree (but only partially). We flew into Bangkok on Monday from Krabi, and our original plan was to take the train on Thursday towards Chiang Mai, but stopping for 2 nights at various…

Exploring and Diving in Koh Lanta

We always knew that we wanted to do our PADI dive course whilst we were in Thailand, we just weren’t sure where or when. After leaving Krabi, we knew we would have a few days to kill before we were going to meet Rich’s cousin Jeanine, so we started looking at the best places to…