temples – Been there, Dunne that

Hoi An – Tailor made clothes, lots of food, and round boats.

Hoi An is only about 45 minutes south of Da Nang, which makes it very easy to get to for either a day trip or for multiple days. We’d heard a lot of really good things about Hoi An, one of which was their tailors, and we wanted to spend a few days there to…

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….

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…

2 days in Krabi

Since our previous bus journeys thus far have all been pretty straight forward, we assumed that that would be the case to go from George Town to Krabi as well, but we were so so wrong. Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of options; however, none of them were terribly straight forward/cheap and/or direct….

Penang and George Town

We couldn’t get away from hearing good things about Penang and George Town when we were traveling in Southern Malaysia (and indeed, even in Indonesia and Singapore), and we didn’t hear a bad word about it – both from locals and travelers alike. We were keen to see what the fuss was about, so what…