When I wrote about the first stop on our trip, Ho Chi Minh, I casually mentioned the “frenzy of traffic”. In Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, it was just out of control. You know things are a problem when on the “Hotel information” sheet left in your room, point number one is “How to cross roads.” “How…
Category: Vietnam
The Last Sapa
We arrived in Sapa exhausted after an 11-hour train ride on the Lotus Express to Hanoi and then a 6-hour ride on an awful bumpy sleeper bus being yelled at by a grumpy driver “NO FOOD” who was watching Vietnamese YouTube music videos the whole way. Sapa town was nothing as we had expected. I…
Show me the Hue
In my research on Hue (pronounced H-way), I did not read anything about it being a university (and therefore party) town. I read about the historical citadel, imperial history and countryside royal tombs, but nowhere did it mention that there would be streets teaming with young people out for a beer, a thumping nightclub and…
Good Morning Vietnam!
There’s nothing like a heady dose of a chaotic South-East Asian city to remind you you’re alive: the frenzy of traffic; the clash of glittering Cartier shopfronts manned by uniformed security guards vs. elderly squatted women wearing “non” (conical straw hats) selling cigarettes and bottled water; the heavy humidity lifting scents of rubbish, then BBQ…
The Token Traveller 