Posted on August 17, 2007
Filed Under Vietnam, SE Asia Trip | 2 Comments
Ah, Hoi An. UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. Beautiful Chinese and Japanese influenced architecture. Narrow streets absent the buzz of motorbike engines and irritating horns, (at least for a couple of hours a day.) It’s been a great place to calm down after hectic Hanoi. Alas, we leave tomorrow for Saigon which is supposedly like Hanoi, but louder, more stressful and much less charming.
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Posted on August 17, 2007
Filed Under Travel Tech, SE Asia Trip | 1 Comment
Way back when, what right now seems like an eternity ago, I wrote a post titled What I’m Packing. There’s one thing that would have been unbelievably useful this whole trip - a high-gain directional antenna for WiFi reception. (Mum etc. just stop reading now.)
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Posted on August 17, 2007
Filed Under Travel Musings, Vietnam, SE Asia Trip | 2 Comments
Vietnam is blessed with such amazing fresh ingredients, as is evidenced in the delicious food everywhere. But it hasn’t rubbed off on their cocktails. You only have to look at a fruit-shake stand menu to see what amazing things they could cook up with the addition of a little rum (there are even dirt-cheap local spirits that approximate rum, vodka and whisky.) But every place we go seems to have the same cocktail list, copied from a hard rock cafe, circa 1991.
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Posted on August 16, 2007
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The next town on our march down the length of Vietnam from Hanoi was Hue. As mentioned previously, Hue was Vietnam’s imperial capital during 18th through early 20th centuries. The town is home to a massive citadel and compound created by the Nyugen emperors as well as many of their tombs. More recently, Hue was the first town south of the “DMZ” or “demilitarized zone”, the line drawn between the communist North and allied South during the Vietnam War.
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Posted on August 16, 2007
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The pigs are sick here in Vietnam. We know this because our favorite meat - pork - is unavailable in restaurants and street stalls. We’ve been told this by about a half dozen restaurants or stalls so far. It shows how close the food here is to the supply. In the West I’m sure there would be new supply lines opened up overnight so we wouldn’t have to live without our bacon butties or cochinita pibil.
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Posted on August 14, 2007
Filed Under Travel Musings, Vietnam, SE Asia Trip | 4 Comments
After a week, we decided to leave bustling Hanoi for more peaceful environs. Our destination was Hue, Vietnam’s capital and imperial city during 18th through early 20th centuries. We had planned to take the train (”The Reunification Express”) from Hanoi to Hue since the overnight journey is supposed to be one of the travel highlights of Vietnam. However, a Typhoon hit the central coast and flooded the train tracks, forcing the railways to cancel all trains. We happened to be in the Hanoi train station when the announcement was made to this effect, and the ensuing chaos was something else! Luckily we had other travel avenues open in the form of Vietnam Airways.
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Posted on August 12, 2007
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Halong Bay, about 150 km north of Hanoi, represents all that is mystical, misty, and mysterious (ha!) about Southeast Asia. You know when you see footage of exotic-looking boats with the rust colored ribbed sails (they’re called ‘junks’) gliding quietly through the mist while pan pipes are playing wistfully in the background? That scene is probably set in or filmed in Halong Bay. So of course we wanted to go there and experience the magic.
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Posted on August 11, 2007
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So why has it been so hard for us to make ourselves write about Hanoi? We keep putting it off and doing it in stages by making lists of things we want to include in the post, but not actually writing the post. I think the simple reason is that there was SO MUCH in Hanoi that it seems a huge task to try to encompass it all. Also, Hanoi is in the unique position of having simultaneously surpassed our expectations and disappointed us. So here goes nothing - read on if you are up for it!
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Posted on August 4, 2007
Filed Under Vietnam, SE Asia Trip | 3 Comments
We’re off to Halong Bay for three days, leaving early tomorrow morning. We’ve been in Hanoi for 4 nights so far, and will be here for 2 more when we return from our trip on the boat. We’ve got a lot of pictures of Hanoi so far, but haven’t had the energy to put together a blog post. So the photos are here for your perusal, with commentary to follow in a few days.
Posted on August 4, 2007
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We’re traveling with three guide books for SE Asia. The Rough Guide to SE Asia (Aug 2005), Lonely Planet SE Asia on a Shoestring (March 2006) and SE Asia, the Graphic Guide (2003.)
Each has their strengths and their weaknesses, and they are all out of date. I’m convinced the guidebook is in a slow state of decline.
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