We set off from our hotel in Siem Reap at 8:30am for our five-and-a-half-hour bus trip to Kampong Chan, where we would board RV Amalotus. It’s a long drive through Cambodia’s countryside on the M1, which is a two-lane road. I always feel for the guides on these journeys. They’re supposed to tell us things…
The alarm went off at 4:15am but we were already awake. You know how it is – we knew we had to be in the lobby at around 4:40 and the body clock did the rest. Everybody had elected to go out to Angkor Wat to see the sunrise over the towers, so we piled…
Our visit to Ha Long Bay was over. We disembarked the ship at mid-morning and boarded the bus for the trip to Hanoi airport. We’d be flying from Vietnam to Cambodia’s Siem Reap airport. Lunch (and Happy House) was at a swanky golf course. Judging by the buggies and caddies for hire – and the…
Ha Long Bay is part of the Gulf of Tonkin, a couple of hours’ drive from Hanoi. It’s an amazing place, a shallow bay where something like three thousand islands tower out of the water. The vast majority present vertical cliff faces, so they’re not the sort of places you’d call home. Unless you’re one…
After an overnight stay in Hue we went straight to the airport for our flight to Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi. We booked into the beautiful Metropole Hotel, which has an interesting history. Built in 1901, it is on the edge of the city centre in the French Quarter. Pete and I went out to find drugs…
Travel mornings are always the same. Have your suitcases outside your rooms at (say) 7am ready for collection by the hotel porters and meet in the foyer after you’ve had your breakfast and vacated your room at 7:50. We identify our luggage before it’s placed in the bus, then we board and hit the road….
We were up bright and (relatively) early this morning to go on a guided tour of one of Hoi An’s large markets. Our guide was a chef at a local cooking school where we would be taken to learn how to cook a few simple Vietnamese dishes. We’d be seeing where our ingredients came from…
Situated on the Thu Bon River. Hoi An was a trading port, at its height between the 15th and 19th centuries. The old town is a UNESCO World Heritage listed site and you can read all about that here. The city lost prominence when trade moved to the nearby city of Da Nang but because…
On our last morning in Saigon Pete and I joined two of the ladies in our group to visit an artists’ colony on an island in the Saigon River. We were taken to the location in an SUV, crossing a brand-new bridge and driving through a neighbourhood studded with very expensive houses. This was going…
Vietnam was the war of my generation. While I marched in moratoriums, my male peers were conscripted into the army. About sixty thousand Australians served in Vietnam, a small number in comparison with the nearly three million Americans but even so the war left its battle scars. Five hundred and twenty-one Australians died and over…