Kyoto. A week too late for the cherry blossoms, a week too early for the azaleas. It didn’t matter. Kyoto was magical even without the blooms. From the mystical geishas tiptoeing off to entertain the evening’s guests, to magnificent temples, shrines and palaces – and magical alleyways filled with hidden restaurants waiting to be discovered […]
The air is still. It is steaming under the shade of the stilt house where we slept last night in a room filled with mattresses on a shining teak floor, protected by mosquito nets billowing under the fans. Our village, a traditional ethnic Thai village 150 km northeast of Hanoi, is a little island of […]
Hanoi was busy, dirty, loud and crowded. We had been dropped right into the old town, which in every other city would have been full of charming architecture, tourist conveniences and a touch of culture. In Hanoi, it’s not. Instead, we found ourselves right in the middle of a busy market selling every disposable […]
Close your eyes. Imagine Vietnnam. No, not the images of bombs exploding over rural villages. Open your eyes and close them again. Picture vibrant green rice paddies, farmers in conical straw hats, bent over tending their rice with wooden tools. Picture water buffaloes refreshing themselves in a muddy winding river, with karst limestone mounts rising […]
We arrived at the little organic farm that housed the open air bamboo cooking school laden down with all of our stuff. A big backpack and day pack each, plus a rugged little rolling suitcase. They looked at us as though we were insanity itself, but were polite enough not to say anything. We were […]
Hue is a popular spot in the tourist guidebooks. They’ve all been here. Frommers, TripAdvisor, and of course Lonely Planet. How do I know? Every restaurant and guest house in town has their @mentions printed on a sign out front. That’s all well and good, especially if Hue delivered the goods. But in my mind, […]
Hoi An was one of the “bucket list” stops on our travels through Vietnam. A busy trading port until the 19th century when the river silted up, the old town is a colourful warren of wooden trading houses whose designs were heavily influenced by the Chinese and Japanese merchants that set up shop here for […]
Da Lat is a gorgeous highland town in central Vietnam, with a distinctly European feel. The climate stays a steady 23*C (74*F) year round, and gorgeous pink bougainvillea spill out over French Colonial buildings that stretch up onto the hills overlooking a tranquil town lake. In short, it’s utopia. It began life as a spa […]
And now, for an entirely new way to travel. We boarded the “sleeper bus” at 8:40 am for our seven hour trip to Da Lat in the central highlands of Vietnam. After the intensity of Saigon, I was desperate for somewhere less masochistic, and so we escaped to the mountains. Shortly out of town, we […]
Recent Comments