For those of you new to our blog, here’s some background (this stint began March 2016): We leased out our home in the United States for two years with the intent of seeing as much of the world as possible. ‘Seeing’ being defined as hanging out (our term for cultural interaction), usually off the beaten […]
Imagine Bill Gates walking up to an ATM machine to get cash: Unlimited cash is available, just plug in your pin number. Well Hoi An sees itself as a Bill Gates and you, the tourist machine, as the ATM. And believe me it has your pin number. The town knows how to extract every last […]
The Bunk Bed Bus Have you ever walked into your home, have all of your friends jump out, yell “Surprise!” and be totally caught off-guard? That’s how I felt when I boarded the bus from Hue to Hội An, Vietnam. No, it wasn’t my birthday and unfortunately there was no party, but I was totally […]
Hue, Vietnam; what to say, what to say? Well, it’s a cool city to walk around, interesting food as chronicled in Carrie’s Hue post, and it has the Forbidden City. Oh, and our hotel, Binh Duong II, was very nice and at around $15/night it was very very nice. To get here from Hanoi take the […]
Time Compression Vietnam is a large country and after our time in Hanoi and Cát Bà, we only had nine days left until our reservation on Koh Rong Island in Southern Cambodia for our 25th-anniversary celebration. Before moving on to Hue, we needed to do a little time compression. There are a few ways to […]
The Dark Side As Carrie mentioned in her Cát Bà post, Cát Bà is the less touristy way to explore the beauty that is Hạ Long Bay. But the island has another story to tell. The all too familiar human story of death and destruction. During the Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s, Cát […]
The Plan Hạ Long Bay — you’ve seen the pictures — and when you are in northern Vietnam, you must experience it. When we were in Hanoi, plotting our visit to the famous UNESCO World Heritage site, we started to wonder if Hạ Long Bay was right for us. It seemed that every guesthouse owner, […]
When preparing for a trip, we scour the guide books and travel sites on the internet to determine what sights we want to see and how to get to them within our allotted time. Usually, a large city is involved as the entry point because it’s the hub to reach the more remote areas. In […]
First Impression Big cities — I’m rarely a fan. Hanoi boasted nine million souls and about half as many motor scooters. Having arrived late at night, we took a taxi from the airport to the Happy Moon Guesthouse. Traffic was chaotic even at that late hour. Watching out of the taxi window made me cringe […]
