Andy's Blog - Gone Further

15 September – 19 September Chiang Mai was another of the ‘must visit’ cities on the itinerary; it’s another place where people wax lyrical about and many say it’s their favourite place in Thailand.  As ever, we were not 100% sure what to expect, I suppose I thought we’d get a mini-Bangkok but it really [...]

12 September – 14 September In Siem Reap we came across a couple of girls who we’d met a week or so earlier in Phnom Penh. As is usually the case, the conversation moved on to travel plans and when we said we were going to Laos one said. “Don’t go to Vang Vieng.” Her [...]

11 September – 15 September Our flight into Vientiane included the most interesting immigration procedure yet. The plane landed in the arse-end of nowhere in Laos and we had to get off and walk to immigration through a building site before getting back on the plane.  Everyone on the plane was scammed for a dollar [...]

5 September – 11 September As I said in my last post, we had no real plans to go down to Sihanoukville. It is a small town on the Cambodian coast with a great beach, great bars and many stunning islands off the coast. That being said we have lots of beach time planned in [...]

We are about four weeks into our ten week trip. When we set off the plan was to get Singapore, KL & Bangkok out of the way and then fly to Hanoi and work our way down the coast of Vietnam and then whizz through Cambodia and Laos. We anticipated that Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos [...]

Even the locals aren’t sure how to pronounce it.  Some go for Nom Pon, Some manage to pronounce the ‘P’ at the start.  I tend to go for Nom Pen. Our journey here was by bus from Ho Chi Minh City.  If you believe dirty-haired wannabe-hippy backpackers (there’s a whole post on these to come [...]

This is my second attempt at a Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC – formerly Saigon) blog. The first one was more like a history lesson; I don’t even like history that much. I’ve redone it and hopefully this is more what I’m after. I may do a good, chunky historically-factual blog in due course but [...]

We weren’t sure where to go after Hanoi. Do we go to Hue and visit the Citadel? How about Da Nang for China Beach? We eventually settled on a route that would take us to Hoi An and then onto Nha Trang – the therory being that we would be able to explore the historic [...]

22 August 2009 – 26 August 2009 This was stop one in Vietnam and represented our first port of call during the trip where we had no idea what was going to happen next with no set itinerary from here on.  As we were arriving late in Hanoi and Pezza was suffering from what is [...]

We arrived in Hanoi on Saturday and are here again now however we have spent the last two days out and about in Ha Long Bay… There are no words that can describe this place that can possibly do it justice. I’ll have a stab at it anyway. What you see in the pictures is [...]