We left Phnom Penh today at 12 noon. All we had to do was pack our bags and walk 5 minutes down the road to get on a boat. The journey would take us predominantly south down the Mekong river into Vietnam. We travelled for about 3 hours at quite a decent speed along the river. The nearer we got to Vietnam the narrower the river got. As it started...

After a quick stop at the Cambodian border for our passports to be stamped there was a short boat trip to the Vietnamese border. We all disembarked and were then ushered through quarantine. We had to pay a small fee (2000 dong or approx 13 cents) and apparently a thermal-sensitive camera measured our body temperature (for bird flu perhaps?). As ...

This was to be a mammoth day of travelling... We were to take a motorbike to the bus, a bus to the ferry,, a ferry to the mainland, a motorbike to the minibus, a mini bus to the bus, a bus to the mini bus and then a bike to the hotel!!! I'm not going to bore you with the details of each journey but we were happy we had cracked the bus ticket si...

DAY 24 - Sunday October 28th: (I'm sitting here back at my familiar computer desk at home in Jersey, 3 weeks after having left South East Asia and therefore approximately 3 months in arrears with my blog writing since the end of October. Accordingly, the whole exitement and relevance of the traveling as and when it happened is now absent, but t...

Just a few thoughts on my time in Vietnam as I leave the country. It's unfortunate, but it's one of the few countries I've visited, perhaps the only one, where I've really liked the country in terms of scenery but disliked the people. It may be that I just had a bad experience there, especially with the bag incident, but the vast majority of oth...

Vietnam - North to South Hanoi After a short stopover in Bangkok, we flew directly into Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital in the North. We were about to dive into a whole different world. Particularly impressive is the flow of the traffic with some 90% of the transportation vehicle being motorbikes. This gets even more impressive after experiencing ...

Got the boat to Chau doc in Vietnam. It was a complete rust bucket but there were very few of us on it so at least we weren't crammed in.Right aligned photo tag: The boat trip took us along the Mekong for the first part of it. It was nice but the river is very wide on the Cambodian side so we couldn't take in much scenery on the riverbank. After...

Quite a lazy transit day. The ferry between Phnom Penh and Chau Doc in Vietnam runs one a day and only carries about 30 or 40 passengers. Travelling down the Mekong with the flow of the river, only stopping off for the formalities at the border crossing which is shown below. The bags are meant to be removed from the boat and passed through airpo...

A much less dramatic border crossing into Cambodia than Vietnam all those weeks ago. Much more pleasant too. From Ho Chi Minh we organised a 3 day tour south to the Mekong Delta and into Cambodia via boat. On the first day we arrived in My Tho and caught a boat to Dragon island (didn't see any dragons though!) and got into small rowing boats whe...

Day 42: Early rise and sour heads found us on a boat again going up the Mekong River towards the Cambodian border. Along the way we stopped at a fish farm which the Irish gang myself decided to opt out and stay on the boat and looking at the others' expressions we didn't miss much. A few minutes later we stopped at a local village to see them we...