I was tired, annoyed, and couldn't wait to leave Vietnam, but I felt obligated to visit the must-sees with very little expectation. Hanoi I enjoyed Hanoi a bit more than I anticipated. It's chaotic like most Vietnamese cities but the touts don't seem as aggressive and it has a few more touristy sites than Saigon. Like that for the rest of Vietna...

We arrived early in Sapa with little sleep on our train, Gemma caught the following after realizing on boarding the lady at the counter gave her the wrong ticket. On arrival in Sapa all the buses outside wait for passangers to board and fill their seats but we soon realised that they wait for the next train to come in order to fill up the seats ...

Overnight train to Sapa on the 27th and 1 night in hotel in Sapa.

Quite why the French decided to use this town in the mountains (read: mist) as a main hillstation is difficult to comprehend. Apparently its foggy and misty most of the year, but, as usual on my trip, weather conditions were severe when I was there: There had been rain and mist since several weeks, and hardly any treks where possible to do. Howe...

We left the clean, crisp air of New Zealand for our next travel destination - Vietnam. We stopped for a night in Kuala Lumpur to see dad :). Our flight to Hanoi was an interesting one. Most of the passengers on our flight were Vietnamese and they had total disregard to safety instructions and were quite oblivious to the the telling off they rece...

We have spent the last few days in Halong Bay, in the NE corner of Vietnam, followed by Sapa in the northern highlands just minutes away from the Chinese border. Halong Bay is a Unesco World Heritage Protected Area. Local legend tells of a giant dragon that came down from the mainland and into the water, and as he went the land at the edges sank...

DAY 3 - Friday October 5th: Drat it! Although the bus ride up the twisting, steep-gradient hills from the train station in Lao Cai to the highland community Sapa was breath-taking in itself with a lake, rice paddies nestled in the valleys and mist hovering above, the stable miserable weather trend was evident upon arrival at 8am - the tail-end o...

An overnight train goes from Hanoi up to the border of Vietnam and China. From there a one hour drive up into Sapa - this area of the mountains brings you to the various hill tribes, Hmong, Muong, Lu Lu, Luo, Tin Phin- there are dozens of them, each with their own individual traditional style of dress, dialect, and other habits, customs, foods, ...

We reached Sapa by travelling over the highest pass in Vietnam with spectacular views lots of waterfalls and only one land slide, which they cleared in record time. Lots of villages perched on the edges of cliffs with traditionally and often amazingly dressed people from a variety of tribes each distinct. Sapa is high in the mountain surrounded ...

Sapa is a truly beautiful place, described as the trekking place in Vietnam, it is a lush, cool highland area of mountains, rice paddies and minority villages. The unfortunate thing about this is that everyone knows it, and due to it being widely publicised it is no longer anything but a commercial haven for those seeking trekking made easy. To ...