07.07.2004

Postcard from Hanoi

05.07.2004

Ba Vi

The palette wars between bitter and sweet taste like an agreeable truce whenever you down the typical strong Vietnamese drip coffee with sweetened condensed milk.

02.07.2004

Hanoi

We arrived in Hanoi this morning, and it looks like hitting 38 degrees. From our first few hours here it seems like a superb city. We managed an early morning walk around an inner-city park and lake - their answer to Sydney's Hyde Park it seems.

01.07.2004

Hue

We left Hoi An for Hue last night, and here we are. Hoi An was a great town to wander round - an old merchant town with narrow alleys and two-storey carved-wooden houses and a generations-old Japanese covered bridge.

Hue

We left Hoi An for Hue last night, and here we are. Hoi An was a great town to wander round - an old merchant town with narrow alleys and two-storey carved-wooden houses and a generations-old Japanese covered bridge.

28.06.2004

Fine dining

If there's one thing we'd like to share with our international audience of sensible readers, it's this common-sense travel tip: do not under any circumstances eat on the streets. Our travel insurance travel tips card authoritatively advises that you should avoid eating on the street lest you get sick. I imagined the office worker who spent July last year working on the travel-tips card and knew she was probably a very sensible person too.

26.06.2004

On the road

With around 70 million people inhabiting a country of two poles joined by a sliver of coastline and serviced by a single-lane national highway it is only obvious that overtaking is an 'interesting', and often-occuring experience.

25.06.2004

Mui Ne

We caught a 'T & M brothers' bus from HCMC to Mui Ne - a little seaside resort six hours north-east. I can thoroughly recommend taking a trip with any other company. The trip was just so slow, which definitely doesn't make it any safer with all the overtaking traffic, and the immovable plastic seats are spaced apart just far enough for the seat installer to install the seat back at the bus-making factory.

24.06.2004

Talk about the war

The sun spent today beating down on us wandering the streets of HCMC taking in the various war museums and the re-unification palace. This ornate building housed the South-Vietnamese Government and President Diem's family sometime before Viet Cong tanks crashed through the wrought-iron gates out the front.

23.06.2004

Ho Chi Minh City

Ah, well here we are - theatre of forgettable political theories when the Domino Theory was all the rage. If one poor, asian country fell to communism they all would. A five hundred metre tall bust of Stalin would now be in place of the Statue of Liberty.