Our Man in Newcastle (formerly Our Man in Hanoi) will be speaking at a meeting of Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) at the Civic Centre in Newcastle, on June 10th at 7:30pm. In his words: There’ll be me and (I think) other ex volunteers all taking the stand for seven to eight minutes to tell our [...]

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Fansipan seems to be the most popular subject on this site right now. I had another series of emails from Martin and Peiling (not sure where they’re from) asking for information before they made the trip. I’m happy to say they made it to the summit and back again to tell the tale! As you [...]

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And it is. The third public holiday in as many weeks and only four days after the last one! This one’s for Pentecost (la Pentecôte), and technically it was yesterday – the Sunday. I guess as it’s a religious holiday, the date is always on a Sunday so the day off is the following day. [...]

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Well, we hit the weekend again and once more we were forecast good weather for most of it. This time, I decided to make some plans and had originally hoped to visit Turin, or even go further afield to Berne, Zurich and Liechtenstein. However, most of my European friends were busy so I decided instead [...]

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Not for me, but for France. After last week’s Labour day, we have “Victoire”, the French version of our V-E Day. The major difference being that the French have a day off whereas we just get some newspaper headlines about how few of the soldiers who fought for us in WWII are still alive. I [...]

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Geoff from Hong Kong got in touch via the original Fansipan post asking for details about the climb and so on. I passed on what I knew and he jetted off to Vietnam for the hike / climb. Then he wrote back with his experiences, which he’s given me permission to publish here. Everyone’s experience [...]

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