The longest day riding, and overall one of the longest days of my stay in South Vietnam. We set off from Da Lat at 7:45am with the aim of getting to Ho Chi Minh City by early evening. The route is quite simple – you follow the “20″ which leads you directly from the mountains [...]

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At one with the locals I’m very late in typing this up and getting it posted but I’ve been really busy since getting back from Vietnam. This post is a brief overview of the trip I took with Thao. I’ll be adding more detailed posts for each day shortly and they’ll be linked from here. [...]

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We set off at around 11:30 after going to Thao’s to repack our things into small bags. Thao had had a friend check out her motorbike and he deemed it satisfactory for our journey – no need to rent others so a huge money-saver! Aiming for the 1A main road, we zoomed east for about [...]

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In the afternoon, we headed back to our resective homes (Thao her place, myself to the hotel) to get changed into something more comfortable. Well, for me that was just another shirt as I was all out of trousers havign ripped the crotch of one pair wide open getting onto her bike the night before. [...]

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My first morning after arriving in Vietnam was to be spent at the wedding of a friend of Thao, my kind guide. Only I discovered the night before that it wasn’t a wedding at all but an engagement ceremony / party. It seems here that more emphasis is put on the engagement than on the [...]

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Visit number five to Vietnam and number three to Ho Chi Minh City. This time was to be my first with a “local” guide in the form of Thao who I’ve been chatting to online for almost two years now, I think. She originally spotted my blog post about climbing Fansipan, which she was planning [...]

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I have to throw a couple of “thanks” out here. First of all to Thao in Ho Chi Minh City who’s helping me plan what promises to be an awesome week or so motorcycling around the south of Vietnam. I’ve been wanting to ride round the whole country since well before that Top Gear episode, [...]

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A fair bit of travel today, and some reminders that prices do change compared to guide books. We checked out of the hotel around 10:00 aiming to be at the airport for 10:30. The cheapest way in Saigon is to use the local bus. Last time I was here, it was 1000d for a ticket [...]

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Arrived in HCM City last night and got a nice little hotelly place. Free wifi (though I can’t get my wifi card to work under Ubuntu since a patch – grr) so hopefully time to whack a few updates on the site tonight before we fly off to Da Nang tomorrow.

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I sat up really late the night before trying to get the wifi card working on my laptop (under Ubuntu – Windows works fine) but we still got up in the morning. We had breakfast in the 333 cafe over the street – a delicious array of fresh fruit and yoghurt. While we were there, [...]

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