The Phong Nha-Ke Bang National Park is a 4 hour drive from Hue and is a very special part of Vietnam. The core zone of the national park in Vietnam is 858 km2 (larger than Singapore) and it spills out into Laos too. It has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 2003. We woke […]
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Hoi An and Hue. Exploring Central Vietnam.
Hoi An translates from Vietnamese as Peaceful Meeting Place and after a few days, I think this is a good name for it. Hue translates as a City of Romance. That one I’m not sure I can comment on. Leaving Ho Chi Minh City we were rushed and frantic. We had to get sassy with […]
Ho Chi Minh City: The City of Motorbikes
The journey from Cambodia to Vietnam was awful. I could write a whole blog post about reasons why I hated it. We had a sleeper bus from 6.30pm-1am from Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh which wasn’t too bad but it was too early to sleep and I was so worried about not waking up when we […]
Phnom Penh and Cambodia’s Dark Past
Usually if we only spend one night in a place I’ll combine the blog posts but Phnom Penh is deserving of its own. In my last blog post about Siem Reap, I talked a lot about ancient history but this blog post focuses more on Cambodia’s modern history back only 40 years. We got up […]
Siem Reap and the Temples of Angkor
If you ever want to visit a country to learn about its history, Cambodia is where you should go. I’m writing this after visiting Phnom Penh and I’ve seen the power of history both contemporary and ancient. (I’m not sure how long ago it needs to be to be called ancient but I’m talking about […]
Bangkok’s High-Rise Buildings and Hierarchies
Like I said in my last blog post, it took us 40 hours to travel from Peru to Bangkok and I arrived very confused, tired, excited and with very swollen ankles from spending 26 hours in the air and not being able to lie flat. Our first 8 hour flight from Lima to LAX was […]
Machu Picchu
Old penis.* An old, abandoned settlement has captured my imagination and easily stolen the spot for my favourite place in Latin America. There are two ways of arriving at this beautiful place: you can take the easy option and get a train to Aguas Calientes town and then a bus up the hill to it […]
Four Days Hiking The Inca Trail
The last four days have been a struggle but a struggle well worth the pain. We started our hiking preparations in Cusco at the G Adventures HQ. We were introduced to our main guide, Kantu, and given a run down of the four days including how far we walk each day and what altitudes we […]
Cusco: The World’s Belly Button
We actually made two trips to Cusco (deliberately, unlike Salta) and spent a total of four nights in Cusco Plaza Hotel 2: two nights before the Inca Trail and two nights after. Cusco is one of the larger cities in Peru with 500,000 residents in the city and around 1,000,000 residents in the region. Cusco […]
Lake Titicaca Cultural Immersion
These last few days have been particularly special. I have seen many things as a tourist but have rarely had the opportunity to go deeper than the exterior. We travelled from La Paz, Bolivia to Puno, Peru relatively easily. I woke up again with more altitude sickness so spent most of the bus journey with […]