The Longji Rice Terraces, also called the Dragon Backbone Rice Terraces, were located a 2-3 hour bus ride from Yangshuo. At the bottom of the mountain we first visited a village of some long hair women. These women let their hair grow all their life, which results in long hair of up to 2m. But of course you have to pay extra, if you want to see a show, where they actually unfold their hair (they usually wrap it around their head). I didn’t pay for that…

After that the bus drove us …Read More

The bus ride from Hanoi took me through some beautiful landscapes, before it ended in a big Chinese city, where I had to change the bus. I got some cash at the atm and had my first encounter with Chinese people. Buying the bus ticket was easier than expected and 15 minutes later I was on a bus to Guillin, the closest city to the place where I wanted to go. When I arrived, it was too late to get a connecting bus to Yangshuo, so I started looking for a backpacker place, that was …Read More

It didn’t have much time left, when I arrived in Hanoi, as my visa was about to expire and unluckily I woke up with food poisoning the next morning, so the only thing I did while I was there, was booking a trip to Halong Bay with the hostel. Halong Bay is only a short bus ride from Hanoi and the main tourist attraction Vietnam. Everybody goes there, so there’s hundreds of boats cruising around at any given time. The scenery is pretty similar to Ninh Binh (without the rice fields), but a lot bigger…

So the “soft” seat the girls from the travel agency booked me in the train, turned out to be a seat in the, literally, wooden class! But hey, the ride was only 18h, piece of cake, right? It was definitely one of the more interesting train rides in my life. The train was packed and some people decided to sleep under the seats, some on the seats and everywhere else. The ride started pretty boring, but after about an hour the train slowed down at some point, which about half a dozen women used to …Read More

The sleeper bus I took from Nha Trang to Hoi An was a bit different than the one I experienced in Laos. Unlike the one it Laos, this one had single beds, three in a row on two levels. So far so good, but unfortunately you couldn’t fully recline (which is a must for me, if I want to get some decent sleep) and the foot compartment was rather small, so that the feet only fitted in sideways. I dosed off most of the time, but I didn’t get any real deep sleep, so when …Read More

Well, there’s not really much to say about Nha Trang. It’s a nice beach city and personally, I liked the beach here much better than the one in Mui Ne. The beach and the water were clean, the weather was good and the nearby mountains made a nice background, so I spent my first day on the beach…
 

On the second day Bram and I booked a boat tour, that someone recommended to us. I didn’t take any pictures, but let’s say it was different from all the boat trips I did so far. …Read More

Apparently the bus I took from Mui Ne to Dalat had some kind of deal with a guesthouse in Dalat, as it stopped in front of that guesthouse and advised every westerner in the bus to get off (all of the Vietnamese people stayed in the bus). The interesting thing was, that we weren’t even given a choice, as they just started to unload all the luggage. Luckily the guesthouse wasn’t that bad and after some negotiating I got the price down to a got level. To same even more, I paired up with another …Read More

Mui Ne is not really a town, more like a 10km long part of a costal street with lot’s of hotels and restaurants. When I arrived from Saigon it was already dark and looking for a guesthouse wasn’t so easy. I found one in the guide book that sounded nice, but the bus driver didn’t know it and had no clue where to stop (they drop everybody off along the road, as there’s no bus station). So he stopped at some travel agency and told the girl there, that I needed a room. She made …Read More

…while it’s now officially called Ho Chi Min City, the Vietnamese people call downtown HCM still Saigon, which makes total sense, as HCM is incredibly huge (about 8 million people). I found this out right at the beginning: In the minibus from Can Tho I met this girl from Belgium. When we arrived at the bus station she looked into her guide book and determined that the street with all the backpacker hotels isn’t too far away and that she’s going to walk there. I didn’t mind saving money and joined her. So we started …Read More

The reason, why I went to Can Tho, is that it is famous for it’s floating markets. I arrived in the late afternoon and before I even finished checking into my guesthouse, a guy tried to sell me his floating markets tour. He was a nice guy, but it sounded all a bit expensive, so I told him I had to think about it and I would get back to him later. I thought I would probably find a cheaper offer, if I ask someone with a boat directly… So I started walking into the …Read More