Travel photos and journals from across Asia [1997-2026]
Vietnam travel
We didn’t have to wait long for a Grab taxi to take us out of Vinh Yen and up the mountain road to the old French hill station getaway of Tam Dao. From a distance, Tam Dao looks like a bunch of tacky hotels, apartment blocks, and restaurants clinging to the side of the hills…
Shit luck would have it that on the day we departed Sapa, the sun was out, and the sky was clear after almost a week of living inside a cold, dank cloud! There are no direct transport links between Sapa and our next destination, Tam Dao, so we decided to break the journey in Yen…
Today was our last full day in Sapa and the last day of the long public holiday, so we planned to go up to Fansipan, hoping the crowds would be limited. However, the weather gods were against us again, and it was pissing down, so we couldn’t ride and had to take a taxi to…
Determined not to be put off by the weather, which was still a dank, chilly whiteout this morning, we waited for as long as possible for it to clear before jumping on the bikes and heading for the O Quy Ho Pass, a mountain road famous for its twisties and viewpoints. Within a few kilometers…
An early start and a cab across town dropped us at the G8 Sapa Tour office, where we were booked on a bus to the tourist hotspot. Buses in Vietnam have come a long way, and this one had 24 bed-cabins in which to comfortably spend the six-hour journey to Sapa. The journey went by…
The China Eastern flight and transit through Kunming and Hanoi airports could not have been quicker or smoother. We were in our apartment in downtown Hanoi by mid-afternoon and sitting in the famous train street with a cold beer an hour later. This major tourist spot is where the trains heading into Ga Hanoi pass…
Another trip out of Saigon took us an hour or so north to the Cu Chi area and the infamous tunnels that ended up as the demise of the US forces during the war. At its peak the tunnel system stretched all the way from the Cambodian border to the outskirts of Saigon, there was…
Not wanting to spend our final days in the city we booked a couple of day trips, the first of which being to the rice bowl of Vietnam – the Mekong Delta. The Vietnamese don’t use the word Mekong and refer to the mighty river as Song Cuu Long, River of Nine Dragons. The journey…
The final leg of our north to south journey took us to the commercial heart of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City. We opted to skip the hedonistic beach resort of Nha Trang for a couple of reasons but primarily because getting there and away would have involved two overnight trains or buses and two days…
This World Heritage site (pronounced ‘mee sun’) dating back over 1500 years consists of around 20 structures where 68 once stood before the American war; the VC used the area as a base consequently a lot of ordinance was dropped on the ancient temple ruins. Restoration efforts were taking place and the site gets very…
I was hankering to get out on two wheels again and explore some of the hinterland so we hired ourselves a local guide and a couple of choppers and headed west towards the Truong Son Mountains, the border with Laos, and the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The legendary route consisted of several tracks crossing in…
It was time to head south again but this time not too far, only 30km to the ancient port town of Hoi An, one of Vietnam’s most atmospheric and delightful places. Checked in at the brand new Sunshine Hotel on the outskirts of town whereupon the staff gave us a map and a lot of…
After the train journey (and Top Gear’s Vietnam special) all I wanted to do was ride back up the Hai Van (sea cloud) Pass, one of Asia’s most spectacular stretches of road. Those maps in the Lonely Planet books are pretty misleading … it’s a bloody long way from My An Beach, south Danang, so…
The old taxi trick was our first introduction to Danang upon exiting the station, “meter” was the only word I could muster and we got it for half the quoted price for using one. Not really sure what I expected from Danang but what we actually found was Vietnam’s largest construction site. The beach itself…
It was time to leave the dizzying moto-mayhem of Hanoi and head south on the train, our destination was Danang in central Vietnam. I had arranged the tickets a couple of weeks earlier via a friend currently based there, the options were hard seat, soft seat or sleeper, we opted for the latter and took…