So we left Vietnam looking for some downtime. We decided to checkout Langkawi, Malaysia, an island in the Andaman Sea near the border between Malaysia and Thailand. We knew it would be a tourist spot, what with it being an island, with beaches, and all of that, but Ellen was still recovering from her sinus […]
Vietnam
Hanoi Museums – Ethnology, Ho Chi Min, Women’s
Museum of Ethnology The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology is a museum in Hanoi, Vietnam, which focuses on the 54 officially recognized ethnic groups in Vietnam. It also covers the 5 major language groups, and there is, (at least while we were there) a water puppet show. We found it to be one of the most […]
Continue reading Hanoi Museums – Ethnology, Ho Chi Min, Women’s
Sapa – Ethnic Villages
Y Lin Ho, Lao Chai, and Sapa Market Thursday morning arrived and it was a beautiful sunny day. At 9:00 Sece (sp?) showed up for our tour. The driver was none other than Tommy’s brother. Sece is “White” Hmong, and was born and raised in Y Lin Ho. Sapa is the largest city she’s been […]
Fansipan
We woke up Wednesday morning, looked out the window, and saw something we hadn’t seen in it seems like weeks – blue sky. Shocking as it was, we decided to seize the day and check out Fansipan. Fansipan is the highest mountain in Southeast Asia. Hundreds of years ago, monks built a series of pagodas […]
Sapa Comedy of Errors
We went to bed Sunday night planning on getting up early Tuesday to head off to Sapa in the Northwest mountains of Vietnam. The Women’s Museum of Vietnam was slated for a visit “tomorrow.” At 5:00 a.m. Ellen woke me with the statement “I think we may go to Sapa this morning!” We checked our […]
Sapa Postcard From Ellen
Prologue Well, we are coming up on 4 months! What’s hard is burnout from making decisions! We are taking more days off, often due to colds, and letting others help plan and set up our activities. We actually don’t travel, as in pack up and move rooms that often. Maybe every 3 days at most. […]
Ha Long Bay
We were looking forward to the cruise on Ha Long Bay for a while. It is comprised of 1,969 islets, most of which are limestone karst. We’d hoped for a luxury cruise, and the bus we boarded early in the morning suggested that we’d lucked out. The journey took about 3 hours, with one stop […]
Hanoi Free Tours
If you notice the splash picture, they really like their eggs in Vietnam. Here’s another version: The multi colored ones are quail eggs, which you see frequently on menus. We’re going to intersperse a few Hanoi shots in this post, but the main theme is free tours. We just mentioned that we wanted to do […]
Ninh Binh to Hanoi
Our Joy Nibi hostess booked us rides to our hotel in Hanoi. 500k VND, or less than $20 for a 2 hour ride. As usual, we were pretty much the last ones on, and last off. This means last row. The younger set had the single seats, and were pretty comfy putting them back, lessoning […]
Trang An
We finally arrived at the Joy Libi Guesthouse in Ninh Binh starved at about 11:30 p.m. The hostess graciously offered us ChocoPies, which are exactly what one would expect from the name. We crashed quickly, and got up the next morning. I had my first salt coffee. It was pretty good, tasted like caramel. The […]