Welcome to my travel diary for Vietnam, which Carol and I visited in November 2018.
I don’t quite understand why, but neither Carol and I have done much travelling in southeast Asia up until now. Perhaps, with our shared childhood obsessions with archaeology and history, we had both concentrated on what we thought of as more dramatic destinations, further afield. Places closer to Australia felt like places we’d get around to … eventually.
But after our trip to Japan, we became more interested in this part of the globe, and we remembered how many people had recommended Vietnam to us. And the more I found out about the country, the more interesting it became. Which is always the way; everything is more interesting when you drop the uninformed clichés and start researching the truth.
Some clichés have a basis in fact however, and our greatest discovery of this trip were the warm, friendly people we met. I’ve never had a tear in my eye when saying goodbye to hotel staff before, and probably never will again. We had a wonderful, unforgettable trip.
How to navigate this diary
The Vietnam link at the top of the page in the main menu takes you to the main Vietnam page where you can access all 21 days of this diary. Alternatively, start reading here (or anywhere, for that matter) and use the Previous and Next links at the bottom of each page to navigate through the days. You can always keep track by looking at the date.
When you’re reading a page, you’ll see blocks of photo thumbnails (wait a little while for all of these to load onto the page). You can roll over a thumbnail to read the photo’s caption.
To see full-size versions of these photos (highly recommended, as the thumbnails are cropped), click on a thumbnail. Once the image is blown up, you can navigate left and right through the full size images, or click the X in the top right hand corner to exit them and go back to the text.
Leave a comment at the bottom of any page if you feel like it.
Một, hai, ba, dzô!