SE Asia Trip 2014

In January 2014, son Scott and fiancée Tash were married on the small tropical island of Boracay in the Philippines.

On the way there we first did a 12 day tour of Vietnam before flying to Manila and thence to Boracay.

We were travelling with Mark, Mollie and Prue and we made a pretty good team. There were 7 others on our tour, 4 Kiwis, Stephen and Andrea, Siegfried and Kirsty, German’s Reiner and Marika, a lone American Jennifer plus our exuberant tour leader Phuoc (pronounced foo) who made it all enjoyable, and we all got on pretty well.

It was Phu who introduced us the concept of the "Happy House" (toilet), his "On-line Buddha" that he emailed everyday to ensure everything went well, (and when it didn't, it was because his Buddha was off-line) and how to "Partée" like a local.

The Vietnam tour started with 3 days in Ho Chi Minh City, followed by an overnight sleeper train to Da Nang and bus down to Hoi An.

After 2 days around the old town of Hoi An we travelled by bus to Hué, the former capital of Vietnam for 2 days, before flying to Ha Noi for 3 more days including an overnight boat trip on Ha Long Bay.

Vietnam turned out to be a fascinating and enjoyable place and not the scary and potentially unsafe country we were fearing. All the advice from previous tourists had turned out to be correct, it was a great but tiring trip and we had fun, mostly.

The “Mission Statement” for the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is Independence, Freedom, Happiness, and at least the latter objective appears to be true.

The consensus amongst our group was that the highlight of the tour was the bike ride around Hoi An and the lowlight was the 17 hour sleeper train trip from Ho Chi Minh City to Da Nang. We also enjoyed watching the mesmerising traffic flow in HCMC.

We were very careful to only use bottled water, which is cheap and easily available, the food was superb (and we only used freshly cooked or reliable food sources), and none of us were seriously sick.

We would certainly consider visiting Vietnam again and we were pleased we went on a tour for our first trip as it made organising things so much easier. We were taken to plenty of interesting places but still had enough time to explore by ourselves. We had the fun company of a few fellow travellers and we learned a lot more than if we’d travelled alone.

We didn’t see very much of the Philippines since that wasn’t the purpose of the visit, but the wedding was a really well planned and excellent event and what we did see of the country and the nice people we met made it a very enjoyable stay too.

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