The Big Honeymoon

Settling in Melbourne

It wasn’t until we were cruising the city streets that we hit our first snag. Our compass was broken. Everywhere we turned, it pointed us north.

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Our first mistake was buying plane tickets back to Saigon from Rach Gia in order to catch our flight to Australia in time. It meant that we would have to leave Phu Quoc island a day earlier than we wanted in order to make the flight.

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Independent on the Mekong Delta

As the last of our days in Vietnam – and for our travels for that matter – were winding down, we wanted to give it one last go at some independent travel as we headed into the Mekong Delta, the low-lying flatlands to the west of Saigon.

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Happy New Year from Saigon

Half-way through the night the bar jacked up its drink prices by about four times the real price, so everyone started crossing the street to buy cheap drinks at the little market and going back to the bar.

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Christmas at Jungle Beach

We hopped in and they drove us about thirty minutes down a narrow road that alternated between pavement and dirt. We passed several tiny villages and even at this early hour many locals were out cycling and walking to unknown destinations.

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An unexpected flight to Hoi An

Moving south down the Vietnam coast, Hoi An is about an 18 hour bus ride from Hanoi. Of course, we can’t verify that because we ended up flying.

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Halong Bay ups and downs

When we arrived we were greeted warmly and led to our private beach bamboo bungalow. It was absolutely beautiful.

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Fear and Loathing in Hanoi

Our time in Hanoi was a like a roller coaster and ran the gamut of emotions.

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Rice Paddies and Hill Tribes in Sapa

With the nightmare journey from Kunming to the Vietnam border behind us, we looked ahead to some trekking in the peaceful and lush green hills around Sapa.

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Dali, and from China to Vietnam

We found Dali to be somewhat of a stripped down Lijiang; touristy, but not pristine and perfect like Lijiang, rather a bit rough around the edges.

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Hiking Tiger Leaping Gorge

The gorge is said to be one of the deepest in the world and the legend is that a tiger once leapt across it while being pursued.

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Lijiang

The landscape changed as our bus drove into the Yunnan province in southwest China. Mountains and hills full of red dirt dominated the scene. We saw our first rice paddies and, on a grimmer note, our first cemeteries in China.

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Giant Buddha in Leshan

Its claim to fame is that the town was the set for the martial-arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. While I couldn’t recognize anything from the movie, it was still a quaint and pretty village.

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Jiuzhaigou Nature Reserve and Songpan

A twelve hour bus ride north of Chengdu got us to Jiuzhaigou, home to a spectacular nature and scenic reserve.

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Chengdu and the pandas

Well, maybe soft sleeper isn’t that much better than hard sleeper. We got stuck with a stinky old man and a young guy who cleared his throat and coughed every two minutes, and who also liked playing music with his cell phone without earplugs.

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Xi’an and the Terracotta Army

She woke the entire carriage of sixty some-odd people and everyone was peering from their bunks to watch.

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Peace and quiet in Pingyao

The town is best enjoyed at night time, when the avenues are lit up by red lanterns hung from shop fronts and the gates and towers are illuminated with strings of white lights surrounding the edges.

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Bishu Shanzhuang and Puning Si Temple

A 5.5 hour train ride sitting in a stiff, upright chair, squeezed in amongst locals, and putting up with vendors constantly strolling up and down the aisle trying to sell noodles and god knows what else, got us to Chengde, 250 km northeast of Beijing.

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Beijing and the Great Wall of China

Aside from the tourist traps in Beijing, we spent most of our time slowly ambling about, enjoying the scenes that unfolded around us. In the hutongs it was people stir-frying in their doorways, playing badminton on the sidewalk, digging up streets to lay pipe in the darkness of the night, with nothing but a small flashlight.

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Terelj and the horse debacle

Oh…my…god. Did that just happen? I jumped off my horse and quickly made my way to where Yvonne was rolling about on the ground.

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White Lake excursion – part II

After Moshi finished repairing his van, we continued on our way and were soon lost again.

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White Lake excursion – part I

We knew we were in a world of trouble when Moshi, our hired Mongolian driver, explained to us that two of the girls had just peed too close to a Buddha worshipping shrine.

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Arrival in Ulan Bator

Disembarking from the train, we were excited to spot a thin man in a dark trench coat and sunglasses wearing white gloves.

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Kuzhir, Olkhon Island

Ahead of us stretched a sandy beach about a kilometer long. A small pond sat back from the beach with some evergreen trees surrounding it, like an oasis.

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Irkutsk, Listvyanka and Lake Baikal

We walked along the dark road huffing and puffing, each breath crystallizing in the frosty air, with only the small patch of light from our headlamps leading the way.

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Krasnoyarsk and the pillars

Other than Yvonne’s little slip and a slightly scraped knee we managed to escape unscathed. The sun was going down so we decided to get out of the forest before we got lost.

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Our 3 night platzkartny experience

Our Trans-Siberian handbook mentions to not even consider riding platzkartny for the entire journey from Moscow to Beijing. Well, this was only about half our journey, so we figured we were fine.

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The insanity that is Moscow

We don’t have enough words in our arsenal to describe Moscow properly. It is a hell of a crazy city. So crazy we don’t know whether to laugh or cry most of the time.

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Spankings in Petrozavodsk

The typical way to take a banya is to sit in intense heat and hit yourself or, better yet, have someone hit you with a besom – a bushel of birch branches and leaves.

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Welcome to Russia

Just before our last metro stop an old Russian man behind me tapped me on the shoulder. He said something I couldn’t understand and then grinned. He had a smile like a crocodile – yellow, rounded teeth interspersed by black spaces.

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Oktoberfest to Berlin

If you’ve never been to Oktoberfest, think of the biggest party you’ve ever been to, then multiply that by at least a thousand.

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European travels come to an end

We’ve discovered something we didn’t know existed. A whole sub-culture of travelers that sleep in airports!

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Postcard perfect Santorini

We hesitatingly followed the guy but stayed a few paces back. He got into a van and drove up to us, telling us to get in.

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Scootin’ around Naxos

The tank was approaching empty and we knew we were many miles from the next gas station. As the needle slipped into the red, we began using as little fuel as possible.

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Heating up in Athens

We are sitting aboard our boat bound for Naxos. For the first ninety minutes of our five and a half hour ride we were in relative peace, enjoying the hum of the ferry engine and the slight breeze off the ocean. And then they came.

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Erzgebirge, Dresden and Swiss Saxony

10,040 km later we find ourselves once again where we started from, and this time it’s sad to say that Freda’s odometer will not be ticking forward for us anymore.

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Corsica. Or not?

Moving south down the coast proved to be a white-knuckle affair – the “road” clings to a rocky face and the direction we traveled meant we were on the cliff side of the street, with nothing but my steady hands on the wheel keeping us from taking a deadly tumble.

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The Big Honeymoon

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