Travel #1: Vietnamese ride

This January was quite special for us – for a very first time we decided to visit Asia. As a destination for our vacation we chose Vietnam – and oh yes, we have to admit, that vietnamese kitchen has played a major role in this decision.

At first we had no intention to blog remarks from our travels on this website, but we received so many questions about our vietnamese trip, that we decided to answer them via few articles. So if you are curious, what have we done in Vietnam for three weeks or planning a trip to Vietnam by yourself, this is a place to be for you!

In this first article we will describe you our journey and where it took us. Main goal of our vacation was to see as many places as possible, so we stayed approximately 2 days at each place. Moving from one place to another is faster overnight with sleeper bus or train. Not only will you save a lot of money but also a lot of time.

Our journey started on 13th January in Saigon (oficially Ho Chi Minh city), where immediately after leaving air-conditioned airport we have faced unpleasant humidity. Unfortunately it took us only couple of hours to get used to it.

The next day we headed again to Saigon airport and this time we flew to Phu Quoc island, which is geografically under Cambodia, but belongs to Vietnam. We spent here 3 sunny days and revitalized our bodies with new energy needed for travelling.

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Last trip to the airport (at least for some time) – we flew way up to north and visited Vietnam´s capital city Hanoi. What a temperature shock we experienced there! It was only 10 – 15 degrees and it was raining all day long… We wandered around Hanoi for day and a half, which was absolutely sufficient. Especially due to huge number of motorbikes and polluted air…we were really looking forward to go back to the nature again!.

We spent next night in bedded bus and in the morning woke up in Sa Pa – land of rice fields, giant mountains and asian minority H´mongs. For 2 days we were riding motorbikes through this almost untouched landscape, where was no sign of modern infrastructure or other tourists.

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Then the time has come to move back to the ocean – we could not miss famous bay Ha Long (bay of descending dragon). According to a legend, dragon once came to help people, but with his tale he crashed land into small pieces, which are now small islands sticking out of the ocean. It was absolutely stunning, but also very tourist place.

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For further travelling we finally chose sleeper train, which was much more comfortable and safer than a bus. We moved from Ha Long to Ninh Binh, from which we travelled to emperor´s city Hue in the middle of Vietnam. Because of heavy rain, we decided to stay in Hue only for couple of hours, during which we managed to visit large complex of former emperors palace. That place was absolutely magnificient and maybe also due to heavy rain, it had really indescribable atmosphere…

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Our journey took us then to Da Nang – the most progressive city in Vietnam, where we stayed for 2 days. From Da Nang we made several trips – to city of lanterns Hoi An, marble mountains or ancient temple My Son.

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After few days we moved to southern Vietnam to city Nha Trang, where we planned to celebrate end of lunar calendar. We went to the streets in the evening and waited for a new year celebration…streets were overcrowded and full of interesting perfomances. However after midnight there were now fireworks, no special celebration and most people disappeared from the streets…probably they don´t celebrate it the way we do.

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From Nha Trang our journey took us again through Saigon, which we decided to took advantage of and visit Cu Chi tunnels. It is a system of tunnels, used mainly during Vietnam war by Vietkong and located only an hour from Saigon. Tunnels were unbelievable – they had even 3 levels underground and the deepest one was 10 meters deep!

Last stop on our journey was delta of Mekong. We wanted to visit famous floating market, but unfortunately due to new year celebration we didn´t experience them – everyone was on holiday and we saw only few motorboats on the river…

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Vietnam is a country of rice fields, beautiful giant mountains, sunny beaches, huge amount of motorbikes, positive and smiling people and most importantly tasty food. We have never visited such diverse country before, which would have so much to offer.

If you like our photos, don´t forget to visit our other galleries.