Halong Bay in Pictures: Day 1 Halong Bay, Vietnam Halong Bay in northern Vietnam is an amazing area comprised of around 1,600 islands and islets with limestone pillars rising right out of the water. Located in the Gulf of Tonkin within Quang Ninh Province, it's on the UNESCO World Heritage Site for both its natural ...

Cruising Halong Bay - In Pictures: Day 2 Halong Bay, Vietnam During day two of cruising Halong Bay, the twelve of us who were staying another night were offloaded onto a smaller junkboat and shuttled to the "secluded" (only 10 other boats around us...) Lan Ha Bay and Soi Sim Island for a day of ...

Halong Bay Cruise - In Pictures: Day 3 Halong Bay, Vietnam For day three on the Halong Bay cruise, the operators give their clients the option to either head to Sung Sot Caves ("Amazing Cave") or just hang on board before heading back in to the city and making our way back to Hanoi. I'm ...

Halong Bay Junk Boat: Paloma Cruise Halong Bay, Vietnam Halong Bay Junk Boat - We had a difficult time figuring out which junkboat cruise to take in Halong Bay. Reviews on the cheaper cruises made them seem to be run-down party boats and the more expensive ones were older-folks and well, more expensive. We weren't ...

Organized Chaos of Hanoi Hanoi, Vietnam Hanoi was my not only the big city that I spent some time in during the my three weeks in Asia, but the first real Asian city I saw. And it was really overwhelming in the beginning. It was stifling hot with a thick haze hanging over the entire ...

Travel Southeast Asia: Why I Went to "the Same Place" Travel Southeast Asia - I'm traveling around Southeast Asia right now, exactly a year after I first went to Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam. When I made the decision to head to Vietnam and Cambodia this time, a lot of people (including my parents) asked me ...

Back in Hanoi Vietnam Hanoi, Vietnam Despite popping some Ambien mid-flight, I had barely slept during the 32 hours of traveling it took for my to get from New York City to Hanoi. My hotel got me into my room when I had arrived at noon, but too tired to even nap, I decided to ...

The Beautiful Mountains of Sapa Sapa, Vietnam When researching last year's trip to Thailand, we had read about how "cold" it got in Northern Thailand where we were heading to Chiang Mai, Chiang Dao, and Chiang Rai. For three weeks, I carried around a light-weight hoodie and a Patagonia puffy (one that balls up to ...

Trekking Cat Cat Village in Sapa Sapa, Vietnam Trekking through to local hill tribe villages through beautiful cascading rice terraces is one of the main draws behind Sapa exploding on the Vietnamese tourism map. Gloomy doesn't really do justice to how bad the weather was when I rolled in to town so I posted up ...