Happy Friday! I’m actually writing this blog straight from our cooking class in Hoi An despite the fact it won’t be published for several weeks. Why you ask? Well, because this was up there with the very best foodie experiences we’ve had while travelling and I wanted to get it all down for you while it’s fresh in my mind.
We decided to take our cooking class for Vietnam in Hoi An due to some great recommendations on Twitter and we’re very glad we did so thank you for those.
Despite our best intentions to capitalise on all the cheap flights we saw advertised, I feel like we took a crazy amount of buses in Vietnam. Mainly because they are ridiculously cheap but also because we are hopelessly disorganised and never managed to book flights far enough in advance for them to be cost effective.
Case in point – when I first looked flights from Da Nang to Ho Chi Minh on our dates were a mere £15 per person… by the time we sat down to book them it was going to cost £116 for both of us to fly.
I struggled to find examples of itineraries I liked when preparing for three weeks in Vietnam. There are lots out there for two weeks, and even more for four weeks due to most people opting for either the free 15 day visa or the entry level 30 day visa. Whilst some examples of three week recommendations were available, none entirely ticked our boxes so we decided we’d share ours.
If there’s one place you add to your travels in Vietnam – make it Phong Nha National Park. It was actually more of an accidental step in our itinerary through Vietnam than anywhere we’d harboured a desire to include. After buying a copy of the Lonely Planet from a street seller in Hanoi we saw the park was located conveniently between Hanoi and Hue and decided to spend a day there. Way back when we’d been planning our trip Rob had mentioned some caves he’d like to see in Vietnam and it turned out this was where they were located so it seemed the perfect addition to our trip through Vietnam.
Despite having studied History to A Level and coming from a family of history graduates and enthusiasts, my knowledge of Asian history was poor to none existent prior to travelling this continent. The majority of my GCSE and A Level history experience as I remember it was, whilst enjoyable, almost entirely centred around the Tudors, the Russian Revolution and WWs 1 and 2.
Now don’t get me wrong, we loved Hanoi. From our beautiful little hotel in the old quarter to the amazing food, crazy streets full of mopeds whizzing past you and historic sights, we had a great 4 nights here. We did feel however, that we were constantly either getting scammed or narrowly avoiding it, more so than any other place we’ve visited with the exception of maybe Marrakech which was also pretty terrible.
There are few things worse than taking the bus from Vientiane to Hanoi. Scooping your own eyes out with a rusty spoon? Drowning in quicksand? Or watching the sequel to 50 Shades of Grey perhaps.
When it comes to our worst ever transport nightmare, nothing compares to our 25 hour, overnight sleeper-bus from Vientiane (Laos) to Hanoi (Vietnam).