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At dusk, Halong Bay begins to fill with wooden junks anchoring for the night. When dark falls, the karsts disappear but every boat is outlined in twinkling deck lights. Although the bay is crowded, it is a solitary experience, shared with just the few other people on your boat. A night aboard is the perfect [...]
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Sometimes, traveling shows us cultures that are different — at times, wildly so — from our own. But at other times, it can remind us of just how much we do have in common with seemingly distant cultures. Watching these women examine skirts at the Sunday Market in Bac Ha, Vietnam, I was reminded of [...]
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As I researched this trip, one of the most worrying segments was the border crossing from Cambodia to Laos. With Travelfish labeling it a “pain in the posterior,” I was a wee bit apprehensive. But as it turned out, it was a mostly painless experience. Having heard that visas would not be issued at the [...]
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A few final observations from two weeks in Vietnam: The sales pitch: Vietnamese salesladies have mastered the personalized pitch. In Sapa, every handicrafts-toting woman and girl began her pitch with “You buy from me?”, thereby making irrelevant the bags of handicrafts we’d already purchased. After all, we hadn’t bought them from her. The books: Way back in Nanning, [...]
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As regular readers of this blog have probably figured out, I am an independent traveler by temperament (and usually also by means). In China I take trains and local buses, and I avoid group tours like the plague. But here in Vietnam, truly “independent” travel is essentially impractical, at least when it comes to securing transportation. [...]
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After almost two weeks in Vietnam, our triptoday to the Cu Chi Tunnels outside Saigon was the first time we visited a site connected to the Vietnam War. In the 1960s, the tunnels were a key defense for Viet Cong fighting the U.S. in South Vietnam. Tthe area was the site of intense battles as [...]
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Begin researching a trip to northern Vietnam, and two things will become clear: You should go to Halong Bay, and you are likely to be disappointed by your trip. Guidebooks and the Internet abound with horror stories from overnight cruises in the karst-filled bay. Admittedly, most of the problems are with insanely low-priced budget tours, but [...]
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I rang in the New Year onboard the train from Nanning, China, to Hanoi, hopefully setting an appropriately adventurous tone for 2010. The train turned out to be a very easy and economical way to get between the two countries. You can arrive in Nanning (the capital of Guangxi Province) without your Vietnamese visa and [...]
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Travel stories and advice from an independent traveler and expat in China. Full bio
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