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<\/a>Our first stop in Vietnam was Danang. We chose this location to have some nice relaxing beach time between our temple and city touring.\u00a0 It did not disappoint.\u00a0 We had sunny hot days and miles of empty beaches.<\/p>\n Well, the beaches were empty during what I’d call regular beach times.\u00a0 Before 8am and after 4pm, it was an entirely different story, as seen below:<\/p>\n It took a while to get used to the constant honking of horns while walking around and also to figure out how to cross streets.\u00a0 The solution was to just start crossing when vaguely clear and the motorbikes and cars will sort of veer around you.\u00a0 Very terrifying.<\/p>\n Sara mentioned our food challenges when traveling and this was a bit amplified in Danang.\u00a0 It is not a major international tourist location as far as we could tell.\u00a0 Plenty of Vietnamese tourists though.\u00a0 They sold a lot of seafood that was presented in buckets still alive and given our lack of language skills we were not entirely certain what we’d get if we attempted to order.\u00a0 Also, nearly every restaurant on our beach front street was exactly the same.\u00a0 Additionally, google maps and the internet in general were not a great help.\u00a0 But hey, walking around looking for food, sometimes you find a dragon bridge.<\/p>\n We did a day trip to Hoi An, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.\u00a0 It’s an old timey city that was not bombed during the war, so a lot of buildings remain from when it was a major trading port for all manors of countries.<\/p>\n Next stop was Cat Ba island.\u00a0 This was our most challenging transfer.\u00a0 From Danang it involved: Taxi, Plane, Uber, Bus, Bus, Boat, Bus and about 7 hours.\u00a0 And yes, we took an Uber in Vietnam – we were very excited it was available since we’d read a lot about dodgy taxis and various scams in Vietnam.\u00a0 With traffic, we were in the Uber for over an hour and the total came to about $17 for the 20 or so miles. Woo.<\/p>\n Once we arrived we were treated to a beautiful view from our hotel room.<\/p>\n Our main reason for going to Cat Ba was to do a tour of Halong \/ Lan Ha bay.\u00a0 It did not disappoint.\u00a0 The boat was quite dodgy, but the views were incredible (well, it could have been sunnier).<\/p>\n After Cat Ba, we were off to Hanoi for two nights.\u00a0 We did our trip back to the city in the reverse of the first one – Bus, Boat, Bus, Bus, Uber.\u00a0 Our time in Hanoi was spent eating good food and walking all over the city.<\/p>\n Vietnam was great.\u00a0 Upon reflection, it was surprisingly the cheapest place we were as well.\u00a0 Beers were only 12,000 dongs.\u00a0 While that may sound *really* expensive, the exchange rate was about 22,000:1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Now that we’ve finished our tour of Laos, returned to Australia via Thailand, and flown to America, perhaps it is now time for me to write my post about our time in Vietnam? Seems reasonable. Vietnam was the most complicated “visa” we had to get. Even with paying for a “visa approval letter” (which was … Continue reading Vietnam<\/span> <\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>