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July 8, 2019 – St. Petersburg Downtown We have officially completed the Trans-Siberian portion of our journey, as Moscow is the end of the Railway. Our new train to St. Petersburg is called Sapsan, which is Russian for falcon. It’s a modern train, with comfy seats for the 3.5-hour journey at 210 kph, much faster […]

March 12, 2015 – Sa Pa So, we’re headed to Sa Pa for a couple of days. We’ll take the train to Lao Cai (yay, finally a train trip!), which is right on the Chinese border. It’s an eight-hour trip, and you have the option of an overnight sleeper or a day-trip. Then there is

March 8, 2015 – Ha Long Bay. The minibus trip to Haiphong Harbor was uneventful. It’s a commercial harbor, very busy as it services most of north Vietnam, but there isn’t a lot to see for tourists. But there is also a section reserved for tour boats, as Ha Long Bay is very popular. We’re

March 4, 2015 – Hanoi. Well, here we are in Hanoi, Vietnam’s second-largest city. It’s our jumping-off place for a boat tour of Ha Long Bay, which was made famous in a couple of James Bond movies for its dramatic landscapes, and for an overnight in Sa Pa, a beautiful town in the mountains near

March 3, 2015 – Hue. The bus ride from Da Nang to Hue is only two hours, and we averaged fifty kilometers per hour, which is pretty good for a major Vietnamese highway. Our perfectly acceptable hotel is half a kilometer from the south bank of the Perfume River, which runs through the middle of

February 24, 2015 – Hoi An #2 Our hotel is about a kilometer north of downtown, which is a pleasant walk in the morning if you manage to avoid being run over by the completely silent electric bicycles that are extremely popular right now. Small enough to avoid regulation, you don’t need a licence, registration,

February 12, 2015 – Hoi An #1 (Reminder: To see images full-size, right-click on the image and select ‘open image in new tab’.)

February 9, 2015 – Nha Trang and Da Nang (Reminder: To see images full-size, right-click on the image and select ‘open image in new tab’.)

February 22, 2017 – Birds of Huatulco I expect that bird-watching doesn’t rate very high on many of your to-do lists….  Actually, it didn’t on mine either, but the amount and variety of birds down here have captured my attention for the past two months or so.  So, if you don’t particularly like photos of

February 21, 2017 – Pluma Hidalgo Debbi’s pen pal (of 51 years), Linda, her husband Barry, and her sister, Marlene from Edmonton, are here in an all-inclusive resort in Tangolunda for two weeks, and we thought it would be fun to go on a tour together.   Deb contacted our friend Enrique (our Mexican Landlord