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January 2, 2017 – Christmas and New Year. Well, things got pretty busy around here with ‘National tourists’ until just before Christmas, then everything quieted down.  Christmas Day was very quiet.  Great, we thought; the ‘Nationals’ have gone home, and now we have the place to ourselves again.  When we got up on the 26th, […]

December 20, 2016 – A Little of This and That Here are two birds that grace us with their presence daily. The black one is a Grackle and the other is a White Throated Magpie Jay. I don’t know what its called, but sure does sing purdy! All fluffed up & no place to go.

December 18, 2016 – Hanging Out Around Town Not too much to report, the past week has been spent settling in, checking out some of the local eateries, and walking about to get the lay of the land. The local bus has a main end-of-route stop about a block from our door, so we use

December 10, 2016 – Not Dead Yet. Well, here we are in Huatulco! The weather was forecast to turn crappy in Calgary, so we went one flight early to make sure we didn’t miss our connecting flight.  Sadly, that meant we had to fly out at 06:25, which meant we had to be there at

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’.)