2 Engineers Retired

In my opinion Hoi An is the most beautiful town in Vietnam.    But – apart from the beaches and rice paddies – the local landscape is a bit – meh. So what to do? Head north of course. Between Hoi An and Hanoi are a few truly spectacular areas.   First we visited Phong Nha, which is home to some giant caves some of which have only become known in the past few years.   Phong Nha considers itself the adventure capitol of Vietnam and is full of cave touring companies some gear shops and low priced accommodation to meet the needs of young adventurers. Our travelling companions (daughter and friend) are in the demographic of high interest to Phong Nha.   We on the other hand are, well, not really.   So, while the girls did a 2 day cave adventure complete with headlamps and ropes, Bob and I did the basic tourist version of a couple caves namely Paradise cave and Phong Nha cave. Why a hat inside a cave?  Great early...

In the Ho Chi Minh museum (Uncle Ho himself) For whatever reason I had pictured Hanoi as grey, severe and laden with rule minders.   What I found was quite different – chaos (all of Vietnam is pretty chaotic especially on the streets), nice buildings that are still in place from the French, good museums and temples.    A government building where Ho Chi Minh worked, but similar to some of the buildings in Hanoi People seem to prefer either Hanoi of HCMC.   We decided that we much prefer Hanoi to HCMC, but interestingly when expressing this opinion in Hoi An we are in a distinct minority.  To a one, people here describe the folks in HCMC as friendly and the Hanoi folks as not.  Given that we mostly talk to people in the tourism industry it is kind of hard to tell for us.  But the cities themselves are different.  (we saw no rats in Hanoi although I know they are there - so score one for Hanoi) Pretty Temple Here is a shot of...

It turns out that DaNang is a mere 2.5 hours by air from Singapore.   So what the heck.   Off to the land of quirky laws, $20 beer and fantastic looking man-made park areas. My cousin and his wife proved to be wonderful hosts (as we expected). We visited the Marina Bay Sands hotel bar – way up on the 57 th floor which provided a wonderful view of the city.   Our visit was at night and of course we indulged in Singapore Slings (invented at the Raffles Long Bar here in the city).   From this windy perch we were able to get terrific views of the Gardens by the Bay area, a man made park with futuristic looking trees full of lights. Night view of Gardens by the Bay Futuristic trees Singapore has quite an interesting history.   It was originally founded as an outpost of the British East India company, and later became a British crown colony.   It was unfortunately occupied by the Japanese during WW2 in a major defeat which cost...